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There is more to shields than just big/small, square/round/kite/whatever. Caesar writes that during the Gaul war his enemies used big, thick, heavy wooden shields. However, they were flat, which meant that they were easy to penetrate with the legionnaires' pila (heavy javelins with lead tips). Not easy enough to reliably kill the man carrying the shield, but the Gauls couldn't dislodge them either - and the added weight made the shields unwieldy. Many Gaul warriors discarded the shields when that happened, even though it meant exposing themselves. The Roman shields were bent in a kind of parabolic shape, making them far more resistant to getting straight-up pierced.
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Nov 13, 2013 21:41
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Roman pila did not have lead tips. There was no lead in them anywhere. It sounds like you might be partly confusing them with the lead-weighted darts of Vegetius' time, the plumbatae, which were short and did not bend. The neck of the pilum I have been told was made of softened iron, but given my personal encounters with archaeologists listing steel as iron and not doing any metallurgical tests, I am not totally sure. Yeah, that's right, I can't remember at all where I got the lead thing from. Still, as far as you can trust Caesar (and I trust him implicitly), the Gauls were totally owned by the pilum to the shield thing. Also, two funny facts about inter-war tank production that I can hardly source right now because I have to leave: - I distinctly remember reading that in 1939 the USA had less tanks than Poland. - If the inter-war Polish army got rid of the cavalry, the savings from the horse food alone would allow them to field something like a platoon of 7TP tanks a year. Feel free to prove me wrong on any account.
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Nov 14, 2013 09:12
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Regarding Warsaw, there is also the fact that the Soviet forces could and did cross the river - on September 16, the 3rd Infantry Division of the 1st Polish Army (formed by the Soviets from post-1939 GULAG prisoners and whoever else more or less Polish they had on hand after Anders's army left to join the Brits) crossed the Vistula in the Czerniaków area and formed a bridgehead, joining up with the Home Army forces fighting in the city. At that point, they were very conspicuously deprived of all air and artillery support, took heavy casualties and went back across the river a week later. Why did the Soviet command do that? 
Tevery Best fucked around with this message at 11:28 on Nov 18, 2013 |
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Nov 18, 2013 09:34
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Grand Prize Winner posted:My (uneducated) guess was that it might have been a CYA effort. If the uprising succeeded, Uncle Joe could say "hey, I sent some guys to help y'all, now vote in a pro-soviet legislature" after the war. I doubt that, given that by late September it was clear that the uprising was going down soon and that after the war the Soviets simply started murdering the opposition and rigging elections anyway, not to mention that the whole "there was a non-Ghetto uprising in Warsaw" thing got promptly swept under the rug and was censored in People's Republic of Poland pretty much until the late 80s.
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Nov 18, 2013 11:32
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Hovermoose posted:Did civilian resistance (as in not organized militia but ordinary people doing acts of defiance in their daily lives) really have any effect during WWII? It depends on what you mean by "ordinary people". In Poland, resistance was very extensive, to the point that the people talk about the Polish Underground State. It had a functioning parliament with all the pre-war parties represented, and it served a lot more purpose than to just bring all the partisan groups under a single command: it had a committee to document German crimes in Poland, a department of education to help organize secret classes (the Germans had banned all secondary and tertiary education for the Poles), a department of justice (presumably to legitimize underground justice against traitors, collaborators and szmalcownicy, the people who gave up Jews to the Nazis for money), it even had a department of agriculture (although I have no idea what for). This underground government had its armed force in the form of the Armia Krajowa (Home Army - aka Sluzba Zwycięstwu Polski from September to November 1939, Związek Walki Zbrojnej until 1942), which itself was made up from several groups commissioned by the pre-war political groups of the country - a fascist and a communist militia remained outside the AK and thus the "mainstream"). They were well organized - split into Divisions, Regiments and so on. Some groups numbered a couple thousand people, camped in the dense woods, had uniforms, horses and some heavy equipment - either hidden during the September 1939 campaign or captured from the Germans, sometimes air-dropped by the western Allies. Other units worked in cities and were significantly smaller, acting in deep conspiracy and pretending to be regular, law-abiding citizens most of the time. In any case, most of those guys were ordinary people, for a given value of ordinary. The AK had a subdivision named Kierownictwo Dywersji (Kedyw - Directorate for Subversion). These guys would pull off things like sabotaging railways, assassinating prominent Nazi figures and blowing stuff up. However, within the organisation there were also groups that dealt with "small sabotage" - many of them made up of kids too young to join the actual fighting forces, mostly former Boy Scouts. They would paint murals on the walls, post bills encouraging patriotic behaviour (such as not reading German-sanctioned newspapers, not going to German-sanctioned theatres, answering any German questions with "I don't speak German" and so on). They would break windows in shops that dealt exclusively with Germans and photo parlours that had pictures of German troops on display. They would splash acid on clothes of women who dated Germans. They would throw tear gas into cinemas and add laxatives to food in trendy restaurants. Make no mistake, these activities were not any less risky than actually picking up a gun and going into the woods - ripping off a German poster was enough reason to get a 15-year-old up against the wall - and yet, those people made contests of who can steal the biggest Nazi flag. Were they ordinary people? Yes and no. And there were also people completely unaffiliated with any sort of resistance who worked in factories making steel, munitions, or anything really for German use who would take those notices to heart and deliberately worked slowly and sometimes sabotaged their equipment or products. Many Wehrmacht troops died because someone working in a factory in Bumfuckowo or Nowheregród decided to mess with their bullets back on the assembly line. And these guys were definitely regular people in any sense of the term.
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Nov 18, 2013 21:36
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Not quite. The experience thing was still there, but the difference between the hastati and the triarii greatly diminished because the Roman army became more professional - the greener guys were still at the front, but they were usually not completely green. It became more of a seniority thing. What did happen was that they discarded the equipment differences - all three ranks were supposed to have more or less the same gear, while in the old system the triarii used spears rather than swords, for example. I have a probably out of print book on the subject with a couple of nice diagrams of legionary formations in Caesar's time, is it OK if I scan those and post them here, or would it be considered  ?
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Nov 21, 2013 11:03
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The one on the upper right appears to be an East German medal commemorating the 60th anniversary of October Revolution, so you got that right. The one on the lower left says "AEROFLOT" and seems to have the winged hammer and sickle that is the symbol of those airlines even today, so I don't think it has anything to do with bomber pilots. No idea on the rest, though.
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Nov 22, 2013 14:49
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Hypothetical question: if I recall correctly, by the end of WWII, Hitler's lackeys tried to persuade him to abandon Berlin and set up a defence elsewhere. Some of them, mostly those connected to Doenitz, suggested going north, where they would be protected by ditches, rivers and whatever else there is in Schleswig-Holstein and northern Germany in general. Others recommended holing up in the Alps. Which of the three places (Berlin, north, Alps) would actually make the most sense as the site of his last stand (from a military point of view, symbolically he obviously had to die in Berlin)?
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Nov 27, 2013 11:05
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You want overrated generals? Well, have you ever heard of General Golz? Yes, the Hemingway one. The noble, brave and capable commander that the Republican general staff kept down in "For Whom the Bell Tolls". Well, the real Golz was named Karol Swierczewski and used the pseudonym "Walter" during the Spanish Civil War. An ethnic Pole from Warsaw, he was a firm believer in communism. He got conscripted by the Tzarist Russian army in 1916, joined the Bolsheviks at first opportunity. Fought under Tukhachevsky during the Polish-Soviet War, took part in butchering the Tambov rebellion. Later on he trained saboteurs smuggled by the Comintern to Poland. Finally he went on to command the XIV International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, where he met Hemingway, Tito and many other luminaries. He did fairly well back then, although he was far more concerned with rooting out "fascist agents" in his units than with actually, you know, fighting the Franco forces. He earned the nickname of "the general who bows to no bullet". That was because it was in Spain that he started to develop his trademark alcoholism: he would get so drunk he'd just get out of the trenches under fire and walk around - sometimes in nothing but his underwear. Despite this, he was later promoted to command of a full division. At the outset of Operation Barbarossa, he commanded the 248th Rifle Division of the Red Army. In October 1941, the division (along with about a dozen others) was surrounded near Vyazma and shattered. Out of ten thousand soldiers in the unit, eight men (including Walter) made it out of the pocket. Swierczewski was, of course, completely shitfaced the whole time. Stalin liked him, though, so he didn't face a firing squad. He did get transferred to a rear-area command. Two years later, the Soviets started forming the 1st Polish Infantry Division. It was supposed to become a basis for an entire Polish army, led by Zygmunt Berling. Walter was put into the division - and later army - HQ as Berling's second in command. In August 1944, elements of the 1st Polish Army were preparing to cross the Vistula. Swierczewski ostensibly took a bath in the river and said that - since he didn't get shot at - it was obviously safe to cross and there were no Germans on the other side. The troops went in with little preparation, support and reconnaissance as well as not enough numbers. 1500 died when it turned out that there actually was a lot of Germans across the river. Berling got canned for this blunder, while Walter received an order to form the 2nd Polish Army under his direct command. And he did. However, the army was understaffed and under-equipped. Only one division had a Polish commander, the rest had to be "borrowed" from the Red Army - and such "borrowings" were quite common all the way down to NCOs and below, so in many units the troops and their commanders did not speak the same language. The troops lacked boots, uniforms, transport and weapons. They had to forage on their own and march hundreds of kilometres on foot. Walter was mostly busy making sure he eliminates all the fascist agents in his force and getting his drink on, so naturally desertions were commonplace. In April 1945, he and his men found themselves marching through Lusatia. Swierczewski wanted to capture Dresden at all costs, so he ordered his armour to push for the city. He's confident that the Germans have nothing left but some Volskssturm and an occasional bunch of regular troopers, so he says "gently caress it" and decides being sober is for posers. Meanwhile, his army resembled Swiss cheese, scattered all over the region. He was drunk, had a gun and did not allow anyone to approach staff maps and try to fix poo poo. He ignored reports of stiffening resistance and lost contact with several of his units. The Germans, in turn, enjoyed perfect recon and attacked him with Brandenburg airborne division and "Hermann Goering" panzer division - pretty much the best they had available at this stage of the war. Needless to say, it was a massacre. The Germans took over Bautzen, smashed any Polish units they could find and nearly killed Swierczewski himself. Seriously, look at this mess. Konev had to bail him out and shift his forces to meet the German offensive coming from Bohemia, which might have cost him Berlin. The 2nd Army lost 2/3 of its armour, 20% of its guns and about 8 000 dead. Some regiments lost 75% of their number. Swierczewski, of course, got promoted. After the war he became an MP. He died in 1947 in a skirmish when he went to inspect some border post, most likely killed by Ukrainian nationalists (though some argue it was a false flag op to get an excuse to deport Ukrainians around). The communist Polish historians and contemporaries praised him as a hero. They even named a mountain after him. To recapitulate: a man who was a raging alcoholic, a paranoid sadist and pretty drat incompetent keeps getting promoted and somehow gets away scot-free after each and every one of his blunders throughout three different wars. He is overrated not only by historians, politicians of several countries, and his military superiors, but even by a Nobel Prize laureate. All while being horrible enough to lose a battle against the Germans in April 1945. I don't think you can top that.
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Nov 28, 2013 23:05
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Alchenar posted:The fact that everyone still thought cavalry was a thing should tell you everything you need to know. Isn't it that cavalry being so useless was mostly a Western Front thing and mostly related to the theatre specifics, though? IIRC the Eastern Front, where trench warfare was obviously far less practicable, saw a lot of cavalry use, and it played a major part in many wars that followed WWI (e.g. Polish-Soviet War, Turkish War of Independence, Greek-Turkish War).
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Dec 14, 2013 11:22
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Davincie posted:How did you guys like Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter? I've been meaning to watch it and I suppose a bunch of war nerds would be the best judge on a German series about WW2 I didn't see it, but half of Poland completely lost their poo poo when this series was shown on national TV. Even the fact that it had actual historians commenting on it before and after the episodes didn't really help. From what I've read, there was quite a bit of reason to it, though, and it appears kinda revisionist. But that's just a second hand opinion, mind you.
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Dec 19, 2013 17:17
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First of all, calling partisan units "bands" is kinda loaded because that's the exact same term Nazis used. Second of all, crazy anti-semites had their own organisations, comparatively tiny, because they didn't want to be associated with the AK, who had instituted a Council for Helping the Jews.
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Dec 19, 2013 21:52
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The slaves were critically needed at the farms to support the Southern economy. Remember that a huge portion of able-bodied men were at the front, fighting, and something had to pay for that fight. If you take away any more of the workforce (and while I'm no expert on work organisation in the CSA, I recall hearing many slave-owners did the menial jobs alongside their slaves, so the hands in the fields are already taken away), the cotton crops are just going to fail. The South had enough problems as it were (e.g. with getting the shipments to Europe past the Union blockade), hauling slaves away to anywhere so that they could build fortifications or whatever would just make things worse.
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Dec 23, 2013 21:39
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Not all castles are big and huge, and given how chaotic the Thirty Years' War was, I'd say many were probably undermanned as well. They didn't have to siege all those castles, since many smaller ones probably just surrendered at first sight of trouble. That said, I'd wager that number is quite seriously inflated.
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Dec 27, 2013 22:51
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Every game about naval combat in the Age of Sail I've played featured round shot, chain shot and grape shot. My question is were there any more types of ammunition in use? How did artillery munitions develop over the centuries?
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Jan 3, 2014 13:41
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Ensign Expendable posted:This tank museum has a virtual tour set up, including the ability to pop into the driver's or commander's seat and take a look around the inside of the tank. Definitely worth checking out, even if not all the interiors are complete. They have an operational Stug IV, though (if Wikipedia is anywhere near accurate, it might be the only one in the world). I really want to visit the place, because the Stug life chose me. Funny thing is that if you're a foreigner you have to tell them a month in advance that you're planning to show up, because the museum is technically on military ground. EDIT: drat, that Sdkfz.6 looks awfully comfy. Tevery Best fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Jan 4, 2014 |
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Jan 4, 2014 20:32
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From what I know, Verdun was not an attempt to "bleed the French dry" at no point, ever. The Germans attacked the city for several reasons. One, Verdun was right in the middle of a major salient in the French line, and capturing it would force the French to fall back on quite a large part of the front. This would drive a wedge between the French forces in Alsace-Lorraine and the rest of their line. Given the limited manpower the French had at the time and the distance between Verdun and the British, that sector of the front would be difficult to reinforce. Another one was that Verdun was a major transport and logistics hub: there were 14 (!) rail lines leading to it on the German side of the front. Capturing the city would allow von Falkenhayn's staff to throw their reserves at any part of the front virtually at will, which would further threaten the French at Nancy. Verdun was also the key to assuring the safety of Metz and capturing resource-rich areas of Lorraine, including the Briey basin. Furthermore, there were also symbolical reasons. It was at Verdun that Charlemagne's empire was split between his grandsons in 843. It was also the last city the Prussians had left after France paid its reparations following the war of 1870. It was supposed to be the war trophy for the Crown Prince and to restore the prestige of the Hohenzollerns. But the most critical reason for the offensive was that Verdun was pretty much undefended by the start of 1916. As strong as the city's fortifications were, they were critically undermanned and with very little capability of bringing in reinforcements - which, as you may remember from the last couple of pages, was a large part of why it was so easy to defend during WWI. There were only three railways to Verdun on the French side, one of which was cut by the Germans at St-Mihiel. Another one was too close to the front and would be quickly destroyed or overrun in the event of an offensive. The third was a local rail line from Bar-le-Duc and was nowhere near what was needed to actually maintain the defence. Verdun also had very few guns. The French general staff took them away in August 1915 for offensive operations in Champagne. The forts were thus severely under-equipped, but that was okay, since Joffre's staffers did not believe in old-style fortifications anymore after what the Germans did to Liege, Namur and Maubege in 1914 and the forts were therefore abandoned. By late 1915, trenches were the only defence of Verdun and even that was maintained mostly for political reasons. This is one of the points where the "meatgrinder" hypothesis seems weak to me. If you wanted to butcher the French, why not pick a place where there are already some defenders? Why pick a place you can easily take with little casualties to either side? The political focus is definitely a reason, but there were other places that were also important to the general public. Verdun was likely to fall quickly and without a significant French presence, trying to stage a war of attrition there would quite probably go better than expected. What's more, the Germans arranged for the offensive in deep secrecy. Their trains moved at night, bringing to the Verdun sector nine additional divisions of infantry, thirteen 420 mm calibre howitzers and many more heavy guns. They also brought additional air units to hamper the French reconnaissance and made diversionary preparations in other areas of the front. Why would they do that if they wanted the French to just come and stick themselves into German guns? If the Germans didn't have to postpone the attack from February 12 to February 21, they would have likely taken Verdun, since it wasn't until around that time that the French started to bolster their defences. Joffre didn't inspect the sector until February 19. The first mention of the "meatgrinder" plan can be found in the "Christmas memorandum", allegedly given to the Kaiser on Christmas Day of 1915. However, my sources say that Gerd Krumeich, a German historian, has conclusively proven that the memorandum is a fake that was written much later and served only to save Falkenhayn's face after his offensive has stalled. I can't evaluate that myself, since I don't have access to the guy's work, but I'm inclined to believe that claim. However, the French had sensed that this was the case even before the end of the war, and this is, I'm told, also the way it appears to be based on Kronprinz's memoirs and German correspondence.
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Jan 11, 2014 12:17
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Roosevelt definitely trusted Stalin way more than he should have, and his being replaced by Truman was a large contributing factor in escalating the Cold War. But it basically had to happen - not because of Churchill hating on the Reds, but because of what Stalin was doing. As long as there was a common enemy, the western allies could overlook the Soviets doing stuff like shooting people who were technically (or sometimes literally) Allied combatants or refusing to negotiate with minor allied governments (to whom the British had various kinds of commitments), or this whole war crime business. But once Hitler was gone and Stalin started to do literally everything in his power to poo poo on the West, the only non-confrontational way to go would be to just let him do whatever the hell he wanted and simply surrender Europe all the way to the Atlantic. Remember that at this point the Soviets were openly disregarding promises they had made in Yalta and Potsdam, they were starting to tear off East Germany from West Germany and instituting a reign of terror everywhere east of the Elbe. Meanwhile, the Americans were decoding the Venona messages and learning about how the Reds had been infiltrating the US for decades by then. Churchill did push Truman towards confrontation, but nowhere near as hard as Stalin did.
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Jan 14, 2014 13:45
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sullat posted:With respect to ”the Spanish flu”, I had heard that the name is a misnomer, the disease was all over the place, but the belligerents suppressed the news to avoid Morale hits, so only the Spanish papers reported it extensively, making it easy to paint as a Spanish problem. No, the name came to be because the flu killed the Spanish heir to the throne.
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Jan 22, 2014 18:50
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Chansons de geste, perhaps? Nobody really believed Roland or whoever else actually did kill thousands of Moors (cf. "servicing targets", a popular topos in XXI century American military fiction), but they did usually vaguely touch on military equipment or organisation in the period.
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Jan 25, 2014 23:35
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Were there really any seriously influential pacifist voices in the whole thing? From what I gather, as much as everyone hated being in the trenches, nobody really wanted to not wage the war and it enjoyed an overwhelming popular support throughout most of the involved nations (one big exception being Russia) until the later stages. Is this correct?
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Jan 31, 2014 19:22
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Because those were two separate agencies with theoretically separate tasks and goals. One of them flourished, the other took the wrong side of some faction war and faded into obscurity. Also I always wonder why the VCheKa, NKVD and KGB are commonly known everywhere, but the no less significant GPU and OGPU are completely off the radar of most history amateurs.
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Feb 3, 2014 00:14
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Can anyone weigh in on just how effective AAA really was in WWII? I think I remember reading (or hearing) that it was good at dispersing bomber formations and being a general annoyance that reduced the effectiveness of bombing runs, but not really a method of reliably taking the plane down.
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Feb 10, 2014 10:07
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I've recently started attending lectures on chosen elements of political history in Mesopotamia up to and before Hammurabi. It's been very interesting, we've started with the Akkad state and Naraam-Sin (the first ruler in the area to deify himself - very interesting stuff, particularly how exactly he went about it) and are working our way from there. Today we've had a lecture on the beginnings of the 3rd Ur dynasty and the rule of Shulgi. The guy apparently reigned for 48 years, which is really impressive for third millennium BC, and as was the convention at the time, dating revolved around year names. Every year had a name based on what the ruler (lugal) did, with their first year being traditionally "The year Whatever, the lugal, took the throne," and then you'd have years like "The year Whatever, the lugal, chopped the cedres," or "defeated Elam", or whatever. Shulgi's year names are pretty well preserved and for the first 18 years of his rule are fairly boring. The 18th year of his rule was "The year the sons of Ur by Shulgi, the lugal, were bound to spears." In other words, this means he created a standing army (after pushing through many administrative and legal reforms to allow for it) - pretty much unique in the area at the time (although I don't think he was the first Mesopotamian ruler to do that?). His foes could only count on pseudo-levies and militias. From that point on, the next few years were all "The year Shulgi, the lugal, razed City X," or "City Y", or whatever. Then there was a break for two or three years, then again "Shulgi razed City A". Sometimes "Shulgi razed City X for the second time", then the third and fourth. By the end of his reign the names just said "Shulgi destroyed B, C and D" and two of the cities were listed as razed ten times over and there was just a huge wall of "Shulgi razed Whateversburg" and I was in full  mode.
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Feb 28, 2014 18:54
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Obdicut posted:How'd he go about it? Well, he didn't want to be some sort of second-league backwater deity, so, uhh, actually he did nothing, you know. It was the citizens, whom he protected from vile usurpers on so many occasions, that visited the main temples of the biggest deities of the land (and not just Akkad, but also other parts of the empire - this was to foster some sort of unity in the state) and prayed that the gods accept Naraam-Sin as one of their own. And what do you know, each of the four (or five? I can't remember) deities was all for it! Also every royal stele ends with the phrase "May whoever erases this writing have his genitals ripped off by god Whatever, and may that god kill all his progeny." Every single one. quote:If the Soviets (and later the Russians maybe, I don't know) called WWII the Great Patriotic War, what did/do they call WWI? The Lousy Tsarist War? The Soviets AFAIK called it the Great War or World War I, except that they usually prefaced it with adjectives such as "bourgeois", "imperialist" or whatever. The problem here is that for anyone but the Russians GPW (1941-45) =/= WWII (1939-45).
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Feb 28, 2014 23:43
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When the Soviets came in, they declared that the Polish state had collapsed and they were merely moving to protect the citizens of the area. They also claimed to "liberate them from the yoke of the Polish feudal bourgeois masters". Naturally, in a quickly called referendum 999999,99% of the populace voted to join the Soviet Republics. As for what it was told in communist Poland: it wasn't. Although one of the first decrees of PKWN (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego, Polish National Liberation Committee), the pro-Soviet puppet government installed in Lublin in 1944 (also known as the Lublin government, as opposed to London government-in-exile) was about recognising Soviet sovereignty on the lands east of the German-Soviet "border of friendship", it for some reason wasn't all that widely publicised. In the Stalinist era in Poland, nobody talked about the pre-war eastern border. It wasn't decried, wasn't ridiculed, or praised, it was simply gone from public discourse or textbooks. Most of the Poles who survived the Soviet rule in the Kresy (as the Poles referred to - and occasionally still refer - the area in question) were deported to the lands taken from Germany in the west (the so-called Ziemie Odzyskane - Recovered Lands). After the end of the most oppressive period - sometime around 1956 - the subject was still carefully omitted in textbooks and political discourse, but occasionally appeared in cultural texts during periods of lax censorship standards. Even so, the question of how the Kresy were lost was never actually approached. They simply were there, sometimes as the land of happy childhood, sometimes as simply the background to a character's past (and for example a hint that they might have been deported to a gulag), sometimes as something else entirely, then they were lost for reasons unspecified, although well known.
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Mar 1, 2014 20:42
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Pontius Pilate posted:Any recommendations for a book covering Poland before the Congress of Vienna? Just looking for an overview--doesn't need to be military history specific. Do you mean "everything that happened before the Congress" or just the Duchy of Warsaw (1807-1815) period? In the former case I'd probably recommend God's Playground, that should be the only accessible enough general Polish history that was published in English (at least as far as I know).
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Mar 5, 2014 20:07
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Frankly, I can see the need for political commissars during the Russian Civil War, where commanders might straight up defect to the enemy. In World War II it really seems like they're around entirely to remind everyone they're living in a totalitarian hellhole. I don't buy the "united the culturally and linguistically diverse troops" argument, since if a unit got a bunch of different nationalities together, I can't see why the commissars, who were likely to be as poorly educated as their subordinates, would actually speak the language or show any cultural sensibility. Unless you actually believe that a Soviet after-hours political talk was any more effective at forming the Soviet Man than a school meeting with a DARE officer is at preventing drug use. Except that a DARE officer can't court-martial you for not liking his program enough, so there's that.
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Mar 20, 2014 21:39
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Don Gato: Do you honestly believe that the state really gave a poo poo about what those guys reported, as long as it was what the state had wanted? Soviet Union did not value truth all that much. The state figured they were doing their jobs because it had traitors to shoot. Here's an example of how information works in a totalitarian state: The year is 1944, Warsaw is on fire and the Red Army is literally across the river. But Stalin does not like the guys who are rising in the city. What do the reports sent back home from intelligence say? That the underground soldiers in Warsaw are obviously colluding with the Nazis and collaborating with them. Why? Because they wear German camo uniforms (that they had actually looted from captured military warehouses, but hush). Fangz: I have no doubt a bunch of them were decent fellows. But you could probably find a bunch of decent fellows in the Nazi Party. On the whole an institution tasked with reinforcing the power of a totalitarian state attracts mostly either pushover silent helpers or awful dregs of humanity and such is the case here. Tevery Best fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Mar 20, 2014 |
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Mar 20, 2014 22:08
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Don Gato posted:That literally what I just said, only with an example. No need to be so hostile saying the same thing. Yeah, sorry. I guess I misunderstood what you said. My apologies.
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Mar 21, 2014 21:09
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I presume we only count people who were actually heads of state at the time of the war? If so, I'd say maybe Nasser could get a shot, I remember reading that during the Suez Crisis he was seen in the streets himself handing out guns and organizing a last-ditch defence of Cairo from an expected Israeli advance. That advance never came, though. And Pilsudski definitely was leading the army from the front lines (as much as it could be said about a modern-day general). However, just before he had left to lead the decisive offensive, he has suspended himself as head of state so that the rest of the government could heap all the responsibility on him in case it backfired.
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May 16, 2014 20:40
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Whatever Stalin used to drink, he definitely was in the business of getting utterly shitfaced in the best Soviet fashion. I don't think I've ever read any sort of story about anyone's personal meeting with Stalin that didn't begin with either "we were in an official meeting" or "we were so drunk we didn't know which way was up".
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May 31, 2014 07:35
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Lichtenstein posted:The Austrian Poles were still quite miserable - while it was the one partition that was pretty chill politically, but it was a piss-poor hungry backwards piece of land. Where this becomes important is that Austrians have had bloodied their hands once there - by instigating a mass murder of local nobility. So I sort of wonder how much of it was them being chill as a general policy and how their partition being some far away unimportant piece of poo poo province with political elites already pacified. I've been meaning to read up on this, but Not necessarily. There are, in general, two periods in the history of Poles in Austria: before and after the institution of the dual monarchy. The former is bad enough and hardly needs further explanation: between the Galician slaughter, the incredible poverty (imagine Ireland at the outset of the potato famine and assume that this is business as usual) and political oppression there is little there to envy. But then there's the other period, after the Ausgleich (and technically a bit before as well), when Poles had a huge influence in Austria-Hungary. The Austrian parliament was filled with tiny little parties that only differed from one another, as they say, in that some conservatives went to the church at 11, and some at 10. The Poles had a significant representation which, despite not being the biggest or the most influential, was the most pragmatic. They assumed a strict party discipline, giving them a reliable and notable voting bloc, which in turn meant that anyone who wanted to form a workable government had to contend with them. After 1870 or so, every single Austrian government had at least one Polish minister, even not counting the ministry for Galicia. And those were very important positions, for example, the ministry of the treasury was Polish for eleven years under Julian Dunajewski, who was one of the few to ever balance the budget of the country, and who left behind several Polish colleagues in important positions within the ministry. This meant that Galicia thrived culturally, as it could count on investments in education and sciences. However, even the considerable power the Poles had in this system had to take a back seat in the face of the fact that strategically, the Austrians did not want to invest in Galician industry and infrastructure, which was the only real way to improve the still critical situation of the rural and urban poor. But for the Austrians, it was clear that the moment a real war with Russia begins, they would consider this area pretty much an expendable buffer, so even the great oil fields of eastern Galicia were largely underutilized - any factory or railroad built in the area was a boon to the potential Russian occupiers, and that was deemed unacceptable. In the end, as enlightened as the area was in 1918, it was also the most economically backwards of the areas that made up the rebuilt Polish state.
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Jun 9, 2014 19:03
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and video games.
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Bacarruda posted:Given how rabidly anti-Soviet Truman was (and not without good reason), I'm not sure he was ever going to be best buddies with Stalin. Given how anti-US Stalin was (for a few good reasons and many, many more bad ones), I'm not sure any US president could have any hope of being best buddies with him after the war.
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Jun 10, 2014 17:03
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Nenonen posted:came from a Polish aristocratic family ---> supervised Poland as Stalin's stooge, despised by his countrymen He jailed, murdered or otherwise persecuted some 200 000 Poles, mostly pre-war officers and members of anti-Nazi resistance movements, so I guess that "despised" part has some more grounding than just his association with Stalin? (Also he was for all intents and purposes less of a Pole than Nietzsche was.)
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Jun 12, 2014 17:47
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They did it all the time. I've seen a 1950s Polish newsreel that touches on the subject, I can grab it and provide translation later. EDIT: wasn't Tommy Gun's main appeal the fact that most Americans of the period would have probably held one in their own hands either during the war or in a boot camp?
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Jul 4, 2014 14:29
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Fangz posted:The claim would be that people who escaped from an encirclement when the rest of the unit did not are possibly deserters. Hence why the dudes who broke out as an organized unit are fine. That, or have been recruited as spies or saboteurs by the Germans.
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Jul 10, 2014 07:10
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Chauchat was AFAIR pretty drat good at its role for the time. A light machine gun was really useful on the offence, as all the armies learned fairly quickly during WWI, but there really wasn't a definite idea on how exactly it should work. Chauchat was one of the more successful designs, even if it had its flaws. Of course, then the Americans came, saw it, decided they want it, rechambered it for their own munitions and generally started loving with the design, and because they could never be arsed to learn the metric system the entire thing went completely tits up and thus the dark legend of Chauchat was born. Or so I recall hearing it told.
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Jul 11, 2014 07:10
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DerLeo posted:So The Atlantic had a nice photo feature on historical reenactors recently. Photo 18 there is quite hilarious. "We're gonna charge, leave that loving bike, man!" "I CAN'T WHAT IF SOMEONE STEALS IT?!?!?!"
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Jul 11, 2014 10:48
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Baron Porkface posted:How did Martinique and French Guiana get away with declaring for Vichy unbombed? "Hmm, yes, let's teach them a lesson about declaring for the collaborators! Luckily, the RAF has an unlimited supply of bombers stationed in every corner of the globe."
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Aug 1, 2014 09:16
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