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Uncle Wilhelm really wanted to make up for that broken shell of an arm he had.
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Feb 13, 2014 23:55
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chaos rhames posted:There's been an extreme amount of focus on the part of both world wars where we fought Arabs and I could not possibly guess why. The Ottoman Empire weren't Arabs. 
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Feb 14, 2014 01:46
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In WWII Canadian troops really excelled in Normandy especially around Caen. But besides that I'm not sure what they did. But this thread is about WWI so yeah, the Canadians did crazy poo poo. I'm looking forward to the storm of new books coming out over the next few years to commemorate the 100th anniversary of every event. I've already purchased The Sleepwalkers, The War That Ended Peace, and Catastrophe 1914.
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Feb 14, 2014 22:34
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Nessus posted:God, the Zimmerman letter is so ridiculous. For those who are unfamiliar: The Germans offered to back up Mexico in declaring war on the US, with the understanding that Mexico would get back Texas, Arizona and New Mexico in the process. The Mexicans paused, looked around, and realized this was an idiotic plan in about twenty ways and declined the German offer. It was such a stupid offer that a huge amount of people believed that it must have been a forgery...until Zimmerman himself confirmed it was real. 
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Feb 14, 2014 23:14
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:A teacher I once had put WWII tactics in relation to the experiences in WWI in a very interesting and different light for me. It wasn't necessarily that all of the countries involved wanted to avoid to Trench warfare again, it was simply (in the German and French cases especially) that none of the nations involved could go to Trench warfare as a viable tactic. Trench warfare requires a lot of manpower, as its basically a tactic of attrition. WWI had bled multiple countries dry of entire generations of capable men. Blitzkrieg was a solution to a manpower shortage; striking hard and fast and using numerically inferior forces to trap and defeat larger forces en masse, so you don't get bogged down in a slog. The French were all about static defense with the big defensive fortification they had in Alsace-Lorraine (completely escaping my mind at the moment). Sorry but that's basically all bunk and completely ignores the strategic realities and planning that were involved in the German invasion of France. No one, literally no one, including the Germans, expected the campaign to go the way they did. The campaign was planned to be a long war of attrition and only through sheer fortune and the actions of mid-level commanders did things play out the way they did for the Germans. And even that wouldn't have mattered if not for some of the most criminally incompetent commanding in the history of warfare by the French General Staff. Basically Blitzkrieg didn't exist until after the invasion of France. It was a way to explain the unexplainable and once the Germans bought into their own hype it hosed them over big time when it failed against the Soviet Union.
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Feb 16, 2014 05:22
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Dreylad posted:MacMillan argues in her book that Wilhelm kept writing about how he hoped for peace, firing off letters to the other rulers about how this crisis was dreadful and we all need to work together, but when it came time to actually make a decision about whether or not to push towards war throughout the crisis, he either didn't act or didn't choose a peaceful solution. That's about as close as I've seen to "The Kaiser wanted peace." Wilhelm was pretty much an idiot and may have had actual mental problems that led to his sporadic behavior.
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Feb 22, 2014 00:48
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For a war that was hardly black and white, Germany did seem to go out of their way to be really dickish about things.
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Feb 23, 2014 23:26
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To be fair, Hindenburg was barely above vegetable status by 1932.
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Feb 24, 2014 23:14
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OAquinas posted:To put things in perspective, that battlefield is all flat farmland these days. Imagine what's buried there. (mostly bombs) And bodies. Lots and lots of bodies.
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Mar 19, 2014 23:22
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I did the poorly written writeup of the World Wars in ask/tell. It was atrocious with literally no redeeming qualities. Don't even watch it out of a sense of curiosity.
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Jun 1, 2014 19:18
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SocketWrench posted:They didn't mention any of North Africa either, it went from "Hitler takes Europe, attacks Russia" to "Americans invade Sicily to get a foothold for invasion". You think that's bad? In the invasion of France segment the Germans were using T-72 tanks!
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Jun 2, 2014 01:28
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