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I was reading some Chomsky the other day and he mentions that the Americans backed fascists against resistance forces in Italy and other occupied countries. Is this true? I could only find a few blurbs about this here and there.
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Oct 12, 2016 07:25
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Rated PG-34 posted:I was reading some Chomsky the other day and he mentions that the Americans backed fascists against resistance forces in Italy and other occupied countries. Is this true? I could only find a few blurbs about this here and there. That's Operation Gladio. It was after the war though, in the 50s, so it wasn't really against resistance forces in any sense. The Americans, particularly the military, weren't really that adverse to providing aid to communist resistance organizations during WW2, they were allied to the Soviet Union after all. The British were much more adverse to and apprehensive of this, particularly Churchill, and sometimes they were at odds with the Americans whom they considered naive (Many American military and political leaders appear to have considered a lot of communist organizations more organized and militarily efficient).
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Oct 12, 2016 13:39
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Also the shitshow in Greece where the Brits started fighting against the communist resistance before Germany was even officially defeated.
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Oct 12, 2016 13:45
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Acebuckeye13 posted:The US was effectively already at war with Germany in the Atlantic, and declaring war allowed Germany to engage in completely unrestricted submarine warfare, which had spectacular success in the first half of '42. Japan declaring war on the US just gave Germany a convenient excuse. People really don't understand just how many merchant ships lie at the bottom of the ocean off the eastern seaboard of the US. The Germans were savaging our shipping.
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Oct 12, 2016 14:56
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VikingSkull posted:People really don't understand just how many merchant ships lie at the bottom of the ocean off the eastern seaboard of the US. The Germans were savaging our shipping. didnt seem to affect the US
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Oct 12, 2016 15:51
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Descar posted:didnt seem to affect the US It was a massive problem and put the entire feasibility of US involvement in Europe in doubt. You want to know how bad it was? There was an actual plan to build a massive aircraft carrier out of loving ice so they could park it in the middle of the Atlantic and provide aircraft coverage over areas that land-based aircraft couldn't reach. This was a serious plan, developed the British, and a prototype was built in Canada before it was cancelled when things got less desperate. The US and UK were terrified of the U-Boats, and were only able to overcome them through America's sheer industrial advantage in shipbuilding.
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Oct 12, 2016 16:59
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Descar posted:didnt seem to affect the US It turns out that having almost an entire continent worth of resources to use allows a nation to handle significant losses much easier.
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Oct 12, 2016 17:24
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Acebuckeye13 posted:It was a massive problem and put the entire feasibility of US involvement in Europe in doubt. It had less to do with industrial advantage and more to do with rapidly improving ASW tech and doctrine. The industrial advantage helped but a lack of subs isn't why tonnage sunk dropped so badly after 42. G
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Oct 12, 2016 17:53
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Acebuckeye13 posted:It was a massive problem and put the entire feasibility of US involvement in Europe in doubt. Why ice?
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Oct 12, 2016 17:59
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Rinkles posted:Why ice? cheap and easy to maintain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete
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Oct 12, 2016 18:01
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Acebuckeye13 posted:It was a massive problem and put the entire feasibility of US involvement in Europe in doubt. For those who haven't read anything about this, you'd be well served (or at least entertained) to do so. I want to say Zack included material on it in "My Tank is Fight," but I could be wrong about that.
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Oct 12, 2016 18:14
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Cyrano4747 posted:It had less to do with industrial advantage and more to do with rapidly improving ASW tech and doctrine. Yeah, Cyrano is correct here. Though, to add to it, when Kaiser and Ford are betting each other and launching Liberty ships in times measured in hours, it's not a stretch to assume the US industrial base could've still absorbed the extra losses.
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Oct 12, 2016 18:22
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Rinkles posted:Why ice? Because you can't sink ice!  Didn't mythbusters have an episode with it?
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Oct 12, 2016 18:32
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  Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Oct 12, 2016 |
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Oct 12, 2016 18:48
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VikingSkull posted:Yeah, Cyrano is correct here. Liberty Ships: Because Five Percent Of You Coming Apart In The North Atlantic Is Acceptable Losses. (whoops turns out that the steel we made the first generation of liberty ships out of has a nasty habit of literally snapping in half when it gets cold enough, sorry 'bout that)
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Oct 12, 2016 18:52
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Cyrano4747 posted:It had less to do with industrial advantage and more to do with rapidly improving ASW tech and doctrine. Wasn't the main doctrinal shift remembering that convoys are a thing?
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Oct 12, 2016 19:01
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Also converting almost a hundred of them into Escort Carriers E: counting all those merchant-hull CVEs, the US Navy commissioned something like 138 aircraft carriers during the war. Aircraft are the best ASW platform and once the huge convoys had carriers, even tiny ones, escorting them, the U-Boats got annihilated FuturePastNow fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Oct 12, 2016 |
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Oct 12, 2016 19:07
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PittTheElder posted:Wasn't the main doctrinal shift remembering that convoys are a thing? Surface radar was also a huge part. Submarines of that era were more torpedo boats that could submerge for a time. They were specifically designed to be loving hard to spot on the surface at night. Surfaced night attacks were where they did a LOT of their work. Escorts with surface radar make that suicidal. There were also important advancements on the sonar front but im hazy on the details. All I know is they got a lot better at finding submerged boats after ~41
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Oct 12, 2016 19:29
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Cyrano4747 posted:Surface radar was also a huge part. Submarines of that era were more torpedo boats that could submerge for a time. They were specifically designed to be loving hard to spot on the surface at night. Surfaced night attacks were where they did a LOT of their work. Escorts with surface radar make that suicidal. In the Royal Navy between the wars, ASW wasn't a major priority for despite already having learned painful lessons about the necessity of escorted convoys in WWI, most British naval thinkers still thought of destroyers and similar ships as intended for fleet actions rather than convoy defense. In so far as they focused on anything, it was ASDIC* training, which as you allude came up empty when the u-boats acted in effect as surface raiders in night actions, often penetrating into the rows of convoys and just going hog wild where the escorts couldn't risk firing on them even if they could see them, which was rarely. Even when that was not the case, SONAR sets were directional and mostly forward-listening but depth-charges came off the sides/rear of the escorts, which combined with the amount of noise thrown up gave canny u-boat aces a chance to play dead or otherwise escape following a depth-charge attack. This changed in 1943 with the introduction of the hedgehog in 1942, which was a forward-firing set of spigot mortars allowing escorts to maintain sonar contact during an attack. *The earlier forms of SONAR.
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Oct 12, 2016 21:27
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Is there a way to get access to German court documents from the late 19th century to around WW2? I've been reading some Nazi propaganda books and they supposedly have excerpts from court documents saying a Jew did a bad thing, and I want to see if the propaganda was referencing a real court case.
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Oct 12, 2016 22:47
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I've been reading Richard Evans's books on nazi Germany recently and one thing I've picked up on is how indifferent hitler was to the ordinary German soldiers (ordering them to stand and fight to the last man rather than retreat, various other decisions that led to mass deaths of German soldiers, closing the blinds on his personal train rather than having to look at soldiers on the way home for leave, etc). Yes, you can say that was just Hitler being Hitler, but given that he'd fought in the trenches during WW1, you might have thought it'd give him a tiny bit of empathy for what the ordinary soldiers were going through.
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Oct 12, 2016 23:25
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qkkl posted:Is there a way to get access to German court documents from the late 19th century to around WW2? I've been reading some Nazi propaganda books and they supposedly have excerpts from court documents saying a Jew did a bad thing, and I want to see if the propaganda was referencing a real court case. Depends on what courts you're asking about. Honestly, a lot of that stuff got destroyed during the war, both intentionally and otherwise. Hemp Knight posted:Yes, you can say that was just Hitler being Hitler, but given that he'd fought in the trenches during WW1, you might have thought it'd give him a tiny bit of empathy for what the ordinary soldiers were going through. From all I've read, Hitler got precisely the wrong message from his time in the trenches, that being "war is awesome, and makes men strong and hard. Any who break or complain are clearly degenerates and/or half-breed enemies of the volk." His belief in personal/national destiny and heroic sacrifice also weighed in, as you can see in his comments after Paulus surrendered the Sixth Army: quote:What hurts me the most, personally, is that I still promoted him to field marshal. I wanted to give him this final satisfaction... a man like that besmirches the heroism of so many others at the last moment. He could have freed himself from all sorrow and ascended into eternity and national immortality, but he prefers to go to Moscow. Captain_Maclaine fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Oct 12, 2016 |
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Oct 12, 2016 23:38
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prussian culture left its mark on many men, for example ernst junger. There were certainly some people on both sides of the conflict who were of the mind that war was exhilarating and good etc. We have lots of information on how prolonged combat affects the psyche and humanity of the soldiers, not necessarily information people in the early 1900s did know about.
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Oct 13, 2016 00:36
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I don't get how you can think war is good and great when you yourself were in the worst most gruesome war to date. Especially if you are like hitler and got shot and put in hospital Coping mechanism?
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Oct 13, 2016 00:38
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underage at the vape shop posted:I don't get how you can think war is good and great when you yourself were in the worst most gruesome war to date. Especially if you are like hitler and got shot and put in hospital Minor quibble: He got gassed, not shot. But to answer the larger question, it's hard really to overstate how Hitler as a person was just a really weird guy. His time in the Imperial Army was, by his own account, one of the best times of his life, and looked at externally it's hard not to see it also as a formative experience. Prior to joining up in 1914 he really never had any direction in life, his abortive attempts to get into the Vienna Academy of Fine Art being the closest he got, and he found he was one of those guys who just really thrives in regimented army life, and developed the first elements of what eventually became his larger ideas on Germany's national destiny while in the ranks (ie: Germany is destined to defeat the Entente and carve out a great empire in the East). He wasn't immune to the horrible parts of trench life, but seems to have considered them secondary, perhaps even necessary, elements of this transformative period of his personal development.
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Oct 13, 2016 00:46
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Its just really bizare that you can go through a traumatic experience first hand and not think its complete and utter poo poo in every way imaginable. Like I can't comprehend it.
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Oct 13, 2016 00:50
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Depends on what courts you're asking about. Honestly, a lot of that stuff got destroyed during the war, both intentionally and otherwise. I'm particularly interested in court documents from Leipzig from the second half of the 19th century, where supposedly a poor, half-blind Jewish student impregnated several daughters of wealthy local families while also running a charity scam, and then used the money to open a small shop where he hired young women to have sex with.
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Oct 13, 2016 00:56
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underage at the vape shop posted:Its just really bizare that you can go through a traumatic experience first hand and not think its complete and utter poo poo in every way imaginable. It wasn't just Hitler, lots of big Nazis saw some of the grimmest of WWI.
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Oct 13, 2016 01:01
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:It wasn't just Hitler, lots of big Nazis saw some of the grimmest of WWI. I know, I was commenting on the discussion.
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Oct 13, 2016 01:02
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underage at the vape shop posted:Its just really bizare that you can go through a traumatic experience first hand and not think its complete and utter poo poo in every way imaginable. Think of it as one of those "it was a horrible experience but it helped make me the man I am today" sort of things, dialed up to 11 because he's Hitler and all. qkkl posted:I'm particularly interested in court documents from Leipzig from the second half of the 19th century, where supposedly a poor, half-blind Jewish student impregnated several daughters of wealthy local families while also running a charity scam, and then used the money to open a small shop where he hired young women to have sex with. I'm not sure exactly where the docs you're looking for live, as I've mainly worked with Germany's national archive system and I don't know whether the legal stuff you're looking for made it into that or is stored separately. You might start out at the Bundesarchiv's resources for that time period, or just contact them directly to ask for help (I've found them very receptive and helpful). How's your German? If I remember right, they've got a bunch of University of Leipzig stuff from the 19th century, so you might find some connections there.
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Oct 13, 2016 01:10
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It was steeped in their society, and also some people find that stuff exciting. Also, i'd actually say the french and the brits had the roughest patches of the war. At least the german trenches had walls and quality of life stuff from the beginning
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Oct 13, 2016 01:11
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Minor quibble: He got gassed, not shot. But to answer the larger question, it's hard really to overstate how Hitler as a person was just a really weird guy. His time in the Imperial Army was, by his own account, one of the best times of his life, and looked at externally it's hard not to see it also as a formative experience. Prior to joining up in 1914 he really never had any direction in life, his abortive attempts to get into the Vienna Academy of Fine Art being the closest he got, and he found he was one of those guys who just really thrives in regimented army life, and developed the first elements of what eventually became his larger ideas on Germany's national destiny while in the ranks (ie: Germany is destined to defeat the Entente and carve out a great empire in the East). He wasn't immune to the horrible parts of trench life, but seems to have considered them secondary, perhaps even necessary, elements of this transformative period of his personal development. I think a missing part of the typical narrative of Hitler's life was that from 1907 to 1913 not only was he was an art school reject, he was basically homeless. He spent his time in Vienna living moving from flop house to flop house (if not on the street at some point). That type of experience was not only humiliating but probably traumatizing. The German army gave him a job, a purpose and 3 square meals. From the his perspective, the hell of war was worth moving up from what was basically "gutter trash." Hell, he even got an Iron Cross out of it. I know it is a pretty unpopular opinion, but Adolf at the end of the day was actually still a human being even if he was a very hosed up one. (Stalin didn't have too dissimilar of a story, he grew up in poverty in Gori, Georgia and most of his early life was pretty hosed up until he joined up with the Bolsheviks just before the 1905 revolution.) Ardennes fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Oct 13, 2016 |
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Oct 13, 2016 01:19
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Captain_Maclaine posted:I'm not sure exactly where the docs you're looking for live, as I've mainly worked with Germany's national archive system and I don't know whether the legal stuff you're looking for made it into that or is stored separately. You might start out at the Bundesarchiv's resources for that time period, or just contact them directly to ask for help (I've found them very receptive and helpful). How's your German? This isn't important enough for me to contact an actual person about, I was just hoping the court cases had been digitized and I could just do a search for the defendant's name, similar to how I can search in court documents for US states from the 1800s.
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Oct 13, 2016 01:33
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To understand Hitler(better, not entirely), you have to see the direction of his life. He was literally a semi-homeless vagrant in Vienna prior to WW1, who spent his time reading political literature, making okayish vignettes of people to survive. When the war was announced from the balcony in Vienna, you can actually see HItler in the photo and he looks loving thrilled. From there, you can see how his ego grew to enormous proportions. In just 19 years, he went from being a homeless bum in Vienna to the Leader of Germany. Of course he thought he was the poo poo, because he had no reason to think otherwise. Through luck, circumstance, and the willing participation of others, he managed to best an a strongly entrenched political establishment. Compound that with a quack doctor who treated his various intestinal problems with all kinds of drugs, add in the incredible stress of running a country at war, and finally add in lickspittles like Halder and Keitel, who kissed Hitler's rear end as hard as they could mush their faces into it, and you can see why he became crazier and crazier and more convinced of just how amazing he was.
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Oct 13, 2016 01:52
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Inspired by this thread I started reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I'm only about 200 pages in but I'm really impressed with the thorough job Shirer did in writing it. It's really interesting to see all the points in history were Hitler and/or the Nazi party. The one that really got to me was that Hitler might have been born with the surname Schicklgruber. Both Shirer and Hitler recognized that that alone might have hindered his political career.
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Oct 13, 2016 02:01
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qkkl posted:This isn't important enough for me to contact an actual person about, I was just hoping the court cases had been digitized and I could just do a search for the defendant's name, similar to how I can search in court documents for US states from the 1800s. Not sure if this is good enough for what you want, but the Harvard Law Library lists a few print sets which are now available via google books. Not a legal historian, so that's about the best I can do. Ardennes posted:I think a missing part of the typical narrative of Hitler's life was that from 1907 to 1913 not only was he was an art school reject, he was basically homeless. He spent his time in Vienna living moving from flop house to flop house (if not on the street at some point). That type of experience was not only humiliating but probably traumatizing. The German army gave him a job, a purpose and 3 square meals. From the his perspective, the hell of war was worth moving up from what was basically "gutter trash." Hell, he even got an Iron Cross out of it. A White Guy posted:To understand Hitler(better, not entirely), you have to see the direction of his life. He was literally a semi-homeless vagrant in Vienna prior to WW1, who spent his time reading political literature, making okayish vignettes of people to survive. When the war was announced from the balcony in Vienna, you can actually see HItler in the photo and he looks loving thrilled. From there, you can see how his ego grew to enormous proportions. In just 19 years, he went from being a homeless bum in Vienna to the Leader of Germany. Of course he thought he was the poo poo, because he had no reason to think otherwise. Through luck, circumstance, and the willing participation of others, he managed to best an a strongly entrenched political establishment. You're both quite right and I should have mentioned more about the impact of his vagabond period which preceded the war. Going from his lowest low to better times, even if they were on the Western Front, had to contribute to his positive opinion on Army life.
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Oct 13, 2016 02:44
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PittTheElder posted:Wasn't the main doctrinal shift remembering that convoys are a thing? It was a lot more stupid than this. They (Americans) understood how convoys worked but chose not to implement convoys. Their argument being that there were insufficient escorts (there were) to protect a convoy and a convoy just creates a very target rich environment. The American navy, particularly Ernest King, didn't respect the British experience of dealing with submarine warfare for the past 2 years and didn't respect or implement any of their advice. The Americans were executing a war in the Pacific and had already given a large amount of destroyers to the UK so they were desperately short of escort vessels at this time. Even so, what assets were available were not mobilised against the u-boat threat. For reasons. quote:When U-123 sank the 9,500-ton Norwegian tanker Norness within sight of Long Island in the early hours of 14 January, no warships were dispatched to investigate, allowing the U-123 to sink the 6,700 ton British tanker Coimbra off Sandy Hook on the following night before proceeding south towards New Jersey. By this time there were 13 destroyers idle in New York Harbor, yet none were employed to deal with the immediate threat, and over the following nights U-123 was presented with a succession of easy targets, most of them burning navigation lamps. At times, U-123 was operating in coastal waters that were so shallow that they barely allowed it to conceal itself, let alone evade a depth charge attack. It took a lot of sunk merchant ships before the US navy mustered what can be considered an appropriate response.
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Oct 13, 2016 02:48
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The_Other posted:Inspired by this thread I started reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I'm only about 200 pages in but I'm really impressed with the thorough job Shirer did in writing it. It's really interesting to see all the points in history were Hitler and/or the Nazi party. The one that really got to me was that Hitler might have been born with the surname Schicklgruber. Both Shirer and Hitler recognized that that alone might have hindered his political career. Shirer is one of my favorite go-tos for a breakdown of the rise of the Nazi party. Just... do NOT take his theories about the German people being uniquely suited for authoritarianism seriously, at all. Any time he opens his mouth about Martin Luther it's almost certainly bullshit.
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Oct 13, 2016 02:57
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underage at the vape shop posted:I don't get how you can think war is good and great when you yourself were in the worst most gruesome war to date. Especially if you are like hitler and got shot and put in hospital Now some men like a fishin' But some men like the fowlin' Some men like to hear, To hear the cannonball roarin'
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Oct 13, 2016 03:10
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underage at the vape shop posted:Its just really bizare that you can go through a traumatic experience first hand and not think its complete and utter poo poo in every way imaginable. We have this mythology that "surviving" some horrible experience grows you as a person, these people are heroes for getting through it and have gained some wisdom and insight. But it's really just bullshit we use to, I don't know, cope with tragedy better? In reality horrific traumatic events tend to just gently caress people up. Tons of holocaust survivors became horrible awful monsters after their humanity was stripped away. Freed slaves returning to africa ended up using what they learned from slavery to oppress people them selves. Quite often people that have been oppressed simply learn to become oppressors. For every person who comes out of a death camp or a horrible war with a deep understanding on the dangers of hatred, another comes out simply broken, while another comes out a hate filled monster only to repeat the cycle.
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Oct 13, 2016 06:25
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