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HEY GAL posted:yeah, "is bethlen gabor/rakoczi going to do a thing" is a running minor theme throughout. the answer is always "maybe, if he feels like it" If the 30 YW was a WWE pay-per-view event you'd have something like six or eight or ten instances where Jim Ross goes BAH GAWD IS THAT BETHLEN GÁBOR'S MUSIC, Bethlen runs in and smacks Ferdinand in the back with a steel chair and takes off again.
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Aug 2, 2016 16:12
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my dad posted:Wouldn't the German counterpart to the Maginot line (I forgot the name) get in the way of "blowing right through them"? The Siegfried Line was not finished, Germany didn't really have the manpower to defend it properly in 1939 (while invading Poland) and the fortifications lacked arms. It was a paper tiger.
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Aug 2, 2016 21:15
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pthighs posted:Can someone explain what was so special about that extra millimeter between the 76mm and 75mm? The 75 mm gun was rather short-barrelled compared to the 76, 31 calibers as opposed to 55-. The 76 mm also had a lot heavier round, so muzzle velocity was increased a lot.
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Aug 2, 2016 22:45
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HEY GAL posted:COMPANY is about 300 guys on paper before the war/early in the war and about 200 guys on paper through the war. Paper numbers have nothing to do with who actually shows up. It isn't a tactical unit either. I have some vague recollections of detached companies doing fighting in the Russo-Swedish wars in the late 16th century. Of course, the armies at that point were absolutely tiny when compared to the 30 YW.
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Aug 3, 2016 12:43
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HEY GAL posted:might you be remembering commanded musketeers, which is where someone takes a few musketeers from every company around, combines them into a group of about 200 or so, and uses those guys as skirmishers/to guard the baggage/to guard cannon/anywhere else they need only a few gun-having dudes to do a specific task? Nah, I remember it explicitly being distinct companies (and squadrons) from a few Swedish regiments doing *something* somewhere in Ingria or the Novgorod region. Don't have the literature for that at home, unfortunately.
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Aug 3, 2016 12:53
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Book recommendation time: I am that loving prat who reads books while walking. I have walked enough this summer to finish Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947, and it is really good. From a milhist pov, it is interesting to see how the performance of the Prussian military ebbs and flows and how political situations affect it. Edit: the part that deals with the 30 YW is kind of weirdly shortish. Bierjörg was a poo poo Elector. Kemper Boyd fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Aug 4, 2016 |
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Aug 4, 2016 20:15
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HEY GAL posted:wait a sec, Kemper Boyd, are you talking about Johann Georg of Saxony, who was the guy who had that nickname, or Georg Wilhelm of Brandenburg? you've confused me I was talking about Georg Wilhelm, confused the nicknames because the Brandenburgian dude was an inefficient alcoholic too.
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Aug 4, 2016 22:57
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HEY GAL posted:i thought he was an inefficient dude with a wound that wouldn't heal, was he also an alcoholic? People made fun of him being a drunk, might have ofc been that it was the perception that since he was poo poo at his job, he's a drunk. Banér, probably because Banér was actually feared for being a mean drunk. Banér was also superstitious beyond the usual and had a bunch of camp followers executed for witchcraft.
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Aug 5, 2016 09:33
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Banérs main contribution was also to make the war even nastier than it had been. I think I discussed this with Nils Villstrand when I wrote a paper about the development of Swedish army for him. Gustav Adolf's Articles of War didn't mean that the Swedes were nice about doing war in any meaning but he probably had a genuine belief in that his soldiers should behave themselves, not only because it is nice but it is good for discipline and the Early Modern is all about Disciplining The Subjects. The net effect is probably that you get a bit less of looting and robbing from your army (this is hard as hell to actually measure) because you're trying to do things in a way that keeps things efficient and orderly, like letting towns get off a bit easier because they can pay you contributions in hard cash, which you feed back into the local economy by buying foodstuffs, instead of just sending your soldiers out to steal grain and meat.. Banér really didn't see the value in that and his army's economy was far more hosed than Gustav Adolf's had been, so going All In with the whole "The War Will Feed Itself" came naturally to him.
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Aug 5, 2016 09:41
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HEY GAL posted:that's not just him, that's everyone. i don't really blame him for that. idk, the hypocrisy thing doesn't really appeal to me considering there were people who seriously discussed the ethical stuff related to war, and even Gustav Adolf read books about the justifications of war and debated pretty hard with his bros about if his idea of getting into the 30 YW was actually justifiable in a moral sense There's a lot of War Nerd level popular history which is pretty much based on the idea that all ideals were always fake and no one really cared about them, and despite being a terrible nihilist, I really don't want to think like that. People before the Early Modern (and even during the 17th century) bought hard into the ideals of chivalry, for example, even when they didn't actually live up to them. And when we're talking about the Early Modern, the most recurring theme in any machinery of the state is that the state clearly tries to do good things from time to time, but due to issues related with organizations, financial realities and the generally weak state of the state, they end up at best being half measures or even counterproductive. As a commanding general, you would have a pretty wide array of choices when it comes to things like contributions or Brandschatzung, and not all of them always took the most convenient path or the path of least resistance. Harrison mentions a lot of negotiation going on in many cases, where generals were satisfied with getting less than they could, because it was a lot neater for both ethical and practical reasons. The Most Practical Reason of course being that if you sent your knechts out to get the money, those fuckers would steal as much of it as they could. I really love the 17th century.
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Aug 5, 2016 12:29
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spectralent posted:Isn't that what patriot missiles are for? The Patriot is the only US AD system that doesn't get bullied on the way to school, and there's not that many of them around. Everything else either doesn't exist or it's pretty much a joke.
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Aug 5, 2016 22:02
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I am OK with the Tiger fight being iffy, considering they used an actual Tiger and had limitations on how it was allowed to be used. It does reflect some things extremely well, like the feeling of frustration felt by many soldiers on the front in early 1945: Germany had collapsed and it was obvious, yet the dying has not stopped.
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Aug 9, 2016 09:31
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bewbies posted:Why is it that war movies always feature actors that are way, way, way too drat old to be in the army? Hey, I'm 40 year old lieutenant clint eastwood and I'm taking orders from 42 year old tom hanks who must be the oldest infantry captain in the ETO, except then he meets 51 year old airborne captain ted danson and everybody is surprised until 46 year old lieutenant brad pitt walks up only to be outdone by 51 year old staff sergeant brad pitt In Fury at least it was sort of part of the backstory of the character that Pitt's War Daddy was a WW1 vet.
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Aug 9, 2016 19:46
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Hogge Wild posted:Eg. Finland has many reservist local defense units equipped with jack poo poo vehicles. The Finnish infantry brigades are supposed to use tractors, trucks and buses for strategic mobility though. Besides, the only thing they're good for is for being a force-in-being anyway since they have almost no AA or AT gear.
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Aug 12, 2016 18:43
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feedmegin posted:So I'm envisioning a unit mounted on frigging John Deeres, 18 wheelers and yellow schoolbuses going into action. Is, uh, that really what they do? It seems a bit...rustic. Essentially yes, though that transport would only be mainly used to plop down the brigades into whatever operations zone they have. The actual details on where wartime brigades are placed are OPSEC ofc (and mind you, i have actually no idea of whatever the military's real plans are) but the infantry brigades would probably only be used for static defense in natural bottlenecks, and not along the main axis of a Russian attack into Finland.
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Aug 13, 2016 11:51
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Nenonen posted:IANAP but I've heard that the test includes some confusing questions just to throw you off. The same questions show up several times worded slightly differently and they look if you're being consistent. There is also a time limit so you can't stop to think for too long. The tests used are based on these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Multiphasic_Personality_Inventory
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Aug 13, 2016 19:26
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HEY GAL posted:dude, france is loving ice cold, look up their anticolonialism things The French are more likely to just pop caps into the newsteam and leave them dead in a ditch.
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Aug 16, 2016 12:20
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HEY GAL posted:actually i think almost everyone i study was a better person than nixon and everyone who hung out with him Basically anyone pre-Napoleon is better than the politicians who came afterwards. The nation state is a hosed up cookie.
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Aug 16, 2016 18:52
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HEY GAL posted:i mean on a personal level. i would rather do shots with baner than whatever the gently caress nixon was on with nixon Same, definitively.
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Aug 16, 2016 21:16
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HEY GAL posted:and look how cultured and educated he is Isn't the the count of Urbino who only had like half a face because he once caught a lance with his face?
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Aug 19, 2016 22:04
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HEY GAL posted:hello Nordic friends! have you heard of this guy? He's buried in the cathedral in my hometown. His tin casket has been put on display there, along with his armor. I usually give a tour to people consisting of "this wrought iron fence is 700 years old", "here is the only queen that's been buried in Finland", "Ĺke Tott was a big deal and probably The Biggest Deal in Finnish history and boy did he marry well" and "Torsten Stĺlhandske was one of the best commanders of cav Sweden ever produced and boy did he marry well." Also: descendants of Stĺlhandske still leave flowers at his chapel in the cathedral.
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Aug 21, 2016 19:29
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HEY GAL posted:awwwwww I shall do so. Those dudes would probably seriously fistpump if they heard someone's talking about them 400 years later.
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Aug 21, 2016 20:42
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Hogge Wild posted:Didn't he die childless? Do you have good photos of his mausoleum? What does the text on it say? Should have clarified, not direct descendants because the noble side of the family has died out. But apparently some people related to him. A tour guide told me this when I wondered about a vase of flowers in the chapel. It's pretty hard to get decent photos or read the text on his memorial since it's behind one of those fences. If I ever have the chance, I could try to ask the staff if I could get some photos.
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Aug 21, 2016 21:01
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HEY GAL posted:...best queen? itym best king Ĺke Tott's son, Claes Tott, was one of Christina's favorites and so bad at fuckin' the Tott line died out. Incidentally, I think there's a relationship between infertility/male impotence and riding horses. That would explain a lot, because all of those dudes spent a ton of their time on horseback. Dunno where I read this and if this is bullshit.
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Aug 21, 2016 22:07
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thatbastardken posted:literally from a roleplaying game I know Reign (because I used the mechanics for my own early modern elfgame project), but I am vaguely remembering something about horseback riding (and biking too) resulting in vascular issues related to men's junk not working properly.
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Aug 22, 2016 07:01
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HEY GAL posted:not according to this guy's book, just "clean the filth" out of the wound, sew the intestines back together, and it might be touch and go but not an automatic death sentence. People did use to survive a lot more serious wounds than people expect. Sure, a whole lot of people did die who wouldn't die today but the human body is a wonderous thing in how resilient it can be. There was someone in either the last thread or the sword thread who said that people in the past were less good at fighting with swords since they couldn't practice as well as us because of no antibiotics, which is hilarious. Even back in the 17th century, cuts from swordfighting practice would not kill you.
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Aug 22, 2016 11:39
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Hunt11 posted:Disregarding the fact that a very recent post in this thread demonstrated why World War II needed to be fought as a certain side was rather found of committing war atrocities at an underrepresented scope, how was it supposed to have ended a year earlier? Well, after Bagration, the Normandy landings and the failure of the Ardennes offensive, it should have been pretty obvious to any German general that the war was going to be lost so the only moral thing to do at such a junction is to stop fighting.
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Aug 22, 2016 16:11
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Cyrano4747 posted:People in the past weren't aliens who we can never hope to understand but you vastly over state the universality of the human condition. I think that a fairly good example is this: I walk into a bar and punch a dude in the back of the head and give him a couple of blows for good measure. Then I go "defend yourself, coward", drag him outside, and when he pulls a knife I stab him with my own. I go back into the bar and tell my friends at the table "guy's been talking poo poo about me and called me a coward." 17th century people would mostly go "oh ok yeah we get you now", average modern day people, not so much.
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Aug 22, 2016 17:31
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HEY GAL posted:we shouldn't veer over into the other extreme, which is assuming we can never understand members of a different culture or that they're literally alien to us I thought about this today when I did yardwork (i.e. ate plums from a tree and smoked half a pack of marlboros), and I think that to understand people in history, we need to have a greater appreciation of the circumstances people were in. Ericsson is one of those historians I always return to, and it's bizarre to think about how violent pre-modern society was, and how much society is driven by concepts that are now fairly alien to most of us, like external honor. A post-estates era society is also one where at least on some level, people from all classes are judged along the same general lines, which makes it hard to understand how an early modern society was one where soldiers, peasants, nobles and miners all had their own codes of conduct/morality. Which leads back to identity being an external factor for the individual, thus, I will use Lacanian theory on my dudes and they should like it.
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Aug 22, 2016 18:06
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HEY GAL posted:i might be completely wrong, but i thought brigade was just what the swedes called regiments The Swedish brigade was around 2000 men on paper, and a regiment was a different thing, being regional-based if a national unit. Except when it wasn't. I really should buy the Swedish General Staff's history of the wars of Gustav Adolf because I could actually look up in it what sub-units the Blue Brigade and the Yellow Brigade had.
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Aug 23, 2016 17:31
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Ataxerxes posted:A regiment was an adminstrative thing and a brigade was the actual combat formation of 2 or 3 regiments, can't remember which. Regiments would not form by themselves in battles, they would always be a part of a brigade. I have a feeling that this changed sometime after the Battle of Nördlingen, more definitively not really around during the late stages of the war, as the armies started to become smaller and more cavalryish. Internet sources are really poo poo for 30YW history, but at least it looks like the Yellow Brigade started out as a regiment and was reinforced up to a brigade without adding regiments as such. I wish I had those glorious big grey books around at home.
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Aug 24, 2016 00:09
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Talking about the psychology of dudes in history based on very narrow material (we have only one comprehensive contemporary biography of an English knight, for example) tends to be iffy as hell, and not all negative emotions about past experiences are PTSD. My gut feel leans towards PTSD being less of a thing on account of people being more accustomed with violence and death in general, on a societal level, and warfare lacks the general stresses it has today. Like, a US soldier anywhere in Afghanistan is never really safe, because at any given moment, they might get mortared or whatever. Hieronymous Sebastian Schütze, on the other hand, can be reasonably secure from violent enemy action whenever he's not foraging, sieging or fighting a battle (which were rare).
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Aug 26, 2016 09:02
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Hogge Wild posted:otoh he can be hit with a random bullet at any time he's near a window Schütze pre-empts this with a walterwhitesque "I am the one that shoots."
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Aug 26, 2016 09:35
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Fangz posted:What would people pick as a Nightmare Team of military leaders? Grigory Kulik in charge of armour, George McClellan in charge of military intel, Gaius Terentius Varro commanding the infantry, Napoleon Bonaparte handling the logistics? Robert E. Lee picking the cause to fight for.
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Aug 29, 2016 13:19
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Nenonen posted:Is that any worse than Dwight "let's march to Berlin when the nearest operational ports are in Normandy, Rhine should be no obstacle roflol" Eisenhower, really? Generals aren't clairvoyeurs, especially when the enemy has no decency to stop fighting after their initial defeat. Rommel's problem wasn't as much the lack of port capacity but this: - His supply could be intercepted, which happened a lot - He didn't have the logistics to actually get stuff to the front. The US could afford to burn (fictional example) ten gallons of gas for every gallon that gets to the front, but Rommel couldn't afford that.
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Aug 29, 2016 14:22
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my dad posted:Is this just good old Wikipedia bullshit? Robert K. Massie (of Castles of Steel fame) mentions the episode in his biography of Catherine the Great. JPJ comes across as sort of a desperate hasbeen pedo in it.
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Aug 29, 2016 20:55
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MikeCrotch posted:Oh god. Lindybeige has a new video. It's called..."Cavalry Was a Stupid Idea". I think I fell asleep while watching that and woke up to needing to use the toilet. That is my Lindybeige experience.
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Aug 30, 2016 11:24
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Anyone coming to Turku in Finland can hit me up, I can show you the tombs of Tott and Stĺlhandske and rant about the local geography and the lack of historical sources about the area.
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Aug 30, 2016 19:10
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Tias posted:I don't know about the border troops, but the VV was the ministry of internal security's military arm, used for places where using the Red Army would look bad - against Russian citizens. Primary duties were full-scale riot suppression, anti-guerilla actions in rebellious areas, and defending fortified urban areas in wartime. I don't know if it still exists in the RF, but you can bet your rear end they have something similar. The MVD RF still exists, and fought in Chechnya and Dagestan. Edit: Except this year they were made a part of the new National Guard of Russia.
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Sep 15, 2016 10:31
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Ataxerxes posted:Sadly none of his books have been translated, the target audience kinda is Finnish, so while they might sell abroad I don't think anyone has thought of translating them. I found this snipped online, but it's all I did: https://lehvaslaiho.wordpress.com/2010/05/27/in-english-stalin-in-the-battlefield/ His best anecdote is from the Finnish counterattacks during the battle of Tali-Ihantala. The official military history says something like "Major Suchandsuch ordered the heavy armor company to counterattack the Soviet tank battalion" and Lehväslaiho comments that it wasn't really a heavy company anymore because all the other tanks had either been shot to poo poo or had to be abandoned. So it was just four dudes (the tank commander had been killed in a previous engagement) in a T-.34, hitting a Soviet battalion, winning and making it retreat.
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Sep 16, 2016 07:58
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