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Siivola posted:Paging Kemper Boyd to the thread. I bet he has some quality dirt. Oula Silvennoinen discovered about ten years back that there was something called Einsatzgruppe Finnland and the Finnish authorities and military turned over unknown amounts of POW's to them, mostly Jewish ones. Finland also ran concentration camps for Soviet civilians in Eastern Karelia which had a terrible survival rate.
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Sep 26, 2016 12:01
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MikeCrotch posted:Wasn't the Finnish government at the time generally a shitshow as well, and there were all sorts of privations and hardships for the ordinary people and soldiers (I mean, more so than usual in war). Or am I totally misremembering that? Not as much as a shitshow, but the govt mostly ruled by decree during the duration of WW2 and the parliament got entirely sidelined until the peace opposition got big enough. Otherwise, privations and hardships were mostly the same poo poo you'd see anywhere else in Europe, i.e. rationing and all that. Finnish pre-WW2 govt in general can be characterized by being irresponsible as poo poo when it comes to relations with the Soviets because for all his poo poo, Stalin was absolutely right about Finland being an unreliable neighbor. .
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Sep 26, 2016 12:16
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xthetenth posted:The main takeaway is that carriers are exceptional at killing each other though. I drunkenly explained ww2 carrier combat once to someone as two boxers who both throw a right hook at each other while hoping they manage to block the other guy's blow.
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Oct 1, 2016 19:34
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Hogge Wild posted:How much has canister shot been used after WWI? I remember someone mentioning that tanks use it still for urban combat. At least the Sheridan tank had canister shot for its gun and I remember it being used in Vietnam.
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Oct 11, 2016 21:32
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:thanks for posting the loving dumbest quote of all time I think the Patton quote about fixed fortifications is even dumber considering he ended up breaking his dick over the fortifications at Metz.
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Oct 12, 2016 14:02
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About the Nazi manufacturing and industry shitfest: It seems to me that the Nazis were never really in a position to make any sort of structural changes to the way their industrial sector worked, since they relied a lot on the support of the German industrialists, who most likely weren't interested in consolidating production and streamlining in collaboration with their commercial competitors. And these sorts of changes would have to have been done in the thirties, not during the war, anyway.
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Oct 13, 2016 09:12
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USMC_Karl posted:
Canister was horrifyingly effective. Here is a nice description from the Great Northern War: Despite all the odds the 4,000 Swedish infantry moved forward, drums beating. Above the ranks in their tattered and threadbare blue uniforms flew their battle standards, as worn and scarred as the men who marched beneath them, but slapping proudly in the warm summer breeze. Soon solid shot from the Russian cannon was ploughing bloody lanes through the ranks, taking off arms, legs and heads, but on they came. At 100 yards the Russian artillerymen changed to grape and scrap shot spewing a hail of iron into the oncoming Swedes. Dozens fell with each blast; their bodies riddled and shredded, and still they marched on. With backs and heads bent forward as if bracing themselves against a blizzard the Swedish battalions now came under volley fire from the Russian infantry, the sound of the impact upon their bodies not unlike that made when throwing handfuls of stones into a mud pile. Still they pressed on without firing a shot in return, and although the line was now far from aligned correctly, the Guard battalions on the Swedish right burst into the Russian ranks, driving them back on their second reserve line. Desperately Lewenhaupt cast around to see if the cavalry were now coming to exploit the breakthrough, but no Swedish squadrons were to be seen. The general noticed that the left wing of his line was in difficulty as the Russians had moved numerous cannon to this part of the field to cover their cavalry to the north. Here the concentrated fire from the guns cut down the Swedish battalions before they could get to grips with their foe. With the right wing still pressing forward, and the left wing clearly faltering, a dangerous gap was now being created in the Swedish battle line. With solid shot, the gunners attempted to make the shot bounce off the ground so it could hit multiple people. A heavy cannonball has a lot of energy going on for it, even when it loses most of it, it can still break bones easily.
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Oct 18, 2016 08:34
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TheFluff posted:Peter Englund? Think so, I googled an English-language description of the battle and it used Englund as a source.
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Oct 18, 2016 09:31
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A good way to understand the HRE is this In childhood, a lot of kids come up with the idea of declaring independence and calling their room a sovereign nation. In the HRE, this was actually true from time to time.
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Oct 19, 2016 14:26
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OwlFancier posted:LHD is the weirdest euphemism for "amphibious assault ship" Landing Helicopter Dock.
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Oct 23, 2016 18:32
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LHD's might have their uses, but I think we can all agree on that allowing Marines to put toy planes on them is dumb.
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Oct 24, 2016 11:34
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Baron Porkface posted:Has a head of state been captured or killed in the heat of battle since Napoleon III? The Esteemed Brother Colonel Muammar Gaddafi seems to be the most recent case.
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Oct 24, 2016 20:11
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Grey Hunter posted:From what I get (this is a new period of history for me) it was a transition from the smaller forces and feudal lead to a more industrial pay led scheme - basically in the Feudal system, you had to fight because your local lord would know if you didn't. In the later periods you fought for pay and for your country, but I guess this was a transition period where you pretty much fought for pay. Then it became cheaper to just hire mercenaries rather than maintain a trained army? Roughly (very roughly, as we're talking about a period spanning hundreds of years and a geographical space spanning an entire continent), I'd prefer to think about the feudal system as one that relied on paid professionals as much as the following periods, just that the method of assembling them was different. A French baron's lance would contain not only knights in his service, but also professional soldiers kept on retainer. The baron pays for them, not the king. And the levies didn't contain untrained peasants, in places and times where the peasants were expected to fight, they usually trained for it. Like the Anglo-Saxon fyrd. But in general, the peasants didn't concern themselves with fighting wars and that is not their job, the feudal compact exists because the liege lord promises to defend those under him. Over the medieval period, you get more and more of the thing where the nobles pay the king money instead of fighting. The monarchs use this cash to hire professional soldiers. And when you get to the Early Modern, everyone has figured out that professional soldiers are the way to go.
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Oct 27, 2016 11:34
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Vaginal Vagrant posted:Could anyone recommended a good Stalin biography? I liked Edvard Radzinsky's Stalin bio a lot, since Radzinsky clearly isn't a fan of the man.
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Oct 27, 2016 21:00
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Started today with thesis work. Realized I probably need to track down which regiments were with Tilly at Magdeburg. Smoked a cigarette. If I don't restrain myself at all I'll end up with a thesis the length of a doctoral thesis and that's not probably worth it unless someone pays me to write one.
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Oct 28, 2016 11:25
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Question for you Cold War-era military stuff experts or aficionados or whatever you call yourself: I've been reading a bunch of stuff (because of Wargame) about how the Soviets did their whole Deep Battle thing (which works excellently in Wargame), how did the US and the rest of NATO intend to defend against something like it? Apart from nuking the poo poo out of Eastern Europe, that is.
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Oct 29, 2016 23:13
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HEY GAL: Sometimes things stay the same the more they change. A friend is writing a book about the battle of Summa in the Winter War, and he interviewed one of the veterans recently. This dude was famous for going out between the lines to fetch corpses because the Finnish troops were underequipped enough to need more guns and ammo and he brought back tons of both. He did confess that he didn't actually do the hazardous trips for this reason, but because the Soviets had vodka rations and he just wanted to be drunk as much as possible..
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Oct 31, 2016 12:29
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The Royal Navy fought tooth and nail against having to escort freighters with destroyers, which is funny. By WW2 they realized it's a pretty good idea.
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Nov 1, 2016 18:47
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Alchenar posted:They always knew it was a good idea, it's just that there weren't enough destroyers to go around and they were desperately needed to keep the Grand Fleet afloat. I remember something like bad analysis on part of the Royal Navy playing a role too. The thinking was that putting ships into convoys would allow the Germans to sink more ships than otherwise if they found one. At the time, it wasn't realized that running convoys makes finding targets harder for the subs.
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Nov 1, 2016 21:16
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Grand Prize Winner posted:From my understanding (based on reading this thread and little else), there were 88 AA units and 88 AT units, which were generally expected to do just one job, but either type of unit could be pressed into service for the other duty in a relatively short time. The Flak version could be used to AT duties, but not the other way around, because the carriage of the Flak version allowed it to be fired as an AT gun, but not vice versa.
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Nov 12, 2016 14:02
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The Russian still have a 125 mm AT gun in service, the Sprut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprut_anti-tank_gun And the Russian 122mm howitzer has gun sights and HEAT shells for AT purposes.
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Nov 12, 2016 17:12
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The british may put a man on a horse, but they will never have proper cavalry.
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Nov 20, 2016 11:54
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bewbies posted:I've come around to the thinking that Lee's attack into PA and Maryland was a decent strategy, kind of a best-of-a-bunch-of-bad options deal. His army was starting to have serious supply issues by the time of Chancellorsville, and he saw things getting really bad that winter as the forage in northern VA was pretty much completely exhausted by then. He knew the political situation in the north; the timbre of the political dialogue was really unstable that spring and summer, and he had a new and totally untested opponent who was taking over a badly disorganized and demoralized army. He also had the rapidly devolving situation in the west to think about - once Vicksburg fell the situation in the west looked...rough, to put it charitably. I think that one of the things that the movie Gettysburg gets right, is that Buford was a loving genius for realizing that the Union really needed to hold the heights to win. Because in a Gay Black Lee universe, Gay Black Buford would have just abandoned the ridges in favor of retreating in the face of a superior foe, and then Meade would have been pressed hard to carry out a really stupid offensive against an entrenched ANV.
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Nov 22, 2016 17:20
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Tias posted:What were musketeers anyway? I never really understood what those guys were doing( apart from, I must assume, fire muskets at some point in between gallant swashbuckling). The Musketeers in the Dumas sense refer to the two Royal Musketeer companies belonging to the Royal Guard. Or more properly, they belong to the military arm of the French Crown, which wasn't just ceremonial guards but troops that were used in the field several times.
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Nov 23, 2016 12:47
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spectralent posted:EDIT: I mean, I assume testudo and stuff are basically impregnable from any side, but presumably peasant levy in the middle ages or pike squares aren't quite the same thing? The testudo can get owned by cavalry easily enough, as proved by the Parthians at Carrhae.
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Nov 24, 2016 13:54
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Plan Z posted:Or hell, just all of the Generals after any war who take all of the positive credit and no blame for the problems, preferring to throw shade on dead/retired officers who can't fight back. Manstein and Guderian take the credit for the attack on France and throw the blame of Barbarossa failing at Hitler. Which is kind of funny except millions of people died.
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Nov 28, 2016 19:44
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Fangz posted:I think generally speaking it's less useful to talk about who is/isn't terrible than it is to understand where the biases of the writer in question come from, and so where they are trying to go with a particular work. I read Irving's Hitler's War and it was interesting in lots of ways. Wouldn't pay money for it tho but.
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Dec 8, 2016 14:53
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chitoryu12 posted:Everyone uses tear gas, but American police are unique in the amount of violence and the number of deaths they cause. While they're theoretically supposed to use minimal force, in practice a lot of unarmed civilians get killed in ways that a military would poo poo their pants over. Americans keep saying that but then again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961
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Dec 17, 2016 09:24
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Nenonen posted:I have heard that there was a push in the 70's or 80's among communist youth here to get into reserve officer or NCO training so that come the day of reckoning they could lead the Civil War Mark 2. That wouldn't work with today's leftists, I'm afraid. That's a myth btw. The Finnish military intelligence kept tabs people they don't want in sensitive positions. So SKP left-wingers usually didn't get into NCO school or ROS. The SKP in general wasn't revolutionary either.
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Dec 22, 2016 10:24
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xthetenth posted:I'm all in for this. Also the really really bad voices in the head are telling me that I should definitely make a full up tabletop rpg system and setting that's 17th century as hell. You should go back to writing so they're less loud. I've been writing one for a couple of years now. It's even nearly finished.
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Dec 27, 2016 09:16
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lenoon posted:Surely the Vikings TV series isn't historically accurate because it's talking about possibly entirely mythical Ragnar Lodbrok? Like it should be a mythical saga, he was a saga kind of guy. There's levels to historical accuracy. Such as the picture that Rome paints of Roman culture and society, it is very accurate based on what we know about Rome. It doesn't matter that Pullo and Vorenus weren't probably around for most of what happened. Vikings has this weird thing going on where some of the stuff in the series is very accurate, and then they drop historical accuracy for the next scene for dramatic purposes. For instance, the scene in the first episode where the two dudes show up at Ragnars and Lagerthas house and she tells them that there's water and food if they want, otherwise they can gently caress off: very much an accurate representation of how the duty of hospitality worked in early medieval Scandinavia. Then again, the next scene where the Jarl, played by Gabriel Byrne, condemns a guy to death for reasons. They didn't have the death penalty. Likewise, Byrnes Jarl is presented a lot like a late medieval king or something. He's the Jarl because people have confidence in his leadership, he can't actually tell people that they have to do what he says for most of the time.
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Dec 27, 2016 18:41
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Jack2142 posted:I think it is a culture institution thing, in the USA the democracy is heavily entrenched via education and history, even the most ignorant of Americans know George Washington didn't become a King and its beaten into our collective consciousness. Since Washington is essentially the patron saint of the US military a general attempting to seize power would run into huge resistance. That sounds like a myth of American exceptionalism, though. Most western countries have not been subject to military coups.
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Dec 28, 2016 11:13
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Cyrano4747 posted:Also doesn't Ragnar fall more into quasi-mythical than straight up mythical? I thought he was one of those cases where there are a lot of things that are clearly mystical / mythical / exaggerated / etc about him, but there's also probably a real person (or persons) somewhere at the core of all that. Yeah, and it's worth noting that he appears in several sources, and probably independently of one another. It's fairly clearly a case where we can say that there is some (and probably, a significant amount) of truth at work there, compared to things like Arthurian stuff.
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Dec 28, 2016 11:19
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Koramei posted:I just used America as an example since I'm more confident saying it didn't have any coups. Is there a reason modern European states have also been fairly immune to it? A strong parliament seems to do the trick. Not even democracy or actual representation, mind you, but a system of government where there's a clear tendency away from dictatorship and a clear idea of how state power is properly used (Cyrano might have a different opinion here). No Nordic country had a military coup happen, for instance. The last one happened in the UK during the Civil Wars, France saw one attempt in the last hundred years or so. The European military coups and coup attempts mostly happen in countries that didn't really have a working democracy going on. Crazycryodude posted:It really depends on A) what you define as a military coup, B) what's a "Western" country (South/Central America in particular would like a word), and C) how far back you're looking. You can replace western with first world, I guess. And for how far back, I've mostly considered the end of the Napoleonic Wars and from that point onwards, when we get the creation of the modern states in Europe and North America that still mostly exist today.
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Dec 28, 2016 17:59
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Cyrano4747 posted:SA engages in a lot of hyperbole. The problem with American schools is the unevenness of quality. A blighted school district in an inner city with gently caress all for a budget and high teacher turn over is truly lovely, but your average suburban public school is in the same ballpark as a western European one. Well, maybe not Finland. Those fuckers have some good game. Finnish school history (with the rest of our public-sphere culture) has a serious tendency to whitewash the last 120+ years or so. Nationalist terrorists are usually called "activists", when discussing the Civil War there's usually a thing going on where people say "well there was the White Terror but also a Red Terror so fair's fair", except that the Red Terror was unorganized killings that the Red govt tried to curb, while the White govt encouraged revenge killings, sent women and children to the camps and never tried anyone for war crimes. And then there's the thing about WW2 where Finland sent Russian civilians to concentration camps where a lot of them somehow starved to death and collaborated the the Einsatzgruppen and turned over Russian Jewish prisoners without batting an eye.
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Dec 30, 2016 18:15
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HEY GAL posted:hooOOOLY poo poo that skull Åke Tott flew something like that as his standard.
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Jan 6, 2017 00:04
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He's been mentioned in the thread before, but this Skallagrim video is worth a watch. Compare that to Lindybeige's stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r08pB3rerw0
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Jan 14, 2017 12:27
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Crazycryodude posted:Oh, Rommel. Scurrying between foxholes, heroically leading from the front, helping the gun crew wheel around their weapon, and micromanaging decisions better left to grades WAY below him. I mean, not to bash the guy, but shouldn't he be doing General things like looking at maps and making sure his logistics aren't stretched past breaking instead of reliving the glory days? I think there's some criticism towards Rommel for doing that poo poo instead of actually staying in touch with his units and managing the DAK. It's a thing sometimes discussed in management strategies in general: the boss might be a guy who's great at [task his staff does] but he should not sit around doing that poo poo himself, but instead act like a manager and make sure his staff can do the tasks they're supposed to do.
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Jan 23, 2017 10:50
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FAUXTON posted:Rommel: McClellan except he made an attempt at offensive action. Au contraire: McClellan was hella into logistics and frequently refused to move because he wanted to have his logistics in shape before taking offensive action.
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Jan 23, 2017 20:22
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Siivola posted:You joke, but that's actually a depiction of peasants during the famine in the 1890's. People still slashed and burned back then. One of the kinda-misunderstanding about slash and burn agriculture is that it's seen a primitive and so on. As long as there's not a huge population doing it, it's going to make people rich as hell. The returns on it are far greater than conventional pre-industrial agriculture. A usual rule of thumb is that for every seed planted, you get back 3-6 grains. For s&b agriculture, that figure is 18-30. The Savolax region in Finland was rich as poo poo (comparatively) during the 16th century.
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Feb 5, 2017 18:02
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