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Can anyone point me towards reading about Soviet doctrine and tactics in WW2? It is very hard to find anything in English that isn't full of Asiatic hordes, human wave attacks, suicide mineclearing  , 2guys1rifle and other nonsense.I guess it's hardly surprising, considering the primary sources are all in Russian and most of them were unavailable until the end of the cold war, while the Germans just couldn't stop running their loving mouth. Geisladisk fucked around with this message at 12:23 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 12:21
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GotLag posted:So what was the most comfortable tank? Sherman? The only time I've heard the creature comforts of the Sherman described was by a Russian who heaped praise on it. On the other hand, he was used to early model T-34s, which coloured his perception just a little. One of the things that he mentioned was that the driver's seat was padded, which he considered a luxury - Giving some idea of what a miserable shitcan the T-34 was when it comes to crew comfort. The most comfortable WW2 era tanks were probably the German big cats, simply because they had a lot of room for the crew, comparatively speaking. HEY GAIL posted:David Glantz should set you up, his books are good and EXHAUSTIVELY informative Thanks!
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Sep 28, 2017 14:36
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And you aren't invading a country that uses a narrower rail gauge than you do, and the jackasses took all their trains with them when they retreated.
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Sep 28, 2017 15:48
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Don Gato posted:How easy was it for the Allies to repair a Tiger? From that article: quote:Scroif and Glagow's Tigers were not left without attention. They became known in early January of 1945. A father-son mechanic duo, Roger and Jean Lecourtier, as well as Bernard Verier, put the tank into working order after a month of work. French tricolour insignia was added to the sides, and the tank received a traditional "geographic" nickname: Bretagne. So two months of man-hours to get this one tank up and running after a relatively minor scuffle. It wasn't really practical. When proper armies used captured vehicles, which rarely happened (unless that army happens to be the Wehrmacht), they were only used until they broke down. Without mechanics familiar with the vehicles and a supply of spare parts, the effort just wasn't worth it. However, this was a case of some enthusiastic civilians wanting to get back at their occupiers, so the usual cost-benefit analysis didn't apply. quote:I can't imagine there were too many spare parts considering the relative scarcity of the Tiger in the west, did the mechanics just shrug and shove Sherman parts that were almost the same size? (I am not a mechanic and dont know how viable that is). Parts are definitely not interchangeable. Maybe in some cases foreign parts could be made to work with some very dubious jury rigging, but I'm guessing those fine Frenchmen had some access to parts from the abandoned and destroyed German AFVs littering their land. Geisladisk fucked around with this message at 10:04 on Oct 23, 2017 |
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Oct 23, 2017 10:02
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Reading How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Apparently, the German plans for Operation Citadel (the Kursk offensive) were so compromised and thoroughly known to the Soviets, that exactly one hour before the German artillery was scheduled to start their initial bombardment, kicking off the offensive, the Soviet artillery started bombarding the German artillery positions. Just imagine what went through the head of the German officers at that point. "Oh gently caress, this is going to go badly, isn't it?"
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Oct 31, 2017 11:31
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MikeCrotch posted:There was a lot of discussion in OKH prior to Citadel that trying to pinch off the salient was the most obvious move possible and the Soviets could predict the attack by reading a map. Von Manstein among others felt that trying to cut across the salient and take a slice out of it was a much better plan than trying to encircle the whole thing, but they were overruled. While reading through the chapters on Kursk, I'm just completely baffled by how the Germans could think this was a good idea. I'm no general, and this might be a 20/20 thing, but the Soviets knew months in advance that the Germans were coming, and the Germans knew it. The Soviets had literally months to stack a tiny area with as much manpower, fortifications, and materiel as humanely possible, and when they couldn't fit any more poo poo, they started stacking the rear areas with a reserve force counting literally millions. The Soviet buildup in the area was completely absurd - The book mentions that the average Soviet infantry company in the region had 9 attached AT guns. That is one AT gun for every squad of infantry. And to top it off, there were no pressing strategic objectives that mandated attacking into that nightmare. The book mentions that while the Germans knew that the Soviet buildup was immense, they didn't have a clear idea of just how huge it was. Was it just a case of everyone giving a collective shrug, and going, "ah hell, how bad can it be"? Committing the entirety of your mobile forces to a largely blind attack into a numerically and materially superior enemy, who you know has had months to prepare, seems completely inexplicable. Then again, it ain't like the Germans had very many good options at that point.
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Oct 31, 2017 16:36
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The Luftwaffe's panzer division is my favorite bit of WW2 trivia, because nothing encapsulates better the incompetency and petty infighting at the heart of the 3rd Reich. "Hitler?" "Yes, Göring?" "I want a tank division" "But you are in charge of the air force?" "Yes, but I want a tank division" "..." "...so am I getting a tank division or what? I'll call it the Para-Tank division" "Göring, that doesn't even make any goddamn sense" Geisladisk fucked around with this message at 12:24 on Nov 10, 2017 |
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Nov 10, 2017 12:22
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Someone posted this in the Historical wargaming thread:Frobbe posted:
Which set me wondering - How serious were the proposals for the Ratte and Monster? The patent absurdity of those proposals should have been immediately apparent, yet they seem to have gained some traction within the Nazi Military-Industrial complex, floating around for a year before Albert Speer presumably muttered "what the ever loving gently caress is this bullshit" and ripped them up. Did anyone seriously think they were ever going to: 1) Manage to get these things operational 2) Have the resources to build even one 3) Not have them immediately immobilized by artillery or air strikes? What was going on? The traditional explanation that gets floated around the internet is "meth is a hell of a drug". It can't be that simplistic, can it?
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Dec 22, 2017 11:36
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Tias posted:What even is the "monster"? Was that a thing nazi engineers actually theorized about? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1500_Monster Basically a Schwerer Gustaf 800mm railway gun minus the railway. A self-propelled 800mm gun.
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Dec 22, 2017 12:57
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Ensign Expendable posted:Similar ideas were floated in Allied nations as well. I particularly like a Canadian equivalent that only had ~160 mm of armour. You can't just tease me like that without giving me any juicy deets. 
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Dec 22, 2017 16:24
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I know I'm not exactly breaking new ground here, but I re-read Band of Brothers. I first read it in my teens, I am now in my late 20s. It hit me like a sack of bricks that Ricard Winters was 26 years old in 1944. Most of the guys under his command were barely over 20. When I was 26 years old I was calling my dad to have him explain to me how to cook a chicken without giving my girlfriend food poisoning, when Winters was 26 he was dragging a hundred loving kids around Europe, while trying to have as few of them murdered as possible. It's discomforting that most of the people who fight in wars are younger than I am now, and I barely feel like a functional adult. War is lovely.
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Jan 4, 2018 17:49
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Jack2142 posted:I think one that gets me is Alexander the Great, just with what he accomplished at such a young age. Then for generations even other incredibly famous historical figures like Caeser visiting his tomb and lamenting how little they accomplished in comparison. bewbies posted:the entire beatles song catalogue was written by the time paul mccartney was 27 I wasn't lamenting that Winters accomplished more or got more poo poo done than I did at his age, rather that it's terrifying to put 26 year old me in his shoes - Having that crushing responsibility to such a large group of what are basically kids, and having a large number of them die or get maimed carrying out his orders. It's sort of hard to put into words, but since I started developing an interest in military history in my teens, the people I read about who fought these wars always seemed... adults, I guess? As a teen or young adult, you read about these people, and although you can sort of grasp the hardship they go through, you also can't really relate to them because they're older, more developed people than you are. You know you wouldn't be able to deal with that poo poo, but you also know that you're just a dumb loving kid. Then adulthood creeps up on you, not as any one defined point, but rather as a series of tiny, incremental changes that culminate in you waking up one morning with a mortgage to pay and children to feed, while still feeling like a teenager, and you realize that there's no such thing as an adult. And then it snaps into focus that these poor fuckers you read about weren't any smarter or grown up or tough or really any different than you, and you finally empathize with the awful reality of what they went through. At that point, for me, it got a little bit harder to "enjoy" military history in the typically juvenile way I always did, fawning over tanks and planes and poo poo, because those things are fundamentally ugly, awful things built to maim and kill other people like you. Typical discussions about things like gun A being able to penetrate the armor of tank X and N numbers of meters kind of snap into context, because the discussion is fundamentally about whether gun A is able to punch through a steel box to maim and kill a bunch of people like you in a completely gruesome and awful way. Sorry if this seems sappy or incoherent. 
Geisladisk fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Jan 5, 2018 |
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Jan 5, 2018 10:44
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bewbies posted:did the Germans have a blanket "no surrender" policy in place during WWII, and if so, can someone source it for me? During the latter half of the war with the USSR, Hitler repeatedly declared towns and cities "fortresses" and directed that no retreat was permissible from them. That is probably what you are referring to. These invariably resulted in the forces trapped there being encircled and ultimately destroyed. This had some fun side effects, such as some commanders methodically avoiding going into towns and cities, despite it being a good idea tactically, in case the town was declared a "fortress" while they were in there. The Germans obviously had a policy of not surrendering throughout the war, right up to the point where they did.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:52
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Was there any fundamental difference in how field artillery was aimed between the World Wars, other than improved communication allowing faster targeting and feedback from observers? The actual aiming of the gun was still carried out by a dude with a slide rule doing trigonometry and hand cranking the elevation and traverse and manually setting the fuse and charge, right?
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Jan 9, 2018 19:09
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How were levy soldiers in feudal conflicts motivated to fight? For the past couple of hundred years, at least, wars have been rationalized and "sold" to the people fighting those wars with nationalism, ethnicity, religion, or idealism. Most people aren't terribly interested in killing other people, so it is pretty important to motivate them to do it. But what about wars between feudal lords purely motivated by personal gain of the lord? For instance, during the Sengoku period in Japan. You are a peasant living under Lord Whatever. He is warring with the Lord in the next province over, Lord Whomever. You are forced into his army as a rank and file spearman. It sucks. The guys you are expected to try your hardest to murder speak the same language as you, are of the same ethnic group, have the same culture, and live only a few days' walking distance from your house. They might as well be your cousins. You have no ideological beef with them whatsoever, the only thing separating you is that a different but identical guy claims ownership of the land you live on. How would you be motivated to fight and kill these guys? Would the war be "sold" to you at all? Would the enemy be dehumanized at all? Was it simply a matter of "it is your duty, do it and shut up"? If so, were you likely to take that duty seriously? Geisladisk fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Feb 1, 2018 |
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Feb 1, 2018 23:55
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quote:The following seems a simple method of estimating what we could do by bombing Germany Christ, the dreary, monstrous math of industrialized total war in that text is horrifying. "Hmm, so if our bombers fly X sorties on average before being destroyed, and each drops Y tons of bombs, that will on average make Z people homeless per bomber produced" I need a cross between  and 
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Feb 2, 2018 18:40
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Anyone read Panzer Gunner? I thought this guy's story was too interesting to pass up, so I picked it up. His parents were ethnic German Ukrainians, migrated to Canada where he was born, dad was a huge nazi, sent him to Germany by himself in 1939 when he was 15, drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1944, ends up being a Panzer IV and later Jagdpanzer IV gunner before returning to Canada in the 50s. That is weird enough to earn a look. But a lot of it, particularly the combat anecdotes feel kinda fishy. He claims to have knocked out a total of twenty or so tanks, which is pretty extraordinary. All of his combat is tank-on-tank with no infantry in sight. Most of the time his unit seems to have no mission whatsoever, and just freely roams around the countryside in groups of three tanks, just dunkin' on T-34s. The author is also kind of getting on my nerves. He seems to have absolutely no self awareness about the fact that he was a Nazi footsoldier in a genocidal war of aggression. At one point his tank gets knocked out, and he and his buddies are sent "foraging" while they wait around for replacements. "Foraging" involves going around the Lithuanian countryside and mugging farmers for their silverware and food. He acts all uppity about an incident where one of this pals threatens a farmer to shake the ham out of him, proudly declaring that he never used any threats or violence in his "foraging". I feel like when a troop of literal Nazis march up to your little hamlet, armed to the teeth, and politely ask you if they can just take all your food, there is absolutely no way you are saying no, threats or no threats. Because of the implication.
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Feb 21, 2018 12:36
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Acebuckeye13 posted:What's funny is that even Speer recognized in his memoirs that the stuff he'd designed with/for Hitler was ostentatious garbage. Memoirs that he wrote in the 60s. If you go purely by autobiographical accounts, the only person in Germany who was ever more than lukewarm about Nazism was Hitler. Also, Hitler was entirely personally to blame for everything from tasteless architecture to military blunders to the genocide. It is entirely possible that is what Speer thought at the time, but a high-ranking Nazi claiming that he totally wasn't into any of that Nazi poo poo should be viewed with just a little skepticism.
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Feb 25, 2018 00:43
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aphid_licker posted:Artisanal handcrafted tank destroyers! Limited edition! The story of the Ferdinand is a prime example of what a goofy and incompetent Nazi Ferdinand Porsche was, and how nepotistic and terrible the internal workings of the Nazi state were. When Nazi Germany wanted a piece of military hardware made, they didn't do it like the Soviets or Americans, where the military designed the thing, it went through all kinds of internal prototyping and testing, and then the finished design was sent to companies or state factories, depending on your favorite economic system, and they were told "build as many of this thing as you possibly can". What the Nazis did was make a rough specification, and then send that specification out to companies, who then made competing proposals for the final design. This results in a lot of equipment being made more to dazzle high-up Nazis than to be a useful weapon of war (see: Panther), but that is another topic. So Porsche submits a proposal for the Tiger. It is really fancy, with a petrol-electric drive, where a petrol generator powered electrical motors which actually turned the drive wheels. This is a neat idea, but turned out to be hot garbage in execution, with terrible fuel economy, in addition to breaking down constantly. It also had the turret located on the front of the tank (think "fat T-34"). The huge turret moved the center of gravity overmuch to the front of the tank, harming it's ability to traverse rough terrain. It also had a tendency to crash it's gun barrel into the ground when traversing trenches. Our man Ferdinand Porsche, however, is convinced that his design is the superior one, largely because he was close to Hitler. He is so convinced that he starts production immediately after the design was completed, before the winner of the design contest had been chosen. Once it is clear that Porsche's proposal will not be chosen for production, Porsche has already manufactured almost 100 chassis. Porsche now has a hundred second-rate heavy tanks without turrets lying around. Porsche tries to get some turrets from Henschel (the manufacturer of the final Tiger I) to mate to their chassis, and gets told to gently caress off, since all the turrets were needed for the real Tigers. Porsche then tries to sell the chassis to the army as a heavy mortar carrier, by just sticking a 120mm mortar into the hole where the turret should go. The army isn't super enthused about this. After collecting dust for six months, the army, who is having a Very Bad Time in Russia, eventually decides to use these 100 heavy tank chassis they have lying around, and the simplest way of doing that is to just slap a casemate with a anti-tank gun on top of them. Thus was born the Ferdinand. Geisladisk fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Feb 26, 2018 |
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Feb 25, 2018 23:56
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Geisladisk posted:
I painted this model of a T-64 - I'm pretty sure it is a T-64B, though the packaging isn't specific. My question is, what are these two horizontal pipes on the back of the turret? I'm guessing some kind of stowage?
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Mar 14, 2018 13:37
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Ah, yeah, that is definitely it. One pipe has a hooked end, and that'd make the other a extension.  Better picture of the same model kit, showing them pipes more clearly.
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Mar 14, 2018 14:27
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Coming in late on the Kursk discussion, but IIRC part of the difference also comes from the Soviets basically writing off vehicles the Germans would have recovered and repaired. There are a number of reasons (most good, a few bad) why the Soviets did it that way, but at least part of the discrepancy is that. It's not that the Soviets wrote off less damaged vehicles than the Germans, it's that in after action reports the Soviets counted a combat ineffective vehicle destroyed, while for the Germans to count a vehicle as destroyed it had to be damaged beyond reasonable repair. This is a big factor (but not the only factor) in the k/d ratios Wehraboos love to jerk over. "Destroyed" Soviet tanks often came back to haunt the Germans, but destroyed German tanks stayed destroyed. They simply had different methods of tallying it up.
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Mar 20, 2018 19:26
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To be fair the Red Army had also been cramming a absurd amount of men and materiel into the Kursk salient for over six months prior to the offensive. There were so many anti tank guns in the Kursk salient that for every nine infantry there was a AT gun and crew. Add to that the Germans were thoroughly owned on the intelligence front - The RA started bombarding the German artillery positions precisely one hour before the Germans' own preliminary bombardment was scheduled to start - And you have a foregone conclusion. The Soviets spent six months turning the Kursk salient into the most heavily defended area in history. Geisladisk fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Mar 20, 2018 |
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Mar 20, 2018 20:58
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Yeah and that makes what the Red Army did all the more impressive. All of that effort and resources into defending the salient and it was still just a sideshow to the summer offensive that they themselves were planning. Oh yeah, absolutely - But it is understandable when you take into account that they had six months advance warning to plan not only the defensive but the counteroffensive as well.
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Mar 20, 2018 21:04
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The Soviets were going at their own convenient pace post-Kursk. They knew the war was won, it was only a matter of winning it in the most advantageous way. They halted 60km from Berlin for almost two months after the Vistula offensive, for instance.
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Mar 20, 2018 22:09
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Nebakenezzer posted:Re the various species of M4/Sherman: did covering them in improvised crap actually help them? I can see any sort of HEAT warhead being flummoxed by them, but I've no idea if the Tank Terror etc was HEAT. Any judgement on Patton forbidding that sorta crap as it compromised the drivetrain, bonus. I can't find the source now, but 95%+ of knocked out Allied tanks in Normandy were knocked out by cannons or landmines, against which your two extra tons of sandbags ain't doing poo poo. It was definitely more harmful .
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Mar 21, 2018 14:08
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This guy is not loving around.
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Mar 21, 2018 14:45
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Cessna posted:You'll note that modern tanks don't use "national insignia" for the most part. I think that tank identification by model would have been much less reliable in WW2 than the modern world. Optics were way worse, there were a lot of nations involved which all produced a handful of original tank chassis, and the armies were exclusively conscripted. Without easily recognizable insignia you would have a lot more instances of, for instance, American troops seeing a British Comet for the first time, panicking, thinking that the mysterious boxy tank is a Tiger, and blue-on-bluing them.
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Mar 21, 2018 21:39
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:are you seriously suggesting that conscripted combat veterans are worse at war than an unbloodied professional force I have no idea how that was what you took away from my post.
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Mar 21, 2018 22:20
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HEY GUNS posted:hahaha they're loving tiny this owns I'm Icelandic. I first saw a foreign horse when I was like eight and saw mounted police abroad and freaked out a bit because they were riding GIANT MONSTER HORSES Geisladisk fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Mar 27, 2018 |
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Mar 27, 2018 21:48
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Can anyone recommend a book that gives a good overview on what lead up to the breakup of the USSR? I've browsed books on the subject a little bit, and it's really hard to find books that aren't either anticommunist gloating ("the USSR feel because communism is bad, you see  "), or tankie hand-wringing looking to pin blame somewhere.
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Apr 10, 2018 18:23
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Cessna posted:Relevant: Link. This guy is trying really hard to make the BF-109 sound awesome, but a plane that is a maintenance nightmare and actively trying to kill you unless you stroke it just so before you even get off the ground isn't exactly what you want in a airplane, warplane or not.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:36
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bewbies posted:I think some Russian WWII enormo-tank used separate round and charge but it was a big pain in the rear end. No doubt someone in this thread knows more on this subject. IS-2s had two piece ammo for their 122mm gun. 
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Apr 16, 2018 20:39
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Mycroft Holmes posted:
This is just stagemanship. Remember, most people in the crowd will be too far away to read normal expressions, so exaggerated expressions and movements help convey the message to more people. Stage actors do this, too. It'sa good show 
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Apr 17, 2018 08:22
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Post-WW2 Western tanks have (generally) had large turrets with a loader, while Soviet tanks and their descendants minimize the size of the turret, and replaced the loader with a autoloader since the T-64. Were/are there any doctrinal differences that lead to this difference? What are the arguments for and against a autoloader?
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Apr 17, 2018 21:40
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AmishSpecialForces posted:Thanks! Thats a badass video. Would a smaller, higher angle version of that be any good for anti drone duties? You are basically describing a standard airburst flak round.
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Apr 18, 2018 00:21
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Nebakenezzer posted:So is the really fast thing moving away from the explosion the heat warhead shoving a fine mist of the former drone? Or is this something different? Also, are the missiles physically ramming the target? I thought most anti-air munitions exploded close to the target, to shred the whole thing in tungsten projectiles. The really fast thing moving away is the HEAT jet itself. HEAT works by tightly focusing a explosion via black magic fuckery into a tight beam that propels molten copper to about Mach 10. HEAT warheads are designed to cut through tank armor, not unarmored drones, hence why the beam cuts a hole through the drone and then merrily keeps going. The missile blows up some distance from the drone. In this picture, you can see the missile after the HEAT warhead has exploded. The drone is covered by the explosion; the oblong object is the missile, not the drone. 
Geisladisk fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Apr 27, 2018 |
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Apr 27, 2018 23:20
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Milo and POTUS posted:Love this. It's like ye olde a-10. There were a couple of other attempts at the same concept during WW2.  The Germans tried strapping a semi-automatic 75mm gun to a HS-129. Unfortunately the added weight and drag made an already underpowered donkey of a plane even worse.  There was also a dopey looking ME-262 variant with a 50mm gun, not intended for ground attack, but to shoot down bombers.  Finally there was a B-25 variant with a 75mm gun in the nose. None of these were very successful because as it turns out you can't hit a loving thing with a fixed cannon on a WW2 era airplane.
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Apr 28, 2018 09:50
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I think the idea was that they could engage the bombers from a greater range, out of the bomber's gunner's range. Afaik it was never deployed in combat, so who knows how that would have turned out.
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Apr 28, 2018 10:05
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I know I'm late to the Me-262 chat - but the reason that Hitler was adamant about it being a bomber was that he wanted to use them to bomb and harass the allied landings in France that they knew were going to happen sooner or later. They (correctly) expected the allies to have total or near total air supremacy, making the older planes unable to slow the landings down. A new jet fighter, on the other hand, could be fast enough to zip in and out with a reasonable chance of survival. This could slow the allied landings down in the crucial first few hours and days, when a counterattack could drive them into the sea. Hitler was also worried that even if the Me-262 would prove a excellent bomber hunter, they couldn't be produced in enough numbers to make a dent in the allied bombing fleets. This proved to be correct in hindsight. All of this actually sounds super reasonable, but Hitler wasn't around to write glossy memoirs blaming all his military failures on someone else. His generals mostly were, though.
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May 7, 2018 11:41
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