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Just finished a book about Stilwell by a butthurt Taiwanese historian. He makes the argument that as soon as it became clear that the island hopping campaign was a viable means of getting bombers in range of Japan, China got hind tit as far as Allied strategic priorities and lend lease aid went. The goal was just "keep China in the war" as opposed to "get Japan out of China." Without getting too deep into alternate history, it made me ponder that even if Japan had won the planned crushing victory at Midway and set up their impregnable defensive perimeter in the Pacific, they'd still have no guarantee of safety. Might have just ended up getting bombed/mined from the other direction. #MondayMilhistMusings
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Aug 23, 2016 01:43
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Raenir Salazar posted:I'm having difficulty figuring out if this is even "wrong" from a military perspective assuming his premises are "right". Yeah, I'm not disagreeing at all, and this guy basically accepts that the Americans and British were making the right choices from their own perspectives. He's mostly just upset at China being expected to keep fighting and dying more or less to kill time while the Burmese campaign gets delayed year after year. Basically from this KMT apologist perspective, the Chinese were fighting "the best troops and best supplied positions" like they had been since 1937, then being yelled at for not helping more in Burma while the western allies diverted promised forces to North Africa, then Italy, then Normandy. I'm basically just spitballing that if the better option of the island campaign was off the table for whatever reason, more focus on opening up Burma and eventually getting better/closer airbases in China would still have been an option. Cythereal posted:Also, August Storm. The Soviet Union had China well in hand. But yeah the logistics are such that by the time this would actually get results the war in Europe is already over and the USSR would be involved.
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Aug 23, 2016 03:40
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Chinse generals on both sides of the rebellions had a thing for organization by fives, because some guy wrote that down in a book a thousand years ago so of course it must be right. The Taiping extended that to civilian life, so everyone was eventually supposed to live in little communes of twenty-five families led by a priest/mayor/sergeant.
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Aug 23, 2016 14:00
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Cyrano4747 posted:
Yep, the strategy decided on made the most sense in the big picture, since Germany could much more plausibly win at some point. Which relates to the original thought I was idly pondering, that even enormous Midway style naval victories wouldn't have been sufficient to save Japan in the long run. Anyway, this dude wasn't even really arguing that the Allies should have done things differently, more just lamenting that the way it worked out China ended up being the one in the proverbial barrel. e: re CCP, he has a whole chapter that's just a very long list of every treacherous communication from US diplomats where they argue that the US should support the Communists. They range from the accurate "Mao is going to win anyway/ Communist China won't necessarily align with the USSR" to lol worthy "Mao isn't a 'real' communist and will enact democratic reform/ this will work out just *great* for the average Chinese citizen." P-Mack fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 14:36
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Cyrano4747 posted:Frankly of you look at China from the fall of the Qing on its a loving miracle it turned out as well as it did. The CCP hosed up a lot, especially in Mao's crazier years, but I'm not sure a KMT dictatorship like what Chang & Co set up in Taiwan would have done much better. In terms of political repression and corruption yeah it wouldn't really be any better, but I think the death toll would be lower. Chiang was really awful, but I don't see him being creative and bold enough to enact truly crazy poo poo on the level of deep ploughing, close cropping, and backyard furnaces. I totally believe he'd massacre tens or hundreds of thousands of dissidents, maybe mismanage a famine to the tune of or two or three million, but Mao's death toll is in 8 freaking digits and that would take a real concerted effort to match. e: remind me not to complain about having to choose the lesser of two evils come election time. P-Mack fucked around with this message at 15:10 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 15:06
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lenoon posted:Crazy Autocrat in control of the entirety of China, might have played out tragically similar... but that's gay black hitler territory. Wikipedia's only giving 4000 executions, so if we multiply that by 50 we're only at 200,000. That's with a population that would have already been self selected for a low commie ratio, though. Dunno if Chiang would have been more paranoid or less if he'd had the whole mainland, so yeah it's firmly in the realm of interesting but useless theoretical comparison.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:24
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Fangz posted:I don't want to make this a huge digression, but I'd kinda like to register my skepticism over the (population growth rate based) methodology behind estimates of death tolls during stuff like the Great Leap Forward, and also the basic idea of comparing death tolls from direct repression on an island regime with foreign support, and from massive famine due to gross incompetence during a period of technological and diplomatic (self-)isolation. I'd disagree that killing millions (be they 10 or 30) through absurd avoidable mistakes helped the cause of industrialization and development- production declined in the aftermath of the GLF. But I'm fine with dropping D&D lite and getting back to tank chat.
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Aug 23, 2016 17:11
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Fangz posted:To clarify, I'm not saying it helped the cause of industrialisation to have giant disasters, I am saying though that if you embark on a gigantic program of industrialisation with few experts on hand then mistakes are going to be made. Okay, I get what you're saying. I do think that the mistakes made go beyond what could be explained by lack of advanced technical expertise, though. Plenty of people in China knew how to grow rice, yet they managed to gently caress that up worst of all. Basically I just don't think Chiang would have ever had the kind of top to bottom, nationwide total social control required to gently caress up on that scale, not that he was any less of a crap dude. Thanks to you and everyone else for all the reasonable and sensible discussion on topics that usually end in a train wreck elsewhere.
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Aug 23, 2016 19:18
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Cyrano4747 posted:Those kinds of problems are endemic to any attempt to haul peasants into the industrial era in a generation. Stalin also starved a fuckload of people to death. The later Maoist crazy also needs to taken in the context of the power struggles that we're going on at the time. The closest analog to the cultural revolution would be stalins purges, only crowd sourced. Eh, I don't see why we need to look at China and Russia and conclude based on that dataset of two that mass death is a necessary component to unification and industrialization. Like the millions of dead landlords (and "landlords") could callously be viewed as the eggs of the new China omelet, but then there's also a huge number of deaths from purely useless agricultural stupidity that did nothing at all to increase production or benefit anyone. I can believe your prediction of the likely trajectory under Chiang vs the actual trajectory under Mao. But I prefer to interpret that as a consequence of two leaders being lovely in different ways, rather than as an unavoidable trade off between mass death and economic stagnation.
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Aug 23, 2016 19:57
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The point I'm trying to make is that massive short term sacrifice in order to jump start industrialization is how the Great Leap Forward was promoted, a military style campaign in which the whole nation mobilizes and suffers to advance fifty years in five, but it didn't work. Peasants didn't give their lives so that glorious new factories could be built and China didn't become a superpower by 1970. They died digging worthless ditches because of pointless stupidity and when it was finally over they had less agricultural production and less industrial production than before they started.
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Aug 24, 2016 00:00
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my dad posted:I don't think anyone here is disputing that? SlothfulCobra posted:Did they have an explanation for why MacArthur was allowed to live? I'm envisioning a bumbling NWO agent and a series of comical mixups with two seemingly identical corn cob pipes, one of which was stuffed with explosives.
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Aug 24, 2016 00:48
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Raenir Salazar posted:For the record GDP continued to grow during the GLF, not at the intended rate but "weaker" isn't entirely accurate either.  China's National Bureau of Statistics shows a GDP drop from 147 to 123 billion yuan from 1960 to 61.
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Aug 24, 2016 01:45
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I think it's encouraging that Churchill had someone quietly do the research and say "No, this scheme is completely hare brained." Thirty years younger he might have just walked in to a war council meeting and said "Everyone, I have a *great* idea."
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Aug 24, 2016 16:21
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SeanBeansShako posted:Eccentric 17th century engineers are not the most....sane of people. But then again, the Hoverboard so we people of the 21st century aren't judging. I once went to an exhibition of memorabilia from Lafayette's grand tour, and they put his face on every product you could think of, like straight out of Space Balls.
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Aug 24, 2016 20:12
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Xerxes17 posted:The true test of technical skill isn't in how complicated you make something, but in how simple. Was the wheel lock invented by a German? I have my suspicions.
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Aug 24, 2016 20:14
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hard counter posted:Aside from the big names like Clausewitz and Jomini, are there any other writers of military theory that are worth looking into (preferably authors whose texts have already been translated)? Read Sun Tzu and then quote from him during powerpoint presentations about your company's third quarter marketing budget.
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Aug 25, 2016 18:01
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Cyrano4747 posted:I've heard people unironically state EU 1950 edition as a silver lining for the Nazis winning WW2. 
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Aug 25, 2016 20:14
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Whatever the Russian nickname for the M3 Lee/Grant will always be funny in a morbid way, to me. I could have sworn I saw an anecdote about some Russian unit that actually liked it, since it broke down a lot less than whatever they were using before.
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Aug 25, 2016 21:59
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Ensign Expendable posted:Maybe that was the Stuart? The Lee was very negatively received by pretty much everyone I read about. Probably, that would make a lot more sense.
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Aug 25, 2016 23:12
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spectralent posted:Maybe a dumb question since it might be a cultural thing that doesn't translate but: This is a very good question that I don't think has a good answer. I mean, we still have a lot of work to do diagnosing and treating PTSD in people today, let alone psychoanalyzing some Saxon mercenary based on his letters. Speaking about my 19th century Chinese dudes, people are definitely grieving and haunted for the rest of their days by the things they have seen. But I don't know if they expressed that in the kind of tics and behaviors that would get a formal diagnosis in the 20th century. There was an article a little while back linking "shell shock" to actual accumulated concussive brain damage from shells which would explain the huge uptick in WWI, but I think that's still very much a matter of some debate.
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Aug 26, 2016 01:17
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Mycroft Holmes posted:Wikipedia says he was a terrible guy. c/d? wikipedia can suck my drat balls i don't know anything about gallas
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Aug 27, 2016 02:49
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Polyakov posted:
Good post! Applicable to WWII as well. Beyond political reasons for not employing women in the industrial labor force as quickly and to the extent the Allies did, plenty of German women (like my teenage grandmother) were busy farming turnips on small, very low tech farms. e: im going to plant some turnips tomorrow i hope they turn out ok
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Aug 27, 2016 20:00
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Taiping Tianguo Part 27 I'll go back and edit in the links to the old posts in the goldmined thread later. Right now I'm lazy. When I left off way back when, it was early 1860. The Taiping had just recalled their forces to the heavenly capital after a feint to the southeast, where they had destroyed the imperial siege camps and broken the imperial army, saving the movement from what seemed like certain doom. This plan was the brainchild of their new prime minister Hong Rengan, a cousin of the Heavenly King who has spent most of the last decade with foreign missionaries before recently returning to advocate reform and modernization along western lines. East... Always to the East With the Southern Imperial Barracks cleared away, the Taiping armies now have space to breathe, and a crucial decision to make. Do they strike east, towards the rich coastal provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu? This would replenish the treasury and could be a relatively easy campaign. Or do they strike west, back up the Yangtze to reclaim Jiujiang, Wuhan, and eventually Hunan? Securing the upper Yangtze would protect the capital and perhaps even open lines of communication with the Nian, Miao, and Panthay rebels to the west, or maybe even a pincer movement with Shi Dakai's wandering army. But achieving it would be a hard fight upstream against Zeng Guofan's fierce and competent Xiang army. In the end, it is Hong Rengan's scheme that wins the day. His proposal is the eastern campaign, but with a twist. He plans to take Shanghai and with it control of foreign trade. The Taiping will then use the vast sums of gold they have There is a crucial risk to this plan. It requires temporarily ceding the initiative in the west while Zeng Guofan advances toward Anqing. Anqing is well positioned, well provisioned, and strongly fortified, and can be expected to hold out for an extended siege. But the western theater cannot be neglected forever. Plans are made for a western offensive on both banks of the river, but with limited manpower and only a handful of talented commanders, they must wait until the eastern operations are complete. The initial push east in May of 1860 goes well. The imperialists under He Chun (the mediocre guy) and Zhang Guoliang (the unusually competent guy) had rallied about 20,000 survivors at Danyang (丹陽). Unfortunately for them, there is a tiny morale problem related to the inconsequntial issue of their troops never being paid. The demoralized soldiers break and flee at the first volley from the Taiping. He Chun escapes with his life but Zhang Guoliang is not so lucky, drowning in a river either in suicide or while trying to escape. Li Xiucheng buries him respectfully, while in far off Beijing the court will lament the loss of their best commander on the eastern front. Changzhou (常州)is the next stop for the rebel advance. Governor He Guiqing (河桂慶) panics upon the approach of the Taiping. His attempt to flee the city is momentarily halted by a protesting crowd fearing the consequences for the city if they are abandoned. The governor orders his bodyguard to fire on the crowd and presses through to make good his escape. Generals He Chun and Zhang Yuliang attempt to prepare a defense, intentionally burning down the town outside the walls, while mutinous and out of control soldiers burn and pillage the town inside. The situation is a shambles as the Taiping arrive, and the generals leave the city and abandon it to its own devices. Some of the defending soldiers defect to the Taiping while local militias attempt to fight on, leading to a horrific street by street bloodbath before the city is secured. He Chun, meanwhile, decides to pack it in and takes a fatal dose of opium. He Guiqing for his part will eventually be executed for his cowardice and incompetence, the highest ranking official to suffer that fate. Suzhou (苏州), the economically and strategically vital center of southern Jiangsu, is seized without a fight at the start of June, in contrast to Changzhou. Taiping infiltrators manage to enter the city disguised as refugees. They then toss ropes over the walls and open the gates for the Taiping army. The populace of the city, meanwhile, lifts barely a finger to stop them. The recent victories have restored the Taiping aura of inevitability, and it seems futile to resist. Additionally, imperial troops retreating/deserting following their defeats have done the usual over the top pillaging on their way through, destroying any goodwill the dynasty may have had. The only group still motivated to oppose the Taiping are the terrified upper classes, but they translate this sentiment into action via mass suicide more so than military resistance.  The Taiping, for their part, will reciprocate their warm welcome, lowering taxes in Suzhou and establishing subsidized loans and social programs for the benefit of the common people. Harsh laws against vices such as footbinding, opium, and even theater are promulgated, but most evidence points to enforcement being lax, especially compared to the early days of the movement. Li Xiucheng's fairminded administration makes a lasting impression. Memorials erected to him in the city somehow survived to this day. Try to find them on your next visit, and feel free to stop by his former residence in Suzhou which is maintained as a museum. Plenty of smaller communities will not be not so lucky. The old believers, the true Taiping, are courteous and pay for everything they take. But anyone can grow long hair, and plenty of recent Taiping recruits (or even just straight bandits) commit awful atrocities. Li's personal benevolence is limited by his reach. The disciplined Taiping army and its general can do little to control the wolves that prowl constantly along its fringes, and prey in the no man's lands between areas of firm control for the Taiping or the Qing. Once a village was firmly under Taiping control though, life largely resumed almost identically to before, though with the traditional local gentry displaced in administration by figures from lower classes, providing some germ of truth to the PRC class war version of the movement. The pattern is repeated throughout eastern Jiangsu and the Taiping advance is rapid. The imperial forces do,however, achieve one major success amidst this general collapse. They prevent the Taiping from retaking Zhenjiang, and so deny them control of the river and access to the northern bank. As the imperial forces are slowly reassembled, most of their manpower for the time being will be directed toward protecting this vital strongpoint. The Taiping armies seem certain to march straight into Shanghai. There are nominally thousands of imperial soldiers in Jiangsu, but most of them are garrisons of questionable effectiveness that do little but drain imperial coffers. Tuanlian militias will provide some benefit by keeping their home villages loyal as the cities around them fall, but no more could be expected of them (and even then, Jiangsu sees more rural communities flipping to the Taiping than has been typical elsewhere). Yong mercenary contingents are present, but these are nowhere near as professional or effective as the yongying armies of Hunan. However, there is still Shanghai itself, and this city has now become only nominally Qing. It's trade taxes, i.e. the city's reason for existing, are now collected by foreigners, and the city's defense will soon be entrusted to them as well. Considering that the last attempt at indigenous militia organization in the city had led directly into the Small Swords rebellion, it seems there aren't many good options other than hoping the foreigners can be engaged to defend the city. Any major foreign assistance will however come at a time and place determined by foreign authorities and in accordance with their own narrow interests. Yankee Ingenuity Foreigners had been involved on the fringes of the struggle for some time, as mercenaries for one side or the other, especially helpful when expertise with foreign made artillery was required. This practice was discouraged by the British, partially for diplomatic reasons and partially because many of these mercenaries were deserters from British ships, as the adventurous were lured by salaries higher than those of sailors and far, far higher than those earned by Chinese soldiers. The spring of 1860, though, would see the first emergence of a purely foreign force. As Shanghai swelled with refugees from the upper classes bringing lurid stories of Taiping atrocities, panic swells and the authorities there looked for an answer. The daotai, Wu Xu(吴煦), will try to raise a new foreign manned army with the assistance of Yang Fang(楊坊), who is not an official at all but a banker. This private army will be raised off the books of either the Qing court or any western authority, necessitating considerable financial chicanery. The solution to their problem of command comes in the form of an American adventurer by the name of Frederick Townsend Ward.  F. T. Ward, photograph Ward's past was complicated. He had been a sailor and had come to China more than once in the early 1850's. Subsequently, he had traveled to Mexico, then been involved in notorious filibuster William Walker's ill-fated invasion of Nicaragua. The next stop was a stint in French service in Crimea, giving him the required knowledge of military affairs, or at least enough to fake it. By 1860 he was back in China on a river steamboat. He runs into the Taiping during the course of this and may well have joined them had they made him an attractive offer. As it is, it is the imperials who are giving him his chance at fortune and glory, and it is irresistible for a man with a seemingly unquenchable thirst for action. Ward begins drilling his men outside the city, a few hundred soldiers to start. They will use the latest in modern weaponry and up to date drill. The hope is that this can be a spearhead force to break through enemy strongpoints and leave the subsequent exploitation and defense up to regular troops. Ward has several Caucasian officers, among them fellow American Henry Burgevine, but the bulk of his rank and file are Filipinos, or "Manilamen" as they are called. This new force will not be popular. Both the British and the court in Beijing will demand its dissolution due to the sensitive diplomatic issues it presents. In both cases, it will be explained as a private initiative of local merchants that is outside Wu Xu's control. The early record of the force, however, is not illustrious. They are ordered to retake the nearby city of Songjiang ( 松江) in June. With no heavy guns, Ward decides to try to scale the wall in a surprise night attack. His men, in proper mercenary fashion, are extremely drunk and not particularly stealthy, and the alert defenders gun them down. Undeterred, Ward recruits replacements and tries again in July, this time with two new foreign-made cannons. They successfully blow down the outer gate and rush through, only to discover that there was a second inner gate that couldn't be seen from outside. The Taiping get medieval and dump pots of burning sulfur on the hapless men below. Eventually, though, they manage to blow a hole in inner gate with a sack of powder and get into the city. The inner gate secured, they sit tight and wait for the much larger main army of imperial regulars to arrive. The Taiping garrison, composed mostly of young boys, old men, and otherwise non-frontline troops, declines to fight and flees the city. Most of his men are dead or wounded, but it has been a glorious success and Ward gets right back to recruiting. Come August, he attacks Qingpu(青浦 ), seeking to replicate the success at Songjiang. Qingpu, however has modern guns and a foreign commander of their own, a mercenary named Savage who would have the poor manners to die before explaining any details of his backstory to historians. In three assaults Savage gets the better of Ward, killing or driving his men off and shooting Ward right in the face. Undeterred, the foreign arms corps recruits yet more men and seeks to honor their incapacitated, ain't pretty no more leader by two weeks later launching another assault on Qingpu. This time they are accompanied by the much larger native Chinese army, and it can be expected to go better. This attack goes even worse. Li Xiucheng himself shows up on their flank and crushes both armies. The bedraggled survivors scurry back to Shanghai, all imperial accomplishments of the past two months reversed at a stroke. The Foreign Arms Corps effectively ceases to exist, but the idea is not dead.  F.T. Ward, artist's intepretation The Great Shanghai Turkey Shoot Li's army had steadily advanced through June, seizing the cities of Kunshan(昆山), Jiading (嘉定), Taicang (太倉) and Qingpu with similar ease to their prior advances. They then waited for some time, while trying to make diplomatic overtures by letter and via missionary channels. They send a letter stating their intent to occupy the city to the foreign consuls at Shanghai, and also invite missionaries to come to Suzhou and Nanjing and witness their benevolent intentions for themselves. It is to little avail. British ambassador Frederick Bruce and French ambassador de Bourbolon had already made up their minds that the future of China still lay with the Qing, and the possibility of serious negotiation with the Taiping was not even considered. While many in the diplomatic corps and missionary establishment will advise a more even handed approach, Bruce sticks to his guns, and as the man on the spot the entire British Empire will follow his lead. His main job was to get a new treaty out of the Qing, and the Qing ceasing to exist would complicate that considerably. The ambassadors are similarly dismissive of Taiping Christianity, and do their best to discourage curious missionaries from making the journey to Taiping territory. (The Americans, while having similar views, will be increasingly irrelevant thanks to some kind of internal dispute going on in that mysterious far off land.)  Not sure what to make of the lack of reply, Li Xiucheng finally moves out in August. Upon arrival on the outskirts of Shanghai the Taiping easily eject imperial forces in the suburbs, progress hindered primarily by fires which had been set by French troops before their arrival. The French also committed rape, murder, and pillage against the civilians whose houses they were burning down, for reasons that are unclear beyond being dickheads. Amid the fighting with the imperialists in the suburbs a French priest and Chinese convert are allegedly shot and killed by the Taiping, which might have caused diplomatic trouble for the Taiping if that die had not already been cast long ago. The Taiping do mark the Catholic church with a notice that the structure and its inhabitants are not to be harmed, in keeping with their assurances given to the French ambassador years earlier. They next make an attempt to approach the city itself, only to met with a blistering fusillade from foreigners atop the walls, their paths of fire now cleared by the destruction of the suburbs. The Taiping repeatedly attempt to come closer to the walls, waving flags, only to get no reply but hot lead from a mix of British, French, and Sikh defenders. Chinese and foreign reports all agree that not a single shot is fired by the Taiping, but the men on the wall nevertheless find this action to be great sport. In one hosed-up-if-true anecdote, a missionary who had been caught up in the fighting in the outer city is escorted out of the flaming suburbs to the wall by a Taiping detachment. Once he is safely lifted over the wall, his rescuers are shot in the back. The next day, heavily armed steamboats join in on the bombardment as well. Several hundred Taiping soldiers will be dead by the time they give up and abandon hope of a peaceful occupation, or even of a civil reply. Li retreats from the vicinity of the city, personally wounded by shrapnel and not wishing to risk engaging imperial forces while still in range of foreign guns. Shortly after this, He receives a letter sent weeks earlier that had been lost in the In any case, the Taiping and the foreigners, as it turns out, have very different concepts of neutrality. Li hoped that neutrality meant strictly taking no active part in the conflict between the Qing and the Heavenly Kingdom. The foreigners interpreted neutrality as, "anywhere we go in China we are sovereign, and gently caress your mum if you don't stay out of the way of our glorious flag." Since defending a Qing city and killing Taiping soldiers was done in their own self interest rather than out of any affection for the Qing, it was still very much a neutral policy, from their point of view. Despite this the Taiping still hold out hope for eventual accommodation and will scrupulously avoid conflict with foreign powers. The international press will meanwhile castigate the British government for gunning down apparently friendly Christians to prop up a corrupt, openly hostile Qing government, viewing it as baffling hypocrisy. You see, there is a minor issue that has been percolating simultaneously with all this activity going on in Jiangsu. 500 miles to the north, the same bunch of hairy barbarous foreigners saving Shanghai from the Taiping are in a shooting war with the Qing that threatens to bring the dynasty to its knees. ---------------------- So yeah, next update we'll catch up on the Arrow War. No idea when that will be as another babby is imminent and the concept of spare time will soon be a cruel joke.
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Aug 28, 2016 04:27
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SlothfulCobra posted:Yeah, I guess there's sort of an emergency release valve in the brain for that sort of thing. Somebody just posted a picture in the Venezuela thread of people queuing for bread with a bullet riddled dead body ten feet away.
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Aug 28, 2016 20:23
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Cyrano4747 posted:Really this thread skews way to hard on the Axis powers being stupid. They weren't the unstoppable evil geniuses of post war myth and wheraboo fantasy but they also weren't the loving keystone cops. It's really impressive they got as far as they did, given the near impossible strategic goals they were aiming for. But it's like a skateboarder doing some really impressive grind then slipping and crushing his nuts on the rail, the YouTube comments are gonna focus on the wrecked bozack. I do think it's curious that wehraboos obsess over the big guns and thick armor of late war German tanks, when the truly impressive Nazi victories over France and Russia consisted of clowning opponents with bigger guns and thicker armor.
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Aug 29, 2016 16:28
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Hunt11 posted:Or Alexander the Great. I'm impressed at Guan Yu's marketing team. Deified for a supporting role on the losing side and he's still going strong today.
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Aug 29, 2016 20:38
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:I meant that if I was writing a brief biography I wouldn't use the phrase "naval officer and pedophile". "Naval officer and ephebophile"
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Aug 30, 2016 00:15
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Basically they'd be fed enough to do slave labor when the Nazis were short on labor and starve to death when the Nazis were short on food, and it would switch between these two modes pretty often because the Nazis weren't very good at accurately predicting their future needs.
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Aug 31, 2016 19:20
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spectralent posted:I've been drawing arrows on maps for the past two hours someone please send help. It's 4:30 on a Friday and I'm pretending my swivel chair is a tank turret. If I sit up straight I can see over the cubicle and it's like I'm looking out of the hatch, watching the ridgeline for
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Sep 2, 2016 21:31
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HEY GAL posted:i still don't give a gently caress about your civil war same Agean90 posted:Does your war have proto-communists? No? Well then your early modern war ain't poo poo now we're talking
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Sep 3, 2016 03:23
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What I like about the Taiping proto-communism is that British observers get really obviously mad at it, but don't yet have the language and ideological framework of capitalist/communist conflict to describe why beyond complaining about "injury to trade."
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Sep 3, 2016 13:41
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Crazycryodude posted:Awww I missed Paradox chat. Well, I'm posting anyways. HoI IV is like an actually playable, streamlined and polished version of III but as with all Paradox games it needs a few major patches/expansions before it really shines (the current AI seems to subscribe to the "maybe if I stay absolutely still and do nothing those Panzer divisions will stop trying to encircle us wait what do you mean they just pocketed and destroyed 3 million troops and took our capital also lol wtf even is an airplane" school of thought). EUIV is probably the best Paradox game as of this moment in time because it's had years of polish and was solid to begin with, but don't go into it expecting a good early modern war game - 'strategy' consists of taking all your dudes and putting them in a big 100k tall stack then smashing them into the enemy's doomstack and whoever wins that one decisive battle spends the next 10 years chasing down the survivors/besieging all the enemy's land. Also technology and tactics just make your numbers bigger there's no huge change in how combat works over the whole 400 year scale. The exploration, colonization, realm management, everything else is great though. Victoria II is probably my favorite Paradox game but then again it seems like there's only about 27 other people on the planet who actually understand and enjoy it so I guess I'm just weird. I remember when Vicky 1 first came out I fired up a game as China. Non-European soldiers had an attack power of 2 and not having a general assigned was a -2 penalty. Since neither side had any default generals coded in I easily put down the Taiping rebellion with zero deaths on either side. I think I'll go grab the Victoria II expansions for $6 and see if it's gotten any harder.
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Sep 3, 2016 18:14
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unwantedplatypus posted:So humans have ridden horses, camels, and elephants into combat, as well as occasionally using dogs. What other animals have we used for war? What are the traits which make an animal suitable for use in warfare? Songhai tried to weaponize a cattle stampede in a battle against Morocco. But the Moroccan cannons scared the cattle into turning around and stampeding the other way so it backfired pretty bad.
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Sep 3, 2016 20:42
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Nude Bog Lurker posted:Not sure whether I laughed harder at Russia getting the poo poo kicked out of him or little i'm still weirded out by there being two germanies
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Sep 4, 2016 02:53
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Italy about to steam into the fray.
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Wait, why don't they? Didn't Marx publish before the Taiping war started? The manifesto yes, but Das Kapital only came out after the war. Even the manifesto was pretty obscure at the time, though, and certainly nowhere near the terrifying spectre it would later become. Marx wrote a bunch of contemporary editorials about China, but they're mostly about condemning the opium wars and British trade policy rather than in depth analysis of the rebellions as anything other than symptoms of economic crisis.
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Sep 4, 2016 13:59
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Nebakenezzer posted:During the siege/sack of Rome, Roman citizens demanded a market for human meat Human meat was being sold by the pound in Anqing by the time it fell. The war in one anecdote: a father promises his daughter he will wait for her to die of natural causes before cooking and eating her. He does not keep this promise.
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Sep 7, 2016 20:51
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Koramei posted:There were a few battles when Cortez first landed that were pretty one sided. I don't think it's terribly controversial to say the conquistadors had superior weaponry, it's just important to emphasize that this wasn't why they succeeded, and that their native allies were far more instrumental. They also had horsies which are tough to deal with if your army has never seen them before and doesn't know how to properly resist a charge. But yeah, couldn't have done it without smallpox and native allies. Even then it wasn't easy. The conquest of Mexico is one of those crazy things where if we send ten gay black Cortez clones to alternate timelines, I'm thinking nine of them fail.
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Sep 9, 2016 21:29
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cheerfullydrab posted:This Kindle version of Shattered Sword is garbage. Every letter with diacritical marks is blank, so I'm reading about the "S ry " and "Hiry ". I have the kindle version and it has those marks, but they show up as tiny jpgs stuck in the text(it really stands out if you do black background instead of white like I do). Maybe you have images turned off or something?
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Sep 11, 2016 13:39
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ArchangeI posted:So what were these grooves for? Asking for a friend. Removing that material cuts down on weight without significantly affecting strength. Sort of like an I-beam.
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Sep 11, 2016 17:39
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I think the question requires distinguishing between "can pierce steel plate at point blank on a flat trajectory" and "can penetrate plate and multiple layers of padding to inflict a serious wound at the kind of ranges typically seen on the battlefield."
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Sep 12, 2016 02:49
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