|
Taerkar posted:I could only make it a few pages. So Bad. The worst part is that EvanSchenck nails it in their first post.
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2016 23:48
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 05:52 |
|
|
xthetenth posted:That's a western allied thing. The 75mm the US and UK made were guns designed around the shell and propellant of the famed French 75mm gun. That's a low velocity metric shell. The US did it from the start as a bespoke tank gun, while the British bored out their 57mm 6 pounder, but the main goal was a gun with good penetration by early war standards and a good HE shell. Later in the war they needed a punchier gun with more penetration, so they both made guns in that size range. Both used inches, and 76mm is three inches. My recollection (and wikipedia's assertion) is that this actually became a big thing when the Soviets reverse-engineered the B29 into the Tu4, because the B29's materials were all measured in Imperial units and the Soviets used metric - they struggled to get a conversion that a factory could use. It's interesting to consider how an essentially arbitrary way of thinking - how do we assign value to a unit of distance? - has fundamental implications like this in the real world.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2016 08:05
|
|
|
GriffX posted:During the American Civil War, how permeable was the border between Union and Confederate territory? Did civilians (traders, etc) pass easily between the two? As a corollary, how were the lines of communication? For example if I were a civilian living in Boston and my cousin were in Charleston would we have any means of communicating? Smuggling was a thing, yes.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 8, 2016 17:39
|
|
|
It was a good film right up until 'I want to send 4 tanks to try to intercept and block an infantry column *somewhere in this grid square*' and my reaction was 'what if they just go around you? or send a couple of guys to sneak up? ' Brad Pitt should have just gone 'that's infantry work and you know it'. e: the attack on the woods seemed about right, as did the attack on the town.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2016 10:34
|
|
|
KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:the assessment that there wasn't much blitzkrieging going on in 1944 is only correct if you think the word can't apply to the Allies. It's a really massive stretch to compare the Battle of France 1944 to the Battle of France 1940. The Allies didn't blitzkrieg out of Normandy. They spend two months fighting a grinding battle of attrition after which they finally achieved a breakthrough and engineered the collapse of the entire German front (aided in no small part by Hitler). But the bit at which they start moving at speed through the French countryside was enabled by the collapse of German resistance, it was not the cause of it.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 12, 2016 14:41
|
|
|
Rommel was told in no uncertain terms that the logistical capacity available to him could not support a drive on Suez and his reaction was 'eh, work something out'. He advances until he can't advance any more, then gets stuck in a position where his mobile units are no longer mobile because he can't get enough fuel forwards to them. As he was told would happen. The Battle of El Alamein goes the way it does and couldn't go any other way because Rommel gave up all of his operational options to dig into a fixed position which Montgomery takes apart at will. Lets cover that again: Rommel, the general known for being good at blitzkrieg and manoeuvre warfare, chose to fight the most decisive battle of his career from a static position. A choice that played to all of the advantages of his opponent. And he got crushed.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 29, 2016 17:47
|
|
|
Admiral Snackbar posted:I know I'm a little late to the Rommelchat, but I wanted to give my two cents' worth... This is a pretty basic fallacy: 'surge' operations can almost always provide you with a capability far higher than average, but not in a sustainable way and at a cost. So yeah, we did that 4 day refuelling job in one, but did no maintenance in that time also all of the drivers have been awake for 36 hours hope you don't need them to do anything now. Also the reason everyone knows Rommel is because he was a committed Nazi, not because he was 'one of the good ones'. The Nazis put a massive propaganda effort into promoting his image and that's how he got famous as the Desert Fox during the war and while he was still a big fan of Hitler. Rommel was a classic member of the Prussian officer class who was perfectly happy with Hitler when he was murdering Jews and Slavs, but suddenly realised that he was a criminal when he started issuing orders that the army didn't want to follow.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2016 22:55
|
|
|
Baron Porkface posted:How did WW2 armies decide who should fight in tanks? People who owned cars. In 1940's Europe that's a quite small proportion of the population, getting to vanishingly small the further east you go. A core role of a tank crewman is maintenance, their first preference went to people who'd laid hands on an engine before.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2016 19:48
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:In short: there were a number of options on hand for ending the Pacific War in the absence of a Japanese surrender that was not likely in the political and leadership climate of Japan at the time. All of those options were different scales and types of horrible. The atomic bomb, the massive use of chemical weapons, Operation Olympic, and Operation Starvation to name some of the biggest. All of them involved mass civilian death. This is wrong, if only for the fact that all of those options apart from the use of chemical weapons were progressed simultaneously. Nobody saw them as mutually exclusive choices. Indeed, Operation Olympic had mass use of nukes as an operational weapon as a core planning assumption. The best way to approach the question is to acknowledge that we're on the far end of the cold war and Mutually Assured Destruction but for Truman and the military establishment in 1945 a nuke is just a very convenient way of delivering 15,000 tons of bombs to an enemy city, something that's been happening every day for years. Indeed for strategic bombing advocates it was the natural conclusion of an argument they'd been making for over a decade about the war winning potential of bombers.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 19, 2016 08:18
|
|
|
the JJ posted:At least partly, because the secret police can't be everywhere. They just need to be where people are.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2016 08:21
|
|
|
OpenlyEvilJello posted:My conservative WAG is 400,000 tons. I kind of want to do some scaling now... What you do is fill the space underneath the air-decks with hydrogen gas balloons to increase buoyancy  e: also Dönitz was a pretty committed supporter of Hitler. You don't become Hitler's heir without being a pretty committed supporter of Hitler. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 13:01 on Oct 10, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2016 12:58
|
|
|
Kemper Boyd posted: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. 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.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2016 21:04
|
|
|
Kemper Boyd posted: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. That's actually true when submarines are pretty rare and most ships going their own way won't encounter one. Once the numbers on patrol go up then so does the likelihood of any given cargo ship encountering one and your chance of survival becomes greater when in a convoy. Note that Channel trade with France and Holland had convoy systems introduced much earlier than Atlantic trade in large part because the concentration of ships made it the better option. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Nov 1, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2016 22:12
|
|
|
I think the key contextual point that's difficult to grasp through time is that there are no cars in an infantry division (well maybe one or two). It's really difficult to imagine a world in which motor transport doesn't exist but that's where many Russian infantrymen found themselves in 1940. So imagine you are on the front line with all your mates and you are totally up for a fight and then someone tells you that 80km behind you the Germans have driven their tanks all around you in a couple of days and cut the railways that your ammunition and food are delivered on. It will take you over a week just to force march to the place where the Panzers are now (assuming the German infantry looking at you from the field over don't have anything to say about it) and you have about 3 days of rations. And that's if your officers are brave enough to start a retreat without orders and if the formations to your left and right manage to do the same thing without someone loving up and turning you all into a wandering rabble. And then if you actually manage to make it to the edge of the encirclement then you still have to fight your way out. Without any of the guns or mortars or stuff that you need to launch an attack against entrenched infantry because you left all that poo poo behind. That's what an encirclement means in terms of how it causes armies to fall apart.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2016 17:05
|
|
|
Ensign Expendable posted:I too would be surprised if, as a Russian infantryman in 1940, I heard that the Germans were 80 km behind me. I picked representative numbers. e: \/ I was tempted to see if I could find an example of some Germans accidentally finding themselves in Lubin and claim I meant that all along Alchenar fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Nov 3, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2016 20:37
|
|
|
Boiled Water posted:I've heard that one of the many conclusions of WWII was that whomever could put more lead in the air was generally the victor of any engagement. Is there anything to that? To a degree, but the Korean war is where NATO encounters the AK47 as a standard infantry rifle while our guys are all equipped with semi-automatics and realises 'oh gently caress we need to up our game fast'.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 4, 2016 18:06
|
|
|
Seen that video before, the thing I notice now is that the guys on either side just stay standing at attention then casually turn inwards.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2016 09:58
|
|
|
Grand Prize Winner posted:Hey, milhist thread. Have a kind of wacky theory but I figure someone here may know the answer. 88 is a common white supremacist/nazi shibboleth for "Heil Hitler." Was the Flak 88 made/invented by Nazis? Literally by Hitler himself.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2016 21:05
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:Between the fall of France and Barbarossa, Britain was pretty much the only thing left of the war. It was probably the closest the Germans ever came to "winning" the war, but they never had a plan to deal with Britain, so they were pretty much doomed from that point on. The question is reversible - The UK literally has no plan to win the war at that point either. Say gay-black-Hitler never invades Russia and so there's no Eastern Front. Say the Nazis love bomb the USA and make it plain that the Pacific war is nothing to do with them in order to keep the public anti-war in Europe enough that Roosevelt cannot get involved. Say there are repeated offers of peace if only the UK will accept German hegemony on the continent. Eventually a peace faction forms in Parliament and Churchill gets forced out. That's how that deadlock gets broken.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2016 19:43
|
|
|
zoux posted:Oh I for sure believe they did it, it's just so perfunctory I was wondering if it had some significance in a military context, as if "compliment" had a different meaning in this case. Googling for "military compiliment" is, of course, useless for this purpose. If you want to understand Lee at Gettysburg you really have to go back to the decision to undertake the Pennsylvania Campaign in the first place. Lee doesn't have a plan that goes beyond 'march around a Northern state for a bit and then have a battle' and that's why when he gets a battle, despite being in the wrong place and on the wrong terms and him knowing this he can't see any option but to follow through as far as he can.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2016 23:26
|
|
|
Boiled Water posted:Was retreat not a thing in the American civil war? On the third day in particular if the Confederate army retreats then it is going to be followed by several fresh and battle-ready Union corps and will need to evacuate wounded and artillery over a river (followed by everyone else) in order to escape. At a minimum Lee needed to bloody the Union army hard enough that it couldn't just show up at the crossing point and smash half the army when the other half and all the artillery was on the wrong side. Lee knew that once his army was engaged in battle that it would have to fight it out, which is why he issued campaign orders that nobody was supposed to bring on a general engagement without his instructions and why he didn't just turn away on the second or third day. It's also why everyone agrees Heath hosed up badly. Ordering Pickett's Charge was a colossal mistake by Lee, but focussing on that mistake tends to take people's eyes off the much greater mistake, which is that Lee's army should never have left Virginia in the first place.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2016 15:12
|
|
|
Fat Samurai posted:Missed the dogfight chat. The original solution was steel plates on the propeller. Unfortunate side effects included bullets ricocheting back into the engine or between the pilot's eyes.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 25, 2016 13:54
|
|
|
Hunt11 posted:Nobody is arguing that the Allies didn't do horrible things to win the war. It is just that what the Axis powers were doing, and would have done if they had won was so much worse. Max Hastings put it well: The difference between Allied crimes and Axis crimes is that the Allied crimes were all committed as a means to the end of the war - and could have been ended earlier by the surrender of the Axis powers. The Axis crimes on the other hand were committed as ends in themselves and they would have continued and even been expanded had the war ended with their victory.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 26, 2016 20:01
|
|
|
There's a sunken ship in the Thames estuary with 1400 tonnes of explosives still on it
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2016 17:54
|
|
|
It's a really bad idea to try and distill Heinlein's political views from one book because across his work he's all over the place. The importance of Starship Troopers is that Heinlein puts the 'western' protagonist up against a perfect communist society that functions really well as a whole and puts to us that the communist society will prevail unless our society is able in some way to engender a sense of civic duty in its members. Now the answer in the book is fascism where the whole human race is united against a common enemy and there's no acknowledgement that total capture by the military industrial complex might have something to do with that, but the fundamental question of what the most effective balance between individual duty and community interest (and how that balance might shift according to the circumstances) is one that's relevant today and will be long into the future.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2016 16:31
|
|
|
TheLovablePlutonis posted:Wikipedia: The people of the Terran Federation are either "Citizens" or "Civilians". Everyone is born a "Civilian", and at age 18 every "Civilian" has the right to enroll for a minimal 2-year term of "Federal Service". In theory a completed term of Federal Service ensures a "Citizen" is willing to put the needs of the community before their own personal well-being. This is because Federal Service is tough and dangerous (by design). It can involve joining the military, being a human guinea pig, testing survival equipment, or manual labour. The Federation makes it quite easy to quit a term of service before completion (even during war-time), but once someone has quit they are never allowed to enroll again. This is to ensure that all volunteers are dedicated, whilst also discouraging people from leaving. Note that within the book the main character and everyone he is with treats the notion of the non-military options as being distinctly inferior for the people who can't hack it in the military. It also makes the principle of 'willing to put one's own life on the line for the sake of the community' fall apart when you are just making up random incredibly dangerous tasks for people to do.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2016 17:57
|
|
|
The other thing is that the vast expansion of the US merchant marine fleet occurred as European merchant fleets vanished from the oceans (for obvious reasons), so the US had a period where it had relatively free reign to muscle in on trade routes.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2016 12:50
|
|
|
The International Community seems to take a bit of a 'you'll know it when you see it' approach but my metric for civil unrest transitioning into a civil war would be actual loss of control of territory by the government to a competing group that seeks to take the role of the state. i.e. it's the difference between not being able to administer a city because there's rioters on the streets every day and you can't get anything done and not being able to administer a city because there's nobody left there who will pick up a phone call from the central government and anyone you send over there will get shot.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2016 12:35
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:Just in casual discussion on somethingafwul, he seems to be a controversial figure - I've heard everything from "egocentric but competent general" to "literal IRL Zapp Branigan." Don't forget taking massive payments from the Philippines treasury. Much like the other US general with a massive cult around him (Patton), he suffers from repeated massive failures of professionalism and of treating every element of his profession with due attention, which is why if you had a pick of military leaders you needed to win a war for you there is absolutely no way you would choose him.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 28, 2016 16:58
|
|
|
Field Marshall Slim addresses this point in his memoirs where he argues that 'specialist' infantry are a terrible idea because it saps talent from the regular infantry for units that you aren't actually going to use all that much because you want to hold them back for their specialist purpose and also it creates a culture where you just assume that regular infantry can't do certain tasks when really they should be able to.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2017 00:10
|
|
|
So I think the thing that distinguishes the German WW1 stormtrooper concept from Allied infilitration tactics is the same thing undepinning the development of the Volksgrenadier divisions in WW2, namely that the Germans weren't seeking to develop a full combined-arms doctrine in the way that the Allies were, they were searching for a way to use manpower to mitigate their deficiencies in artillery, armour, and in the air. The Germans don't get a creeping bombardment for suppression, so they have to infiltrate as far forwards in advance. They don't get armour support to remove strongpoints, so the initial attack has to develop in a way that bypasses them. Or to put it another way; Allied infiltration tactics were driven by a desire to minimise casualties in the assault. German infiltration tactics were driven by the need to find a way to make a successful assault by employing infantry without generous support, with an acceptance that increased casualties might be the price paid for success.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2017 14:04
|
|
|
MikeCrotch posted:Germans didn't use creeping bombardments as much because they preferred the use of extremely intense but short preparatory bombardments, around 30 minutes at absolute maximum effort for the artillery crews, in order to achieve maximum surprise. The Germans also didn't need to soften up Allied positions as much since Allied trenches were both of worse quality and in worse positions than German ones. Creeping and box bombardments were more about preventing the movement of reserves. The Germans had to work around using them because by 1918 they don't have the shells.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2017 21:57
|
|
|
glynnenstein posted:I took a folklore class that examined storytelling among first-responders and it was fascinating. Every field has it's workers bonding over "war stories" about the crazy poo poo they've seen; it's a very simple interaction that everyone has to reinforce in-groups who share status. In the context of EMTs who deal with deeply terrible poo poo, it's also a way to share your trauma with other people who understand in a socially accepted way, a bit like therapy except it's contextualized as bragging so it doesn't seem weak, which is important in the world of police, EMTs, and firefighters. The guys who had stories about responding to plane crashes apparently tended to have the highest status because in those crashes they would see the worst traumas (evidently a lot of decapitations). It also went over how quickly folks working in cities where you deal with tons of traumatic violence have short careers because there are limits to coping with that in normal ways. In the military it's called 'decompression'. The thing about PTSD is that it ultimately comes down to an inability to process and 'encode' a memory, so the brain gets stuck in stress mode. Just being able to talk though a memory is an incredibly important element of preventing/reducing PTSD because it reduces suppression. Case study: in the aftermath of the Falklands war the rate of PTSD and suicide among veterans was way higher amongst those who were flown back as a priority and went straight to their families than amongst those who spent 2-3 weeks on a boat sailing back. The reason? The guys on the boats spent that time talking to each other about what they'd seen and done. The guys who got the 'preferential' treatment never got that chance.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2017 13:58
|
|
|
Missiles have a lifespan. They also tend to be quite costly to maintain. Modern delivery systems pack more warheads into each missile and are better at defeating countermeasures, which means you need fewer of them. Fewer missiles/warheads results in less risk of proliferation. The world is safer if Nuclear powers use their replacement cycle to draw down into a reliable and effective second-strike capability.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2017 16:54
|
|
|
steinrokkan posted:One probably should keep in mind the historical difference between technically explosive rounds and modern high explosives which moved artillery into a whole new qualitative area, because effectively those two things are very different, and the historical break between them represents a major change in warfare. Yeah, one key element is the ability to produce explosives in industrial quantities, the other is producing high quality fuses. The ACW being right on the cusp of development of a lot of transformative industrial age technology means that you see a lot of these things appear in one form or another, just not to a degree that gets you WW1 flanders fields in Virginia. Quality of fuses was basically what made Union artillery very good and Confederate artillery quite poor. Lets take the rifles for example: yes they're rifles and are accurate to rifle ranges. Smokeless powder is not a thing yet however, so your ACW battalion volley firing is producing a thick cloud of smoke almost as fast as a Napoleonic battalion, with the same subsequent rapid loss in effectiveness. So there's instances in which these weapons are far more effective than they were 50 years before, but not to the extent that they were 50 years afterwards.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2017 01:48
|
|
|
Siivola posted:Matt Easton keeps saying it was sword thrusts, because the Brits were making the swords too bendy. I think Richard Holmes said that there was a massive debate in British Cavalry about whether a foreswing or a backswing or thrust was best and they couldn't quite work out why they were doing so badly and it seems the real reason was they were all incredibly lazy and didn't ever bother to sharpen their swords.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2017 09:50
|
|
|
Deptfordx posted:So how dangerous were Korean, and Indeed WW2 era planes when making gun attacks on troops. Could they target accurately, or just spray the area? The guns are accurate to a plane shaped object out to a couple of hundred meters. How effective his strafing run is going to be depends upon the time he has to identify the target and whether he's in contact with a land air observer describing the target to him. If he hasaid time to do a couple of flybys and has an observer, he'll gently caress you up first pass. If he's all by himself there's no reason he'd even see your guys.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2017 14:48
|
|
|
Ensign Expendable posted:There was a lot of fighting and exercises in between the wars. For example, the USSR fought with the Basmachi bandits, with Chinese warlords, with Japan, in Spain, Poland, and Finland. Each of these wars revealed deficiencies in theories that were developed during peacetime, and these deficiencies were corrected, and then the new theory would be tested in battle, and so on and so forth. Another example: the Germans learned a lot about using mechanised forces just from their entirely unopposed occupations of Austria and Czechoslovakia, things like how much a road net can bear, how much fuel a Panzer division needs to keep with it to operate, the need to have integrated maintenance etc etc. Also lots of intently watching everyone else - the Spanish Civil War is a classic example because the Nationalists used German tactics of armoured warfare which were unsuccessful and the Republicans used French/British tactics. The French and British concluded that they were on the right track, the Germans decided that the Spanish had just done it wrong and made notes.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2017 20:34
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:It helped that the Republicans had good (Russian) tanks. And I'm not sure you could argue the Nationalists were unsuccessful in the long run - though most of their armour was, if I recall, actually Italian - not supplied by the Italians, mind you, but actual Italians as an expeditionary force. We all know how effective Italian armour ended up being in World War 2... Italian interwar tanks were perfectly comparable to those of everyone else, they just couldn't keep pace. My point was that while the Nationalists won in the end, they won fighting the kind of slow positional warfare that the French and British establishments were expecting a modern war to be (there were young officers in both armies who were arguing vigorously for a more mobile outlook, but they didn't get the break that Guderian did to shape a force with a free hand). What the Western Allies saw as evidence that tanks were best use to support the war-winning infantry, Guderian saw as evidence of a need for much closer combined arms support of the armoured force.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2017 00:33
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 05:52 |
|
|
feedmegin posted:I would disagree and point to Jobbo_Fett's post earlier. They were fine in the early 30s, but by the time the Spanish Civil War rolled around they were...not great, even by the standards of the time. 'Armed with machine guns and 20mm cannon' is not much of a criticism when the Germans are pottering about with Pz1 and Pz2's. They're not fantastic tanks and were massively outclassed by the start of WW2, but in the Spanish Civil War they were perfectly serviceable (if demonstrating that the Tankette theory was a dead end) and fit squarely into the 'a tank is better than no tank' bracket where you wouldn't turn one down.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2017 14:40
|
|