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Notably, several B-29s ran into trouble operating against Japan that led to them making emergency landings in Soviet territory. Since the Soviets were officially neutral in the Pacific, they interned the planes in keeping with international law. They also took the opportunity to produce the Tu-4, a nearly exact reverse-engineered copy of the B-29.
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Aug 2, 2016 01:53
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Endman posted:I can see how that might be a pain, but certainly less of a pain than trying to take a Star Fort. I wonder why many successive generations of professional soldiers who actually fought in those centuries never thought of this very obvious "just go round" tactic you've discovered. It's a pretty basic feature of military strategy. Fortifications don't just make the things inside them more difficult to attack, they control the entire area surrounding them. One of the things inside them, being protected, is a mobile force. You can't destroy that force without reducing the fortifications, and you can't ignore them because they will sortie and interfere with you. For example, your army has to eat, which means foraging or a supply train, probably some combination of the two. Living off the land requires you to disperse men in foraging parties, who are then vulnerable if the enemy sorties from their fortress. Likewise, your supply train is vulnerable to attack. You ignored the star forts, and now your army is starving. There is also the probability that you may have to fight a pitched battle, and if you left enemy fortifications intact in your rear, while you are engaged with the enemy's main force the garrisons will sortie and hit you from behind. Also a specific issue with the idea of just going around the forts and capturing a city, which is loss of cohesion during pillage. Basically, when you march in your men will want to steal anything they can get their hands on, find booze and get wasted, assault women, fight over loot, booze, and women, and just generally collapse into disorder. You really do not want this to happen with enemy garrisons intact in your rear, because they are in fighting order and your men are not. Reducing the star forts is very difficult. Not reducing the star forts is fatal.
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Aug 15, 2016 02:22
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Arquinsiel posted:Was fatal at least. Patton got stuck on them after being all Well, like ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted, technical innovations over the course of the 19th century gave attackers considerably better options for dealing with fortifications. Better guns, better shells, etc. made it more feasible to reduce forts through firepower. Moreover, by the time Patton was butting up against the Siegfried Line, sorties by defenders were much less dangerous because leaving the fortifications meant exposing themselves to artillery and airpower and probably being disrupted before they could do anything useful. He was pretty safe just leaving men to screen the fortifications, because he knew they had the finest artillery and close air support in the world backing them. The development of modern fire support is just a huge problem for those kinds of counterattacks. Even if the combat spearhead comes through okay, softer supporting elements just get chewed up badly. The German reaction to the landings at Anzio are a great example, because they did what they were supposed to do--they identified the landing site and used their mobile reserve to mount a determined counterattack. But in practice, any German column that moved exposed itself, and was met by overwhelming fire from naval guns and air support. Got wrecked before they could do anything useful. Of course since then you do see armies with a material disadvantage moving towards guerrilla warfare, and arguably the principle is very similar. Instead of having walls and trenches you hide yourself in the civilian population, and you make sorties by ambushing the enemy and then retreating back into obscurity.
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Aug 15, 2016 02:55
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about no fort being able to stand up to his genius. Ended up having to just go round and leave forces to bottle them, which was totally fine with the USA's manpower advantage at that time and probably wouldn't have worked in any other war or will ever work again.
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Endman posted:Consider me educated on why reducing fortifications is so critical. Of course, if you could do so next time without the snide comment at the beginning, that would be even better. sorry, I thought the comment about wife-loving was a signal that you were up for a little gentle ribbing
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Aug 15, 2016 03:23
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Nude Bog Lurker posted:I was interested in this: the standard trope (probably inaccurate) in Commonwealth militaries is the green officer with the experienced sergeant who really runs the platoon, the only three words a second lieutenant needing being "carry on, sergeant", and the classic "are you sure, sah?". Is that stereotype common in the US? The idea of a green junior officer who leaves everything to the NCO exists, but American social classes are different and we generally don't place outsize value on sang-froid. That officer is more likely to be represented as a dangerous incompetent or an impediment to his men, than as a benign or comic figure. Take Vietnam-era "fragging" as an example.
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Sep 7, 2016 12:41
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Is a crossbow slower to load and fire than a matchlock? If it is competitive with a matchlock in penetration and killing power, yes. When you're shooting a projectile with mechanical force, you have to supply as much work to draw the bow back as it will release when you shoot. You're not using an explosion to move your projectile. For something you're doing with just your arms and back, like a longbow, 150 lbs. draw weight is reasonable... provided the archer has been training for a very, very long time. However, crossbows have a much shorter power stroke than a longbow, so it is less efficient when imparting energy to the projectile. To get a crossbow to deliver similar performance to that longbow you probably need 300ish lbs. draw weight, far too much to be spanned by hand. It can be done with a belt hook, which allows you to employ both your legs. Machines are another option. You still have to do the same amount of work to span the crossbow, but you can do it more slowly over a larger distance. A goats foot lever spreads out the work by think 4:1, which makes a 400ish lb. crossbow manageable and still pretty quick to fire. But stacking up against a matchlock demands easily over 1000 lbs. draw weight. To span that you need to drastically increase your mechanical advantage by using a windlass or a cranequin, but all that mechanical advantage means you'll be working at it for a pretty long time. It will actually work out slower than a matchlock, especially if you account for hooking and unhooking the machine.
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Sep 8, 2016 03:00
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:First I don't think that by the time you get real lock-fired guns (and especially once you get corned powder) that either man-portable crossbows or selfbows are really their equal in terms of wounding potential and penetrative power. By "competitive" I didn't mean to imply that crossbows with very high draw weights were equal to matchlocks. I was getting around to the discussion of spanning with mechanical devices by specifying that not all crossbows will give you the least of what a matchlock can do--a high likelihood of penetrating quality body armor and causing wounds at short range. That requires a very heavy crossbow, which takes longer to span. They will be less powerful than a matchlock, but still sufficient to have a good chance of getting that result. quote:At the same time, crossbows, even windlass-driven types, are noticeably faster to span than arquebus or muskets are to load (half a minute vs. a whole minute). There are a lot more discrete steps in loading early firearms, and you need to take care not to blow yourself up you also need to make sure that the cherry on your match is ready, etc etc. The rate of fire for a matchlocks is given by most sources at between 1 and 2 shots per minute, but I can definitely believe that the faster number is at best an optimistic ideal-conditions estimate.
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Sep 8, 2016 05:35
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:I still think you're overselling the power of crossbows, and I say that as someone who is generally in their corner when in discussions comparing them to other ranged weapons. Wounding through good-quality plate armour from the front is, from all the evidence I've seen, very unlikely for man-portable bows or crossbows. Consider me corrected. I've been reading for such a long time that crossbows were effective at penetrating armor that I didn't consider it could be a misrepresentation.
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Sep 12, 2016 01:14
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Koramei posted:Nearly every pop history thing like that you get in games or whatever is either wrong or nearly wrong Not games. Lots of history books I've read (e.g. "Medieval Military Technology" by Kelly DeVries) repeat the idea that crossbows could reliably penetrate even the heaviest body armor. I didn't realize it was mistaken conventional wisdom. Admittedly, most of what I read about medieval and early modern warfare is pitched at the general interest level.
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Sep 12, 2016 02:30
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There is also the usual problem of people focusing on technical issues to the exclusion of (much more significant) strategic and operational factors. i.e. in '41 and '42 German forces were opposed by surprised and disorganized Soviet armies, so their offensives were spectacularly successful. They captured enormous territory at a lower cost than might otherwise be expected, and they were also able to completely destroy many large Soviet formations in encirclement battles. Running up the score, so to speak. By comparison, Soviet forces from '43-'45 were facing an organized defense and paid full price for offensive gains. Consequently, even after adjusting for significant differences in how they measured vehicle losses, we would still expect to see a higher loss rate among the Soviets.
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Sep 20, 2016 02:07
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Raenir Salazar posted:The 100 Years Ago Today Subreddit talked about the Brusilov Offencive, does anyone know if anything about the Russian preparations and strategic conditions going into it, strategy and so on, that maybe highlights or foreshadows Russian strategic and operational strengths? Like could you look back at it and see "Aha, and this is why Bagration." IIRC Brusilov's tactics probably had a significant impact on other European countries in the short term (during WWI), but they didn't have any kind of defining influence on Russian tactics generally over a longer term. Brusilov's tactics--advancing trenches under camouflage to serve as forward scouting and assault positions, extended observation to establish enemy strength and positioning, brief but accurate and intense preparatory bombardment followed immediately by close assault from picked infantry teams--presaged and probably influenced infiltration tactics used later on in the war. However, there isn't a straight line between that and Bagration. There is a family resemblance. Carefully plotted, pre-sighted, and brief but intense artillery preparation continued to be part of Soviet offensives for a long time. Camouflage, secrecy, and deception (the Russian umbrella term is maskirovka) was also a feature, but they had a staff college devoted to military deception before WWI. Soviet military theoreticians and the ideas they produce had a lot more to do with their hands-on experience in the Russian Civil War, and later on WWII, than with Brusilov.
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Sep 21, 2016 02:47
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We discussed potential industrial-era Anglo-American Wars a little bit earlier in this thread, or maybe the last one. There was a war scare (the Trent Affair) during the American Civil War, and like everybody has been saying there was just-in-case planning up through WWI and the interwar period. We shouldn't forget that this was standard practice because nobody wanted to find themselves caught up in a war with no plan for how to fight it. The Canadians had their own (hilarious) counter to War Plan Red, which I think involved disrupting the expected US offensive by counter-attacking, invading places like Albany and Seattle, and then destroying infrastructure and retreating back to Canada. This would hopefully delay the American offensive sufficiently for British reinforcements to secure Canada from invasion. It is rather more likely that the participating Canadian troops would be completely annihilated without accomplishing anything useful. This is particularly the case because the British were planning not to reinforce Canada and instead to attempt a distant blockade and commerce raiding to bleed the American economy until they agreed to negotiation. Anyway, food is the key problem in an Anglo-American War during the mid-late 19th or early 20th century. As time goes on, the population increasingly exceeds the UK's ability to feed it with local production. The deficit is made up by imports from many places like Russia, Argentina, and Australia, but most importantly from Canada and the United States. By 1914 Britain is importing something like 60% of all foodstuffs and 80% of grain/flour, and over 40% of that grain/flour is coming from the USA and Canada (according to "The International Grain Trade" by Michael Atkin). War with the USA cuts off both, as Canada will not be able to hold out for long. If this happens when Britain is otherwise at peace, it works out as a race. Can the Royal Navy collapse American public support for the war before Britain starves or collapses into bread riots? If this happens during WWI, when Russian exports are cut off and shipments from the rest of the world are disrupted--even moreso after US entry stretches the RN thinner and the Americans attempt raiding of their own--defeat is a foregone conclusion, and in a fairly short time frame.
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Sep 22, 2016 18:12
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feedmegin posted:Or Britain, which in the 19th century is pretty much the richest country on earth, pays top dollar for grain and other foodstuffs from other sources such as India and Argentina (and gently caress anyone else who needs it including the locals), and America can't do a drat thing about it because Royal Navy. You're missing many important issues. Here's a screengrab of the relevant table (2.2, page 18) from "The International Grain Trade." I will also be using a .pdf paper from 1970 about global grain supplies located here if you want to follow along. First, if we're talking about the 19th century, different areas become productive in foodstuffs, and feasible sources for grain shipments, at different times. With respect to India and Australia, the Suez Canal opens in 1873. Before that point, it isn't efficient to import grain all the way round Africa, and they aren't doing it. Table 2.2 in "The International Grain Trade" (page 18) shows 0 wheat to the UK from those sources until the 1873-1877 period. Moreover, imports from India are a very small proportion of the total until production increased during the period 1883-1887. This has mostly to do with infrastructure expansion in India, specifically railroads to bring grain from agricultural regions to major ports for export. Argentina is not a major player until the 1890s; on page 9 of the pdf you will see that it was actually an importer] of grain until the 1880s. Australia is similarly a negligible source until 1903-1904. So, depending on when during the 19th century you are talking about, the sources you name may be unavailable or insufficient. This leads into the second issue with your reasoning, your apparent assumption that the global food supply is effectively unlimited and North America can be easily replaced by other sources. This is incorrect. In reality, there is a given amount of wheat produced worldwide in a given year, which fluctuates but tends to increase over time. With the exception of India, under British rulers who historically had few qualms about letting the inhabitants starve, grain-producing countries will see to the needs of their population first, and export second. Whereas to some extent grain merchants may be tempted to sell abroad if British buyers are making high offers, other governments do not want their populations to become hungry and rebellious. Consequently, fluctuations in production will affect available global supply. You can compare the above chart to global production figures on page 5 of the pdf. British imports from Canada and the United States are atypically low in the period 1903-1904, which is explained by atypically poor harvests in those countries during those years, combined with very good harvest in Russia. They had less grain available for export, Russia had more. Further to this, the reason that the USA and Canada become the primary sources of food for Britain by 1914 is the characteristics of agriculture in those countries. They both have large areas of fertile farmland and technically advanced methods of agricultural production, and small populations relative to how much food they're producing. Even in bad years like 1903-1904 they have a substantial surplus to export to Britain, meaning that although the British had to resort to massive expansions in their grain imports from Russia and India, they did not have to completely replace the USA. This is fortunate, because as explained above there is a maximum amount of grain that can feasibly be bought on the open market at any given time. If the largest source is altogether cut off, that is a bad thing. In the later part of the historical period we're discussing, competing bidders (France and Germany, mainly) are becoming more significant, and Indian and Russian surpluses are smaller due to population growth and comparatively primitive means of production. We're speaking counterfactually so we can't say for sure, but it is possible that in a given year, there will not be sufficient excess production outside North America to meet Britain's needs--that is, enough to stop Britons starving. Finally, except during WWI the issue is not so much that Britain will immediately run out of food. Like I said, there's a period of time during which the USA and Britain will have to see who is having more trouble. The immediate problem is social and political disruption due to sudden severe shortages and spikes in food prices. British merchants may be able to make up the shortfall by purchasing more from their other partners, Russia being the most viable option for the most of the period 1860-1914. This will be expensive, as you say, but the fact that Britain generally is a very wealthy country does not mean that all Britons are wealthy. In fact, much of the population is poor enough, and spends a large enough proportion of their income on subsistence, that an abrupt major increase in food prices represents a serious problem for social stability. This would most likely require massive government intervention in the form of price controls, subsidies, and rationing. Over a longer time frame Britain may begin to run into calorie shortages, and shortcuts like demanding excessive exports from India become an issue for overall imperial stability.
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Sep 23, 2016 01:12
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feedmegin posted:if there literally isn't enough grain available on the markets world wide (which, frankly, I just don't buy, but even so) Why not? Do you have data? In 1913, estimated total worldwide wheat production is 4 billion bushels. That's all the wheat in the entire world, including wheat that will be consumed locally and never exported, because the people in the country where it was grown need to eat as well. Production in the USA and Canada is 1 billion bushels, and because of the technical advantage and fertility of those countries, they can export a disproportionately large amount of that. Russia also produces 1 billion bushels, but inefficient transportation infrastructure and a higher population (which is more reliant on wheat alone for subsistence) mean less is available abroad. Your position is that withdrawing countries that produce 25% of the world's wheat from the global market won't have a major effect on the availability of bread to British consumers. Imagine for a second what would happen if global oil production abruptly fell by 25%. quote:it's not going to just sit there, it's going to work to increase grain production in the areas under its control (India primarily, probably, depending on the time period, but it's not like the British Empire is exactly small you know), and that is going to work. I mean, in the modern world the UK has 70 million people and India feeds a billion, do you really think a UK-controlled India can't keep 1/15th of India's population fed if the government puts its mind to it? Have you considered perhaps that agriculture in 1860-1914 is not the same as agriculture in 2015, particularly in India? edit: To put a finer point on this, India's population grew rapidly during the early 20th century without corresponding expansion in transportation infrastructure or agricultural mechanization. By the mid-20th century production was below local needs and India was a major importer of food. Beginning in the 1970s, the Green Revolution began a period of rapid continuous growth in production, and India is currently a net exporter once again. In 1914 India is not yet in the position of having no available surplus for export, which won't happen for some years, but it probably has less excess capacity than, say, the entirety of North America. quote:For a real world example of how this goes down, look at how well King Cotton and the US blockade worked out for the Confederacy in harming British industry. Global trade adapts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancashire_Cotton_Famine Substitute "bread" for "cotton" in this scenario. Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Sep 23, 2016 |
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Sep 23, 2016 12:31
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lenoon posted:I don't know much about wheat imports, but wouldn't blockading Britain from food imports over the Atlantic be of only limited effect unless we're talking about the US allying with France, Germany or Russia in this hypothetical war? Interdicting imports from Canada sounds all very well and good but when you could literally have people swimming across the channel with a bag full of baguettes it seems to be a marginal victory. By the early 20th century the major exporting countries are the USA, Russia, and Canada (more or less in that order), with Argentina, Australia, and India in the second tier. France and Germany are both importing food rather than exporting it, though not to the same extreme extent as Britain. They will not be supplying Britain, they will be bidding against her. feedmegin posted:The UK wants grain to get from the US to Europe, it's not going to try and stop it. Okay, think on this for about a second. From the 1860s onward US military strength is too high relative to Britain's sealift capacity to send and supply troops across the Atlantic, meaning a land invasion or even a defense of Canada is impracticable. There are marginal areas that are difficult to get to from America and Britain can probably hold them indefinitely. For example, at that time Nova Scotia has limited overland communications with the rest of the continent and is accessible only by an isthmus with notably rough terrain. Newfoundland, Labrador, and Prince Edward Island are all practically accessible only by sea. But the bulk of British possessions and dependencies near the USA are indefensible against a determined American attack and will just have to be conceded. Consequently, Britain's only means of actually hurting the United States is economic warfare through commerce raiding and blockade. It isn't feasible to detain, board, and inspect every US- or neutral-flagged ship going to and from North America to ensure they're carrying only foodstuffs. Even if they could, the USA would see what they were doing and cease trading. Allowing the USA to freely trade in grain with neutral nations makes the blockade in general obviously untenable. It amounts to a concession that American grain exports are too important to Britain for them to actually fight the USA, at which point they might as well sue for peace. feedmegin posted:Um. If a US wheat embargo has that much of an effect on the entire industrialised world in anything but the shortest of terms (either directly or because Britain is spending a tonne of money to buy it all from other sources), then what happens instead is that the entirety of Europe forms an alliance and pushes America's poo poo in (while also improving its agricultural practices by state mandate so that can't happen again). This is pure fantasy for two reasons, some of which I outlined above. First, Britain has by far the greatest capacity of any nation in the world to mount such an overseas invasion, with France coming in a very distant second place. No other European power has the ability to make more than a token contribution. Total European military strength massively exceeds the USA's, but the proportion of it that is actually deployable to the North American theater is minuscule in comparison to the force that the USA would be able to devote to its defense from at least the 1860s onward. The war will have to be prosecuted at sea, meaning they are limited to embargo, blockade, and conceivably terror attacks on civilian targets (e.g. naval bombardment of New York City) although those weren't popular at the time and would probably be of limited usefulness due to American defensive sorties and defensive sea mines. Second, and in consequence of the first reason, Britain is the power that will be responsible for the grain shortages, because as I explained above their only means of harming the USA is through blockade. The USA has no particular reason to make a move towards embargoing Europe, because they can beat Britain locally by occupying the best 90% of Canada and waiting for them to make an offer for peace. At that point the onus is on Britain to do anything at all, and blockade is the only practical option. Consequently, if other European countries are made to suffer by the war, it will be Britain's fault for initiating the blockade and bidding up the price of Russian and Argentine grain. Alternative, Britain could choose not to pursue a blockade, but that amounts to not seriously attempting to fight. In line with that, the most realistic scenario would be a limited war in which there is no significant blockade of the USA and certainly no embargo of Europe, in which the USA occupies Canada, while the Royal Navy confines the US Navy to port and mounts operations against US overseas targets. However, since these are mostly in the Pacific there is limited available strength and it will probably not amount to more than nuisances like the seizure of coaling stations and raids on harder targets like Hawaii and the Philippines. The final result would probably be a negotiated peace to the USA's advantage, though not severely so. However, the hypothetical seemed to be asking about the outcome of a (much less likely) total war, so I tried to answer that. quote:The end result of this is not 'everyone in Britain starves to death' over any timescale, or anything close to it. On that we agree, we just seem to quibbling about how painful shortages would be for Britain and over what timescale. Polyakov posted:See my earlier posts about food production but Britain also had a lot of slack capacity that it was choosing not to employ because it wasnt economic to do so. This capacity is helpful but insufficient to Britain's food needs; it was a useful supplement during WWI but only in conjunction with continuing massive importation from the United States and Canada in spite of the submarine warfare.
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Sep 23, 2016 15:05
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If you like podcasts, the design podcast 99% Invisible did a recent episode about hearing loss in combat. It's mostly about contemporary warfare and current efforts to come up with a technological solution: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/combat-hearing-loss/ There is also a bit in there about the tradeoff in hearing protection between needing to hear certain noises (like guys coming to ambush you) and needing to not hear others (the ambushers shooting automatic weapons at you from close range) IIRC there is a little bit about why combat hearing loss is a more serious problem in modern times, and it has to do with intensification of firepower. Very loud noises are bad for your hearing generally, but permanent damage is more likely if things are very loud continuously for a period of time. So, depending on your role in combat you would have varying levels of hearing loss. People who worked around artillery or on the gundeck of a ship were more likely to get hearing damage in battle than musketeers, who would have been correspondingly more likely to lose their hearing than, say, pikemen. In the modern period combat is loud as gently caress. There is a lot of artillery, explosions, and rapid fire weapons, and significant hearing loss is a basically inevitable result of combat unless you take steps to protect your ears.
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Sep 23, 2016 16:54
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HEY GAL posted:they are right next to/in front of us tho True, but damage results from a combination of how loud and how frequent the noise is. Your ears will recover more effectively from brief, widely spaced loud noises than if the noise happening a lot over a period of time. Your musketeers are by necessary always near their weapons when they are firing, but they move around so as a pikemen your proximity to the firing is more variable. If you're in the ranks of your square where the gunners are always nearby, you're doing about as bad as they are.
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Sep 23, 2016 17:41
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feedmegin posted:Well, Chesapeake v Shannon indicates that wasn't always true. But US frigates were bigger than British frigates so yeah, I'm sure taking them on one on one was officially discouraged, especially given how Not all American frigates were created equal. Chesapeake and Shannon were both 38-gun frigates of similar displacement, complement, and armament. Constitution and the other 44-gun Americans were much bigger and better-armed, with much larger crews. Those were the ones that the British frigates were ordered not to engage.
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Sep 26, 2016 20:24
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Disinterested posted:Also why chasers are often Bronze on a well appointed ship. IIRC O'Brien actually does refer to the bow chasers as brass rather than bronze, for whatever reason. Aubrey captures a couple of long bronze 9 pounders in an early novel, and he keeps them as his personal property and installs them in the bow of each new ship he commands, for basically the rest of the series.
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Sep 26, 2016 21:26
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feedmegin posted:While this is true, I suspect the order was simply 'don't engage American frigates on your own', not 'don't engage these 5 frigates but that one is ok'. It's not like you'd be able to tell the difference at a distance, in any case. This is true. The 38- and 44-gun American frigates were rigged alike so they would appear the same at long range, and even after they closed distance they also had 15 gunports to a side. It would be pretty hard to tell that they were just slightly oversized even from very close in, so I think the first indication that you'd bitten off more than you could chew would be when the shooting started and you realized from the range and the sound that they were shooting at you with 24-pounders.
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Sep 27, 2016 18:47
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Eela6 posted:To make it into a bunch of smaller sub-questions: You can't really think of states at this time having their entire military under a single administrative or organizational structure. In most European countries armies are raised on the regimental system. Men are recruited into a regiment from within a geographic area, and each regiment has its own command, administration, recruitment, and logistical structure so it is nominally able to function as an independent formation. On campaign, regiments will be piled together to form larger armies. Spain adopts this system as a result of the reforms initiated by the Spanish Bourbons after the War of the Spanish Succession (aka the Bourbon Reforms). Another aspect of these reforms is simplifying the Spanish imperial administration in Europe and in the New World, including attempts to better integrate the various parts of the Spanish crown with one another. As a result of these two things, there is not really an idea of formally separate armies that answer specifically to the monarch in his capacity as king of Aragon, of Castile. Firstly because armies barely work like that anyway, and secondly because that would have gone against the objectives of the Bourbon reforms. In practical terms regiments raised in adjacent areas might be formed into the same army and therefore you would wind up with armies of mostly Catalonians, or mostly Castilians, etc. quote:What kind of armies are they? That is, are they small or large - both absolutely or relative to their rivals? Are these armies comprised of professional soldiers, militia / levies, mercenaries, or some combination? In 18th century Spain, as with most European countries, the armies are populated by long-service professionals who are not literally mercenaries as they are employees of the state and loyal to the crown rather than to their company/regiment as an independent entity. On the other hand, they are similar to mercenaries because they enlist primary for the promise of (more or less) steady pay, food, and the opportunity to loot. Spanish armies are not tiny but they are smaller in relative terms than other continental powers by this time. This has to do with a severe decline in the European Spanish population over the 17th century, and shortcomings in the administrative, financial, and transportation infrastructure of Spain. The Bourbon Reforms were initiated to try to bring Spain in line with other European countries in those areas, but pretty much failed. Spain has a lot of problems. It doesn't have a very large population, the roads are poo poo so transport is best by sea and the interior is pretty isolated, there is very little manufacturing, the tax base is small and not collected efficiently, etc. etc. etc. In Central and South America, Spanish garrisons are frequently very very small relative to the land area and population they are expected to control, which is as normal for colonial administration at this time. For example, in the Mexican revolt led by Miguel Hidalgo, professional Spanish armies were often outnumbered by more than 10:1 and could still win (e.g. at Calderon Bridge, 6000 Spanish soldiers defeated about 100,000 insurgents). This isn't to say that the Spanish armies were amazing, only that the rebel armies didn't have much in the artillery, firearms, or powder, and they were a disorganized mass of irregulars against real soldiers. In other areas, for example most of the South American campaigns, the number of soldiers involved on either side is typically very small considering the areas over which they are campaigning. I don't think sure Simon Bolivar ever commanded as many as 10,000 men, and frequently he was campaign with only 2-4,000, or even less. He carried out the Admirable Campaign with like, under 800 guys. This is a function of the underdeveloped nature of many of the Spanish colonies--the population is small, and the territory doesn't have the infrastructure or forage to support anything bigger. quote:Who commands? is it professional / merit based? hahaha no quote:Is it a nobility thing, or can you buy commands Yes to both. As in most European armies commissions are purchased, and people of low birth are limited in how far they can advance. Advancement to command in the Spanish army is mostly political and social. IIRC the British had frequent complaints during the Peninsular War that their Spanish allies were commanded by incompetent assholes (see, e.g. the Battle of Barroso). Interestingly, this wasn't as much of a problem in the colonies, because positions there were not at all prestigious, and could in fact be dangerous due to tropical diseases in some areas. Ambitious aristocrats avoided them, which opened those opportunities for competent officers. For example, if you've been listening to the Revolutions Podcast, you may have noticed that Monteverde, who commanded the Spanish army that put down the First Venezuelan Republic, was in the colonial service partly because he was from the Canaries and therefore socially inferior. It was also common for well-to-do creoles from the colonies to send their children to be educated in Spain proper, where they frequently joined the military. For example, Simon Bolivar had a military education in Spain, and Jose de San Martin actually served as a staff officer in the Peninsular War. However, because these people were barred by birth from social and military advancement beyond a certain level, they often went back to the colonies to serve. Finally, an important thing to bear in mind is that the Spanish army in the colonies was not very Spanish. The armies fighting to keep the colonies under Spanish control are mostly composed of locally recruited royalists.
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Sep 30, 2016 18:22
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OwlFancier posted:Smoothbore percussion muskets, cannons and gatling guns for the Zulus I think, maxims and early rifles for the Boers. uh, no The British began issuing rifles to specialist units beginning the late 18th century and throughout the Napoleonic Wars. IIRC the first general issue muzzle loading rifle was the Enfield Pattern 1853, adopted in that year (also a major small arm used by both the Union and Confederate armies in the American Civil War). This was improved into the breach-loading Snider-Enfield adopted in 1866, and finally replaced by the Martini-Henry in 1874. The troops in the Zulu Wars had Martini-Henry rifles and 7-pounder field guns, and then I think they got some gatling guns but only towards the very end of the war. They were similarly equipped for the Boer War, which took the place very soon afterward, while by the Second Boer War they were rocking MLEs, Maxim guns, and a little more artillery including howitzers.
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Sep 30, 2016 20:04
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Given how effective slings were, and the fact that they and their ammunition are ridiculously cheap, why were they abandoned in favor of archery in almost every part of Europe? I assume it has to do with arrows being more likely to cause incapacitating or fatal wounds as they pass through the body. I'm also curious about the effectiveness of sling bullets against padded cloth armor like the gambeson, which were considered the minimum standard for armor.
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Oct 6, 2016 22:03
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:I'm the completely unnecessary and useless second bridge. Well you know it probably doesn't maneuver very well and it would be extremely hard to turn it around in confined waters without running it aground. For example the entire Indian Ocean. It probably just has two sets of screws at either end, like a freight train with forward and rear locomotives, and if they need to turn around everybody just moves from the forward bridge to the aft bridge.
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Oct 10, 2016 03:48
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bewbies posted:seriously how much does it weigh? I hope it has other weight-increasing features that aren't immediately evident from the picture. Tell me it has armored flight decks like the RN carriers from WWII. FrozenVent posted:There are ferries that work that way. Oh or better yet this ship has two entire duplicate command staffs and they just take turns. During normal operations the aft captain and his guys are just chilling out with sudoku or taking naps, but when it's time to reverse they go on duty and the forward bridge gets to relax. Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Oct 10, 2016 |
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Oct 10, 2016 04:15
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Disinterested posted:I'm sure what the classic image of assasination is varies by culture a lot. I'm also sure for some it's the carbomb. USA: politician or celebrity shot by crazy person, often by pistol at close range, occasionally by rifle from distance Russia: journalist killed by government via dubious "suicide," "mugging," or exotic poison Colombia: two guys on a dirt bike pull up, the one in the back fires a machinegun at a person who could be important or not (it doesn't matter), they drive away Japan: politician or military officer killed via sword (includes 20th century assassinations, for some reason)
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Oct 20, 2016 22:59
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Raenir Salazar posted:I want a military scifi thriller from the perspective of an army that uses Deep Battle, is that so hard to ask for? It never shows up in any meaningful way in the games, but the humans in Mass Effect (the "Systems Alliance") are described in fluff material as relying on something analogous to Deep Battle.
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Oct 21, 2016 19:05
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feedmegin posted:The Lewis gun for example dates back to 1911, It wasn't issued in any significant numbers until 1916. quote:and the same logic also applies to regular rifles as well. But this is correct. The zigzag prevents an enemy from taking the entire trench under enfilading fire should he breach the line. Like Hegel says, you don't need machineguns to do this. One great example is the Bloody Lane at the Battle of Antietam in the American Civil War. Confederate troops in one sector used a sunken road as a makeshift trench to repulse several attacks by Union infantry. However, the road was long and straight so when an attack finally reached the road, they raked the Confederate defenders with enfilading fire and broke them in short order.
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Oct 26, 2016 14:25
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no! you are wrong and something else about the Austrian Navy is much much more famous
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Oct 28, 2016 23:49
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Hogge Wild posted:I've read about how the German Blitzkrieg was fueled not only by gas but also by meth, and how the Fnnish long range patrols were using the same poo poo, but how much did the other countries use drugs for military purposes? Basically every country. Amphetamines were and are extremely common because military personnel often wind up in situations where they have no opportunity to sleep for extended periods. Strong stimulants are necessary to keep them going. Amphetamines were used very extensively by German soldiers and Hitler himself ate MASSIVE amounts of amphetamine pills. Amphetamines were used by the Japanese, and in fact the process for creating crystalline methamphetamine (aka the MacGuffin from Breaking Bad) was invented by a Japanese chemist. The US Army Air Corps used amphetamines for wakefulness. The USAF still uses dextroamphetamines (aka "go pills") to increase the number of sorties each pilot can fly before needing a break to take a nap. In 2002 a USAF pilot blew up a bunch of Canadians and he tried to claim a kind of diminished capacity defense because he was hopped up on speed at the direction of his superiors. The people in charge were pretty dubious about whether the incident could be blamed on drugs and he was found guilty and reprimanded, so make of that what you will. To some extent raging on cheap speed is something you just have to accept in a military context, because you have (for example) X number of pilots who need to fly Y number of sorties in every 24 hour period, and X and Y don't add up to victory without you multiplying by Z (which is feeding them dexies so they don't need to sleep). And of course you can also think about opioids, which are pretty much indispensable to military operations--morphine, fentanyl, etc. They're also indispensable to medicine generally, but in a military context people get wounded or injured and they have to be dosed. As far back as Alexander the Great soldiers were doing opioids. On a more mundane level, huge numbers of American GIs got addicted to tobacco during WWII because they were issued cigarette rations. That's also a drug, and it had a real and seldom-considered cultural and medical effect that lasted probably for generations.
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Nov 5, 2016 05:03
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Tias posted:I would imagine the US military has switched to Modafinil by now? Looks correct. Guess I'm not up to date on military pharmacology!
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Nov 5, 2016 18:16
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Hunt11 posted:AP's represent the worst aspects of education. Teaching to the test instead of trying to teach the subject itself. This is probably more appropriate to somewhere else, but w/e I actually just finished the student teaching phase of becoming certified to teach HS social studies--Friday was my last day. I'll be licensed and looking for work in January. The pro teacher I worked with does AP US History and AP Government, so I p. much just taught AP the whole time. The best kids in the school, really. He has a union contract and all (at least until Betsy Devos drops a meteor on the planet), but as far as administration is concerned his students' scores on the AP exam pretty much determine whether he has succeeded or failed at his job that year. He's not going to get fired if they do poorly, but the conditions of his job might change. Our kids were pretty much the best students in the school, smartest, most motivated. If he does a bad job, maybe he has to teach freshman history. Or ELL classes. He's qualified to teach AP courses, but if the kids don't perform he might be pushed somewhere he's not qualified, just to run him out of the profession. Who gives a poo poo about the kids? Punish the teacher and do nothing to resolve the underlying condition. This is America, you communist fucker. So he has a really strong personal incentive to teach to the test. This was frustrating to me on several occasions--there's a period of several weeks where supposedly I had sole responsibility for teaching, but my cooperating teacher jumped in and scrubbed some of my lessons to spend more time working on how to beat the exam portion. I had to weigh that. The kids miss out on important and interesting content so they can perform better on a test, but that test gives them the chance for cheap college credit, and it protects his job if they pass. I've also put in some time as an essay scorer in the big pile of poo poo that is the standardized testing industry, so I had some insight into what exactly they needed to get done to score well. I created what I think was probably a pretty interesting and engaging lesson about the Declaration of Independence, appropriate to 10th graders. Did we do that lesson? Nope. Instead I bashed together a pretty strong lesson drawing on my scoring experience. I figure I probably pushed some kids over the line to where they have a chance to earn gen-ed history credits on the cheap. They'll do better on the ACT/SAT written exam to get into college. They'll have a better chance to get that AP credit. So... yay? They'll do better on a piece of poo poo test that doesn't measure anything that actually matters. I also invited the school principal to observe my lessons, so that when I applied to some other school, or to his school, and they asked him, he could say that he'd seen me teach. He came in to my AP Government class, and without going into intensely boring pedagogy for teaching 16-18 year old kids, the lesson was that I put useful information in front of them and gave them time to look at it in groups, and then I had a conversation with them about the content. His comments on the observation consisted pretty much entirely of "where is my data?" and "give me data!" poo poo. When I went over it with him later my response was (briefly), "this is AP Government, these kids self-selected to take a harder version of this course, they know that pop quizzes are bullshit, so I'll find out if they learned it on the test at the end of the chapter." Basically, most of the kids are too smart for me to gently caress them around on a daily basis to produce data for admin. Kids know busy work when you assign it, so I concentrated on getting a qualitative feel for their progress instead of producing quantitative data for you (when, subtext, you won't do anything with it anyway). We're also in a weird position because we're teaching these kids government in late November 2016--get loving serious here, all of this good government bullshit about the electoral college, the function of the media, the "paradox of American democracy" in that it functions effectively even when the public has a low overall knowledge of history, policy, current events, etc. That's obsolete. Does the American political system function well in spite of voters being poorly informed? Does it really? Get serious. I had a student who refused to sit in her assigned seat because the other two people in her table group were Mexicans. You have to thread the gap between the kids' idiot Trump-voting parents and their lived reality, where they have to anticipate going to college, or joining the workforce, or joining the army, in an age of uncertainty. I was talking to a kid the other day, who is a junior in high school but has somehow already committed to enlistment in the US Army as soon as he graduates. I had to explain to him that when Fox News has a headline in the form of a question ("Voter Fraud? In Hillary Clinton Popular Vote Victory") it means the article is made up. This is a kid who will maybe someday have to fight in a place I don't even know where.
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Dec 11, 2016 09:10
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Cyrano4747 posted:Getting college credit is swell but you have to also ask yourself if you actually gain anything taking, you know, real university level history classes. As someone who teaches those I pretty strongly believe that yeah you do and it's not only getting the reference when I compare Trump to James K Polk. I agree and I always recommend CC to college-bound kids, and kids who aren't sure about college. Also, the possibility of college credit from passing the exam is always offered to kids as the main reason to take AP, but the incentives for the schools are a little different. For one, a lot of schools are being pushed to improve "rigor" and offer better, more challenging courses, taught by more qualified teachers. The local school board or state board of education might set "more rigor" as an official yearly objective for administrators and faculty at your school. Offering more AP classes and getting more kids enrolled is a way to demonstrate you're doing that, and it's cheaper and easier than, say, hiring teachers with graduate degrees. All you have to do is train a teacher to be familiar with the cookie-cutter AP curriculum, and tell the smart kids to enroll. Principal can tell his boss, "Since last year we added two new AP Courses and increased enrollment in AP sections by 50 seats." If you have a choice between a move that produces quantitative data that will fit on a powerpoint slide, and qualitative improvements that probably better represent actual rigor, go with the numbers every time. For two, the AP exam is another source of student achievement data, and it is one where the school can grease the numbers a little bit. You select the smartest kids. The admin sets it up so that a student has to get a referral from a teacher or counselor to enroll in the AP course. It's mostly smart, ambitious kids who even bother asking, but you can weed out the ones who simply have no chance before they even walk into the classroom. Once they're in, the teacher is keeping track of their grades. The ones who fail out the first semester go down the hall to the regular version of the same course for the second semester. They don't take the AP exam. You also have the kids who are keeping it together to pass the classroom portion of the course, but aren't developing the skills or knowledge to pass the exam. Their parents are probably paying out of pocket for their kid to take the exam, why not save them the money and the effort by quietly discouraging those kids from taking it? Really, you're doing them a favor. Right? After all this you get to May, and some proportion of the kids take the AP exam, and some percentage of them pass, and eventually College Board spits those numbers back to you. After this process of winnowing down the population to just the kids you think have the best chance of passing, you get data. Your principal can go to the school board and say, "we have drug dealers in the halls, half the students are failing, one in five of them drops out before graduation, but 40 of the 50 kids we allowed to take the AP US History exam scored a three or better. That's 80%, against a nationwide average of under 75%!" Accentuate the positive.
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Dec 11, 2016 18:09
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Ensign Expendable posted:Do they also naturally develop pikes and poofy pants? John Brown hoped that his raid on Harper's Ferry would lead to a massive slave rebellion, and he actually ordered 1000 pikes to equip the expected rebel army. According the link he had trouble covering the costs, but he was eventually able to pay for 954 and stockpile them near the arsenal, where they were sitting when the slave army didn't rise up. We can also quibble over whether or not they were actually pikes, since they were only 6 feet long and probably closer in design to a boar spear than to a true pike. No idea about the pants, though.
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Dec 15, 2016 17:23
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bewbies posted:Warfare in the west during the early parts of the industrial age, was, for the most part, only between militaries. Though there are handful of examples where civilian populations were deliberately targeted, doing so was widely frowned upon and not often done. See the exchange between Sherman, Hood, and the may of Atlanta I posted a few pages ago as an example: even the displacement of civilians was considered mildly barbaric. Not criticizing, just asking for clarification: I assume that by "in the west" and "for the most part," you mean to exclude wars against indigenous peoples.
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Dec 15, 2016 23:01
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Cyrano4747 posted:SA engages in a lot of hyperbole. The problem with American schools is the unevenness of quality. A blighted school district in an inner city with gently caress all for a budget and high teacher turn over is truly lovely, but your average suburban public school is in the same ballpark as a western European one. Variation in educational outcomes is greatest between rich and poor districts, even within the same state, because money is allocated at that level. However, I think non-Americans should also understand that nearly all educational policy is set by state governments, and they have considerably more leeway than even other federal systems, like Germany's. Public education systems in the Northeast and much of the Midwest (i.e. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, etc.) are fairly healthy at the state level. Schools in poor areas of Massachusetts or New York will still perform more poorly than those in wealthy areas, because they are less well-funded and because the students will be negatively impacted by their socio-economic disadvantages, but on average they benefit from the state government having some degree of commitment to sound educational policy. States in the South, West, and Southwest don't really have that, and the schools suffer for it. There is even a lot of variation between states with bad systems, as to the exact way they manage to be terrible. Texas and Louisiana both suck, but in fundamentally different ways.
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Dec 30, 2016 18:44
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EggsAisle posted:How did Yugoslavia break down so thoroughly into the wars of the 90's? The most common explanation I've heard is "death of Tito + preoccupied/uninterested Soviet Union + rampant nationalism", but that's a suspiciously tidy explanation. I'm trying to understand how a system comes so unglued and turns to such bitter and vigorous fighting. I'm definitely interested in the perspectives of people from that part of the world- I know there's at least one Serbian goon who posts in this thread (not sure about other former Yugoslav republics) so any insights or corrections would be most welcome. I don't want to get too into detail because the story is extremely complicated and would take a very extended post. For Yugoslavia the question is not so much why it broke apart but rather what kept it together until it broke apart. Yugoslavia was invented by the Treaty of Versailles and the people who were shoehorned into did not really share a national identity in any meaningful sense. You could argue that the initial name of the state was an illustration of this: Yugoslavia was a later neologism, and for a decade after Versailles it was the "Kingdom of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs." Different groups contained within Serbia broadly spoke similar languages but were usually separated by religion and about a thousand years of history. They were put together in one state, basically under Serb leadership, to reward the Kingdom of Serbia for having been on the right side of WWI, and because actual national self-determination would have produced untidy borders and small, weak states. The victors of Versailles wanted to ensure that there would be strong states in Central Europe to act as a check on German resurgence or the expansion of Communism from the USSR. This is similar to the motivation for combining the Czechs and Slovaks into one national state--separate peoples who were "close enough" to be bundled in one state, which would then be large and strong enough to stand on its own. In Yugoslavia result was a very unstable state riven by ethno-nationalist tensions, most significantly between Serbs and Croats. Violence between groups was frequent and shocking. In 1928 a radical Serb MP assassinated the leader of the Croatian nationalists in the middle of a Parliamentary session. In 1932 the king was assassinated by a conspiracy of Croatian fascists (the Ustashe) and Macedonian/Bulgarian separatists. Uprisings and riots were also common. This was not a very stable country, and things got much worse during WWII. Yugoslavia was under Axis occupation but actually spent the war engaged in a full-blown civil war full of ethnic cleansing and brutal atrocities. During the War, the Communist Partisans under the leadership of Tito emerged as the most effective resistance to the Axis and secured recognition as such from not only the USSR but also the USA and UK. They were able to crush the Serbian nationalist Chetniks and the Croatian nationalist Ustashe and finally, with Soviet assistance, forced the Germans to withdraw from Yugoslavia. It was after WWII that Yugoslavia actually began to function as something like a stable country. This was accomplished through a combination of authoritarian repression of political dissent plus a federal system that permitted expressions of ethnic difference (though not so much for Albanians, AFAIK). Tito probably decided to permit national difference from some combination of genuine internationalism (as a Marxist), political pragmatism (recognizing that efforts to force unity would backfire), and his own heritage as a child of a mixed marriage. Tito's system worked well during his lifetime, in part because he broke with the USSR and pursued a more balanced socialist policy that allowed for more engagement with the West and greater market flexibility--both of which fostered economic growth. However, TIto's authoritarianism only papered over the existing divisions within Yugoslavia. The fissures were still there, under the surface, and they had been evident from time to time even with a popular dictator in place. e.g. protests by mostly Croatian autonomists forced Tito to issue a new constitution in 1974 that surrendered some control to Yugoslavia's constitutive Republics. In the absence of the strong man who had forced compliance through his personal popular appeal and force of personality, his successors tried to work out power-sharing arrangements to balance the interests of competing groups within Yugoslavia. This didn't last. Once Tito was gone it all began to crack up, gradually at first and then with brutal abruptness. The main thing to see is that the apparent stability of postwar Yugoslavia disguised underlying conditions of instability. This is not to say that the Yugoslav Wars were a historical inevitability. Just that the conditions that gave rise to them didn't go away, and it took a continuous effort of management to keep them under control. Tito's force of personality and national reputation was a big part of that, but there were other contingent issues. The power-sharing regime came under economic and political pressure because of the decline of Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as a global economic recession in the late 1980s-early 1990s. The different republics stopped working together and federal cooperation gave way to a power vacuum. Serb nationalists under Milosevic tried to seize control. Everybody else reacted by heading toward the exit, and that put into motion a brutal civil war over who would have control over which parts of the former Yugoslavia.
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Jan 7, 2017 05:23
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my dad posted:The Yugoslav movement had a long history that didn't even start in Serbia. I talked about it a few times in the previous iteration of this thread. I apologize for my mistake. If you have the time and inclination to make a longer post after your holidays, or even just links to those previous posts, I would be happy for the opportunity to learn from it and be corrected. edit: TBH I actually know more about 1830s Illyrians than I do about 1990s Yugoslav Wars, so I'm very interested in your perspective about historical antecedents Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Jan 8, 2017 |
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Jan 8, 2017 05:08
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SimonCat posted:Keep in mind that every side in the Yugoslav wars of the 90s has really strong opinions, so take anything My Dad says with a grain of salt. I'm not saying he's wrong, but I've heard enough Serbs claim Kosovo as Serbia to disagree with him. I'm aware. I'm also conscious of making deliberate decisions to omit or generalize important details in the interest of what I thought was brevity, but which somebody with a different perspective could see in an entirely different light. For example, I know there was a large body of people in Yugoslavia, just as there was in the USSR, who identified more strongly with the federal state than with its constitutive republics. Who believed in the promise of Yugoslavia. I don't believe there was any opinion polling so we don't know what proportion of the population felt so, but it could have been substantial. I did not mention this because, in hindsight perspective, the unifying impulse was overcome by national separatism, and the continuity in those separatist movements over the decades seems important. But that's just based on what I've read. I'm prepared to see my writing as unfair and incorrect, which is the least anybody can do when offering their analysis or opinion. I'm interested in what he has to say.
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Jan 8, 2017 06:52
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my dad posted:But before I start, the claims that Yugoslavia was invented by the Versailles, and that the languages are separate, are so incredibly, mind-bogglingly wrong that it kinda set the tone of the rest of your post to me, and caused me to overreact to some degree. To give you a personal language-related experience, it's been kinda hilarious listening to a Croatian linguist on Croatian TV trying to tiptoe around the minefield of nationalism-triggers to explain that, uh, yeah, Serbs and Croats speak the same language but feel free to call it Croatian, just like Serbs are free to call it Serbian, it's not like it's being stolen out of your mouth. Bonus points for watching it replayed on some Serbian TV station with actual subtitles added ( Thanks for the post, it's very informative. To get more into some specific details, you previously mentioned longer-term roots of Yugoslavian national consciousness as a precedent for the post-Versailles Kingdom, specifically originating outside Serbia. I assume that you were referring to the mostly Croatian-based Illyrian movement. I'm aware that movement existed and that it suggested a framework for national consciousness and state formation for South Slavs, but I understood it more in the context of contemporaneous national revival movements in Central Europe, the same as the Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, and so on. In common with those other examples the most important and in this case most successful aim was the creation of a standardized language and its popularization among the intellectual class. However, I have difficulty drawing a line from these movements to the creation of the Yugoslav state, because at any particular time it's difficult to say how widespread or popular was the idea of national unification for all Serbo-Croatian speakers, either in the elite political class or among the population at large. You are rightly critical of hindsight perspective and I have to admit to using it--Yugoslavia "failed," so we want to find the reasons in its prior history. But at the same time I think you have to guard against doing that in the opposite direction. People who believe in a national identity always look to the past for their antecedents, and they are invested in finding it. You have to consider whether you're really drawing a direct connection. For example, Goethe and the Grimms played important roles in creating the intellectual underpinnings of a common German national identity, so you could say that they anticipated the realization of the German national state. On the other hand, a political process overseen by conservative German aristocrats was the proximate cause of unification. It probably would have been unthinkable without the groundwork laid by others, but it didn't rely on the same reasons and justifications. Was Germany in 1871 the realization of the aims of the rebels of 1848? Parts of it, sure. In the same way, standardization of the Shtokavian dialect throughout the area where Serbo-Croatian was spoken was very significant and also probably a necessary step without which later movements would not have been possible, but I'm not sure about the connection between early Yugoslavism in the 1790-1830s and the actually existing Yugoslavian state in 1920, or in 1950 for that matter. And again, we don't know a lot about how much people in general believed, because we don't have that much data. We do have information that should lead us to believe that there were substantial problems from the outset. For example, the Croatian Republican Peasants' Party, which opposed the creation of the kingdom and advocated for an independent Croatian Republic, ordinarily swept the Croatian electoral districts. This is the situation that was eventually brought to a head by the assassination of Radic and the royal dictatorship. I thought the renaming of the state was significant because the name Kingdom of Yugoslavia was adopted as part of a package of initiatives that included the monarch arrogating dictatorial powers, outlawing and forcibly suppressing opposition parties (most importantly the HPSS), radically changing the internal organization of the state, and officially abolishing all nationalities in favor of the Yugoslav identity (article IV of the 1931 constitution). Initiatives that also led opponents of Alexander I to boycott the political process, form paramilitary organizations like the Ustashe, and eventually assassinate him. This all implies to me that whereas some level of identification with Yugoslavian national identity did exist, it was not so strong that it was overcoming competing loyalties. All that said, I want to return to the comparison with Germany for a moment. One of your criticisms is that I was representing Yugoslavia as dis-united or broken in a way that people don't generally say about Germany or Italy, and that is a fair point and one that I should probably clarify. I agree that "failed" states are usually represented as having failed because they were in some way fundamentally deficient compared to "successful" states, and I agree that this is wrong. However, I think the error isn't so much on the side of questioning Yugoslavian national identity, but rather in failing to question German or Italian, or other national identities. What happened in Germany 1933-1945 is not seen as a failure of the national project. Or 1945-1990. Or we don't look at the Kulturkampf as indicating dangerous fissures in the German national project, probably because we know that the Catholics eventually came around. So I did say that Yugoslavia was fragile and there were a lot of factors pulling it apart, but I didn't mean to say it was uniquely fragile or destined to fail. I think most national states are more fragile than people realize. And both times Yugoslavia broke up, it was the result of external pressure--a coup and an invasion in 1941, and as part of a general continent- or world-wide political and economic crisis in the 1990s.
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Jan 9, 2017 20:42
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) that read like someone just replaced one of the spoken words with a synonym every once in a while.