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Is battle of the frontiers the start of wwi between France and Germany, but without the swing through Belgium? Do you have any recommendations for books in french on it?
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Jun 15, 2018 12:16
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Trin Tragula posted:If you're a fluent speaker, get thee stuck into the French Official History, which is available in its entirety for free on the internet and which will happily drone on for years in bollock-numbing detail about generals and dates and places and plans. JcDent posted:What is it with the Battle of the Frontiers interest? I'd never heard of it, but have been curious about how the early days went up to the trench digging competition, since I figured there had to be a few big battles beforehand. ilmucche fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Jun 15, 2018 |
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Jun 15, 2018 17:53
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Trin Tragula posted:It's very easy to overlook it between the STRONK RIGHT VING (another major failing of The Guns of August) and the Marne, but if nothing else it had France's deadliest single day of the war (22 August), and it was a massive ATTENTION GUILLAUME ROBIN that there were a lot of seriously faulty assumptions in people's thinking. Casualties for the semi-mobile battles at the start and end of the war usually absolutely dwarf those sustained during trench warfare. Like, 10 months grinding away at Verdun saw roughly 800,000 total casualties and ~300,000 dead (give or take 50,000 each way for both sides), which is only slightly more than what they got from one month in August and September 1914. Which is not including all the battles of the vast Marne/Grand Couronee counter-offensive, for which you can add another 600,000-odd combined casualties in about two and a half weeks. Give everyone four years to get so much better at war, invent all these new toys, make them semi-mobile again, and it means you're back to seeing 500,000 casualties a month, for four months. There's just so much written about the race to the sea and trench warfare that it seems that the transition from rank and file into trench warfare gets overlooked, though I think some of the boer and american civil wars had some aspects of heavily defensive warfare. I've often wondered how the fights worked out once the trenches were broken through. Like say when the Canadians took vimy ridge it seems like they got fairly deep into the german lines, and had green grass and untouched land in front of them from what I read in Pierre Burton's book. How did they handle the fact they were now sitting in german communication and back line trenches with germans further down the line? Once battles shifted further into towns what was the fighting like, did they shell the place flat and dig more trenches?
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Jun 15, 2018 19:36
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Trin Tragula posted:Enemy lines and urban combat Okay, so it was a lot like other battles, take their lines and hold off hoping the rest catch up. Obviously that didn't happen all along the trench line at once, so I'm guessing there were a lot of salients? Is that the word? The trench lines would just kind of fall back and redig so the opposing armies weren't sharing trenches kind of thing. I heard they put bends in the trenches quite a bit to avoid propogation of blasts, would that have helped cut lines off when the enemy took them? Has urban combat become more common over time? I know wwii has significant examples, Stalingrad, ortona, caen etc, but has there traditionally been an avoidance of fighting in towns? Is it more about the approach and the ease of defending a town that prevented urban warfare? Bronze/Iron age seem more like they'd be siege oriented like the Gauls had done and whatnot rather than wading straight in to attack, or just trying to catch and ambush armies in the open.
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Jun 15, 2018 23:29
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Sorry, I missed the start of these logs. Are they of a unit deployed on the front? It sounds like these guys are in the trenches/ on the front. I don't have a good grasp of what the front looked like at this point. Had they moved beyond miles of trenches??
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Jul 16, 2018 21:37
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Wouldn't civilian casualties in wwi have been limited by the fact it was a static war? The war didn't roll through cities like wwii or mobile armies. Civilians weren't going to stroll up to the trenches and have a wander about. Wars that run through population rich areas would have more casualties.
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Jul 20, 2018 11:58
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Ww1 was mostly barbed wire, not razor wire? The idea was to tangle people up so they could then be shot? How big were the fields/ how high did the wire go? I'm under the impression that in some places they just erected a big cube of wire so you couldn't go over or under
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Jul 27, 2018 18:04
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On the subject of the wire, how did all that get strung up? Even doing it at night it seems like the noise and time would be super noticeable.  Like how are these guys not getting shot while putting this up (or during this picture)? Kind of leads me to another question, with battlefield footage of world war 1 and I suppose later wars, was it just random guys with a camera taking pictures/ video and praying they didn't get shot or hit by artillery?
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Jul 29, 2018 15:03
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On noise, how is the hearing of frontline soldiers? I imagine that having your ear within a foot or two of multiple explosions doesn't do you any good and that hearing protection isn't really an option.
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Jul 31, 2018 08:58
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chitoryu12 posted:Watching some InRange videos, Ian McCollum actually has a book on the history of mud loving up military operations. Wasn't Agincourt or Poitiers all about the mud? I thought one of the major battles was decided because the french had to cross a shitload of thigh deep mud which meant they were picked off or exhausted by the time they got to the enemy lines
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Jul 31, 2018 15:57
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Was wire used in the boer War or the American civil war? It being so synonymous with wwi makes sense since it was a mostly static war, but was it used to funnel people/ for defensive positioning prior? How quickly did wars after wwi shift away from trench warfare? Did the Russian Revolution (it was late 191xs right?) have much in the way of trench warfare or was it back to mobile?
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Jul 31, 2018 21:51
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I thought mercenaries were useful in that it helped avoid the need for a standing army, and it's a lot more reasonable from a nation standpoint to put mercenaries in a dangerous position than your own citizens who will hate you later on
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Aug 2, 2018 07:56
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Isn't "never parachute into an area you just bombed" some sort of saying? My former neighbour was the son of a nazi parachutist. There isn't much of a story to go with that, but the guy sure did hate the Russians. Edit: and the British
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Aug 2, 2018 21:34
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Tekopo posted:I saw another TIK video and it's quite funny to see the wehraboos come out in force for relatively uncontroversial opinions like "the soviets were actually quite strategically, operationally and tactically adept" I like that it's "I'll take, you take" rather than "if they met". Pretty sure the Russians had the better strategy at least, given they loving won.
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Aug 3, 2018 18:02
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Do modern armies still estimate casualties beforehand? In wwi they would estimate a casualty %, how did they come up with that number? Obviously terrain, what they can target with artillery, but what was an acceptable rate? Certain attacks had 50% predicted and went ahead. Did the soldiers know this?
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Aug 3, 2018 18:11
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How did defectors work in ancient times? Like at Salamis how did the Greeks know the Greek Persian ships had defected? Did they just start ramming Persians? Same with land battles, did they start attacking friendlies, and then other side assumed they'd switched?
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Aug 4, 2018 08:50
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Did they actually use bones and stuff as tools in the trenches? Once read that unidentified bones were sometimes used as hangers and such. Seems way too gruesome to be true, but that seems like the entirety of trench warfare really.
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Aug 5, 2018 21:30
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13th KRRC War Diary, 6th August 1918 posted: Slight Trench Mortar activity. Enemies artillery was more active today than usual, otherwise there was nothing to annoy us. Good patrols went out under 2nd Lt. BARRIE and rifle grenaded the enemy post which we had attempted to raid last night. What were day to day casualties like from this?
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Aug 8, 2018 11:15
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Grey Hunter posted:Just nipping in to let you know I'm running a goon vs goon Lp of Combat Mission - Final Blitzkreig. Poorly, if beyond overlord is anything to go by.
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Aug 9, 2018 11:14
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Given how the Japanese treated other places they invaded if they took hawaii there likely wouldn't be many Americans left, so we could've seen the interesting effect of dropping an atomic bomb on a volcano
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Aug 10, 2018 06:56
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The Lone Badger posted:AFAIK the biggest advantage of composite bows is that you can make them smaller for the same power, allowing you to have bows powerful enough to be militarily-relevant but short enough to fire from horseback. They're also a bit more efficient than a simple bow in transforming the stored energy into kinetic energy. Don't they also require less strength to draw?
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Aug 10, 2018 08:20
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Rockopolis posted:Man, I've always wanted to vist Goryōkaku one day. Is that like a bump cap? Not sure if that's the proper name, but I've seen them on certain industrial sites as an alternative to a proper plastic helmet. Like a baseball cap, but with some reinforcement and padding.
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Aug 13, 2018 10:46
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I thought the bignthing about space battles was that you want insane maneuverability, the kind that would put forces on a ship that would turn a human inside to jelly. Also, life support systems take up space and weight that could be better used for more weapons/fuel.
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Aug 16, 2018 10:58
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Raenir Salazar posted:High maneuverability isn't particularly useful in space combat because of long ranges; you can dodge kinetic rounds possibly depending on whats providing your delta V budget and whether you can rotate or spin; but missiles and (depending on the range before diffraction kills your efficiency) lasers can't be outmaneuvered so removing humans doesn't help your spaceship. Maneuverability maybe not, but sizewise a person plus all the poo poo needed to keep them alive is a much bigger target than not having all that equipment. Also, humans die and people tend to not want that to happen. feedmegin posted:High maneuverability may not be so useful in space, but high acceleration certainly is, precisely because of long ranges; an unmanned spacecraft can get to where it wants to go a lot more quickly if it doesn't have to worry about crushing flesh bodies in the process. As shown repeatedly on the Expanse come to think of it. This is what I meant when I mentioned people turning to jelly
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Aug 16, 2018 15:32
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GotLag posted:Depends on who's doing the dying and who you're asking Space warfare casualties will be mostly friendly fire incidents as pilots die from too many g's during acceleration. Statistically I think this will be true.
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Aug 16, 2018 15:39
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bewbies posted:I think someone mentioned it earlier but Peter F Hamiltons take on Future Space Combat is both creative and seems plausible to me, the layman. They're very good books. The bit where they realise ships are accelerating way too fuckig fast towards them to be holding a human is what made me think of that argument.
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Aug 16, 2018 16:01
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WoodrowSkillson posted:thats how capital ship guns worked in mass effect, big rear end railguns that spanned the length of the hull. the whole idea is to get your guns on line and avoid the enemy's. Intergalactic circle strafing
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Aug 16, 2018 16:20
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Military Future Mk. II: The economics of throwing rocks at your enemies
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Aug 16, 2018 21:47
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JcDent posted:Hey, if space combat ends up being endless boarding actions, good. Legend of the Galactic Heroes style. Big fuckoff axes everywhere
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Aug 17, 2018 08:09
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Quintili vare, tank destroyers redde.
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Aug 18, 2018 12:27
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SerthVarnee posted:EVERY MORNING I WAKE UP AND OPEN PALM SLAM A SHELL INTO THE BARREL. IT’S WORLD WAR II AND RIGHT THEN AND THERE I START TAKING THE SHOTS ALONGSIDE WITH THE MAIN CHARACTER, GAY BLACK HITLER. I DO EVERY SHOT AND I DO EVERY SHOT HARD. MAKIN WHOOSHING SOUNDS WHEN I SLAM DOWN SOME TANKIE BASTARDS OR EVEN WHEN I MESS UP TECHNIQUE. NOT MANY CAN SAY THEY FOUGHT THE WORLDS MOST DANGEROUS WAR. I CAN. I SAY IT AND I SAY IT OUTLOUD EVERYDAY TO PEOPLE IN MY COLLEGE CLASS AND ALL THEY DO IS PROVE PEOPLE IN COLLEGE CLASS CAN STILL BE IMMATURE JEKRS. AND IVE LEARNED ALL THE TACTICS AND IVE LEARNED HOW TO MAKE MYSELF AND MY APARTMENT LESS LONELY BY OUTMANEUVERING EM ALL. 2 HOURS INCLUDING WIND DOWN EVERY MORNIng 
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Aug 18, 2018 17:39
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Cythereal posted:I was gifted Guns, Germs, and Steel today, and I seem to recall this book being rather controversial. Is it the good kind of controversial, or should I politely donate it to a library a few months from now? It was really loving boring and repetitive and I much preferred carnage and culture, though I think that has its own issues.
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Aug 25, 2018 00:40
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If wwi was the first war where most of the deaths occurred from combat does that count all the civilian deaths? Or were ancient/medieval/dark ages armies just big groups of massively ill, starving to death men that went into battle sick as dogs and already on death's door?
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Aug 27, 2018 21:43
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Nenonen posted:You're correct, but it doesn't look much less of a letter soup than APFSDS so I forget. Chobham is another one, either it's an acronym or an English meal. Chobham is also a small town.
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Aug 31, 2018 08:50
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Tias posted:Castle attack How effective was climbing ladders? Like siege towers I kind of get, but sending your dudes up a ladder seems like a terribly inefficient way to get access. How does the dude survive when he clears the wall?
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Sep 5, 2018 08:09
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It's the hot oil stuff that seems really terrifying. Though I imagine that took a lot of defenders to pull off
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Sep 6, 2018 07:42
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Tias posted:drat, the master engineer shade game is stronk : Where was this?
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Sep 6, 2018 14:57
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Nenonen posted:Grand Wizards of the Coast Tragic: the gathering
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Sep 9, 2018 22:40
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Gold Is that a true story?
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Sep 11, 2018 08:47
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When I read GULAG instead of Gulag it makes me think of GURPS. Maybe the prisoners should've rolled a better character, or invested in sneak so they could leave.
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Sep 13, 2018 22:09
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