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100 Years Ago 27 July: The South African Prime Minister tries to work out why they haven't put German East Africa to bed yet (spoilers, that rotter Lettow-Vorbeck won't stand and fight like a gentleman). The BEF turns Longueval and Delville Wood into a fine paste and then occupies most of the ground where they used to be; the Blockade of Germany continues slowly tightening; Oskar Teichman's men at the Suez Canal are starting to get restless; Lt-Col Neil Tennant sails to Basra by way of Muscat in Oman; Evelyn Southwell is heading south, towards the Somme; and Maximilian Mugge watches draft after draft of men head off to the front. 28 July: One day I will have many more rude words to say about General Haig's failure to rein in one Sir Hubert de la Poer Gough once it is well and truly clear that the man is only suited to an army command in a very particular set of circumstances; today is not that day. Suffice it to say that the Chief is busy blaming the Australians for something that his mate Gough is foisting on them. Oh, also, the Germans are sending a lot of planes to the Somme. In the Caucasus General Yudenich must now pivot to face an actual threat for a change; Britain, France and Russia are now plotting to stitch up the Romanians, and it serves them bloody right too; Louis Barthas tries to find some water; Lt-Col Fraser-Tytler socialises with the French again; E.S. Thompson receives another issue of Railway Magazine; and Maximilian Mugge weighs in on matters of theological importance. Also, HEY GAL posted this early in the old thread and it clearly still belongs here because it makes me giggle like a complete idiot 
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Aug 2, 2016 00:32
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TasogareNoKagi posted:How do you keep the various military subdivisions straight? Battalion, brigade, company, corps, division ... Same as most other knowledge, you just need to spend enough time thinking about it and then it sticks. There was a day when Jimi Hendrix only knew one chord, and there was a day when I couldn't remember whether the company commander reports to the platoon commander, or t'other way about. Then I spent a few years reading about stuff and now I can usually remember that infantry companies, cavalry squadrons, and artillery batteries are rough equivalents of each other.
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Aug 3, 2016 00:23
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100 Years Ago 29 July: I'm inordinately proud to have worked in a direct and suitable reference to that grand moment of high culture "when Father Ted kicked Bishop Brennan up the arse". Of course it's all about Pozieres windmill today, where attacks fail and General Haig covers himself in the opposite of glory by totally misunderstanding the command situation and then personally berating ANZAC commander General Birdwood for something that is pretty much in no way his fault. It also happens that this coincides with yet another battle beginning in the Caucasus, which has provided an opportunity to finally work in my metaphor of a pikeman to depict how an army's fighting strength is strongly concentrated at one end of a relatively vulnerable supply line. Louis Barthas's funny story about the blokes finding wine turns quickly horrible; Neil Fraser-Tytler celebrates his birthday with a five-course lunch (with champagne, natch) and a visit from his brother; E.S. Thompson hears the rumours; Edward Mousley has finally completed his journey from Kut to Kastamonu; and Maximilian Mugge receives heartening news of a trouble-making Irish MP. 30 July: The ears are senseless that should give us hearing to tell his commandment is fulfilled; that Maurepas and Guillemont are dead. Flows so nicely, doesn't it? Shame neither of them were declared villages that died for France. Yesterday's birthday boy Fraser-Tytler is faced with a task straight out of the very depths of Hell; Wully Robertson puts some cromulent questions to the Chief on behalf of the government; French intelligence is very optimistic; there's a very minor development in Persia; some rotter plays a prank on E.S. Thompson's mates; Emilio Lussu meets an old crony who appears to have excused himself clothes; and idiot son of a Montreal millionaire Clifford Wells might, might just have successfully calibrated Baby's First Bullshit Detector.
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Aug 4, 2016 00:11
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WALLENSTEIN: I didn't get a harrumph outta that guy! TILLY: Give the generalissimo a harrumph! STETER: ...Harrumph? WALLENSTEIN: You watch your rear end.
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Aug 4, 2016 01:05
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Guys I don't know if you noticed this but July 1916 was a loving terrible month for a shitload of people 100 Years Ago 31 July: And glory be, it's over now. The end comes with some navel-gazing from Generals Joffre and Haig; then a bollocking from Haig to Rawlinson; Max Plowman marches round and round the Bull Ring at Etaples several hundred times; Lt-Col Neil Tennant has arrived at Basra and does some well-meaning moaning about how terrible the logistics still are; E.S. Thompson continues his string of bad life decisions by trying to burn his tent down with himself inside; his mates have cut the Central Railway at Dodoma; and then the month ends on the most appropriate send-off I can think of, a three-exploding-horse salute. 1 August: What do you mean, there's another month? We just got done with the last one! Winston Churchill puts the case against the Somme; General von Knobelsdorf launches a surprise attack against Fort Souville; things are beginning to clank and crunch into action on the Salonika front; Lt-Col Fraser-Tytler wades through yesterday's gore and departs from the story for a while for a well-deserved rest; E.S. Thompson reads the newspapers; German fighter ace Oswald Boelcke is on a grand tour of Germany's allies to keep him from getting shot down over Verdun; Henri Desagneaux celebrates the war's anniversary with his favourite rats; and Maximilian Mugge still has a fly in his fatigue cap about folk songs. 2 August: General Haig puts the case for the Somme, which seems so much more reasonable when horses aren't in fact exploding in front of one's eyes; the Battle of Bitlis is already not going well for the Ottomans; Emilio Lussu takes a cavalry staff officer to loophole 14, with predictable consequences; Evelyn Southwell is still very depressed; E.S. Thompson gets some actual orders; and Maximilian Mugge has shockingly discovered that he doesn't much care for the Army, or for being Private Mugge.
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Aug 7, 2016 13:07
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Fangz posted:Do they basically have a guy with a sniper rifle sitting watching spots like that all day, in case someone's head appears? Short answer: yes, everywhere on every front where there's trench warfare, every so often there's a ping as some idiot gets up on the fire-step to let a working party come through the narrow trench, forgets to duck down, and catches the wrong bloke's eye at 500 yards. That particular loophole is such an obvious target, high on the highest hill, that it almost certainly has one or more sniper posts that were put there to cover it and with standing orders that your first priority is to immediately shoot any fucker who opens it, and given the accuracy it's probable that the main post covering it has a fixed rifle. Longer answer: where there's trench warfare, there's snipers. In a WWI context I often prefer to call them "marksmen", because the word "sniper" has modern images of a specially-trained dude in a giant ghillie suit, with his own precision-engineered sniper rifle and a gigantic scope that you could use to take a pot at someone on the International Space Station if you felt like it. WWI snipers are generally just regular guys with the standard service rifle (which was generally good out to at least 2,000 yards but used at a quarter the distance or less, even by snipers) who've passed some proficiency tests. They don't need to wear a bush because they live in a trench, and they've probably had sniping posts built for them; a good officer will do what he can to ensure that the spotters have a good-quality telescope or pair of binoculars. Ex-blog-correspondent Bernard Adams was, among other things, in charge of his battalion's snipers, and he wrote a lot about the job that never made it into the blog for reasons of space. quote:I was up on No. 1 post, with a sniper who was new to the work. It was still freezing, but the snow-clouds had cleared right away, and the wind had dropped. There was a tingle in the air; everything was as still as death; the sun was shining from a very blue sky, and throwing longer and longer shadows in the snow as the afternoon wore on. It was a valuable afternoon, the enemy's [barbed] wire showing up very clearly against the white ground, and I was showing the new sniper how to search the trench systematically from left to right, noting the exact position of anything that looked like a loophole, or steel-plate, and especially the thickness of the wire, what kind, whether it was gray and new, or rusty-red and old; whether there were any gaps in it, and where. All these things a sniper should note every morning when he comes on to his post. Gaps are important as patrols must come out through gaps, and the Lewis gunners should know these, and be ready to fire at them if a patrol is heard thereabouts in No Man's Land. Similarly, old gaps closed up must be reported. So, that dummy head was being waved near where someone was shot and killed in the German trench; they're trying to draw more fire from snipers who will then reveal their position to other observers. Both sides are constantly playing cat and mouse with the enemy's sniping posts (or their machine-gun posts, or their trench mortar emplacements, or their artillery's observation posts) and trying to camouflage their own posts as well as possible. If you find one, that could well be a valid reason to call in a few rounds from the seven-mile snipers further back. And then the enemy retaliates, and for a few minutes all the infantry sentries swear under their breath and wonder which bloody idiot started all this nonsense over nothing of importance... (Or, alternatively, you're French and you're in a quiet sector where everyone's far too sensible for any of this nonsense. In which case, you know exactly where the enemy's sniper post is, because you know that good old Corporal Schmidt always hangs out a tablecloth over the top of it when he's got some newspapers to swap.)
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Aug 7, 2016 17:53
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There is one very obvious flaw with the "look for the flies" method of finding a latrine. It's not necessarily this.Cyrano4747 posted:more to the point seeing a swarm of loving flies at more than a hundred yards just reeks of bullshit. it's not going to be a black cloud coming off the shitter that can be spotted from 400-500meters out. I'd buy that the observer, whoever he is, has a good enough telescope to see that there are flies over there, apparently buzzing around something. What I also buy is that he is going to see a lot of flies wherever he looks, because the latrine is far from the only thing in a goddamn trench (and in the shell-holes around the trench) that's going to draw flies. The only useful thing that "there are a lot of flies" indicates is "They are living in a trench".
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Aug 8, 2016 12:18
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Never before has your username been so appropriate!
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Aug 8, 2016 22:56
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Is it okay to get mad about a three-hour documentary series that shamelessly bills itself as "The Somme: Both Sides Of The Wire", and then the presenter says the name "Falkenhayn" approximately 1.3333 (recurring) times per hour? I hope the fucker donates his body to medical science so they can figure out how he got that brass neck. 100 Years Ago 3 August: A clevair ruse on the Somme, where there is now a run on barbed wire, wins a few hundred yards worth of trench. Hurrah. There's obviously a really good party going off in Tabora, because there's now troops from three different empires converging on it; nobody has manufactured any spare parts for the Mark I tanks yet; Oskar Teichman's men prepare for combat in Egypt; Oswald Boelcke's junket has now reached Bulgaria; Max Plowman explores Le Touquet, which he's rather enjoying; E.S. Thompson shares stories of naked horseplay and alleged executions; and Maximilian Mugge spends the day learning how to pretend to look busy. 4 August: The ANZACs and chums attack and capture Pozieres windmill, and one of their sergeants becomes the latest recipient of the order "get these dead fuckers piled up into a barricade". The Ottomans finally decide to poo poo at the Suez Canal rather than getting off the pot; Oskar Teichman makes friends with some prisoners; it's nearly time for Sixth Isonzo to get underway, but don't worry, General Cadorna has actually learned something from the last 11 months of slaughter!; Clifford Wells has arrived in France and immediately takes the chance to insult all Quebecois; Herbert Sulzbach still has no work to do, apparently; Neil Tennant complains about the wind this time; and E.S. Thompson continues arsing around with gay abandon. 5 August: It's a curate's egg of a situation for the Ottomans in the Caucasus; the Battle of Romani turns against their mates on the Suez Canal; Oskar Teichman gets his leg broken by shrapnel and does not, in fact, grumble; a British Red Cross man describes the state of Verdun itself (literally falling down around his ears); General Haig is delighted to see the Australians beating off the enemy on three separate occasions; E.S. Thompson gets on the march and complains that his sergeant won't let him drink the water they're carrying to keep the water-cooled machine-guns cool if there should be an attack; Captain Henri Desagneaux tries to convince himself that a local cesspit is flooding his underground shelter with water; Max Plowman shows us that even a committed pacifist can have silly romantic notions about the Army; and Maximilian Mugge is now thinking he might as well be sent up the line, if his skill with languages isn't actually going to be used. NLJP posted:shaft https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7OxTxAvvLw  
Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Aug 9, 2016 |
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Aug 9, 2016 01:43
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bewbies posted:Why is it that war movies always feature actors that are way, way, way too drat old to be in the army? Hey, I'm 40 year old lieutenant clint eastwood and I'm taking orders from 42 year old tom hanks who must be the oldest infantry captain in the ETO, except then he meets 51 year old airborne captain ted danson and everybody is surprised until 46 year old lieutenant brad pitt walks up only to be outdone by 51 year old staff sergeant brad pitt If you're dealing with Serious and Weighty Issues like War and Death and The Meaning of It All, a risk-averse producer is going to want to cast proven veterans in the lead roles, even if his lead roles are supposed to be clueless teenage subalterns. It's very rare that things all fall into place like, say, Daniel Radcliffe is a box office star and shows he's a good enough actor to play Kipling's son in My Boy Jack while he's the right age to do it.
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Aug 9, 2016 16:23
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OwlFancier posted:I seem to remember early WW1 tanks were not actually bulletproof and could be stopped by machinegun fire. The Mark I wasn't proof against anything stronger than colourful language; you probably wouldn't get shot while inside one, but you could get hosed up real bad by spalling from even ordinary rifle shots in the wrong place. Which of course assumes that you haven't already been gassed to death by carbon monoxide off the engine, or boiled by the heat; once they got over their initial pants-filling terror, some enterprising Germans noticed that one tank had stopped to open the doors and get some fresh/cool air in, so lobbed in a few grenades, and the tank ceased to be a problem.
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Aug 9, 2016 22:18
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100 Years Ago 6th August: It's the first day of the Sixth Battle of the Isonzo and I'm not using words like "slaughter", "failure", and "bastard". What is going on? The Germans give up on the idea of taking the Windmill Hill back at Pozieres; Oskar Teichman is still waiting to be evacuated; Robert Pelissier discusses America and Wagner; Oswin Creighton (Marlborough College & Keble College, Oxford) complains that his officers are just too toffee-nosed even for him and the men appear to have some strange definition of "religion" that he was previously unaware of; Max Plowman meets his company sergeant-major; and Evelyn Southwell watches the trains going by. 7th August: Irony time at Sixth Isonzo! They've finally achieved something worth celebrating, and it's only taken a year. The BEF prepares for another hopeless penny-packet poke at Guillemont; Generals Joffre and Haig convene a mutual admiration society; Edward Mousley is trying very hard not to catch malaria; Oskar Teichman and his broken leg head off to the rear in a train truck without suspension; Max Plowman's new commanding officer bollocks his subordinates for such hideous crimes as "being civil to private soldiers"; Oswald Boelcke has a jolly nice dinner with General von Mackensen, who is apparently rather less stern without his amazing hat; and glory be, Maximilian Mugge is being recalled to Blighty by the War Office. ArchangeI posted:What prevented the designers from using a device known to the modern world as an exhaust pipe? I've been trying to work this out for a year and I still don't know. The first exhaust venting system came on the Mark V, which was basically a really big fan that blew the gases back out of a hole the top. Anyone know the history of exhaust systems on cars? I've got an It-Stands-To-Reason suspicion that perhaps if all contemporary car/tractor/aeroplane engines just belched exhaust straight out of them and nobody had yet thought you might need or want a pipe to take the gases somewhere else... Nenonen posted:Which in turn is because the crew needed to be constantly adjusting gears and fixing the engine. Things were, shall we say, primitive But on the other hand, I remind people once again that the Mark I's engine did have a conveniently-sited shelf that, within a week or so of the training crews getting inside the things for the first time, was being used for frying bacon and any other food they could lay their hands on. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Aug 10, 2016 |
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Aug 10, 2016 01:47
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If Battlefield I lets me do GKW vs Flying Elephant vs Tsar Tank, they can have all my money
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Aug 10, 2016 01:58
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100 Years Ago 8 August: More of the finest high-class three-Michelin-star irony for you at the Sixth Battle of the Isonzo, where the Italian Army has learned so well from the first five battles that they've just done themselves out of any chance of turning a propaganda victory into a serious chance to dislodge the entire Carso front. On the Somme there's another futile push against Guillemont; but there are more problems than just that, including that King George V is in town and General Haig has just sacked a corps commander whose name is not Hunter-Weston. The Brusilov Offensive limps on; E.S. Thompson attempts to poison his whole section and the Colonel too; Germany's laziest gunner Herbert Sulzbach has just moved position, with precisely zero increase in his workload; Louis Barthas is having a grand old time chatting to some German sentries, and has even riddled out how the situation might be turned to a military advantage for La Patrie; and Clifford Wells has just met "an exceptionally attractive chap", chortle chortle. 9 August: In non-irony news, the Italians continue to push the envelope in aerial bombing with the largest air raid ever, but on the ground their engineers have a major shortage of chewing gum and hairy string. General Sarrail's contribution to bringing the Romanians into the war eases gently into a half-arsed kind of action, sort of; Nivelle, Petain, and Joffre argue about the manpower requirements for Verdun; the Battle of Romani develops well for the defenders as Oskar Teichman goes into hospital in Cairo; Lt-Col Neil Tennant of the RFC is climbing out of his boat to be gently towed behind it (I promise this sentence makes sense in context); Max Plowman crushes gently on his company commander; and Maximilian Mugge has returned to Blighty, to be confronted with...a cliffhanger. Tune in next time for the thrilling conclusion!
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Aug 11, 2016 18:13
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PittTheElder posted:Not WW2, but wasn't there a bunch of labour disputes in Britain in '17-'18, in the face of rising costs and frozen wages in the mining and munitions sectors? Short answer; there was consistent rumbling industrial unrest from 1915 onward, first over the cost of living, then over dilution in the munitions factories, etc and anon. At one point I was following it and then lost the thread under the weight of the summer offensive. Fabulously interesting but never quite directly relevant to a battlefield story, except insofar as e.g. how dilution (the use of unskilled workers to increase shell-manufacturing capacity; making shells is a skilled job that can't just be done by any old idiot) was a double-edged sword; on the one hand you had a lot more shells, but on the other hand you had a lot more duds. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 23:31
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Polyakov posted:Im glad to know that Jackie Fisher still found work after his retirement from the RN. Never forget that the first tanks came about because of a project by the Navy to build a land-based weapon for the Army that the Army didn't want 
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Aug 12, 2016 12:22
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Endman posted:Is this before or after Jutland? Because I imagine after that the Royal Navy was extremely bored. It was a classic Winston Churchill Good Idea in the winter of 1914-15; someone who'd been driving RN armoured cars (don't ask) at First Ypres suggested that a big trench-smashing steamroller might be a thing worth having, they tried to take it to the War Office and got nowhere, Churchill was going "you idiots, this is going to revolutionise warfare" and everyone else was "there goes Winston talking over-dramatic bollocks again  ". So then he set up the Landships Committee on his own authority as First Lord of the Admiralty, using the First Lord's equivalent of petty cash, in an office that was officially registered as being occupied by someone else, to pursue the project in secret. (Because if the War Office had found out, they'd have gone to the Prime Minster and the Chancellor of the Exchequer and told them that Winston was wasting money on another of his crackpot ideas and had it stopped.)And they still managed to beat the French, who had a three months' head start on an officially-sanctioned project with proper access to all the big munitions manufacturers, and who'd immediately figured out that they were trying to build a tracked fighting vehicle to troll around the battlefield shooting baddies with a big gun, by seven months. You really couldn't make it up if you tried.
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Aug 12, 2016 13:04
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Flintlocks: the tool of capitalist running-dog lickspittles!
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Aug 12, 2016 22:09
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100 Years Ago 10 August: Opportunity missed at Sixth Isonzo! Let's spend a week running uphill at some completely different impenetrable trenches! This will surely yield dividends. Meanwhile, Joffre and Haig are apparently total BFFs, even as Joffre's liaison with BEF headquarters has written an utterly scathing indictment of the said headquarters's attempts to direct the Battle of the Somme, and it turns out that there might just be 50 tanks in France in mid-September but there won't be any spare parts for them. There's an attack of some sort in Salonika; crazed student Briggs Kilburn Adams continues his ridiculous summer job; Max Plowman is less than impressed by pack drill and Field Punishment Number One; Oswin Creighton moves house and decides he likes Northerners more than aristocrats; and the full truth about Maximilian Mugge's new battalion is now well and truly out of the bag. 11 August: There's an attack from Pozieres towards Mouquet Farm which from the ANZAC side of the hill looks like just another bloody slog, but from the German side caused an extremely dangerous crisis; a medical officer arrives at Contalmaison and goes straight into a cellar full of the most hellishly wounded men; quite a lot of the Germans on the Somme are extremely disinclined to follow General von Falkenhayn's blethering about packing their fire trench with men and clinging tenaciously to every inch of ground at all times; Max Plowman patronises his men, although he's trying to ingratiate himself with them; Neil Tennant has been trying to muck about in a boat and succeeds only in boating around in the muck; walking pratfall E.S. Thompson once again fails at removing himself from his battalion's ration strength; Evelyn Southwell spends a pleasant morning floating origami boats down a river; and Maximilian Mugge's outrage is still firmly in first gear.
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Aug 14, 2016 01:15
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I'll give you even money that he's having a wank with his other hand
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Aug 14, 2016 12:56
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HEY GAL posted:tbqh if my hauptmann had been really in character, that would have been a preamble to stealing it from me, probably. embezzling from your own guys was super common, if you were an officer Let's play a game, this one is called "1715 or 1915?" quote:Lieutenant Malvezy cast envious eyes upon my new binoculars, and brazenly proposed that I exchange them for his own, which weren’t worth forty sous. I refused. He insisted; I refused even more emphatically. He didn’t waste much time exacting petty vengeance on me. The more things change, etc etc etc.
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Aug 14, 2016 18:42
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100 Years Ago Good news, motherfuckers. Someone's just come back from holiday.  12 August: We close the book on the Battle of Romani, and General Haig plays a genuinely hilarious jape on General Joffre; but that's just an appetiser for the return to action of Sergeant Flora Sandes, the only Briton the Salonika front who actually wants to be there. Oh, and General von Falkenhayn's position as German commander-in-chief is looking extremely ropey and he desperately needs to not be totally wrong about something; good thing he's assuring everyone in Berlin and the Kaiser too that Romania cannot possibly enter the war until the end of September even if they wanted to, which they probably don't. Digestif courtesy of E.S. Thompson, who's managed to lose his mates' kit, and Max Plowman, who has acquired a batman, a patronising attitude, and a disturbing piece of news.
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Aug 15, 2016 01:37
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Taerkar posted:Where was Nixon on the ol' Civilization scoreboard? How much higher was he than Dan Quayle? I've got him plugged in somewhere near Richard III.
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Aug 16, 2016 18:17
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Owlkill posted:Around where I grew up (Herefordshire) one of the local surnames is Wanklyn, I like to think that could be a trade-related surname. For people who are good with their hands, you mean?
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Aug 16, 2016 19:20
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doot de doot short-notice jobs, great for my bank account, terrible for my blog 100-Ish Years Ago 13 August: The Battle of Bitlis turns bad for the Ottomans; there's a lot of new aeroplane types arriving on the Western Front; Louis Barthas nearly gets sent over the top; Max Plowman watches the guns; E.S. Thompson makes some obvious observations; Maximilian Mugge slips into a moment's casual anti-Semitism. 14 August: The Australians are still slogging slowly downhill towards Mouquet Farm; General Haig continues his Ineffectual Burblings 1916 tour; Lt-Col Neil Tennant leads his first air raid; Max Plowman gets shot at; Herbert Sulzbach is still a lazy slacker; Maximilian Mugge is still restraining his rage. 15 August: General Haig issues an operations order for yet another Big Push; his intelligence officer continues talking complete purestrain bollocks; Max Plowman marches through a complete hellscape of a wasteland; Clifford Wells feels the need to vouchsafe "I am not making this up"; E.S. Thompson and friends confiscate some sofas to make their billet more comfortable; and Maximilian Mugge is still aggravatingly discreet. edit: Louis Barthas is a far better man than I can ever hope to be, and if he really is possessing me then he's doing a bloody awful job of work Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 01:12
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too much poo poo to do atm 100.05 Years Ago 16th August: yucky maggots, flora sandes, "death valley" 17th August: romania, sixth isonzo ends, nosy politicians, edward mousley 18th August: the problem of attacking reverse-slope trenches, playing golf on an airfield in Iraq, e.s. thompson does not gently caress up
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Sep 5, 2016 00:35
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Nebakenezzer posted:So just outta curiosity, what marks all the aviators as toffs? The Golf playing and the fact the Lt. Col. doesn't look down on them? "Duh, all the RFC pilots were toffs?" In 1914 there were about 250 officers out of 12,738 serving in the Army (including the RFC) who had been promoted from the ranks, and the social background of the Army's officers is monocultural enough to safely assume that all the rest were educated at public school and then either a university or Sandhurst or both, absent evidence to the contrary. On top of that, of the 250, one of them was Wully Robertson, and all but one or two of the rest were quartermaster-sergeants and other such logistics-wallahs who got their commission for being incredibly good at logistics and worked strictly as supervisors of Moving poo poo Around. 30 Squadron RFC was formed shortly after the war began and only intermittently provided with reinforcement drafts; aside from the occasional grammar-school oddity like Hereward de Havilland, who was commissioned on the strength of his credentials as a test pilot, it is incredibly statistically unlikely for any of these other officers to have been anything other than gentlemen with an interest in flying who'd come through the public school conveyor belt.
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Sep 5, 2016 23:53
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100 Years Ago, Sort Of 19 August: African wildlife, Tolkien, Plowman, Persia, Flora Sandes is great at sleeping, the American Flora Sandes begins her journey to the war. 20 August: Joffre's thoughts, the concluding part of the Saga of Loophole 14 (absolutely not to be missed, this is some A* lunacy), E.S. Thompson, Louis Barthas loves the Czarina of Russia (I am not making that up). (edit: yes, I know, I've tried to fix it, I have third-party confirmation (HEY GAL says "whagwan booyakasha my mandems", or words to that effect) that in fact I have fixed it, and yet...) Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Sep 7, 2016 |
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Sep 7, 2016 19:10
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mcustic posted:Hi guys! Here's a photo of my great-grandfather. Could anyone be so kind to identify the uniform and give me any details about where he might've been deployed or what was his unit? I'm 95% certain that's an Austro-Hungarian blouse/tunic/whatever (the pocket shape and the hat), but anything more than that is beyond my resources.
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Sep 8, 2016 11:26
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ArchangeI posted:"His imperial and royal Majesty would like to congratulate Gen. Cadorna to yet another very successful offensive at the Izorno and would like to offer his most heartfelt encouragement to continue operations in this sector." You know why we talk about (spoilers) twelve battles of the Isonzo, even though the Italians just crossed it and really the next six should be the Battles of the Vallone, or of Doberdo, or something like that? Some propaganda-wallah in Vienna had a thought in May 1915 "there are probably going to be a lot of battles in this general area, so every time they attack and gently caress it up, it's the next Battle of the Isonzo, and they'll look worse every time"...and the Italian general staff was so thick, they just followed the enemy's naming convention, and by the time they realised "wait a minute, this is making us look really, really bad..." it would have looked worse for them to try to get a different name over.
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Sep 8, 2016 22:25
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cheerfullydrab posted:Stories grow bigger in the telling, it's a universal human truth. Bernard Adams, 1915: quote:I listened agape to hear myself the hero of a humorous story. When the mine went up, I had come out of my dug-out rather late and asked if anything had happened. This tale became elaborated: I was putting my gloves on calmly, it seems, as I strolled out casually and asked if anyone had heard a rather loud noise! And so stories crystallized, a word altered here and there for effect, but true, and as past history quite interesting. Michael Green, 1960s: quote:Beaver's remarks about VE night in Cairo started a spate of reminiscence. We all knew each other's wartime stories, of course, and waited politely for each to finish before dashing in with our own. The formula on these occasions is to say, as the laughter for the previous story dies down, 'I don't know whether I told you about the time I was stationed in North Wales....' and everyone else, who has heard the story at least twenty times before, politely mutters, 'No, no,' and then the speaker launches into a tissue of lies based on some long-forgotten original incident. Hearing these stories every year, it was interesting to see how they grew under intense competition from everyone. I love those stories.
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Sep 12, 2016 21:43
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HEY GAL posted:i took Trin Tragula to a museum in dresden today and i would like to say that i was wrong: small portable telescopes date from 1608, which i learned today, and one of the oldest ones in the world is in that museum. so you totally could have been staring downrange with a spyglass in the 30yw. dude how can you post this but not mention the sword which is also a matchlock pistol and there's a small watch on the end of the pommel and also it has an extra compartment at the top of the scabbard which holds your racing spoon and a small complete set of tools for working out the bore of a cannon and which direction you should point it??? (I am not making that up.)
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Sep 13, 2016 09:49
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Tias posted:What's a racing spoon? In the British Army, the spoon you carry so you can have something to eat with in the field. The ideal racing spoon is exceptionally durable and as large as can fit into one's mouth, in case something bad happens and the only way to get food is via an all-in meal in a big pot with everyone sticking their spoons in and grabbing as much as possible, as quickly as possible (which is why it's the "racing" spoon).
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Sep 13, 2016 13:23
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OwlFancier posted:I genuinely didn't think indirect machinegun fire actually worked because I thought the rounds lost too much velocity over that sort of range. No "supposedly" about it, mynheer, it's an excellent way of laying down suppressive fire at targets who are less than about 800 yards away. You don't need to kill them or hit them, just keep them suppressed until the blokes can get in among them with the bayonet.
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Sep 13, 2016 19:48
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10 Beers posted:How can you mention the sword and not post a picture of it?!! C'mon, man! It is a Cool and Good museum and you should support it by travelling to Dresden and paying the entry fee 
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Sep 13, 2016 21:31
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xthetenth posted:Ich verstehe nur ein bissen und spreche kein Deutsch. Speako no Krauto, but if you can't look at a sword that also does eight other things or a four-barrelled matchlock pistol and enjoy yourself without a sign that says "four-barreled matchlock pistol", I don't know what to tell you
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Sep 13, 2016 21:39
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xthetenth posted:But if I can't speak the language how do I avoid the foraging mercenaries I advise not avoiding them, they're totally chill as long as you drink some beer and laugh when it seems indicated to do so
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Sep 13, 2016 21:48
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Blog post coming soonJack2142 posted:I am not trying to say this would have been a good idea, it just seems like with how heavily the Germans were gambling in 1918 I just was wondering if there was any consideration of rolling the dice at sea like they were elsewhere. There was an attempt to do something in late April (just after the backs-to-the-wall panic about the Channel Ports), which ended in exactly the same way that all the other German attempts to do something did*. By 1918 all merchantmen travel in convoys; Admiral Scheer starts sending out cruisers to gently caress with them; the Grand Fleet detaches a battleship squadron to deal with this irritant; now the Germans have another chance to do what they've been trying to do all along, get hold of some small capital-ship element of the Grand Fleet on its own, kill it, and then run away very fast before they get caught. Scheer's also had his submarines out on observation duty, trying to figure out when the convoys come and go and where it is they come to and go from, with the idea that he'll intercept a convoy and so draw the battleship squadron out so it can be dealt with. Trouble is, yet again the submarines screw up their one job and send home duff information. (The British official historian makes some bitchy comments wondering why he didn't have a civilian spy in Norway help them out.) Scheer sorties the High Seas Fleet on the 22nd, gets to the shipping lanes on the 23rd, spends a lot of time sitting nervously in the middle of the sea waiting for a convoy that never arrives, there's a lot of undignified waddling around in fog from all parties, eventually the HSF gets out of there on the 25th, successfully avoiding both the convoys and the late-arriving Grand Fleet. Then one of their dreadnoughts gets torpedoed on the way back. Just another day at the office. *excepting Jutland, which only went off because one little Danish tramp steamer wandered into exactly the right bit of sea to be noticed and inspected by supporting vessels from the two battlecruiser fleets at the same time, one of which had already been ordered to turn away before spotting the ship, but the flag signal to turn north hadn't yet percolated down to them when they sighted the merchant. Turns out it's really hard to arrange a fleet battle when both sides are determined to do it on their terms. quote:I mean I know it's a bad idea, however the throwing away lives in operations with slim chances of success seems pretty par for the course in WWI. Oh yeah, and almost nobody in the comfortable chairs did a thing when they thought it had a low chance of success, and the reasons why they thought they in fact had a high chance of success are often quite interesting. Check me out if you like this sort of thing! It's a real gas, or at least it is after April 1915.
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Sep 23, 2016 21:20
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The Increasingly-Inaccurately-Named 100 Years Ago 21 August: The Germans sack General von Knobelsdorf, and von Falkenhayn is scrambling to save his own position; the bloke in charge of tanks in Britain orders another thousand of them built for shits and giggles; Robert Pelissier is not having any fun at all in the French sector of the Battle of the Somme; I wonder whether it's time to stop poking fun at E.S. Thompson yet; idiot son of a Montreal millionaire Clifford Wells censors some letters; and Maximilian Mugge tries to engage with Shakespeare. 22 August: General Haig bollocks General Rawlinson, and it's not that Rawlinson doesn't deserve it; it's just interesting that Haig is capable of noticing flaws in Rawlinson's command while remaining totally unaware that he himself is making exactly the same mistakes. JRR Tolkien hangs out with a friend for what will be the final time; Max Plowman has his first brush with death; and Edward Mousley portrays Kastamonu as the world's worst CenterParcs resort. 23 August: The French government is getting cold feet about the concept of bringing Chinese labourers to Europe at exactly the same time that the British government is starting to develop an appetite for it. How about that? E.S. Thompson confirms the tag of "walking accident" on his way to a concert party; Herbert Sulzbach has been given some actual work for a change; Henri Desagneaux is most put out by the consequences of an enemy trench raid; and Ruth Farnam makes her way towards Paris. HEY GAL posted:no, do it it's true, she didn't hardly mutter "long way down, isn't it? keep smiling!" at all!
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Sep 24, 2016 17:04
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 13:20 |
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Patrick Spens posted:Edit: Hey Trin I'm aware this is first would problems as gently caress, but I've taken the plunge on trying to read your day-by-day blog from the beginning, and it's kind of annoying that there isn't a next button at the bottom of the posts as well as the top. Yeah, I've tried to fix this a few times, and each time it breaks and doesn't do what it's supposed to and you end up missing three or four days at a time using the bottom buttons. The book doesn't have this problem, and you get a lot of added material too! e; f, thanks
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Sep 25, 2016 18:56
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