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Homura and Sickle posted:I think a couple things. You, look — we didn't use chemical weapons in World War II. You know, you had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn't even sink to using chemical weapons. So you have to, if you're Russia, ask yourself, is this a country that you and a regime that you want to align yourself with? You have previously signed international agreements rightfully acknowledging that the use of chemical weapons should be out of bounds by every country. To not stand up to not only [inaudible] but your own word should be troubling. Russia put their name on the line. So it's not a question of how long that alliance has lasted. But at what point do they recognize that they are now getting on the wrong side of history in a really bad way really quickly? And again, look at the countries that are standing with them. Iran, Syria, North Korea. This is not a team that you want to be on. And I think that Russia has to recognize that, while they may have had an alliance with them, the lines that have been crossed are ones that no country should ever want to see another country cross. I see what you did there, but it might be worth discussing: Zyklon B was really questionable as a "Chemical weapon" because it would dissipate in the wind, not blow around the battlefield and settle in trenches and encampments soldiers were hiding in, hence the need to round people up into sealed buildings to use it. Homeboy from SNL was right, it was a Pesticide. Sebastien Lenorman fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Apr 25, 2017 |
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Apr 25, 2017 18:25
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Agnosticnixie posted:The whole "they will always commit suicide" thing was dumb orientalism fueled by the fact that the US side of the pacific war was almost entirely on tiny islands where there was literally no hope of escaping. A lot of the suicides in Okinawa had more to do with the fact that Okinawans were seen as subhumans by the mainland Japanese. The Japanese surrendered plenty and were just as human as the rest, there's still japanese POW journals. This has always been weird for me to comprehend because I don't think any big sources out there that stray away from the "animals that fight to death" narrative. As much as I fellate World at War, the Japan-centric episodes were pretty awful in that regard. I get that there was a huge cultural divide between U.S and Japan, but I think that weird xenophobia has still been coloring our interpretation of the Empire of Japan to this day. Any free sources on the topic via Youtube/pdf/history website? Id request book suggestions, but my nonfiction backlog is hopelessly overflowing. I've had Benedict's Chrysanthemum and the Sword suggested to me, but some book reviews say it still suffers from bias up to the point where it's a net loss for understanding Japanese culture. e: also, my dudes, if you got some near and dear WW2 source, feel free to write up your pitch for it and I can stick it in the OP.
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Apr 25, 2017 19:44
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buglord posted:This has always been weird for me to comprehend because I don't think any big sources out there that stray away from the "animals that fight to death" narrative. As much as I fellate World at War, the Japan-centric episodes were pretty awful in that regard. I get that there was a huge cultural divide between U.S and Japan, but I think that weird xenophobia has still been coloring our interpretation of the Empire of Japan to this day. It's not entirely just xenophobia, state ideology since the start of the army's rule by assassinations period was basically built around dusting off the Hagakure, but it's just weird to assume universal popularity of the ideology when just 10 years before they were obsessive about democratic reforms and xenophobia certainly colors the willingness to take it for granted.
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Apr 25, 2017 20:04
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The whole "Atomic bomb = surrender" thing, while not entirely untrue, is overly simplified but makes for a convenient piece of history and an ex post facto justification for straight of murdering a good portion of a city. Instead, it was the Japanese leadership finally realizing that unless they surrendered they were going to face an outright revolt which would have destroyed the Imperial Throne/the Meiji notion of kokutai/the actual imperial family forever and probably instituted some sort of communism. A lot of things convinced them of this: reports of Japanese soldiers just taking supplies and going home; Manchuria and Korea being lost to the Soviets in a few weeks; the submarine blockade starving the country; a good 60% of urban areas being firebombed to ash; and finally the atomic weapons (which let them save face by saying "if it weren't for the blasted Americans and their super weapon!"). Thus decided to take their chances with the Americans, which paid off because a good portion of them got away with it.
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Apr 25, 2017 20:17
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buglord posted:This has always been weird for me to comprehend because I don't think any big sources out there that stray away from the "animals that fight to death" narrative. As much as I fellate World at War, the Japan-centric episodes were pretty awful in that regard. I get that there was a huge cultural divide between U.S and Japan, but I think that weird xenophobia has still been coloring our interpretation of the Empire of Japan to this day. It's not entirely xenophobia. Although tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers did end up in Allied POW camps, the number is still comparatively low, and there was a fair reluctance on the part of Japanese soldiers to surrender. Attributing this to some inherent property of Japaneseness or some kind of "Bushido spirit" would be way off the mark, but the peculiarities of Japan's political systems and geopolitical role in the late 19th century had fostered an extremely hardline culture in the Imperial Japanese militaries. Also, there was a widespread fear among Japanese soldiers that any soldiers captured by the Allies would be tortured or killed, and while that fear is largely blamed on Japanese military propaganda, it was almost certainly reinforced by the very real tendency among Allied soldiers in the Pacific to summarily execute captured or surrendering Japanese soldiers.
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Apr 25, 2017 20:26
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Its hard to call it xenophobia when it was written down in black and white. Emphasis mine.quote:The Japanese military's attitude towards surrender was institutionalized in the 1941 "Code of Battlefield Conduct" (Senjinkun), which was issued to all Japanese soldiers. This document sought to establish standards of behavior for Japanese troops and improve discipline and morale within the Army, and included a prohibition against being taken prisoner. The Japanese Government accompanied the Senjinkun's implementation with a propaganda campaign which celebrated people who had fought to the death rather than surrender during Japan's wars. While the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) did not issue a document equivalent to the Senjinkun, naval personnel were expected to exhibit similar behavior and not surrender. Most Japanese military personnel were told that they would be killed or tortured by the Allies if they were taken prisoner. The Army's Field Service Regulations were also modified in 1940 to replace a provision which stated that seriously wounded personnel in field hospitals came under the protection of the 1929 Geneva Convention for the Sick and Wounded Armies in the Field with a requirement that the wounded not fall into enemy hands. During the war, this led to wounded personnel being either killed by medical officers or given grenades to commit suicide. Aircrew from Japanese aircraft which crashed over Allied-held territory also typically committed suicide rather than allow themselves to be captured. This actually backfired in a big way for the japanese. Those japanese soldiers who did decide to surrender and survived would be more likely to provide valuable intelligence to americans than they otherwise may have. This is because they were grateful or at least relieved not to be tortured and killed like their superiors led them to believe would happen under allied capture, but also because they thought their lives in japan were over and they would return to be disgraced, imprisoned or even killed if the japanese won the war. Sebastien Lenorman fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Apr 25, 2017 |
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Apr 25, 2017 20:44
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That the japanese army was run by insane firebreathers isn't really controversial, it's just the idea that their ideology was universally applied when they were largely a state within the state at this point is more questionable, especially when there's good indications that a lot of the people in government were literally fearing for their lives if the war didn't end soon (and not because they were expecting to be hit by firebombings)
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Apr 25, 2017 21:02
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Dead Reckoning posted:(Also, no one was worried about the Soviets invading Hokkaido, because Soviet amphibious capability in the east could best be described as "lol.") I will not stand for this disparagement of Comrade Leonid's fishing boat. 
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Apr 25, 2017 21:07
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The A-Bomb debate is likely going to go on forever, there are just too many variables for it to be simple. That said I was listening to one of Dan Carlin's podcasts (I know, he's flawed in some cases but he's interesting to listen to) and he brought up a point from a purely PR perspective. Say Truman decides not to drop the bomb, the Soviets invade on schedule and Japan surrenders a few weeks or a month later then they actually did. When the public and Congress find out that Truman had a billion(?) dollar "war winning" weapon and refused to use it there's going to be outrage and even cries for impeachment since Truman's inaction is going to be blamed by family members (rightly or wrongly) for every American killed in the Pacific or in a Japanese POW camp since he decided not to drop the bomb. I'm not sure I fully buy that argument but it was a interesting angle to approach things.
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Apr 25, 2017 21:31
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Nckdictator posted:The A-Bomb debate is likely going to go on forever, there are just too many variables for it to be simple. That said I was listening to one of Dan Carlin's podcasts (I know, he's flawed in some cases but he's interesting to listen to) and he brought up a point from a purely PR perspective. Say Truman decides not to drop the bomb, the Soviets invade on schedule and Japan surrenders a few weeks or a month later then they actually did. When the public and Congress find out that Truman had a billion(?) dollar "war winning" weapon and refused to use it there's going to be outrage and even cries for impeachment since Truman's inaction is going to be blamed by family members (rightly or wrongly) for every American killed in the Pacific or in a Japanese POW camp since he decided not to drop the bomb. Would people have considered Fat Man and Little Boy to be "war-winning" weapons if they hadn't been dropped? At the time, US officials were much more worried about a scenario in which the two bombs were dropped and Japan still didn't surrender - there was an ongoing debate among military officials of whether to keep trickling nuclear bombs into the bombing campaign as soon as they were ready or to hold them back and stock up so that they could have multiple bombs ready to use during Downfall.
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Apr 25, 2017 22:32
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Japan would have surrendered without the nuclear bombs, but then again this wasn't fully understood in Washington at the time. The more decisive factor was actually the Soviet entry into the Pacific War because it foreclosed both of Japan's remaining strategic options that were considered by the war cabinet, but the bombs provided a very convenient excuse for surrendering and so were played up after the fact.
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Apr 25, 2017 22:43
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I wonder what world history would be like if the bombs hadn't been dropped. Its possible we could have gone to war with the Soviets fairly shortly after (probably Korea) and both sides decided to test out their new toys, and then welp
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Apr 25, 2017 22:46
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Feldegast42 posted:I wonder what world history would be like if the bombs hadn't been dropped. Its possible we could have gone to war with the Soviets fairly shortly after (probably Korea) and both sides decided to test out their new toys, and then welp What year do you think the Soviets got the atom bomb?
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Apr 26, 2017 00:14
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Feldegast42 posted:I wonder what world history would be like if the bombs hadn't been dropped. Its possible we could have gone to war with the Soviets fairly shortly after (probably Korea) and both sides decided to test out their new toys, and then welp It seems very unlikely that anybody would have had the appetite for an actual major war so soon after WW2. Besides that, the effects of nuclear weapons would have been pretty obvious even without using them against actual targets.
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Apr 26, 2017 00:24
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Cerebral Bore posted:Japan would have surrendered without the nuclear bombs, but then again this wasn't fully understood in Washington at the time. The more decisive factor was actually the Soviet entry into the Pacific War because it foreclosed both of Japan's remaining strategic options that were considered by the war cabinet, but the bombs provided a very convenient excuse for surrendering and so were played up after the fact. Nckdictator posted:The A-Bomb debate is likely going to go on forever, there are just too many variables for it to be simple. That said I was listening to one of Dan Carlin's podcasts (I know, he's flawed in some cases but he's interesting to listen to) and he brought up a point from a purely PR perspective. Say Truman decides not to drop the bomb, the Soviets invade on schedule and Japan surrenders a few weeks or a month later then they actually did. When the public and Congress find out that Truman had a billion(?) dollar "war winning" weapon and refused to use it there's going to be outrage and even cries for impeachment since Truman's inaction is going to be blamed by family members (rightly or wrongly) for every American killed in the Pacific or in a Japanese POW camp since he decided not to drop the bomb. "Hey, we spent a notable fraction of our GDP on developing this revolutionary weapon. Should we drop it?" "Nah, seems a little inhumane." *Curtis LeMay turns another city the size of Cleveland to ash*
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Apr 26, 2017 00:31
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Discussing the loving nukes should be a separate thread. Warbadger posted:20% of the total armored vehicles, 20% of the fighters, 30% of the bombers, gobs of weapons/ammunition/fuel/tools/food, entire factories, plus the general purpose trucks used to move everything and everyone around. It's hardly even mentioned in the US and it was not taught in the USSR - at least not to anyone I've ever spoken to educated in the USSR. Yeah. I don't know how you can say that Lend-Lease was not super important to the Soviet Union's war effort. The Soviets probably could have won without it* , but it shortened the war for them and in effect saved hundreds of thousands of lives (if not more considering the nature of the war in the east). I think I read that in 1942 more than half of all boots used by Soviet soldiers were supplied through Lend-Lease. Without the trucks and locomotives supplied offensives like Bagration would likely not have been possible in 1944, and the Soviets would not have been able to devote their wartime production so thoroughly towards weapons as they did, the most important equipment supplied by Lend-Lease was mostly more in general equipment as stated above rather than in weapon systems. It was important enough the Soviets that they and the British invaded Iran in order to secure a safer, quicker route for the shipments. *At the start of Barbarossa Stalin (or Molotov, can't quite recall) approached the Bulgarian ambassador about the possibility of negotiating a settlement through them, the ambassador refused this and said that even if they abandoned Moscow and were forced back to the Urals they were bound to win in the end
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Apr 26, 2017 00:42
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Dead Reckoning posted:This is a bullshit counterfactual not supported by any Japanese records or accounts of the government's decision making in its final days. Your ignorance of history doesn't mean that the evidence isn't there, and it is if you'd bother looking even medium hard.
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Apr 26, 2017 00:46
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Randarkman posted:Discussing the loving nukes should be a separate thread. Honestly it would have been a very different war had they lost the areas around Moscow and St. Petersburg. That's where most of the population, industry, and agriculture was. Still is.
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Apr 26, 2017 01:02
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Warbadger posted:Honestly it would have been a very different war had they lost the areas around Moscow and St. Petersburg. That's where most of the population, industry, and agriculture was. Still is. Well, he was just a Bulgarian ambassador. Can't expect him to have all the answers.
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Apr 26, 2017 01:04
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buglord posted:This has always been weird for me to comprehend because I don't think any big sources out there that stray away from the "animals that fight to death" narrative. As much as I fellate World at War, the Japan-centric episodes were pretty awful in that regard. I get that there was a huge cultural divide between U.S and Japan, but I think that weird xenophobia has still been coloring our interpretation of the Empire of Japan to this day. Chrysanthemum and the Sword is basically the ur-example of a hilariously racist and orientalist caricature of the Japanese. Book's thesis is basically that being a fascist, insect hivemind is programmed into the Japanese mindset. She comes up with a three-level hierarchy of societies based on how morality works, in which white Europeans, called a 'guilt culture', judge morality on an individual basis and thus have the basis for a liberal culture and politics, Asians (yes, very broad category, she's clearly talking about Confucian east Asians but says it applies to SE, S Asia and Muslim countries too because why the hell not), called a 'shame culture', lack individuality and thus morality can only take the form of a sort of totalitarian society-wide shaming of the nail that sticks out etc etc, and then, for the cherry on top of the racist poo poo-cake, blacks, native Americans and 'other primitive tribal societies', are a 'fear culture', in which basically individuals need the immediate threat of physical violence in order to behave properly. The only contact she actually had with Japanese society was apparently POWs captured during the war. The guilt culture versus shame culture stuff is considered more or less complete BS according to the actual anthropologists I've asked about it, and also by the modern field of japan studies, however it's still very prominent and popular in common public discourse. Some guy wrote a book in the 80s applying the theory to Arabs and it was apparently very popular among the neocons. You see the terms guilt culture and shame culture very casually used in op-eds and essays and stuff to this day in TYOOL 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arab_Mind Nobody ever mentions the part about black people needing the slavemasters' whip in order to not kill and rape all the white women though, I wonder why
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Apr 26, 2017 01:29
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Nckdictator posted:The A-Bomb debate is likely going to go on forever, there are just too many variables for it to be simple Uh, i think you're missing the part that white cisgendered men did it and people died. Just ask forums user icantfindaname Sebastien Lenorman fucked around with this message at 02:23 on Apr 26, 2017 |
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Apr 26, 2017 02:19
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Sebastien Lenorman posted:Uh, i think you're missing the part that white cisgendered men did it Hey come on now, J Edgar Hoover was in the Executive branch too
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Apr 26, 2017 03:05
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Main Paineframe posted:It's not entirely xenophobia. Although tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers did end up in Allied POW camps, the number is still comparatively low, and there was a fair reluctance on the part of Japanese soldiers to surrender. Attributing this to some inherent property of Japaneseness or some kind of "Bushido spirit" would be way off the mark, but the peculiarities of Japan's political systems and geopolitical role in the late 19th century had fostered an extremely hardline culture in the Imperial Japanese militaries. Also, there was a widespread fear among Japanese soldiers that any soldiers captured by the Allies would be tortured or killed, and while that fear is largely blamed on Japanese military propaganda, it was almost certainly reinforced by the very real tendency among Allied soldiers in the Pacific to summarily execute captured or surrendering Japanese soldiers. This is an important part. When fighting on an island or otherwise a place without a clear frontline or places without good supply lines, it can be tough to take anyone prisoner. Where would you send them to? If you tell them to just walk back toward your lines, you risk them running away. If you escort them, you have to potentially fight to a safe space for the POW then back again, and even then they can still run away. That fact alone contributes to how bloody the War in the Pacific was.
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Apr 26, 2017 04:19
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So is their any good reading on Japanese civilian culture during the war? The whole would they have surrendered or not debate made me curious to what their general frame of mind was during that time but all I can find is stuff on the military.
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Apr 26, 2017 05:24
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drilldo squirt posted:So is their any good reading on Japanese civilian culture during the war? The whole would they have surrendered or not debate made me curious to what their general frame of mind was during that time but all I can find is stuff on the military. Here are two books, the first is vingettes from the home front, second probably has more military history https://www.amazon.com/Japan-at-War-Oral-History/dp/1565840399 https://www.amazon.com/Rising-Sun-Decline-Japanese-1936-1945/dp/0812968581/
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Apr 26, 2017 05:47
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Democrazy posted:This is an important part. When fighting on an island or otherwise a place without a clear frontline or places without good supply lines, it can be tough to take anyone prisoner. Where would you send them to? If you tell them to just walk back toward your lines, you risk them running away. If you escort them, you have to potentially fight to a safe space for the POW then back again, and even then they can still run away. That fact alone contributes to how bloody the War in the Pacific was. The tendency among allied Allied soldiers to not try to take Japanese prisoners was also reinforced by early examples of Japanese behavior towards allied troops, particularly against POWs when tales began to filter back of the horrid conditions the Japanese subjected their prisoners to. The same mindset of "take no prisoners" and "show no mercy" was likewise fostered on the Western front between certain German and allied units (such as the 12th SS and the Canadian 3rd infantry and other units), and in general on the eastern front where both German and Soviet units would fight to the point of destruction. Åarticulalry in the case of German units later in the war where it was especially futile and took on a similar kind of futile mass suicide as with the Japanese in the Pacific, though real actual suicide wasn't insitutionalized the way it was in the Japanese military. Both Axis combatants pursued a kind of committment towards national self-immolation in the face defeat, and it really can be argued that if you look away from the "culture" of mass suicide in the Imperial Japanese military, the Germans were actually the ones to take it furthest as unlike the Japanese they basically fought to the finish in a futile last stand, rather than the Japanese who were eventually persuaded to surrender without an invasion of their home.
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Apr 26, 2017 07:34
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Randarkman posted:*At the start of Barbarossa Stalin (or Molotov, can't quite recall) approached the Bulgarian ambassador about the possibility of negotiating a settlement through them, the ambassador refused this and said that even if they abandoned Moscow and were forced back to the Urals they were bound to win in the end This is like Salazar's advice to Franco on joining the war, which was essentially "Portugal has been a British ally for centuries and the British always win in the end, don't be an idiot".
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Apr 26, 2017 08:02
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Warbadger posted:Honestly it would have been a very different war had they lost the areas around Moscow and St. Petersburg. That's where most of the population, industry, and agriculture was. Still is. The agriculture is a fair bit south of there and it's not like the Soviets didn't evacute literal industrial parks and millions of workers during the war already. That said the big impact of Leningrad was that it tied up a fair amoint of Axis forces and it's very questionable if they Germans could even possibly have taken Moscow for simple logistical reasons.
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Apr 26, 2017 10:16
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Personally I'm against it.
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Apr 26, 2017 13:02
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Randarkman posted:The tendency among allied Allied soldiers to not try to take Japanese prisoners was also reinforced by early examples of Japanese behavior towards allied troops, particularly against POWs when tales began to filter back of the horrid conditions the Japanese subjected their prisoners to. The same mindset of "take no prisoners" and "show no mercy" was likewise fostered on the Western front between certain German and allied units (such as the 12th SS and the Canadian 3rd infantry and other units), and in general on the eastern front where both German and Soviet units would fight to the point of destruction. Åarticulalry in the case of German units later in the war where it was especially futile and took on a similar kind of futile mass suicide as with the Japanese in the Pacific, though real actual suicide wasn't insitutionalized the way it was in the Japanese military. Both Axis combatants pursued a kind of committment towards national self-immolation in the face defeat, and it really can be argued that if you look away from the "culture" of mass suicide in the Imperial Japanese military, the Germans were actually the ones to take it furthest as unlike the Japanese they basically fought to the finish in a futile last stand, rather than the Japanese who were eventually persuaded to surrender without an invasion of their home. I wouldn't call it a "commitment toward national self-immolation". Unconditional surrender is a big deal, as it means surrendering full control of your country to the enemy, unilaterally laying down your arms and granting the the uncontested right to do literally whatever they want with your government, industry, people, and territory. The Germans and Japanese were both well aware of how lovely that could turn out for an occupied country, considering how they had treated the territory they had occupied over the course of the war, and were therefore rather reluctant to surrender without attaching at least a couple of conditions. That's why they continued to fight long after things were clearly hopeless - not because they felt they had any chance of winning, but because they hoped that continued resistance would give them time and leverage to at least tack a couple of assurances onto their surrender. Even after the fall of Berlin and suicide of Hitler, Donitz still sought a separate peace with the Western Allies, and gave in to unconditional surrender only when Eisenhower declared that he would no longer accept the surrenders of German forces on the Western front unless Germany itself announced total surrender.
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Apr 26, 2017 14:39
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Randarkman posted:The tendency among allied Allied soldiers to not try to take Japanese prisoners was also reinforced by early examples of Japanese behavior towards allied troops, particularly against POWs when tales began to filter back of the horrid conditions the Japanese subjected their prisoners to. I think one of the big incidents that affected the behavior of the Allied infantryman on the ground int he Pacific happened at Guadalcanal, August 1942. A wounded Japanese soldier killed himself and a Navy corpsman with a grenade. There were also incidents of bodies being booby trapped. The killing of a medic in the middle of an act of mercy undoubtedly led directly to a "take no prisoners" attitude among the marines on Guadalcanal. The wikipedia article is surprisingly informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_prisoners_of_war_in_World_War_II
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Apr 26, 2017 17:33
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Nude Bog Lurker posted:This is like Salazar's advice to Franco on joining the war, which was essentially "Portugal has been a British ally for centuries and the British always win in the end, don't be an idiot". In hindsight, the war was already over, in the sense of Germany's defeat being inevitable, before Russia and the USA entered the war. If Britain had signed a peace and accepted defeat some time between Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, then, sorry tank fans, Rusiia loses. It's not just the loss of the arctic convoys. Its not just America no longer having a reason to get involved in the. War in Europe. It's that the kind of UK government that signed a peace with the Nazis would have been at least trading with them, and more likely offering direct material support and encouraging volunteers to go fight on the Eastern front. And of that didn't work, escalating from there. On the other hand, with Britain hostile, if Hitler hadn't invaded first, Stalin would. And even if he didn't, the war ends around 1948 when the first British A bombs are dropped on the port containing the German high seas fleet.qo
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Apr 27, 2017 13:52
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Lately I’ve been listening to an audiobook called The Nuremberg Trials by Ann and John Tusa. I initially picked it up because I dont know how you can attempt to make a not-show-trial while also trying to make a legal precedent for the future by making some examples out of Nazis. While the book is pretty informative so far (and also a really entertaining listen), its just adding more and more complexity to something which was already pretty confusing. Like, there was about 7-8 hours of background information before the book discussed the first day of the trial. There’s still so much more ground to cover, but I think the weirdest thing is how much infighting occurred between the allies with regard to which country gets the “lions share” of floor time and gets to show the most new information first. Then you have the allies trying to devise a trial that essentially keeps the ball in their court, while also trying hard (and not so hard) to give the Nazis the right to defense and testimony, but only to a limited capacity. And then the Soviet Union is one of the less immaculate countries that participated in the war, and could basically be also guilty for a laundry list of war crimes...so how to do you prevent the Nazis from turning that around and crying poor? There’s still another 15 hours of this book, but Christ this case is gigantic and it had to be freaking nuts to be in the court room all 200-something days, hearing and seeing all sorts of insane testimonies and now-historical speeches.
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Aug 17, 2017 05:43
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That sounds like a fantastic book. I'm sure the book uses it as a source but Gustave Gilbert's Nuremberg Diary is a really fantastic read on the reactions of the guilty to the trial. If half of what he wrote about Streicher was true (and there's no reason to doubt) then it's honestly hard to imagine a more disgusting human being.
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Aug 17, 2017 05:55
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Warbadger posted:20% of the total armored vehicles, 20% of the fighters, 30% of the bombers, gobs of weapons/ammunition/fuel/tools/food, entire factories, plus the general purpose trucks used to move everything and everyone around. It's hardly even mentioned in the US and it was not taught in the USSR - at least not to anyone I've ever spoken to educated in the USSR. People tend to only talk about tanks and planes and not the absolutely enormous amounts of industrial and logistical supplies. Perhaps they didn't turn the tide but that certainly helped save time and soviet lives. You can't do Bagration without trucks and fuel and boots and trains. also if anyone wants to read about/discuss WW2 things that aren't extended a-bomb chat or hot takes about how nobody has ever heard of the eastern front (haha dumb americans am i right), you should prolly just read the a/t milhist thread.
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Aug 17, 2017 18:23
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also the soviets hired Albert Kahn, the man who basically build 20th century industry in america, to build their industrial plants as well you really have to admire the Soviet capacity to identify excellent ideas from overseas and just straight up copy them by buying/licensing them if possible and just pirating them if not
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Aug 17, 2017 22:08
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I'm at a segment in my audiobook where the conversation went to the Nazi branches of the armed forces. Apparently they didn't work so harmoniously and event went as far to sabotage eachother? And contrary to what I thought, not only did nazis plunder, but they thought of that as a substitution for sustaining the axis throughout the war?
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Aug 18, 2017 03:01
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This book on the rise of Nazis in a small German town I think would make a very good reading recommendation: The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945, Revised Edition by William Sheridan Allen  https://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Seizure-Power-Experience-1922-1945/dp/1626548722 This book details how a small German everytown went from fairly normal to a hotbed of Nazi activity. This was not caused by widespread class agitation but rather the middle class abandoning their old parties and joining up with the Nazis out of fear. The book details the methods the Nazis used in the town and how they adapted to what worked and what did not work. There is also a fair amount of discussion of what methods were used to oppose the Nazis and what alternate strategies could have been used that would've been more successful. Extensive primary sources are used and it also has tons of charts and graphs.
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Aug 18, 2017 03:07
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buglord posted:Lately I’ve been listening to an audiobook called The Nuremberg Trials by Ann and John Tusa. I initially picked it up because I dont know how you can attempt to make a not-show-trial while also trying to make a legal precedent for the future by making some examples out of Nazis. While the book is pretty informative so far (and also a really entertaining listen), its just adding more and more complexity to something which was already pretty confusing. Like, there was about 7-8 hours of background information before the book discussed the first day of the trial. Ever since I read the story of Doenitz's lawyer i've always wanted to see a comparative study of the defenses and defense strategy of the various Nuremburg defendants.
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Aug 18, 2017 03:30
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:People tend to only talk about tanks and planes and not the absolutely enormous amounts of industrial and logistical supplies. Perhaps they didn't turn the tide but that certainly helped save time and soviet lives. You can't do Bagration without trucks and fuel and boots and trains. I'm telling you, the last WW2 thread got better eventually.
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Aug 18, 2017 05:39
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