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Jobbo_Fett posted:Are you looking more for a book detailing uniforms, tactics, high-ranking officers, and more as a catch-all book, or something more narrative, or something that only focuses on one front/battle/campaign? I'm not looking for an Osprey level uniforms guide, but more more of an overview. I'd be especially interested on the Italian army in the USSR.
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Oct 24, 2018 21:34
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Geisladisk posted:I had to google it. Calling people "man-eater" is one hell of a insult. For a start, that's kind of supposed to be the ideal going way back, it's just that most papers didn't care to try. But on top of that, there was a necessary contraction in editorial line that occurred as cities stopped being able to do things like support 25 different independent daily newspapers. When readership for all papers was high enough then sure you could go hard on being a specific subset of the political spectrum and soak up all the readers within that target. And in smaller time areas there still tended be enough demand to support 2 or 3 major position papers, plus the real hick places would just have to accept whatever the publisher's politics were. But with the newspaper business contracting and especially a bunch of mergers happening as one paper or another goes under for real or almost does before a merger? You start merging the editorial direction of the papers, you start trying to make sure you're at least pleasing all the sides behind the origin papers. You basically can't afford to be as out there, and it starts being very lucrative to appear to instead target the "We Do Real Unbiased Journalism" thing if you can afford to do that. Then you also have things like radio and then TV broadcasting coming around, and the fact that those were known from the start to cover fairly large distances, and to necessarily take up a limited amount of available broadcasting in a given area. While radio especially started as a free for all, most countries' telecommunications regs would quickly start to demand a form of neutrality or fair play on opinion topics. This was especially big for TV stations as a lot of places would only have one broadcaster available for as much as a decade after WWII and the ability for countries to resume prewar TV expansion plans or start all new TV service. Now obviously in some countries there was only government public broadcasters on radio and/or TV which have natural reasons to set a "neutral" position to avoid offending their own funders. But there was still big concern for the private broadcasters. Even though these broadcasters public or private were quite legally required to "do the truth is in the middle on anything important, avoid as much bias perception as possible", the rules were heavily geared to encouraging that, as was ensuring you'd get the advertisers not fleeing you.
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Oct 24, 2018 22:02
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", which is... not inaccurate.
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Went to shoot a bunch of guns. Goddamn, the StG 44 is not fun to shoot. I can see how it’s better than the German alternatives, but it’s really clearly outdated even compared to guns from 1947. Slick metal handguard, painful recoil, push-button fire selector...
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Oct 24, 2018 22:02
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Cessna posted:I'm not looking for an Osprey level uniforms guide, but more more of an overview. I'd be especially interested on the Italian army in the USSR. 
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Oct 24, 2018 22:06
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 Edit: Huh, there's this: 
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Oct 24, 2018 22:34
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Geisladisk posted:I had to google it. Calling people "man-eater" is one hell of a insult. The short answer is that journalistic objectivity was first touted by newswires like AP and Reuters, in the mid-nineteenth century. But they weren't doing this for the benefit of readers, at least at first. They sold stripped down, highly factual reporting to newspapers, who were then expected to add their own political spin. Also, newspapers are still pretty partisan if you look at with a dispassionate eye. When Qaddafi was killed, the Sun headline was something like "this one's for Lockerbie". The broadsheets generally went with some version of "death of a tyrant". There were very good reasons to hate Qaddafi and celebrate his death. But for a French royalist, there were equally good reasons to hat Napoleon.
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Oct 25, 2018 00:00
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I've had "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" stuck in my head for days. What was going on with the actual conflict, why were they hiring mercenaries, etc.? Also apparently in the '60s there were still private mercs? You didn't have to join a PMC/one of Hey Gal's dudes' regiments to be a soldier, you could just sign up as an individual?
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Oct 25, 2018 00:28
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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In the US military, how many layers of hospitals do they have that they ship wounded and ill soldiers between? I've been watching Mash lately, and that's the most interesting part, there's so much logistics moving people around while they're incapacitated. So far as the show presents it, there's the field medics who ship patients off to Mash, which may ship people off to Japan if they're serious cases and not stable. Presumably there's a point where they're shipped to America and a point where they're discharged and they're a problem for the VA and private enterprise.
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Oct 25, 2018 00:38
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The basic version ca. WW2/Korea is that you have immediate care at the front (so, the medics) who then stabilize the wounded to send to the regimental aid post. The aid post is also pretty much right in the combat zone. There they either treat it if it's relatively minor or further stabilize and send them further down the chain. Next stop is the casualty clearing station, which is far enough back that it shouldn't get artillery fire. They have more complex (although still relatively basic) equipment and the same "treat or send on" rubric is applied again. Next stop is either a field hospital or a military hospital. Field hospitals are just what they sound like, and basically what MASH depicts. You have all the poo poo you need to perform pretty complex surgeries but it's a temporary facility and a lot of the crap is under what could be described as field conditions. A military hospital is a full blown real deal hospital set up on a permanent basis, usually in the home territory or a friendly ally. So, Germany or Walter Reed in the modern context. edit: a lot of this gets collapsed a bit with the advent of rapid medivac by air. If you can take the obviously really badly shot up guy right off the battlefield you can effectively cut out regimental aid and the clearing station and put them right in a surgical facility. This is what they're depicting in MASH when you see the helicopters come in and it's a pretty major component of everything you see from Vietnam to now. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Oct 25, 2018 |
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Oct 25, 2018 01:08
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Now, if you want to talk care after the immediate trauma you get into stuff like stateside rehab and, if the person is wounded seriously enough, organizing their discharge paperwork. IIRC there are convalescent units organized around the big military hospitals that people get attached to while waiting for their medical discharge to happen. This is half-remembered and I'm sure someone with personal experience with how exactly that works can clarify it a lot.
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Oct 25, 2018 01:13
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Chillbro Baggins posted:I've had "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" stuck in my head for days. What was going on with the actual conflict, why were they hiring mercenaries, etc.? Also apparently in the '60s there were still private mercs? You didn't have to join a PMC/one of Hey Gal's dudes' regiments to be a soldier, you could just sign up as an individual? The Belgian Congo Crisis had mercenaries fighting against the Congolese army and some mercenaries fighting in the subsequent Simba Rebellion. From what I piece together you still signed up to a "regiment" as letting armed men roam around the countryside supposedly on your side without oversight is probably a bad idea.
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Oct 25, 2018 01:23
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So Roland joined a regiment just like Hey Gal's dudes did. ... oh right my father basically did that , but on the payroll of the US Army. (Dad says Thompsons were too heavy, he preferred the M3 if he had to carry a .45 SMG.)
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Oct 25, 2018 02:54
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SlothfulCobra posted:In the US military, how many layers of hospitals do they have that they ship wounded and ill soldiers between? I've been watching Mash lately, and that's the most interesting part, there's so much logistics moving people around while they're incapacitated. This is how the US Army does it. Note: I am not an expert, this is mostly hearsay and conjecture. There are five levels of care, sort of. The first three are in theater, the last two are elsewhere. I'll walk through this using PFC Bob, who just got his foot blown off by an IED somewhere in Iraq. Level 1 is unit level stuff, starting with combat lifesaver and unit medics providing on site care. When Bob ate that IED, his buddy Phil from his squad was the CLS first on the scene. He applied a tourniquet and bandage. A company medic moving with his platoon was there shortly after, he cursed Phil for applying the tourniquet incorrectly, gave Bob some painkillers, and called for a medevac. Level 2 is the "Golden Hour" level...the most important level for patient survival. It used to be the battalion aid station where you generally went to die, but nowadays Forward Surgical Teams (FSTs) bring real live surgery all the way down to this level with a badass humvee-portable surgery that looks that the one thing from Breaking Bad. This is called "Level 2 plus" and it is the biggest advance in military medicine since penicillin. Bob is stabilized and then worked on by a FST, who keep him from dying thanks to medicine. They tape his leg arteries up so he doesn't bleed out and send him on his way. Level 3 is the Combat Support Hospital, or CSH. This is nominally a corps asset, but the way it works nowadays, basically every major installation has its own CSH. This is a full-up bad rear end hospital, with like 300 beds and a full staff and just about everything a modern general hospital has. It is also modular, so you don't have to deploy the whole thing if you don't want to. Bob arrives here and gets cleaned up, made comfortable, further treated if necessary, and evaluated. Once it was assessed that he no longer has a foot, he's considered permanent casualty and is evacuated further. If he had a less serious injury, he could convalesce at the CSH for a week or so, but anything longer than that and you're headed for Level 4. Level 4 is the big theater hospital. There are a couple of these Bob might go to...there's a semi-permanent CSH in Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, or hospitals in Bahrain or Doha, or Landstuhl in Germany. If you just need a few weeks to recover, you'll chill in a CENTCOM hospital, like I did when I broke my ankle in Afghanistan. If you're like Bob and don't have a foot, you're off to Germany. Once there, Bob gets the bad news: his military career is probably over, so there isn't much we can do for you here. They'll make sure he's healthy for the trip home, and off he goes to... Level 5 is CONUS care. The (in)famous Walter Reed is the most common destination, but there are a number of different possible destinations for Bob. In this case, let's say he goes to WRAMC for his initial treatment...he starts physical therapy, gets a new bionic foot, and so on. Once he's done with all that, he gets sent back to his home station for further rehab and medical retirement. At his home station, he's put in the WARRIOR TRANSITION UNIT, which is code for "holding pattern until you're done outprocessing battalion". He gets more therapy and job training and so on, and it is here that he develops both his opiate addiction and alcohol dependence. After discharge, he's handed over to the VA, where he receives world class care. He finds a comfortable but intellectually stimulating job, kicks his substance abuse habits, and transitions effectively back into society.
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Oct 25, 2018 03:14
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Chillyrabbit posted:The Belgian Congo Crisis had mercenaries fighting against the Congolese army and some mercenaries fighting in the subsequent Simba Rebellion. Here's a 3-part youtube compilation of clips from the Italian film Africa Adido for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDGDw4GWcf4 It shows some of the activities of a mercenary unit in the conflict. Warning it can be pretty graphic and the movie itself is known to be pretty racist and exploitative.
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Oct 25, 2018 03:20
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bewbies posted:After discharge, he's handed over to the VA, where he receives world class care. He finds a comfortable but intellectually stimulating job, kicks his substance abuse habits, and transitions effectively back into society. 
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Oct 25, 2018 04:14
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Major Major Major posted:Here's a 3-part youtube compilation of clips from the Italian film Africa Adido for anyone interested: You might also want to get a copy of two books by Frederick Forsyth; his novel, "The Dogs of War", which is about mercenaries in Africa, and his non-fiction "The Biafra Story", about the Biafra War.
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Oct 25, 2018 04:25
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HEY GUNS posted:several threads ago someone described richelieu in this painting as "some kind of catholic darth vader" I think that was me as it was my wallpaper several threads ago but perhaps I began thinking of it that way after someone else’s post. Who cares though that’s in the past. To make this more than a glorified bookmark, a perhaps too contemporary question: was there any practical reason for Reagan removing the mothballs on the BBs or was it as silly as it seems? Besides the kickin’ rad factor of course.
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Oct 25, 2018 07:10
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Epicurius posted:You might also want to get a copy of two books by Frederick Forsyth; his novel, "The Dogs of War", which is about mercenaries in Africa, and his non-fiction "The Biafra Story", about the Biafra War. Another good one, and supposedly the most authoritative on the mercenary business in that era, is "The whores of war" by Wilfred Burchett. Unfortunately it's also long out of print. Time to hit them used books shops.
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Oct 25, 2018 07:55
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Thanks for the recs on the Congo thing, I'll see if my local library has any of those, and if not, Amazon order time!Pontius Pilate posted:was there any practical reason for Reagan removing the mothballs on the BBs or was it as silly as it seems? Besides the kickin’ rad factor of course. Aside from just being balls-out completely badass-looking, the Iowas were well out of date as a concept, but they were there and Reagan was in a dick-waving contest with the Soviets, so they got pressed back into service. They welded a bunch of cruise missile launchers to the decks to make them useful, but the gun battleship as a general concept was proven outdated by airplanes and modern torpedos in, oh, let's be generous and say April of 1945 (when IJN Yamato, the biggest, baddest BB ever built was killed by a combination of the two.) Even by that time, BBs were mostly glorified AA platforms, and rarely used the big guns, and then mostly for making craters in beaches for the Marines to trip over upon landing. Reagan reactivated the Iowas despite their expense to crew and clearly outmoded role just beacuse they were big and cool-looking. And the Marines wanted them, to "prepare" the beaches they were landing on. The last time a BB went toe-to-toe with another of its kind was in November of 1942, when USS Washington, of the class before the Iowas, beat the poo poo out of IJN Kirishima, a leftover from WWI (imagine USS Texas, she was built at the same time). Kirishima had been doing pretty well in a slugfest against USS South Dakota, after blowing away SoDak's radars, various other antennae, and fire directors, and closed to searchlight range and began slamming accurate 14" fire into the deaf, dumb, and blind SoDak when Washington snuck up and, in 17 minutes, scored at least nine 16" hitson the enemy battleship, which proved to be fatal. Washington met up with South Dakota in the morning, and escorted her battered sister ship back to friendly waters from which she could limp home for repairs. Edit: apologies for not italicizing ship names, I'm posting from my phone. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 09:39 on Oct 25, 2018 |
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Oct 25, 2018 09:30
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You forgot about the Battle of Surigao Strait, which just happens to have taken place on this very day in 1944. Well, unless you mean toe to toe in the sense that the Japanese had any chance of winning... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leyte_Gulf#Battle_of_Surigao_Strait_(25_October_1944)
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Oct 25, 2018 09:51
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Chillbro Baggins posted:So Roland joined a regiment just like Hey Gal's dudes did.
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Oct 25, 2018 10:33
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HEY GUNS posted:until the rise of the PMC you joined either on your own, or you joined some kind of small fly-by-night operation that was probably run by British people with too much time on their hands. Mercenaries played decisive roles in all sorts of African wars and it's people like this that all the UN regulations are talking about. Speaking of white mercs in Africa, Tanzania's richest man, Mohammed Dewji, was kidnapped by heavily armed white men this week (later rescued). It's not clear if it was a ransom job, or political.
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Oct 25, 2018 10:54
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I had to do some writing on the Tanker War recently and the one thing you see the Iowa doing a lot there is refueling destroyers and frigates. The worlds most expensive oiler. Oh they also had the Dallas cowboys cheerleaders perform on the fantail (I want to say Christmas of 86) while a few DDs and FFGs steamed alongside so their crews could watch from their own decks. So also worlds most expensive USO stage
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Oct 25, 2018 11:48
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Reagan reactivated the Iowa because it was big and made all the terrified dumbasses that were his constituency's dicks hard. That's pretty much it, there was no actual military reason for it, just "Big gun! Big gun go BANG! Not pussy little gun! Big gun! American STRONG! We have BIG GUN!"
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Oct 25, 2018 14:23
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Yeah, I know a woman whose father was a pilot in the British airforce. After he was kicked out for reasons that were not explained (probably booze), he ditched his family and became a mercenary pilot in Africa until he retired.
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Oct 25, 2018 15:02
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Crazycryodude posted:Reagan reactivated the Iowa because it was big and made all the terrified dumbasses that were his constituency's dicks hard. That's pretty much it, there was no actual military reason for it, just "Big gun! Big gun go BANG! Not pussy little gun! Big gun! American STRONG! We have BIG GUN!" Well, the new thread's off to a great start.
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Oct 25, 2018 15:05
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I mean, I’m sure the big guns were part of it but he also reactivated old liberty ships because bringing mothballed ships to service is still cheaper than building new ones. He campaigned on a 400 ship navy. He didn’t say it had to be 400 new ships. *edit* Actually he promised 600 ships https://www.nytimes.com/1982/12/29/us/reagan-hails-navy-led-by-battleship.html Solaris 2.0 fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Oct 25, 2018 |
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Oct 25, 2018 15:08
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Fangz posted:You forgot about the Battle of Surigao Strait, which just happens to have taken place on this very day in 1944. Well, unless you mean toe to toe in the sense that the Japanese had any chance of winning...
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Oct 25, 2018 15:39
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darthbob88 posted:And the battle off Samar, also this day 74 years ago, in which the Samuel B Roberts traded fire with the Kongo, Chikuma, and Yamato. I assume they meant battleship on battleship engagements. Not to knock the Sammy B....
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Oct 25, 2018 16:02
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sullat posted:...(probably booze)...mercenaries
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Oct 25, 2018 16:07
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Mr Enderby posted:Also, newspapers are still pretty partisan if you look at with a dispassionate eye. When Qaddafi was killed, the Sun headline was something like "this one's for Lockerbie". The broadsheets generally went with some version of "death of a tyrant". There were very good reasons to hate Qaddafi and celebrate his death. But for a French royalist, there were equally good reasons to hat Napoleon. A pretence of objectivity, or a strong line between objective reporting pieces and partisan commentary, is specifically an American thing anyway. British newspapers tend to have a specific slant (usually right wing outside the Mirror/Graun/Observer) and are written accordingly.
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Oct 25, 2018 16:18
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Is this thread more open to general history? I was wondering what more informed people think of this article series on Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages. A friend of mine recommended it to me saying that it exploded some of the alt-righty stuff you see about the period, but reading what they've written so far... I dunno, I'm kind of iffy? It really feels very off to be backwardly applying such clearly modern conceptions of gender and also race to almost a thousand years in the past, and I don't know if they really show proper large scale social phenomenons as opposed to what could be interpreted as a few mostly one-off incidents of interest. The rape article feels particularly all over the place since they spend so much time talking about modern events and not the Medieval period, which makes me kind of feel like it was written first and foremost to comment on current issues and that actually placing such a thing in the Medieval context is a bit of an afterthought, also this line: "But the popular belief that rape was widespread, expected, and acceptable in the Middle Ages has an even more ominous implication: that sexual violence against women is somehow a natural state of human affairs." I don't really understand how that follows at all! In the next article their comments on ethnicity, in the context of Europe, also feels a bit cherry picked with only a couple of real examples of some mixed faith marriages in Spain before the Reconquista really took off. I'm not terribly fond of them, again, backwardly applying the concept of 'White' to the 13th century too. I Believe they wrote a similar series on Race in Medieval Europe but I haven't look at that yet.
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Oct 25, 2018 21:03
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MikeCrotch posted:It's possible as long as you're not all bunched up (i.e. with interlocking shields). I'd like to hear more about that stuff, is there a thread for it?
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Oct 25, 2018 21:09
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LARP
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it's actually quite difficult to compare the rate of sex crimes either across different times or at the same time but in different places, since different regions (and in places like italy that's as fine-grained as the city-state level) define things differently, different things are illegal in different places, and some sexual crimes may have been isolated to only certain places in europe Garthine Walker, “Sexual Violence and Rape in Europe, 1500-1750,” in Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher, eds., The Routledge History of Sex and the Body: 1500 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2015) HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Oct 25, 2018 |
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Oct 25, 2018 21:10
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ChubbyChecker posted:I'd like to hear more about that stuff, is there a thread for it?
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Oct 25, 2018 21:11
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HEY GUNS posted:there is both a HEMA thread and a general fencing thread, my friend thanks, i'll check those out
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Oct 25, 2018 21:24
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Fangz posted:You forgot about the Battle of Surigao Strait, which just happens to have taken place on this very day in 1944. Well, unless you mean toe to toe in the sense that the Japanese had any chance of winning... Guadalcanal is still the last time battleships on both sides scored hits, right?
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Oct 25, 2018 21:29
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khwarezm posted:Is this thread more open to general history? I was wondering what more informed people think of this article series on Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages. HEY GUNS posted:it's actually quite difficult to compare the rate of sex crimes either across different times or at the same time but in different places, since different regions (and in places like italy that's as fine-grained as the city-state level) define things differently and different things are illegal in different places Even in the modern world it is difficult to compare rates of sex crimes because of different definitions - For instance, the old far-right chestnut of Sweden being the rape capital of Europe originates in Sweden having a much wider definition of what constitutes rape. Comparing rates of sexual abuse across both space and time is not only difficult but futile. I only skimmed the articles linked, but I definitely agree that they are overextending themselves trying to apply modern concepts to a medieval world where they necessarily didn't apply. However, it does kind-of-sort-of have a point in that our perception of the medieval period (and all of history) is heavily coloured by our own expectations and society. We tend to expect the society of the past to be basically like our own, except more backwards. When it comes to gender roles, we expect them to be basically what they are today, but possibly more rigid. Same with attitudes towards race. This isn't always or even usually the case. For instance, in medieval Iceland, gender-based division of labour was was practically nonexistant - The nature of the work that farmers (i.e literally everybody except a handful of clerics) did was such that there was no room or no need for it. A uninformed modern person generally assumes that the men would work the fields and the women take care of the home and children, but the reality is that during the long late-Summer days, there was an insane amount of work to do and men and women did the same work - Otherwise there would be no way to get it all done. During the long and dark winter months, there was barely anything to do, so people of both genders mostly just dozed off and took care of housework like knitting and other crafts. The only places where there was significant gender-based division of labour was in the coastal villages, where men would row to fish while women generally took care of the children at home. However, in those communities, knitting was considered a masculine activity - Fishermen in the arctic need warm clothes more than just about anyone, afterall - whereas in the modern western world knitting is a feminine activity. People in the past had a lot of immensely hosed up attitudes towards gender - I think trying to paint medieval Europe as more progressive by modern standards is a mistake - But they had hosed up attitudes to gender in a very different way than we do today. Our views on gender roles, especially the stay-at-home housewife, are codified and solidified in the 19th and early 20th century. Ditto for medieval people's views on race - Modern racism is a product of the Age of Imperialism. That is not to say that people before that had particularly enlightened views on strange visitors from far away places, but their views do not fit into our modern notions of racism. The people of the past are not just the people of today but with more backwards views, they were messed up assholes in entirely different ways than we are messed up assholes today. Geisladisk fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Oct 25, 2018 |
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Oct 25, 2018 21:32
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Geisladisk posted:
Personally, I'd say that you can draw a very direct line towards modern racism starting in Iberia as the Christian powers advanced down the peninsula in earnest and people got really obsessed with purity of the blood and paranoid about crypto-jews and secret Muslims.
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Oct 25, 2018 21:41
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khwarezm posted:Is this thread more open to general history? I was wondering what more informed people think of this article series on Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages. the problem was at my end ChubbyChecker fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Oct 25, 2018 |
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Oct 25, 2018 21:41
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