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Hey, can anybody recommend any WW2 memoirs from people serving on carrier aircraft maintenance crews? Also in general memoirs from the odd sides of war - was reading "Naples '44 - An intelligence officer in the Italian labyrinth" by Norman Lewis and it feels like there's a lot to look into in terms of daily life in an army outside of the front lines and command tents.
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May 3, 2021 10:58
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Hey, here's a silly pop culture history question. There's a scene in the original Call of Duty during the battle of Stalingrad where the player is disembarked from a transport craft, handed an ammo clip, and told to follow someone else handed a rifle and to scrounge for weapons from dead guys to fight. Company of Heroes 2 also has a similar scene. Did this ever actually happen at Stalingrad or elsewhere as far as we can determine, or was that artistic license based on Soviet stereotypes?
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May 6, 2021 10:16
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Question: During WW1/2, a big part of why the US was drawn into the war with sympathy for the Western powers usually to do with blockade and submarine activity, with the Americans arguing in large part that there should be freedom of the seas (and while they disliked the British blockades of Germany, they disliked German uboats torpedoing their ships more). Now that the US is a hegemonic naval power and a key advantage in any peer conflict would be their control of the seas, what's the modern US policy of blockades in war? For that matter, in the event of a major shooting war that somehow doesn't go to nukes, how practical is it for the US to impose a modern blockade on, say, Russia or China?
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May 8, 2021 14:21
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Raenir Salazar posted:I feel like this is a question better suited for the Cold War thread ChubbyChecker posted:save modern day what ifs to some other place Sorry about that, I was knee-deep in the archives and got to a bit about the blockade in WW1 and submarine campaigns in WW2 and my mind popped the question. Interesting answers, though - I've always had a vague sense that the USN was one of the particular American advantages and I WAS vaguely aware that other nations weren't just going to let that slide but wasn't aware just how far they've gone in finding ways to even the odds. Edit: To pull things back more solidly into history, did the guy doing the Taiping posts ever finish the war out, and is there a collection of all his posts somewhere? It's been a long time since I checked these threads. Tomn fucked around with this message at 19:17 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 18:52
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Related to the Vietnam War, I recently reread Eri Hotta's 1941: Countdown to Infamy and the discussion here got me wondering - has anyone attempted to run some kind of analysis on how and why governments decide to embark on disastrous wars? Like, are there any noteworthy commonalities between Hitler's decision to Barbarossa, Napoleon's decision to go to Moscow, Washington's decision to enter Vietnam, Japan's decision to visit Pearl Harbor, Moscow's decision to enter Afghanistan, etc? Or are they all their own separate and highly unique individual situations and there's no "one easy trick" of decision-making or organizational structure that'll help prevent such mistakes?
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May 10, 2021 22:09
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Polyakov posted:The curious thing about Japan particularly is that I don't think even a majority of the high command thought they would win, or even that they could. They were men constrained by fear and a lack of imagination, they could not back down from the course that the country had taken, not only because it would be unthinkable bit also because they knew they would likely get murdered for it, and nobody was sure of whether everyone else would support peace and so nobody operant enough took a stand. But there was a lot of private doubt and relatively sober assessment of their odds outside of the public eye. But they had spent too much, invested too much moral capital and had too many deaths to realistically be able to climb down. Coming off of Eri Hotta it feels like a lot of people also tended to get locked into narrow, short-sighted institutional viewpoints - i.e. "A Pacific War would be good for the navy as we would be allocated more resources in order to prosecute it," or "Withdrawing from Southern French Indochina to satisfy US diplomatic demands would harm the morale of the soldiers and the army's overall fighting spirit and thus is unacceptable." Hotta also notes how Japan's "imperial conference" system did a lot of damage to peace efforts since despite them being pretty much an imperial rubber stamp to approve government decisions, they attained the level of sacred, inviolable writ once the Emperor approved their conclusions. Which means that when a conference in October declared that Japan "must be resolved for war with the US and Britain" (which got inserted pretty much because of dickwaving between the Army and the Navy as opposed to a serious thought-through strategic decision), future ministers would feel that they lacked the backing to overturn officially expressed divine will - even while Hirohito was busy trying to figure out if there was any way to gently convince ministers to work harder for peace without direct imperial intervention. Like you said, it's a particularly weird situation because in retrospect it's kinda clear that almost nobody actually wanted war, they just kinda assumed everyone else did and nobody was willing to take direct responsibility for a climbdown. FMguru posted:There's also been a lot of work about how bureaucratic politics and organizational imperatives drive state decisionmaking. You really can't understand Japan's behavior in 1937-1941 without understanding the way the Army and the Navy clashed over things in ways that made a coherent, "rational" foreign policy impossible, for instance. Yeah, I'm kinda thinking in terms of organizational principles that might be applied in the future based on past lessons. Yes, everyone makes bad decisions sometimes, but are there specific organizational setups that particularly encourage bad decision-making? Similarly, are there any best practices worth adopting to try and avoid common collective decision-making pitfalls? You mention there's been a lot of work on the subject - any specific books you could recommend? Edit: Other than the ones you mentioned already I mean, sorry, I just came off a twelve hour flight. Tomn fucked around with this message at 00:30 on May 11, 2021 |
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May 11, 2021 00:27
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So, somebody tell me about mid-century/Cold War mercenaries. How were they formed, and how were they hired? Were they usually decommissioned WW2 veterans looking to trade on their skills? Were they hired en bloc where possible by approaching demobilized units, or formed out of whatever the employers could pull together, or assembled based on one guy contracting to find enough old war buddies to form a useful force? How large were these mercenary forces generally, both in absolute terms and relative to their employers/opponents? Were they generally hired to act as major combat formations, or more in some kind of specialist role as trainers/officers etc? Keep in mind that my previous knowledge has been pretty much occasional references to their existence here and there and the Jagged Alliance games so I'm starting with a pretty low knowledge base.
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May 17, 2021 11:36
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ChubbyChecker posted:Former Imperial Japanese troops too in the SE Asia. And former ROC soldiers. Iirc many of the local drug cartels were established by them too. That's actually pretty interesting! I hadn't heard of this before but I suppose it would make sense. Do you have any books on the subject?
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May 17, 2021 18:44
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Question about the American Civil War - as I understand it the US has traditionally (prior to WW2 anyways) had an aversion to and distrust of standing armies. Given that, what was the social status of professional soldiers before and after the ACW? Like, if someone had declared he intended to make a career as an officer of the regular army in 1860, say, how would his friends and family have responded? Conversely, if he'd made that declaration in 1866, what would the response have been? Were they respected and honored, or somewhat looked down upon?
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May 20, 2021 12:47
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Interesting stuff, thanks! To carry on from that, how did WW1 affect the popular perception of soldiering as a profession, if it did at all? Cessna posted:One other consideration is that a lot of the Civil War generation of officers didn't retire. They created a log jam in the cursus honorum for decades, making it impossible for a generation of junior officers who entered the military after the war to get promotions until they eventually died off. Honestly, for navies the problem of matching officer supply to ship supply has been a problem forever. I'd have to look it up to find the exact numbers (and details) quoted, but N.A.M. Rodger in The Command of the Ocean notes that around the 18th century, the best time for a prospective Royal Navy officer to be born was around 20-odd years before the next war - just old enough to have been recently promoted to lieutenant or so and thus take part in glorious attention-grabbing actions that might kick him up to commander, in which capacity he will hopefully perform daringly enough to become post-captain at which point he'd be set to climb the seniority ladder all the way to admiral without any further effort. Getting promoted to lieutenant or commander shortly before the end of the war means furious competition for rare positions, especially commanders - they're much more limited in what ships they can command, and there's few of them active in peacetime. Apparently a number of lieutenants would refuse promotion to commander when offered on the basis that their chances of making a living in the peacetime navy are better as a serving lieutenant than a half pay commander. Given that in the 18th century the Royal Navy was at war roughly once per generation (until Napoleon anyways) that also means that even if they could find berths anyone who didn't make the jump to post captain during the war was doomed to become a middle-aged or more junior officer come the next war, with almost no prospects of beating out the energetic younger generation. A lifetime of bitterness probably doesn't help promotion prospects either. The Napoleonic Wars were apparently the first real time the Royal Navy were able to have multiple generations of experienced, trained officers climbing the ranks. I can't recall right now if they worked out a permanent solution to the whole staffing problem before the end of the war, though, and unfortunately that's where the book ended so I've no idea what happened during the Victorian period. I think I recall bewbies mentioning the modern USN has an "up or out" system where you either get promoted or fired, which I think had its own issues, so I guess the problem hasn't really been entirely fixed yet? I wonder if there's some way of applying inventory management techniques to officer training? ...and now I've got the mental image of Jeff Bezos in charge of officer training for the US military, that's gonna help me sleep at night. (Note: All of this is from memory of a single source, I am not an actual historian, just wanted to try and contribute to a thread in which I normally just ask questions!) Tomn fucked around with this message at 23:29 on May 20, 2021 |
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May 20, 2021 23:26
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FastestGunAlive posted:Up or out isn’t perfect but it keeps from bottle necking and it forces people to stay competitive, educated, and career relevant. The marine corps has started actually looking at promoting officers early more aggressively (it has been very very rare) just to further incentivize performance and staying in Oh sure, I'm not saying it's a bad system or that it isn't the best option available, just noting that matching officer supply to ship supply is not an entirely solved problem, and maybe never will be. Would be interesting to see if anyone can come up with personnel innovations to better solve the problem within the next century. You know, promotion talk got me thinking of a silly pop culture question - I remember when I was very young in one of the Tom Clancy books there's a scene where an American officer (probably ubermensch Jack Ryan) runs across this highly efficient British sergeant and thinks "drat, what a waste. If he was in the US military he'd have been promoted to officer. Instead he's stuck in the British Army as a NCO for the rest of his career." Was that an accurate representation of promotion patterns in the two countries at the time (I assume around the '80s-'90s)? If it was, do we know why their patterns diverged, and how it impacted overall effectiveness, if it did? Bit of a dumb question I know but it's weird the little things that stick in your head decades later and I always wondered a little about it.
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May 21, 2021 15:36
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Thanks for the interesting responses all!Cessna posted:Lol, no. Clancy never spent a day in the military and it shows.* Yeesh. Last time I read Clancy was in high school and I don't think I realized how much of a hack he was then. Trin Tragula posted:In, say, the Royal Tank Regiment. Good luck trying to do that in the Household Division. Say, on that note, one thing I'm kinda curious about in the British context. So far as I'm aware, the British Army is called that instead of the "Royal Army" because of a British distrust of monarchy and unwillingness to let the king get his hands on too many soldiers (whereas the Royal Navy is a pure and unsullied representation of the will of the British people and also they can't really storm the country in a coup). All right, fair enough, symbols matter, fine. Why is it though that there's so many units with some kind of royal title? King's Own Light Infantry, Royal Tank Regiment, This Or That Royal Scion's Own Rifles, etc. etc. Was it just that regiments were considered sufficiently unimportant that they could get away with that, or the honors considered sufficiently honorary and meaningless, or that the trend for giving out such names only started after the position of the monarchy relative to Parliament was safe enough that nobody thought it'd be a big deal anymore? Edit: SlothfulCobra posted:Napoleon lived to see his conquests mostly dismantled if he was told anything about world events in prison, although I'm not sure what his grand plan was for the future if he didn't eventually get ground down and defeated by his foreverwar. He carved out thrones for him and his family throughout half of Europe, and I guess the other half was supposed to remain theoretically independent, but indefinitely subordinate to France? I've read at least one biography (don't have it with me or I'd check the details) that suggested that part of the problem was him declaring himself Emperor - as Consul he has a shaky but theoretical right to rule from the people, but as Emperor he doesn't have traditional divine right or bloodline claims and he doesn't have democratic backing so all he has left for legitimacy is glorie, and battle was the only way he felt he could rely on to get that. Thus, fighting wars constantly to maintain prestige on the home front, and reacting with war whenever anything happened that might damage that prestige, which was ultimately unsustainable and not terribly well-planned ahead of time. Mind, I don't recall if the author notes that maintaining glorie was a real political problem or if Napoleon simply thought it was. It's possible France would have been happy with just letting him be Emperor as long as they could be at peace, but Napoleon was too insecure among the crowned heads of Europe to believe that. Which is all to say "He might not have had a plan and was reacting purely based on short-term political imperatives" Tomn fucked around with this message at 18:06 on May 21, 2021 |
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May 21, 2021 17:52
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zoux posted:How dare Tom Perkins Belvedere publish slanderous lies such as that, it's quite clearly not true. Speaking as a tall ship sailor who also had some training on modern yachts later, it's possible. Even as a deckhand on board an authentic ship of the period it's entirely possible to get extremely good at handling the rigging and working aloft and generally being active and useful while having very little idea of how to maneuver a ship under sail or basic sail theory, because your entire world consists of remembering which lines do what and go and when to make them do the things they do and how (my first vessel, a relatively small 100-foot ketch, had 88+ lines if I recall correctly). Unless you actively work at it and are instructed in it, it's very easy to learn how to respond to orders without having the faintest clue what the ship is actually doing relative to anything else on the water. Navigation and the difficulties of are even more advanced things that a trainee probably wouldn't be asked to do much of beyond plotting his position during hourly nav checks*, without any idea of how one should direct the boat to go anywhere, how to counteract the effects of wind and tide, how to judge how long a given journey might take and how to plan for it, etc. Even steering the boat isn't likely to bring much practical experience in how to actually drive the boat, because as a helmsman you're mostly following a course your watch leader sets out and most of the time you're just running in a straight line and maybe changing course once in a four hour watch, if that. Complex maneuvers are more for showing off, tight navigational corridors, combat, and docking - and in all those cases you DEFINITELY want to be telling the trainee exactly what to do, assuming you wanted a trainee at the helm at all. Plus, as I understood it Patrick's early experience was on a square-rigged vessel - these don't worry about crash gybing nearly as much as modern yachts do, and probably wouldn't have been hammered into his training the way you do for modern yacht sailors. (To explain - crash jybing (or gybing, whatever, there's a million ways to name it) is when you bring the stern of the ship through the eye of the wind without meaning to while running downwind. This is bad on a fore and aft rig (that is, a rig where the sails run parallel to the ship usually) like most modern yachts are because when you're running downwind, the boom holding the bottom edge of your mainsail is going to be swung as close to perpendicular as the boat as you can get in one direction, and jybing would cause the boom to quickly and suddenly slam over perpendicular on the other side - leaving aside the risk of bashing someone in the head it also stresses the parts pretty badly and can potentially cause a lot of damage to the boat, which is one it's one of the biggest things yacht sailors are warned against doing. On a square-rigged vessel, however, the sails are generally perpendicular to the ship already by default and there's no serious risk of a gybe causing the yards to slam one way or another. Thus, if you're mostly trained on the one, you're not conditioned to be as wary of causing that particular accident on the other.) Meanwhile, theoretical knowledge of what one should do in a given sailing situation is VERY different from making those decisions in a command position on the water. I realize this sounds trite, but it's true - there's a lot happening at once, the variables are shifting with every second you use to think about what's happening, and sometimes things happen VERY quickly. Being able to work out an interesting sailing scenario and the correct decisions while sitting at an armchair with some pen and paper and a bottle of wine nearby is just completely different from being on a bouncing deck with the wind having just shifted and the sail making bad flappy noises and spray half-blinding you and poo poo was that buoy over there the one you were supposed to keep to port or starboard and crap what's that other guy doing is he going to follow the rules of the road or is he an idiot he's getting real close oh god. Going from a deckhand on a large vessel to being trained for command of a small one was a revelation in all the thinking that goes into even the simplest decisions, even just "turning from left to right." Not only that, but there's so many fine skills and sometimes unconscious habits that help make a good sailor that any time off boats degrades experience very very quickly - "I've forgotten more than you'll ever know" is a very real feeling sensation I get when I've been away from boats for too long (like I have because COVID, hooray). To bring this back to MilHist a bit this was apparently a serious issue in the Royal Navy during the 18th century when by the time a new war started most of the old captains and admirals had forgotten most of their relevant battle-fighting skills in the peace and had to relearn them. If he hadn't been on boats since his youth it's completely plausible that he would have forgotten everything about practical sail handling later in life, even if he maintained the emotional memories and the feel of the boats. So in sum, it's plausible to me that O'Brian might have had some experience sailing in his youth on a tall ship, but ended up completely forgetting about most of it later in life or having never learned the skills relevant to modern yachts to begin with. Though, given how much he concealed about his actual personal history it's also plausible that he did just make up his past on boats as well, so who knows. Edit: Also, there's the fact that being good at ONE boat doesn't mean you're automatically good at every other boat, with different handling characteristics. It takes a little time to get used to a new boat and their quirks. My first vessel had a habit of not responding at all to the wheel for a few seconds, at which point it'd suddenly turn 360 degrees on a dime if you'd been silly and kept going hard over because the helm didn't seem to be responding. * Come to think of it, even plotting position was something trainees did on my boats solely because this just required looking at the GPS and and marking the position on the chart with a record of the date and time. In an age without GPS that still relied on celestial and landmark navigation it's entirely possible that trainees wouldn't have been allowed anywhere near navigation. Tomn fucked around with this message at 23:24 on May 21, 2021 |
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May 21, 2021 22:58
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Aside, I looked up the yacht O'Brian was on and that thing's a bloody monster. It's not something I'd throw at an inexperienced helmsman.
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May 21, 2021 23:42
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SubG posted:You send your PBYs out to look for the Japanese, get a report that they've spotted the Kido Butai, you launch a bunch of bombers at them, they report hitting a half dozen ships and heavily damaging them, and then it turns out they've actually encountered a supply convoy and the extent of battle damage was splashing water on one of the oilers. I can understand being disappointed. I should think that accidentally overestimating the effects of a naval engagement in the event of a victory was incredibly rare prior to gunpowder because most naval engagements were decided by some combination of ramming and boarding - real hard to walk away with a mistaken idea of how well you did under those circumstances unless you were on the losing side. INTENTIONALLY overestimating how well you did, on the other hand, is a glorious and ancient tradition. Edit: For that matter, even after gunpowder most engagements were extremely close range and when decisive would end with one ship surrendering, and when indecisive would end with the other side successfully running away which should give everyone involved a pretty decent idea what everyone was still capable of. Edgar Allen Ho posted:How did early modern ships even manage to find each other? Answer: With difficulty. Nelson's two great victories at the Nile and Trafalgar* involved a lot of running around back and forth trying desperately to locate the French fleets. Generally lighter, faster frigates would cruise around acting as scouts to try and bring word of enemy fleet locations back to the main fleet, but when everyone is days away from each other trying to catch up to the main fleet in transit is a tricky proposition and there were never enough frigates anyways. *Nelson didn't just catch the French out of Cadiz, he was actively blockading them at Toulon and was blown off station, which the French took as an opportunity to break out following which he chased them around half the bloody world before effectively blockading them in Cadiz - which he did deliberately loosely to try and entice the combined fleet to come out. That being said, in the early modern period especially logistics and wind patterns played a major role - few fleets could afford to put to sea for very long before running out of food so they had to take the most efficient paths to their destination, and prevailing winds and currents in a given location could dictate where exactly any fleet wishing to do anything had to go in order to get where they were going. This usually means that most major naval battles were fought somewhere closish to land - in the open ocean with nothing to fight for and an endless expanse of space where you could be it's a mug's game trying to catch anyone out there. Better to go where the enemy wants to go and lie along chokepoints, or if your victualing system was good enough (as the Royal Navy was in the Napoleonic Wars) just keep a permanent blockade on their ports. Also re: timely orders, the simplest answer is they didn't. A degree of individual initiative was expected of an admiral on a foreign station. Tomn fucked around with this message at 22:29 on May 23, 2021 |
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May 23, 2021 22:21
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SubG posted:Perhaps. It's difficult to know for sure because of the paucity of detailed accounts of naval engagements during e.g. the Hundred Years War, but when you've got dozens if not hundreds of galleys or whatever going at it in a general melee it seems like an accurate accounting of whatever you didn't lose or manage to capture yourself would be difficult. Like after the Battle of Margate/Cadzand the English were probably (rightly) confident that they did well, having captured a large number of ships and scattered the rest, but the disposition of the remainder, not counting those that were e.g. burnt in the harbour and therefore easily accounted for, was probably fairly fuzzy even to those engaged in the battle. Eh, you might be right - just noting that from an individual captain's point of view it's pretty obvious if you won a boarding action or not, or successfully rammed the enemy or not, as opposed to WW1 or so where it's someone with a set of binoculars looking at something nearly on the horizon and trying to make out if you even actually hit the enemy, let alone what damage it did. I will note however the spotting in an engagement is still probably pretty easy compared to land observation because we're talking about individual ships, as opposed to amorphous regiments, on what is essentially a flat, featureless plain while every vessel has their own high ground from which they can climb to get a better view of things, in a scenario where both fleets are going to spend hours maneuvering in sight of each other before contact - which, again, is liable to happen at very short ranges, like we're talking pistol shot range. Plus, decent weather is pretty likely because, well, they're sailing vessels and rely on the weather to move around - I'd have to check because probably there have been a few, but fighting a major naval engagement in the middle of a storm would be rare because of the sheer luck-of-the-draw danger involved, and even without a storm a very strong wind badly restricts options as the ship heeling over would cause the upwind vessels to be unable to fire their lower deck gunports since they'd be right up against or in the water with their available guns by default pointing lower at the water and thus having lower range, while the downwind vessels would be firing their full broadside at a higher angle and thus greater range. And in times of rain or poor visibility, without the ability to see other vessels an admiral's command and control over his own fleet would be badly restricted as well, relying as much as it does on flag signals, which means most commanders would be unlikely to be willing order a major engagement. As such, most naval engagements are likely to occur in conditions of good visibility - at least until the shooting starts and everything is obscured by gunpowder smoke except whoever you're dueling right this moment. Fakeedit: Like, I want to reemphasize than pre-modern boats are sloooooow. We're talking 4-6 knots on a good day. There's a lot of time to take a good long look at the enemy. Tomn fucked around with this message at 14:35 on May 24, 2021 |
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May 24, 2021 14:33
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BalloonFish posted:The one that comes to mind is the Battle of Cape St Vincent (the 1780 one), which was not only fought through a succession of nasty squalls but most of the action happened at night. Yeah, I couldn't think of a specific battle offhand but I was sure there were a few because there had to be SOME admirals crazy enough to go for it. Not surprised it's a late 18th century British admiral either, they really emphasized gung-ho "attack at all costs" thinking by then. And yeah, one thing we tell tourists a lot is that boats aren't faster than armies because they move faster, it's because they can go all night without stopping (if the wind holds). A pony express could beat a boat in a race handily, if you've enough spare horses. That's actually another way of finding fleets to fight - depending on where you are, if you set up messenger relays it's possible to sight a fleet and get word to your own in harbor in time to come out and engage. Didn't realize the effects of coppering on overall speed was so small, but as I understood it coppering's biggest advantage was in keeping ships out of drydock for longer and allowing them to maintain speed better over time due to slower underwater growth, right? The faster speed was just a bonus and all?
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May 24, 2021 18:30
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SubG posted:I understand what you're saying and agree that there are a bunch of factors which would tend to reduce the effects of the sort of confusion I'm talking about. Eh, there's a reason why I specified early gunpowder - with wooden ships under sail it's a good deal easier to notice when the enemy is dismasted, when you've beaten five gunports into one, when the other guy is distinctly low in the water, when they're just plain not returning much fire, and perhaps most critically when they're capable of limping away, which is usually a sign that however badly they've been hit it isn't critical. Not to mention that, again, with short-range engagements with wooden ships it either ends with one ship striking and surrendering, one ship running away (which, again, is a sign that whatever damage isn't too critical), or something very dramatic and obvious like a fire or explosion that's pretty much a death knell for a wooden vessel. It's not just the nature of visibility here, it's also a question of the nature of the kind of combat you're looking at. Armoring, internal engines, explosive shells and long-range gunnery changes the equation a lot more. For the same reason determining how well you pounded a naval fortification is pretty difficult because, well, it's not a ship. Different factors at play in terms of how easily you can confirm that it's been pounded into uselessness. It's also worth noting that the importance of spotting damage differs from era to era too. As ships become larger, more expensive, and more mission-critical, there's fewer of them and knowing whether the Enterprise needs a few more months in drydock or if the Yamato had been successfully sunk can be potentially war-changing information. Conversely, if the Victory was sunk in battle then we've got a few dozen other ships of the line that do pretty much the same thing - it's a loss, but a not a critical one and in and of itself unlikely to change the balance of power between two battle fleets. If we wind back to the medieval era the vast majority of ships in a fleet action are small merchant vessels pressed into service as boarding platforms and the king doesn't really care that much about the state of individual ships, only whether he holds the field at the end or not (and back then naval battles are largely fought because you're trying to get your troops from A to B and the other side is trying to stop you, so the REAL measure of success is how many soldiers you still have left when all's said and done). On the whole, to go back to your original thought I'd agree that assessing damage in naval engagements was probably most difficult - and most critical - around WW1/2. Earlier on for most of human history it's both easier to do and less important.
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May 25, 2021 13:05
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Tulip posted:So as a person reading this thread who is not very knowledgeable about Western Naval military history during the early modern, I feel like the debate here is "navies could leave an engagement with relatively weak intel about their opponent" vs "navies usually left those engagements with great intel about their opponents." And what I'm seeing in this historical debate is that the weak intel side presents, piecemeal, a bunch of historical instances of one or both sides of a battle leaving the battle with unclear or wrong intel, and the strong intel side dismisses these as either exceptional and out of line with a first principles derived theory. Well, let's take Trafalgar - out of 33 French ships of the line, 21 were captured by the Royal Navy and one exploded spectacularly mid-battle. The British meanwhile lost none. While admittedly they were forced to abandon or scuttle a lot of those captured ships afterwards, and while I don't have information offhand on what the British think happened to the ones who got away in the aftermath, when you've got your own crews frantically trying to get your prizes seaworthy it'd be pretty hard to mistake the scale of your victory as anything less than it was. Or take the Battle of the Nile, in which out of 13 French ships of the line 9 were captured, 1 exploded spectacularly again, and another was scuttled by fire, while under fire. Again, the British may or may not have known what happened to the ones who got away but the scale of the victory is again very clear. Admittedly, those are exceptional battles. But the original question was over which era of warfare saw the most misreported results of a naval engagement, and when the standard for victory is "we captured their ships" it's hard to mistake a defeat for a victory given that you could always count how many ships of yours were missing and how many new ships you got. Compare this to "Well we're pretty sure we dropped a bomb that hit a CV, or maybe it was a BB, or it might actually have been a CVL, or maybe even a DD, but anyways we hit them hard, damaged them a lot and probably left them in a sinking condition. Or at least they'll be in drydock for months. Or possibly a week. But we're pretty sure we hit them, anyways. Well, mostly sure. Maybe 60%. Point is we did well!" I'll note also that early records like the ones you noticed may not have been spotty but part of that may well be because they simply weren't viewed as necessary because you absolutely DID trash the enemy in a glaringly obvious way and no more needs to be known or remembered. There's points now where British historians can't even find records for which British ships were in the line of battle for a given battle, which wouldn't indicate that they then had no idea how many ships their own fleet had, but rather that they didn't think it was that important to keep track of. You're right that I'm arguing from first principles, though. I'm not a trained historian, just an enthusiastic amateur, and I'll freely admit I might very well be talking out my rear end and might have been jumping a little too far from an initial offhand remark. I do think it's worth pointing out how radically different the nature of naval warfare is when you go from the age of sail to modern warships, however - the question of naval intelligence doesn't really map one-for-one from one era to the other. Tomn fucked around with this message at 16:43 on May 25, 2021 |
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May 25, 2021 16:38
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ChubbyChecker posted:How much did an ordinary seaman get prize money from those battles? Again, not a historian and had to do some digging, but to quote from NAM Rodger in The Command of the Ocean... quote:The Convoys and Cruizers Act of 1708 laid down a division of prize-money which was in force for a century. The commander-in-chief took one-eighth, the captain a quarter, the master and lieutenants, the warrant officers and the petty officers one-eighth each, and the remaining quarter was divided among the 'private men', seamen and marines. Even this inequitable distribution gave the seamen significant windfalls. The Nile netted every man £7 18s, Trafalgar £9 9s 6d, and Strachan's action of November 1805 (when all the prizes were brought home), £10 13s - roughly half a year's pay on the 1797 scale. He apparently gets this figure from "The Enemy At Trafalgar," which is apparently a collection of letters and memoirs from French and Spanish sailors who'd been in the battle so I'm not sure how he got the figures exactly. As far as I knew prize money was based on actually bringing the ship back and selling it, as well as the condition of the ship and how much you could get for it, so I wouldn't have thought every sailor in the fleet would have gotten the same amount (especially those who didn't take any prizes at all). Maybe for the purposes of those major battles they decided to divide up the value of the shares amongst the entire fleet? There was apparently some compensation money for ships sunk too based on the number of guns they had. It's worth noting that since prize money was based on the condition of the ships and the value of the cargo battered warships after a fleet action wouldn't have been worth that much compared to plump, intact merchant vessels. From elsewhere in the book... quote:The four frigates which took the Spanish register ships El Tetys and Santa Brigida in 1799 shared £652,000 net. The admiral got £81,000, four captains £40,730 each, and every seaman received £182 4s 9 3/4d - ten year's pay. Major fleet actions pay in glory rather than gold. Though you might have to offset that against the value of not having to pay for drinks again for a decade or two... BalloonFish might have better and more detailed information. Also don't ask me to interpret the wacky British currency system because I'm as lost as you are. Tomn fucked around with this message at 19:48 on May 25, 2021 |
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May 25, 2021 19:46
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Tulip posted:Especially since the equivalent to "IDK looks like that bomb hit" would, apples-to-apples, be something like "we fired a few cannons at a ship we saw briefly" which I imagine generally didn't go reported. I think one of the things that makes the whole thing kinda apples-to-oranges, though, is the significance of "we fired a few cannons." In WW1/2, if you hit the enemy with a single battleship shell, a bomb, or a torpedo, you had a reasonable expectation of having caused significant damage and a reasonable hope of having scored critical damage of some kind. With a smoothbore naval cannon firing roundshot, if you hit the enemy with a single ball you can reasonably expect not very much in the way of effect at all, compared to the overall functioning of the ship. Occasionally a lucky shot might do something very important, like damage the rudder, or kill the captain, or cut up important rigging, or maybe start a fire by accident or something, but that's a golden BB. Generally speaking if you want results you need to get in close and hammer as many salvos as you can into the enemy as quickly as possible - sheer weight of fire is the key to causing the enemy any significant damage. As such, an age of sail captain has no real reason to be trying to track the exact impact of any specific shot unless he's in a chase and hoping for a lucky break. To try and gauge what impact you're having you're looking at damage over time, steadily degrading the enemy's ability to fight. Even if you wanted to, trying to pick out which of the 30+ odd guns banging away did the damage you were looking at would be tricky at best. That makes individual shot and damage reporting of much less concern to a captain of the time, and not really worth writing home about. It's the final results of all that fire that matters - whether it softened up the enemy enough or disabled them badly enough that you could take them or sink them. That's a much easier metric to gauge the effects of than "Did that single shell we fired from kilometers way significantly impact the enemy?" Edit: Vahakyla posted:This reminds me of the absolutely mind boggling wealth inequality of militaries just recently. The difference between officers and seamen in this is prize pool is whack. I'd like you to note the bit that says "the commander-in-chief gets an eighth share." Note that for the purposes of prize money, "the commander in chief" is whoever you report directly to, even if they're sitting on their rear end in a cosy house on shore and you're hundreds of miles away at sea cruising up and down the trade lines. Admirals could make BANK. The Command of the Ocean posted:Two successive commanders-in-chief each made about £300,000 in prize-money during their careers, Rainer entirely and Pellew largely on this station [the East Indies]. Keith in the Mediterranean made just under £67,000 in less than three years. It was for this that admirals faced the risks of a tropical climate or, like H.C. Christian at the Cape in 1798, separation from a sick wife and a beloved family: "With my West India prize-money also, I hope we may be enabled to take tolerably good care of our dear girls. The boys will, I trust, be taken care of. This is my most anxious wish, and the reflection that strengthens and supports me in the sacrifice I have made - namely, that I am working for them." Also not related but I thought this was an amusing quote. The Command of the Ocean posted:Mistakes were easy and expensive. "Law is a bottomless pit and I have no inclination to fathom its depths," in the words of one commodore declining to get involved with a Danish prize." Edit edit: As Thomamelas mentioned, the rules concerning divisions could change over time. The Command of the Ocean posted:A new division of prize-money was promulgated in 1808, in which the seamen and marines divided a half between them (petty officers and able seamen benefiting particularly), and the admiral and captain were reduced to one-tweleth and one-sixth respectively. This aroused strong protests from the captains. Tomn fucked around with this message at 21:11 on May 25, 2021 |
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May 25, 2021 20:50
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Cessna posted:This may be a bit misleading. Look at Jutland, for example. That's fair, but consider what you're comparing against: The Command of the Ocean, again posted:Attacking Porto Bello in 1739, one of Vernon's ships, the Hampton Court, 70, fired 400 rounds in twenty-five minutes, which suggests each gun fired about one round every two minutes, and this is probably near the upper limit of any ship's performance...There was no question, however, of being able to sustain such a rate of fire. Men running out guns weighing up to two tons each could not support such an effort for long. The captain who trained his men to fire so fast was planning to close to very close range before opening fire, or the guns' crews would be exhausted before the shot began to tell. "I do not wish the ships to be bilge and bilge," said Howe at the First of June, "but if you can lock the yardarms so much the better, the battle will be the sooner decided." That implies a fighting range of about twenty feet. All of this fire would usually fail to actually SINK a ship, just to disable it and kill enough crewmen that they would be too demoralized to fight back. We're looking at far more rounds fired to less overall effect at much closer range. That's not a situation where you want someone standing by with binoculars observing the enemy and excitedly calling out every individual hit from every individual cannon.
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May 25, 2021 21:54
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So I have a friend who's a nautical archaeologist with a focus on the Vasa, and when the whole Age of Sail gunnery discussion came up I remembered that she mentioned a lecture on the subject. Got in touch with her, and long story short, here, have a lecture on the effects of naval gunnery on a replica wooden hull and the likely effects on the crew within. There's a lot of neat footage of the effect of a 24 pound ball within the hull of a ship. Would be interested to see what the tank nerds here make of the experiment and the whole spalling situation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO71nuiN4ds&t=3709s Couple of points of note to summarize: - Accuracy on smoothbore cannons at 1000 meters require a fine degree of aiming and control that, practically speaking, didn't really exist on ships of the period (17th century) - Splinter damage was highly reliant on where the shot hit - in sum, the thicker the hull at point of impact, the larger and more deadly the splinters, while piercing through thin timbers could cause fast-moving small splinters that could be effectively deflected by wool clothing and were unlikely to pierce skin or injure someone even on exposed skin unless they hit an eye. - Conversely, hitting a heavily timbered part of the ship could create fast-moving splinters weighing a kilogram or more which will absolutely ruin your day. - There is no amount of timbering that will stop a 24-pound ball from ripping clear through your ship out both ends. - Lighter shot up to about 12 pounds or so CAN be stopped by sufficiently heavy timbering however. - Against heavy artillery a lightly built ship would actually be better than a large, heavy ship as with a light ship the ball wouldn't be causing the kind of dangerous spalling it would against a heavily timbered ship and would instead just be punching relatively small holes through (overpenetration in tank terms, right?) - Since the degree of damage caused by a ball is based entirely on where it hits, and since there's no practical way to aim for the dangerous parts of the ship, the important thing was sheer volume of fire to maximize your chances of hitting the heavily timbered sections. - The sheer variability involved explains why in some heavily fought two hour engagements you could end up with a total of two casualties between both ships, while two similar ships fighting in similar conditions could walk away with hundreds of casualties. (None of this is intended to be in support of my prior arguments by the way, I just thought this was cool and wanted to share) She also passed along a chapter from a book discussing those test results as well as the experiments they made regarding ergonomic handling of the guns and the recorded effects of sound, smoke, etc. I'll post those up once I confirm whether it's OK to pass those on or not.
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May 29, 2021 14:46
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Scratch Monkey posted:Unrelated question: Is Dr. Hocker from Philadelphia? Sorry, I haven't the faintest idea. Why do you ask?
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May 29, 2021 15:41
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Grumio posted:For the Burma theatre, I enjoyed Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser, more famously known for the Flashman books. It's not an overview of the campaign, but rather an extremely small scale look at what it was like for him and his platoon of rough characters from Cumberland. I read the book recently and enjoyed it too, but I have to admit I was a bit taken aback to realize just how deeply conservative and pro-Empire Fraser was. He had hints of it in his other books but that was where he really put it right up front, bold and explicit. Not to mention just being deeply old-fashioned in other ways, I mean the guy spends a few pages complaining that automatic rifles are a blight on the army and degrading proper standards of marksmanship and wasting bullets. Actually, there is one point he makes that I find interesting - he spends a lot of time complaining about the evils of disgusting modern journalists who harry and niggle at soldiers until they get them to admit on camera that they're afraid, which he views as deeply harmful to morale because the proper way to deal with fear is never to admit it and to present the image of being utterly without fear so as to draw strength from what you're supposed to be and so that others around you can draw strength from the same - anything else, he believed, would have been to open the floodgates of terror for everyone in the platoon. He also claimed never to have seen any cases of anything resembling PTSD save for one man in his platoon who woke up one night screaming that he was being attacked by a swarm of tiny Japanese soldiers led by some government minister or other - to which the solution was to tell the man to take his kukri to them, which he did enthusiastically before dropping back to sleep. My question is, what does our modern understanding of fear and combat PTSD have to say to that? Is Fraser just being old-fashioned, or is there any justification to something he felt very strongly about? If he's just being old-fashioned, what's the modern, say, US Army's understanding on how best to deal with fear or the likelihood of PTSD? Has the US Army's methods of trying to encourage courage changed significantly over time?
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Jun 2, 2021 16:45
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Cessna posted:You know what? I was wrong. So hey, semi-related question, but what exactly makes for a fast march compared to a slow one? I.E., if one officer marches faster than five miles in ten days, what are they doing differently? What's the poo poo officer doing that he shouldn't? What's the efficient officer doing right? What, in fact, are the logistics of logistics?
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Jun 2, 2021 23:18
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Wingnut Ninja posted:You're going from coordinated fire with high-quality targeting to a local turret director manually eyeballing it through smoke and fire and picking his own targets after all the fancier stuff gets blown off. How much training and practice would you generally get in doing that during the run-up to WW2?
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Jun 4, 2021 19:15
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FuturePastNow posted:Yeah, the Avenger could carry one torpedo, limited by the size of its internal bomb bay. The Skyraider could carry up to three. Or about 4x as many bombs as the Avenger. If a plane carries multiple torpedoes, do they release them all in a big spread on one run, or take multiple runs? Even with relatively crappy Japanese AA and the decayed state of their forces by the late war it feels like taking multiple torpedo runs must have been a harrowing prospect.
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Jun 6, 2021 01:02
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Cyrano4747 posted:My understanding is that the RN of this time actually did lean heavily into gunnery drills and in doing so got much better rates of fire. As I recall that came into play in a few of Nelson's victories. I'm wondering if the idea of Sharpe doing the same was the author conflating the idea of British naval gunnery being a deciding factor with how things worked on land. I posted a few excerpts from The Command of the Ocean earlier talking about exactly that, but to sum up the Royal Navy eventually came to the idea that what really mattered was short bursts of close-in firepower - smoothbore cannons at sea had poo poo for accuracy, so you had to get up close to engage, and if you're doing that the way to make your shots count more is just to fire faster and get more weight of metal in. Except you can't do that forever, because yanking giant guns back and forth is tough work and nobody can keep up the pace endlessly, so the idea is to slam in a bunch of volleys as quick as you can and when you see your guys start to tire or their guys start to get visibly demoralized, go for a boarding action and take their ship. So not really all that different from the idea of "fire a few volleys and charge" described earlier, albeit for different reasons. Conversely, The Command of the Ocean asserts that the French relied on a doctrine of long-range disabling firepower, standing off and trying to aim for the rigging to cripple the enemy and render them less able to maneuver so that you could rake them from vulnerable points. The thing is that this didn't really work because it turns out that reliably hitting another ship at all at long range is a crapshoot, let alone reliably hitting specific parts of their poo poo. Why exactly the French stuck to this policy when it wasn't showing results I'd have to check, as I'm not sure I remember. It may be related but the author spends a great deal of time lambasting French naval architects for relying too much on theorizing from (then-flawed) first principles and insisting on their use no matter what practical experience in the field said. Apparently this was an Enlightenment thing, the idea that empirical evidence was inferior to logically assembled theorems? If true that might potentially explain why the French stuck with a flawed tactic.
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Jun 7, 2021 06:02
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The Lone Badger posted:Did the british shift to rapid close-range fire accompany a shift to short-barrel high-calibre guns? Or was changing the guns in use too large a prospect? As I recall, not entirely, no - the 17th century was basically a lot of experimentation over "how do we fight with guns on boats" and the Royal Navy at least started nailing down the doctrine of close range heavy firepower around the 18th. Carronades definitely made the idea of "short-range high firepower" a lot more attractive, though, especially since they were cheaper and lighter as well. That being said while the Navy did experiment with all-carronade ships they eventually decided that it was better to use carronades as a supplement instead of the main armament because as bad as normal cannons were at anything beyond short range carronades were even worse at anything beyond point-blank range and they figured it would be too great a vulnerability to be unable to effectively respond if your enemy can keep away. Interesting note on this: Apparently in Drake's time the line of battle hadn't been fully developed yet, nor the idea of broadside fire. Ships were arranged with their heaviest guns to the front, and the way they fought was by charging the enemy, firing their heavy forward guns, jinxing around to let off both broadsides, and then retreating to reload because guns of that period took an age and a half to reload. So like I said, experimentation. e;f, b
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Jun 7, 2021 06:19
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Just be careful with the word choice around naval architects there, those are the guys who actually design the ships and the French certainly had the best in the world. The British spent a lot of time copying French designs, very notably both the large and small 74s. Eh, I'd have to look up it up for details but Rodger spends a LOT of time arguing both that "French naval architects weren't as revolutionary or impressive as they were commonly assumed to be," and that "the idea that British or French or Spanish ships were better or worse is somewhat flawed." To touch on the latter, since I remember those arguments better, he specifically notes that each fleet designed their ships for the missions they were intended for. The British anticipated needing to send ships on long-range cruises and long-term blockades in all weathers, so they were designed to be weatherly and strongly built with large cargo holds. The French meanwhile were anticipating that their fleets would be blockaded, but could strike out in favorable conditions when the British fleets were dispersed by weather or other factors to try and defeat them in detail, so they designed ships that sail very well and very quickly in good weather and light airs but which had poor seakeeping qualities and small cargo holds, which meant that British captains tended to complain about captured French ships as they weren't particularly good at the kind of things British captains were asked to do. Meanwhile the Spanish during the 18th century designed their fleet not so much to win wars as to be a cost-effective deterrent against their colonial holdings, being robust, relatively easy to maintain and relatively cheap to construct so that they could have strength assembled at enough critical ports to make invading the Spanish Empire a costly headache without breaking the budget. He doesn't go into the Spaniards in as much detail but Rodger gives the impression that the Spanish had a much more coherent vision for what they wanted out of their navy and a better plan for achieving that than did the French, which he represented as not really being entirely sure what they wanted their navy to do and not being certain how to achieve it. Edit: Also apparently there was a whole thing where French designers insisted that the ship's timbers flexing and letting in some water while under way was a good thing that made their ships faster. It didn't and it wasn't, and it degraded their ships faster. Tomn fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Jun 7, 2021 |
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Jun 7, 2021 17:00
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Nenonen posted:"C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas une pipe" as Napoleon said. I see what you did there. Clever.
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Jun 8, 2021 19:25
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Cessna posted:Cannon fired round shot, a solid iron ball. If I recall correctly, the point of shells at that point was more shrapnel rather than raw HE, right? More knocking out infantry with shards of metal instead of, say, demolishing a building.
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Jun 8, 2021 20:55
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Wingnut Ninja posted:This thread is the first place I've seen the term "horse artillery" and that provoked a similar, though much more horrifying, reaction. Well-deserved horror. Horses are some of the most vicious and merciless gunners you'll ever meet. Never let a horse get their hooves on artillery. There's a reason we phased them out.
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Jun 11, 2021 17:02
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In a bit of a rush right now so can’t post details but I believe this is what you’re looking for: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Motivation-War-Experience-Soldiers-Old-Regime/dp/1316618102 Short version: No, soldiers were not dumb brutes kept in line only by the lash. There was a strong sense that they were morally and socially “better” than common laborers. Phobophilia posted:Considering how much internecine warfare and plunder took place between Christian states in the middle ages/early modern I'm surprised there wasn't more of a movement to attribute your towns and villages being raped and plundered as divine punishment for your own soldiers going off to rape and plunder. Surely people realized there was something deeply morally hosed up about some of your largest 3rd born sons going off and returning with great riches after adventuring in other European lands, then soldiers from that neighbor coming in to return the favor. On the other hand, see the Biblical conquest of Canaan. Taking from the Other to benefit Yours is cool and good (at least according to the Old Testament!) Tomn fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Jun 14, 2021 |
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Jun 14, 2021 13:17
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Fangz posted:I think you should go read a book on the 30yw first before you try to crowbar it into your lions-led-by-donkeys narrative. Which in this day and age with modern scholarship doesn’t even really hold up that well for WW1 anyways.
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Jun 14, 2021 18:05
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human garbage bag posted:I have a theory that wars would be much less frequent if the soldiers knew the real casualty rate. I'm looking for evidence for this theory with records of soldiers not knowing the casualty rate in various wars. I know that in the end of WW1 the french soldiers refused to fight because they found out the casualty rate. Among the other things that people have stated, if you think "telling people the real casualty rates" has a significant effect on deterring risky behavior in a significant subset of the population, I'm glad you slept through 2020. People believe the statistics they want to believe. SlothfulCobra posted:Something I wonder about soldier salaries is how much of an effect is there from soldiers who don't spend much while doing their service and so after they come back from service they'd have a big pile of money the equivalent of being paid a competitive salary in the real world for the duration of their duty but saving all of it because they didn't have rent, groceries, or other regular expenses. This is all second-hand but I've heard that US soldiers, as college-age kids with their first salary and often their first budget and no significant daily expenses, have a strong tendency to blow that salary on endlessly stupid poo poo during their first (and second, and third, and subsequent...) leave despite the best efforts of older, wiser heads.
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Jun 14, 2021 21:16
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human garbage bag posted:So if young potential soldiers were shown videos of the reality of war during their education then they would be less enthusiastic to go to war? I'm sorry, but world peace cannot be achieved through a fifteen minute educational video. If this is really a problem that bugs you, instead of starting from a theory and trying to cobble together evidence to prove it, try starting from the question of "Why do wars happen and why do they continue?" Then see where your research takes you from there instead of trying to insist on a preset solution from the very beginning.
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Jun 14, 2021 21:40
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human garbage bag posted:But the low casualty rate would explain that, free college isn't very useful if you're dead. Somehow I doubt people today would sign up to participate in a ground war in China for free college when they could instead be a truck driver and make $60k+ a year. If there was a ground war in China I guarantee there'd be a whole lot of people signing up for a whole raft of other reasons, mostly non-material ones. Patriotism, a desire to protect their homeland, a once-in-a-lifetime experience you can tell people about, a once-in-a-lifetime experience that you'll be forever shamed for missing ("Well, during the Great War your granddaddy shoveled poo poo in Louisiana"), hatred for the Chinese, hatred for Communism, a general sense of duty, a desire for adventure, possibly even some wild takes about defending a nebulous idea of Freedom and Democracy, a family lineage of military officers (though in that case you'd probably ALREADY be in the military), etc. etc. It wouldn't be everybody but there'd be plenty of volunteers, at least at first. But that's how most wars go, start with a big surge of volunteers and patriotism and then increasing rely on drafts as the really enthusiastic guys get killed off.
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Jun 14, 2021 23:06
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Hey, here's a question: In 18th century warfare, if a regiment broke and fled in combat but didn't desert entirely and managed to recover enough to rejoin the army after the battle, were the soldiers punished for doing so in any way? And if so, what was the punishment?
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Jun 15, 2021 02:57
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