|
Chamale posted:Because the Germans' nice uniforms made it too difficult to drop their trousers, and they pissed their pants all the time One of my favorite thread moments was also that effort post as it had me imagining a group of German's sewing uniforms as fast as possible before the T-34s crush them. "sew faster hans!"
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2020 21:34
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 07:20 |
|
|
So I was browsing the COLD WAR/AIRPOWER thread and they had a good discussion regarding The Falklands war. Specifically, the British actually came pretty close to losing? Like if the Argentinians had knocked out a few more support ships, or even a carrier - it would have been over. I never thought much about this conflict before, so went down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole and holy moly does this war not get enough attention outside of the UK/South America. It's the only large scale naval battle I can think of in the last 40 years, and it's equally impressive that a suppose top tier Cold War power nearly lost most of their surface fleet to a non-peer opponent. Some questions for the thread: Did the British come as close to losing as I stated? What could the Argentinians had done differently to actually defeat them? What would the consequences of a British loss had been? This is 1982 and the Cold War is very much in full swing - I image NATO get's embarrassed that one of their members surface fleets gets destroyed by a non-communist aligned state, and the Soviets win a major diplomatic coup by default. In addition, the UK itself is probably thrown into turmoil and the Thatcher government collapses. The "special relationship" with the US is probably strained as suddenly the RN can't adequately protect the North Atlantic. Maybe China tries to make moves to force the UK to hand over Hong Kong early? As for Argentina, the military Junta survives at least for a while longer. I'm sure they get massive amounts of Soviet / Eastern Bloc aid throughout the rest of the 1980s and become a pain in the side of the US. Also, what lessons were learned from the Falklands war?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2020 16:35
|
|
|
FastestGunAlive posted:“Britain almost lost: if a few more of their ships had been sunk they’d give up” doesn’t sound like Britain almost lost to me While I appreciate the usual glib responses that SA is lovingly known for. I'm being serious. They lost 6 surface ships. When was the last time a major naval power lost that many in a conflict especially to a non-peer opponent? Seems to me there is a realistic alt history where the Argentinian military is a little better organized and puts a whole lot more hurt on the British. I mean whatever, this thread argues all day if gay black Hitler could have won in the east but I guess bringing up a suppose British defeat in the Falklands is "fantasy". Solaris 2.0 fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Dec 30, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2020 16:56
|
|
|
KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:You've narrowed this definition so tightly that I suspect the answer is "never" Right, but that's my point, it feels like that should be a big deal. I mean I am sure the Falklands War is a huge deal in UK and especially Argentinian circles but as an American I had only barely heard of it, and I never even knew the UK had lost so many ships. I thought it was fascinating and figure I'd ask the thread since I can't of many modern naval engagements. People don't have to respond to my question if they don't feel like it. I just thought it was interesting.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2020 17:04
|
|
|
Koramei posted:Yeah I feel like characterizing the Argentines as some completely backwater nothing entity mischaracterizes it a bit. Didn’t they have completely state of the art anti-ship missiles? Right my bad I wasn't trying to categorize them as back-water, I used the term non-peer to indicated that they were not a major world power. The Iran comparison is apt, I didn't think of that before. From my brief googling on the topic, Argentinian had a few of the French Exocet missiles and managed to sink a support ship with them, and hit a destroyer. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/15/exocet-missile-how-sinking-hms-sheffield-made-famous https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/15/revealed-full-story-behind-sinking-of-falklands-warship-hms-sheffield Acebuckeye13 posted:The US likely wouldn't have let Britain lose the war. Though the US was ostensibly neutral, had Britain lost a carrier the US was prepared to give them an older US ship to replace it. Also yea, this is nuts.  *edit* Anyway if anyone has good reading/podcast/documentaries regarding this conflict feel free to PM me or share. I'd definitely would love to learn more. Solaris 2.0 fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Dec 30, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2020 17:29
|
|
|
FastestGunAlive posted:I did not mean my answer to be completely sarcastic. I would still question the idea that Britain almost lost after losing six ships. Was the morale of the troops low enough that mutiny/surrender/refusal to fight was a possibility? Did any of the tactical commanders seriously consider surrender/cease fire or communicate to higher that they were at risk of failing their mission? Did strategic and political leadership seriously discuss surrender or cease fire after losing six ships? I should say my post was badly written - I shouldn't have implied the Argentinians could have "sunk most" of the British fleet. However when writing the post I was referencing this bit from the US Naval institute I had read when googling around for info. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019/december/fighting-along-knife-edge-falklands quote:The struggles with hiding and defending the fleet led to difficult questions about how best to use Britain’s two small aircraft carriers, HMS Hermes and Invincible. They were the greatest assets in the British task force and their air wings the best defense against Argentine air attacks.39 They also were the greatest British vulnerability, however, and they dictated the deployment and tactics of the entire task force. Woodward wrote of the “inescapable truth that the Argentine commanders failed inexplicably to realize that if they had hit Hermes, the British would have been finished. They never really went after the one target that would surely have given them victory.”40 Woodward’s solution was to keep the carriers as far out to sea as possible, almost exclusively using them for air defense. However, it does appear that in this scenario the US was ready to lend the UK the Iwo Jima. I would still imagine that if the Hermes had been sunk it would have been devastating to morale, not to mention the material/personnel losses. Also thanks goons for the references for Harrier 809 and One Hundred Days!
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2020 18:33
|
|
|
FMguru posted:The really wild thing about the Falklands War was that the British were due to retire both carriers in less than a year (one sold to India, the other headed for the scrappers). If Argentina had waited for ten months, it's hard to see Britain mounting the kind of response they were able to. Well that would have been awkward. Although I think the US could have easily weaseled out of that given the fact that it was the Argentinians who invaded British territory.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2020 19:54
|
|
|
You figure the Japanese are firing those things at close range too. Having them concealed and waiting until an unsuspecting Sherman is right ontop of it.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2021 15:42
|
|
|
Cessna posted:Tank engines breathe air; they need an intake and an exhaust just like a car. Even if they're covered or protected they can't be airtight. I take it modern MBTs are better protected, or can you immobilize an Abrams if you hit it with a Molotov in just the right spot?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2021 18:10
|
|
|
Trin Tragula posted:You got suckered. The Central Powers had been worn down so far that they simply lacked the resilience to react to major offensives in the way they'd been able to previously. If you must have a turning point for that war, it's the entry of the Americans, but it really doesn't make much sense to think of WW1 as even having turning points. Everything happens very quickly at the start, then everything bogs down forever while the strain increases and increases and increases on both sides, but by 1918 there's so much pressure going one way that all the others can do is collapse, which all happens so suddenly that even at the start of October 1918, everyone's planning for the grand war-winning offensives of 1919 and it isn't fully apparent just how hosed the Germans are. The planned 1919 offensives are something I wish I could read more about. Like apparently it would be a proto-Blitzkrieg with massed Renault Tanks backed by close support aircraft and rolling artillery. And waves of Americans doughboys marching to glory. 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2021 01:26
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:While that's not wrong, I wonder if a more competent Fuhrer would have never gotten to where the Germans were in the Winter of '41 just because he'd have been smart enough to not, you know, invade all his neighbors at once and never gotten the string of lucky wins that let Hitler look like a military genius for two years. It was explained to me once that you can treat German military successes 1939-1941 less because of brilliant strategic-level long-term decision making, and more because Hitler kept rolling a natural 20 and they (the German high command) just kept going with it. Problem is you eventually stop getting lucky with your dice rolls and oops suddenly you're in a war of total annihilation with the world's major powers that you have no hope of actually winning.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2021 21:46
|
|
|
Fish of hemp posted:Would the german people be willing to suffer drawn out trench warfare with France again? the original plan the German high command came up with for France was for half a million casualties to push the French to the Somme. Stalemate. Then in two years a final big push to Paris From Wikipedia but not sure about the sourcing quote:
I have no idea if the German population would find this acceptable. Also from reading Wages of Destruction I don’t know if the German economy could support a WWI style stalemate + blockade.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2021 01:57
|
|
|
Vincent Van Goatse posted:Funny this is that my interest in military history was basically kickstarted by playing 90s simulators and strategy games (in the case of armored warfare it was Steel Panthers) and those taught me German tanks were anything but immune to Shermans or T-34s used with a modicum of skill, which convinced me that maybe Allied tanks weren't as hopeless as people liked to claim. Not military history per say, but what started my fascination with History (in particular, early 20th century )was when I watched this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_and_the_Shaping_of_the_20th_Century This was 1996...I would have been 11 years old. Yes I was a weird kid. Anyway it peaked my interest so much I read every history textbook, particularly milhist, I could get my hands on at the local library. Started playing flight sim games too. Saving Private Ryan and Medal of Honor (PS1 game)were big influences on me as well. Jane’s WWII fighters, European Air War, Combat Mission, Close Combat also reinforced a WWII obsession with me in those years. Unfortunately I also found myself glued to The History channel by the late 90s and was a Wehraboo for a few years because of it. 
Solaris 2.0 fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Mar 3, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Mar 3, 2021 02:06
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:I was watching random clips of Man in the High Castle since apparently it's ended and so my youtube reccomendations have blown up with them, but how plausible is it that into 1962 Japan doesn't manage to produce their own atomic bombs when IIRC in the real world Japan had made decent progress but was probably mostly constrained by the same lack of resources Germany was dealing with due to fighting the second world war? How does Japan need twenty years and borrowed designs to finish their own? China coming out of the civil war and occupation needed 20 years but Japan it seems like shouldn't need that long? I actually just started watching this show yesterday. In addition, I like how future Nazi Germany is flying its leaders around in Concord supersonic passenger jets, but this new Japanese Empire can only send it's leaders on passenger ships, implying that the Japanese Empire doesn't even have access to jet aircraft capable of trans-pacific flights. Which I find funny because the Japanese were able to create their own version of the ME-262. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakajima_Kikka I can totally buy that a victorious Japanese Empire could not quite compete with a victorious Nazi Germany in this alt-hell-world. But the idea that this victorious Empire somehow remains 20 years behind in technology seems a bit much even in the context of this how, given how things went down historically. I mean at the start of the war the Japanese Navy had some of the most advanced ship and airplane designs on planet which allowed them to conquer most of the Pacific.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2021 17:00
|
|
|
xthetenth posted:
This part is staggering to think about even for me. I had long just assumed the British ceded the Pacific to the Americans after their fleet was crushed and fled to the Indian Ocean. However by 1944 not only had the British completely reconstituted their fleet, it was an impressively powerful force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Pacific_Fleet Just looking at this wikipedia article (and I don't doubt the accuracy of the basic numbers) I found: 6 fleet carriers 4 light carriers 2 maintenance carriers (I had no idea this was a thing) 9 escort carriers 4 battleships 11 Cruisers and a whole lot of destroyers, corvettes, submarines, support ships, ect. This what was available to the British in the Pacific by 1945. Even if Kido Butai survives into 1944-45 that's a force that can very well go toe-to-toe with it.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2021 16:02
|
|
|
Yea I don't think it's a hot take to say that, assuming the rest of the world is at peace and no one else gets involved in this fantasy conflict, a UK vs Japan war breaking out in 1940-1941 is a far more even fight than one against the US. And one that the Japanese may very well still win. Of course, wars don't happen in a vacuum and I doubt there is any scenario where the US watches Kido Butai wreck the British Pacific Fleet and take over all of the UK's colonial possessions while threatening US territories and is cool with it. I also don't know what France does in this scenario either. French Indochina is also sitting right there...
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2021 17:09
|
|
|
Tulip posted:Was this at all realistic or do you mean "negotiating a favorable peace with the KMT" here? This seems substantially more unlikely than the "IJN beats RN" stuff we've been talking about, partially because we know they were stalling out by 1938 and I am dubious that more oil would have helped much. I don’t think the Japanese ever actually had a plan for what they wanted to do in China? Like they bungled into it and then couldn’t figure a way out. Do we have any better ideas of what their ultimate hope or goal was? Was it hoping the KMT would come crawling on their knees begging for a settlement?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2021 15:28
|
|
|
IIRC The Kwangtung army by August of 1945 is nothing more than a counter-insurgency force. All of its best troops and equipment long since shipped off (or sunk) to other campaign theaters. The equipment they did have being horribly out of date. The Manchuria Operation is an absolutely impressive logistical feat by the Soviet Army, but it's also extremely lopsided given the fact that the Soviet Forces involved were battle harden after 4 years of fighting the Wehrmacht and possessing some of the best offensive equipment, training, and doctrine in the world at that point.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2021 18:50
|
|
|
To be fair this alt-discussion of "How does Japan win a war against the Soviet Union and is capturing Vladivostok enough?" is only equally insane as the real-life scenario of "Nazi Germany and its allies invade the Soviet Union with the plan of advancing to the A-A line and then.....stop?" Apparently Hitler envisioned Germany in a forever war around the Urals, and that anything in Eastern Russia (around Vladivostok) would be left to the Japanese sphere of influence.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2021 22:07
|
|
|
I mean the Japanese defeated the Russians before without needing to take Moscow so it stands to reason why they think they could do it again.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2021 00:07
|
|
|
Didn’t the Luftwaffe fly Stukas all the way up to the Battle of Berlin? I could have sworn I read an account of Stuka attacks on Soviet tank columns as they massed along the Oder.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2021 02:19
|
|
|
Jaguars! posted:
Were there many instances of American/British and Soviet aircraft accidentally getting into dogfights with each other at the end stage of the war? Seems like the skies above the Eastern Front got really confusing with all the different aircraft flying around.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2021 14:23
|
|
|
The other thing to consider about the 1991 Gulf War is that it took place right before the Cold War drawdowns and demobilizations. In fact I think Saddam was banking on the Soviets to act as some sort of mediator not realizing that they were instead busy imploding?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2021 14:01
|
|
|
Are there any good, and recent academic articles/books/documentaries about the Persian Gulf War? I just spent some time searching Google and Amazon and it seems like it is now a forgotten war. A lot of the material I did find is in that 10 year period between the Gulf War and 9/11 when everyone's attention shifted. But I can't find much post-2003. It's weird to me to think of the Gulf War as a forgotten war, given it's enormous cultural impact as a kid growing up in the 90s. Or maybe its not that its forgotten, but the last 20 years of non-stop mid-east "forever wars" have significantly lessened its cultural impact in the West.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2021 20:46
|
|
|
Nenonen posted:WHICH ONE!?! 1991 the one thats been discussed the last few posts. *edit* Is "The Persian Gulf War" still the official name of that war? There have been...a lot of wars in that region the last 30+ years.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2021 20:58
|
|
|
Nenonen posted:I suspected so and sorry if my trying to sound funny came off as hostile, it's just a little peeve of mine that the Iran-Iraq war was the original Gulf War, then the Kuwait war thing started being called that, then people started calling the 1990 and 2003 wars Gulf War 1 and 2, respectively. Oh no I get it, that's why I'm legitimately wondering if "Persian Gulf War" is still the correct name for it. Anyway it's a war that's always fascinated me because it felt like the peak of US diplomatic and military power being used while it's Cold War adversary is literally disintegrating. But it's hard finding modern write ups about it. Searching Amazon at first glance there isn't much. And the only documentary I can find of note is a PBS Frontline documentary from 1995. To agree with Cessna it was a huge deal at the time. One of my earliest memories is watching CNN with my parents while Baghdad gets lit up with tracers the night the aerial war started. I was far too young to understand what was happening, but its a memory I still have.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2021 21:22
|
|
|
Its mind-boggling to me that we went from being perhaps over-prepared for Gulf War 1/ Desert storm with predictions of a months-long campaign, mass casualties, or even getting bogged down into an Iran-Iraq war level stalemate. To the run up to the 2003 War when Rumsfeld was up there telling us how easy it was all going to be, that needing a 100,000 troops was probably still too many, and that everyone would be home in a few months. It's a good thing that Iraq was defeated so easily in 1991 but onth sure does seem like it created a sense of overconfidence especially among the neo-cons that would cause disaster not a mere 10 years later.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2021 15:25
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:I mean, again, it was defeated pretty easily the second time around too. The problem was the occupation, which is a separate matter. Yea this is true. I remember reading articles at the time that figured Saddam would pull his Republican Guard divisions into and around Baghdad for a "Battle of Berlin" style final stand where the US would have to then fight street-by-street. No one expected the Iraqi military to just melt away and Saddam to go into hiding and Baghad fell without much of a fight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_(2003) Of course, the Iraqi military melting away was a double-edge sword as they took all their weapons with them. And the weapons that were left, were left unguarded in barracks and depots that were cleaned out and used to fuel the initial stages of the insurgency. Solaris 2.0 fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Mar 31, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2021 16:24
|
|
|
Alchenar posted:If only there were some sort of historical example of Western nations invading a fascist regime, occupying it, and then in short order rebuilding all the institutions and establishing self government. I might be completely wrong on this, so forgive me, but ironically wasn't Bremmer trying to follow the Allied Denazification process? The problem being defeated Nazi Germany 1945 does not = defeated Ba'athist Iraq 2003. The situations and conditions in both of those nations and times were wildly different. Solaris 2.0 fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Mar 31, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2021 19:47
|
|
|
Even if the Spring offensive captured Paris I don’t think that ends the war and the exhausted Germans are probably thrown back in the inevitable Allied counter-attack. Germany itself then still collapses in revolution and faces the Allied 100 days offensive. It’s just all this happens in Spring 1919 instead of fall 1918. Solaris 2.0 fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Apr 2, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Apr 2, 2021 18:15
|
|
|
zoux posted:https://mobile.twitter.com/NinjaEconomics/status/1379509214066933764 The “Gulf of Hate” is actually pretty spot on. *edit* lol they just tossed on “Bismarck” SD which is an actual city.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2021 00:11
|
|
|
Embers of War by Fredrik Longevall is another must read if you are interested in the Indochina War. Basically, yes there were units of Japanese Army soldiers who sided with the Viet Minh in late 1945-early 1946 because, honestly, gently caress France. In fact when the surrender documents were signed, the IJA forces basically let the Viet Minh "loot" the French colonial arms caches. Also the French never used metropolitan troops (regular army troops from France) during the war as they didn't want to admit to fighting a full-scale colonial war. So they used Foreign Legion and Colonial Troops from all over, including Algerians, Moroccans, Senegal, ect. However by not going all in the French really could only hold the major cities and the Red River Delta region for most of the war. Also in the aftermath of the communist takeover of China the US began to get more and more involved and by 1954 was basically funding most of the war, even "lending" the French aircraft, ships, and all sorts of military equipment, some flown and operated by American "volunteers".
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2021 18:13
|
|
|
Panzeh posted:Sure, so, the first thing to understand about Giap is that almost his entire impact was on the French Indochinese war- once the country got split in half, a lot of shuffling in the Northern camp left both him and Ho Chi Minh in largely ceremonial posts. Giap had more pull than Ho, and had some say in the organization of the PAVN throughout the US part of the war, but they were both relatively marginal figures in terms of actually making strategic or operational decisions at that point. This is all really fascinating thank you. Are the Vietnamese archives mostly closed off or is there on-going research? What I mean is, it seems like there isn’t all that much info on North Vietnamese government decision making during the American War years, and I’m wondering if it’s a lack of access to the archives or a lack of proper translation.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2021 23:56
|
|
|
ThisIsJohnWayne posted:If you want to understand more about what's so challenging about accessing the archives in Hanoi, there's an interview with someone who's done it for a couple decades here; Interview with Pierre Asselin, author of "Vietnam's American War: a History" from the podcast "New books in military history", episode 323 November 18 2019. I'm listening to this podcast now and it is fascinating. It seems like the Vietnamese government is pretty open about access to anything pre-1954 so researching the French Indochina war or the colonial period in general is "easier". But they are a lot more restrictive with what you can access post 1954.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2021 18:12
|
|
|
Lawman 0 posted:I was genuinely unaware that the Japanese had proper landing boats. The only reason I knew this was due to playing way too much Battlefield 1942 back in the day.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2021 01:40
|
|
|
Polyakov posted:CNN's The Cold War has an hour long episode on Korea. Its not in fantastic detail because its only an hour but its good for what it is. (Honestly id reccomend just watching the whole series too). The Cold War series is fantastic because it was made in…1998 I think? So they got to interview a whole bunch of people from the different Cold War eras. Everyone from Russian Civil War vets, to Truman administration officials, to Fidel Castro (!!). Like the World at War series I make a point to rewatch it every 5 years or so.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 20, 2021 14:01
|
|
|
FastestGunAlive posted:Just gonna leave this here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yndRSqA69Kc I thought this show was…not good. For a show called “Das Boot” it had basically no Uboat combat instead focusing on a convoluted plot where the uboat crew mutiny against the captain, throw him off the boat, and he ends up in….New York City???  The resistance side plot was a little more interesting if nothing special.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2021 23:38
|
|
|
Question for the thread. Was the US Navy prepared to decommission some of it's ships in preparation for Downfall - the idea being to free up crew to be transferred to the Army and trained/used as infantry? Supposedly my Grandpa on my fathers side stated he was slated to be transferred to infantry to be used for the invasion. He served on a Destroyer Escort, but given how intense the Kamikaze and submarine attacks were supposed to be by the Japanese, I highly doubt the US Navy was prepared to decommission some of their most important screening ships so their crews could be tossed into a meatgrinder on land. Unfortunately my Grandpa died in the 90s, my Grandmother a few years after that, and my father passed away a few years ago - so I don't have anyone to ask to clarify that story. Searching online doesn't yield anything.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2021 17:07
|
|
|
Iirc during the Berlin offensive Soviet units took any liberated POWS they got (that were in a condition to fight), gave them a rifle, and threw them immediately into battle. But yea this wasn’t always the case and Penal Battalions (and the horror that comes with) were a thing.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2021 14:32
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 07:20 |
|
|
Cythereal posted:The biggest issue, fundamentally, isn't whether the Nazis would be able to figure out anything from any given piece of a modern tank. It's that reproducing them, even if they were to try to black box cargo cult it, would have been functionally impossible. German industry during WW2 struggled at the best of times, and modern tanks are built with a lot of very fancy metallurgy and precision machining that Nazi Germany would likely have been simply incapable of replicating even if they understood what they were looking at. Now give the Americans an M1 Abrams in 1942 to to tinker with. 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2021 15:19
|
|