|
bewbies posted:Mid-century steel armor was very effective, and still would be against a variety of threats. Every WWII-era battleship would absolutely laugh off the USN's current anti-ship missile (except maybe Bismarck's amusingly thin deck armor? It'd probably still be fine). Also something to bear in mind for these discussions is that you don't have to sink a ship to effectively kill it. None of the Japanese carriers at Midway, for example, were actually sunk by the Americans. They were gutted and reduced to drifting, burning hulks, but none of them sank until the IJN scuttled them. Ships are generally designed to float above all other design considerations, and it tends to take something severe to make them stop floating. But you can render a ship completely useless and fit only for the scrap yard without seriously compromising the ship's ability to float.
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2020 17:27
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 17:18 |
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:So many posts about length and seamen and hogging and no one is gonna say anything? The Navy is all about rum, sodomy, and the lash. And no one drinks rum anymore.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2020 19:56
|
|
|
Greg12 posted:Were there plans to strengthen it? Yep. It was one of the proposed ways of dealing with Japan: enforcing a much tighter blockade, planting so many mines in the internal waterways of the Home Islands you could walk from one end to the other without getting your feet wet, and just letting Japan starve to death. The existing blockade didn't have the full effort of the USN behind it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2020 19:00
|
|
|
Ice Fist posted:Which is really saying something, considering how effective US anti-shipping efforts were. Operation Starvation also proposed taking Formosa/Taiwan in most permutations, to give the sub fleet an even closer base to Japan for resupply.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2020 20:35
|
|
|
I checked The Sleepwalkers, and another big part of German fears of Russia around that time were due to Russia's strategic interests getting increasingly boxed in in the 1910s. Japan had firmly blocked off the Far East for Russia, and the Anglo-Russian Convention curtailed any attempt by Russia to go south. Coupled with the Franco-Russian Alliance, Germany at the time believed that Russia had only one direction left for expansion and that was west into German and Austrian spheres of interest - doubly alarming given the Russian infrastructure improvements, huge population, and apparently explosive economic growth. German geopolitical planners were very afraid that Russia's enormous growth and military improvements were aimed directly at Germany for lack of anywhere else to direct them, and the feeling that Austria was Germany's only real ally left.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2020 15:08
|
|
|
Trin Tragula posted:I think the point is the [citation needed], though: how is it that we know what Zee Chermans were supposedly thinking? People talk. And write. And there are records of these things. Also, we're specifically talking about the time of Kaiser Wilhelm, who was, uh, not the most reticent or secretive guy in the world.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2020 15:14
|
|
|
CommonShore posted:"Everybody hates us. Better start a war!" Germany didn't start WW1. They told Austria that it should crush Serbia for killing Franz Ferdinand and Germany would support Austria in that endeavor. Problem is, Russia wanted a strong and powerful Serbia as a lever to weaken Austria and the Ottoman Empire to expand Russia's influence into eastern and southeastern Europe, ideally with long-term plans of seizing the Bosphorus to link the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. So Russia backed Serbia, Germany backed Austria, and things went downhill from there. Note that Russia was the first of the major powers to mobilize for war against another of the major powers. Germany mobilized in response to Russia.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2020 16:30
|
|
|
Edgar Allen Ho posted:So what you're saying is yes, Germany started the war. Personally I'd say Serbia and Russia did.  I think the "Germans started the war!" thing is a self-aggrandizing myth from the victorious powers unwilling to take a hard look at the consequences of their geopolitical power games. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Dec 27, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2020 17:15
|
|
|
steinrokkan posted:Austria-Hungary didn't "fail" to accept the capitulation, they never intended to follow through with the terms of the sham ultimatum to begin with, the fact that Serbia didn't reject the ultimatum outright was just a minor inconvenience. That's a curious way of saying "The Serbian government knew about the plot to kill Franz Ferdinand and refused to admit it, and had a long history of officially denying corruption, revanchist terrorism, and ethnic cleansing in their territories to outside observers." Alchenar posted:A very curious way of letting Germany off the hook for saying to Austria "go kill a bunch of Serbs to feel good about yourself, we're sure you can do it fast enough to settle the matter before Russia gets involved". One of Serbia's primary geopolitical goals was to remove Austria as a major power so they could claim some 'Greater Serbia' that existed only in propaganda.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2020 17:47
|
|
|
steinrokkan posted:Meanwhile plucky little Austria was just peacefully chilling on its ancestral Bosnian clay, in no way provoking the hostility of its neighbours, while the perfidious Serb schemed just around the corner. Oh, you mean the Bosnia that Austria had occupied for twenty years and Serbia's own ally Russia told Austria they could annex - then lied to the world when Austria did just that, calling it an unprovoked act of aggression? One of the hilarious bits from The Sleepwalkers is the documents from the Serbian government calling Franz Ferdinand a grave threat not because he was a militaristic hardliner, but because he was a reformer who threatened to reduce the ethnic tensions inside Austria-Hungary that Serbia was hoping to exploit. As for 'the perfidious Serb scheming just around the corner'... yeah, that's actually a pretty accurate description of early 20th century Serbia and its history through the Balkan Wars. Slim Jim Pickens posted:When you don't understand what "citation needed" means but know exactly which defunct regime to defend How's that Greater Serbia working out for you?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2020 18:14
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:No? It didn't want anyone else to be dominant over the continent, especially the land superpower doing its best to build up a fuckoff huge navy, which is a different statement. And also to contain Russia, which could be an enormous threat to Britain's colonial holdings, especially to India. Containing Russia was the main reason for the Anglo-Russian Convention, hoping to mute the Russian threat via diplomacy.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2020 18:48
|
|
|
Gnoman posted:On a related subject, what warship (excludong unseaworthy boondoggles like the Vasa had the shortest lifespan? Bismarck and Blucher are obvious candidates, but is there anything that was sank quicker? My candidate: CSS Hunley. Lost 21 crew between three separate sinkings.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2020 14:51
|
|
|
Warden posted:So, it's gonna be a while till I'll have enough time and mental energy to finish my effort-posts on how Finland came to be. I dun hosed up and agreed to teach some extra courses, and the next few months are gonna be a bit tough. I can make no promises if and when I find time to do it, but I swear I'll get it done eventually. Sorry about that. It's been really interesting! I love this thread for teaching me a lot about conflicts and historical events I've never heard of.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2021 16:03
|
|
|
best bale posted:someone early in the thread mentioned that there’s been new scholarship in WWI studies since Guns of August was written. Anyone have a list of the “new classics” for wwi? Both broad and narrow focus welcomed The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark is the new standard for a look at how and why WW1 happened. The book ends with the actual declarations of war, but it's the gold standard right now for a detailed analysis of how and why the war happened.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2021 20:06
|
|
|
CommonShore posted:I'm imagining that this had a whole bunch of organic material features that are now gone that made it look entirely different, perhaps like those hats from the 90s that had ridiculously long brims, and then some kind of floppy ears. IIRC, there are references to it being worn over a leather cap at minimum in some historical writing.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2021 20:40
|
|
|
Night10194 posted:What is the stupidest warship design IRL? What is the silliest thing someone actually built in the 20th century and expected to accomplish things as a warship? My submission: the Shinano. Battleship/carrier hybrids just don't work.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 3, 2021 13:38
|
|
|
I just finished my first re-read of Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser, years after the first time I read it. It's still one of the most haunting books I've ever read for all that it's not about war - about weapons and the military, but not exactly war. If you have any interest in the Cold War or the history of nuclear weapons, I cannot recommend this book enough. And probably a bottle of strong booze.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2021 21:20
|
|
|
Polyakov posted:You could but theres not a whole lot of point because what kills ships far more than a hole in them, that with compartmentalisation they are quite well able to survive, is being on fire or having their damage control efforts overwhelmed, even as far back as WW1 with the seydlitz or WW2 with the US CA that lost its front end whose name escapes me, ships dont die to suffering significant flooding or loss of structure. which you want the explosive warhead to produce, on top of the explosive effect in internal spaces which is going to do things like buckle bulkheads, break doors so they arent watertight and rupture water lines to stop you fighting the fires you just started. Ships arent armoured enough to warrant massive armour piercing and have enough redundancy that hitting one thing is unlikely to knock them out. Planes dont really have the same level of redundancy and neither do tanks where spalling from the hit will kill the crew and they only have the one or at best 2 engines and hits to their control surfaces might make them crash. Worth bearing in mind: at Midway, none of the Japanese carriers were actually sunk by US air strikes. Gutted and rendered unusable, yes, but they only actually sank when the Japanese scuttled them. Killing a ship is a different question from sinking a ship, and generally much easier to do.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2021 12:56
|
|
|
The Zero was also pretty lightly armed for an air superiority fighter of the time. Zeroes were very effective against the more lightly built planes of the war, but often struggled to inflict meaningful damage on bombers, Hellcats, and other heavier aircraft.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2021 19:32
|
|
|
VictualSquid posted:Here is the "meaty" paragraph of that article: It sounds plausible to me, with the caveat that the 'planes lost' total probably does not reflect all the planes being physically destroyed. US industry during WW2 was so staggering in scope that it wasn't at all uncommon to take a look at a plane that got damaged in an accident or in combat and just write it off as lost, it's faster and easier to just get a new plane than to repair that one.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 26, 2021 13:10
|
|
|
Panzeh posted:The only Soviet invasions of Japan proper were going to be done because the US asked for it- they'd have to foot all the amphibious and naval capability for it anyway. There's no possibility of the Soviets snatching Japan out from under anyone. This is something a lot of "But the Soviet Union!" types forget. The Soviet Union had zero naval capability to go up against Japan, and even less amphibious capability.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 6, 2021 03:09
|
|
|
SerCypher posted:It ended up being a really big deal. Note that this is still going on today with the private prison industry.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 14, 2021 12:29
|
|
|
PittTheElder posted:Did the US administration (or the Allies at large) ever seriously consider not invading Japan, and just sitting back to let the bombing and blockade do it's thing? Yes, it was called Operation Starvation. It was projected to be even more inhumane and costly to the Japanese people than the atomic bombs.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 7, 2021 23:16
|
|
|
PittTheElder posted:No I know that, I'm just curious if anyone proposed cancelling Downfall and just letting Starvation do it's thing. Yes. It was the plan favored by the Navy, and they wanted to land on Taiwan and turn Taiwan into a giant airbase and sub pen. It was discussed extensively.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 8, 2021 00:38
|
|
|
It's also important to remember that most people outside the Manhattan Project scientists did not regard the atomic bomb as some shocking new weapon or level of atrocity. For the most part, the military saw it as simply a continuation of the strategic firebombing campaigns that already scorched much of Japan's urban centers. The conventional strategic bombing campaign did more damage than the atomic bombs did, and to most of the military personnel involved the atomic bomb was simply a matter of putting an entire bomber flight's payload into one bomber.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 30, 2021 13:30
|
|
|
everydayfalls posted:Briefly interrupting Japan surrender chat to go back to tank in a field chat. Here is a gallery of old tanks and nature reclaiming them. My favorite: 
|
|
#
¿
Aug 30, 2021 17:55
|
|
|
Libluini posted:You're thinking too small. It'll be better to go back and give Kaiser Friedrich a chemo therapy, so he has a chance to survive That or drop a fuel air bomb on London. The Sleepwalkers did an awfully good job of convincing me that British leadership, especially their foreign ministry, thought they were the goddamn master race and other nations only existed as NPCs in the game of the glorious British Empire.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2021 12:41
|
|
|
White Coke posted:So basically giving the Nazis future equipment just helps out whoever beats them. I do wonder what they’d think about any technology that’s derivative of theirs. Aren’t a lot of post-war machine guns based on the MG42? 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.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2021 14:32
|
|
|
More WW2 naval stuff: Anything by James D. Hornfischer is worth a read. Neptune's Inferno (about the Guadalcanal campaign) was already mentioned, but he also did Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors (about the Battle off Samar) and The Fleet At Flood Tide (about Saipan and a broader view of the island hopping campaign, including the atomic bomb).
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2021 14:34
|
|
|
FMguru posted:One of the recent PacWar books (Toll or Hornfishcher, I forget which) had a detailed account of the battle for Manila, which I had only known the vaguest details about previously. It wasn't Hornfischer, unless he came out with a new book since The Fleet at Flood Tide. That book's big land battles it covers are Saipan and Tinian.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 16, 2021 19:57
|
|
|
My favorite "breakthrough tank" design of WW2 was the T28. The Americans built a couple expecting to need a heavily armored assault gun to crack the Siegfried Line, then stopped after two prototypes when they were deemed unnecessary. But there's something about the low, compact profile, center-line cannon, and four treads that make it look more like a science fiction vehicle than something from real life.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2021 03:46
|
|
|
I had a great-great uncle with a similar story, but he was a POW in WW1. U-boat sailor, a ship's cook, got cornered by a destroyer off Canada and surrendered. Wound up in a POW camp in Illinois and liked it so much he came back after the war. According to family legend, part of why that particular camp had no successful escapes was simply the guards showing new prisoners a map of the US, with a map of Europe overlaid on top, and went "You don't know the language, you don't know the customs, everyone knows there's a POW camp here, and this is how far you have to go to make it to the coast - and then you have to cross the Atlantic and get back to Germany. What do you think your chances are?"
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2021 18:36
|
|
|
One of my favorite little details about that kind of thing was that during the Korean War, it was a persistent rumor among the North Korean forces that the Iowas were secretly armed with atomic shells. 16" guns leave big craters.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2021 15:53
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:What is the surrender process for boats like? Usually, declaring over the radio that you're surrendering, lowering all guns to safe position, and sailing towards a port. The country being surrendered to usually sent ships to escort the surrendering vessel in to make sure it wasn't a false surrender.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2022 22:44
|
|
|
Well, poo poo. A big, interesting conversation about one of my particular areas of interest happened while I was asleep.  One of the things I'll add about Japanese carrier construction is that most Japanese carriers were designed with two hangar decks, and sometimes three. Typically, one above the ship's strength deck, and one down in the hull proper. On the one hand, this let Japanese carriers carry a lot of planes. On the other hand, it also drastically complicated ship construction: that's a lot of weight and empty space getting oddly distributed through the ship, and multiple hangar decks also mean multiple elevators, which are major structural weak points and prone to mechanical failure, so you typically want to keep them as few and small as possible. The Japanese use of closed hangars was in part a reaction to the design constraints imposed by this arrangement: all that 'ship stuff' has got to be somewhere, and if a huge volume of the ship's guts is dedicated to hangars, then it makes sense to keep those hangars in the middle of the ship for stability and seakeeping reasons, then clustering the ship stuff around the hangars. American and British carriers did not have this problem, because they did not typically (I believe there were one or two exceptions) build ships with multiple hangar decks. Another problem this multiple hangar deck design introduced was that Japanese carriers were typically slower to fit, deck, and launch aircraft than their counterparts because there's that much more vertical travel on the ship's elevators, and the elevators can only carry so much at a time - and can only move in one direction at a time. This design did let Japanese carriers carry a lot more aircraft than British closed-hangar designs, but also meant that Japanese carriers simply could not afford much in the way of armor. They tended to be very top-heavy designs, and especially the older ships like Akagi were known for their poor seakeeping in rough weather. Later designs like Soryu had much lighter construction across the board, making them far faster and better at seakeeping than the older ships, but also much more vulnerable to damage.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2022 14:57
|
|
|
Scratch Monkey posted:The Japanese proclaimed anti western colonialism as a raison d'etre for their war in east Asia but they very much did not see all Asians as equal. They expected their Asian brothers to fall into their rightful places under Japanese rule as soon as the westerners were gone Just look at Japan's treatment of China and Korea. Japan's goal was very explicitly to become the British Empire 2: Pacific Boogaloo, and they were as mercilessly xenophobic, oppressive, and exploitative of conquered native populations as their role model.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2022 14:39
|
|
|
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2022 14:55
|
|
|
I think someone already mentioned this, but another reason why shotguns were used by the US in WW1 is that they'd already been issued to American infantry, during the Philippine-American War, where they were found to be useful in close-quarters engagements there. So when the US entered WW1, they had already issued, trained with, and used combat shotguns, and found a good use for them. The European powers, who favored the SMG for the same conditions, didn't already have combat shotguns.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2022 13:50
|
|
|
The discord for this thread has enjoyed these, so I thought I'd post them here. I'm friends with a professor who teaches European history at the college I work at, and this is a selection of prompts for term papers that's gotten her some of her most memorable (for good and ill) results:quote:The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 was an intensely controversial diplomatic treaty of the early 20th century, and has remained so among historians to this day. In particular, popular and diplomatic opinion was and is divided as to whether the Convention was primarily aimed at curtailing German growth and expansion, or intended to end the colonial conflicts and potential for war between the United Kingdom and Russian Empire. Discuss the intentions of the Anglo-Russian Convention as perceived by both signatory powers and the practical effects of the Convention in Europe in the context of both the anti-German and anti-Russian interpretations of the Convention, and present a brief argument as to whether the Convention succeeded in its goals. quote:Many works of modern scholarship regarding the First World War assert that the war was fundamentally a response to the Ottoman Empire's decline in power in the 19th and 20th centuries, creating a power vacuum that destabilized politics in Europe, Central Asia, and North Africa. Do you agree with this assessment? Support your argument with at least X works from this semester's required reading list, and at least Y more works of scholarship. Address the Balkans, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, and the British-Russian frontier in Central Asia. quote:Many historians believe that the emergence of a united German state in 1871 was the most significant event in European history in the past two hundred years. Using evidence from at least X of this semester's assigned readings, and at least Y other scholarly sources, take the view of a high-ranking government official in France, Russia, the United Kingdom, or the Ottoman Empire in the year 1871 and assess the likely diplomatic, economic, and military consequences of German unification. Include references to your chosen nation's domestic politics and how German unification was reported in your nation's domestic media.
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2022 18:32
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 17:18 |
|
|
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2022 23:39
|
|