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Schadenboner posted:Were the sandwiches ruined? *slow camera pan across No Man's land past piles of mangled bodies to close up of muddy, trampled cheese sandwiches. Werner Herzog: Krieg ist die Hölle...
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Dec 11, 2020 18:56
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Xiahou Dun posted:My penis!?!? *theme from Thomas the Tank Engine muffled by Xiahou Sun's trousers.
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Dec 30, 2020 02:35
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Horrifyingly, the Schwarzgerat from Gravity's Rainbow is starting to seem much more reasonable...
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Feb 17, 2021 06:20
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I may have mentioned this ITT before, but Henry II of France died in a jousting accident during a festival celebrating a peace treaty. And to clarify something up thread, that yes, there is a Nostradamus quatrain that is interpreted to have predict his death, century 1 - 35.
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Apr 22, 2021 23:05
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I've been working through Grimm's Fairytales with my 5yo and there's a lot of stories with the "soldier coming back from war, decides to help witch/solve princess mystery/serve devil" trope. Though the recent derail was annoying, many of the responses were interesting in casting light on the psychology of the tales, because the soldier is usually "gently caress it, I made it through war, I can accept the risk."
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Jun 17, 2021 01:32
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Interestingly, there's one where the soldier's farming family refuse to help him out, because soldiering is all he knows. Considering these are German tales, I wondered if it was lingering resentment of farming communities for soldiers from the 30 years war. The stories were oral, of course, and the tropes get all mangled sometimes so it would be next to impossible to tell.
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Jun 17, 2021 02:12
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Cessna posted:This sort of thing shows up in all sorts of different cultures. Russian soldiers at the end of their enlistment (25 years) in the Napoleonic Wars frequently had to resort to begging as they received no pension and knew nothing about farming. Geez, that's pretty bleak. Nice to know mistreatment of veterans has historical precedent. That actually makes the story make more sense because pretty sure the soldier in question overcomes a robber band purely by chutzpah and near suicidal insanity, because he'll die either way.
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Jun 18, 2021 05:10
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MrYenko posted:It’s right here. Many (not all) WWI engines were rotary radial, in which the back of the crankshaft is bolted to the airframe, and the entire engine spins around the crankshaft with the propeller solidly bolted to the front. This essentially requires a total-loss lubrication system, which used castor oil. Knowing little of airplane engines, or engines in general, that seems a bit Wiley Coyote. What's the reasoning with that?
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Jul 19, 2021 07:34
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Space Gopher posted:It was a bit Wile E. Coyote (aerospace frequently is!), but the design solves a specific, difficult problem. Ah, that makes sense. I swear the more I read about avionic engineering, the more I'm amazed any one ever climbed in a plane.
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Jul 19, 2021 17:18
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Vahakyla posted:Probably. But history is full of stories of infantrymen, sailors, and long range recon dudes who had to light one up, and it exposing them. The British writer Saki was killed by a German sniper while hiding in a shell crater. His final words were "put that bloody cigarette out" according to sources. I always wonder if several people quit smoking that day.
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Sep 25, 2021 16:57
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Milton-Bradley's famous board game "Allies" piL posted:Team up as the the United States, United Kingdom and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to defend civilization from, well, that's not important, but work together! Joke aside, I feel that there's a legit game to be made here, maybe the last days of WW2 where players have to co-operate enough to ensure that the Probably some horrid combination of Diplomacy and Risk that has to be played by mail otherwise it just descends into fistfights.
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Oct 11, 2021 18:29
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Ithle01 posted:The first is Churchill Well, gently caress me. That seems to be exactly what I was thinking of. On a more proper milhist note: I was listening to "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" in the car with my 5yo (her pick), and ended having to give a child-safe explanation of warfare in 20th Century Africa and to explain why Roland may not have been the nicest guy. Which made me think - when did the general attitude to mercaneries change? Everyone loves them in Renaissance Italy and into the early modern era. Now - not so much.
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Oct 12, 2021 03:17
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Well when did using them start getting generally frowned upon?
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Oct 12, 2021 04:00
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Valtonen posted:There is a little-known Finnish alternate history / war movie about invading Luxembourg made in the 1980s if I recall- I’m not sure if it will help you or not since it has been a while since I saw it and I doubt it goes into details you need. It is called Kummeli: stories. I wonder if you'd bother physically taking Luxembourg City or just bomb it flat. From memories of being there 20 years ago, it seems like trying to get actual troops into the central city would be pretty difficult.
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Oct 15, 2021 06:30
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Nessus posted:Perhaps if they landed their elite Romanian vampire commandos? Would they be able to invade if they weren't invited? And could anyone invite them, or would it have to be the King?
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Oct 18, 2021 09:46
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Oct 22, 2021 07:34
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Xiahou Dun posted:Linguistics stuff This has been really fascinating, especially the difference between "Taiwanese Mandarin" and "Regular Mandarin". I was in Taiwan, briefly, in 2007 and I obviously heard a lot of guoyo. Later that year I was employed in a casino back in Australia that had a lot of Chinese clientele and was puzzled why I never heard anyone speaking "Mandarin", not being aware of all the stuff you've just elucidated. I later realised that there was a Taiwanese accent and that Mainland "Mandarin" had the exaggerated 'r' sounds - the erhua thing - which I had heard plenty of in the casino, but hadn't realised was 'Mandarin' becuase I was expecting the sound of guoyo. I'm glad I can now put the actual proper nouns to all this and explain the difference without doing a weird, probably racist, impression of the erhua in putonghua.
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Nov 25, 2021 00:27
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Randarkman posted:Obviously the most extreme example of that that comes to mind is the NKVD executioner Vasily Blokhin who basically carried out the entire Katyn massacre by his own hand. He also performed lot of executions during Stalin's purges, like alot of the big ones, Zinoviev, Tuchachevsky, Yezhov, yeah, that was him and he probably did alot of the ones further down the chain as well. I was actually trying to remember Blokhin's name reading the thread prior to your post. Has anyone ever written anything about the psychology of this? I read Lewis Yablonsky's Robopaths years ago, but that was more about low level Einsatzgruppen kind of things. I always wonder if Blokhin was just broken enough to be okay with killing, or whether it was something that had to be done and that doing it himself would ensure it was done quickly with minimal trauma for everyone helping it along.
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Nov 30, 2021 07:37
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PeterCat posted:Reposting this from the "prehistoric and historic Iowa" FB page. 
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Dec 6, 2021 16:34
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ChubbyChecker posted:would watch Spike Milligan was artillery, so there's his war memoirs. Probably a bit more about jazz trumpet than guns though.
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Dec 13, 2021 02:13
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Are OPFOR dedicated wholly to being OPFOR, or do they have regular armed forces jobs when there aren't war games?
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Dec 17, 2021 09:56
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Which propaganda station was popular with soldiers purely because they played the latest jazz records? Am I imagining that anecdote?
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Dec 19, 2021 09:30
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Memento posted:Any electric powered machine gun has a variable rate of fire. The M134 Minigun, and the GAU-8 Avenger, for examples. Wondering whether a dial or slider would be more appropriate for setting the rate.
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Jan 7, 2022 00:25
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Memento posted:On the OH-6 helicopter, which doesn't have door gunners, the pilot controls the rate of fire with the trigger on the cyclic, by pressing it harder for more dakka Before reading the text in the picture, I was "ah, Streetfighter 1 controls then." The Lone Badger posted:Dial, marked 1-11. Nigel Tufnel voice: this is our A-11 Thunderbolt...
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Jan 7, 2022 05:08
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VostokProgram posted:Don't forget that Eastern Poland in the 30s is now part of Belarus. Probably has even fewer indoor toilets than modern eastern Poland Is there any particular historical reason Belarus seems to have come out of the dissolution of the Soviet Union so poorly? I feel that if I read about something being poo poo in Eastern Europe - poverty, crime, etc - it always seems Belarus manages to find a way to make it crappier.
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Jan 9, 2022 04:33
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mllaneza posted:Not the origin of the phrase "a gentleman and a scholar", but I'd say they're closely related - you'd have th best chance at an education with an aristocratic background. I always wondered if it was a slight on scholars, as the gentleman bit indicates being well-mannered.
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Jan 10, 2022 03:58
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In fairness, the history of universities can get pretty brutal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Scholastica_Day_riot
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Jan 10, 2022 08:16
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Comstar posted:There's a gold plated AK47 in the Australian War Museum just hanging around at the end of the "modern military conflicts" area for all to see. When WW3 comes, we'll have a Lancaster, half a Japanese midget submarine and the Red Baron's boots to work with. 
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Jan 16, 2022 06:12
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Xiahou Dun posted:I would like to draw the interest in the torture question to The Report (2019), which is a fictionalized account of how the CIA implemented the torture system and tried to cover it up, through the lens of Adam Driver being a very frustrated FBI agent. Ooh, that sounds interesting. I'll see if it's free on Amazon here. Tomn posted:As it happens, Ex Urbe has a fantastic post about the influence of Beccaria on European ideas about torture and I can do no better than to link her here.. It’s a bit of a long read but well worth it, diving deep into the Enlightenment thinking of the time and how Becarria used it to argue against torture. Thanks, that was a great read!
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Jan 24, 2022 10:19
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Speaking of wartime training films, would anyone have a link to the WW2 US film explaining the various firearms? I remember a scene where they were shooting German helmets through trees with a rifle.
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Feb 28, 2022 08:34
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Siivola posted:I made a playlist of several of these films a while back, it might be in there: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyIShWdwyUtmLI504S34IFXZoIPfcvmtN Oh cool, it is. Infantry Weapons and Their Effects is what I was after. Thanks!
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Mar 1, 2022 18:24
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PittTheElder posted:I hope there was a commissar deployed to supervise such weapons and make sure a comedic slide whistle was played each time it was used Comrade! They heard the funny whistle and are coming this way! Comrade Kholm! Sound retreat! *filthy and battered Soviet veteran sighs as he pulls out his filthy and battered sax...
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Mar 17, 2022 03:07
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Flesnolk posted:How good was military medicine in the early WW2 era, say the end of the 30s going into the 40s? If I'm GI John Doe and I catch a bullet to my hip taking an enemy position, let's say they get me back to a field hospital so I don't just flat out die, a couple years afterwards am I walking around okay, albeit probably with a limp or cane? It would depend when during WW2 you were shot in the hip. The big difference being the availability of antibiotics, specifically penicillin. In 1942, some dude was treated for septicemia, which used half of the available penicillin in the US at the time. By 1944, the US was able to manufacture millions of units a day. Getting shot during or after D-Day would greatly improve your survival chances. It really can't be overstated the difference antibiotics have made in the world. A hundred years ago, you'd be more likely to die from some kind of infection. Now, it's cardiovascular disease or cancer that will get you. A whole bunch of modern surgical techniques and medical procedures depend on antibiotics stopping you dying from infections after you've been cut open or otherwise immunocompromised. Scarily, it's possible that by 2050 we'll be at the end of the antibiotic era due to microbial resistance to antibiotics and the lack of new antibiotics being developed.
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Apr 4, 2022 17:01
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Any pre-modern surgery is terrifying to my weak modern constitution. Romans doing c-sections, amputations, and trepanations and poo poo with nothing more than "here's some wood to bite down on." Yikes, I might just ask for a head amputation instead. I'd be tempted to argue surgery today is likely to be more brutal, at least orthopaedic surgery, thanks to advances in antibiotics, technology, etc. I've seen footage of an old time amputation and I've been an observer in the removal of the prosthetics of a knee replacement. One was swift and kinda elegant. The other was like 2 hours of someone trying to debone a roast pork leg but only having the tools in their garage to choose from. If the person you're cutting up is awake and watching you, I feel you're going to at least try to be a bit more gentle.
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Apr 9, 2022 04:36
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<press briefing outside Beziers, France, 1209 AD> "Uh, Abbott Amalric, my sources indicate that there are still good Catholics in the city as well as the Albigensians. Will this cause any confusion as your forces take the city back?" "That's a good question, Caesarius, and
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Jul 28, 2022 06:35
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G1mby posted:battles_of_the_isonzo_you_can_help_by_expanding_it.jpg "...though Odoacer had 2:1 numerical superiority with his Heruls and Scirians, Theodoric and his Ostrogoths managed to hold them off with frontal assaults after impressive (but short) artillery barrages..." Cessna posted:Navy showers don't flow continuously; they have a little hand-held head with a button on the back that turns on the water. You spray yourself to get wet, then stop the water and soap yourself. Then you spray the soap off. Years ago, I went to the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney, which has the HMAS Onslow, an Oberon class submarine. Nothing has stuck with me more than the tour guide explaining the particular odour submariners would have after 3 months living in a metal tube with a diesel engine and 67 other dudes. And weekly showers, if memory serves. I don't know if its true, but they said they'd just dump the uniforms after a rotation, rather than trying to clean them.
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Aug 2, 2022 01:05
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Gnoman posted:Unlike the land forces, sailors rarely were without the services of a kitchen. It was kind of built into the ship they lived on. They used a lot of canned and dehydrated ingredients, but there would be no point to C-ration style meals in a can (which were only supposed to be used for short-term field use anyway). I've never really thought about it before, but what did kitchen staff and other non-combat roles do on a ship when it went into action?
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Aug 2, 2022 13:11
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VostokProgram posted:Apparently sulfonamide wasn't invented until the 30s. What treatment did battlefield casualties in WW1 and other early 20th century conflicts receive? Was it still just amputation for everything? Good question. A quick google found this paper that talks about all the fun stuff surgeons did in the war: https://www.infezmed.it/index.php/article?Anno=2017&numero=2&ArticoloDaVisualizzare=Vol_25_2_2017_184 The one that jumped out was the use of silver salts for antimicrobial purposes. You can still get silver infused dressings - common dressings like Tegaderm or Mepilex often have an Ag variant. They tend to be saved for things like severe burns though because they're expensive. I'd never heard of it before, but ignipuncture. Its pretty much what it says on the tin.
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Aug 5, 2022 05:40
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Xiahou Dun posted:In the eye. I think that's the more modern use. According to the paper it was used to drain exudate from soft tissue inflammation - there's a photo there with a leg that's been poked several times to illustrate the point. They also used it to probe wounds as incisions were more likely to get infected.
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Aug 5, 2022 09:34
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VostokProgram posted:Apparently sulfonamide wasn't invented until the 30s. What treatment did battlefield casualties in WW1 and other early 20th century conflicts receive? Was it still just amputation for everything? Just to add to this, apparently amputation was pretty common at the start of the war - in the first 6 weeks, there were about 300,000 French casualties with about 20,000 amputations, usually due to infection. The big one was gas gangrene (google that if you hate your eyes), which could be found in 5% of wounds. If you copped a penetrating abdomen wound - oops, enjoy your shock and sepsis. The problem was infection from soil-based bacteria that contemporary antimicrobials were insufficient to deal with. The innovation was Dakin's Solution, which is diluted bleach with sodium carbonate and boric acid. Wounds were kept open and irrigated with the solution, which killed bugs without hurting the flesh. The concentration of bleach, 0.5%, is the strength recommended for household disinfectant, incidentally. There's a lot of interesting medical innovation happening during the war - figuring out anti-coagulants means you can build blood stock for transfusions, there's portable x-rays, traction splints mean you can set fractures - this is especially good for fractured femurs as mortality goes from 80% to 20%. A big one is the birth of modern plastic surgery, meaning reconstructive surgery, with the surgeon Harold Gillies and his team pioneering a lot of the techniques such as grafts while re-building faces for severely injured soldiers. (A non-military aside to this, is that he later became involved in sexual reassignment surgery, having experience rebuilding genitals for injured soldiers and completed surgery for one of the first transmen and the first transwomen in the UK. The former, incidentally, assisted with surgeries for the latter.)
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Aug 5, 2022 13:44
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