Milhist Thread: Ok, so get this: we name the army groups 1, 2 and 4...

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Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Who wrote the effortpost about Nazi uniforms and why they sucked? One of my favourite things I've seen from this thread, it deserves to be on page one.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2020 21:01

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 18:11

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

How did the allies win world war 2 on the ground when faced with such superior german vehicles and discipline

Because the Germans' nice uniforms made it too difficult to drop their trousers, and they pissed their pants all the time

# ¿ Dec 6, 2020 21:04

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

I found Cessna's excellent uniform posts from two threads ago.

Cessna posted:

It's a baggy cotton duck (Edit: with increasing rayon/synthetic content as the war goes on) smock with elastic at the waist and wrists.

It's reversible. One side has "Spring" colors (brown, green, black) and the other has "Fall" colors (brown, orange/brown, black).

The reversibility is silly. The smock has built-in pockets which turn inside-out to reverse with fully sewn flaps and buttons on both sides - but the pockets are situated under the Y-strap suspenders and gear so it's hard to get to them.

Best of all, the smock goes on OVER the regular wool feldgrau (field grey) uniform. Remember how I talked about the internal suspenders and aluminum hooks earlier? That's just part of it. A Wehrmacht feldbluse is a ridiculously complex garment. For comparison, a modern men's suit has about 20-25 pieces of cloth cut and sewn together. A feldbluse has over 80 - yes, 80 - pieces of cloth cut to pattern and sewn together, and that does not count the insignia. Every feldbluse - EVERY ONE - was tailored to the individual wearer. Yes, tailored.

Check out the chest pockets, for example. This is an early-war feldbluse:

Look at how the pockets have that curved scallop flap and the folded bellows design. That's not easy to make. By 1943 they had simplified the design to a simple patch-pocket, like this:

But here's the thing - they put all of that work into sewing MILLIONS of those pockets. Cutting the wool, folding it, sewing it on, attaching the pebbled metal buttons... But when you put on that camouflage smock you can't get to the pockets. They're useless. Put on the smock and you can't get to the internal suspenders and hooks either.

They sewed millions and millions of those complex pockets - and millions of the complex internal suspenders, and internal linings, and made hooks - and all of that was useless, wasted cloth and labor.

And, again, the answer is "because Nazis."

Cessna posted:

I've had my hands on originals, and they're sooooo bad. The smock is that canvas-y duck material. It does NOT breathe at all; it's like a canvas trash bag. So your Nazi soldier is wearing:

- a ribbed sleeveless ("wife beater") undershirt.
- a "service shirt." This is sort of like a cotton men's dress shirt, but thicker and longer - that is, it hangs down well below the waist.
- a wool "feldbluse." Scratchy thick wool.
- that canvas-duck smock.
- leather field gear and equipment.

It's a mess - way too hot in the summer, nowhere near enough to stay warm in the winter. Nothing is waterproof. It all smells like wet dog.* The WWII gear I'm most familiar with is US, and it is a generation ahead of the German crap.

* Sometimes you can read WWII memoirs where they talk about going out on patrol and finding Germans by smelling them. "I could just smell the Nazis." Before I did reenacting I thought this was an exaggeration, a soldier's hyperbole. Having done reenacting, it's totally legit. Get that wool uniform and leather field gear wet and it smells like wet dog. It's a really distinctive smell. I can easily imagine if you get a company of troopers wet, and add in tobacco and maybe a cooking fire and you could smell them hundreds of yards away.

[Considering what 1940s industrial tailoring was like, do you know how much of this was finished by hand?]

The smock wasn't. The feldbluse was. I have never seen a WWII German feldbluse (the solid green/gray wool jackets) without some sort of tailoring.

If it means anything, they had unit tailors assigned as a section at the battalion level. Yes, this is insane.

(I always picture a battalion being overrun by T-34s while their sewing section commander yells "Sew faster, Hans! Faster!")

[How did the same people who tailored every feldgrau jacket to every grunt not realize it's impossible to not look like bill clinton c. 1993 in a windbreaker]

All of their stuff looks weird.

[Does this mean that if you were wearing an ss smock over a standard-issue feldgrau jacket you had to take off literally every piece of gear you had to take a poo poo, or do the pants go up and down without engaging with the hook assemblage?]

And the trousers - regular uniform trousers - were held up by their own suspenders, which needed unbuttoned as well.

Hey, if it means anything, their early-war paratroopers had it worse. Their Fallschirmjagers (paratroopers, and I'm too lazy to put the umlaut over the "a") were set up to jump from low altitudes. They wore a distinctive jumper-outfit over their gear, the idea being that it would keep their gear from snagging on anything parachute-related when they jumped.

Guess what? There's sort of a fly opening, but if you want to poop, you have to take off your entire uniform:

Cessna posted:

[what dye and mordant did they use, i might be able to tell if that would have happened]

I don't know the exact dye or color-fasting process off-hand, but I have reference books I can check when I get home tonight.

I DO know that:

- they were manually screen-printed early in the war. Later in the war they switched to machine printing. Some variants had some colors (i.e., the black sections) applied by rollers after the cloth was already dyed. Not all do this, but it is interesting when you catch it.

When you've looked at this stuff for a long time you start seeing where the camouflage pattern repeats itself. In some patterns the green/brown "repeats" at a different rate/in different places than the black. They dyed the cloth with the green and brown, then applied the black in a separate process.

- There were many different varieties of this camouflage. Some used three colors of dye, with areas overlapping to produce the effect of having more colors. On this smock, for example, you can see where the green and light brown overlap at the edges to give a dark brown effect:

- The priority item they made was a thing called a "zeltbahn." This is a triangular section of cloth that is sort of like a half-tent; lace two together and you have a tent. You can also use a single section as a poncho. You can also lace multiple sections together to make even bigger tents.

Here's the crazy part. Some variants of the camouflage were numbered. 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, etc. The idea was that if you lace together the appropriate matches, number-wise, the camouflage pattern on the tent will be continuous, without any breaks or places where the camouflage doesn't line up perfectly.

Like so. This is a reproduction, but you can see the join:

(You can find period photos of this, but in black-and-white you can't see it as well.)

But here's the thing. Say the camouflage doesn't line up perfectly. So what? No one will notice. It's not like an enemy is going to suddenly see your tent because the camouflage lines up 6" off. This is a nightmare of unnecessary complication.

- The pieces of cloth that were left over were stitched together to make the smocks and helmet covers. Sometimes you can find odd numbers stamped in odd places, like so:

This doesn't mean that the guy with this helmet is "Number 6," rather, the cloth was cut from a roll of the #6 cloth I described above. The smocks and helmet covers were made from scraps, and it shows. I have never seen a single one that didn't have some sort of sewing "error" on it - where the camouflage pattern lines up wrong, where there's a bit of "spring" cloth on the "fall" side or vice-versa, where the sewing is just awful, etc. This stuff was made by people who were starved and working at gunpoint, and it shows.

Cessna posted:

[holy loving hell! i'm remembering all those holocaust survivor testimonies where the old hands sneak up behind the author during intake and whisper to them "tell them you're a tailor" and it saves their life! i thought just yeah, useful skills, pretend to have useful skills, but there was a specific reason the SS wanted tailors]

The SS was, in many ways, a self-contained empire.

Those camouflage smocks were sewn by the inmates of concentration camps. If you could use a sewing machine you might survive a bit longer.

Ever see photos of the Warsaw uprising of 1944?

These are Polish fighters. They are wearing Waffen-SS camouflage smocks and helmet covers.

When the Warsaw Uprising started one of the first things they did was liberate the nearby Gęsi�wka concentration camp. That camp used inmates to, among other things, make the camouflage cloth and sew it into shelter-sections, smocks, and helmet covers.

The Polish Home Army liberated the camouflage and used it themselves.

Cessna posted:

[germans! ]

They had bellows-sewn buttoned pockets on a shirt inside a tunic which had bellows-sewn buttoned pockets that was itself inside a smock that made all those pockets unreachable, and that smock itself had reversible buttoned pockets that were stuffed under the field gear.

The Aristocrats!

Cessna posted:

No, sorry...

Here's how [Stahlhelms] were bad.

First and foremost, they weren't adjustable. No, really - you had to get one that was the right size for your head, like a hat. They came with 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, or 62 cm liners and corresponding shell sizes. You could not swap a different sized liner into a non-corresponding shell. Think that makes logistics easier?

Helmets were made in multiple stages with multiple mechanical presses. It took multiple individual presses to give the helmet its shape. These are WWI helmets, but the same process was followed in WWII:

There was no real assembly line - a worker would make one press, then put it on a pile. After the pile was high enough the next worker would take the helmets and carry them to the next press. This is confirmed by multiple photos of factories:

The edges were then press rolled by hand. They were also heat-tempered on the front of the helmet. This wasn't done with a huge industrial oven - there are photos of workers grabbing individual helmets with a big steel set of tongs and sticking them in an open furnace. Rivets for ventilation, the liner, and the chin strap were pressed in by hand. They were also spray-painted by hand, not on an assembly line.

After the helmets were painted they were given an individual paper wrapper to make sure the paint wasn't scuffed before it was issued. Think about that for a minute. Here are helmets being wrapped:

Each helmet had two decals (until 1940), again, applied by hand. If you've ever built a model airplane, imagine having to apply thousands of decals all day long:

The liner consisted of five leaf-springs wrapped with a leather liner which was, yes, sewn in by hand. This took a LOT of specialized labor. Here's a photo of a helmet liner. (Not my helmet, but I can take a photo of one of mine if anyone is interested.) You can see the rolled rim pretty well. See that stitching on the seam in the back? Done by hand.

Here's a Fallschirmjager/paratrooper's helmet. See that stitching across the liner? Hand sewn.

In contrast, an American/British/Russian helmet was hot-stamped. This made the helmet in one step and tempered it. Each step after that was automated, done by assembly line. And helmets had adjustable liners, so any soldier could wear them.

By 1942/3 the Germans stopped rolling the edges, dropped the decals, and simplified the manufacturing. Too little, too late.

Cessna posted:

[this is the most German poo poo of all time]

Right up there with the Battalion level tailors are the helmet wrappers.

"What did you do in the war, daddy?"

"I was a helmet wrapping supervisor, I made sure that all helmets were wrapped properly in individual paper wrappers and that all of the corners were folded properly before they were shipped to the supply depots."

Cessna posted:

The stahlhelm - and so help me, now I prefer the term "naughty German helmet" - WAS a bad way to go. It required vastly more labor to produce, and it wasn't really that much better than comparable helmets of the time.

So, you're in charge of allocating resources and manpower. Would you rather employ:

- One soldier with a really good helmet (that still won't stop a rifle bullet) and a helmet-wrapper-supervisor.

- Two soldiers with good helmets.

Cessna posted:

In 1939 the Iron and Steel Specialty Division of the Third Reich Research Council (don't make me type it out in German) tested a bunch of helmets from other countries, some captured, some purchased pre-war. They found that none of the helmets were ideal for protection or ease of manufacture. In 1942 they designed a new helmet that had really good ballistic protection and was easy to make. This was initially designed "on the down low," but the design was so good that they decided to show off the results to Hitler. Hitler liked it, but vetoed production because it didn't look German enough.

This was the helmet that post-war became the standard East German helmet. It looks a bit funny, but it was just as good at being a helmet - maybe even a bit better than the "naughty German" helmet - and it was vastly easier to produce. Check it out, it is one hot-stamped piece of steel, essentially a "naughty German" helmet adapted to be built using American or Soviet manufacturing techniques:

But, again, it was not put into production because it didn't look German enough.

Cessna posted:

[https://www.tankarchives.ca/2017/08/whose-helmet-was-better.html]

[Obvious caveats apply, of course.]

From that report:

"When shooting with a rifle at 800 meters using a mod. 1908 bullet (counting all hits), Soviet helmets were penetrated 7.7-10% of the time, and German helmets were penetrated 34.5% of the time. The PPSh penetrated German helmets 41.4% of the time, but Soviet helmets only 11.5-11.7% of the time. The TT could penetrate German helmets 38.8% of the time, compared to 12.4-13% for Soviet helmets. Even the Nagant could penetrate German helmets 29% of the time..."

Okay, let me revise my question above.

So, you're in charge of allocating resources and manpower. Would you rather employ:

- One soldier with a mediocre helmet and a helmet-wrapper-supervisor.

- Two soldiers with good helmets.

Cessna posted:

The rationale was that they didn't want the "little guy/big helmet" look, so their soldiers wouldn't end up looking like Dark Helmet from Spaceballs. And it goes back to the "tailored" mentality behind uniforms.

Look at those SS smocks - remember how I said that the actual manufacturing of the smocks was pretty crappy, while the wool uniforms were tailored? That's because those weren't viewed as the real uniforms. They were something that you put on over a uniform, but took off when you were marching in front of the cameras on a parade. You went to war in your dress uniform, but covered it with a camouflage smock. Once the fighting was over you took off the smock, prettied up your uniform, and stomped around in parades. That was the ideal.

That's great if you know you can count on victories like 1938/1939/1940. You want a quick campaign, maybe even one without a fight (1938), followed by a snappy-looking parade in front of the cameras for propaganda. Your soldiers will look good in the newsreels.

But in a serious war, like what they faced against the UK/USA/USSR? Forget it.

Cessna posted:

[honestly my takeaway from this all this uniform chat is that fashion considerations play a larger role in military uniform design than most people realize]

YES. Fashion is HUGE. It's all about sending a message.

The Nazis "focus grouped" their uniform designs in 1935/36. They brought in groups of young women and had them evaluate potential uniforms for attractiveness.

Like I said above, think about what a Wehrmacht uniform is designed for - to look good in propaganda films. Combat effectiveness was not a consideration until 1941 or so, and ease of production didn't come into play until after that. Compare a 1918 uniform to a 1940 uniform:

1918:

1940:

The 1940 uniform is tighter. It is more tailored. This makes it look sharper and cleaner - again, it looks better on parades, more streamlined and modern - but the fact is that a baggy uniform is more practical in combat.

The 1940 uniform has much more complex insignia. Look at the collar - they all have "Litzen," those little bars on the collar. In WWI these were only for "Guards" - that is, elites. In WWII all soldiers had them, the message being "you're all elites now."

(As an aside, sewing that litzen is horrible. You have to fold the cloth, sew it to a backing, then sew that to the collar. It's miserable.)

The 1940 buttons are shinier, there are complex pockets. Again, this is to look good, not for combat practicality or ease of manufacture.

It's all about sending a message - these soldiers are going to fight a fast, decisive, modern war, then look good in the victory parade.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2020 21:48

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Would it have been a factor that most muskets in the 17th century were not rifled, unlike 19th century muskets? Unrifled pistols would be relatively worse by comparison.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2020 09:37

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

White Coke posted:

Someone, please post pictures of over engineered sharpened sticks.

German.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2020 02:45

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Schadenboner posted:

Was this the guy who insisted that this pattern of rifling was superior against the "savage races"?

I think that was the Puckle gun, which had square bullets for use on non-Christian targets.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2020 04:22

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Cessna posted:

In my experience German groups are split between:

(A) People who are big History nerds who just want to get into things and don't care who they dress like.
(B) People who are into German gear because they built too many Panzer models when they were kids.
(C) Assholes who want a Fourth Reich.

I was in group A, and in retrospect that was too much. And the fact that there's too much (that is, any) of B or C just completely ruins it.

I'm automatically leery of anyone who collects more Nazi memorabilia than other countries of WWII. A reenactor with an American, Russian, and German uniform is dedicated. A reenactor with a Wehrmacht uniform, an SS uniform, and no others is a neo-Nazi until proven otherwise.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2020 19:16

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

poisonpill posted:

Is there any way to win a war without air support, or is it possible to lose a war when you dominate the airspace? If not, the most recent posts are making it look like that was a huge reason for the outcome of WWII. So what changed? Why did Vietnam, OEF, etc. not really depend on airspace? Or am I missing something here?

Wars have some kind of goal. The Allies' goal in World War II was, roughly, to stop Germany from being a threat. That can be accomplished by burning their cities from the air, although they needed a ground occupation afterwards. A war like Vietnam where the goal is to establish a new form of government and change the hearts and minds of the people is different. You can't win that war by dropping napalm from the skies, although the Americans certainly tried their hardest.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2020 02:35

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Did the Nazis ever strafe an inflatable army and uncover the ruse?

# ¿ Dec 19, 2020 00:49

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

I stood too close to a cannon when I was 12; a 16-pounder firing a quarter charge. I wanted to see it up close so I snuck under the safety rope at the last moment. Now my friends have to tap me on the shoulder before speaking to me.

Platystemon posted:

Yeah this was some Franklin Armory bullshit they introduced at Shotshow 2018. Didn’t work well and didn’t fool ATF.

What loophole was it trying to use? I've heard stories of convicted felons being allowed to possess smoothbore black powder pistols, was this playing with the definition of "smoothbore"?

# ¿ Dec 24, 2020 04:35

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

The Lone Badger posted:

I believe the US did what it did because their ludicrous industrial capacity meant that once on a war footing they were producing more materiel than they were capable of using.

I read 112 Gripes About The French and it states patriotically that every rifle in French hands is an American away from the frontlines. The same is true of tanks and Soviet tank drivers.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2021 06:25

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Nessus posted:

Would the V1 have qualified as a cruise missile as we understand them? I thought it was essentially a highly specialized aircraft but you could have, in theory, put a guy with a joystick in front.

Cruise missiles are essentially specialized aircraft that can only do kamikaze attacks. An engine, wings, some kind of guidance, and a cargo of explosives.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2021 23:08

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Molentik posted:

That was U-1206.

The sub sank near the coast of Scotland, did they get picked up by the Royal Navy pretty much right away? Or did they perhaps row to shore?

# ¿ Feb 19, 2021 01:50

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

To what extent is sheer mass the most important factor for armour? I was under the impression that it's a huge part of performance against a high-speed slug, whereas more sophisticated materials are more important for something like HEAT.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2021 23:39

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

zoux posted:

Here's one, what's the stupidest way a head-of-state or monarch has died in combat

Emperor Carus. Struck by lightning after being warned by an oracle that starting a war during a lightning storm was a bad omen.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2021 19:58

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

EggsAisle posted:

I remember in late 2001 hearing about a Taliban offer to set up a duel to the death between Bush and Blair and Omar with AK-47's in a mountain pass or something. No idea if there's any degree of truth to that, or if it's on a similar level to bin Laden's secret underground supervillain lair.

As a kid, I wished world leaders would just murder each other at the UN instead of going to war. As an adult, I still think it would be a better system than the one we have.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2021 11:34

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Just a real-life version of this comedy sketch: Moving The Border

# ¿ May 5, 2021 05:03

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

What happened to North American trade and communication networks during and after the epidemics caused by European contact? I know that smallpox spread through these networks much faster than Europeans could travel, did they collapse at some point in the Great Dying or did long-distance trade between Indigenous nations continue?

# ¿ May 21, 2021 08:32

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Milo and POTUS posted:

Crosspost since I think it's relevant

This is great, thank you. My grandpa never talked about his time in the Navy - I think he felt bad about being removed from combat duty after they found out he was actually 15. He's listed in the records I found as having no home address, which is interesting.

Chamale fucked around with this message at 07:16 on May 29, 2021

# ¿ May 29, 2021 07:09

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

PittTheElder posted:

Don't let the public image fool you, Canada was and is racist as poo poo. Culturally we mask it under feigned politeness and an enormous amount of passive-aggression.

As mentioned we absolutely interned our own Japanese descended population. But also, take a guess as to when the Canadian government stopped conducting an active genocide against native peoples! Did you guess 1996? Because oh boy is it ever still a problem here. Alternatively, can you guess which province conducted a eugenics program until <checks notes> 1972??

That's not accurate, the genocide didn't stop in 1996. Forcible sterilizations of Indigenous women officially stopped in 2018. The foster care system still takes Indigenous children away from their parents at least ten times more often than white children. Those 215 children found in the mass grave near Kamloops? Some of their murderers are still alive. I'd be surprised if anyone gets convicted.

Bringing it back to milhist, what does modern battlefield archaeology look like? Some historians in Alberta are hoping this news leads to more funding to study the sites of some late 19th century battles and massacres.

# ¿ May 31, 2021 12:02

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

ChubbyChecker posted:

i wonder if some dude in the spirit of the age of enlightenment ever calculated how reliable it was?

Up to 1 in 5 were duds, according to this article about a man who died in 2008 while trying to clean a naval shell from the Civil War.

Civil War cannon shells had an innovation called a Bormann fuse. The cannonball was filled with gunpowder and shrapnel, and plugged with a metal disk. This disk contained gunpowder that burned at a predictable rate, with the burn time on it, so the artillerymen would use an awl to punch a hole and set the fuse to explode in 1 to 5 seconds. The cannonball could explode in front of enemy soldiers and effectively become grapeshot, which was much deadlier than a single heavy iron ball.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2021 08:15

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

My social studies told me that some people stopped going to work during the crisis because it seemed pointless when the world was about to end. That was so striking, it's one of the things that got me interested in history.

Nenonen posted:

The real losers were some Soviet missile troops personnel who had been promised a transfer from Bumfukgrad, Siberia to Cuba.

One of the first things that tipped off the Americans was satellite photos showing an unusual number of soccer fields near a Cuban military base. Cubans play baseball, Russians play soccer.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2021 20:20

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

ZombieLenin posted:

The thing is though, from my perspective as a living breathing human, actually engaging in that profession seems batshit crazy. Then again, so does engaging in the profession these photographers are documenting.

This reminds me of the earlier discussion about whether soldiers would enlist in the military if they knew the odds of dying (which gave us our current thread title). I've read that among elite athletes, there's a disproportionate number of extreme optimists who believe that they can take risks and everything will turn out fine for them. I suspect the same is true among soldiers and war photographers.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2021 20:56

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

The Nazis murdered millions of Jews, Poles, and Soviets. Did the planners of the Holocaust ever cite religious justifications, since Germany is largely Protestant, or was it all based on Nazi ideas about race?

# ¿ Aug 5, 2021 22:37

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

OPAONI posted:

I mean.... a limited nuclear exchange did happen and was part of forcing the receiving side to surrender. It probably only worked due to the unique historical context of the end of the war in the pacific, but it did happen.

Absolute madness to suggest it would have worked if Japan also could drop a nuke on the US.

"Nuclear exchange" implies that both sides are dropping nukes on each other.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2021 13:49

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

There's a good conversation to be had about art that uses military themes, whether it's anime, film, books, or video games. I think it's a mistake to treat war as an apolitical struggle between Side A and Side B - their motivations will always be relevant to the war. It also leads to a tendency to idolize the coolest weapons or bravest soldiers with no consideration for other factors at play. This problem is especially common in video games, since they have less dialogue and more shooting, but it comes up in war movies as well.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2021 05:30

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Raenir Salazar posted:

100% agreed. Video games are in particular interesting in terms of the problem, like you have Wolfenstein which does a good job at explaining why the Nazi's are bad through its storytelling and mechanics; but then you have games like Battlefield which uh, have a much weirder approach especially in the multiplayer which plays into the Side A vs Side B problem.

Enlisted is a multiplayer-only game that seems to have accidentally done a great job on this. Veteran players have access to better equipment than new players. The Allies are more popular than the Axis, so new players start by default on the Nazi side (until they click a button, between games, to join the Allies). As a result, battles in Berlin 1945 involve experienced Red Army players with submachine guns fighting new players with WWI rifles, and a handful of hardcore Nazis, or at least people who enjoy playing as Nazis in video games. It's intriguing, and in a sense it's much more realistic than a typical video game where both sides are supposed to have an equal chance of winning.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2021 06:19

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

FPyat posted:

I'm pretty sure it was confirmed that the wehraboo in question, who goes by TheJamesRocket on other sites, is an honest to god fascist trying to "hide his power level."

It turns out that if you think racial purity and Aryan willpower are more important than logistics, you make incredibly bad decisions about war. That's a recurring theme of this thread.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2021 18:16

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Didn't Chinese partisans occasionally resort to raiding museums for weapons in WWII? I vaguely recall reading, probably in this thread, about Japanese troops ambushed with bronze swords and Zhuge crossbows.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2021 22:57

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

SerCypher posted:

Some properly equipped troops also carried swords, since there were millions of them floating around China still. I doubt they came from museums, but instead old stockpiles, or under peoples floorboards. There were apparently lots of cheap sabres stamped out during the boxer rebellion for example.

That makes sense, thank you. Maybe I read the phrase "museum piece" to describe those weapons and then misremembered it later. I get that the main utility of such a weapon, like the unsuccessful Liberator pistol, was to attack a soldier and take his rifle.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2021 01:56

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

bewbies posted:

Is "Das Boot" on Hulu worth watching? I like submarines but hate bad romance subplots.

I'm pretty sure this post logic-bombed the thread, I see I was not alone in my confusion. I googled to see if Hulu has a terrible cut or something, and that's how I learned about the new TV series.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2021 18:37

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

What was the briefing like for the pilots who flew the atom bomb missions? I assume they were told exactly what to expect, did any of them ever write what they were told and if it included any mention of the enormous project that went into making the bombs?

# ¿ Aug 30, 2021 23:45

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

SerCypher posted:

I guess this blends into today, as I know the .50 M2 hmg has regular, AP, AP incindiary, etc. Is there any reason to not just put AP ammo in every MG all the time?

I can answer this part. AP ammo is less effective against humans because it's designed to penetrate in a straight line. FMJ ammo is designed to tumble when it hits flesh, which creates a larger wound and is more likely to cripple or kill someone.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2021 03:02

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Soviet joke from 1943: The pessimist says the glass is half empty. The optimist says the Americans will create a second front!

# ¿ Sep 2, 2021 22:33

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Xiahou Dun posted:

What’s the distance for a metaphorical knife fight between tanks?

WWII had at least 50 cases of tank ramming , usually leaving both tanks inoperable. Tanks were effective at crushing light vehicles and airplanes. One guy got Hero of the Soviet Union for derailing an armoured train by ramming it in a T-34.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2021 18:55

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

In Louisiana, the life expectancy of an enslaved person on a sugar cane plantation was seven years. In Haiti it was four years. Life expectancy at birth for Black people in Louisiana was 22, partly due to the 50% infant mortality rate.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2021 02:12

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Carillon posted:

it wasn't simply labor, but skill and knowledge that built financial empires for those who took advantage

There's a fair bit of West African ironwork in the Deep South, because so many blacksmiths were abducted and forced into slavery.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2021 07:00

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

This thread had an anecdote of a Red Army soldier who painstakingly repaired a Sherman tank after the war ended, only for it to be melted down or thrown into the sea or something like that. Can anyone repost it or link it if they remember the story?

# ¿ Sep 24, 2021 04:24

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

I suppose there would have been many of those stories in 1945. Whoever wrote this one had a great sense of comedic timing. It described how this man had to use another tank to tow this Sherman out of a bog, and then he had a large team to disassemble the tank and the engine and scrub the mud off of every part, then he put it back together and proudly watched the engine roar to life, then he accompanied it on a train to Odessa, and then he watched as it was thrown off a pier.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2021 08:24

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 18:11

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Vahakyla posted:

I have never smoked myself, but I didn’t always believe the stories either, really. Until I was OPFOR, crawling to find the blufor pickets, and in the nightly forest I first saw a glimmer of red, then again. And again and I realize it is a cigarette. Was really neat, but definitely alarming to think of all history’s casualties caused by nicotine addiction.

Hundreds of millions from lung disease, maybe thousands from war.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2021 19:52

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Milhist Thread: Ok, so get this: we name the army groups 1, 2 and 4...

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