feedmegin posted:

Errr, well, for the first, if the UK had sued for peace before the US had entered the war, or shortly after it - Europe would be prohibitively expensive to invade. It was hard enough as it was over the 2 miles or so of the Channel, it would absolutely have been a non-starter from the US East Coast with the RN out of the war. Nobody's invading the US any time soon but by exactly the same logistics there is certainly a scenario where the US isn't invading anyone either. That's before the political impact of 'if the UK has made peace/been defeated, why should we bother?'.

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

BalloonFish posted:

Not at all an area of expertise for me, but my understanding is that the offensive force of Operation Torch was launched from the UK, and the only true trans-Atlantic element were the fast convoys heading straight from the US to North Africa, scheduled to supply the invasion force once it had landed - the convoys carried ammunition, fuel, vehicles and supplies but not units that were embarked in the States and came off the boats in North Africa into action, as was the case for embarking units cross-Channel for Overlord.

Fuschia tude posted:

Don't Europeans consider the Italian invasion of Ethiopia a few years earlier to have marked the actual kickoff of the war?

zoux posted:

Is the "all tankers wear pistols" an actual practical concern or is it a Patton thing

Siivola posted:

Can you guys elaborate a bit? I don't understand how a rondel dagger solves either of these problems.

DTurtle posted:

Wouldn't armor also play a big role with this? I can't imagine a cutting attack working against proper armor, while stabbing (or bludgeoning) should work.

This shows an anti-armor dagger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iU3q23jGX0

Siivola posted:

Okay so my bad, yes, obviously the rondel dagger solves the problem of there being armour in the way.

But there's always been armour in the way, so why invent the armour-piercing dagger a thousand years after the armour that it pierces? How does making the mail bits smaller, or developing gauntlets, make people finally bin their old daggers and buy these new ones? Why is the rondel dagger better at hitting people in the armpits than a busted old quillon dagger? Why does developing gauntlets create an impulse to also develop new daggers?

Alchenar posted:

But in a 21st Century war (if that prompted the comment) then they're probably right - the hard limit for practical purposes on a modern state has swung back to the amount of kit it can acquire rather than the population available.

Tomn posted:

Ah, yeah, I hope you don't mind my bringing it here but I was genuinely uncertain where things stood factually, and in any event an argument about WW2 would have been a derail over there. I will say though that it seemed strange to say that manpower wasn't an issue at all during WW2 and the statistics about German deaths vs German population seemed a bit odd - yes, it might be a relatively small percentage of overall population but I imagine the statistics about the percentage of men of the traditional fighting age generation would look a good deal more skewed (and for that matter aren't Russian and Ukrainian demographics currently kinda funky-looking specifically because of that lost generation during WW2?). I was aware also from Tooze that German industry had constant labor shortages at the factories as well, made up with foreign conscripts from conquered territories. But I could also see the argument that industrial production was what prevented more divisions in the field, so...yeah, that's why I brought it here.

Cyrano4747 posted:

[...]

So really the crucial question isn't what the size of your draftable male population is, the crucial question is how much surplus labor do you have in that population.

My grandfather is a good example. He joined the Army in 1940 because being a sharecropper loving sucked, the pay was pretty good for someone who never finished middle school, and he got free food. That's pretty much the platonic ideal of who you want in your military.

Alchenar posted:

I also think there's some serious misplaced causation. The German army didn't fall apart in 1945 because it was fighting in Germany and losing areas from which it could recruit, it fell apart in 1945 because the army in the West was torn apart in Normandy and the army in the East was torn apart in Bagration and Germany had no ability to reconstitute those formations.

I'd also take issue with the description of the Wehrmacht being at its peak in 1944. I think the broad consensus is that it was never more powerful than when it launched Barbarossa in 1941, and every year thereafter it became less and less powerful as units become hollowed out and the force gradually demotorised.

Typo posted:

something like 1/3 of military aged German males died in WWII

Kvlt! posted:

Thank you!! So did the Japanese just not believe the allies had an atomic bomb when the flyers were being dropped? Or did they just not think they would use it?

Also any recs for books or documentaries regarding nukes on the axis side (less interested in the aftermath and more their nuclear programs/before the bombings) would be appreciated

Libluini posted:

Panzerfäuste are still in use today. The Bundeswehr uses the Panzerfaust III currently.

Just make sure to extend the black tube thing meant to release a stream of molten copper on impact if you go up against tanks. The default mode is purely HE.

Libluini posted:

We only got to train firing them out in the open (well, inside a forest, since that was 99% of the available Gelände in Northern Germany), but our NCOs liked to tell us that if we're ever in a situation like the simulated firing range (200-300m in a trench directly in front of incoming MBTs), we're probably dead before we get to fire the thigns. Fun times.

Since the Bundeswehr was already in a bad shape back then, we didn't even get to do live firing, we got these ridiculous little toys that looked like darts and would simulate a really weak backlash on "firing". Presumably just so we could actually feel it if we hosed up. (But not to the level of injuring ourselves)

zoux posted:

I gather, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that modern Germany (despite what's going on in some regional elections in former DDR states) is among the most tolerant societies on the planet. I've heard that far from shying away from educating generations about the Nazi era, they fully face it and they don't try and lessen the evil and horror perpetuated by Nazi Germany.

I assume that as soon as Hitler shot himself in 1945, the German populace didn't suddenly become pro-semetic and open-minded, especially given how many committed as hell Nazis ended up in positions of power or otherwise integrated back into polite society. So how did that transformation occur, was it driven domestically or externally, and how did it differ between East and West Germany?

Cyrano4747 posted:

One small correction - denazification in both the east and west were about equally successful if you define it in terms of making sure Nazis aren't in power. In both cases very similar proportions of people holding sensitive jobs (say, schoolteachers) in 1955 are going to have nasty Nazi pasts. The idea that the East Germans had a harsher denazification is largely a myth.

Cyrano4747 posted:

One more thing, this isn't even strictly a myth propagated by the East German state, a lot of it comes from activists in the west looking around, realizing how many old Nazis still had their jobs, businesses, and wealth, and insisting that they had to come to grips with this. East Germany was frequently held up as an example of where they had done better, but without a full understanding that no, they hadn't, they just swept it under the rug better and if someone tried to open a dialog about that over there they got arrested as a dissident.

Libluini posted:

Unternehmen Barbarossa was a direct operation targeting Moscow, then Taifun to try again after Barbarossa drowned in mud, followed by Fall Blau in 1942, which then confusingly went after the Caucasus oil fields, because someone must have reminded Hitler that Germany kind of needed that fuel yesterday.

Just too bad about all those massive, massive losses the Wehrmacht took in 1941. "My bad" -Hitler in 1942

two fish posted:

That's interesting, thank you!

But what I meant was a chart like this, something similar to which you would often see in American history textbooks growing up, except with maybe a little more formal formatting:



Do they have these for the Chancellors of Germany in history textbooks for kids, and if so, who's on it?

two fish posted:

Were there plans to use atomic bombs on Germany during World War II, assuming they had been developed in time?

quote:

Lastly, there is one other significant FDR-specific datapoint, which I have written about at length before. In late December 1944, with Yalta looming, Roosevelt and Groves met in the Oval Office (along with Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War). In Groves’ much later recollection (so we can make of that what we will), Roosevelt asked if the atomic bomb might be ready to use against Germany very soon. Groves explained that for a variety of reasons, the most important one being that their schedule had pushed the bomb back to the summer of 1945, this would not be possible. It is an interesting piece, one that simultaneously reveals Roosevelt’s potential willingness to use the atomic bomb as a first-strike weapon, his willingness to use it against Germany specifically, and the fact that FDR was sufficiently out of the loop on planning discussions to not know that this would both be impossible and very difficult.

Alchenar posted:

It's not alt-history if you are looking at actual historical record: https://ieer.org/resource/commentary/always-the-target/

TL:DR there were never any serious plans to use the bomb on Germany at any point and this represents a serious delta between what the scientists building the bomb thought they were doing and what the military planners thought they were doing.

There's lots of speculation as to what was being thought in the link but my personal theory is this: it was necessary to liberate Europe to win the war in the west, which inevitably meant an invasion regardless of whether you used the bomb. It was not necessary to liberate Japan to win the war in the east.

quote:

Up until early 1944, the bomb was still talked about as if it were going to be a deterrent against Germany.

By early 1944, Groves had decided that the Germans having a bomb was “unlikely,” but that it still needed to be held out as a possibility. By late 1944, it was clear, from the Alsos mission, that Germany was nowhere near an atomic bomb

The very earliest discussion of targets of any sort was held in May 1943. As the last item of a much longer meeting, talking about all sorts of other matters (…), a group composed of Groves, Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, Admiral William Purnell, and Major General Wilhelm Styer had this discussion:

quote:

The point of use of the first bomb was discussed and the general view appeared to be that its best point of use would be on a Japanese fleet concentration in the Harbor of Truk. General Styer suggested Tokio but it was pointed out that the bomb should be used where, if it failed to go off, it would land in water of sufficient depth to prevent easy salvage. The Japanese were selected as they would not be so apt to secure knowledge from it as would the Germans

…
Note that the context, here, of choosing Japan over Germany is reflective of how uncertain they are about the bomb itself: they are worried that the first one will be a complete dud, and so their choice here is that if a dud were to land in Germany, it would be more dangerous thing than if it were to land in Japan.

The first concrete discussion of targets came in the spring of 1945. These are the famous “Target Committee” meetings at Los Alamos which discussed what kind of target criteria they were using, what cities might fit it, and so on. Grim business, but entirely focused on Japan, in part because by that point it was clear that Germany’s defeat was imminent.

Is there any evidence that anyone in power would have considered atomic bombing Germany, though, had they the ability? The only insight I’ve found on this comes from a postwar interview that General Groves gave, sometime in the early 1960s:2

quote:

REPORTER: General Groves, could we go back for a minute. You mentioned in your book [Now it Can Be Told] that just before the Yalta Conference that President Roosevelt said if we had bombs before the European war was over he would like to drop them on Germany.3 Would you discuss this?

GROVES: At the conference that Secretary Stimson and myself had with President Roosevelt shortly before his departure, I believe it was December 30th or 31st of 1944, President Roosevelt was quite disturbed over the Battle of the Bulge and he asked me at that time whether I could bomb Germany as well as Japan. The plan had always been to bomb Japan because we thought the war in Germany was pretty apt to be over in the first place and in the second place the Japanese building construction was much more easily damaged by a bomb of this character than that in Germany. I urged President Roosevelt that it would be very difficult for various reasons.

[discussion of problems]

The bombing of Germany with atomic bombs was, I would say, never seriously considered to the extent of making definite plans but on this occasion I told the President, Mr. Roosevelt, why it would be very unfortunate from my standpoint, I added that of course if the President — if the war demanded it and the President so desired, we would bomb Germany and I was so certain personally that the war in Europe would be over before we would be ready that you might say I didn’t give it too much consideration.

At this meeting, Groves had thought that the first uranium bomb (Little Boy) would be ready by late July, and that the first plutonium bomb would be ready by early August — far too late for use in the European war.
…
So what’s the take-away answer? The long and short of it is, of course, that they didn’t have the bombs ready to use in the European theatre, knew they wouldn’t from fairly early on, and so never took the time to try and clarify the logistical issues that would have made it practicable. But Roosevelt’s question to Groves does leave open the possibility that they might have done it, if all of those things had turned out differently.

Nenonen posted:

There was some weird dynamic where Germans didn't like to fall in the hands of the Soviets but felt that it was safe to surrender to the western allies. I have never, ever understood why though, probably the food in POW camps

Urcinius posted:

Oh, for some visual enjoyment here is the US Navy exploring air groups for the Yorktown and Lexington classes. I'll let you guess the year based on the planes.

Urcinius posted:

And then lovingly photoed. Adorable, right?

Urcinius posted:

Oh, for some visual enjoyment here is the US Navy exploring air groups for the Yorktown and Lexington classes. I'll let you guess the year based on the planes.

zoux posted:

What was plan B if Overlord failed?

MikeC posted:

Is there a good book specifically, or contains good detail, for contingencies if Overlord went south?

Eisenhower posted:

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

Raenir Salazar posted:

Right, so if Britain and France had declared war on Germany and very much in a position to welcome the USSR likewise intervening against Germany over the question of Czech sovereignty it doesn't seem like an unreasonable consequence that France might overlook the entirely on paper alliance with the ally that's clearly not helping them for the other on paper ally that is. Just so we're clear on our premises here as maybe there was a misunderstanding as to the specifics, under this set of circumstances I don't think its a question of "Would the USSR be willing to throw down with the Allies, Germany, and Poland" I don't think that what that scenario would look like, I think it is "The western capitalists have as we predicted thrown down with the Fascists, and conveniently we also are allied with Czechs and the French so we can intervene and strengthen our international position".

Which an additional point of order, we're forgetting about the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance, specifically aimed at containing Nazi Germany which was signed in 1935, which also likewise preceded/prompted the following Czech-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance (Which Wikipedia also describes as a dead letter by 1936 which I mention for completeness wrt the Franco-Polish Treaty), but if we're considering the Franco-Polish alliance as still possibly in effect by a hypothetically failed Munich, then we also have to consider the Soviet-Franco Treaty as a consideration for the purposes of the point being made.

Ultimately this is of course alt-hist and isn't what ultimately went down but it doesn't seem like Turtledove was completely off base to use these treaties as the basis for that series.

zoux posted:

What they were doing was incredibly brave, how often did they get caught? Or was it a collective punishment deal

Urcinius posted:

Was exploring Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King's papers at the Library of Congress and came across an interesting monograph in his post-war files involved with the historians writing the history of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is undated & unattributed but appears to be in King's voice. It's a very interesting and candid read of his high level (i.e. only a few dozen pages) thoughts about the long, intense war. Thus, what stands out to him is most telling about which events struck lasting chords with him.

In the midst of the monograph is a swipe about the relative cooperative spirit between the US Navy and Royal Navy. He specifically calls out two instances in 1942 where each navy requested a carrier of the other - Wasp in March and Illustrious in October. Right or wrong, the number of questions, delays, and ultimate selection of carrier by the Royal Navy in response to the US Navy request was less congenial than the US Navy's earlier response to the British request within two days (three days if we include the initial British confusion about which battleships King was offering).

Recently, I found King's response to the questionnaire that the British Admiralty Delegation hit King with back with upon his 27 October 1942 request for Illustrious or other carriers to reinforce Halsey's Southwest Pacific forces. To this I added some of the contextual correspondence so y'all can see the conversation from origin to finish. Then I further added the correspondence for the March 1942 British request that netted them Wasp. Between the two you can see what drove King's post war comparison.

Urcinius posted:

Yeah! There’s some great scholarship on both points.

Randomcheese3 posted:

Dye packs, meanwhile, were more of an interwar concept. The USN produced them from 1928, and used them in 1930. Most other navies copied this in the following years. The French did so in 1936, with a variant that could also colour hits. The British could copy the French design after the start of WWII, while the Japanese introduced dye packs in 1941.

Phanatic posted:

Just a quibble:

The distinction between a low explosive and a high explosive is that with a deflagrant, the chemical reaction is propagated subsonically via conductive heating, and with a high explosive the reaction is propagated supersonically via compressive heating.

Both black powder and smokeless powder are low explosives. Black powder is theoretically capable of detonation but this is very difficult to make happen and it's not going to detonate under any conditions you're going to find in your back yard. Basically its burn rate is *weakly* dependent on pressure so if you have enough of it under the right conditions you might get some of it to detonate by putting it under enough pressure that it undergoes a deflagration-to-detonation transition, but we're talking about "ship's magazine" quantities.

BalloonFish posted:

Basically the whole story is like something from a pulp novel anyway, and I'm always surprised that it doesn't get more outings as a vehicle for movies, TV series, video games etc.

Greggster posted:

I can only imagine just how much institutional knowledge the american army (granted, it was the navy and the marines that did all the heavy lifting in the pacific but that knowledge must've been shared with the armed forces right? must've gathered throughout the pacific before they did D-day, and any lessons learned they applied to the invasion of europe?
Or is it just a simple case of each amphibious assault is a whole new beast to tackle, especially with the gargantuan trail of logistics that comes with invading a whole side of a country?

quote:

With the publication of its Joint Overseas Expeditions in 1933 and then Joint Action of the Army and the Navy in 1935, the Joint Board laid out a coordinated approach to "joint overseas expeditions" and specific missions for the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. For the Army these included "joint overseas movements" and "landing attacks against shore objectives."
...
The basic doctrine for joint amphibious operations was thus largely set before the war, but the details of unified command would be resolved only during the war.
...
By late 1939 the outbreak of the war in Europe reawakened the Army's interest in landing operations. The 3d Infantry Division at Fort Lewis, Washington, planned and conducted an amphibious training exercise of sorts with the Navy in January 1940 that culminated in a landing at Monterey, California. Both services performed poorly in the exercise and were highly critical of each other's efforts. The training exercise caused the War Department openly to question the Navy's capacity and willingness "to prepare or train on an adequate scale for amphibious operations."
...
To counter Axis threats to the Western Hemisphere, the following October the War Department ordered the formation of three "emergency expeditionary forces." Task Force 1, with the 1st Infantry Division, began training for an assault landing mission in early 1941. With little relevant recent experience in opposed landing operations, the Army turned to the Navy and Marine Corps for usable tactical doctrine. Between the world wars, the Marine Corps and Navy developed a concept of amphibious warfare centered on an island-hopping naval war against Japan in the Pacific as laid out in various iterations of War Plan ORANGE. The Marine Corps' ideas were contained in its Tentative Manual for Landing Operations (1934), which the Navy adopted for its current landing operations manual, Fleet Training Publication 167 (FTP 167), Landing Operations Doctrine, United States Navy, 793S. The Army largely borrowed the Navy's FTP 167 as its initial doctrinal publication on amphibious operations, Field Manual (FM) 31-5, Landing Operations on Hostile Shores (June 1941).

The Army made scant progress in joint amphibious training in 1940-41, except to identify how very much remained to be done. In June and September 1941 two joint training forces, each composed of an Army and Marine division with a partly integrated joint staff under a Marine general officer, were established under Navy command in the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets. Joint Army Navy training exercises in August 1941 and January 1942 only confirmed the joint amphibious force's lack of readiness for combat.
...
Offensive joint amphibious operations received so little attention during the early months of 1942 [by the Navy] that few cargo and troop transports or landing craft and boat crews were available for the training or operations of either the Army or Marine Corps. The Navy Department also restricted the growth of the fleet's amphibious elements by limiting the flow of personnel and the priorities assigned to landing craft production.
...
When the final JCS paper (JCS 81/1) was signed early in September 1942, it made no mention of the Army's shore-to-shore operations and concluded:
"Amphibious operations are essentially the responsibility of the Navy. Until such time as the Marine Corps can be expanded to fulfill necessary requirements for present and projected strategy, it is recognized that selected Army units must be made available for training and participation in amphibious operations. "

Even the exact meaning and consequences of this paper were open to question, and further discussions dragged on into early 1943 before any final compromise agreement could be reached. Out of a sense of frustration and urgency, throughout 1942 and into 1943 the Army pursued two separate amphibious training programs—one for ship-to-shore operations with the Navy and the other for shore-to-shore operations on its own.

For ship-to-shore operations, the amphibious corps were the principal battleground. Here the initial discussions foundered on fundamental differences between the Army and the Navy and Marine Corps over the organization and role of the Army divisions in assault landings. The Navy and Marine Corps wanted specialized Army light divisions that would be tailored for and used only in amphibious operations. The Army Ground Forces (AGF), which replaced GHQ with the March 1942 War Department reorganization, were adamant that all Army divisions be standardized for large-scale land operations and not specialized for limited missions.
...
In a 9 April 1942 memorandum that he drafted for Marshall to send to King, Eisenhower clearly delineated the differences between the services on amphibious forces and the differing operational requirements in the Atlantic and Pacific:
"In the Atlantic we may become involved in a cross channel effort, with the consequent need for landing equipment designed especially for that purpose. More over any amphibious operations will probably be merely the spearhead of a prolonged, heavy, land operation. This is the type of task for which Army divisional and higher organization is definitely pointed. ... In the Pacific, offensive operations for the next year or more promise to comprise a series of landing operations from shipboard to small islands with relatively minor forces. This is the type of amphibious warfare for which the Marines have apparently been specially organized."
...
At the same time, the War Department charged the Services of Supply (SOS) with "the organization, training, supply and equipment of boat operating and maintenance units, the operation of transportation facilities for landing operations, and for the equipment and training of shore parties." SOS directed the Corps of Engineers to establish an amphibious command to organize and train engineer units that would in turn train with the tactical units, operate landing craft in shore-to-shore combat operations, and direct the shore parties to handle the logistical lifelines over the beaches. This was a natural choice because the engineers handled all of the Army's river crossing operations and also had extensive experience with small boats in its peacetime civil works functions on the nation's harbors and inland waterways.

In June 1942 the chief of engineers established the Engineer Amphibian Command (EAQ at Camp Edwards, Massachusetts, alongside the AGF's newly established Amphibious Training Command (ATC).
...
Shore-to-shore operations required an Army organization that combined the functions of a Navy beach party and a Marine shore party but did not lose unity of command at the waterline. Hence, they created the engineer shore regiment of three battalions to operate on both the near and far shores. This regiment was then integrated with the existing boat regiment and service units to create an engineer amphibian brigade (renamed engineer special brigade in 1943) of one boat and one shore regiment, each with three battalions, that could lift and then support one division. A boat and shore battalion together could support a regimental combat team (RCT), with individual boat and shore companies supporting the combat battalions. With its assigned quartermaster, ordnance, medical, and signal units, an EAB numbered 363 officers, 21 warrant officers, 6,898 men, and 180 LCVPs (Landing Craft, Vehicle and Personnel) and LCMs.

Experience during the summer of 1942 at Cape Cod resulted in significant refinements in doctrine, tactics, and organization as well as numerous improvements in landing craft, navigation and communications equipment, beach clearance and crossing techniques and equipment, and shore operations. Considerable effort was devoted to developing efficient organization and procedures for shore operations, which the EAC knew would be critical to the success of any landing. Although refined through later combat experience, the basic shore operating structure and procedures developed by the Engineer Amphibian Command were subsequently used by the engineer special brigades and the specially trained engineer combat units that supported all of the Army's wartime amphibious operations. New techniques and equipment, especially Marine Corps' Landing Vehicle, Tracked (LVT), and the Army's amphibious truck, the DUKW, were tested and adopted for a variety of assault and support operations. Both vehicles saw extensive service in most later amphibious operations and proved extremely valuable to both the Army and Marine Corps.
...
Even as the EAC was struggling through the difficult summer of 1942, decisions were being taken that would radically alter its future.
...
[Stuff about the British, cross channel landings in France in 1942/1943 vs North Africa, stuff about equipment, etc.]
...
After discussions with Marshall and King on SLEDGEHAMMER-ROUNDUP, Mountbatten met separately with King and personally warned him not to allow the U.S. Army to operate the landing craft in any cross-Channel attack. "You are selling the birthright of the Navy. We can't stop the invasion of Europe," Mountbatten told King. If the Navy allowed the Army to carry out these operations, Mountbatten continued, and "the Army puts itself ashore,... in the long run you don't need a Navy."
...
In Europe and the Mediterranean from Torch on, joint amphibious assault forces came under naval command until lodgments were successful, at which time command transferred to the ground commanders. With some theater variations, Eisenhower's approach became standard for most of the Army's wartime joint amphibious operations and was also similar to the unified command arrangements for U. S. joint operations approved by the JCS in Amil 1943.
...
By September 1942, the EAC's once bright future had quickly faded. Decisions at the joint and combined levels on TORCH resulted in cutting the planned eighteen engineer regiments to eight engineer amphibian brigades and then to three operational and two reserve brigades. [...] But its future and that of the 3d Brigade [...] were now bleak indeed as many of their trained amphibian personnel were siphoned off as cadres for the shore engineer units (36th and 540th Engineer Regiments) that would support Patton's TORCH landings.

Just as the situation appeared lost altogether, Col. Arthur G. Trudeau, the EAC's chief of staff, learned that General Douglas MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) lacked the landing craft and amphibious forces to sustain any offensive operations. He quickly saw a future for the amphibian brigades and approached the Services of Supply and the War Department's Operations Division with a plan to send the brigades to MacArthur. Within weeks the Army and Joint Chiefs agreed to deploy the 2d, 3d, and 4th EABs to SWPA along with a complete landing craft assembly unit and plant.
...
The year-long tug-of-war between the Army and Navy and within the Army itself over organization, planning, and training for amphibious operations finally ended in February and March 1943. Although many wrinkles remained to be ironed out, the TORCH landings in November 1942 had clearly demonstrated that the Army and Navy could successfully plan and conduct a large joint and combined amphibious operation under unified command. Moreover, the long and often acrimonious discussions on amphibious training and operations between the Army and the Navy and Marine Corps had eventually produced a basic understanding on respective roles and missions, organization, doctrine, and command that generally worked well during the rest of the war. Marshall agreed that the Navy would take over all amphibious training in return for its support for the Army's future operations.
...
From June 1943 on, the three engineer special brigades and 7th Amphibious Force underpinned MacArthur's strategy in the Southwest Pacific using the 800LCVPs and 2,000LCMs churned out by the engineer boat assembly plants in Australia and New Guinea. The brigades conducted 36 major and 344 secondary shore-to-shore and ship-to-shore operations and made 148 combat landings in carrying Army, Marine Corps, and Australian Army assault forces from Nassau Bay, New Guinea, to Lingayen Gulf, Luzon, in the Philippines and on to the East Indies. Retaining their original boat and shore organization, these brigades employed Army amphibious doctrine and operated both under Army command and with the Navy's 7th Amphibious Force. Their operations were an exacting and successful test of the Army's original 1942 concept of amphibious warfare based on integrated boat and shore operations under Army command.

In addition to their combat operations, these units also handled many of the theater's logistical lifelines, carrying 4.5 million passengers and 3 million tons of supplies while covering over 7.75 million miles. The shore battalions also did much of the construction that sustained the air and ground combat forces and provided the logistical infrastructure for their operations.
...
The Army's role in amphibious operations during World War II was large and critical, but it remains little known and studied today. U.S. Army forces participated either in the assault or support phases in 58 of 61 wartime U.S. amphibious operations. In the Pacific theaters, the Army and Navy conducted 39 major amphibious operations involving a regimental combat team (RCT) or larger unit. The Army also took part with the Navy and Marine Corps in six major assault operations and supported seven others.

In Europe and the Mediterranean, together with Allied forces the U.S. Army and Navy were responsible for all six of the largest amphibious operations ever conducted—North Africa, Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, Normandy, and southern France. Among these was the largest and most complex joint and combined amphibious operation ever undertaken, Operation OVERLORD, on 6 June 1944.
...
In his Third Official Report of December 1945 to the Secretary of the Navy Fleet Admiral King clearly out lined the importance of this joint wartime experience:
"The outstanding development of this war, in the field of joint undertakings, was the perfection of amphibious operations, the most difficult of all operations in modem warfare. Our success in all such operations, from Normandy to Okinawa, involved huge quantities of specialized equipment, exhaustive study and planning, and thorough training as well as complete integration of all forces, under unified command.. .. Integration and unification characterized every amphibious operation of the war and all were successful."

Pantaloon Pontiff posted:

Random kind-of-specific milhist question that I've always wondered but never seen mentioned anywhere: What was the deal with German army group names during WW2? At times they used geographic names (like Army Group North, Africa, or Group South Ukraine) and at other times they used A, B, C... and there doesn't seem any particular reason for the switch. For the invasion of Poland there were Army Groups North and South, then for the battle of France there were B, A, C from north to south, then for Barbarossa there was North, Center, and South, but South later split into A and B. Was there any real reason for this naming, or was it just 'whatever seemed good at the time'? It makes sense to me that they wouldn't follow the WW1 tradition of naming army groups after their commanders, since Hitler was often at odds with commanders and would replace them, but the geographic vs letter designations always struck me as odd.

midnight77 posted:

He hasn't been this insulting to the Hohenzollerns or the Hapsburgs, so it might just be that. Still, it is interesting learning that, for instance, Imperial Germany had no other mobilization plans beyond the Schlifen plan, in that a mobilization necessarily, because of time tables, involved invading Belgium. They literally had no contingency plans.

Alchenar posted:

Hot take: the Schlieffen/Moltke plan was probably actually the best plan Germany could have come up with without having someone with prescience on staff.

With the benefit of hindsight the optimal plan is possibly to go entirely defensive on the West, do whatever it takes to keep Britain out of the war as long as possible, and try to pull off and exploit a Big Tannenberg in the East. France throws away a large chunk of its army to no effect in its 1914 campaigns and you continuously offer peace and maybe concessions on Alsace-Lorraine.

This of course all requires you to be gay black Imperial Germany etc etc.

Cessna posted:

When Titans Clashed by Glantz - about USSR v Nazis - may be what you're looking for.

D-Pad posted:

Excellent post and your concerns are the same I had and why I asked the question. The story seemed just a little too "neat" to be true. That being said as I've dived into more WW2 history I have been a bit surprised at how much debauchery everybody was getting up too compared to the typical view we have of the sexuality of that generation.

quote:

According to Terry Gould's The Lifestyle: A look at the erotic rites of swingers, swinging began among American Air Force pilots and their wives during World War II before pilots left for overseas duty. The mortality rate of pilots was so high, as Gould reports, that a close bond arose between pilot families that implied that pilot husbands would care for all the wives as their own – emotionally and sexually – if the husbands were lost. The realities of the demographics and basing of US Army Air Force (USAAF) pilots and crew suggest that this arrangement did not evolve during WWII, instead evolving later. US military personnel in WWII were not accompanied by their families (and many, especially in the USAAF, were single) – the giant military bases where families live while accompanying a deployed soldier, sailor, aviator, or Marine are mostly Cold War creations. Though the origins of swinging are contested, it is assumed American swinging was practiced in some American military communities in the 1950s. By the time the Korean War ended, swinging had spread from the military to the suburbs. The media dubbed the phenomenon wife-swapping.

quote:

I do not have a print copy of The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites of Swingers, and only a Slate article, it seems, does not use some slight variation on Wikipedia's phrasing [he quoted an older less skeptical version of the Wikipedia article] yet also cites Gould.

After this, I saw that Semaphore answered the question on History (using different sources). Semaphore gives one source that supports the idea, but ends with

quote:

However, there is very little actual evidence supporting this story, which seems to trace back to journalist Gay Talese's 1981 book, Thy Neighbor's Wife.

quote:

One theory is that swinging began among Air Force fighter pilots and their wives during World War II ... Neither theory has been well documented or verified.

- Taormino, Tristan. Opening Up. Cleis Press, 2013.

This got me worried, as I could not confirm Gould's sources. Then I saw this article: [He linked to a defunct aggregate site, this link is to the original article on Psychology Today]

quote:

It seems that the original modern American swingers were crew-cut World War II air force pilots and their wives. Like elite warriors everywhere, these “top guns” often developed strong bonds with one another, perhaps because they suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the military. According to journalist Terry Gould, “key parties,” like those later dramatized in the 1997 film The Ice Storm, originated on these military bases in the 1940s, where elite pilots and their wives intermingled sexually with one another before the men flew off toward Japanese antiaircraft fire.

Gould, author of The Lifestyle, a cultural history of the swinging movement in the United States, interviewed two researchers who’d written about this Air Force ritual. Joan and Dwight Dixon explained to Gould that these warriors and their wives “shared each other as a kind of tribal bonding ritual, with a tacit understanding that the two thirds of husbands who survived would look after the widows.” The practice continued after the war ended and by the late 1940s, “military installations from Maine to Texas and California to Washington had thriving swing clubs,” writes Gould.

I tried to track down the Dixons. This says that they were sexologists who retroactively studied this in the 60s. I have found some of their other work, but none of it is related to the scenario - or even the time period - discussed.

I think that this may negate Semaphore's concerns, showing that the "theory" was actually around way before Talese's book, and looks to be true. But I don't know this for sure.

quote:

A common myth claims that a "key party" is a form of swinger party, in which male partners place their car or house keys into a common bowl or bag on arriving, and at the end of the evening the female partners randomly select a set of keys from the bowl and are obligated to leave and have sex with its owner. However, numerous researchers have tried unsuccessfully to confirm a first-hand account of such a party, suggesting that they are nothing more than an urban legend.

SlothfulCobra posted:

The second half of the initial claim seems actually verifiable; whether pilots had any special deals with their compatriots' wives to take care of them after they died. Although it's not the more interesting part, it's something that could actually be checked on (assuming they kept to the deals and weren't just lying to get some sex).

Although a veteran looking after his dead comrades' wives is also the kind of thing that outsiders could just make up that they were all sleeping together as well. As all relationships must be implicity sexual.

quote:

When I mentioned this at a recent presentation in San Diego, a former fighter pilot in the audience raised his hand and said, "Same thing; different war." He explained that among his colleagues flying air missions in Vietnam, mate-swapping was the norm. Another woman in the audience, who had dated military pilots confirmed that in her experience, non-monogamy was understood to be standard in that community.

Whether this is due to an awareness of death that brings on a sense of carpe diem, an expression of the sort of interdependence and love typical of military units, or both, it's clear that not all adultery in the military results in scandal and shame.