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Absolute tragedy. Commiserations to Sandwich Anarchist and chitoryu's family.
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Feb 10, 2023 22:55
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Cyrano4747 posted:You can replace some of this labor with women or older workers, of course, but there are limits to that, mostly having to do with skills transfers. Sure, you can grab Rosie and train her to rivet in a couple of weeks, but unless she's been trained as a machinist for a few years you're not going to effectively replace the guy who has been making all the complex cuts for your greebles. If you're in a society with more gender parity and women in the workforce to begin with this isn't as huge a problem, of course, but if we're talking 1940 and you're trying to grab secretaries and housewives for factory work it's a consideration. Doesn't this actually make the problem worse, or at least creates a new problem? When women are integrated into the workforce, there no longer is a reserve of able but non-working adults. When you take a guy out of a factory, sure, there are trained women who can do his job, but it's one less worker without anyone who could replace him.
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Mar 10, 2023 20:54
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If it's 1940 and you need to take riveters to the front, Rosie, who is otherwise unemployed (ignoring for the moment her household obligations, which she almost certainly has in spades), can come in and take over Jim's job. The factory still operates on 100% of its pre-war workforce numbers. If it's 2023 and you need to take riveters to the front, Rosie can't take over for Jim because she'd already been working there anyway. The work that Jim would do has to be divided between other employees or left undone. (Obviously they can recruit the people who had been unemployed before, but those people are also getting drafted, so from the standpoint of an economy this resource is as limited as any other.)
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Mar 10, 2023 21:13
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An intermediate cartridge was fundamental for the entire concept, so I don't think I agree with this assessment.
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Apr 3, 2023 21:55
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I'm not sure if I agree with the "people didn't think of the Nazis as the Holocaust guys until 1955" thing. The reaction to US soldiers liberating concentration camps was immensely strong, leading to outbreaks of violence against German civilians and POWs. The Nuremberg trials and Auschwitz trials were huge events that drew immense attention from the international public opinion. Sure, maybe it took people some time to internalise just how horrible the Holocaust and general Nazi exterminationism were, but I'm pretty sure they were widely understood as a big deal and a terrifying crime.
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Apr 21, 2023 17:55
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SeanBeansShako posted:But yes, Sharpe is mostly accurate with the uniforms (though I am not certain if there were Polish Dragoons in Spain?) and Officer uniform regulations are pretty much a different ball game from rank and file. Polish troops were very much present in Spain, both during the initial campaign that put Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne and later while fighting against the British. However, to the best of my knowledge, no Polish dragoon units were ever raised by the French. Polish cavalry in French service (as opposed to forces raised by the Duchy of Warsaw on its own) consisted entirely of cheveaux-legers lancers. There were several infantry regiments as well.
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May 19, 2023 13:10
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VostokProgram posted:I was thinking about that chart of Napoleon's army from earlier. I'm wondering, what were his other options besides walking to Moscow? Just not invading seems like the best one to me. But I guess he could have also gone to St Petersburg and maybe been resupplied by the french navy along the way? Would that have been viable? He would probably have been fine if he stopped campaigning upon capturing Smolensk and picked it back up next Spring. He decided to press on the issue in hopes of resolving the war faster and it turned out to have been a bad gamble.
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Jun 20, 2023 22:23
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Cyrano4747 posted:Crosspost because I figured this might be of interest here too: Very interesting. Are there any units from Provinz Posen or SIlesia?
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Jul 11, 2023 15:17
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SeanBeansShako posted:Re thread title; the truth hurts Francophile Bonapartists. I cannot believe you would personally attack me like that
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Jul 11, 2023 18:12
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Cyrano4747 posted:So interestingly that's one of the areas that this is a bit of a pain in the rear end as a reference. It's easy enough to look up a specific unit (it's in the TOC) and it's easy enough to look up a specific officer (huge index of last names in the back) but if you're specifically interested in a region it's dodgier. I need to read up on how Imperial Army regiments were raised, but I don't believe the standing ones were drawn from the same geographical area. Note that I could be wrong, but this is the impression I've gotten. So in that example above, I believe Cologne is where it was headquartered in 1910. It would be interesting to get a copy of this from, say, 1880 and see if that unit was someplace else 30 years prior. One of the things I want to do is build my own index of units by location. Interesting. I'm mostly curious to see if there are any Polish names in the officer rolls, and it seems like that Landwehr unit has none (but I am not that good at reading fraktur).
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Jul 11, 2023 23:16
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Xiahou Dun posted:I have literally never heard anyone use this term and it’s taxonomically misleading. It's absolutely a widely used term. Why do you think it is taxonomically misleading?
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Aug 22, 2023 18:50
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Cyrano4747 posted:Now, did the British and the French do much to stop the invasion of Poland in 1939? Not really, but they also didn't ask for peace after the deed was done and Poland was occupied. They really weren't in a position to launch a major campaign in the late summer of 1939. There's a lot of criticism to be had when discussing the Sitzkrieg, but it's a bit much to say that they just passively sat back and did nothing because of some general disinterest in what happened to Poland.  (I am well aware that Déant was not arguing in good faith, as evidenced by his later collaborationism, but the argument was nevertheless emblematic of a relatively popular way of thinking.) Interest in Polish sovereignty in both Britain and France was always counterbalanced by the unwillingness to relive the horrors of the Great War. I would argue it is that specific sentiment that led to the Sitzkrieg, whether or not the UK and France had any capability to mount operations against Germany in September of 1939 (which I am not addressing here, but I do believe it is at least an open question). My reasoning here is that this unwillingness to commit to the possibility of a war meant that any and all preparations to deter or confront Hitler were slow and greatly belated. If the Britons and French were truly, on balance, as involved in the issue of Eastern European sovereignty as you posit, I think those efforts would have started before even Munich, and certainly would have been more energetic. Chamberlain would have been thrown out of office instead of feted, certainly. In light of that equivocation I would say it is thinkable that should Germans have invaded the Soviet Union instead of Norway in April of 1940, the Western Allies would have been content to treat the situation in Poland, at least temporarily, much like the US and NATO treated the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. Putting Plan R4 into action could have been seen as sufficient for the time being and the Germans would have been left with more or less a free hand to act in the USSR. I do not think it would have been a particularly likely course of action, obviously, but not completely unthinkable. There are a number of reasons why this probably would not have happened: 1. Churchill, who was very open about his attitudes towards the USSR and Germany (favourable mentions of the devil etc.). 2. Polish government in exile and increasing number of Polish volunteers in France and UK. While obviously they never enjoyed a major role in Western policy decisions, they were nevertheless pressure groups. 3. Extensive resistance in occupied Polish territory. This undermined any claims that the situation was not urgent. 4. As a result of 3, lack of a collaborationist Polish government. It is unclear whether the Germans even pursued such a solution, but in any event there was never an individual or a group in Poland with any degree of support that favoured collaboration. 5. As a result of 2 and 3, fairly extensive knowledge of German atrocities in Poland influencing the public opinion. I suppose this is a lot of words to affirm the null hypothesis, but hey.
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Sep 6, 2023 17:33
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It's also really difficult to build spy networks when you're a Nazi, since your ideology is reprehensible to most people and also you're trying to infiltrate places your government is actively bombing explicitly out of spite. Also German intelligence remained terrible even after the war, funnily enough.
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Sep 15, 2023 00:14
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feedmegin posted:I can't even put my finger on why, but looking at that picture it is blatantly obvious they aren't actual Americans. I'd wager it's the mismatched uniforms, disproportionately large patches, the car which I don't think is an actual Jeep, and the blackface.
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Sep 15, 2023 18:37
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Cyrano4747 posted:Is that supposed to be blackface, or just cammo paint stuff? Looks kind of like what I've seen dudes doing for makeup to make themselves less visible in Vietnam. It could be. It probably is. But I found the idea that some guy decided they need a black man in their pretend US Army and whipped out the shoe shine both darkly funny and distressingly possible. EDIT: There's a whole lot of Eastern Bloc culture from the period that does exactly that, for the record.
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Sep 15, 2023 19:05
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Chuck_D posted:Next let's talk about Nazi rifles being manufactured by slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentration camp. That's not always true. The wz. 35 Vis pistols were made quite well (if slowly), because the Polish resistance was stealing them. Although I guess that's also a bad time after all.
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Sep 27, 2023 14:34
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That's very clearly a couteau de breche.
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Oct 31, 2023 15:24
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Nessus posted:To loop back to Milhist, I gathered the abundance of nobility in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth probably contributed to their relative military weakness and eventual destruction, since you had to get basically unanimous buy-in from their legislature to do, like, anything. I'm not sure if it was literal unanimity or just a really high supermajority threshold. Literal unanimity. Starting in 1505, under the Nihil novi constitution (so called because it established the legal principle of Nihil novi nisi commune consensu, nothing new unless with common agreement) the King could no longer make any laws or decrees without the assent of the Sejm*, and Sejm made its decisions by unanimity. There was a good reason for it: the Commonwealth did not have a law enforcement system, meaning any such actions were carried out by the nobles themselves, so any non-unanimous or at least near-unanimous decision would be an empty letter. But the Sejm did not work the way the House of Commons or a modern parliament would: they would hold a vote, see which side was ahead (the proverbial "counting of sabres"), and then get together and try to hash out a deal that worked for everyone involved (or at least that everyone involved would agree to). This was called "ucieranie się" (literally "rubbing off"). With time, this evolved into the "liberum veto", or "free veto" system - anyone could veto anything, and if they could not be convinced, so be it. It is worth noting that this principle was considered a positive thing, since the nobility believed it meant there'd always be at least one honest man to stop a bribed majority from enacting some illicit scheme. *with the exception of matters regarding royal cities, matters of education and religion, Jewish affairs, fiefdoms of the Commonwealth, peasants living on royal land, and mining. Now, this does not mean the king could not do anything at all. The king appointed (frequently with assent) many office holders, and specifically in military matters eventually a system where 1/4 of the royal land income was reserved for a standing army (so-called "wojsko kwarciane," literally "quarter army"). Obviously the king did not need any permission to use these forces against invaders. The exact system of organisation was dependent on the specific branch of the military - generally speaking, they were split into a "national model" army and a "foreign model" army, where the national model was recruited "comradely," i.e. a captain (exact name of the rank depended on the kind of unit) was given a bunch of money and told to recruit X "comrades" who would then arrive with their entourages (the entourage was paid by the comrade), while foreign model units were recruited in a "free drum" model, where volunteers just showed up to the recruiter and got enlisted. (Artillery, while technically part of the foreign model army, was in actuality its own thing organisation-wise, more resembling a guild system.) Of course, in practice, few kings in the Commonwealth period actually commanded their armies, they had hetmans for that. This principle of unanimity did not actually begin to cause systemic issues until the mid-17th century. After all, if an act wasn't passed by the Sejm, it probably wasn't that important or could be implemented locally later or maybe we'd just take it up again at the next Sejm. However, the Sejm was legally restricted to six weeks of activity. Any extensions past that point had to be approved by a vote. In 1639, Jerzy Sebastian Lubomirski vetoed the extension and the Sejm parted without any further legislation. The real blowup happened in 1652, when Władysław Siciński* of Upita vetoed the extension of the coronation Sejm (this is not the royal election, it's just the Sejm meeting where you finish up all the legal requirements preceding coronation) and immediately left the building. Reportedly, people were shocked and the Marshal of the Sejm decided to reconvene after the weekend (Siciński's protest happened on a Saturday) in the hopes that the man would see reason and come back - the Sejm had not really attended to any real legislative issues yet. But on Monday, Siciński was nowhere to be found and the confounded Marshal declared "I guess that's it, we're going home?". This established a dangerous precedent and people back then could see it. A proposal was made to restrict vetoes that would terminate Sejm business to at least until both houses of the Sejm got together to hash out what they arrived at, but it died in the committee because the Commonwealth's situation became increasingly more chaotic in the second half of the 17th century, starting with the devastating Swedish invasion of 1655. In 1670, the coronation Sejm ended after 5 weeks when a dude declared he's vetoing everything from this point on and left. In 1688, the Sejm was vetoed before it even formally constituted itself by electing a Marshal. In total, in the 17th and 18th centuries, 73 Sejms were effectively called off. It turned out that sure, it's tough for a foreign monarch to bribe the entire Sejm to vote for something stupid... but it's pretty easy for one guy to coerce one other guy to stop the same from doing anything useful. By the time the Saxon dynasty took the throne in the late 17th century, this was the new normal and people were beginning to rationalise it, saying that it's better for the Commonwealth to be chaotic and weak, since that means nobody had to be afraid of it and so they would not have reason to invade it pre-emptively. Just look at all those conquering absolute monarchs around! We, in our little semi-anarchic playground, aren't dangerous, so why bother us, right? The Saxon monarchs mostly governed through the Senate (to the extent that the Sejm could be circumvented) and by the time Stanisław August Poniatowski was elected in 1764, the reform-minded found a loophole that said that Sejms convoked under a confederacy (basically a form of legal protest movement of the cities or nobility for emergency purposes or for execution of the law during an interregnum, later famously the Confederacy of Bar under Pułaski fought a national uprising against Russian presence in the Commonwealth and influence on the government, but lost) did not allow for a veto and allowed for majority votes, so the Sejm would simply start by forming a confederacy. *Siciński is extremely hated in the Polish historical consciousness. It is said that when the Marshal reported to the Senate and the King what Siciński did, one of the senators shouted "May he perish!", to which the rest of the room immediately replied "Amen!". While it was commonly thought he died from being struck by lightning, it was in actuality part of his family that died after a lightning strike. Aleksander Bruckner claimed that until the end of the 19th century there was a cupboard at the church sacristy in Upita which held Siciński's mummified corpse, which the locals would show to people, saying that the earth refused to take the body. ChubbyChecker posted:for a time it also contributed to their military strength, because they had a large and good quality cavalry force Yes and no. A Sejm was not a form of direct democracy. It was made up of the Senate (holders of 140 explicitly named offices) and the House of Deputies (representatives elected by the nobility at local sejmiks). Sejmiks were a form of more direct democracy in that any local noble could attend. Most of them were effectively local government - they had the right to levy local taxes, they could make some resolutions of their own, they elected certain offices and had a degree of influence over the implementation of the decisions made at the Sejm. Some decisions even required ratification by local sejmiks. The King paradoxically had a lot more influence over a sejmik than the Sejm - he was authorised to send a letter to the sejmik that had to be read before the proceedings, and with enough buttering up that tended to be enough to get most sejmiks to do what was asked of them. A deputy ("poseł") to the Sejm was given instructions on how to vote by his sejmik (based on the issues that the king's letter mentioned), usually with some leeway, but was not legally liable if he did not adhere to those instructions, he just had to explain himself at the sejmik meeting after the Sejm, and if he did so poorly, he would not be elected again. Now, there was one kind of sejm where it was a whole lot of people - the royal election, where everyone had the right to attend (what's known as the viritim principle). According to estimates, a typical election attracted between 10 and 15 thousand participants, and potentially up to 100 thousand. However, not everyone would attend them, since it turns out yeah maybe I don't want to travel half the country to get into shouting matches with some fucko from Radom. Elections were held in Wola, a village near Warsaw (now part of the city), and as such were especially heavily attended by Masovian nobility - which was much poorer and less educated than average. This was considered a problem. The short-lived 3rd of May Constitution, while greatly vaunted for its progressive nature as the second constitution in the world etc. etc., was actually a giant blow to democratic representation in government. While it extended many rights of the nobility to burghers (and promised 'protections' to the peasantry), it removed direct royal elections in favour of succession by inheritance, disenfranchised landless nobility, and banned liberum veto. In exchange it promised more political stability, a triple division of power, and potential further improvements in the political system. But in spite of its symbolic status in Polish society, which it has retained until today, it never really went into effect, since Russia invaded and after a brief armed conflict forced the king to recant the constitution and consent to the II Partition of Poland.
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Nov 17, 2023 21:39
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One thing I forgot to mention is that national model army had seniority over foreign model army. A comrade of the national army could not be commanded by even a general of the foreign model army. For this reason, foreign model officers always made sure to enlist in the national model army as well.
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Nov 17, 2023 22:34
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I have no idea. Maybe? Probably? Considering that the national model army recruitment was giving a dude money and telling him to bankroll a bunch of dudes, it's not impossible they just did it for free to get the rank, at least some of the time, but there were set salaries for different unit types, so that would probably be illegal?
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Nov 17, 2023 22:50
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mllaneza posted:To round out all the fascinating Polish chat, here's a really great novel set during this period. It's a Gothic romance in the classic style. There's a test for books like this, open it to a random page and see if there's any action. These books have tons of it; there's a duel, skirmish, raid, battle or siege one after the other. So this is just WF&S split into three? Man, they're nickel and diming you poor sods.
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Nov 18, 2023 22:21
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sullat posted:Correct me if I'm wrong but IIRC one of the reason why the Sejm had so much power to begin with was that in the 1300s, Poland wanted to ally with France so they sent a delegation over to France to propose the alliance. While they were there the Polish king died without an heir so the French king told the delegation, "I've got this annoying little brother, make him King of Poland and you've got your alliance." The little brother went to Poland and the Polish nobility basically told him, "give us all the power and you can be king" and the French guy was like, "Sounds great!" Then his older brother died and and the French king of Poland immediately ghosted Poland and ran back to France to be king of France and so the Polish nobility was basically in charge of Poland until he died because he refused to resign being king of Poland. You are confusing two events. There was a French king of Poland in the 14th century - Louis of Anjou, better known in Poland as Ludwik Węgierski - Louis the Hungarian, because he was actually the king of Hungary first. He was allied with Casimir the Great, the last Piast King of Poland, and Casimir promoted him as his heir in case the line died with him, which it did. Louis was acceptable for the nobility, since he was Casimir's brother-in-law. While Louis is remembered fondly in Hungary, he was an absentee monarch in Poland, mostly leaving the day-to-day affairs in the hands of his mother as regent. Notably, however, he did introduce the Privilege of Kosice, which introduced a single tax on all of nobility (much lower than the taxes before) and, more importantly, obliged the king to not raise any new taxes without the consent of the nobles. Louis died in 1382 and by the terms of the Privilege the throne went to his daughter Jadwiga, now a saint, who went on to marry Jogaila and thus introduce the Jagiellonian dynasty to Poland. The other French king in the story is Henri de Valois (Henryk Walezy), who came in on the other end of the Jagiellonian dynasty, which was quite some time after the Nihil novi constitution. For some time, the Polish throne was technically elective within the dynasty, although the kings had always made sure their sons would succeed them. But the royal Jagiellonian line died out with Sigismund II, and the nobility decided to essentially make it an open contest. Henri was the fourth son of the King of France and everyone believed it extremely unlikely that he would inherit, so his mother had been shopping him around various European monarchies for a while; his prospective brides included Mary, Queen of Scots and a Spanish princess. That all failed, however. The first French emissary to propose marriage between Henri and Anne, Sigismund's sister, which would have given him a claim to the throne, was not allowed at the king's death bed and went home with nothing. But the French spotted an opportunity and dispatched another emissary, now to put Henri's candidacy for the election. Unfortunately, the emissary arrived hot on the heels of the news of the Night of St. Bartholomew's massacre in Paris, where the royal family ordered a mass assassination of Huguenot leadership. This was not very well received in Poland. Some angry letters were sent home and the electioneering efforts were redoubled (reportedly the emissary would show Henri's portrait to the nobles and entreated them to say if a man of such innocent and tranquil visage would really just murder heretics in the street), but the Poles remained unconvinced. What did tide them over were the massive promises that the French diplomats made in Henri's name. These came in two distinct sets, which became foundational documents of the Polish legal system from there on: the Henrician articles, named after Henri, were a set of fundamental promises the king had to make with regards to the legal system (guaranteeing the privileges of nobility, regular meetings of the Sejm, obligatory council of sixteen senators assenting to the king's executive decisions, ban on succession through inheritance, Sejm control over foreign policy, freedom of religion, right to rebel if the monarch breaks his obligations), while the pacta conventa were specific electoral promises made by a given candidate (Henri promised to fund the education of 100 Polish nobles in France, pay back the debts of Sigismund, maintain an alliance with France, bring 4 thousand Gascon infantry for a war against Ivan the Terrible, bring foreign scholars to the Cracow Academy, pay 450 thousand złoty a year to the state treasury, send a French fleet to the Baltic, rebuild the Polish fleet and renovate the Cracow Academy). He also made a promise to marry Anne, although that was not in his official pacta conventa. This all allowed him to beat Ernest Hapsburg, the son of the Holy Roman Emperor; Ivan the Terrible, Tsar of Russia; and John III Vasa, King of Sweden and husband of Sigismund's other sister Catherine. So the young king-elect was pretty mad when he found out what was promised in his name. When Polish emissaries arrived to officially offer him the crown (with an entourage that stunned the Parisian crowds), he tried to bargain some more - reportedly he chafed at the freedom of religion and freedom of rebellion the most - but after a year he eventually caved in and became King of Poland. Which is when the problems began. Actually, they began just before he was crowned, when the Crown Great Marshal demanded he swear to respect Protestant liberties immediately, supposedly telling the king 'iurabis, rex, promisti' ('swear it, o king, you have promised') or 'si non iurabis, non regnabis' ('if you won't swear it, you won't rule'). So a few days later Henri went to meet Anne and it was a complete disaster. Henri was extremely promiscuous and almost certainly bisexual, he surrounded himself with fine women and young men he called 'mignons.' Anne was an old woman thirty years his senior, and most likely not a looker even in her younger years. He tried to be polite about how much he was repulsed by her, but it was really obvious. He also turned recalcitrant about the promises he had made, eventually only publicly swearing to uphold religious peace. His coronation Sejm left without making any legal acts as a sign of protest, warning the king to get his act together or get deposed. Henri, although educated, had very little political experience. Sources say he would mostly spend his days gambling with state money and feasting. He did not speak Polish, so his involvement in royal duties was minimal, although he was not really interested in Polish affairs, either. We are told he spent two weeks simulating sickness to avoid meeting with petitioners. He did not wear local clothing, and his fashion sense - involving plenty of jewelry, make-up, perfume - was seen as effeminate by his subjects. Both sides grew increasingly disillusioned with each other, although certainly were still willing to reconcile and give each other a chance - until six months later the news came that Henri's brother, the King of France, had died. See, although Henri was the fourth son, his father died relatively young in a tragic jousting accident, and was succeeded by his eldest son, 16 years old Francis, who quickly died of an ear infection. The King's second son, Louis, had died as a child. So Francis was succeeded by the third son, Charles IX, who was ten when succeeding the throne. He was healthy, however, and expected to reign for a long time. Unexpectedly, at the age of just 24, he died of tuberculosis. His only son was a two years old bastard, ineligible to succeed. Henri took the opportunity and bolted out of the country. He was pursued and caught, although the pursuers only asked him to stay or at least appoint someone as his regent. Henri refused. He was tired of the cold, strange country, so far from home, full of angry foreign people who were trying to pull a fast one on him, even though he was their King, as if they did not understand how monarchy works. No, he would go back to France, where it was warm, he could be counselled by his mother, where he did not have to marry some old hag, and where people respected him and his station, and where parties were parties instead of drunken crawls. Reportedly, however, he had been quite taken in by the Wawel Castle - spacious, comfortable, thrice the size of contemporary Louvre, and well equipped with various facilities. One legend has it that it was at Wawel that he first saw people eating with a fork and when he ran away, he stole a set of cutlery along with him (although cutlery was introduced at the French court by his mother, making this legend very spurious). Another (also poorly sourced) says that it was there that he had first encountered indoor plumbing, which he later had installed in his own palace. It was there that he was assassinated by a radicalised Dominican friar in 1589, after fifteen years on the French throne. Following Henri's flight, the Sejm sent an ultimatum demanding his return by May of 1575 on rigour of deposition. As he failed to do so, he was dethroned, and Anne succeeded him, briefly serving as the second female King of Poland (after Jadwiga). The French and the Poles then wrote some angry poetry about each other, and the matter was put to rest, more or less. One of the few remaining artifacts of Henri's rule in France is an inscription on the clock of the Palace of Justice. In 1585, Henri had the clock renovated, installing a new face decorated with the coats of arms of Poland and Lithuania and the inscription 'He who gave him two crowns shall give him the third,' a reference to his kingship in Poland (which he continued to claim until his death) and France, with the third crown supposed to come in Heaven.
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Nov 19, 2023 01:37
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Also I figure there might be interest in this post I made in one of the old threads, since it touches on a related subject.
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Nov 19, 2023 02:18
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Bright Bart posted:(My only question: The massacre happened after Henri's death. It was mostly organize by Henri's wife, in name of her and Henris' son. Do you mean a different massacre sullat?) I think you're asking me, not sullat? But you're thinking of the wrong Henri. Henri II, who died in 1560 and indeed had nothing to do with St. Bartholomew's Night massacre, was the father of Henry I of Poland (who later became Henry III of France) and was twenty years old or so when the massacre happened.
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Nov 19, 2023 20:37
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bob dobbs is dead posted:dying young is absolutely a magic way to cement any leader's legacy. jfk, alexander, caesar, henry iii... Alexander and Caesar may have died young (relatively young in Caesar's case, he was 55, which may not be too impressive in the current era of gerontocracy, but was certainly a fullness of age in ancient Rome), but they died absolutely on top of the world. They both literally had no-one left to conquer that mattered. It's hard to argue their legacies would not have been cemented if they continued to live on.
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Jan 30, 2024 00:10
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Now that we have Caesar out of our hair for a year or two, let's -- Text message notification sound
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Apr 11, 2024 07:42
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While Germany's imperial ambitions obviously shoulder a lot of the blame for the outbreak of the war, it has to be said that it did kind of happen as a confluence of factors that enabled those ambitions to come to fore. After all, the Morocco Crises, for example, did not lead to war, even though they occurred in a world state far more favourable to German colonial ventures. In the immediate run-up to WWI, it seemed like German militarism was on the wane, and the Scramble for Africa was put to rest. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand created a once-in-a-lifetime situation where the Austrians could act in the Balkans from a moral high ground, the Russians appeared unlikely to intervene, the British and French were distracted by their own crises, and in the event of a war, Germany could count on Austria-Hungary to at least try to pull its own weight. Everyone expected a lengthy diplomatic argument ending with Austria getting some kind of concession from Serbia and things going back to status quo, just like in the case of Morocco, the Great Game (which ended in convention just seven years prior), the Fashoda crisis, the Balkan wars (contained to the region through Great Power diplomacy), and so on. The Germans decided the odds were favourable on their roll of the dice, and Austria-Hungary went for broke in Serbia, while Russia chose war. But if Gavrilo Princip never went for the sandwich, the conditions for those gambles would not have occurred, and quite possibly would never be replicated.
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Apr 30, 2024 18:27
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By the time Austria-Hungary sends the ultimatum, it's clear they're gunning for war - and that is not even because of the language they used and demands they made, but because a 48 hr deadline was completely insane and calculated specifically at preventing European diplomacy from defusing the situation. But they did not send the ultimatum until July 23rd, almost a full month after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. They spent most of that time trying to figure out if they want to go to war, how they want to proceed with the war, if they even can go to war, will Russia intervene, and trying to sleight of hand their timing so as to prevent Russia from coordinating with Serbia and France, hoping to win as much time as possible at the word go. Their problem was that they did not anticipate the crisis (which would be very hard, considering what brought it about). Their troops were not in the barracks, they were in the fields for the harvest season. Their officers were on leave. Their diplomats were on holidays. It was a giant clusterfuck.
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May 1, 2024 19:57
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Defenestrategy posted:What role where tanketts supposed to serve? They dont seem as if theyd be more mobile or survivable than a half track or a truck with a .50 on it A TKS tankette could reach speeds of up to 47 kph and could mount a 20 mm HMG/autocannon (or, far more commonly, a 7.92 mm MG) in a fully tracked, lightly armoured vehicle that was about 132 cm tall. That's a hell of a lot more survivable than a flatbed truck and likely more mobile in most circumstances, as well as a lot cheaper and easier to maintain than a half-track.
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May 5, 2024 19:48
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Defenestrategy posted:I can see their use as an anti-partisan/police vehicle where the most it's going to deal with is probably homemade explosives/incendiaries. It just seemed like it was too lightly armored to actually do much more than what putting a 50 cal on a jeep or a six pounder on a half track would have accomplished for cheaper and less maintenance. Half-tracks were terrible maintenance hogs and actually all around bad ideas.
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May 5, 2024 23:39
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 23:55 |
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I said it before, but going by the big international factors that clearly mean war had to happen shows us that the trend was very much against it. Imperialism? Colonies were mostly bleeding money and nobody would go to war over a bit of dirt in Africa, as evidenced by Fashoda, Morocco, Aboukir and other such crises. Militarism? On the wane, even in Germany, where the naval arms race against Britain ended in 1912 after they realised they lost, and events like the Zabern affair showed that society was fed up with Prussians thinking the entire state should be their barracks. Alliance networks? Explicitly defensive. Nationalism? The French public in June of 1914 was aghast at the thought of going to war over Alsace-Lorraine, Russian Pan-Slavism was mostly an excuse to mess with the Ottomans, and in any event you can hardly say Austria-Hungary was motivated by nationalist fervour (except to tear itself apart). The war resulted from an unprecedented sequence of events that then led to a series of opportunistic grabs and miscalculations which ended in the death of millions.
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May 14, 2024 15:06
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