|
Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:At least in his WWII Nazi books he bends over loving backwards to show that the Nazi system was rotten to the core and that everyone was culpable. There was no bifurcation between "good Germans" and "bad Germans". Everyone had their hands dirty and were deeply implicated. And somehow he's a favorite "Dad historian"?? Makes no sense to me except that probably bad people enjoy his well written narrative elements and just ignore the parts that don't fit into their personal prejudices. His books are mixed I think - he does better when focusing on the narrative of a specific event but his latest book on the whole of WWII was pretty bad from what I've heard
|
#
¿
Jul 14, 2022 14:18
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 06:43 |
|
|
Riot Bimbo posted:agreed, but it's worth noting that meth makes you loving insane and reinforces just about every bad impulse you could have so like, prolific dopamine-based stimulant abuse absolutely correlates to bad behavior I don't know if it was this thread or the MilHist thread but the "Nazis on Meth" book is pretty bad history, most people in the German army would have gotten 20 meth pills or nothing, and there is literally no evidence that lots of regular people were going out and buying meth off the shelves. If anyone in WWII were meth fiends it was the Finns; quote:Koivunen was a Finnish soldier, assigned to a ski patrol on 20 April 1944, along with several other Finnish soldiers. Three days into their mission, on 18 March, the group was attacked and surrounded by Soviet forces, from which they managed to escape.[2] Koivunen became fatigued after skiing for a long distance, but could not stop. He was also the sole carrier of army-issued Pervitin, or methamphetamine, a stimulant used to remain awake while on duty.[3] He took them all and had a short burst of energy, but then entered into a state of delirium, and lost consciousness. Koivunen remembered waking up the following morning, separated from his patrol and having no supplies.[4] In the following days, he escaped Soviet forces once again, was injured by a land mine which also set fire to a nearby Russian camp, and laid in a ditch for a week waiting for help.[4] Having skied more than 400 km (248.5 mi) he was found and admitted to a nearby hospital, where his heart rate was measured at 200 beats per minute, triple the average human heartbeat,[5] and weighing only 43 kg (94.8 lbs).[4] In the week Koivunen was gone, he subsisted only on pine buds and a single Siberian jay that he caught and ate raw. He ended up surviving and died peacefully at the age of 71.[4]
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2022 11:30
|
|
|
Slavvy posted:So, what, you think that before gilette's magic invention there was no such thing as shaving...? Straight razors loving suck to shave with tho
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2022 11:54
|
|
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:anyhow my answer the iran-iraq war Specifically that swamp that got electrified while under chemical bombardment
|
|
#
¿
Jul 26, 2022 10:39
|
|
|
vyelkin posted:In terms of casualty rate for members of the military, discounting units used for actual suicide missions, possibly the closest you get to a regular assignment being a death sentence was being assigned to crew a German submarine in World War II, which had something like a 75% fatality rate. And while the daily discomforts and hazards were different from those of soldiers freezing to death on the Eastern Front, before your almost certain death the weeks, months, or years spent crewing a submarine were still extremely uncomfortable and terrifying. There were Luftwaffe units whose job was to shoot down US bombers by literally ramming them in midair then bailing out. They had a projected 90% fatality rate. Obviously a lot fewer of them than u boat crews.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 27, 2022 15:28
|
|
|
Dameius posted:Has anyone invaded Russia from the east and won? The Germans in WWI
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2022 12:25
|
|
|
Wasn't it just that the cold meant people didn't bleed to death? Seem to remember a similar situation at Eylau in 1807. That battle started because it was so cold that Prussian and French troops started fighting over who would get to sleep in a house and things escalated from there.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 7, 2022 13:10
|
|
|
Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:What, exactly, was the point of HMS Vanguard?? Everything the British did in WW2 was a stupid failure or a waste of time and money and usually human life. Except, of course, for getting the USA on their side. Vanguard was ordered in 1941 before it was clear that airpower was the deciding factor at sea and was designed to use left over 15 inch guns, as guns are the longest lead time item on a battleship. Her construction was not a priority during the war as the British knew a fast battleship was not top priority, and the Kriegsmarine and Regia Marina had been largely defeated midway through the war. Battleships did have more purpose in the North Sea/Med than elsewhere though, due a combination of terrible weather and land based air respectively making naval air less effective relatively speaking. The Japanese were also out there with Yamato and Mushashi as well. Of course you always have to factor in the institutional inertia of the battleship lovers in every navy who weren't ready to give up on them, the RN included.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 12, 2022 10:52
|
|
|
Fish of hemp posted:Now that one of the ogs, Elisabeth II has passed way, can someone recommend good books about British imperialism? Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2022 21:04
|
|
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:Lincoln was the luckiest motherfucker to get got when he did. his plan for reconstruction was absolutely terrible and because he was Lincoln, the radical republicans would have had a much worse chance of implanting radical reconstruction over him like they did to Johnson Also the guy who replaced him was such an obvious malicious, incompetent fuckup that he was going to look incredible by comparison
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2022 13:49
|
|
|
Britain pre-WWI also had extensive military ties with France, the extent of which was not widely publicly known and came as quite a shock to many British politicians as essentially the Foreign Office had tied Britain to France behind everyone's backs. Britain likely would have left Germany and Russia to duke it out if France was kept out of it, but the French government at the time was incredibly belligerent and wanted another go at Germany so the Germans were understandably unwilling to take the French and British at their word that they would not invade, especially as the German battle plan relied on taking France out first (though how predetermined the "Schlieffen-Moltke" plan was in 1914 is a hot debate topic to this day). At the end of the day, in 1914 there is absolutely zero chance Britain takes Germany's side against France, it's just a totally ahistorical scenario for all the reasons mentioned. In 1917 the only way the Allied Powers would have accepted peace is at the very least a return to the status quo ante and admission of guilt by Germany (which would have been very expensive) and with US entry into the war the French would have also probably demanded Alsace and Lorraine too. The German army after Brest-Litovsk was in good enough shape to attempt the Spring Offensive so until that went south in 1918 I don't think Germany was contemplating total military defeat being likely. The Allied powers agreed, they expected the war to last till 1919 - the military collapse of Germany was a lot more sudden than expected, though it's possible the home front would have totally collapsed under the blockade if the war had dragged on longer anyway. Any discussion of whether Germany could win the war has to reckon with the fact that Germany was literally starving to death and on the verge of revolution through 1918, and in reality even though Ludendorff said the military situation was hopeless and advised the Kaiser to sue for peace it was an attempted revolution in Kiel that absolutely sealed the deal.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2022 18:41
|
|
|
One of my favourite nazi economic facts is that Germany in WWII almost ran out of coal (despite being, you know, Germany) because they hosed the trains up so badly
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2023 12:28
|
|
|
Fish of hemp posted:What was the most destructive colonial war post WW2? Possibly the Congo Wars though there a few contenders up there. Also depends on how you're defining destructive, in the Korean War something like 95% of all the buildings were destroyed in the North.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2023 00:11
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:in the Doomsday Econ thread, it came up that the sheer amount of labor required to farm food was so incredibly high that it seems ludicrous for people to consider the possibility that they could revert to or become subsistence farmers, for whatever reason that they might deliberately want to pursue it The 2 biggest labour saving devices in history were the washing machine and the steam shovel Pretty big argument for the home washing machine being one of the key elements of women's liberation in the mid 20th century
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2023 10:24
|
|
|
Incredible
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2023 17:52
|
|
|
Weka posted:More seriously, what was bad about Stalin? Huge ratcheting back of the promise of social freedom promised in the early USSR back towards social conservatism, especially in things like art
|
|
#
¿
Jun 25, 2023 19:35
|
|
|
Weka posted:Was he wrong to do so? Things like this seem bad until you consider the USSR was under siege it's entire existence. https://youtu.be/wF0JdAim6Pc
|
|
#
¿
Jun 26, 2023 10:44
|
|
|
Cookie Cutter posted:Napoleon, famously not singling out minorities for massacre, just ask anyone in the Caribbean and La Reunion. Not European so they don't count, very French tbh Ah but you see he said he regretted it later
|
|
#
¿
Aug 30, 2023 00:23
|
|
|
Russian futurism wasn't tho
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2024 21:47
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 06:43 |
|
|
ROK troops were also notorious for being extremely bloodthirsty in Vietnam, something that might have something to do with the fact that South Korea was a literal police state into the 80s
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2024 18:29
|
|