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Popular Thug Drink posted:it doesn't matter which one you have when your enemy is lying helpless at your feet. it's ok to be wrong sometimes asdf32, it doesn't make you any less of a person Well we're in agreement that the bomb was a factor in the final surrender and your main angle at this point seems to be "hey Americans the bomb was less important than you think!" without actually knowing how important that is. Speaking for myself I originally had a socialist history teacher who made the bomb like a 3 day segment and in his best attemp to be neutral painted it in a very negative light (that teacher also had Hermann Goering's pajama's in the classroom closet which was pretty weird/neat). Most intelligent people intuitively grasp that the bomb was an exclamation point at the end of a long sentence (the war). But they also get that the bomb was something different, even in the context of all the destruction that had come before it.
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Jan 4, 2016 02:41
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DrProsek posted:
Following the terms of the Yalta agreement and attacking within 3 months of the fall of Germany gets him those as a concession from the US. Not attacking gets him them as a concession from the Japanese; they were offering basically anything short of the home islands for keeping the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact going another year. Sure, from hindsight the invasion went near-perfectly, but nothing is a sure thing before you start it. So what's his motivation for taking the risk of invading to get basically the same outcome? Preferring a concession from the Allies rather than Japanese only makes sense if he believes that in a year's time the UN framework outlined at Yalta is going to be in place, and the Japanese empire wont be. Which will be true because america is going to have the bomb, and noone else will for 5 years. And if you have a nuke, and you can launch 1000-bomber raids, you can, within that 5 years, start stepping up to 100-nuke raids. Which at the very least is going to make atomic research impossible for anyone not at peace with the US. Trying to work out what Stalin would have done were that not the case is a meaningless exercise, like asking 'would he have invaded if there were no gravity?' or 'what-if Panzers were made of cheese?' But it does seem entirely coherent that he would have allowed the empire to keep Korea, which would have been enough for the Japanese ruling class to consider the war a successful exercise, worth repeating in a decade or two. And then dared the US to spend the next five years convincing them otherwise, while the Soviet Union put a peacetime economy back together.
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Jan 4, 2016 03:08
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Mystic_Shadow posted:Would it have been feasible to blockade the Japanese Islands and smother their empire like that, or was the 'atomic bomb' / 'ground invasion of the islands' dichotomy the only reasonable choice? I'm just having a hard time believing that killing hundreds of thousands to millions of civilians was the only option. Smothering the empire by blockade would effectively be killing millions of Japanese civilians in a far more unpleasant fashion than fire bombing or atomic blast. The winter of '45 would have been real goddamn unpleasant for anyone living on the islands as their industry ground to a halt as they were cut off from their only source of coal because the US Navy blew up their ferries and people began to freeze and starve to death
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Jan 4, 2016 05:15
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Bolow posted:Smothering the empire by blockade would effectively be killing millions of Japanese civilians in a far more unpleasant fashion than fire bombing or atomic blast. The winter of '45 would have been real goddamn unpleasant for anyone living on the islands as their industry ground to a halt as they were cut off from their only source of coal because the US Navy blew up their ferries and people began to freeze and starve to death Assuming, of course, that Japan doesn't surrender until winter.
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Jan 4, 2016 05:30
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Mystic_Shadow posted:So essentially the Japanese were defeated but wouldn't sign a truce, we had already blockaded the home islands, and the Japanese leadership was willing to kill off their own people to save face, and the bombs were the most humane action. That's pretty rough, but thanks for the explanation. the bombs weren't the most humane action. we were just going to drop the bombs regardless, because you dont launch the most expensive secret military project of all time just to not use the thing you developed. the only thing that could have prevented the bombs from being dropped was a japanese surrender before august 6, 1945 i dont even think the bombs were all that bad, given that we were already flattening japanese cities with strategic bombing. there's really no moral difference between atomic bombs and firebombing, and we had already crossed that line of mass attacks against civilians the most humane course of action for the united states would have been to accept conditional surrender, and i don't blame the US for pushing for unconditional surrender. it was just a terrible situation all around. the japanese, like the germans, were not going to accept any surrender which forced a total defeat until certain conditions were met which defied military logic - in the case of germany, the death of adolf hitler, paranoid megalomaniac, and in the case of japan, the snuffing out of any desperate chance to assure that the emperor, the embodiment of japanese society, wouldn't be deposed (ultimately the emperor chose to gamble his own office, and won) Effectronica posted:Assuming, of course, that Japan doesn't surrender until winter. yeah, there's a big counterfactual here. the only real evidence we have is a marked tendency on the part of japanese military leaders to not place a high value on civilian casualties. the japanese population at this point was well aware that the war was going far worse than official propaganda claimed, and many people were quietly cursing their government, but japan was a facist authoritarian society and japanese culture places a bit stronger emphasis on deference to authority, so it's hard to say if mass popular protests would have caused the war to end as the japanese people called for surrender we do know that japan correctly predicted american intentions and their plan of attack, and a costly operation olympic could have encouraged japan's military leadership through the winter radmonger posted:So it is going off into alt-history land to think that without the bomb he would still have invaded, instead of accepting whatever concessions the Japanese would have offered for neutrality. In that fantasy-land with no bomb, what are his motivations for attacking supposed to even be? oh for sure he would have. the longer the pacific war went on, the more stalin would have had to gain at the surrender. he already had the military and an enemy to point them at, russia was much less sensitive to war weariness, ultimately japan might have been turned into a split buffer state like korea or germany instead of a wholly owned american outpost. so stalin's motivations were the same in the east as they were in the west, more space between russia and western capitalist powers boner confessor fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 05:48
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I don't think a conditional surrender would have been humane for the non japanese who would have been under their rule.
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Jan 4, 2016 06:25
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i dont really see a surrender agreement where the japanese get to keep colonies. more like "surrender, and we promise we won't hang the emperor, prime minister, chiefs of staff, etc"
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Jan 4, 2016 06:41
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Popular Thug Drink posted:i dont really see a surrender agreement where the japanese get to keep colonies. more like "surrender, and we promise we won't hang the emperor, prime minister, chiefs of staff, etc" I'm talking about what the japanese stated they were willing to surrender under.
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Jan 4, 2016 07:20
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Popular Thug Drink posted:i dont really see a surrender agreement where the japanese get to keep colonies. more like "surrender, and we promise we won't hang the emperor, prime minister, chiefs of staff, etc" The US should have done all that anyways, and would have been unable to in a negotiated settlement. Even if we ended up not doing it in reality, the counterfactual of a negotiated settlement is still the less-than-optimal outcome
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Jan 4, 2016 08:06
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Some online resources if anyone's interested: Lots of Goons are already familiar with him, but Forgotten Weapons is a really good channel for antique/unique firearms, and he obviously does a lot of stuff on WW2 guns. There's very little shooty action, no gun-guy politics (unless there are political issues relevant to the gun's history), and tons of good information on backgrounds, history, and machinery. Archive Awareness and Soviet Gun Archives are two blogs run by SA's Ensign Expendable, and focus on pre-to-slightly-post-war tanks and guns, respectively (the vast majority from the Soviet point of view). They both use a lot of international primary documents to point out interesting tests, stories, and theories, and he'll actually do things like cross-check casualty reports on Allied/Axis sides of engagements. My only complaints are that he doesn't always provide links to the original documents, and since the many of the articles are in response to Germanophile message board ravings, the tone can get ridiculously  in certain entries. The Gun blog is rarely updated, but the Tank one updates very regularly.Lone Sentry is just goddamned packed with all kinds of information: Photos, stories, analysis, etc. I regularly look over this site, and I'm still not close to seeing everything. Since the paragraph is short, I'll throw in WW2 Equipment Data. It's an incredibly spergy look at WW2 munitions, in case you ever wanted to know just exactly how many parts there are to a 300mm Japanese rocket or something. If you wanna know about big boats, then here are two blogs: Combinedfleet and NavWeapons. Combinedfleet.com focuses entirely on Japanese ships, while NavWeapons includes all of the major Navies. If you're looking for stories, iremember.ru has a site full of English translations of Soviet war stories here. It's an interesting side you don't always get to hear, but keep in mind it can have the same problems that a lot of memoir-type works tend to have.
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Jan 4, 2016 11:28
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radmonger posted:Following the terms of the Yalta agreement and attacking within 3 months of the fall of Germany gets him those as a concession from the US. You're completely misunderstanding Stalin's motives here. The USSR in 1945 was completely exhausted by the war, and Stalin knew that his position was far weaker than it appeared. Therefore Stalin was much more interested in maintaining good relations with the western allies because they were the only possible threat to him in 1945. Because of this Stalin went ahead with the invasion as he had promised to do so and going back on his word would have pissed off the western allies something fierce. In comparison Japan was in the goddamn hole, and they had nothing to offer him that would be even remotely as valuable for the USSR as continued western goodwill would be. drilldo squirt posted:I'm talking about what the japanese stated they were willing to surrender under. What the Japanese stated as their surrender terms and what they would have accepted in reality are two different things. In the end they even accepted unconditional surrender. DrProsek posted:Close, but looking at communications between Japanese officials towards the end of the war, the bomb wasn't really this huge gamechanger that came out of nowhere and forced them to surrender, or at least if it was, the USSR joining the war also had the same effect. And the USSR joining was only such a problem because it meant Japan lost a negotiating partner and the USSR wiped out the Kwangtung Army, which were basically the one land force they had that was doing more or less okay up until they got wiped out. To expand on this a bit, the Japanese war cabinet basically had two competing strategies for ending the war on better terms than unconditional surrender. The first was pushed by the Foreign Minister Shigenori Tōgō and basically was to approach Stalin and have him mediate between the US and Japan in the hope of obtaining more favorable surrender terms, which obviously relied on the USSR staying neutral. He assumed that the USSR could be bought off and that the USSR wouldn't want the US to get a stronger position in the pacific after the war, but as mentioned this turned out to be a mistake because Stalin valued his relations with the US more than anything that Japan could offer him. The second option was pushed by the military wing of the war cabinet, and it basically meant concentrating everything they had in western Japan and making the expected US invasion so costly that the US would be willing to settle for a negotiated peace. However, this plan literally meant that everything they got had to be concentrated to defend western Japan, and as a consequence they would have nothing left to defend against an attack from the east. Therefore this plan also relied on the USSR remaining neutral, because even with their limited capacity for amphibious operations there was the percieved possibility that the USSR could pretty much have waltzed ashore on Hokkaido and Japan couldn't have done anything about it, and that would have made any meaningful military resistance impossible. This is why the USSR entering the war was decisive. It completely destroyed the remaining strategic options that Japan had
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Jan 4, 2016 11:42
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NikkolasKing posted:Hm, fair enough. The "offers of peace" thing just conflicts with everything I've ever heard about the necessity of the Atomic Bombs. The discourse about the "necessity" of the atomic bombs typically takes place within the framework of Allied insistence on unconditional surrender, which isn't commonly challenged for various reasons. Japan was that "fanatical" because they were not willing to accept American conditions for peace, the Americans were not willing to accept their conditions for peace, and the Japanese weren't ready to literally hand their country over to the Americans and allow them to do whatever they pleased with it. Japan had no illusions that they might possibly win the war at that point, but unconditional surrender is one hell of a condition, and the Japanese still held out hope for a negotiated peace that would let them keep their current government and maybe some of their overseas colonies. I doubt the Japanese expected much from the Americans directly, but they thought they had some diplomatic rapport with the Soviets and hoped that they could get the Soviets to help them push for a negotiated peace and act as a mediator in said negotiations. To that end, the major Japanese strategic objective at that point in the war was to make any invasion so difficult and costly that the Americans would decide it was easier to agree to leave them a few shreds of dignity in a negotiated peace than it was to outright conquer the country. How much the bomb matters is something that will likely never be known for sure. On the one hand, it sent a message that the Americans could destroy Japan more cheaply than expected (since the Japanese knew nothing about the enormous cost of the Manhattan Project); on the other hand, it came at about the same time that the Soviets made clear that they were in no mood to help Japan out diplomatically, ruining Japanese hopes of a negotiated peace once and for all. Either way, if the Allies had been willing to compromise and allow Imperial Japan to continue to exist, neither an invasion nor a nuke would have been necessary. Of course, before you get into moral judgements based on that, you have to figure in the brutality of Imperial Japanese rule, particularly in its colonies, so it's not like a negotiated peace would necessarily have been much better in terms of long-term civilian toll. Mystic_Shadow posted:Would it have been feasible to blockade the Japanese Islands and smother their empire like that, or was the 'atomic bomb' / 'ground invasion of the islands' dichotomy the only reasonable choice? I'm just having a hard time believing that killing hundreds of thousands to millions of civilians was the only option. Feasible? Oh yeah, absolutely. By that point, Japanese naval and air power were nonexistent. But the Japanese civilian casualties from starvation, disease, exposure, etc would have been enormous. It'd be a game of genocidal chicken in hopes that the Japanese government would blink in the face of mass starvation before the US government blinked at the sheer death toll. The bomb wasn't the only option, but there was no option that wouldn't have led to the deaths of a whole bunch of people - the only question was where the casualties would happen and the proportion of civilian to military deaths. Also, for a variety of reasons, the US wanted the war ended as quickly as possible, so a prolonged blockade was seen as undesirable. radmonger posted:This is missing the fact that Stalin certainly knew about the bomb, via spies, since at least 1942. He probably knew about the decision to drop it, and in any case by his nature wouldn't have believed it could be created and not used. Influencing the post-war regional balance of power. By 1945, it was already obvious that the US and Soviets would be the undeniable superpowers coming out of WWII, that they were unlikely to get along all that well after the war, and that facts on the ground in 1945 would play a major part in what Southeast Asia looked like in 1946. Japan was arguably a preliminary battleground for the Cold War, with both powers using it as a punching bag to display their military might to each other and secure favorable positions in post-war negotiations. The atomic bomb wasn't just aimed at the Japanese - it was also a convenient excuse to display the power of the bomb to the Soviets and any other would-be rivals, without risking being seen as provocative by openly carrying out a test just for the sole purpose of intimidating the Soviets. Diplomatic baggage was also a key factor. There was a fair amount of distrust between the Soviets and the other Allies, but the Soviets had agreed to invade Japan after the defeat of Germany, and breaking that agreement would have had significant consequences for their other end-of-war agreements with the rest of the Allies.
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Jan 4, 2016 21:08
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DarklyDreaming posted:So I watched this, and after watching a couple other lecture videos on that channel I got to this one: Stephen Ambrose 
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Jan 5, 2016 01:59
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With regards to the atomic bomb, it's important to remember that we're looking at this with the benefit of decades of hindsight. At the time, it was not clear that Soviet entry into the war would have pushed the Japanese into unconditional surrender. Indeed, Germany held out under two simultaneous invasions and did not surrender until Hitler committed suicide in an occupied and destroyed Berlin. That Japan is an island nation unsuitable to invasion and that the Japanese had demonstrated fanatical resistance that at least equaled (I'd say exceeded) that of the Germans is a strong motivation to try the atomic bomb. Moreover, the Japanese had survived the conventional bombing campaign thus far as did the Germans survive the combined British and US bombing campaign. The invasion of mainland Japan was seen as a real possibility and perhaps the only solution to ending Japan's Imperial ambition, the atomic bomb a potential panacea. And this is a government that is presently in the business of engineering the defeat of Germany in such a manner that further revanchism is impossible. The belief that the terms of the Treaty of Versailles is what led to the second world war is driving a radical new type of occupation and reorganization that would see the spirit of revanchism beaten out of Germany. To then turn around and take a conditional surrender from Japan would fly in the face of this strategy. Whether or not revanchism would take root in Japan following a conditional surrender, it's clearly something that would have been on the mind of the United States government. Then there's also the emotion of the times. Decades into the future we can read atomic bomb literature from Japan and understand the monstrousness that was inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We are sufficiently separate from Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, and the Rape of Nanking that we can look at the suffering of the Japanese during the war with clear eyes and recognize that, in stopping the atrocities of Imperial Japan we committed atrocities ourselves. But, within the context of World War II, the scale looks a bit different. The Japanese had murdered 17 million Chinese alone. The Rape of Nanking killed approximately as many Chinese civilians as Japanese civilian deaths in the atomic bombings and that's not discussing the literal mass rapes and wanton maiming the Japanese soldiers took part in while doing all this killing. To most people of the time, it was as Sir Arthur Harris put it "They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."
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Jan 5, 2016 03:07
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Pinely posted:With regards to the atomic bomb, it's important to remember that we're looking at this with the benefit of decades of hindsight. At the time, it was not clear that Soviet entry into the war would have pushed the Japanese into unconditional surrender. Indeed, Germany held out under two simultaneous invasions and did not surrender until Hitler committed suicide in an occupied and destroyed Berlin. That Japan is an island nation unsuitable to invasion and that the Japanese had demonstrated fanatical resistance that at least equaled (I'd say exceeded) that of the Germans is a strong motivation to try the atomic bomb. Moreover, the Japanese had survived the conventional bombing campaign thus far as did the Germans survive the combined British and US bombing campaign. The invasion of mainland Japan was seen as a real possibility and perhaps the only solution to ending Japan's Imperial ambition, the atomic bomb a potential panacea. Yeah, but on the other hand, 10% of the US populace wanted to commit genocide against Japan, consistently throughout the war. Once we start down that road we end up with a vast and deep misanthropy at the end of our journey.
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Jan 5, 2016 03:38
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Soviet sealift/amphibious assault capacity in the Pacific tends to be vastly overstated. The Soviet Pacific fleet in 1945 consisted of two cruisers (and one, the Kaganovich, wasn't fully fitted out until 1947) and 11 destroyers, a handful of LCIs received from the US, assorted minesweepers and torpedo/patrol boats and such, and inexperienced naval infantry. (And of course one has to consider that the fleet probably wasn't in the best shape because it had been plundered for ships and men to fight Germany.) They didn't have or produce anything similar to the Higgin's boat or heavy LCT style transports, meaning that they were unable to rapidly bring men ashore, and were unable to land tanks and heavy artillery. They had limited naval power to bombard shore defenses or protect landing craft from sea/air attack. The Red Army also lacked numbers of long-range bombers/ground attack aircraft and fighters to support a attack on Japan. The one time they tried invading a island they had to drop their infantry off piecemeal by ferrying them ashore with torpedo boats and minesweepers (which kept getting lost in the fog), shore artillery sunk five of their lend-lease transports, and it almost failed because they only had a few anti-tank rifles and the Japanese turned out to have a bunch of obsolete light tanks, so a lot of marines got awarded Hero of the Soviet Union (posthumous) for going after the tanks with satchel charges and grenades.
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Jan 5, 2016 08:17
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DarklyDreaming posted:So I watched this, and after watching a couple other lecture videos on that channel I got to this one: Also depends on "WW2 Historians." Most are discerning enough to not take people at their word, but other ones with political agendas tend to repeat sources that validate their claims no matter how wrong the sources are. The absolute worst book I've read on WW2 happens to be one of the most popular ever written: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000XUAETO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1 Death Traps by Belton Cooper is so awful, that there's a running joke on several WW2/Military forums that you can open the book to any page and find at least one factual inaccuracy. I've tried it a few times, and very rarely do I find a clean page. The book is written by a former liaison officer in the 3rd Armored Division, and the few fleeting moments where he truthfully talks of his own experiences are actually quite interesting. The rest of the book is a mixture of incoherent ramblings he knows nothing about, and a ghost-written critique of the M4 Sherman tank that uses a mixture of wrong information, and wrongly interpreted information. Unfortunately, since it's juicy gossip that's easy to read, it got quite popular with contrarian types, usually the kind who fit the Wehraboo profile. History Channel even made a documentary based off of it which eventually permeated the rest of its programming, forcing it to become uncomfortably praising towards the Wehrmacht, and its popular reputation of "The Hitler Channel." It's pretty much a chore to try to find forums online that aren't completely influenced by this thing anymore.
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Jan 7, 2016 04:37
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There is a major issue in Western WWII history that it has a hugely pro-German bias for a few reasons, mainly because surviving German generals were taken at their word when they gave their postwar interrogations and published their memoirs, and their responses were not viewed as critically as they should be. The reasons were mainly twofold: 1. The Western Allies realised that they needed West Germany to have a strong military to deter the Soviets, and thus needed the remnants of the WWII Wehrmacht and its commanders to be the core of that new army. 2. The Soviets were not releasing their documentation, so for anything on the Eastern Front there was only the German viewpoint to go on. This is one of the reasons that there is a pervading sense of the Germans being superior soldiers who were only ground down by the barbaric Russian hordes, that everything that went wrong for Germany during the war was Hitler's fault and that it was only the SS who committed atrocities in the East - the Wehrmacht had its hands clean. The surviving German generals had no interest in indicting themselves for war crimes or being the culprit in cocking things up during the war, and the Western allies had a vested interest in rehabilitating the image of the German military. The opening up of Soviet archives since the fall of the USSR and more critical modern history has helped in this regard but you still get the 'Clean Wehrmacht myth' and 'it was all Hitler's fault, the German general staff could do no wrong' bandied about a lot to this day,. MikeCrotch fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Jan 7, 2016 |
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Jan 7, 2016 17:31
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C.M. Kruger posted:Soviet sealift/amphibious assault capacity in the Pacific tends to be vastly overstated. The ability of Japan to defend Hokkaido is always implicitly overstated, however.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:34
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MikeCrotch posted:There is a major issue in Western WWII history that it has a hugely pro-German bias for a few reasons, mainly because surviving German generals were taken at their word when they gave their postwar interrogations and published their memoirs, and their responses were not viewed as critically as they should be. Speer also tends to be credited with every single increase in German production, despite many of them being due to investments made before he came to power and him making some really stupid decisions, since he was a smooth talker and had a nice book.
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Jan 7, 2016 22:14
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Darkrenown posted:Speer also tends to be credited with every single increase in German production, despite many of them being due to investments made before he came to power and him making some really stupid decisions, since he was a smooth talker and had a nice book. I've yet to crack open Tooze but my impression has always been the Goring was so godawful at the job that anyone taking over would have also increased production.
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Jan 8, 2016 00:55
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Effectronica posted:The ability of Japan to defend Hokkaido is always implicitly overstated, however. Ultimately also the central issue would be dislodging the Soviets if they even get a minor foothold on Hokkaido. It wasn't that the Soviets even needed to conquer Hokkaido to a have a part to part to play in the postwar order but that they just needed to be the first ones to accept a surrender from local forces once a general surrender was called. It may have not been success, but also certainly it was a worry for the US especially if the war dragged on long enough for the Soviets to get forces and equipment into position to make some time of landing. That said, I don't know if a Soviet occupation would have been viable even so, but also certainly there would be a great deal of backroom bargaining over the issue. Edit: I also doubt the US would be especially interested in attempting their own landings either all things considered, one thing is that the Western allies did not especially want to push the Soviets too far. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 01:12
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ComradeKane posted:Anyway, has anyone read Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, by Catherine Merridale? I've read it. It's very good if you want to learn about the World War II Red Army, although if you find the prose hard to get through it probably won't get any better, I don't remember any significant shifts in quality or tone.
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Jan 8, 2016 01:24
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Raskolnikov38 posted:I've yet to crack open Tooze but my impression has always been the Goring was so godawful at the job that anyone taking over would have also increased production. Yeah a lot of Speer's post-war claims have been debunked but he still came out looking like the sanest man in an army of living Saturday morning cartoon villains
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Jan 8, 2016 02:13
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Handy WWII tip DO NOT TRUST ANYTHING ALBERT SPEER SAID AFTER THE WARThanks for listening
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Jan 8, 2016 16:30
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The best Speer moment was when he was trying to bullshit the tribunal into believing that for lack of a ladder he would have killed Hitler personally.
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Jan 8, 2016 16:34
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MikeCrotch posted:Handy WWII tip You shouldn't trust anything he said during the war either 
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Jan 8, 2016 17:15
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I think my favorite story is how the Brits were secretly recording the conversations of captured generals during the war, even going so far as to bring a tangentially related topic up, leave the room, and then listen in on the ensuing conversation between the generals. That's one of the reasons we know the Wehrmacht's hands were dirty. Incredibly, many of these generals discussed war crimes they had committed in addition to betraying a clear knowledge of the holocaust. It's not like such recording technology was unheard of either, they just foolishly assumed that the British wouldn't bother to do so.
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Jan 8, 2016 19:23
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I forget if it was in Speer or Guderian's book where they talked about showing off one of the giant railway cannons to Hitler, and one of the first things he asked was "Can this shoot tanks?" The man looked at an artillery piece with no side traverse that could only shoot in the direction the railway was pointing, and ask "can this shoot specific, small targets?"
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Jan 8, 2016 23:02
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Yeah well you also had Churchill enthusiastically endorsing a project to build aircraft carriers out of wood pulp and ice.
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Jan 9, 2016 09:08
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HerraS posted:Yeah well you also had Churchill enthusiastically endorsing a project to build aircraft carriers out of wood pulp and ice. Yeah I think that for all of the guffawing at Nazi superweapons, it's important to maintain perspective that the Allies had some fantastical ideas as well. I mean, some guffawing is warranted considering the B-29 was a lot more practical (?) than the Maus, but in the bizarro Man in the High Castle universe the book would be titled "My Four-Engined Bomber is Fight!"
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Jan 9, 2016 09:20
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Mans posted:You shouldn't trust anything he said during the war either Are you saying we shouldn't believe Nazis?
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Jan 9, 2016 16:38
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Plan Z posted:I forget if it was in Speer or Guderian's book where they talked about showing off one of the giant railway cannons to Hitler, and one of the first things he asked was "Can this shoot tanks?" The man looked at an artillery piece with no side traverse that could only shoot in the direction the railway was pointing, and ask "can this shoot specific, small targets?" You are assuming he meant 'can this shoot _at_ tanks. Perhaps he meant 'can it shoot tanks out of the barrel, where they deploy a parachute and shoot Russians on the way down?'
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Jan 9, 2016 16:47
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Orange Devil posted:Are you saying we shouldn't believe Nazis? You'd be surprised how many people claim "X SS Commander killed 40 American tanks without receiving a single shot!" When the only resource that claims it is the SS unit commander's diary or something. gradenko_2000 posted:Yeah I think that for all of the guffawing at Nazi superweapons, it's important to maintain perspective that the Allies had some fantastical ideas as well. Yeah, but Allies had fewer of the insane weapons, and we rarely ever went through with thorough testing. The most we got out of the Pykrete project was a few people wasting time in a Canadian lake. Germany, due to its insane procurement system and Hitler's odd demands, tended to actually seriously pursue these things. I guess, if anything, they did us a favor by proving a lot of this to be nonsense, because I can see Cold War projects that would have tried to do something like the Maus.
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Jan 9, 2016 20:37
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General WW2 research question: How can one go about finding their relatives' service records? I'd like to know more about my grandfather's service in Europe during the war. I tried requesting infomation the army a few years back and received a nice letter informing me a fire during the 70's burned most records?
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Jan 9, 2016 23:02
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My Imaginary GF posted:General WW2 research question: How can one go about finding their relatives' service records? I'd like to know more about my grandfather's service in Europe during the war. The National Archives is the best place to start. You generally need to be next of kin to order service records directly (spouses, offspring, etc) so that probably won't work for you, but they also have an alternative method for the general public and more distant relations of veterans. I'd give that a look, first of all.
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Jan 9, 2016 23:08
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If there's pictures just give them to Brown Moses.
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Jan 10, 2016 08:33
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Brown Moses is the unironic "this looks shopped" king of the internet, capable of deducing anything from any image or information. He should go into mixed media art after he finishes solving all war.
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Jan 10, 2016 10:35
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Anosmoman posted:If there's pictures just give them to Brown Moses. There are letters. Boxes upon boxes of letters. They're all in an archane cursive form of Yiddish, however. The one we paid to have translated details how the godless Commies have occupied Jewish property and refuse to turn over a barn to an extermination camp survivor, inbetween detailing how X and Y member of the extended family was last seen in 194X or 194X.
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Jan 10, 2016 10:40
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| # ? May 15, 2024 17:30 |
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Why where the Germans so behind everybody technologically? Is it that they are just genetically stupid?
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Jan 11, 2016 14:37
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