|
Mans posted:People should also realize that the fall of the western roman empire wasn't a catastrophe. There where no Dark Ages, no barbarian slaughter, no destruction of the arts. It's really important to clarify that what happened was the natural process of a decaying structure, with the people who took over adopting most of the stable and organized structure of Roman economic life and adapting it to modern, decentralized lives. Yeah, this isn't rally true. The end of the empire in the West was definitely a catastrophe. Widespread trade and literacy disappeared with the Roman state and didn't return for at least a couple of centuries. Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization goes into this in detail and I find it hard to argue with his conclusions. Also Stilicho deserves more praise than he gets. Dude was one of the last great Romans and got murdered for his troubles. Adrian Goldsworthy's account in The Fall of the West is good but not extensive enough. Of course it's easy for me to say that since Roman History isn't my field. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at Nov 5, 2011 around 22:35 |
| # ¿ Nov 5, 2011 22:33 |
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 19, 2013 19:43 |
|
|
Modern Day Hercules posted:I just want to say, that even though a lot of what's being discussed isn't strictly military history, I really like the way this thread has been going for a while. Obscure minutia about World War 2 might be interesting to some, but I feel like I'm far from alone in saying that this thread is better off without it. Depends on your definition of minutia, really. For instance there's the matter of coal in relation to navies of the Ironclad and Dreadnought ages. It's a very important element in terms of contemporary force projection but to explain it correctly involves lots of technical detail that probably qualifies as minutia to >80% of readers.
|
| # ¿ Nov 5, 2011 22:43 |
|
|
R. Mute posted:^^ I don't know about literacy, but trade didn't really decline any more than you'd expect when war ravages a region and rebounded pretty quickly. Henri Pirenne claims the Mediterranean trade was only cut after the Islamic expansion in the 7th and 8th century, but even that claim is being disputed now. Again, I'd recommend reading Ward-Perkins' book. He explains in details how, while trade didn't disappear per se, it became incredible circumscribed. Instead of importing things from thousands of miles away the trade routes pretty much consisted of one village selling locally-made poo poo to another nearby village. And the quality and workmanship of said poo poo went drastically downhill after the end of the Western Empire as well. Modern Day Hercules posted:That's not funny Good. It wasn't meant to be. Suffice it to say that if I've learned anything from working on a military history Ph.D it's that one man's "minutia" is another man's important historical evidence.
|
| # ¿ Nov 5, 2011 22:55 |
|
|
mllaneza posted:Vince, do you want to field that or do I have to dig out tons of coal/hp/hour for some RN cruisers and then plot coaling stations on a globe ? I can put an effortpost about it together in a couple of days or so.
|
| # ¿ Nov 6, 2011 12:59 |
|
|
Mans posted:Bryan Ward-Perkins is a whinny baby who cries about the fall and disgrace of Rome because they lost territory that the Romans took by force and genocide, and because of the lost of trade that they themselves stole. And you, apparently, are one of those people desperate to erase anything that the Romans accomplished because they don't fit your model of an ideal society. Witness your application of terms like "genocide" to a period of history in which pretty much all of the inhabitants would laugh in your face if you tried to explain to them the concept of genocide. Barbaric as it is, that was the established principle of warfare in those days. Furthermore you don't seem to want to admit that the fall of the Western Romans was a tragedy. You go to great lengths to obfuscate how the collapse of trade and literacy damaged the West for centuries, no matter what the prime mover in that collapse was. EDIT: None of this, however, is meant to deny that the empire tore itself apart in the fourth century. The barbarian invasions of the fifth century were simply what finally broke the back of Roman society in the west, which is what did the most immediate damage. Whether a continued western empire could've restored itself to its former glory is debatable (and I'd say that the answer is no), but because of the invasions and migrations and all the disruption, it never got the chance to fail on its own. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at Nov 6, 2011 around 17:22 |
| # ¿ Nov 6, 2011 16:19 |
|
|
SeanBeansShako posted:The Royal Navy was especially determined to keep using its sails even when the French Navy started to use steam engines and bolted on the first metal armour to their ships hulls. The Navy of course only then upgraded because blarrghbllry the French! Yeah this isn't actually true at all despite what "common knowledge" says. The Royal Navy was using steam in a big way by the 1830s but until the screw propeller came into its own the bigger warships couldn't use steam very effectively without compromising their broadside firepower. Paddlewheels were a massive weakness on a battleship. Also reducing the philosophy behind the first ironclads was "blarrghbllry the French" is the kind of horrible Geoffrey Regan/Oh What A Lovely War nonsense that this thread should be specifically trying to dispel. Sails were also retained because the early engines weren't particularly good and there wasn't a network of global coaling stations until the last couple decades of the 1800s. Notice that the mastless warships like Devastation were never sent much farther abroad than the Mediterranean because there was neither the infrastructure to support them or anything there they would be needed to fight anyways. Read Steam, Steel, and Shellfire and John Beeler's Birth of the Battleship for more information. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at Nov 9, 2011 around 20:49 |
| # ¿ Nov 9, 2011 20:45 |
|
|
Nenonen posted:You'd think this must have eventually been reflected in the local cuisines. You might think so, but the actual inhabitants of Moronia and Incestia would be the ones eating Moronic and Incestual cuisine the vast majority of the time, so they would have no incentive to eat horrible things as a strategic deterrent. Rodrigo Diaz posted:Are you at all, in any way, familiar with medieval Western European or Eastern Roman warfare? Because foraging was a key operation in both. These statements are really very wrong. Yeah, even for the Roman Army it was an important duty. Julius Caesar spends a not-insubstantial amount of time discussing how he secured grain supplies for his legions in The Gallic War, and he mentions foraging parties frequently as well IIRC. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at Jan 19, 2012 around 22:45 |
| # ¿ Jan 19, 2012 22:42 |
|
Can we not invade Moronia this year, cause you know, they eat insects there and their wine is made from horse cum?
Well it's either Moronia or Incestia, and you know the Incestians get all their vital minerals from eating little pebbles and their beer is brewed from the poo poo of a diarrhic camel. So which one is it?
|
gohuskies posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(1959_film) I really, really doubt this. Mass suicide parties make good drama but that's just not the way the human race works.
|
| # ¿ Feb 21, 2012 23:58 |
|
|
wdarkk posted:Probably because she proposed it for radar-guided torpedoes, and the US bureau of ordinance were loving terrible. I doubt it was that simple. Without looking at the original Navy commentary on the proposals, I'd be skeptical they were as stupid about the invention as you suggest (although the torpedo detonator fiasco does give me pause). According to one source I read, the co-inventor made some wild claims about how well they could miniaturize the device (it was initially far too big to fit into a torpedo) and accused the Navy of being bullet-headed morons when they didn't believe him completely. Also torpedo bombing was one of the most dangerous forms of attack since the plane had to fly low and pretty drat slow to make the drop correctly, so having the plane loiter after dropping the fish so a guy on board could send signals to the torpedo guidance device in the face of heavy flak doesn't seem a terribly good idea.
|
| # ¿ Mar 13, 2012 11:44 |
|
|
DerLeo posted:The Civil War isn't a law. Maybe not but it's a hell of a precedent against.
|
| # ¿ Mar 27, 2012 22:51 |
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:I wonder whether the war actually sped up the abolition of slavery in America. Yes, it did. The Southern states went so far as keeping Lincoln off their ballots entirely because they found the possibility of an abolitionist being elected intolerable. The South had no interest in allowing slavery to wither on the vine and had spent the past sixty years obstructing anything that might even hypothetically endanger slavery as an institution. I can't see it ending any other way that it did. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at Apr 5, 2012 around 01:28 |
| # ¿ Apr 5, 2012 01:25 |
|
|
Acebuckeye13 posted:Next question: What would have changed if George Washington was a Terminator? He wouldn't have needed all those sets of false teeth.
|
| # ¿ May 6, 2012 09:04 |
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:For that matter, why is the US/NATO trying to put up a "missile defense" system in Europe? I was under the impression that ABMs are banned by treaty. Partially it's a show of support towards the former Soviet Bloc states in Eastern Europe. Putting up a missile shield (no matter how much of a joke it is) in defiance of Russian efforts plays well in that area. Mostly there's a lot of former Russia Watchers in the DoD and State who think we're still fighting the Cold War and need to "contain" the Russians, whatever that means. I'm not claiming Russia isn't a strategic priority for the US, but clowns like Bolton bitching about the latest nuclear force reduction treaty can claim an audience that is not uninfluential in policy circles. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at May 7, 2012 around 14:53 |
| # ¿ May 7, 2012 14:51 |
|
|
steinrokkan posted:As someone who lives in one of those states, I can tell you that it does not play well at all. In fact, it was a very antagonizing policy step which made most people hostile against Americans and turned them in popular imagination into war-mongering imperialists. Even those who supported the shield framed it as "a burden we should accept as a sign of gratitude to our American allies for their long-lasting democratic efforts". Yeah, that's something I should have explained better. It plays well to the governments of those states, or at least the elements in those governments who are left over from the days of Solidarity and Samizdat. As for the actual populaces of those states, well it's as you say.
|
| # ¿ May 7, 2012 15:43 |
|
|
Chumpion posted:Hang fire, no it's not, I know even without a sly google that Barham and Hood weren't World War 1 ships. No, you're wrong. Hood wasn't completed until after World War One but she was certainly a World War One design, and Barham fought at Jutland so she's definitely a World War One by any metric you care to name. Ghost of Mussolini posted:His other book on the subject, Castles of Steel is also a very good read detailing Britain v. Germany at sea in WW1. Massie is actually not particularly good when it comes to the nitty gritty of naval strategy since like John Keegan he's a historian who has gone most of his career without looking a primary source face to face. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at May 21, 2012 around 00:48 |
| # ¿ May 21, 2012 00:46 |
|
|
Shimrra Jamaane posted:Well there weren't many primary sources from WWI still alive. Primary sources meaning archival materials.
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2012 20:40 |
|
|
Tovarisch posted:Never heard of mc02, was funny to read. To be perfectly honest, most of the time he's as full of crap as he is of carbohydrates. Carriers are vulnerable, like everything else in the world, to ballistic missiles, but the Chinese anti-carrier ballistic missiles he's so excited about are something like fusion power: it's assumed they'll exist one day but as of yet they don't.
|
| # ¿ May 23, 2012 01:02 |
|
|
Ego-bot posted:What's everyone's opinion about Harold Lamb? I can't go to garage sale without seeing at least one of his books for sale. I'd never heard of him until just now, to be honest.
|
| # ¿ May 23, 2012 01:39 |
|
|
Nenonen posted:Another quite baffling design by later standards was the French submarine Surcouf which was armed with a twin 203mm gun turret. It also carried an airplane that was supposed to spot for the shells at maximum range. It's not actually that baffling. She was designed to take advantage of a loophole in the naval treaties of the period. Cruisers and other surface warship tonnage was limited, but submarines weren't. The result was a series of large "cruiser" submarines.
|
| # ¿ May 24, 2012 14:40 |
|
|
WebDog posted:Time for a bit of clarification on facts... Can't speak for the Roman stuff, but the cruise liner (actually they weren't technically cruise liners, just regular passenger liners) battle you mention was the Carmania versus the Cap Trafalgar in 1914. quote:And also there was also some history on why WWI circa warships ships have that weird bulging hull as it was apparently developed to skirt around class designation by tonnage - what were the details behind that? Those were actually anti-torpedo bulges. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at May 25, 2012 around 01:52 |
| # ¿ May 25, 2012 01:25 |
|
|
Ensign Expendable posted:I read that Voroshilov started falling out of Stalin's favour in 1942-ish, so if he became unpopular enough by the time Stalin died, he could have been saved that way. It's an interesting story. Voroshilov was in command of the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939 which went completely tits up. Stalin yelled at him for that failure during a dinner meeting, and Voroshilov answered back in kind, pointing out (quite reasonably) that Stalin was the one who'd wiped out the best of the Soviet officer corps. Stalin relieved him but for some reason didn't have him shot.
|
| # ¿ Jun 1, 2012 16:43 |
|
|
An interesting note about copper bottoms is that they persisted through to the end of the nineteenth century on British warships. Of course, iron and steel hulls being what they were, you couldn't attach copper sheeting directly to them because it would cause a galvanic reaction and ruin both. So how do you solve that issue? Sheath the bottom of the hull in wood then bolt the copper to the wood, of course!
Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at Jun 1, 2012 around 19:39 |
| # ¿ Jun 1, 2012 19:37 |
|
|
R. Mute posted:I love this one. For unnecessarily engaging a cruiser with a tiny destroyer and throwing away the lives of most of his men, this dude gets a VC. Glowworm stumbled into the German ship in bad weather. It's not like he was trying to get himself a VC with a suicidal engagement.
|
| # ¿ Jul 3, 2012 16:20 |
|
|
Alchenar posted:What was worse, building a 700 ship navy including a full fleet of ironclad steam frigates that instantly made obsolete ships-of-the-line which had by and large been the same for centuries triggered a full blown arms race on the continent that lasted fifty years, culminating in the Dreadnoughts. This isn't actually true. The ironclad race in Europe started with the French Glorie, and none of the pitifully few steam frigates built by the United States during the 1860s were ironclads. If fact, most of them didn't even work properly.
|
| # ¿ Jul 18, 2012 06:07 |
|
|
Trench_Rat posted:was there any surface action between capital US Navy ships and Kriegsmarine ships in ww2? No. By the time the USN battleships were anywhere near German territory the Kriegsmarine was pretty much either at the bottom of the ocean or in the Baltic. The Massachusetts did, however, engage an incomplete French battleship during Operation Torch.
|
| # ¿ Aug 22, 2012 10:19 |
|
|
Magni posted:IIRC the last defenders of Iwo Jima were two machinegunners who surrenderd in 1949. The last one on Guam came out in 1972. My grandfather spent time on Guam as an Air Force squadron commander in the 1950s and my dad told me that he and my aunts and uncles were told not to go too far off the roads because there were still Japanese holdouts there.
|
| # ¿ Aug 24, 2012 07:25 |
|
|
ArchangeI posted:If I recall that right, the Serbs were even willing to agree to most of that, but AH, backed by Germany, wanted to deal with them once and for all. That's correct. The only point of contention the Serbs were willing to raise was Austrian police operating within Serbian territory, because at that point they had pretty much nobody on their side, not even the Russians (albeit only because the Austrian diplomats apparently lied through their teeth about not having plans to attack Serbia immediately). One interesting fact is that Tsar Nicholas apparently straight-up told the Serbians to accept the ultimatum to buy time until foreign pressure caused the Austrians to back off on their conditions. This may have been the only time in his life he could rightfully call himself the sensible one. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at Sep 2, 2012 around 15:56 |
| # ¿ Sep 2, 2012 15:54 |
|
|
DasReich posted:The English were committed to a continental war in 1906 when they made a secret agreement with the French. The language was unambiguous, Britain was in it for the long haul. Belgium was just a casus belli to whip the general public into a patriotic fervor. France did this because they knew that if they went to war without help they would be royally hosed. This is oversimplified and wrong. I'm not even sure where to begin but pretty much every detail of this is either factually in error or disputed by historians. The best place to start, I guess, is that there was never any such 1906 agreement as you claim, only informal staff talks by a few British and French military officials which weren't considered binding, although the French hoped they were movement towards such an agreement. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at Sep 20, 2012 around 23:25 |
| # ¿ Sep 20, 2012 23:10 |
|
|
Alekanderu posted:Those Swedish battleships would be really hard to hit given that they never existed. He means the three Sverige-class coastal defence ships, which were often described as "coastal battleships".
|
| # ¿ Sep 25, 2012 22:46 |
|
|
A lot of the multi-engined bombers had various mechanical devices (cams and so forth) that either kept the turrets from rotating dead astern or kept the guns from firing at a certain angle. I know that at least most American bomber turrets did and the Lancaster, Blenheim, and Do 17 had similar mechanisms. For single-engined planes it was up to the gunner not to be a loving idiot, basically.
|
| # ¿ Sep 25, 2012 23:22 |
|
|
Alchenar posted:Nobody really knows how many B-17s managed to shoot each other down in those box formations. The answer is not very many, if any. The combat box formation isn't anything like an infantry square or a phalanx. There was a decent amount of distance between most of the aircraft and gunners were specifically trained about friendly fire. Accidents happened and bombers were hit by friendly fire, but it was rarely to the point of doing serious damage. You can pretty much file B-17 gunners shooting each other down in the same place as the idea that those crazy dumb Russians taught dogs to blow up their own tanks: the trash can. Here's what the combat box actually looked like. While there were occasional incidents of aircraft being hit and knocked out of the sky by bombs dropped by other aircraft flying ahead of them, that was a completely problem. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at Sep 26, 2012 around 01:35 |
| # ¿ Sep 26, 2012 01:27 |
|
|
Throatwarbler posted:It was sunk in 1946? By whom? It collided with another ship and sank.
|
| # ¿ Sep 26, 2012 15:52 |
|
|
This is waaaaay the hell out of my field of expertise, but weren't jousting matches a sort of war game/miltiary exercise?
|
| # ¿ Sep 26, 2012 21:35 |
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:So the whole "Russia lacks a warm-water port" was just Harpoon/Cold War/Tom Clancy wankery for setting up hypothetical invasions of Wilhemshaven, Iran, Korea and the likes? I was under the impression that Murmansk and Vladivostok are still northerly enough to be shut down by ice, while Kaliningrad is in the Baltic, which has its own set of strategic-value problems. Russia did lack a decent warm water port until Murmansk was built up, and their desire for one was definitely not Tom Clancy wankery. They fought several wars in the nineteenth century to capture Constantinople so they would have free access to the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus. Then they obtained Port Arthur in the Pacific, built up a fleet, and were kicked out by the Japanese.
|
| # ¿ Sep 28, 2012 04:12 |
|
|
Armored trains were extremely useful in Poland and Russia during the interwar period because apart from the railroads there was next to no real transportation infrastructure, so an armored train could act in a similar fashion to a mechanized column. Combine that with the lack of serious, dedicated anti-armor weapons in the conflicts of the time (namely the Russian Civil War and the Polish-Soviet War, where both sides were mainly foot soldiers and cavalry chasing each other across the vast empty steppes, possibly with horse-drawn artillery support if they were lucky) and you can see why the Poles kept a large number of armored trains around up to 1939.
Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at Oct 6, 2012 around 20:05 |
| # ¿ Oct 6, 2012 20:02 |
|
|
Ensign Expendable posted:My favourite part about German "efficiency" is all the garbage Porsche built that nobody even wanted in the first place. "Herr Guderian, we've begun production on those Tiger tanks you talked about." "What the gently caress? We didn't even give you a contract for those!" "We've built ninety of them." "Gott im Himmel! OK, turn the turrets around and weld them in place so we can use them as assault guns or something." Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at Oct 10, 2012 around 17:53 |
| # ¿ Oct 10, 2012 17:49 |
|
|
Oh goddamnit, are we really having the Internment Camps vs. Final Solution argument? How loving hard is it to just admit the Japanese-American internment was a travesty of justice and a horrible disgrace but nowhere near the same league as the Nazi camps except that they both involved camps?
|
| # ¿ Oct 11, 2012 19:50 |
|
|
billion dollar bitch posted:Also both the B-52 and the Bear have tail guns. Have these ever scored any air to air kills? Yes. I've actually been to Fairchild AFB and seen one of the B-52s in question.
|
| # ¿ Oct 16, 2012 17:13 |
|
|
Also, if you guessed that "bombe"/bomba is related to "bomb", you're right. The original full name for the prototype was bomba kryptologiczna: "cryptologic bomb".
|
| # ¿ Oct 20, 2012 01:14 |
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 19, 2013 19:43 |
|
|
Shimrra Jamaane posted:Did they ever manage to drop that bomb in a pickle barrel? Nope. Although really that was more propaganda/advertising than anyone's expectations for the Norden sight's effectiveness.
|
| # ¿ Dec 3, 2012 08:43 |
|
