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Why did the Allies decide to land in northern France in WWII instead of say, Denmark or northern Germany? Denmark had a much smaller garrison and taking Denmark would have cut off 300,000 German troops in Norway and put Allied tanks within a couple of hundred miles of Berlin.
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May 5, 2010 21:19
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Chade Johnson posted:Only one of those regimes was a violent, fascist state geared pretty much exclusively for war. Nazi Germany was less geared for war than the SU, they didn't fully mobilize until 1943. I am looking for a comparison of military spending in the years leading up to the war, but I am fairly certain that the SU was spending more. By the end of 1940 the SU had fought Japan, Finland and Poland and had annexed the Baltic states. The early Soviet defeats had more to do with the purges and with Stalin's ineptness than with a lack of investment in the Soviet military.
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Jul 27, 2010 04:06
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asbo subject posted:The literature and poetry written about ww1 was far superior to anything produced about ww2. I do agree that film and tv about ww1 is woeful though. Both the book and the movie adaptation of All Quiet on the Western front are absolutely amazing.
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Aug 3, 2010 22:45
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Copernic posted:Where do I find a good introduction -- preferably a book - to military tactics and strategy? Either small squad or large-scale. I don't know how reputable this is but I thought it was pretty neat: http://www.amazon.com/Art-War-Western-World/dp/0252069668/ref=sr_1_1?s=gateway&ie=UTF8&qid=1285288482&sr=8-1 Granted I read it a number of years ago so my memory may be tricking me.
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Sep 24, 2010 01:35
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Did British politicians actually care about Belgian neutrality, or was it a fake outrage to rile up the public? Would Britain have joined the war eventually anyway? What exactly would Germany have done if they had knocked out France in a few weeks or months? also this: http://angusmcleod.deviantart.com/art/World-War-One-Simple-Version-128505446 OctaviusBeaver fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Nov 24, 2010 |
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Nov 24, 2010 02:26
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Has anyone read the compilation book "The Collected What If"? I have the first one and it is complete crap. Totally unrealistic bullshit. I remember one of them was about how if Winston Churchill had been killed by getting hit by a car the Germans would have won in Europe and then they would invade South America and the US would have to fight them there.
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Nov 25, 2010 07:19
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d3c0y2 posted:If anyone has any questions on Appeasement in the lead up to the Second World War i'd be happy to answer them to the best of my ability. I'm not an expert by any means, but I did just get a 1st on my essay on the rationality of the policy of appeasement so I should be able to answer most questions you throw at me! Would Britain and France have been better off not declaring war on Germany when Poland fell and instead continued to rearm? Would Hitler ever have attacked the SU if France and Britain were still around and at peace with Germany?
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Dec 7, 2010 18:55
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I've been reading Beevor's Stalingrad and I have a question about how the Germans and Russians used armor to carry out an encirclement. In the maps you see a bunch of arrows punching through the enemy front line and moving around to surround some enemy forces. But what is it that's keeping them surrounded? I can't think of a good way to word this, but I guess I'm asking if some of the pieces of the spearhead are left behind to keep the encirclement or do they just attack and keep going forward to disrupt stuff behind the front lines?
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Dec 9, 2010 04:22
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Can someone explain why the 76mm Sherman was so different from the 75mm Sherman? The numbers make it seem like such a small difference but apparently it had a large effect, why was that?
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Jan 31, 2011 22:36
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In WWII what did the Western allies do with all of the tanks and guns they must have captured during the war? Did they use them for anything during the conflict? I assume they were destroyed after the war.
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Aug 23, 2011 22:07
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Was the broad front strategy really the way for the western Allies to go in WWII? The Americans and the British must have been the most mechanized armies in the entire world, compared to the Germans who still used millions of horses to haul stuff around. They had huge, well trained air forces that could act as spotters and close air support. And they decided to slog forward mile by mile in a straight line. I can't imagine a strategy that would more effectively negate all of their advantages. Then when they did grow a pair, they blew it on Market Garden where every single part had to go exactly right for it to work. Why not just use either Soviet or German doctrine, both of which seemed to be more effective at quickly taking large chunks of territory very quickly? OctaviusBeaver fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Oct 10, 2011 |
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Oct 10, 2011 19:04
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Tab8715 posted:Yes, but that's the point my friend is getting at. Many leaders did know but simply didn't give a gently caress because of this. I think the idea that people in the US and Britain were ok with the mass extermination of Jews is false and offensive. This article has some good info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_bombing_debate The consensus among allied planners seemed to be that the best way to help people in concentration camps was to end the war ASAP. It is arguable that they should have done more, but the attitude certainly wasn't "Who cares? We hate Jews anyway."
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Oct 18, 2011 02:42
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Graviton v2 posted:I think as well conscripts in the Sweden are used as labour for social projects when not at war, would that be right Mr. Sunshine? Sounds kind of like slavery though, taking people by force and using them for public works for a menial salary. I suppose it wouldn't be worse than doing it for military purposes, though back in the day I think you could argue that it was a necessary evil to fight off the Reds. Anyway, were the generals of the Western Allies worse at using tanks than the Germans or was it just different circumstances? The Germans were able to invade France and use armor to make rapid, deep penetrations and force a surrender. After Overlord the Allies seemed to just push forward on a broad front without really taking any risks. I realize that they had supply problems because they lacked good harbors until later, but they did have enough fuel to try Market Garden. Market Garden just seems ill-conceived in the first place because it relies on every step in a complex plan going exactly as expected with no room for error. Surely there was some way they could have ended the war before winter given what a terrible state the Germans were in after the Normandy campaign.
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Nov 27, 2011 00:04
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BoBtheImpaler posted:I've got a question! I want to look up my grandfather's history in WW2, and I'm looking for resources to tell me where he fought. I've got a lot of his army paperwork, so I have his unit information down to what company he was in and what ranks he held at what dates, so I'm looking for a website or forum where I can figure out where he was and when. Specifically, I'm looking for where the 15th Infantry Division was after May 1944 or so. That doesn't appear to exist, are you sure it wasn't a regiment instead of a division? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Army_divisions_during_World_War_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_Infantry_Regiment_(United_States) Best of luck, some people in my family tried to find out about one of our relatives who died in the war but his records had been lost in a warehouse fire or something like that and everyone who knew more is long gone by now.
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Jan 22, 2012 06:40
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gohuskies posted:There's a great story in Ambrose's D-Day book about a couple of Koreans who were "drafted" into the Japanese Army, captured by the Russians at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol, press ganged into the Red Army and sent to fight the Germans, captured by the Germans, press ganged into the German army and sent to the Normandy coast to build the Atlantic Wall. Apparently American soldiers were surprised to find a few Koreans surrendering to them on D-Day. I guess this is probably a picture of one of those guys. Almost as weird: Chiang Wei-kuo was Chiang Kai-shek's son and he served in the Wehrmacht before WWII. He was a panzer commander who rode a tank into Austria during the Anschluss. He was about to participate in the attack on Poland before he was recalled to China to fight the Japanese.
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Feb 12, 2012 07:57
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In 1944 and 45 the Luftwaffe was pretty much incapable of putting up meaningful resistance against allied bombers. The US was churning out heavy bombers in numbers the Germans could never have even dreamed of. And yet years of constant bombing wasn't enough to make the Germans surrender. The Germans could never have come close to churning out as many bombers as the US and the ones that they did build didn't carry nearly as many bombs as a B-25. I think that that is proof that even if every RAF plane in the world vanished, the Germans wouldn't have been able to inflict enough damage to the UK to make them surrender before getting caught up in Barbarossa.
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Apr 22, 2012 04:23
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So I think it was this thread where somebody posted the link to 112 Gripes About the French pamphlet that was distributed to GIs in France after the war. In it they mention an 850 franc gift from the French government to GIs stationed there, but I couldn't find anything about that by Googling. Does anyone know what they are talking about? Here is a link to the collection: http://www.e-rcps.com/gripes/ And here is one where they mention the 850 francs: http://www.e-rcps.com/gripes/89.html Also they mention that a French conscript at the time was earning the equivalent of $.06 per day, holy poo poo. That got me curious so I looked it up and a private in the US army made $600/yr or about $1.60/day. I tried to find out what a Soviet grunt would make but not luck.
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May 7, 2012 22:50
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Also that was what they earned in the US. During WWII most of them would be getting a bonus for serving overseas and I believe another bonus if they were actually in combat.
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May 8, 2012 18:38
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Rent-A-Cop posted:The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty allowed each signatory one ABM site. The USSR's ABM installation was in Moscow, designed to protect the city from US missiles. The US's site was in Grand Forks, North Dakota, designed to protect US missiles from Soviet missiles. An interesting look at each country's priorities. Pretty sure this had more to do with different doctrines regarding deterrence between the US and the USSR than with the Soviets' deep respect for the sanctity of all human life. I may be remembering this wrong, but I think the Soviets were planning for a nuclear war that escalated gradually because they had superiority on land in Europe while NATO wanted to keep their nuclear deterrent intact to prevent a war in the first place, which is why they would prefer to put their ABM shield near silos. In reality I doubt those shields would have done much in a full on nuclear wr.
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Jun 12, 2012 05:45
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Agreed, your grandfather is a very gifted writer. Is there any sort of national archive in Canada that would hold onto stuff like that? It really deserves to be preserved and shared.
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Jun 14, 2012 04:34
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^^^^^what he said I wonder if part of it isn't the fact that pre-industrial age you might have a long campaign with only a few battles that would last hours or maybe a couple of days. Once you get large conscripted armies and modern supply lines you can have a front line with constant fighting for months at a time. Maybe it's not so much a few hours of being really scared as it is months and months of constant stress and fear that causes PTSD. I'm not an expert at all, just speculating.
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Jun 20, 2012 19:26
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But the Balkans are the soft underbelly of Europe dontcha know.
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Jun 26, 2012 05:11
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Farecoal posted:Thanks for the answer it was very informative Guns are really simple and it's not really conceivable that any civilization could be making useful combustion engines but not have figured out explosives. Large scale mining takes explosives and you don't have an industrial revolution without a ton of iron and coal.
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Jul 31, 2012 02:19
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tallkidwithglasses posted:Are you really saying that Israeli and American air superiority is due to the quality of the pilots and not the decade+ technological advantage of their aircraft? Huh? I've never heard of the F-86 being described as all that superior to the MiGs they were fighting. I just checked Wikipedia and the F-86 was only a couple of years newer. American Airforce pilots have definitely had the advantage of more flight hours in training compared to anyone else they have fought going back to WWII. I'm not as familiar with the various Arab-Israeli wars, but on paper the Arabs generally seemed to have pretty modern equipment supplied by the Soviets, as well as seemingly overwhelming numbers. Obviously it varies by country and by which war it was. Would you care to elaborate more on this?
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Aug 2, 2012 02:26
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'm not that knowledgeable on the Arab-Israeli Wars either, but a quick Google tells me that these were the planes in use by the Israeli and Egyptian Air Forces during the Six Day War of 1967: So they seem roughly comparable, or at least built in the same era. I'm not knowledgeable enough to compare specific aircraft from the same period, but I doubt that the French were building stuff that was vastly superior to the Soviets in general. The Israelis had ungodly kill ratios. Granted a lot of Egyptian/Other fighters were killed on the ground, but it doesn't exactly say much in favor of their airforces that they allowed that to happen.
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Aug 2, 2012 03:26
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nothing to seehere posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable It would have been mad not to have a plan to fight the extremely aggressive dictatorship that had formed an alliance with Nazi Germany and invaded Poland just a few years earlier. Armies plan for all sorts of things that are unlikely. The fact that there is a plan for something doesn't mean that anybody has any intention of carrying it out.
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Aug 10, 2012 03:18
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Frosted Flake posted:Are Americans taught about the Fenian raids? It seems like the US government turned a blind eye to a pretty big terrorist organization that was based there. I'm not an expert on them, but from my understanding they weren't really a terrorist group. They didn't try to scare Britain by killing civilians, they tried to invade Canada and fought the army. I don't think Britain at the time really had a leg to stand on when complaining that people were invading them to take their land, given, you know, the British Empire.
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Aug 19, 2012 14:10
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KildarX posted:Has terrorizing the local populace in a war[Bombing of London for example] between nations ever done anything besides steel the resolve of the populace? Specific examples please. After bombing Rotterdam the Germans threatened to bomb other Dutch cities at which point they gave in. Granted the Dutch could never really hope to offer much resistance in the long run due to the Germans' overwhelming numbers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotterdam_Blitz Also nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was pretty effective.
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Aug 19, 2012 14:53
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Crasscrab posted:Pretty common stuff back in the day. Cruel as it is, its better for the community as a whole. In the Spartans case it was all about having boys that were fit to become soldiers, but say you're a slave of the Spartans (and believe me the Spartans had A LOT. These were the Helots, and they're something you never heard about before because just about the only thing Frank Miller got right in his 300 graphic novel was that a battle took place at Thermopylae, Spartans were involved, and the Persian army was delayed. Other than that it's a complete piece of poo poo with historical inaccuracies out the rear end and some pretty serious Eurocentrism.) Looks like you've been taken in by those "mainstream" historians who completely disregard the influence of minotaurs and goat-men on the development of Western military theory.
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Aug 25, 2012 21:05
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Magni posted:Well, there's been a few medieval armies that basically pressed POWs into service as a first wave when assaulting fortifications. The two examples I remember are the Mongols during their conquest of China and the Ottomans, who used that tactic during the final siege of Constantinople. In both cases, the rest of the army was formed up behind said first wave with orders to just kill any poor bastard trying to flee and the prisoners had been promised to be set free if they either broke through or held out until the guy in charge ordered the attack stopped. The Germans and the Soviets both used penal battalions. They stuck criminals or soldiers who had fled in them and sent them on suicidal charges or used them to clear minefields with the promise of release if they survived for some amount of time. The tasks were generally dangerous enough that they rarely had to let anyone go. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtrafbat and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafbattalion
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Sep 19, 2012 22:59
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Blckdrgn posted:These normally don't get covered due to not being as "exciting" as a racial issue. Wasn't it pretty much standard practice at the time to intern civilians of enemy countries?
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Oct 10, 2012 02:01
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SeanBeansShako posted:The whole sudden Germaniphobia (not a real word I bet) after the declaration of war was really odd, as after the Franco Prussian War the Military world dumped French fashion, tactics and technology like a cold fish which it had idolised for decades and suddenly the Prussian Soldier, Officer and tactics were the stereotypical example of the perfect force. I get 1815 because of the Napoleanic Wars but what happened in 1898?
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Oct 11, 2012 02:06
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Ensign Expendable posted:The Germans had a tank destroyer named Dicker Max. I bet the guy up thread saying the Soviets were cooler feels pretty stupid now.
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Oct 12, 2012 00:06
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General China posted:Catch up was the word. The things you mention happen a lot later, about as late as britain is holding your coat so you can catch up in the fight 3 years later. What time period are you talking about exactly?
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Jan 1, 2013 02:59
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Alchenar posted:It is however the basis of a really incoherent argument. The fact that Hitler was able to take the guns away demonstrates quite clearly that widespread gun ownership is not going to protect you against an authoritarian regime. The Jews weren't armed in the first place. Hitler made it illegal to arm themselves at all. Even if having guns couldn't have stopped the Holocaust, I can't imagine many people would rather die in Auschwitz than in a gun battle with the SS.
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Feb 26, 2013 23:47
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In the Total War thread somebody posted this Youtube video where a guy goes through the mechanics of Iron Age sword/shield fighting that they worked out from practice and reading later treatises. It's a really cool explanation that explains how they used concepts like leverage and momentum to get an advantage.
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Mar 12, 2013 04:48
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Alchenar posted:I'm imagining people 1000 years from now digging up the US-Mexican border and speculating as to what kind of tension could possibly cause such a high level of militarization, only to be told the answer is 'immigrants'. All the parts of it I've seen have been a chain-link fence with barbed wire so probably not. Now the DMZ in Korea might be interesting.
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Jul 12, 2013 22:36
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SeanBeansShako posted:Speaking of more interesting odd bits of Military history, the fate of the infamous German surface fleet of the 1st World War is worth looking into. Haha no kidding Wikipedia posted:Salvaging the Seydlitz also proved difficult, as the ship sank again during the first attempt to raise her, wrecking most of the salvage equipment. Undaunted, Cox tried again, ordering that when she was next raised, news cameras would be there to capture him witnessing the moment. The plan nearly backfired when the Seydlitz was accidentally refloated while Cox was holidaying in Switzerland. Cox told the workers to sink her again, then returned to Britain to be present as the Seydlitz was duly refloated a second time.[31] Cox's company eventually raised 26 destroyers, two battlecruisers and five battleships.[31]
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Aug 19, 2013 23:21
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the JJ posted:As for deception, well, it's a pretty common way of making war. There's your traditional 'light your campfires (or inflatable tanks) over here while you really go over there' for instance, Alexander in India. Sun Tsu talks about it, um... Supposedly Hannibal told his center to retreat at Cannae to get the double envelopment, feigned retreats in general are pretty common. Hastings, I think, was another supposed case. One time Hannibal got trapped with his army in a valley where the Romans had blocked up all the exits. He tied torches to the horns of his cows and sent them towards the Romans at night, who thought he had a huge army storming up the hill and left their posts letting his army slip away. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ager_Falernus
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Aug 24, 2013 14:28
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Nthing A/T but jeez you guys are making much ado about nothing, D&D is a wordier old GBS and there's only two Stalin apologists who are balanced out by the one or two nazis there At this point it's not so much "I support Stalin" as much as "Stalin was a bad guy, but (supports literally everything Stalin did)" so a little better but still unbearable.
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Nov 11, 2013 03:30
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