PYF Historical Fun Fact: (USER LOSETH POSTYNG PRIVILYGES FOR FOUR AND TWENTY HOURS)

The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > PYF Historical Fun Fact: (USER LOSETH POSTYNG PRIVILYGES FOR FOUR AND TWENTY HOURS)

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

A series of Parisian newspaper headlines on Napoleon's march back from exile:

March 9: THE CANNIBAL HAS LEFT HIS DEN

March 10: THE CORSICAN OGRE HAS LANDED AT CAPE JUAN

March 11: THE TIGER HAS ARRIVED AT CAP

March 12: THE MONSTER SLEPT AT GRENOBLE

March 13: THE TYRANT HAS PASSED THOUGH LYONS

March 14: THE USURPER IS DIRECTING HIS STEPS TOWARDS DIJON

March 18: BONAPARTE IS ONLY SIXTY LEAGUES FROM THE CAPITAL

March 19: BONAPARTE IS ADVANCING WITH RAPID STEPS, BUT HE WILL NEVER ENTER PARIS

March 20: NAPOLEON WILL TOMORROW BE UNDER OUR RAMPARTS

March 21: THE EMPEROR IS AT FONTAINEBLEAU

March 22: HIS IMPERIAL AND ROYAL MAJESTY ARRIVED YESTERDAY EVENING AT THE TUILERIES, AMID THE JOYFUL ACCLAMATION OF HIS DEVOTED AND FAITHFUL SUBJECTS

# ¿ Nov 9, 2015 18:18

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 05:38

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

BrigadierSensible posted:

Melbourne was originally going to be called Batmania, after John Batman.

This would have lead to awesomely named football teams such as the Batmania Demons, Batmania Heart, (now Batmania City), and the currently defunct basketball team East Batmania Spectres.

There is a position in Australia's parliament called Shadow Minister for Justice. It is currently held by the member from Batman.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2015 05:40

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Arcsquad12 posted:

I was at work, so I didn't. I just thought it was neat. Looking on Wikipedia, Gwynne Dyer apparently described the casualties at Borodino as a fully loaded Boeing 747 crashing with no survivors, every five minutes for eight hours.

Seventy thousand casualties at minimum in one day. The only thing that comes close to that was July 1st 1916 at the Somme.

If we count disease outbreaks, Spanish Flu killed an average of 100,000 people every day for a year between August 1918 and July 1919.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2016 01:04

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Pick posted:

Would marriage rituals between men and women during those periods not be considered "heterosexual" then?

No. People didn't classify things as heterosexual or homosexual then.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2016 03:05

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Comrade Koba posted:

I've seen Grozny translated as "awe-inspiring" several times. I guess the most accurate translation would be Ivan the Awesome.

Or Ivan the Awful

# ¿ Mar 21, 2016 21:53

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Boardroom Jimmy posted:

The sale of the office also completely wiped out the papal treasury and the pope was unable to pay any bills for a time.

The sale of the papacy cost the papacy all of its money? Did the new pope drain the coffers as soon as he could or what?

# ¿ Apr 6, 2016 02:14

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

The Magna Carta was signed two weeks after Genghis Khan sacked Beijing.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2016 02:40

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

A White Guy posted:

It's a little more complicated than that. Harrison gave the longest presidential inaugural speech in history, topping out at 8,445 words (and that was his reduced version), taking him almost 3.5 hours to deliver. Additionally, he gave his speech outside on a fairly cold winter morning, without a hat, overcoat, or gloves.

Perhaps not surprisingly, he came down with a cold that progressed to pneumonia and died only 32 days later.

The speech being the reason for his death is a myth, he probably died after moving in to the White House because its water supply was badly contaminated with human feces.

Chamale has a new favorite as of 00:11 on Jul 1, 2016

# ¿ Jul 1, 2016 00:09

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

ToxicSlurpee posted:

It was the differing local scarcity that made it valuable. This is why trade networks happened; salt flats, dried lakes, and the places that rock salt can be mined are useful for gently caress all other than salt. However, salt was literally impossible to get in some places. Others it was prohibitively costly to get locally. Everybody needed salt but few people had an easy supply. Of course you can't catch fish on a salt flat soooooo if you want fish you gots to trade but hey that one culture that has good fishing water can't make enough salt to preserve it. This other culture makes pots good for storing stuff in so hey let's each do our thing, trade the results, and we'll all have long term stores of salted fish.

Unless this translation is way off, salt cost 100 denarii communes per modius in 300 AD, cheaper than flour. That's equivalent to about $20/pound of salt in modern terms. So at some point salt got really cheap, unless that translation is wrong.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2016 04:03

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

The Mighty Moltres posted:

I just told a bunch of friends and my sister about this post, please tell me that you have sources so I don't look like a fool.

Here's a 1985 article about it with a free, questionably accurate history lesson. (The Romans only salted the earth around Carthage symbolically, right?)

# ¿ Jul 11, 2020 09:41

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

verbal enema posted:

Who was that one king who refused to accept a town's surrender until he got to try out his new trebuchet? I wanna say he even name it God's Own Sling. I feel like that guy probably had a few people hurled a couple thousand feet

That was King Edward, in the war against William Wallace. The trebuchet, War Wolf, was the largest ever built and he refused to accept the Scottish surrender until he had demolished the wall of their castle.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2020 19:56

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Versailles has "Chloe, 1848" carved into a mirror somewhere. A tour guide told me that it was actually written around 1920, but at this point that's historic graffiti anyway.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2020 11:43

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Sucrose posted:

IMO the advent of nearly 100% accurate paternity testing has eliminated 90% of the societal reasons for having marriage be a thing. The other 10% is couples having the legal power to make medical decisions in the case their partner gets incapacitated, etc. Not that I'm against marriage or anything, but I think in the future the percent of unmarried couples with children is just going to get higher and higher. So they might as well make marriage absurdly easy, because it really doesn't matter anymore.

I got legally married to my fiancee shortly after the engagement, so that she could get on my insurance and for the sweet tax break. We broke up before the actual wedding would have happened, but still came out ahead after paying for a no-assets no-kids divorce.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2021 21:22

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

3D Megadoodoo posted:

How do they know it wasn't just a fat guy sneezing or something?

There was a widespread belief at the time that kings were magically protected from death. The assassin stole a button from Charles's own coat; because it had been on his person, it could be used as a weapon against him.

Albrecht von Wallenstein, a general from a few decades earlier, was assassinated on a day that his horoscope predicted would be exceptionally unlucky for him. Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2021 10:23

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

The sailors confessed because they didn't think they had done anything wrong, a better lawyer could have argued temporary insanity. Now sailors know that when they draw lots to eat somebody, it's best to say he died of natural causes first.

# ¿ May 1, 2021 00:06

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Carthag Tuek posted:

also i guess chivalry was a thing

Not really. Chivalry was some rules for combat to make sure knights were mostly killing peasants instead of each other, and some rules to say "for the love of God, stop robbing and raping every person you see." Armies at the time would try to raid loot as much as possible and besiege helpless cities, but fighting other armies was a waste of blood and money. Cr�cy and Agincourt started the same way - a French army finally caught up with an English army that had been raiding their towns and farms, and tried to kill them.

It's a couple hundred years later, but I loved Hey Guns' description of a 17th-century army: "Like a Gathering of the Juggalos, but drunker and less heavily armed."

# ¿ May 29, 2021 03:06

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Any more good stories of dysfunctional Nazi 'efficiency'?

This series of posts about their uniforms from the Military History thread is incredible.

Cessna posted:

It's a baggy cotton duck (Edit: with increasing rayon/synthetic content as the war goes on) smock with elastic at the waist and wrists.

It's reversible. One side has "Spring" colors (brown, green, black) and the other has "Fall" colors (brown, orange/brown, black).

The reversibility is silly. The smock has built-in pockets which turn inside-out to reverse with fully sewn flaps and buttons on both sides - but the pockets are situated under the Y-strap suspenders and gear so it's hard to get to them.

Best of all, the smock goes on OVER the regular wool feldgrau (field grey) uniform. Remember how I talked about the internal suspenders and aluminum hooks earlier? That's just part of it. A Wehrmacht feldbluse is a ridiculously complex garment. For comparison, a modern men's suit has about 20-25 pieces of cloth cut and sewn together. A feldbluse has over 80 - yes, 80 - pieces of cloth cut to pattern and sewn together, and that does not count the insignia. Every feldbluse - EVERY ONE - was tailored to the individual wearer. Yes, tailored.

Check out the chest pockets, for example. This is an early-war feldbluse:

Look at how the pockets have that curved scallop flap and the folded bellows design. That's not easy to make. By 1943 they had simplified the design to a simple patch-pocket, like this:

But here's the thing - they put all of that work into sewing MILLIONS of those pockets. Cutting the wool, folding it, sewing it on, attaching the pebbled metal buttons... But when you put on that camouflage smock you can't get to the pockets. They're useless. Put on the smock and you can't get to the internal suspenders and hooks either.

They sewed millions and millions of those complex pockets - and millions of the complex internal suspenders, and internal linings, and made hooks - and all of that was useless, wasted cloth and labor.

And, again, the answer is "because Nazis."

Cessna posted:

I've had my hands on originals, and they're sooooo bad. The smock is that canvas-y duck material. It does NOT breathe at all; it's like a canvas trash bag. So your Nazi soldier is wearing:

- a ribbed sleeveless ("wife beater") undershirt.
- a "service shirt." This is sort of like a cotton men's dress shirt, but thicker and longer - that is, it hangs down well below the waist.
- a wool "feldbluse." Scratchy thick wool.
- that canvas-duck smock.
- leather field gear and equipment.

It's a mess - way too hot in the summer, nowhere near enough to stay warm in the winter. Nothing is waterproof. It all smells like wet dog.* The WWII gear I'm most familiar with is US, and it is a generation ahead of the German crap.

* Sometimes you can read WWII memoirs where they talk about going out on patrol and finding Germans by smelling them. "I could just smell the Nazis." Before I did reenacting I thought this was an exaggeration, a soldier's hyperbole. Having done reenacting, it's totally legit. Get that wool uniform and leather field gear wet and it smells like wet dog. It's a really distinctive smell. I can easily imagine if you get a company of troopers wet, and add in tobacco and maybe a cooking fire and you could smell them hundreds of yards away.

[Considering what 1940s industrial tailoring was like, do you know how much of this was finished by hand?]

The smock wasn't. The feldbluse was. I have never seen a WWII German feldbluse (the solid green/gray wool jackets) without some sort of tailoring.

If it means anything, they had unit tailors assigned as a section at the battalion level. Yes, this is insane.

(I always picture a battalion being overrun by T-34s while their sewing section commander yells "Sew faster, Hans! Faster!")

[How did the same people who tailored every feldgrau jacket to every grunt not realize it's impossible to not look like bill clinton c. 1993 in a windbreaker]

All of their stuff looks weird.

[Does this mean that if you were wearing an ss smock over a standard-issue feldgrau jacket you had to take off literally every piece of gear you had to take a poo poo, or do the pants go up and down without engaging with the hook assemblage?]

And the trousers - regular uniform trousers - were held up by their own suspenders, which needed unbuttoned as well.

Hey, if it means anything, their early-war paratroopers had it worse. Their Fallschirmjagers (paratroopers, and I'm too lazy to put the umlaut over the "a") were set up to jump from low altitudes. They wore a distinctive jumper-outfit over their gear, the idea being that it would keep their gear from snagging on anything parachute-related when they jumped.

Guess what? There's sort of a fly opening, but if you want to poop, you have to take off your entire uniform:

Cessna posted:

[what dye and mordant did they use, i might be able to tell if that would have happened]

I don't know the exact dye or color-fasting process off-hand, but I have reference books I can check when I get home tonight.

I DO know that:

- they were manually screen-printed early in the war. Later in the war they switched to machine printing. Some variants had some colors (i.e., the black sections) applied by rollers after the cloth was already dyed. Not all do this, but it is interesting when you catch it.

When you've looked at this stuff for a long time you start seeing where the camouflage pattern repeats itself. In some patterns the green/brown "repeats" at a different rate/in different places than the black. They dyed the cloth with the green and brown, then applied the black in a separate process.

- There were many different varieties of this camouflage. Some used three colors of dye, with areas overlapping to produce the effect of having more colors. On this smock, for example, you can see where the green and light brown overlap at the edges to give a dark brown effect:

- The priority item they made was a thing called a "zeltbahn." This is a triangular section of cloth that is sort of like a half-tent; lace two together and you have a tent. You can also use a single section as a poncho. You can also lace multiple sections together to make even bigger tents.

Here's the crazy part. Some variants of the camouflage were numbered. 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, etc. The idea was that if you lace together the appropriate matches, number-wise, the camouflage pattern on the tent will be continuous, without any breaks or places where the camouflage doesn't line up perfectly.

Like so. This is a reproduction, but you can see the join:

(You can find period photos of this, but in black-and-white you can't see it as well.)

But here's the thing. Say the camouflage doesn't line up perfectly. So what? No one will notice. It's not like an enemy is going to suddenly see your tent because the camouflage lines up 6" off. This is a nightmare of unnecessary complication.

- The pieces of cloth that were left over were stitched together to make the smocks and helmet covers. Sometimes you can find odd numbers stamped in odd places, like so:

This doesn't mean that the guy with this helmet is "Number 6," rather, the cloth was cut from a roll of the #6 cloth I described above. The smocks and helmet covers were made from scraps, and it shows. I have never seen a single one that didn't have some sort of sewing "error" on it - where the camouflage pattern lines up wrong, where there's a bit of "spring" cloth on the "fall" side or vice-versa, where the sewing is just awful, etc. This stuff was made by people who were starved and working at gunpoint, and it shows.

Cessna posted:

[holy loving hell! i'm remembering all those holocaust survivor testimonies where the old hands sneak up behind the author during intake and whisper to them "tell them you're a tailor" and it saves their life! i thought just yeah, useful skills, pretend to have useful skills, but there was a specific reason the SS wanted tailors]

The SS was, in many ways, a self-contained empire.

Those camouflage smocks were sewn by the inmates of concentration camps. If you could use a sewing machine you might survive a bit longer.

Ever see photos of the Warsaw uprising of 1944?

These are Polish fighters. They are wearing Waffen-SS camouflage smocks and helmet covers.

When the Warsaw Uprising started one of the first things they did was liberate the nearby Gęsiówka concentration camp. That camp used inmates to, among other things, make the camouflage cloth and sew it into shelter-sections, smocks, and helmet covers.

The Polish Home Army liberated the camouflage and used it themselves.

Cessna posted:

[germans! ]

They had bellows-sewn buttoned pockets on a shirt inside a tunic which had bellows-sewn buttoned pockets that was itself inside a smock that made all those pockets unreachable, and that smock itself had reversible buttoned pockets that were stuffed under the field gear.

The Aristocrats!

Cessna posted:

No, sorry...

Here's how [Stahlhelms] were bad.

First and foremost, they weren't adjustable. No, really - you had to get one that was the right size for your head, like a hat. They came with 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, or 62 cm liners and corresponding shell sizes. You could not swap a different sized liner into a non-corresponding shell. Think that makes logistics easier?

Helmets were made in multiple stages with multiple mechanical presses. It took multiple individual presses to give the helmet its shape. These are WWI helmets, but the same process was followed in WWII:

There was no real assembly line - a worker would make one press, then put it on a pile. After the pile was high enough the next worker would take the helmets and carry them to the next press. This is confirmed by multiple photos of factories:

The edges were then press rolled by hand. They were also heat-tempered on the front of the helmet. This wasn't done with a huge industrial oven - there are photos of workers grabbing individual helmets with a big steel set of tongs and sticking them in an open furnace. Rivets for ventilation, the liner, and the chin strap were pressed in by hand. They were also spray-painted by hand, not on an assembly line.

After the helmets were painted they were given an individual paper wrapper to make sure the paint wasn't scuffed before it was issued. Think about that for a minute. Here are helmets being wrapped:

Each helmet had two decals (until 1940), again, applied by hand. If you've ever built a model airplane, imagine having to apply thousands of decals all day long:

The liner consisted of five leaf-springs wrapped with a leather liner which was, yes, sewn in by hand. This took a LOT of specialized labor. Here's a photo of a helmet liner. (Not my helmet, but I can take a photo of one of mine if anyone is interested.) You can see the rolled rim pretty well. See that stitching on the seam in the back? Done by hand.

Here's a Fallschirmjager/paratrooper's helmet. See that stitching across the liner? Hand sewn.

In contrast, an American/British/Russian helmet was hot-stamped. This made the helmet in one step and tempered it. Each step after that was automated, done by assembly line. And helmets had adjustable liners, so any soldier could wear them.

By 1942/3 the Germans stopped rolling the edges, dropped the decals, and simplified the manufacturing. Too little, too late.

Cessna posted:

[this is the most German poo poo of all time]

Right up there with the Battalion level tailors are the helmet wrappers.

"What did you do in the war, daddy?"

"I was a helmet wrapping supervisor, I made sure that all helmets were wrapped properly in individual paper wrappers and that all of the corners were folded properly before they were shipped to the supply depots."

Cessna posted:

The stahlhelm - and so help me, now I prefer the term "naughty German helmet" - WAS a bad way to go. It required vastly more labor to produce, and it wasn't really that much better than comparable helmets of the time.

So, you're in charge of allocating resources and manpower. Would you rather employ:

- One soldier with a really good helmet (that still won't stop a rifle bullet) and a helmet-wrapper-supervisor.

- Two soldiers with good helmets.

Cessna posted:

In 1939 the Iron and Steel Specialty Division of the Third Reich Research Council (don't make me type it out in German) tested a bunch of helmets from other countries, some captured, some purchased pre-war. They found that none of the helmets were ideal for protection or ease of manufacture. In 1942 they designed a new helmet that had really good ballistic protection and was easy to make. This was initially designed "on the down low," but the design was so good that they decided to show off the results to Hitler. Hitler liked it, but vetoed production because it didn't look German enough.

This was the helmet that post-war became the standard East German helmet. It looks a bit funny, but it was just as good at being a helmet - maybe even a bit better than the "naughty German" helmet - and it was vastly easier to produce. Check it out, it is one hot-stamped piece of steel, essentially a "naughty German" helmet adapted to be built using American or Soviet manufacturing techniques:

But, again, it was not put into production because it didn't look German enough.

Cessna posted:

[https://www.tankarchives.ca/2017/08/whose-helmet-was-better.html]

[Obvious caveats apply, of course.]

From that report:

"When shooting with a rifle at 800 meters using a mod. 1908 bullet (counting all hits), Soviet helmets were penetrated 7.7-10% of the time, and German helmets were penetrated 34.5% of the time. The PPSh penetrated German helmets 41.4% of the time, but Soviet helmets only 11.5-11.7% of the time. The TT could penetrate German helmets 38.8% of the time, compared to 12.4-13% for Soviet helmets. Even the Nagant could penetrate German helmets 29% of the time..."

Okay, let me revise my question above.

So, you're in charge of allocating resources and manpower. Would you rather employ:

- One soldier with a mediocre helmet and a helmet-wrapper-supervisor.

- Two soldiers with good helmets.

Cessna posted:

The rationale was that they didn't want the "little guy/big helmet" look, so their soldiers wouldn't end up looking like Dark Helmet from Spaceballs. And it goes back to the "tailored" mentality behind uniforms.

Look at those SS smocks - remember how I said that the actual manufacturing of the smocks was pretty crappy, while the wool uniforms were tailored? That's because those weren't viewed as the real uniforms. They were something that you put on over a uniform, but took off when you were marching in front of the cameras on a parade. You went to war in your dress uniform, but covered it with a camouflage smock. Once the fighting was over you took off the smock, prettied up your uniform, and stomped around in parades. That was the ideal.

That's great if you know you can count on victories like 1938/1939/1940. You want a quick campaign, maybe even one without a fight (1938), followed by a snappy-looking parade in front of the cameras for propaganda. Your soldiers will look good in the newsreels.

But in a serious war, like what they faced against the UK/USA/USSR? Forget it.

Cessna posted:

[honestly my takeaway from this all this uniform chat is that fashion considerations play a larger role in military uniform design than most people realize]

YES. Fashion is HUGE. It's all about sending a message.

The Nazis "focus grouped" their uniform designs in 1935/36. They brought in groups of young women and had them evaluate potential uniforms for attractiveness.

Like I said above, think about what a Wehrmacht uniform is designed for - to look good in propaganda films. Combat effectiveness was not a consideration until 1941 or so, and ease of production didn't come into play until after that. Compare a 1918 uniform to a 1940 uniform:

1918:

1940:

The 1940 uniform is tighter. It is more tailored. This makes it look sharper and cleaner - again, it looks better on parades, more streamlined and modern - but the fact is that a baggy uniform is more practical in combat.

The 1940 uniform has much more complex insignia. Look at the collar - they all have "Litzen," those little bars on the collar. In WWI these were only for "Guards" - that is, elites. In WWII all soldiers had them, the message being "you're all elites now."

(As an aside, sewing that litzen is horrible. You have to fold the cloth, sew it to a backing, then sew that to the collar. It's miserable.)

The 1940 buttons are shinier, there are complex pockets. Again, this is to look good, not for combat practicality or ease of manufacture.

It's all about sending a message - these soldiers are going to fight a fast, decisive, modern war, then look good in the victory parade.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2021 19:40

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

BrigadierSensible posted:

This reminds me of the famous origin of the word "kangaroo".

Which is initially told as when Captain Cook and the first White people came to Australia they saw this giant hopping beast that they had never seen before, so asked a local what it was. The aboriginal bloke replied "kang garoo", which meant in his own language "I don't understand what you are saying to me."

It turns out this story is only half true, and the "I don't understand" stuff comes from when Cook and his party ventured further inland and came across another aborigine who belonged to an entirely different tribe and spoke an entirely different language. So when the invaders tried to communicate using the few words they had learned from the coastal people, this new bloke was still baffled.

It also contributes to a huge myth about Australian history, that the Aboriginal people were all hunter-gatherers with no knowledge of the wider world. The first British expedition to Australia met a local sailor who spoke English because he had spent several years trading with Singapore. But as part of colonizing the land, they plowed over Aboriginal farms and destroyed Aboriginal dams and houses and fisheries.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2021 08:52

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Perestroika posted:

Yeah, a person's honor and dignity was considered a very real, measurable thing that would be respected in judicial matters in a number of places. Hey Guns over in the milhist thread had a number of fun anecdotes about soldiers in the 30 Years' War constantly suing the hell out of each other over insults. With one particular couple of enemies, it got to the point where the court ordered them to get to their trials on different roads, because any time they met on the road to or from a trial they'd get into a fight that'd lead to them suing each other all over again

I loved the story of Hieronymus Sebastian Schuster. He was drunkenly shooting pistols out the window with his friends, when one of his pistols misfired. He gestured with the gun to tell his servant to fetch the key used for reloading it, and then the pistol went off and shot another soldier in the face, killing him instantly. Schuster fell on top of the victim, sobbing and begging forgiveness. A court martial determined that it was purely an accident and sentenced Schuster to a lecture on gun safety.

Some time later, Schuster was carrying the company's banner on horseback when another horseman approached and insulted him, saying he wasn't worthy to hold the banner. Schuster politely tried to make the man back away, and the other soldier said "What are you going to do? Shoot me in the face?" Schuster leapt off his horse and tackled the other man to the ground.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2022 20:44

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Samovar posted:

6,000,000 Jewish people died in the camps - but around 10,000,000 overall died in the camps, because even though the majority of the people in these camps were Jewish, not all of them were, and indeed some camps were made specifically for other populations.

Another lesser-known detail is that roughly 1.5 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust were shot by death squads, not murdered in concentration camps.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

My grandmother got deported to Ravensbrück at age 5, to age 9. The camp for women. It's insane that some nazis sat around and decided "well this extermination of undesirables plan must go forward, but the small girls deserve the lady's camp. We will murder them with dignity."

They tried to extract as much labor as possible from the victims first. The military history thread had some great posts describing how the tailored Nazi uniforms required far more manpower than other contemporary uniforms, so there were concentration camps dedicated to making clothes for the SS.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2022 07:43

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Rats arrived in the Galapagos Islands around 1850, and ate all the tortoise eggs for over 100 years. When they started trying to save the species in 1965, all of the surviving tortoises were over 110 years old, and biologists managed to save several species by getting them to reproduce and protecting the eggs.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2022 02:13

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

When it comes to covid, "science" conveniently changes to make it so that whatever encourages people to spend money is safe. It's not a problem with evidence itself, it's a problem with politicizing public health bodies. Restaurants are an insane idea during an airborne pandemic, but service jobs are a big sector of the economy, so they declare it's OK to take off your mask in public if you're eating.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2022 15:40

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Leaving without saying bye is called "the Irish goodbye", but it's "French leave" in Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. It's "English leave" in Russian, and "Polish exit" in German.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2022 19:25

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

After Japan outlawed the Bible in 1603, some communities kept practicing in secret and passing down Christianity orally. They venerated Jesus, John, Peter, and Paul, and believed that Christianity would let them break the cycle of rebirth. When Japan opened to foreigners in 1868, most of the 30,000 hidden Christians joined the Catholic Church. However, some followers believed that their faith was the true one and the Catholics had gone astray, so they kept practicing their own Christianity. There are still some practitioners now, but most are very old.

Every religion is heavily influenced by retellings and artistic interpretations, but the Kakure Christians are a fascinating example because they diverged so much while isolated from the rest of Christianity.

# ¿ May 11, 2022 09:47

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

girl dick energy posted:

Isn't Iceland the only country that still uses patronymic names? That's honestly kind of admirable.

Patronymic names are still used in parts of Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and a few other countries. Although people with these names will often adopt a last name if they have to do a lot of paperwork with Westerners.

# ¿ May 12, 2022 08:03

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Alhazred posted:

Australia's fauna is basically 90% feral animals and 10% spiders.

The three most common animal-related fatalities in Australia: getting kicked by a cow, falling off a horse, and crashing a motorcycle into a kangaroo.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2022 23:28

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Some German spies got caught at the Battle of the Bulge because their military IDs spelled "Identification" correctly, while authentic American ones had a typo - "Indentification".

# ¿ Jul 18, 2022 14:37

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

It's also surprisingly common for someone to survive an attempted suicide by gunshot and then seek medical attention. It happens slightly more than 10% of the time. That's more common than a suicide by multiple shots, which implies that most people who survive the first shot change their mind about killing themselves.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2022 08:43

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Dolphins are known for pushing stranded swimmers to shore, but they'll also sometimes push swimmers deep out into the ocean. Dolphins are assholes and like pushing people.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2022 20:18

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Yorkshire had a tradition of putting a live ferret in a man's trousers to see how long he could endure it. The contests would end in a matter of minutes. But nowadays, the entertainment value has been ruined by the contestants raising and taming the ferrets themselves.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2022 22:18

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

16 million Americans fought in WWII, and a lot of people at home were in factories making weapons and uniforms. 2.7 million Americans fought in Vietnam and 3 million fought in Afghanistan or Iraq, out of a larger population, so it's much less likely that someone has family stories from those wars.

My grandpa joined the Navy underage, and when they learned his real age he was discharged and spent the rest of the war working in a shipyard. I think he felt ashamed of that, so he never talked about his time in WWII. My other grandpa was also too young to join the military during the war.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2023 08:01

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

There was a Polish pilot shot down in the Battle of Britain who crash-landed at a country club, and won a game of tennis.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2023 07:33

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Ichabod Sexbeast posted:

Was he treated as a pirate, or an eccentric king? Did they try to hang him, or send out lightly guarded treasure ships every now and then to keep him occupied?

He left the throne because he lost a war and got usurped. After a decade of piracy, he became a duke in 1449.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2023 23:13

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

FreudianSlippers posted:

The Alf in Gandalf is "álfr" or elf in the original text because to the Norse Elf probably meant something more akin to minor diety or powerful supernatural being instead of being a separate race as we would understand it today.

Due to this there are some dwarves who are elves and also some venerated ancestors who are elves and so on and so forth.

Troll works similarly but was usually used to describe malignant supernatural powers like wizards, ghosts, and monsters. Like with elves it didn't become a word for one specific type of creature until the 18th century when people got really into categorization and Trolls became just giants/ogres. In the Scandinavian languages this older still survives as magic is Trolldom and a wizard is a trollmand. Which is why in Nordic translations of Lord of the Rings Gand-Elf is a Troll-Man.

The wand in Gandalf means "wand" or "staff". Gandalf was a mythological dwarf, but wand-elves are also a type of being in Beowulf. It's interesting to read Beowulf and see references to orcs and to Middle Earth. Tolkien was a huge fan.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2023 21:29

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

The Reichstag fire was staged by the SA six days before an election, to give the Nazis a pretext to terrorize left-wing voters, and then to pass the Enabling Act in the weeks afterward. After the war, some SA members testified that the building was already on fire when they dragged some young communist into it and then arrested him.

The Nazis had been planning Kristallnacht for a while when Grynszpan shot Ernst vom Rath. If that hadn't happened, Goebbels would have invented some other crime to blame on the Jews.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2023 11:05

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Imperador do Brasil posted:

The only person with my last name ever known to die in any war was another cousin who was a courier in WWI and had a wall fall on him in France.

I'm morbidly fascinated by the stories of the unluckiest people to die in war. There was an American in WWII crushed by an air-dropped crate of food when its parachute failed to deploy. I also know of at least one person hit and wounded by celebratory gunfire on VE Day.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2023 23:44

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Milo and POTUS posted:

Wasn't the last vietnam casualty some dude who got rabies or is that an urban legend

People are still dying of complications from Agent Orange exposure. The last American deaths named on the Vietnam War Memorial are three marines who were executed by the Khmer Rouge after trying to rescue hostages from the SS Mayaguez.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2023 04:57

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

An event from 2009 counts as a historical fun fact, right?

https://youtu.be/YD-xxoQwOo4?si=EFeDQ7JaXd4FKGT4

"That is most unparliamentary."

# ¿ Nov 6, 2023 07:43

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

English "yard" comes from that Old Norse word as well. The proto-Indo-European word "gher", meaning "to enclose", is the origin of yard, garden, chorus, and court.

Chamale has a new favorite as of 23:40 on Mar 19, 2024

# ¿ Mar 19, 2024 23:37

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 05:38

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Zopotantor posted:

Sisu 2: Now He's on Meth.

Sisu was a very fun movie. You could make a good movie about the Finns fighting in WWII, but unfortunately they were on the side of the Nazis, so instead they made a movie about one Finnish guy who fights a ton of Nazis.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2024 22:31

The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > PYF Historical Fun Fact: (USER LOSETH POSTYNG PRIVILYGES FOR FOUR AND TWENTY HOURS)