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buttcoinbrony posted:Fair enough, I thought they were beyond the strongman days, they just found a more palatable strong(wo)man. Well it is a family business after all.
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Feb 7, 2016 18:38
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Anosmoman posted:They inflicted 2:1 casualties on the Soviets while fighting Britain, France and the US and they did it with inferior technology. The whole endeavor was lost from the beginning but while it lasted the German military did kinda ok. Sometimes I wonder how much of wehrabooism comes from western Allied propaganda and folk history that inflated Germany into a supersciencey overdog to make their own victory seem like a glorious triumph against all odds rather than inevitable and minimize the importance of "the commies". And how much comes from Hitler's favorite engineer later putting his name on a certain very famous rear-engined sports car (that IIRC he had no personal hand in designing, and still owed a great deal to the Tatra like Volkswagens and the 356 before it). Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Mar 2, 2016 |
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Mar 2, 2016 22:59
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sparatuvs posted:And their plan once they beat the soviets? A massive return to the land where production was switched to agriculture by hand. Of all the harebrained Nazi schemes, Wehrbauern were the absolute dumbest idea they ever had, hands down. Holy poo poo. Perhaps they could have asked the British how peasant armies fare against regulars from an industrialized superpower.
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Mar 2, 2016 23:00
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Woolie Wool posted:Sometimes I wonder how much of wehrabooism comes from western Allied propaganda and folk history that inflated Germany into a supersciencey overdog to make their own victory seem like a glorious triumph against all odds rather than inevitable and minimize the importance of "the commies". The best allied narrative is how "plucky little Britain" stood alone against a mighty German empire in the space between the Fall of France and Barbarossa. Yes, the combined peoples of present-day Canada, Nigeria, the UK, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Burma, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, and many more, with the finances of the USA, the unlimited oil of Saudi Arabia, the raw materials of places like the present-day DRC, all that was utterly nothing against the mighty juggernaut of a gimcrack empire/alliance consisting of present-day Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Denmark, Poland, Norway, Austria, The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Northern France. Really British propaganda being such an excellent myth-maker is a thread than runs through both world wars. The worst part about it is that so many Americans were ready to discount early Holocaust reports as more British lies, especially after being burned so bad in WWI.
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Mar 31, 2016 10:31
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Woolie Wool posted:Sometimes I wonder how much of wehrabooism comes from western Allied propaganda and folk history that inflated Germany into a supersciencey overdog to make their own victory seem like a glorious triumph against all odds rather than inevitable and minimize the importance of "the commies". Well it was really about first France/Britain and then the USSR collapsing in spectacular fashion and trying to somehow explain that. When you look at just technology and number of tanks/men nothing explains why the nazis could do it not once, but twice. When you have two opposing sides of roughly equal strength and one completely dominates the other you have two options - either you are incompetent and weak or your enemy is incredibly powerful. The former is not a good narrative so it's better to go with the latter - you are fighting someone much stronger but you persevered through shear force of will. D'aww. I just think its funny when people rant about the crappiness of the German army as if it's important. I mean if you have a trash army with crap technology led by morons but a much larger coalition with better technology still needs 5 years to defeat it... well then you also suck. Congratulations on your vastly superior tank designs which was offset by.... worse leaders? Strategy? What?
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Mar 31, 2016 16:02
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So, US History Class taught me a lot of WWII was the fault of the European powers and "appeasement." They hosed up by letting Hitler get away with poo poo. All Neville Chamberlain's fault or whatever. But I'm wondering, is this actually.true? Could World War II have been averted if England or somebody had said "no! You can't do that!" Now I can't remember what it was Germany did... Was it invading Poland? But yeah, just wondering if anything would have prevented the wars once the Nazis were in charge, or if it was inevitable no matter what England or whoever did?
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Apr 10, 2016 21:22
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NikkolasKing posted:So, US History Class taught me a lot of WWII was the fault of the European powers and "appeasement." They hosed up by letting Hitler get away with poo poo. All Neville Chamberlain's fault or whatever. Britain and France weren't really in proper shape to fight a land war vs Germany between 1933 and 39, if they'd started a war in 1936 when the Nazis remilitarized the Rhineland they would have likely won but it would not have been an easy war and public opinion in both Britain and France was extremely anti-war so it would have been massively unpopular
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Apr 10, 2016 21:32
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It also should be put in context that France itself was extremely politically divided from 1935 to 1938 in part to the Spanish Civil War, and French hesitancy was in part due a sheer lack of political unity. In addition, the British foreign policy toward the continent was always traditionally isolationist and Britain's intervention in WW1 was still seen as an "emergency" measure. Also, in all honesty, much of the elite in both countries saw Hitler as a potential bulwark versus Stalin. Also, while the allies would have probably won a war with Germany, it would have taken quite a while for them to put a reliable invasion force together and even then there was no real plan on how to occupy what would an extremely hostile Western Germany. If anything it could have ended up a mess where the allies had an advantage but not enough to make meaningful progress, and maybe have actually retreated if Stalin start to capitalize on the situation by taking Poland.
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Apr 10, 2016 21:59
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In addition to the political situation, the period between 1936 and 1939 was a critical rearmament period for Britain and France. Defense budgets had been slashed to the absolute bone after the onset of the Depression, and there was a legitimate concern that neither country actually had a strong enough military to take on Germany. While in retrospect it's pretty clear that they probably could have taken on Germany and won at any time before the annexation of Czechoslovakia, it would still have been a bloody campaign, one the general British and French public likely wouldn't have had the stomach to sustain. By negotiating the Munich Agreement, Britain and France bought what they felt was the precious time they needed to re-arm-and in the process, helped to demonstrate that Hilter couldn't be negotiated with after he broke the agreement less than a year later.
Acebuckeye13 fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Apr 10, 2016 |
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Apr 10, 2016 22:26
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NikkolasKing posted:So, US History Class taught me a lot of WWII was the fault of the European powers and "appeasement." They hosed up by letting Hitler get away with poo poo. All Neville Chamberlain's fault or whatever. To truncate the previous answers: militarily speaking, yes, it could have been prevented, at great cost. Politically speaking, there was not a chance in hell of stopping them, thanks to the aforementioned great cost. Turns out it's really hard to sell the sons and daughters of WWI on the line "no, seriously, we promise, THIS time we're not going to throw a generation's lives away for nothing."
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Apr 10, 2016 23:01
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Ze Pollack posted:To truncate the previous answers: militarily speaking, yes, it could have been prevented, at great cost. "If you liked everyone you know dying for the independence of Belgium, you'll just LOVE everyone you know dying for the independence of Czechoslovakia!" This was hard when it seemed like Czechoslovakia didn't even want to be a country itself, and even friends of the West like Poland wanted a slice. It wasn't just Germany invading some small country and taking it over, it was a complicated dismantling. Also Hitler super triple promised that this was the last territorial expansion of Germany.
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Apr 10, 2016 23:27
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Also noteworthy that the Americans who like to talk so much poo poo about Neville Chamberlain and appeasement were totally cool with letting the USSR annex a chunk of Czechoslovakia after the war, because standing up to dictators is super hard. This piece is still a part of Ukraine today.
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Apr 10, 2016 23:40
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cheerfullydrab posted:This was hard when it seemed like Czechoslovakia didn't even want to be a country itself, and even friends of the West like Poland wanted a slice. Czechoslovakia was one of the most stable political unions in all of Europe at the time. The ones who wanted to see it broken up were usually not Czechs or Slovaks. Germany was well aware of how well supplied and numerically superior its foes were, but that wasn't that big a factor in their game plan. The Germans were always hoping to make continuation of war to be politically unviable by their enemies. Hence their stubborn resistance, even against the West, all the way to the end. A lot of Nazis were convinced that the allies were on the brink of discord and separate peaces.
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Apr 11, 2016 02:20
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A lot of Nazis were convinced that their inherent superiority as ethnically pure Germans would make victory inevitable despite the numerical advantages of the subhuman Slavs and mongrel Americans
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Apr 11, 2016 02:23
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Anyone who talks poo poo about Neville Chamberlain should be asked what he got the UK to do after Sep 1 1939
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Apr 11, 2016 02:39
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After spending some time in my childhood playing lots of WWII games, I'm really glad I've recently discovered the term Wehraboo because it describes those types I ran into that had Waffen SS clans but were totally just doing it for the "historical accuracy". Now I wish there was a term for Russia/Soviet-philes who are obsessed with how badass Stalin was or whatever. One thing is to argue that the USSR was the biggest combatant in WWII and deserves more recognition in Western history, but another is some of the jerking off people do about the USSR (and even Russia today)
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Apr 11, 2016 18:45
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P-Value Hack posted:Now I wish there was a term for Russia/Soviet-philes who are obsessed with how badass Stalin was or whatever. One thing is to argue that the USSR was the biggest combatant in WWII and deserves more recognition in Western history, but another is some of the jerking off people do about the USSR (and even Russia today) tankies
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Apr 11, 2016 18:46
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P-Value Hack posted:Now I wish there was a term for Russia/Soviet-philes who are obsessed with how badass Stalin was or whatever. One thing is to argue that the USSR was the biggest combatant in WWII and deserves more recognition in Western history, but another is some of the jerking off people do about the USSR (and even Russia today) Nowadays we call them RT
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Apr 11, 2016 19:29
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P-Value Hack posted:After spending some time in my childhood playing lots of WWII games, I'm really glad I've recently discovered the term Wehraboo because it describes those types I ran into that had Waffen SS clans but were totally just doing it for the "historical accuracy". Yeah, when I used to post on the Paradox Interactive Forums (Producer of games Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, etc), any mention of the Holocaust/Strategic Bombing/PoWs and other controversial subjects were completely banned, along with any Nazi imagery (including ingame flags, which was tricky when it came to game mods, etc). This rule seemed a bit draconian on the surface, but then I stumbled upon a non-official Hearts of Iron forum. It wasn't overtly Nazi, but literally EVERY single poster on that forum had a lovingly crafted and detailed Waffen SS Avatar, Signature, etc, with full unit details, and all sorts of quotes about the righteousness of the struggle on the Eastern front. Pretty much every other thread was a circle-jerk discussion of how the war in the East could and should have been won, how a Nazi victory would have been better than what actually happened, etc. The rule seemed justified after that - if you give those Wehraboo types an inch they take a mile. Tigey fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Apr 11, 2016 |
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Apr 11, 2016 20:48
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Stalin first petitioned the Allies for an alliance and was rejected, most firmly by the poles. The French attempt to revive talks August 21, 1939 came too late, on the advent of Molotov-Ribbentrop. Britannia could have chosen to utterly change the course of the war then, just as it failed to do so when George the coward king did not save the Tsar's children.
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Apr 12, 2016 06:45
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a hundred boners posted:Stalin first petitioned the Allies for an alliance and was rejected, most firmly by the poles. The French attempt to revive talks August 21, 1939 came too late, on the advent of Molotov-Ribbentrop. Britannia could have chosen to utterly change the course of the war then, just as it failed to do so when George the coward king did not save the Tsar's children. In all fairness to Poland, that alliance came with the stipulation that Soviet troops would be garrisoned on Polish soil, and Poland had literally fought a war against the Soviet Union and taken a large chunk of territory just 19 years earlier. Poland knew the Soviets were planning on ratfucking them one way or another.
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Apr 12, 2016 19:17
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Sergg posted:In all fairness to Poland, that alliance came with the stipulation that Soviet troops would be garrisoned on Polish soil, and Poland had literally fought a war against the Soviet Union and taken a large chunk of territory just 19 years earlier. Poland knew the Soviets were planning on ratfucking them one way or another. It's not like Stalin was engaging in a campaign of genocide against Poles within the Soviet Union at the time when his offer was communicated. Oh. He was? Well, poo poo.
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Apr 12, 2016 22:51
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My Imaginary GF posted:It's not like Stalin was engaging in a campaign of genocide against Poles within the Soviet Union at the time when his offer was communicated. Surely, making friends with France and the UK would save Poland from its neighbors!
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Apr 13, 2016 12:54
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cheerfullydrab posted:Really British propaganda being such an excellent myth-maker is a thread than runs through both world wars. The worst part about it is that so many Americans were ready to discount early Holocaust reports as more British lies, especially after being burned so bad in WWI. Honestly, I wonder if British propaganda was really that good or if we're just disproportionately exposed to it because it's in English and disproportionately likely to sympathize with it because of the cultural and political similarities. Also, British propaganda tended to be more convenient than the truth for US political stances. Anosmoman posted:I just think its funny when people rant about the crappiness of the German army as if it's important. I mean if you have a trash army with crap technology led by morons but a much larger coalition with better technology still needs 5 years to defeat it... well then you also suck. Congratulations on your vastly superior tank designs which was offset by.... worse leaders? Strategy? What? It's not like the Western Front was super hot after the Fall of France and the Battle of Britain. Since they faced no serious threat of land invasion from Germany, Britain and the US were content to focus on other fronts and let the Soviets keep Germany busy while they took their time building up the resources, army, and training necessary to strike back. Scratch Monkey posted:Germany was well aware of how well supplied and numerically superior its foes were, but that wasn't that big a factor in their game plan. The Germans were always hoping to make continuation of war to be politically unviable by their enemies. Hence their stubborn resistance, even against the West, all the way to the end. A lot of Nazis were convinced that the allies were on the brink of discord and separate peaces. Unconditional surrender is not an easy pill to swallow for any nation and therefore tends to encourage resistance, especially so for a Germany still deeply affected by their surrender in WWI, and double super especially so for a nation that pulled the kind of ultra war crimes poo poo that the Third Reich and Imperial Japan were both so fond of. The Axis nations' focus on separate peaces wasn't some sort of eleven-dimensional chess plot to exploit the weakness of democracies or whatever, it was a simple realization that a diplomatic solution that might leave them with something would turn out better for them than unilaterally laying down their arms and hoping the Allied armies would be in a merciful mood when they arrived.
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Apr 13, 2016 16:04
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P-Value Hack posted:After spending some time in my childhood playing lots of WWII games, I'm really glad I've recently discovered the term Wehraboo because it describes those types I ran into that had Waffen SS clans but were totally just doing it for the "historical accuracy". There was some hilarious SS drama in the Midwest reenactor groups a few years ago. In fairness to the scene, it's my understanding that the identifiable parties involved weren't welcome after that. http://www.citypages.com/restaurants/the-story-behind-a-nazi-themed-dinner-at-gasthofs-photo-6603035 http://www.citypages.com/restaurants/scott-steben-nazi-dinner-organizer-has-ss-tattoo-photos-6599474
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Apr 13, 2016 22:36
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This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!
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DeusExMachinima posted:There was some hilarious SS drama in the Midwest reenactor groups a few years ago. In fairness to the scene, it's my understanding that the identifiable parties involved weren't welcome after that.  "I hate Minnesota Nazis!" As a WWII reenactor myself I can tell you that shithead closet Nazis who do SS are far less uncommon than is comfortable.
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Apr 13, 2016 23:07
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Plan Z posted:Maybe. There was a scene where Hitler stares in the mirror and with a determined look trims his mustache down into a Chaplin. Was expecting an Elliot Reed-style montage of him ripping up his clothes, throwing his pickelhaub out the window and putting on a brown shirt while Tom Petty sang Horst Wessel Lied in the background. Couple of pages ago but this sounds identical to a scene in the miniseries "Hitler - The Rise of Evil" starring Robert Carlyle (Begbie from Trainspotting!) as our eponymous hero. The general idea of the scene was that his buddies had been fighting with the communists and trying to get famous but one of his sidekicks said he wasn't recognisable enough, so he did that to his moustache. It's complete rubbish of course, with the generally accepted theories behind his 'tash being either "trimmed it so it wouldn't catch on his gas mask" or "Hitler was actually a human being and just quite liked it". The series is peppered with historical inaccuracies (the most damning being the characters around him; the producers seemed to just pick the ones with the most pronouncable names and fitted other peoples achievements into their roles, accuracy be damned) but the general jist of it is decent. For a part of Hitlers life which is largely overlooked by TV and film it's certainly worth a look though.
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Apr 14, 2016 00:06
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cheerfullydrab posted:The best allied narrative is how "plucky little Britain" stood alone against a mighty German empire in the space between the Fall of France and Barbarossa. Well, Britain is an island, and it's empire is super far away and it's most valuable constituent parts are also being attacked. In "peacetime", Britain's armed forces were set up to shoot maxim guns at men wearing skirts and wooden shields. They really weren't up to the task of this huge land empire across the channel that's being built by an approximate technological equal, I'd say that's exactly what the British empire was most vulnerable to because Britain itself was left exposed and surrounded. Then again, the real state of the Nazi land empire is worth examining. The British empire was old and fairly normalized, but the Nazi one hadn't even begun to settle down. In dutch factories the Nazis ordered to produce weapons it was basically a game of seeing how slowly and badly you could work without getting caught. That's one hell of a lot of defective tank parts and dud bullets.
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Apr 14, 2016 01:51
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duckmaster posted:Couple of pages ago but this sounds identical to a scene in the miniseries "Hitler - The Rise of Evil" starring Robert Carlyle (Begbie from Trainspotting!) as our eponymous hero. The general idea of the scene was that his buddies had been fighting with the communists and trying to get famous but one of his sidekicks said he wasn't recognisable enough, so he did that to his moustache. It's complete rubbish of course, with the generally accepted theories behind his 'tash being either "trimmed it so it wouldn't catch on his gas mask" or "Hitler was actually a human being and just quite liked it". That mustache scene would have been much better if he had been staring at a picture of Charlie Chaplin instead. I've always found it strange how up in arms people get when Hitler is shown as anything other than a 100% evil, baby eating monster. I remember the uproar that came about when Downfall / Der Untergang was released, because it dared to show Hitler doing things like petting his dog and being nice to children when he wasn't being an insane dictator. Like, he was an actual person with a family and a life, he didn't spring fully formed from some earthen womb.
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Apr 14, 2016 11:40
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Apologists Germans loved the "Hitler as a monster" thing, because then it wasn't like the other parts of the state wanted to build death camps or invade the east, it was this one bad egg who everyone else couldn't possibly stand up to. Hitler was horrifyingly human, that's why he was so popular.
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Apr 14, 2016 13:38
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It's also really important to remember that Hitler was human. Thinking of Hitler as an inhuman monster who spent all day every day raging about the Jews--essentially, as a Bond villain, a caricature--makes it easier to dismiss him as a unique phenomenon that could never happen in a different context. Thinking of him as human, someone who could be nice to his dog and fall in love with his girlfriend and laugh with his friends, is deeply unsettling and even terrifying because it makes us question the darkness inherent to humanity in a fundamentally different way. It's not "what could create such an inhuman monster?" but rather "what is it about humanity that allows us to do such dark things?"
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Apr 14, 2016 14:12
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vyelkin posted:It's also really important to remember that Hitler was human. Thinking of Hitler as an inhuman monster who spent all day every day raging about the Jews--essentially, as a Bond villain, a caricature--makes it easier to dismiss him as a unique phenomenon that could never happen in a different context. Thinking of him as human, someone who could be nice to his dog and fall in love with his girlfriend and laugh with his friends, is deeply unsettling and even terrifying because it makes us question the darkness inherent to humanity in a fundamentally different way. It's not "what could create such an inhuman monster?" but rather "what is it about humanity that allows us to do such dark things?" its pretty common to kill everything that doesn't belong to your group in pretty much every animal, the only difference is that humans are incredibly smart and way better at it
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Apr 14, 2016 14:15
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vyelkin posted:It's also really important to remember that Hitler was human. Thinking of Hitler as an inhuman monster who spent all day every day raging about the Jews--essentially, as a Bond villain, a caricature--makes it easier to dismiss him as a unique phenomenon that could never happen in a different context. Thinking of him as human, someone who could be nice to his dog and fall in love with his girlfriend and laugh with his friends, is deeply unsettling and even terrifying because it makes us question the darkness inherent to humanity in a fundamentally different way. It's not "what could create such an inhuman monster?" but rather "what is it about humanity that allows us to do such dark things?" Very true. A person can easily feel safer categorizing Hitler as a cartoon supervillain rather than a real person; there's a sort of absolution there if you can deny the shared humanity. It feels like it's been a little while since a new question was raised, so what do you feel is the legacy of WW2 with regard to collateral damage? Civilian deaths have been a part of warfare since time immemorial but if you're doing the killing with a sword then it's a conscious choice to, say, massacre or decimate a village that refused to cough up the crops or embrace the new God or what-have-you. Setting aside deliberate WW2 atrocities that are obvious and many, there also seemed to be a lot of new avenues for random and chaotic civilian casualties. I'm a layman when it comes to history but it seems to me that around the time it became feasible to use bombers on a large scale, it also became acceptable to bomb the crap out of urban population centers. Is this something that people came to accept in the apocalyptic context of total war and then just continued to accept as the new normal for armed conflict? Was there a slow creep from military to industrial targets through evolving strategic doctrine, or were cities targeted because the bombs-on-target accuracy was so poor that you couldn't really drop direct strikes on smaller targets? Was there intense public debate about these acts like you have protests against drone strikes today or was the general wartime attitude that every available weapon should be used as early and often as possible? I can picture a Londoner of a certain mindset in Spring '45 hearing about the firebombing of Dresden and being glad for it.
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Apr 14, 2016 15:35
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The Ranger posted:It feels like it's been a little while since a new question was raised, so what do you feel is the legacy of WW2 with regard to collateral damage? Civilian deaths have been a part of warfare since time immemorial but if you're doing the killing with a sword then it's a conscious choice to, say, massacre or decimate a village that refused to cough up the crops or embrace the new God or what-have-you. Setting aside deliberate WW2 atrocities that are obvious and many, there also seemed to be a lot of new avenues for random and chaotic civilian casualties. I'm a layman when it comes to history but it seems to me that around the time it became feasible to use bombers on a large scale, it also became acceptable to bomb the crap out of urban population centers. Is this something that people came to accept in the apocalyptic context of total war and then just continued to accept as the new normal for armed conflict? Was there a slow creep from military to industrial targets through evolving strategic doctrine, or were cities targeted because the bombs-on-target accuracy was so poor that you couldn't really drop direct strikes on smaller targets? Was there intense public debate about these acts like you have protests against drone strikes today or was the general wartime attitude that every available weapon should be used as early and often as possible? I can picture a Londoner of a certain mindset in Spring '45 hearing about the firebombing of Dresden and being glad for it. The way they did it was that they designated a nominal military target located in a urban center, but the bombers were way to inaccurate to hit it so the bombs fell mostly on civilians. The people in charge probably knew this full well. After the bombing of Dresden, Churchill wrote that the Allies should cease bombing purely to increase the terror, so I guess he was aware at least. The a-bombs were dropped were the population was the densest. To be sure, a number of military targets also went up in smoke but that seems incidental (I doubt anyone would call it anything other than terrorism if someone nuked the White House, a military target). "A History of Bombing" by Sven Lindqvist goes into this question. I know there were protests in Britain against the bombing of Germany because George Orwell condemned them in a column of his (http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/eaip_02 bottom of page), where he argues that it is less bad to kill women and children than killing males only like on the front lines. Also, females in the military are uggos (truly the greatest intellectual of his time).
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Apr 14, 2016 16:23
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The Ranger posted:Very true. A person can easily feel safer categorizing Hitler as a cartoon supervillain rather than a real person; there's a sort of absolution there if you can deny the shared humanity. Basically whenever someone condemns Nagasaki and Hiroshima I just ask if they're for or against the B17 existing. Weeds out the know-nothings pretty fast.
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Apr 14, 2016 19:44
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Saturation bombing on the scale of WW2 was not the "new normal". Maybe some places in Vietnam came close, but the wholesale annihilation of cities from the air is something that just didn't happen after 1945.
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Apr 14, 2016 20:11
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Scratch Monkey posted:
Ages back at a camp Roberts event I went to with the CHG I was wandering around the barracks area with a friend drinkin a bottle of wine we stole from the French bar (it was a western front event, the French resistance were playing accordions, serving drinks and wermacht were cheering Hava nagila) because we were 17 and really cool. We rounded a corner, halfway into the bottle, and walked alomg the barracks in the dark. We looked in a window and stopped in our tracks as one of the guys in the 12th SS unit took off his tunic, revealing a swastika on his entire back. The 12th has a bad reputation in the CHG for being assholes, paintball farbs and literal nazis. I hear little has changed since my encounter back in 2006. Though for more context the guy I was drinking with (we were British 1st paras for the event) was from lancaster, became a total douche, smuggled in class 3 from Arizona and referred to black folks as "those people". I once sat in a car with him and this German-American kid from a loaded family in Orange County as they played music by some "Johnny reb" musician (can't remember the actual name) as they sang along to songs about lynching the blacks. The OC kid was in a regular german army unit and top rate German supremacy hardon. I stuck with the British and Russian units, they had better senses of humor and we're more into the self aware LARP. Plus our comissar in the Russian 150th served two tours in Afghanistan in the 80s and was the best campsite cook you ever met. Strange times. Now I airsoft. It's slightly better.
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Apr 14, 2016 20:21
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Crocuta posted:I know there were protests in Britain against the bombing of Germany because George Orwell condemned them in a column of his (http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/eaip_02 bottom of page), where he argues that it is less bad to kill women and children than killing males only like on the front lines. Also, females in the military are uggos (truly the greatest intellectual of his time). One of the great things about reading Orwell's newspaper columns is being reminded that he had terrible opinions sometimes.
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Apr 14, 2016 20:27
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Woolie Wool posted:Saturation bombing on the scale of WW2 was not the "new normal". Maybe some places in Vietnam came close, but the wholesale annihilation of cities from the air is something that just didn't happen after 1945. I wonder how much of this is due to an actual change in what we would consider the conduct of war and how much of it is just due to the fact that we haven't seen developed nations fight a total war since World War II though. 1945 was really the last time that two industrialized nations with the capacity to annihilate cities from the air fought each other. The US certainly tried in Vietnam (if I remember right, they dropped more bombs in Vietnam than were dropped by all powers during all of World War II) but that was a different kind of war and as far as I know most of their bombing of cities like Hanoi was targeted strikes with fighter planes, the occasional Linebacker II-type mission aside. It's possible to say that war has changed since 1945 and saturation bombing is no longer normal, but I wouldn't say that for certain until you can point to a comparable situation to World War II and see it not happening. It's clear that even powers like the US are still not holding back on missions because of civilian casualties (in drone strikes and bombings, etc.), and that's before even getting to militaries that might be considered less scrupulous like the Russians.
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Apr 14, 2016 21:31
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vyelkin posted:I wonder how much of this is due to an actual change in what we would consider the conduct of war and how much of it is just due to the fact that we haven't seen developed nations fight a total war since World War II though. 1945 was really the last time that two industrialized nations with the capacity to annihilate cities from the air fought each other. The US certainly tried in Vietnam (if I remember right, they dropped more bombs in Vietnam than were dropped by all powers during all of World War II) but that was a different kind of war and as far as I know most of their bombing of cities like Hanoi was targeted strikes with fighter planes, the occasional Linebacker II-type mission aside. Air power usage in Vietnam is a complicated subject, as the various campaigns differ greatly from one another in scope and type, and were usually linked to larger political goals, often quite muddily. Some of the bigger campaigns, like Barrel Roll, Steel Tiger, and Commando Hunt to name only a few, targeted the Trail, but used all sorts of different aircraft as pragmatists fought with technology enthusiasts in the air services over what worked best (in very short: the former found that gunships and older, slower aircraft were better for interdiction, while the latter wanted the shiniest, most expensive warbirds loaded down with the newest electronics). As you note, B-52 generally didn't get used much for saturation bombings of urban centers other than during Linebacker II, and occasionally during Rolling Thunder, but they did also get used for saturation attack of non-urban targets during the illegal MENU bombings of Cambodia, and also against during Cedar Falls and Junction City against the iron triangle. However, this wasn't for a lack of intent on the part of air force commanders, in particular Curtis LeMay who was unsurprisingly all for leveling anything/everything much as he had during WWII. I don't recall specifically who managed to hold him in check or why, since I studied the air campaigns primarily with an eye to their casualty rates among American fliers (POWs and MIAs in particular), and only picked up the command philosophy side of things tangentially.
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Apr 14, 2016 21:41
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