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The book all these allegations are going out in, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War is currently number 58 in the WHSmith best sellers chart, just ahead of Peppa Pig: Peppa's Halloween Sticker Activity Book and a long way behind Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975 by our favourite Sir Max Hastings. No one gives a poo poo.
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Oct 29, 2018 15:33
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I stopped giving a gently caress about WHSmith best sellers chart when they stopped stocking Pratchett books. That particular branch is dead to me.
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Oct 29, 2018 15:34
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HEY GUNS posted:are they meant to look like windbreakers, because lmao 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 fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Dec 20, 2018 |
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Oct 29, 2018 15:47
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i sew. i can feel that jacket. considering what 1940s industrial tailoring was like, do you know how much of this was finished by hand? edit: 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 edit 2: 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 HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Oct 29, 2018 |
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Oct 29, 2018 16:05
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HEY GUNS posted:i sew. i can feel that jacket. 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. quote: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!") quote:edit: 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. quote:edit 2: 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: 
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Oct 29, 2018 16:27
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Cessna posted:Guess what? There's sort of a fly opening, but if you want to poop, you have to take off your entire uniform the nazis infented a three hundred year old problem for themselves quote:* 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. also in the 17th c buff coats were finished with cod oil and chalk, imagine that when it rains tasty ALSO: all woolen or silk stuff would have never been washed, ever. part of the way they constructed the clothing--like the seams, or how breeches or doublets were shaped--means they would fall apart if washed. quote:If it means anything, they had unit tailors assigned as a section at the battalion level. Yes, this is insane. edit: it's like that scene from three amigos, "sew, very old one! sew like the wind!" HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Oct 29, 2018 |
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Oct 29, 2018 16:35
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Cessna posted:- 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. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Oct 29, 2018 |
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Oct 29, 2018 16:41
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Corsair Pool Boy posted:As a kid I thought the airborne were Air Force units. Airborne are trans infantry.
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Oct 29, 2018 16:58
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HEY GUNS posted:gonna push back against you a little here: all woolen poo poo smells like wet wool, i probably smell like that in reenactments as well. plus the stuff i oil my sword with, plus wet metal. also everyone smells a tiny bit like what they eat and you can really tell the difference if it's a food you're not used to. one difference is that linen seems to be a really "clean" material, like you smell less bad if your shirt is made of linen Yeah, but American uniforms and field gear were made out of (for the most part) cotton post-D-day. Soviet stuff also, for basic uniforms, with cotton supplemented with synthetics later on. (Yes, greatcoats were often wool, so this isn't always the case.) So you'd have German infantry out there smelling like wet-dog wool while the GIs/Frontoviks didn't. It's really noticeable. quote:this is old school as poo poo for europe, it reminds me of the kind of shirts i wear at reenactments, which is knee length. Yes. Add in the boots and the VERY high-wasted trousers with suspenders and they look like Mennonite farmers before they put on the feldbluse. quote:are you sure they were cotton? how were they constructed? specifically what do the shoulders, neck hole, and sleeves look like Here's a reproduction, but...  There really wasn't a uniform standard here. They varied in color from orangey-brown to green to grey, with every shade inbetween. They also varied in material - some were cotton, some wool, were knit, some were twill. Later-war ones were made out of crappy synthetic fibers and fell apart rapidly.
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Oct 29, 2018 17:03
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Cessna posted:Yeah, but American uniforms and field gear were made out of (for the most part) cotton post-D-day. Soviet stuff also, for basic uniforms, with cotton supplemented with synthetics later on. (Yes, greatcoats were often wool, so this isn't always the case.) So you'd have German infantry out there smelling like wet-dog wool while the GIs/Frontoviks didn't. It's really noticeable. quote:Here's a reproduction, but... Nenonen posted:Airborne are trans infantry. hot take: everyone is a dragoon HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Oct 29, 2018 |
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Oct 29, 2018 17:08
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HEY GUNS posted:I didn't know that, I though everyone's uniforms were always wool. What did US troops do when it was cold? Pre-1943 the US Army did wear a lot of wool, but they phased in other fabrics over time. I'm not saying "US never used wool, Germans always did;" rather, when you've got GIs in cotton and Germans in wool you can smell the difference. Early on in WWII the USA used a lot of wool overcoats, and these were to be replaced with coats that used a "layers" system with cotton sateen over a pile liner: Here's the jacket and the (separate) liner:   But it was a hodge-podge. You can photos of the Battle of the Bulge where some troops have wool overcoats, some have those jacket/liners, and some have "tanker's" jackets, whatever they could scrounge up.
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Oct 29, 2018 17:18
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Cessna, are those SS camo pictures showing recreations or originals? I assume recreations because I thought the originals bleached out during use, like, immediately.
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Oct 29, 2018 18:01
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Cessna, are those SS camo pictures showing recreations or originals? I assume recreations because I thought the originals bleached out during use, like, immediately. Those are from the collection of the Imperial War Museum - note the "IWM" in the lower right corner. They're originals.
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Oct 29, 2018 18:16
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Cessna, are those SS camo pictures showing recreations or originals? I assume recreations because I thought the originals bleached out during use, like, immediately. what dye and mordant did they use, i might be able to tell if that would have happened
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Oct 29, 2018 18:51
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What did Japanese troops wear? I’m hoping the answer isn’t “wool” because I can’t imagine how much that would suck in the Tropics.
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Oct 29, 2018 18:56
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Solaris 2.0 posted:What did Japanese troops wear? I’m hoping the answer isn’t “wool” because I can’t imagine how much that would suck in the Tropics. Wool for colder locations, cotton for warmer ones.
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Oct 29, 2018 19:26
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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
HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Oct 29, 2018 |
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Oct 29, 2018 19:27
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Now I'm imagining the designer of the pockets on Nazi uniforms to be somehow secretly the hero that saved thousands of lives.
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Oct 29, 2018 19:29
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Fangz posted:Now I'm imagining the designer of the pockets on Nazi uniforms to be somehow secretly the hero that saved thousands of lives.
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Oct 29, 2018 19:31
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Ferdinand Porsche, actually a comrade
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Oct 29, 2018 19:59
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HEY GUNS 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.
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Oct 29, 2018 19:59
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HEY GUNS 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.
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Oct 29, 2018 20:09
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HEY GUNS posted:you were a child, i hotglued an airborne patch to my milsurp backpack as a child before someone told me i probably shouldn't Why? Nobody reasonable's gonna give half a poo poo if a kid has a unit badge or something. Or are you talking about the glue
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Oct 29, 2018 20:17
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This turned out to be a surprisingly interesting question. I won't editorialize on it further. Which ship can take more punishment before sinking? An Iowa BB, or a Nimitz CVN?
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Oct 29, 2018 20:18
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Cessna posted:This is a nightmare of unnecessary complication. 
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Oct 29, 2018 20:21
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Milo and POTUS posted:Why? Nobody reasonable's gonna give half a poo poo if a kid has a unit badge or something. Or are you talking about the glue
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Oct 29, 2018 20:22
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bewbies posted:This turned out to be a surprisingly interesting question. I won't editorialize on it further. Above or below waterline ordnance?
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Oct 29, 2018 20:22
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HEY GUNS 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 fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Oct 29, 2018 |
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Oct 29, 2018 20:26
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Saint Celestine posted:Above or below waterline ordnance? Yeah define 'punishment'. Another WW2 battleship? Exocet? Kh-22? Nuclear tipped Kh-22?
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Oct 29, 2018 20:30
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Saint Celestine posted:Above or below waterline ordnance? We'll say a mix of modern munitions.
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Oct 29, 2018 20:33
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It’s probably a good prior to assume ships from the 70s are tougher to kill in general just due to applying 40ish years of lessons learned for damage mitigation and control, particularly the entire experience of WW2. Layer on manufacturing and materials improvement and newer ships start with a big leg up.
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Oct 29, 2018 20:36
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Comrade Gorbash posted:It’s probably a good prior to assume ships from the 70s are tougher to kill in general just due to applying 40ish years of lessons learned for damage mitigation and control, particularly the entire experience of WW2. Layer on manufacturing and materials improvement and newer ships start with a big leg up. No! The 70's was the age of the aluminum superstructure. The logic was that modern weapons made armor obsolete, so we should make ships lighter and faster, use that space for other systems, etc. In 1975 the USS Belknap had a collision the the carrier USS John F Kennedy. A minor fire broke out. It wasn't contained quickly, and all that aluminum burned, resulting in this: 
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Oct 29, 2018 20:43
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HEY GUNS posted:a teacher told me it was disrespectful to people who were really in that unit or had relatives who were. i don't go out of my way to be an rear end in a top hat even then so i took it off Meh I wouldn’t care, especially if it was a kid. Even an adult having a patch i don’t care, not like it’s some stolen valor thing.
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Oct 29, 2018 21:01
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Comrade Gorbash posted:It’s probably a good prior to assume ships from the 70s are tougher to kill in general just due to applying 40ish years of lessons learned for damage mitigation and control, particularly the entire experience of WW2. Layer on manufacturing and materials improvement and newer ships start with a big leg up. A lot of the damage control lessons were learned in WW2, damcon wasnt really a major feature of US naval expeditions for a long time afterwards for fairly self evident reasons.
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Oct 29, 2018 21:06
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Comrade Gorbash posted:It’s probably a good prior to assume ships from the 70s are tougher to kill in general just due to applying 40ish years of lessons learned for damage mitigation and control, particularly the entire experience of WW2. Layer on manufacturing and materials improvement and newer ships start with a big leg up. As pointed out, that's exactly why the ordnance involved matters. Exocets and suchlike carried by NATO frigates are going to bounce off the armour of an Iowa that was built to withstand 16" shells (and we are talking about sinking it not mission kill so knocking the radar off doesn't count). Massive Soviet stuff (missile or torpedo) built specifically to KO a carrier is probably a different matter, though.
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Oct 29, 2018 21:10
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I think we went through this in the old thread and concluded that the Iowa's armor would stop modern anti ship missiles because of course the missiles weren't designed for armor thicknesses that no longer exist. If battleships are still a thing it would be trivial to go back to the drawing board and make bigger missiles though so whatever.
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Oct 29, 2018 21:27
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Nah a Silkworm AShM carries a shaped charge big enough to cut through a Iowa's citadel. Since the 70s the logic has mostly been "don't get hit." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZXHsNqkDI4
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Oct 29, 2018 21:29
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bewbies posted:So I'm reading a new book about bad rear end Soviet traitor Oleg Gordievsky and I was pretty shocked at a long section making a lot of strong claims about Michael Foot as a paid KGB agent in the 1960s and 70s. If you haven't read it, you might enjoy the book about Vladimir Vetrov, Adieu Farewell . As spying goes, he's a weird guy. He was an asset of the DST rather than DGSE. He was responsible for doing a lot of damage to the Soviet technology spying rings. He also goes way the gently caress off the rails as a person.
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Oct 29, 2018 21:42
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Thomamelas posted:He also goes way the gently caress off the rails as a person.
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Oct 29, 2018 21:46
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HEY GUNS posted:isn't that lots of spies Kinda. In his case he starts drinking heavily. Not too abnormal. Where he goes really off the rails is he gets a mistress then drunkenly stabs her in his car. When a cop comes over for a bribe thinking it's a couple making out, Vetrov panics and stabs him. Which is what gets him caught.
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Oct 29, 2018 21:58
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