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Gun Jesus seemed quite smitten by it though. 
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Dec 15, 2020 03:00
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Raenir Salazar posted:Gun Jesus seemed quite smitten by it though. He's firing a later model, look at the difference in the grip. Early top, later bottom.  I always assumed the top one had a pistol grip that folded out to a human-normal position, but that's how they came. At 0:09 of that video he says "we have an original, 2nd-pattern FG42" Memento fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Dec 15, 2020 |
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Dec 15, 2020 03:02
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Lawman 0 posted:Does anyone have good reading on the First Congo war? I'm mostly curious how all the various players got mixed up with it. Jason Stearn's Dancing in the Glory of Monsters is my first stop for the Congo Wars. He's an NGO analyst rather than a historian, but he knows central Africa and spent years there, including being coordinator of the United Nations Group of Experts on the Congo, which researched who was funding and supporting armed groups.
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Dec 15, 2020 03:04
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Memento posted:He's firing a later model, look at the difference in the grip. Early top, later bottom. Slightly more of a question to Nebakenezzer's/Cyrano's post where the take away that I got was that it was a bad gun overall when I vaguely remembered Forgotten Weapons to have been very glowing in their review of it and I basically forgot about your post about the grip watching a man very happily being at peace with the world. As an aside to Nebakenezzer, any chance can you edit out that one bad word in the post you quoted? e: He does test fire the first pattern FG-42, apparently it's because it was meant to resemble the grip of the mauser rifles and is fairly comfortable when prone, unless I misheard. But so far watching the video he seems to like it as well. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Dec 15, 2020 |
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Dec 15, 2020 03:09
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poisonpill posted:Is there any way to win a war without air support, or is it possible to lose a war when you dominate the airspace? If not, the most recent posts are making it look like that was a huge reason for the outcome of WWII. So what changed? Why did Vietnam, OEF, etc. not really depend on airspace? Or am I missing something here? as mentioned, the actual strategic goals of a war matter hugely. another factor that was brought up indirectly was fierce inter-service rivalries, which is something the US military was hardly immune to in the back half of the 20th century. but there definitely was a sense in the postwar Pentagon that airpower was a solution to conflict (a sense that was over-inflated by a number of factors, such as the Strategic Bombing Survey, and heavily lobbied by the new Air Force), and that committing to airpower over conventional forces could "win" modern warfare. there were plenty of airpower zealots, basically.
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Dec 15, 2020 04:02
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Nebakenezzer posted:I was going through the old cold war thread looking for posts to highlight, and Cyrano wrote this in 2012 and I never really forgot about it because of his characteriztion of Hermann Goering: Don't forget the next logical step: the now ground-based paratroopers got tanks to form the Fallschirm-Panzer-Division 1. Hermann Göring, which (unlike some other nations) did not even nominally have any tanks that could be air dropped, just ordinary tanks but under an Air Force brand. This largely pointless unit was upgraded to a whole Panzerkorps before the end of the war because of course it did.
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Dec 15, 2020 04:40
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Taerkar posted:Also didn't it turn out that hitting infrastructure actually caused more of a setback than originally believed? In Wages of Destruction he quotes Speer complaining in early 45 (I think) that strategic bombing had effectively isolated the Rhineland from the rest of Germany. Factories were still standing but they couldn't get enough raw materials in or finished goods out for them to be any use.
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Dec 15, 2020 04:42
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For Christmas my father asked for either Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World by Mead, or Albions Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer. Are they pretty good in terms of the arguments or are they chuddy/wrong/out-of-date?
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Dec 15, 2020 04:47
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Comstar posted:So this movie is happening in 3 years or so Theres plenty of actions to choose from, even if its a single day or two from a campaign. The movie Battle of Britain does a really good job at telling a story without it just being one battle, which could be quite boring if theres no character development attached to it. Sure, you could nail some visuals like in Dunkirk but you need substance with that style. As an example, pick any date where someome became ace in a day, there are numerous such cases. Hell, pick a pilot like Canada's Beurling in Malta and his numerous victories in only a handful of days. (27 im 14 days) Dont have to include all days, but you can already line up his training in act 1, deployment/hardships in act 2, victories and losses in act 3. Close out with a credit roll from fade to black that mentions his post-war death helping out Israel.
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Dec 15, 2020 06:12
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poisonpill posted:Is there any way to win a war without air support, or is it possible to lose a war when you dominate the airspace? If not, the most recent posts are making it look like that was a huge reason for the outcome of WWII. So what changed? Why did Vietnam, OEF, etc. not really depend on airspace? Or am I missing something here? While a perfectly coherent question on its face, the way this is phrased is really open. What is meant by "win a war" and "dominate the airspace"? How flexible is your definition of "war"? Historically, you have stuff like the Winter War where Soviets had air superiority and the result was a win in many aspects but a confusing mess in others. I would also imagine there'd be instances of relatively small-scale warfare where one side has in the order of one plane and the other has none. That sort of gives the side with a single plane "domination" over the airspace but doesn't translate to much of a force multiplier. Similarly, you could imagine a variant of the conflict where the side with no air assets obtains a bunch of MANPADs and "dominates" the airspace in the sense of completely denying it to the other party, while lacking any aerial assets to take advantage of their domination. Does the Colombian conflict with FARC count as "war" and where does the resulting peace deal land on the "win a war" spectrum? If you consider the Egyptian revolution of 2011 "war", then that's an example of a situation where one side technically has total domination of the airspace, but there's no realistic way to take advantage of that technical domination.
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Dec 15, 2020 09:13
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Chamale posted:Wars have some kind of goal. The Allies' goal in World War II was, roughly, to stop Germany from being a threat. That can be accomplished by burning their cities from the air, although they needed a ground occupation afterwards. A war like Vietnam where the goal is to establish a new form of government and change the hearts and minds of the people is different. You can't win that war by dropping napalm from the skies, although the Americans certainly tried their hardest. Could it though?
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Dec 15, 2020 11:05
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Did early machine gun crews, using guns like the Gatling gun and the Maxim gun, fall under the purview of artillery or infantry? iirc the French army under Napoleon III treated the mitrailleuse as an artillery piece, right?
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Dec 15, 2020 11:09
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ChubbyChecker posted:Could it though? I think (provided we are willing to set aside the 'moral atrocity' element of the discussion for a moment) there's a really interesting dimension to the strategic bombing argument in WW2. The reason at the time proponents argued for the creation of these vast bomber fleets at enormous expense was that they were a way to carry the war to Germany in the years before the Allies could undertake serious ground operations. Yet its only in February 1945 (the month of Dresden and the commencement of low level firebombing of Japan) that strategic bombing goes from being something that has a noticeable but non-critical impact to having the kind of effects that might be war winning on their own if continued. That's after Allied armies are already advancing on German soil and the US Navy is launching the penultimate set of island hopping invasions before eyeing up the Japanese mainland. Aerial bombing had an impact and could have been decisive, but in strategic terms it turned out to be slower than just walking.
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Dec 15, 2020 11:35
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Ofaloaf posted:Did early machine gun crews, using guns like the Gatling gun and the Maxim gun, fall under the purview of artillery or infantry? iirc the French army under Napoleon III treated the mitrailleuse as an artillery piece, right? British machine guns were originally part of the Royal Artillery but after the first year of butchery in WWI they were reorganised into their own Corps.
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Dec 15, 2020 11:56
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Alchenar posted:I think (provided we are willing to set aside the 'moral atrocity' element of the discussion for a moment) there's a really interesting dimension to the strategic bombing argument in WW2. The reason at the time proponents argued for the creation of these vast bomber fleets at enormous expense was that they were a way to carry the war to Germany in the years before the Allies could undertake serious ground operations. Yet its only in February 1945 (the month of Dresden and the commencement of low level firebombing of Japan) that strategic bombing goes from being something that has a noticeable but non-critical impact to having the kind of effects that might be war winning on their own if continued. That's after Allied armies are already advancing on German soil and the US Navy is launching the penultimate set of island hopping invasions before eyeing up the Japanese mainland. I don't think that any amount of bombing would have made Hitler surrender, even if he was the last German alive, because he wasn't the sanest individual. Even Himmler was willing to make a deal (that would have kept him and Nazis ruling). The war wouldn't have ended until there was a new flag on Reichstag.
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Dec 15, 2020 12:03
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ChubbyChecker posted:I don't think that any amount of bombing would have made Hitler surrender, even if he was the last German alive, because he wasn't the sanest individual. Even Himmler was willing to make a deal (that would have kept him and Nazis ruling). The war wouldn't have ended until there was a new flag on Reichstag. "Make Hitler surrender" is a very specific criteria though. There's a fair argument to be made about whether strategic bombing was moral, or cost-effective. But it did have an impact - if nothing else, it's not like the Germans just sat back and let the bombs drop. All the Flaktowers and AAA cannons and Jet fighters and night fighters and special planes with upward pointing guns... all of those were in response to the strategic bombing threat, so from the German regime itself it was clear that the campaign mattered. I think there's a danger that we base too much on state media of the time, which in both Germany and the UK were keen to invoke this idea of a "blitz spirit" of fortitude in response to air bombing, and ignore real morale impact of air bombing on the population that can go unrecorded. Fangz fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Dec 15, 2020 |
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Dec 15, 2020 14:08
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Fangz posted:"Make Hitler surrender" is a very specific criteria though. "The bombing campaign" is also a huge blanket to throw over a very complex series of operations. If you're asking about "strategic bombing" the answer is going to be very different for hitting an airfield vs hitting a factory vs hitting a rail yard vs hitting oil production and storage.
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Dec 15, 2020 14:13
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ChubbyChecker posted:I don't think that any amount of bombing would have made Hitler surrender, even if he was the last German alive, because he wasn't the sanest individual. Even Himmler was willing to make a deal (that would have kept him and Nazis ruling). The war wouldn't have ended until there was a new flag on Reichstag. Note that the post didn't say "make Hitler surrender", but "to stop Germany from being a threat." If you nuke every major settlement of a nation to a point of mass starvation and total destruction of all industrial capability and transportation infrastructure, I'd pretty much say that nation is no longer a threat to you. Whether you are able to realistically do that both materially (i.e. have sufficient bombers, munitions, crews etc.) and politically (e.g. without having your population rise up over the absolutely horrific human cost and the morality of what you are doing) is a totally different question. Drop a literal nuke on Reichstag and whether Hitler surrendered in the last seconds before the explosion is kinda immaterial. My hunch is that total warfare (such as WW2) is too messy to allow for complete isolation of a single aspect like strategic bombing from all other aspects of the war. Note that this is not meant to be a weird hot take like "all war bad, ergo war crimes not worth talking about". For what it's worth, I think strategic bombing is a lovely thing to do. But I don't think it'd make a material difference to me personally whether I was killed from starvation due to a blockade, a bomber flying in from 400km away, an artillery piece firing from 10km away, a tank firing from 750m or by a dude throwing grenades through my sitting room window. Now, the latter approaches obviously provide for more fine-grained control of the amount of destruction caused but where exactly the line of "these are acceptable, these are not" falls on that spectrum is a value-specific moral calculation. And that calculus changes depending on whether my house is located next to an ammunition plant/between two bunkers in a defensive line, or somewhere outside of the area of active military operations. Fake edit; Cyrano and Fangz beat me to the point I was trying to make.
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Dec 15, 2020 14:23
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Fangz posted:"Make Hitler surrender" is a very specific criteria though. I think there's a fair case that Strategic Bombing would have been enough to get Himmler to sue for peace on 'the Nazi party gets to stay in control of Germany, no war crimes tribunals etc' because we know in reality that that's the delusional plan he had in 1945. The thing is, we also know that Himmler's attempt to negotiates came way too late and he never seriously contemplated deposing Hitler - something that would have been a minimum step even if the Allies decided to about-face on unconditional surrender. This conversation takes us back to Gay Black Hitler. The Strategic bombing campaign should have made reasonable people surrender. But if the Nazis and Imperial Japan had been reasonable people then there wouldn't have been a war.
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Dec 15, 2020 14:24
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Alchenar posted:I think (provided we are willing to set aside the 'moral atrocity' element of the discussion for a moment) there's a really interesting dimension to the strategic bombing argument in WW2. The reason at the time proponents argued for the creation of these vast bomber fleets at enormous expense was that they were a way to carry the war to Germany in the years before the Allies could undertake serious ground operations. Yet its only in February 1945 (the month of Dresden and the commencement of low level firebombing of Japan) that strategic bombing goes from being something that has a noticeable but non-critical impact to having the kind of effects that might be war winning on their own if continued. That's after Allied armies are already advancing on German soil and the US Navy is launching the penultimate set of island hopping invasions before eyeing up the Japanese mainland. Looking at the relatively short time between the bombing of Dresden and V‐E day and concluding that bombing was worthless is a bit like looking at the timing between the atomic bombings and the Japanese surrender and concluding that America could have just waited six days and not needed the bombs. The timeline we are looking at is one in which the Allies did build and use vast bomber fleets. People look at Nazi materiel production numbers and say “see! They go up even as the bombing is ongoing!” Who’s to say that the numbers wouldn’t have risen significantly more rapidly without the bombing pressure? Who’s to say the collapse would still have started in February of 1945 and not months later? How many people would have died in the death camps in the interim? How many more civilians in occupied Western Europe and the Soviet Union would have been gripped by hunger that year if the war had dragged into summer? What would a delay in Europe mean for East Asia where many thousands of civilians were dying daily in the so‐called Greater East Asia Co‐Prosperity Sphere? A minuscule shift in the end date of the war was worth the expenditure of vast amounts of resources.
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Dec 15, 2020 14:32
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Raenir Salazar posted:e: He does test fire the first pattern FG-42, apparently it's because it was meant to resemble the grip of the mauser rifles and is fairly comfortable when prone, unless I misheard. But so far watching the video he seems to like it as well. it clearly cannot be that good as they replaced after 2400 units
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Dec 15, 2020 14:45
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:it clearly cannot be that good as they replaced after 2400 units Clearly, but that's still a little more nuanced than being completely garbo.
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Dec 15, 2020 14:48
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its not really, plenty of garbage poo poo made production, especially nazi poo poo
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Dec 15, 2020 14:56
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It’s worth noting that fg42 derivatives were troubled in foreign service too. The Swiss made the Stgw 52 which was heavily influenced by the FG42. They only made about 500 of them and adopted the much longer lived Stgw57 soon after. The US combined some features of it and some features of the MG42 to make the M60 and that was more successful but still a design with a complicated history and debatable effectiveness.
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Dec 15, 2020 15:14
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Also I don’t know how true this is but I’ve heard that part of the reason for that early grip was to fit the gun in the drop tubes the luftwaffe used for their gear. Yeah they didn’t drop with their guns. This caused some problems on Crete.
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Dec 15, 2020 15:16
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:it clearly cannot be that good as they replaced after 2400 units That's not really the best argument, plenty of good equipment had limited production runs - just look at the Jumbo Sherman, which was limited to only 254 tanks.
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Dec 15, 2020 15:19
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The best gun design of WW2 was the Erma EMP 44 it's a series of tubes And this is the best design of post-war era 
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Dec 15, 2020 15:21
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Acebuckeye13 posted:That's not really the best argument, plenty of good equipment had limited production runs - just look at the Jumbo Sherman, which was limited to only 254 tanks. Something that large runs gets you, though, are revisions to fix some of the outstanding issues. I don’t know that this factors into the fg42 discussion but I mention it because of the very different histories of the Stgw52 and the M60. The Swiss made the decision to poo poo can it so it was never really iterated on (much, the Stgw54 was a thing), while the M60 was iterated enough to be not-terrible by the time it was retired.
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Dec 15, 2020 15:22
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Nenonen posted:And this is the best design of post-war era I want stats on that drill so I can work out the lock time.
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Dec 15, 2020 15:29
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OctaviusBeaver posted:In Wages of Destruction he quotes Speer complaining in early 45 (I think) that strategic bombing had effectively isolated the Rhineland from the rest of Germany. Factories were still standing but they couldn't get enough raw materials in or finished goods out for them to be any use. Doesn't surprise me at all. A disruption to infrastructure doesn't just hit one point of distribution it hits everything down that line. Things get pushed back and that can cause a cascade effect from bottleneck to bottleneck. One can also see that going on right now thanks to COVID and international shipping issues
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Dec 15, 2020 16:23
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Taerkar posted:Doesn't surprise me at all. A disruption to infrastructure doesn't just hit one point of distribution it hits everything down that line. Things get pushed back and that can cause a cascade effect from bottleneck to bottleneck. It also becomes a big problem when you have different factories making sub-assemblies or parts. One of the weird things you'll see with late war K98ks is that all of a sudden you start seeing early war parts on late war guns. Things like milled barrel bands that were replaced by stamped versions to speed up production, or hardwood stocks years after they had moved to laminates. What happened was that transportation got so hosed that subcontractors making small parts couldn't get their crap to the factories that did the assembly. The solution was to go rummaging through warehouses to find parts that had been rejected as out of spec in past years and either use them as is if they were close enough or refurb them enough to get them to work. In other cases it's dusting off old equipment to make poo poo that had been subcontracted out. I forget why the stock thing happened, but it was a similar supply chain fuckup.
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Dec 15, 2020 16:42
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Acebuckeye13 posted:That's not really the best argument, plenty of good equipment had limited production runs - just look at the Jumbo Sherman, which was limited to only 254 tanks. are you seriously trying to argue that a tank production run is at all analogous to a rifle production run in terms of scale or magnitude? i'm not real familiar with why more jumbos weren't produced but i suspect the root causes were somewhat different than "make a new better version"
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Dec 15, 2020 16:42
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:are you seriously trying to argue that a tank production run is at all analogous to a rifle production run in terms of scale or magnitude? Considering the number of parts involved, you're right, a tank's production is a lot larger in terms of scale and magnitude.
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Dec 15, 2020 16:46
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Nebakenezzer posted:There were a few other random examples of this having to do with rifle variants and pistols and I think a few light mortar designs, but the FG42 is the most famous example and the one I remember the best. A couple of points about Fallschirmjager (German paratrooper) uniforms always stick out to me. (Yes, there should be an umlaut over the "a.") Fallschirmjagers used a different tactical model than the Allies. In tl;dr terms, the Allies jumped out high over the target. This gave them more time to open their 'chute and made it so that they could carry more of their own gear in a bag. This made them more exposed, which led to them jumping at night. In contrast the Germans dropped in broad daylight very low. They couldn't risk having anything on their person that would snag on anything, so they got all kinds of special gear, stuff that was more suited to a Rocketman-like daredevil than a soldier. So: 1. They had a specially made "jump smock." The initial models had a problem:  They had a zipper, but no other sort of waist closure or opening. As a result, if they wanted to take a crap, they had to take off the entire smock - which meant that they had to take off ALL of their gear as well. Here's a group of them in Crete. Note that they aren't wearing pants. Yes, it's hot, but in the interest of expediency they've just dropped their pants entirely so as to make crapping possible. It's smock, gear, and nothing else:  2. They had specially made boots for jumping out of planes.  Note that the laces are on the side, supposedly to help avoid snagging on parachute shrouds. What gets me is the little groove on the heel - it's a bit hard to see, but there's a distinct groove cut where the heel meets the sole. The soles were rubber, a rarity for Germans, who usually used leather. This is because they were issued special cloth bootie covers that would slip over the sole of the boot. Why? So that they wouldn't track mud into Goering's precious airplanes. Even in 1944, when German paratrooping had been off the table for years and the Luftwaffe was a wreck, their cobblers still specially made those grooves in their boots for the special cloth covers.
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Dec 15, 2020 16:51
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if you dont want to write the umlaut just write ae
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Dec 15, 2020 16:52
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Cyrano4747 posted:Also I don’t know how true this is but I’ve heard that part of the reason for that early grip was to fit the gun in the drop tubes the luftwaffe used for their gear. Right, like I said, they didn't jump with their gear, just the stuff they wore (including specially made knee pads) and a pistol. They'd hit the ground, then run and try to find the canister that contained their rifles. What, the canister blew away and landed somewhere else? Oops.  
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Dec 15, 2020 16:55
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:if you dont want to write the umlaut just write ae Or I could write it in Word and copy/paste, but gently caress Nazis.
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Dec 15, 2020 16:56
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Cyrano4747 posted:Also I don’t know how true this is but I’ve heard that part of the reason for that early grip was to fit the gun in the drop tubes the luftwaffe used for their gear. The Luftwaffe also attempted a paradrop during the Battle of the Bulge which was a disaster, partially because of this "drop poo poo seperately" thing. The reason why poo poo was dropped separately was that the Ju 52 was so tiny relative to even the C-47 that getting the paratroops and their gear just didn't fit. e: ^^^ or what Cessna said? Hm. Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Dec 15, 2020 |
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Dec 15, 2020 16:56
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Nebakenezzer posted:The Luftwaffe also attempted a paradrop during the Battle of the Bulge which was a disaster, partially because of this "drop poo poo seperately" thing. The reason why poo poo was dropped separately was that the Ju 52 was so tiny relative to even the C-47 that getting the paratroops and their gear just didn't fit. No, like I said, it was doctrine. Allied paratroopers dropped high, at night, and carried their stuff. German paratroopers dropped low, in daylight, and didn't carry their stuff. Edit: Here's a famous photo of the drop on Crete. You can see how low those planes are:  Cessna fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Dec 15, 2020 |
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Dec 15, 2020 16:59
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Cessna posted:No, like I said, it was doctrine. Yeah, sorry, I just noticed. Was this docterine thing because of the Ju 52 being small, or was their doctrine always about dropping into defended airspace to take strong points? For that matter, were Allied Paratroopers looked at differently (kinda like Air Dragoons - you get em into combat via plane) or did they believe that paradrop surprises just worked better dropping next to defended airspace?
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Dec 15, 2020 17:03
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