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Wasn't 'Blitzkrieg' used mainly by Allied press, and not by Nazi propaganda?
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Dec 18, 2020 17:14
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SlothfulCobra posted:I guess that's probably plausible considering France's history before and after the war, but was there anything in particular that was causing civil unrest that they were worried about? Or did they just think that some charismatic officer could take hold of the entire army and coup the federal government without needing some wedge to build public support? France literally had a de-facto fascist military coup in 1940. And when that happened, most French people kinda just went along with it.
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Dec 18, 2020 17:33
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ChubbyChecker posted:Wasn't 'Blitzkrieg' used mainly by Allied press, and not by Nazi propaganda? Yes, although (recursively) the Germans picked it up from the Allied press and ended up using the term themselves after the fact in their propaganda. Edit: To be clear, it was not a term or specific concept used by the German military itself; the word was just a propaganda term. Cessna fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Dec 18, 2020 |
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Dec 18, 2020 17:33
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:You mentioned a separate military for the Grand Dutchy - what was the status of a unit like the Finlandsky Guards Regiment and Guards Rifle Battalion? Part of the Finnnish army, or not? Were the units comprised of ethnic Finns in Russian service? Finlandsky Guards were not a Finnish unit. Russia had seized territories during the 18th century that at some point had been under Swedish rule and as a result had people of Finnish origin living there, but they lost their rights and were turned to serfs. Russia later recruited troops from people with Finnish roots there and formed the original Finlandsky Guards in 1806. The unit continued until WW1, and they joined the Bolshevik Revolution in late 1917 and were later incorporated into Red Army. Later, units of the Russian army (ethnic Russians) that were garrisoned in Finland were also sometimes labeled Finlandsky Guards, not to be confused with the Finnish Guard. As for the Guards Rifle Battalion, it's colloquially known as the Finnish Guard, but the official name translates to "Russian Imperial Guard's 3rd Finnish Sharpshooter Battalion". They were seen as a separate elite unit, and they served in several Russian campaigns, for example in Polish rebellion in 1831 and Russo-Turkish War in 1877-78. They started as a Finnish unit belonging to the Russian Army stationed in Helsinki, but were incorporated into Finnish army in 1880 when conscription was invoked. When the Finnish army was dissolved in 1901, they were exempt for that, although a number of officers resigned their commission as protest to Russification. When Russian government got worried about Finnish separatism, they dissolved the Guard in 1905, and after that there were no Finnish troops at all in the Grand Duchy. Warden fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Dec 18, 2020 |
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Dec 18, 2020 17:35
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Cessna posted:Yes, although (recursively) the Germans picked it up from the Allied press and ended up using the term themselves after the fact. It was used sporadically and very spottily by a few German officers writing think pieces in the mid-30s, but that was basically a rehashing of Schwerpunkt doctrine. So not really a new idea, as you said. "Concentrate your forces to create a breakthrough and rush units into the gap to exploit it and gently caress up the enemy's rear" isn't exactly a revolutionary idea. It was (probably) brought to England by a Fritz Sternberg, Jewish and socialist refugee who wrote a book talking about how if Germany went to war they would need to go for fast, decisive victories because they were too economically and socially brittle to sustain a long one. He had a later book titled aptly "Why Hitler Can't Win." He wasn't using the term to talk about breakthroughs, he was just saying that the germans needed a lightning fast war or they'd crumble because of, well, all the poo poo this thread has talked about so many times re: economic poo poo. This thread would actually really like him. The dude basically called the major problems with the Nazis way early. IIRC he also became massively disenchanted with the USSR because of Stalin's BS and was active in leftist circles pushing disengagement with the USSR and a kind of leftist third way. So you're right that Goebbels' machine didn't pick up on it until after the western press started bandying it about in reaction to Poland and France, but they picked it up from a previous, non-popular discourse in German, and that discourse wasn't focused on it in the sense that we use it today, but just an emphasis on having to win a quick war.
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Dec 18, 2020 17:53
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Warden posted:Finlandsky Guards were not a Finnish unit. Russia had seized territories during the 18th century that at some point had been under Swedish rule and as a result had people of Finnish origin living there, but they lost their rights and were turned to serfs. Russia later recruited troops from people with Finnish roots there and formed the original Finlandsky Guards in 1806. The unit continued until WW1, and they joined the Bolshevik Revolution in late 1917 and were later incorporated into Red Army. Really interesting, thanks!
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Dec 18, 2020 17:55
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Cyrano4747 posted:It was (probably) brought to England by a Fritz Sternberg, Jewish and socialist refugee who wrote a book talking about how if Germany went to war they would need to go for fast, decisive victories because they were too economically and socially brittle to sustain a long one. He had a later book titled aptly "Why Hitler Can't Win." He wasn't using the term to talk about breakthroughs, he was just saying that the germans needed a lightning fast war or they'd crumble because of, well, all the poo poo this thread has talked about so many times re: economic poo poo. Sure, he also wrote The Military and Industrial Revolution of Our Time which makes for some great early Cold-War reading. I'd argue that this was more of a case of something that was already in progress in many different forms from the end of WWI on - from Liddel-Hart's ideas to Soviet Deep Operations - that got a catchy word hung on it by the press when it became part of the popular consciousness.
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Dec 18, 2020 18:04
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Cessna posted:Yes. Cavalry was also used by the Germans in the invasion of Poland in 1939 - they had more cavalry than the Polish. It was used in France in 1940, it was used extensively on the Russian Front of WWII, etc., etc. Would cavalry have been useful on the Western front to exploit a breakthrough? Were there a lot of cavalry units sitting around waiting in 1918, or had they been dissolved? My great grandfather joined the Canadian cavalry in 1916, so I've always wondered if he was very smart or very stupid for doing so.
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Dec 18, 2020 18:17
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Really interesting, thanks! Finnish Broadcast company (YLE) has some recorded interviews from 1937 publicly available where they interviewed old veterans from the Finnish Guard about their service, during the Russo-Turkish War and during peacetime as well. The funniest parts are about how they earned some extra cash by chopping wood for gentlefolk and sometimes got laid with their servant girls, but occasionally had to rush to hiding half-dressed when the master or mistress of house arrived unexpectedly. Also stories about looting pieces of cowhide and trying to fix their lovely boots so that their feet wouldn't freeze during wintertime. The veterans also reminisced about one their buddies who wasn't a very good shot until he got his one of his eyes shot off and his aiming improved dramatically after that. Apparently, he never got the hang of closing one of his eyes when aiming, but when that got taken care of by enemy he became a prize-winning sharpshooter. Warden fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Dec 18, 2020 |
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Dec 18, 2020 19:00
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White Coke posted:Would cavalry have been useful on the Western front to exploit a breakthrough? The real problem with that hypothetical breakthrough was one of communication, logistics, and supply, the boring but all important factors of war. The fact is that there were times when armies did make a big gap in their enemy's lines. In April 1915 the Germans used 150 tons of gas in an attack at Ypres; this completely devastated the Allies. In June 1917 at Messines the Allies blew up mines under the German trenches and killed 10,000 troops in the blast, creating a giant hole in their lines. But these, and other gaps, never went anywhere. This is because even if you achieve a breakthrough the real problem is that you can't move enough troops through that gap fast enough to gain any sort of decisive advantage. In very, very brief terms - okay, say everything goes right and you break open a gap in the enemy's trenches. Now's your big chance, so you need to start pouring troops through that gap. You do this because want to do damage - maybe you can isolate enemy units into pockets so that they can be destroyed, or maybe you can shoot up the enemy's rear area. But in WWI you can't dump troops and supplies through that gap fast enough to form that pocket and isolate an enemy, or launch a raid that does enough damage, because everything favors the defender in that situation as far as scale or speed or logistics go. You can't pour troops through the gap fast, because your logistics and supplies all stop when they hit the trenches. Sure, you can move things TO the trenches relatively quickly by rail, but no rail line crosses no man's land. When you get to the front you have to stop and walk. All of your stuff is going through that relatively small gap at a relatively slow pace. And once they're through, you don't have effective means to tell them what to do next because radios are in their infancy and you can't effectively relay orders to those units any faster than a messenger on foot. In response, the enemy can move their stuff and send in reinforcements and supplies by their well developed rail network. You're walking through mud, they're moving by trains. You have no real way to coordinate your movements, they're on their home turf and coordinating through their established communications network. They have every advantage, and before long the troops you poured through that gap are going to be cut off and surrounded themselves. This applies to cavalry too. Say you send a bunch of horse cavalry through. Sure, they'll move faster than walking (but not THAT much faster over extended periods) and make an exciting charge, but that only goes so far. They're still reliant on resupply. And before they make it any further they're going to be confronted by an enemy that isolates them and cuts them off; they won't accomplish much of anything at all. By the later half of WWI everyone understood this and figured out that given the limitations of the time it was foolish to try to make a breakthrough that would only end up being surrounded and cut off anyway. Instead, the way to win ground was by gradual limited gains that would be consolidated before the next attack. The British army called this, aptly, "bite and hold." You take ground, then stop and consolidate before they move in their reinforcements, then repeat the process deliberately. Later on in WWII you could pour stuff through that gap with tracked vehicles that move fast and can communicate with their headquarters with radios. They could move quickly and coordinate their efforts in order to surround and isolate enemy units. But that technology just wasn't there in WWI. Cessna fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Dec 18, 2020 |
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Dec 18, 2020 19:04
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White Coke posted:Would cavalry have been useful on the Western front to exploit a breakthrough? Were there a lot of cavalry units sitting around waiting in 1918, or had they been dissolved? My great grandfather joined the Canadian cavalry in 1916, so I've always wondered if he was very smart or very stupid for doing so. At the very beginning and the very end, before trench warfare was in place and during and after the battle of Amiens, yes. In the middle, for most of the war, not really, though not for lack of hope. No man's land would be so hosed up with shell holes, wire, etc, that horses couldn't really move over it faster than men. Defenders would preregister their own trenches for their artillery so that if they lost their trench, the breakthrough point would be the target of highly accurate fire and counterattack, and sitting on a horse would be a very dangerous place to be. Most importantly, the German defenses were in depth enough that attackers couldn't get all the way through the multiple trench lines in one day to clear all the way to open land where cav could move. You can pretty consistently get one enemy trench line on the first day of your attack, some units will get two but then they'll be stuck forward and be open to counterattack from three sides so they're often pushed back. By the time you're pushing for trench lines 2 and 3, enemy reserves have been brought in, they're making new trench lines in their rear, and you're stuck again. You never get past the third line to make a hole all the way to open cavalry country. That said Haig did have a bunch of cav units sitting around in reserve for many of the big battles, just in case. At the Somme they had a reserve army of three infantry divisions and three cavalry divisions in place ready to exploit the big breakthrough they hoped for. This also informs things like big arguments about day 1 objectives - Rawlinson says we need to focus on just getting the first enemy trench line on day 1 so let's concentrate our artillery there and we can go for the second line after we've got the first solidly in hand, Haig says we'll never get a breakthrough unless we're pressing up to the second line on day 1, so we need more ambitious objectives and to spread out our artillery prep across the defense in depth. gohuskies fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Dec 18, 2020 |
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Dec 18, 2020 19:09
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My usual recommendation for a one-volume starter history of the First World War is Peter Hart's The Great War: A Combat History. He's in charge of the Imperial War Museum's sound archive and he just loves a good personal account.
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Dec 18, 2020 19:21
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I watched Midway this week and was geniuinely surprised how hard they seem to have tried to make it historically accurate. It was still a pretty bad movie but I appreciated the effort
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Dec 18, 2020 20:34
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Cav is also useful in reserve (either to exploit or contain a breakthrough) even if you don't plan to fight on horseback because it has much higher operational and tactical mobility.
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Dec 18, 2020 20:34
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bewbies posted:I watched Midway this week and was geniuinely surprised how hard they seem to have tried to make it historically accurate. Yeah it's a bad film and it's a bit hollywoodised but it gets the sequence of events about right, there's clearly a bit of labour-of-love in catching the little anecdotes of the battle, and it doesn't as far as I know fall into any of the common misconceptions of the battle.
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Dec 18, 2020 20:52
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Alchenar posted:France literally had a de-facto fascist military coup in 1940. Worth remembering that this is what happens in basically every fascist takeover. For every commited ideological fanatic there’s 50 people going “eh, they won’t eat my face.”
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Dec 18, 2020 20:59
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Pryor on Fire posted:I think I have finally overcome my deep-seated hatred of stupidity and aristocrats enough to read my first book about WWI Since you're already expressing your hatred of aristocrats in addition to the good suggestions above you might want to check out Poilu by thread patron saint Louis Barthas It's a memoir so if you want the blow by blow of who moved armies where etc you're not going to get that, but if you want a book that gives you a sense of what it was like serving in the French Army you can't do better. He's also, uh, a little critical of officers. Just a tich.
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Dec 18, 2020 21:11
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Dethrone Louis XI and replace him with our Louis imo
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Dec 18, 2020 21:24
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Tangential to WWI does anyone have good reading about the Balkan wars before it?
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Dec 18, 2020 22:33
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Worth remembering that this is what happens in basically every fascist takeover. For every commited ideological fanatic there’s 50 people going “eh, they won’t eat my face.” Well yeah, every successful fascist takeover. Because that's axiomatic. e: but you are right, I didn't mean that there was a French specific fascist tendency, just that the Republican leadership at the time were entirely reasonably concerned that French democracy was a bit fragile.
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Dec 18, 2020 22:37
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https://i.imgur.com/sWBvsEM.mp4
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Dec 18, 2020 23:12
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Lol looks like something out of Top Secret
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Dec 18, 2020 23:19
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Pictured: A dramatic recreation of Italians fighting in Eritrea.
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Dec 18, 2020 23:36
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That looks so god drat fun. I wanna get liquored up and throw around/knock over big, inflatable tanks.
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Dec 19, 2020 00:16
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Xiahou Dun posted:That looks so god drat fun. I wanna get liquored up and throw around/knock over big, inflatable tanks. Milhist goonmeet and it's literally just this plus a certain someone stabbing the tanks with a pike
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Dec 19, 2020 00:31
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I really want the modern military to find an excuse to make giant inflatable armies. Or maybe that should catch on with reenactors.
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Dec 19, 2020 00:49
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Did the Nazis ever strafe an inflatable army and uncover the ruse?
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Dec 19, 2020 00:49
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Chamale posted:Did the Nazis ever strafe an inflatable army and uncover the ruse?
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Dec 19, 2020 00:52
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In a twist, the strafing is actually a plane pulling a bunch of realistic kites, because the germans want to fool the allies into thinking they fell for the trick.
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Dec 19, 2020 01:03
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Milhist goonmeet and it's literally just this plus a certain someone stabbing the tanks with a pike Well if we're gonna do it as a group then we also need to do that bit at the end of the gif where they're "driving" the tank so we can blindly ram into each other. It's important.
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Dec 19, 2020 01:31
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SlothfulCobra posted:I really want the modern military to find an excuse to make giant inflatable armies. I mean many militaries probably still have them although they likely have additional stuff to help look real, like heat generators
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Dec 19, 2020 01:46
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Xiahou Dun posted:Well if we're gonna do it as a group then we also need to do that bit at the end of the gif where they're "driving" the tank so we can blindly ram into each other. It's important. 420th Tank Destroyer Battalion, 69th Armoured DraGoons Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Dec 19, 2020 |
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Dec 19, 2020 02:42
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Unit motto: in similitudinem tribunalis et vos in domum tuam
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Dec 19, 2020 03:29
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I would've gone with something from Cattulus but sure.
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Dec 19, 2020 03:33
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As an aside, I saw this on twitter not long ago
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Dec 19, 2020 05:09
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O someone has a mean sense of humor and I might have to merry them.
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Dec 19, 2020 05:11
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Xiahou Dun posted:That looks so god drat fun. I wanna get liquored up and throw around/knock over big, inflatable tanks. want age 25-70 guy to come over and jo in my inflatable tank yard. mutual touching and stuff but nothing more than that... im not gay. its all real scale. then after you finish you can stomp around and hurl the tanks and trucks like a superman (dont puncture they are my sons) we can do this until 4 am or until we get tired. also i have lots of imitation crab meat in my freezer that i need to get rid of so you can have a bunch when you leave. its all perfectly good we just got too much!!!
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Dec 19, 2020 07:03
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3/5 reference post, should have changed out imitation crab meat for expired military rations tho.
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Dec 19, 2020 11:22
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Chamale posted:Did the Nazis ever strafe an inflatable army and uncover the ruse? SlothfulCobra posted:In a twist, the strafing is actually a plane pulling a bunch of realistic kites, because the germans want to fool the allies into thinking they fell for the trick. I've read a story, which was probably made up, that during some bluffing operation a single German plane flew over a fake airfield that had dummy planes and dropped a wooden bomb on it. e: typo ChubbyChecker fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Dec 19, 2020 |
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Dec 19, 2020 13:37
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Kemper Boyd posted:3/5 reference post, should have changed out imitation crab meat for expired military rations tho. Also, get David Hader to do a read out of it.
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Dec 19, 2020 13:44
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