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Lawman 0 posted:A good post. If the ship were able to be sunk, they wouldn't have called it the 'Invincible'.
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Dec 30, 2020 19:11
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FrangibleCover posted:a good post So it really was a forgone conclusion?
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Dec 30, 2020 19:16
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sullat posted:If the ship were able to be sunk, they wouldn't have called it the 'Invincible'. cough
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Dec 30, 2020 19:25
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The really wild thing about the Falklands War was that the British were due to retire both carriers in less than a year (one sold to India, the other headed for the scrappers). If Argentina had waited for ten months, it's hard to see Britain mounting the kind of response they were able to. Only slightly less wild was the behavior of Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was the US ambassador to the UN and an important architect of Reagan's foreign policy. She had come to prominence with an article about how the US needs to back right-wing governments no matter how brutal, and she absolutely LOVED the Pinochet and Galtieri regimes - so much so that she tried to get the US to declare neutrality in the conflict, and even floated having Reagan activate a 1947 act about coming to the defense of South American countries against outside aggressors.
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Dec 30, 2020 19:34
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FMguru posted:The really wild thing about the Falklands War was that the British were due to retire both carriers in less than a year (one sold to India, the other headed for the scrappers). If Argentina had waited for ten months, it's hard to see Britain mounting the kind of response they were able to. Well that would have been awkward. Although I think the US could have easily weaseled out of that given the fact that it was the Argentinians who invaded British territory.
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Dec 30, 2020 19:54
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FMguru posted:Only slightly less wild was the behavior of Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was the US ambassador to the UN and an important architect of Reagan's foreign policy. She had come to prominence with an article about how the US needs to back right-wing governments no matter how brutal, and she absolutely LOVED the Pinochet and Galtieri regimes - so much so that she tried to get the US to declare neutrality in the conflict, and even floated having Reagan activate a 1947 act about coming to the defense of South American countries against outside aggressors. So how much traction did her initiatives get during the conflict?
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Dec 30, 2020 19:59
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FMguru posted:The really wild thing about the Falklands War was that the British were due to retire both carriers in less than a year (one sold to India, the other headed for the scrappers). If Argentina had waited for ten months, it's hard to see Britain mounting the kind of response they were able to. Lawman 0 posted:So it really was a forgone conclusion?
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Dec 30, 2020 20:02
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Hunt11 posted:So how much traction did her initiatives get during the conflict? Reagan's first term foreign policy appointees were quite a crew. Like the Secretary of State, Al Haig, who got on TV just after Reagan was rushed to the hospital following an assassination attempt to inform our allies and other nations that he was in charge - which came as something to a shock to Vice President George HW Bush. FrangibleCover posted:If Argentina waited ten months the Junta would be getting inverted tours of Buenos Aires petrol stations, they couldn't wait much longer than they did. FMguru fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Dec 30, 2020 |
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Dec 30, 2020 20:14
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Lawman 0 posted:So it really was a forgone conclusion? The RN's task force commander definitely didn't think so. Argentine planes landed thirteen bombs that didn't detonate. There's no excuse for that kind of failure rate, but better weapons system maintenance from the Argentines certainly would have put the task force at major risk.
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Dec 30, 2020 20:15
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Were any non-British warships lost to catastrophic magazine detonations in the WW1 to say, present day time frame?
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Dec 30, 2020 20:42
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Were any non-British warships lost to catastrophic magazine detonations in the WW1 to say, present day time frame? Arizona is probably the most obvious example. also this ship https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJcDVbH5q3k
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Dec 30, 2020 20:49
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PittTheElder posted:Were any non-British warships lost to catastrophic magazine detonations in the WW1 to say, present day time frame? The Bretagne, at Mers al Kebir in 1940. The Arizona, at Pearl Harbor. The Roma, hit by German guided bombs in 1943. The Yamato, hit by everything in 1945. I'm sure there are others.
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Dec 30, 2020 20:53
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PittTheElder posted:Were any non-British warships lost to catastrophic magazine detonations in the WW1 to say, present day time frame? Yes, quite a few. Most famously the Arizona, the Italian Roma, and the Japanese Mutsu.
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Dec 30, 2020 21:19
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bewbies posted:The RN's task force commander definitely didn't think so. Woodward says he could have lost the war but - He has a reputation for being rather windy - Nobody invites you to do more dinner speeches if you say "Oh, any idiot could have done it, they were useless. Mostly it was a question of trying to limit friendly casualties."
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Dec 30, 2020 21:26
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Wars aren't fought by robots in a vaccum. A higher rate of losses could have easily made the british not consider retaking the falklands to be worth the potential risk of more losses. If you're losing frigates at a faster rate, you have more gaps open in your defences and you start reconsidering if you'll make it to the islands whatsoever.
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Dec 30, 2020 22:09
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PittTheElder posted:Were any non-British warships lost to catastrophic magazine detonations in the WW1 to say, present day time frame? SMS Pommern - Torpedo hit secondary magazine. RM Leonardo Da Vinci - Unknown, probably poor propellant handling FS Suffren - Torpedo hit detonated magazine IJN Tsukaba - Poor propellant storage IJN Kawachi - Poor propellant storage RM Armando Diaz - Torpedo detonated magazine USSRS Marat - Aerial bomb detonated magazine USS Reuben James - Torpedo detonated magazine IJN Hayate - Shore battery hit detonated torpedos USS Juneau - Torpedo hit detonated magazine USS New Orleans - Torpedo hit detonated magazine (Ship not lost but everything forward of the number 2 turret was lost) USS Liscombe bay - Torpedo hit detonated magazine IJN Unryu - Torpedo hit detonated magazine USS Halligan - Mine hit detonated magazine USS Solar - Crewman dropped a hedgehog charge which detonated magazine USSRS B-37 - Fire in torpedo compartment detonated magazine IIS Sahand (ish) - Fire eventually detonated magazine RFS Kursk - Poor ammunition manufacture detonated magazine.
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Dec 30, 2020 22:10
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Cessna posted:The Yamato, hit by everything in 1945.  *record scratch* 
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Dec 30, 2020 22:14
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Wars aren't fought by robots in a vaccum. A higher rate of losses could have easily made the british not consider retaking the falklands to be worth the potential risk of more losses. If you're losing frigates at a faster rate, you have more gaps open in your defences and you start reconsidering if you'll make it to the islands whatsoever. Except the British had already landed their ground forces by the time the air attacks really even started. The Brits landed overnight on May 21/22 and most of the air attack action was from 23rd through the 25th.
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Dec 30, 2020 22:46
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On a related subject, what warship (excludong unseaworthy boondoggles like the Vasa had the shortest lifespan? Bismarck and Blucher are obvious candidates, but is there anything that was sank quicker?
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Dec 30, 2020 22:49
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Gnoman posted:On a related subject, what warship (excludong unseaworthy boondoggles like the Vasa had the shortest lifespan? Bismarck and Blucher are obvious candidates, but is there anything that was sank quicker? Shinano has to be a contender.
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Dec 30, 2020 22:53
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Cessna posted:Shinano has to be a contender. Well, that's pretty obvious now, though she never technicall entered service.
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Dec 30, 2020 22:56
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FrangibleCover posted:Fuzing, rather than maintenance, but yes. However, the Argentinians can sink every frigate in the world if they're not actually hitting the landing ships. Woodward was also a submarine specialist, and so I'm a little sceptical of his ability to know how well things would have gone. Woodward spent a lot of time during the war coming up with ideas (or supporting ideas from higher HQs) that someone more experienced with carrier warfare or amphibious warfare wouldn't have. He apparently endorsed a plan to use the amphibious ship Fearless as a decoy to draw in Argentinian aircraft, which the amphibious specialists with the Task Force had to shoot down.
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Dec 31, 2020 00:08
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Randomcheese3 posted:Woodward was also a submarine specialist, and so I'm a little sceptical of his ability to know how well things would have gone. Woodward spent a lot of time during the war coming up with ideas (or supporting ideas from higher HQs) that someone more experienced with carrier warfare or amphibious warfare wouldn't have. He apparently endorsed a plan to use the amphibious ship Fearless as a decoy to draw in Argentinian aircraft, which the amphibious specialists with the Task Force had to shoot down.  I'm not really familiar enough with the exact criticisms of Woodward to come down hard on the guy, but the only history he seems to come off well in is the one he wrote.
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Dec 31, 2020 00:19
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PittTheElder posted:Were any non-British warships lost to catastrophic magazine detonations in the WW1 to say, present day time frame? My grand-uncle was part of a B-24 squadron's ground crew and munitions getting shipped to Italy on the SS Paul Hamilton when a Ju-88 out of southern France put an aerial torpedo into her side:  Of the 580 men aboard they recovered one body.
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Dec 31, 2020 00:26
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Gnoman posted:On a related subject, what warship (excludong unseaworthy boondoggles like the Vasa had the shortest lifespan? Bismarck and Blucher are obvious candidates, but is there anything that was sank quicker? Mary Rose Tres Reyes https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816618119/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i5
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Dec 31, 2020 02:51
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Mary Rose had been in service for 33 years when she sank. Even her most substantial refit took place more than a decade before she was lost.
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Dec 31, 2020 03:11
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The HMS Captain wasn't quite a Vasa like boondoggle. It was an early ship with masts and turrets. But she ended up pretty overweight, and had a freeboard of six feet, six inches. Which is low. And her center of gravity was pretty high. The whole building process was a poo poo show. The Admiralty didn't want Coles' design. They cancelled it, he complained till it got uncancelled. During the design process it a bunch of people pointed out some concerns about the freeboard and the amount of canvas it would need. Which was a concern when you're firing big guns near canvas, because it tends to gently caress it up. Coles got sick during the actual build process and the design went from 6,960 lt to 7,767 lt. Which caused the 8' freeboard to drop to 6'6" It was launched in March of 1869. Commissioned in April of 1870. It sank in September of 1870. It ran into a gale where the low freeboard and the high center of gravity combined to capsize it during a gale, killing most of it's crew.
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Dec 31, 2020 03:22
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Whilst reading Wikipedia I came across an article which said the tin the summer of 1917 a German division had 54 heavy and 108 light machine guns, while a British division had 64 heavy and 192 light, and a French division had 88 heavy and 432 light machine guns. How did the different armies distribute machine guns among their units, and why did the French have so many more than the others? Even accounting for the Germans switching to triangular divisions there's a pretty big difference.Raenir Salazar posted:We were involved since the US invaded Canada during the war, it's unclear to me if there were any Canadian troops serving in those specific regiments (whether they settled in Canada after the war or if any of those regiments were raised in Canada or transferred from Canadian militia's to regular British army service) that took part in Cochrane's operation. So while its probably not the specific case of specifically Canadian troops burning down the white house there were Canadian forces engaging with American troops during the war of 1812 (I can see the argument of the troops serving in those regiments being "honourary" canadians if for example, they had largely en mass resettled in Canada afterwards, like the Loyalists who fled to Canada). By the end of the argument I was just tweaking him. I pointed out how he was wrong, he doubled down on nationalism, so I decided to just enflame him. The irony of accusing someone attacking him blind nationalism of being an even more uncritical nationalistic moron was lost on him.
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Dec 31, 2020 03:58
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Yeah, it's a pretty poo poo thing to do (to you, to be clear) and I can see how that could get under a person's skin.
Fearless fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Dec 31, 2020 |
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Dec 31, 2020 05:07
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Gnoman posted:On a related subject, what warship (excludong unseaworthy boondoggles like the Vasa had the shortest lifespan? Bismarck and Blucher are obvious candidates, but is there anything that was sank quicker? CSS Virginia (aka the Merrimack)
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Dec 31, 2020 05:11
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The USS Merrimack was in service for five years before being sunk and converted to the CSS Virginia. CSS Virginia was scuttled five months after completion. So the Virginia fits if you're counting her as a separate ship.
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Dec 31, 2020 05:14
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It did get in at least one battle in it's short life so at least it wasn't a complete failure like the Vasa.
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Dec 31, 2020 05:18
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Fearless posted:Yeah, it's a pretty poo poo thing to do (to you, to be clear) and I can see how that could get under a person's skin. As an American, I think everyone should feel as ashamed of their country as I do about mine.
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Dec 31, 2020 05:29
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White Coke posted:As an American, I think everyone should feel as ashamed of their country as I do about mine. Just by there being lots of countries there's probably one that didn't do a war crime*, but yeah, good point. Although I'd bring up Canada's policy to First Nations peoples before The War of 1812 just saying. *Now I'm wondering if this is true and just cycling through random countries. The easiest would probably be something super tiny that mostly didn't do much like Lichtenstein, but even then I'm sure they've done some sketchy financial poo poo at a minimum. Maybe one of those semi-fake micro nations who have the population of their government and some sheep?
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Dec 31, 2020 05:40
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New Zealand isn't fake! I do think there's good reason to be at least wary about your country, whatever it is. Not just your country's sins, but because of the kind of stuff that nationalist groups who are excessively proud of their country get up to. I also kinda think sometimes that maybe I don't have to take responsibility for things that happened in this country before my family got here, but I know that I still benefit from the things people in this country did. But also from the same token, Canadians benefited a whole lot from American and British imperialism, or at least wound up with a lot of products from it.
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Dec 31, 2020 06:27
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SlothfulCobra posted:New Zealand isn't fake! New Zealand occurred to me but I just assumed they did something awful to the Maori or something because, you know, colonialism. But maybe they were super chill. And as a German-American I'm totally aware of hosed up poo poo and owning to them, I'm just doing a thought experiment.
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Dec 31, 2020 06:35
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They definitely had a go at it. They were somewhat less successful than in some other places, but only somewhat.
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Dec 31, 2020 07:45
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Xiahou Dun posted:Just by there being lots of countries there's probably one that didn't do a war crime*, but yeah, good point. Although I'd bring up Canada's policy to First Nations peoples before The War of 1812 just saying. Before, during and after, long after if we are to be honest (and we must be). Canada is just starting to reckon with the full horror of what it has done and by sitting on our hands and looking the other way as a lot of folks would have us do we are complicit in the original crime. And through all this, despite having been given absolutely no reason to do so (and frequently ample reason to do otherwise), the Indigenous peoples of Canada have held the line to defend the country that has betrayed them continually. Canada's military history cannot be told or understood without acknowledging their service and impact. It's something that extends well beyond their prowess as soldiers, sailors and aviators-- even non-Indigenous Canadians recognize on some level that the six hundred odd First Nations and Inuit communities contribute to what makes us unique as a country. We've had multiple iterations of our warships named after Indigenous cultures and their iconography and art feature in our military heraldry. There's also a recognition on some level at least that they're the most Canadian of us all. After the Second World War, the RCN underwent some pretty serious growing pains culminating in a series of mutinies in which crews of several warships refused to respond to orders from a bunch of martinets that had been trained in British wardrooms. It was concluded by several flag officers in the RCN that serious efforts had to be made to train Canadian sailors and officers in Canada rather than sending them abroad to learn even worse habits from the RN. By 1959, one of the last training programs to be brought back to Canada was the advanced gunnery courses that had been held since 1910 in HMS Excellent, on Whale Island, Portsmouth. Gunners in the RN and Commonwealth navies had a reputation in those days for very rigid discipline and a mania for cleanliness-- virtues instilled by the training received in Excellent. Canada decided to make a big deal out of the end of an era, and it was also decided to present some kind of exceptional gift as a way of marking that "Canada was here." It was also decided that the gift had to be large, immobile and exceptionally difficult to clean out of spite to the Howard Hughes level mania for mopping and shining and so it was settled that the most proper Canadian gift-- aside from flooding the parade square with maple syrup-- would be a totem pole. It was named Hosaqami, a Kwak'wala word meaning "You, the face of authority" and it was carved by Mungo Martin who was a prominent artist in his own right. Allegedly, this was done in one of the workshop spaces of a Canadian warship during the crossing of the Atlantic but that may not be accurate. What did happen, however, was on arrival in Portsmouth Hosaqami was mounted on two naval field gun carriages and paraded through the streets, holding up traffic and irritating the locals on its way to HMS Excellent. As this happened, a party of Indigenous RCN sailors in the traditional garb of their peoples abducted the most senior RN officer they could find to preside over a Potlatch ceremony to be held in his honour. As memory serves, they grabbed the captain of one of the RN fleet carriers then in port. Hosaqami was then installed somewhere near the parade ground on Whale Island and future generations of gunners were trained in Canada. About thirty years ago, Hosaqami was returned to Canada as decades of exposure to acid rain and overzealous cleaning had made it structurally unsound. An RCN officer of Metis ancestry, after consulting with Chief Martin and his family, arranged to bring it back to Canada and allow it to return to the earth in keeping with the practice of the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw people. It was thus returned to a space behind an RCN officer's mess in Esquimalt, where it continues to quietly moulder away. However, Chief Martin's family have since carved a replica, which resides proudly in Victoria at the residence of the Lieutenant Governor of BC. This might not seem like a big deal to most folks that aren't Canadian, but the truth that most people miss when they poo poo on the study of military history is that these same institutions say and reflect a lot about the character of the countries they defend and this is absolutely something that is worth knowing more about, particularly if a relatively young country is still trying to understand what it truly is. In a moment at the end of a long process designed to make part of our national defence apparatus more uniquely Canadian, nobody could think of people more truly Canadian than several dozen RCN sailors of Indigenous ancestry. And what is all the more tragic, is that the families of these sailors would continue to be scourged by the residential school system and the Sixties Scoop as they represented their country.
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Dec 31, 2020 10:17
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FMguru posted:Zero, and it greatly reduced her influence in the administration going forward. Still, it was a hell of a thing watching the UN ambassador of the US flying to Buenos Aires and saying that the US should remain neutral in this unfortunate situation, taking the side of fascist junta in a peripheral region against the US's #1 ally and the keystone of our Cold War posture in Europe. She should be a card in Twilight Struggle.
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Dec 31, 2020 10:24
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SlothfulCobra posted:New Zealand isn't fake! New Zealand is just Canada without the introspection.
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Dec 31, 2020 13:02
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