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Raenir Salazar posted:Italy I think iirc did licence German equipment IIRC, probably planes/engines? 
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Jan 18, 2021 16:16
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Even if they had let the Italians license produce tanks would Italy have even had the equipment and specialists to make them? Looks like pretty much every Italian tank was riveted vs. Germany welding things together.
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Jan 18, 2021 16:30
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:Even if they had let the Italians license produce tanks would Italy have even had the equipment and specialists to make them? Looks like pretty much every Italian tank was riveted vs. Germany welding things together. It's not like their navy guys were busy.
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Jan 18, 2021 16:43
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I have a weird/dumb question that is only tangentially milhist but this is the most active thread for such things and it's bothering me so I'll ask anyway : Is there any scholarship or serious evidence on which was invented first, the spear or the axe? I randomly was thinking about the evolution of tools (hey gotta think about something when you do the dishes), and my pulled-from-the-butt tummy feels makes me assume something at least knife-adjacent, i.e. a small sharp thing you hold in your hand, would pre-date either. Then the question sort of becomes if it's more natural to have a long sharp thing or a shorter sharp thing you move in an arc. Then I started adding in the idea that the spear would be better for hunting and an axe is more useful as an all around tool, and I know there were stone hammers that eventually got sharpened variants and ahh I've got too much for my little layman's brain. If someone magically had answers to this, that'd be great, but I guess what I'm asking for is good reading about the evolution of tools. I haven't thought about this since college when I'd take archeology courses just for funsies so I'm clueless.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:01
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Here is the official US response to the Shotgun matter (via the Swiss government). https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1918Supp02/d912 The actual legal analysis document is out there, I recall reading it once, at the time it was only in a text document that was horribly formatted. I’m going to see if I can find it as it’s an interesting (and iirc slightly humorous read, because “really we have to do this”) Wiki article on the 1897 posted:The Judge Advocate General of the Army, Secretary of State Robert Lansing, carefully considered and reviewed the applicable law and promptly rejected the German protest. This may seem a little over the top, but I’m a sucker for reading primary documents. It just sucks so few are often converted to more readable formats. Marshal Prolapse fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Jan 18, 2021 |
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Jan 18, 2021 17:03
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Xiahou Dun posted:Is there any scholarship or serious evidence on which was invented first, the spear or the axe? I think this is more of a question for Anthropologists, and I doubt that there's a definitive answer.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:05
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Some excepts from the analysis (though not Robert Lansing’s) Samuel T Ansell who was the JAG of the Army, can be found on page 17-18 of this 1997 issue of The Army Lawyer. https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/10-1997.pdf
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Jan 18, 2021 17:09
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Cessna posted:I think this is more of a question for Anthropologists, and I doubt that there's a definitive answer. O yeah, totally. Just that thread moves like a dammed-up creek so I thought I'd at least try here.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:11
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Xiahou Dun posted:I have a weird/dumb question that is only tangentially milhist but this is the most active thread for such things and it's bothering me so I'll ask anyway : I feel like the spear would come first, because you can make a kinda cruddy spear in one piece (sharpened long stick) but the axe requires some means of attachment.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:12
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Xiahou Dun posted:I have a weird/dumb question that is only tangentially milhist but this is the most active thread for such things and it's bothering me so I'll ask anyway : Hand axe, ie. a sharp stone without a handle is the oldest tool. Hafted axes are hundreds of thousands years younger than spears.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:19
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wdarkk posted:(sharpened long stick) And as always, we're back to pikes.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:19
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Cessna posted:And as always, we're back to pikes. Pikes aren't sharpened, they are only pointy.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:22
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It still amazes me how much of a clown shoes operation Italian war industry was.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:22
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Welcome to the old weapon zone, 24/7 discussion on pikes and bayonets. Sometimes we talk about swords too.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:23
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Lawman 0 posted:It still amazes me how much of a clown shoes operation Italian war industry was. Really? I mean this was a county that had the greatest difficulty in defeating Ethiopia without tons of poison gas (not to take anything away from the Ethiopians and holding them off), which honestly was something the British and French had done dozens of times in Africa and other areas (without poison gas). SeanBeansShako posted:Welcome to the old weapon zone, 24/7 discussion on pikes and bayonets. Sometimes we talk about swords too. Are crossbows too next gen?
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Jan 18, 2021 17:24
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MazelTovCocktail posted:Are crossbows too next gen? they're a bronze age weapon, so much older than bayonets
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Jan 18, 2021 17:26
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ChubbyChecker posted:they're a bronze age weapon, so much older than bayonets Huh, I always thought cross bows was Middle Ages, and part of the reason for the decline of knights being important for defense.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:31
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The Chinese invented the crossbow real early, as with many things. ...and now I'm idly googling to see if anyone ever put a bayonet on a crossbow.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:37
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Lawman 0 posted:It still amazes me how much of a clown shoes operation Italian war industry was. they were pretty goofy but keep in mind that everyone except for the US, USSR, and to a lesser extent the UK was loving goofy as hell. like France is probably giving Italy a run for their money, as is Japan
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Jan 18, 2021 17:38
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MazelTovCocktail posted:Huh, I always thought cross bows was Middle Ages, and part of the reason for the decline of knights being important for defense. It’s complicated. The technology existed in the time of Socrates, but there were not a great number of them on the battlefield then or in the many centuries between then and the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, China had their own relationship with the weapon.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:40
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:they were pretty goofy but keep in mind that everyone except for the US, USSR, and to a lesser extent the UK was loving goofy as hell. like France is probably giving Italy a run for their money, as is Japan I thought France was pretty decent at making weapons in quantity, how goofy were their practices?
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Jan 18, 2021 17:45
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Gort posted:I thought France was pretty decent at making weapons in quantity, how goofy were their practices? How do you feel about Monopoly?
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Jan 18, 2021 17:46
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:they were pretty goofy but keep in mind that everyone except for the US, USSR, and to a lesser extent the UK was loving goofy as hell. like France is probably giving Italy a run for their money, as is Japan At least the French military industrial complex was quite good at achieving its objective, which was to spread state largesse as broadly as possible. e: French tanks aren't even the biggest issue. They had them and they had them in the places they decided they wanted them. The great mystery of France 1940 is 'Where did all my fighters go?' Alchenar fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Jan 18, 2021 |
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Jan 18, 2021 17:49
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French tanks were surprisingly decent for the early war, but they didn’t have a lot of them and they were not deployed intelligently.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:51
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SeanBeansShako posted:How do you feel about Monopoly? Possibly the worst board game I've ever had the misfortune to play
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Jan 18, 2021 17:52
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Gort posted:Possibly the worst board game I've ever had the misfortune to play much of its bad reputation comes from house rules. if played with official rules, it's not awful
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Jan 18, 2021 18:35
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ChubbyChecker posted:Hand axe, ie. a sharp stone without a handle is the oldest tool. Hafted axes are hundreds of thousands years younger than spears. Choppers: 2.6 mya Handaxes: 1.6 mya Grind-edge axes: 44 kya Hafted axes: 6 kya Spears are somewhat more complicated. We have hard evidence of wood tip spears by 400 kya, but we have weaker evidence that may point to stone tip spears as early as 500 kya, and the real trouble in the mix is that spears are not unique to homo, as chimpanzees have been observed making them so wood spears could be extremely old for all we know. Platystemon posted:It’s complicated. The technology existed in the time of Socrates, but there were not a great number of them on the battlefield then or in the many centuries between then and the Middle Ages. Yeah, China was using repeater crossbows by the 4th century BCE. There's a lot of differences between European and Chinese pre-modern military tech, and there's really two things that can probably be used as general principles if you're starting from a European understanding: 1) China's agricultural system (esp after rice comes into dominance) made the population density of humans much higher than Europe but also made horses way more rare (basically the defining feature of the 'Chinese core' is that any land that could support horses would be better off supporting very intensive agriculture) and 2) China got into casting iron really really really early, to the extent that was a debate for a while that China never had bloomeries (they did but it was brief). This has a ton of knock on effects, for example armies of mounted elites disappear from the core of China by the end of the Warring States, which means that wars between China and its northern neighbors take on very odd characteristics.
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Jan 18, 2021 18:41
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Platystemon posted:French tanks were surprisingly decent for the early war, but they didn’t have a lot of them and they were not deployed intelligently. I was under the impression they had quite a bunch actually?
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Jan 18, 2021 19:30
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MazelTovCocktail posted:Really? I mean this was a county that had the greatest difficulty in defeating Ethiopia without tons of poison gas (not to take anything away from the Ethiopians and holding them off), which honestly was something the British and French had done dozens of times in Africa and other areas (without poison gas). The Ethiopians had a bunch of modern weapons unlike the rest of Africa. They straight up slaughtered an invading Italian army attempting to colonise them in the 1890s. 'We have the Maxim gun and they do not' breaks down when they in fact do.
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Jan 18, 2021 19:36
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Tulip posted:Yeah, China was using repeater crossbows by the 4th century BCE.
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Jan 18, 2021 19:39
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There's a good and pretty recent Harvard series in 6 parts: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/collection.php?cpk=1338 Maybe overkill but imo the region kind of justifies more than 1 book if you want to touch on everything. For covering it broadly in a sensible way and not even attempting to be comprehensive, I also like Gina Barnes' The Rise of Civilization in China, Korea, and Japan (make sure to look for the 2015 one; there are older editions that are more out of date) which covers history up through the 1st millennium in the sort of cross-national way that gets neglected way too much in East Asia studies.
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Jan 18, 2021 20:00
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A "broad history" of China in the first half of the 20th century would probably need an entire book because there's so much going on in there. For the history of the region as a whole, I'm not sure a single book would get you more than a paragraph would.
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Jan 18, 2021 20:15
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The go-to book for premodern China when I was coming up was The Open Empire by Valerie Hansen, and I still see it recommended so I figure it's good. Heads up that it is basically a textbook and while it is a significant departure from traditional Chinese histories (i.e. has a lot more detail about social life at the expense of palace/intellectual history), it is still very much not a military history, if that's the subject you're really into.
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Jan 18, 2021 20:19
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Gnoman posted:A "broad history" of China in the first half of the 20th century would probably need an entire book because there's so much going on in there. For the history of the region as a whole, I'm not sure a single book would get you more than a paragraph would. Yeah, honestly I find surveys to be the best option and then hone in on what you like the most. No I wish I could give you a recommendation but my experience is more Imperial Chinese history. Tulip posted:The go-to book for premodern China when I was coming up was The Open Empire by Valerie Hansen, and I still see it recommended so I figure it's good. Heads up that it is basically a textbook and while it is a significant departure from traditional Chinese histories (i.e. has a lot more detail about social life at the expense of palace/intellectual history), it is still very much not a military history, if that's the subject you're really into. Yes! Get this book. Loved it in college. I still have it today, one of the few books I kept from college. Honestly even if your primary focus is military history this book is just so good for giving you the broad picture.
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Jan 18, 2021 20:19
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Gort posted:I thought France was pretty decent at making weapons in quantity, how goofy were their practices? Interwar French procurement and production makes modern Canadian procurement look sensible. There was a lot of tension particularly in tank development that led to shifting requirements, but most French arms manufacturers besides the state arsenals were relatively small workshops, and couldn't scale production. The French automotive / tank industry was subsidized by the government through defense contracts, and so there were a lot of little places to keep afloat. The S35, for instance, had its turret made by a separate company from the body of the tank. This kind of distributed manufacturing can work OK, but in practice it meant that component bottlenecks were widely distributed and difficult to identify and solve. They had a really hard time synchronizing the production of turrets and hulls. Similar problems with various fighter production - fighters produced and sitting because they didn't have instruments, or guns, or sights. The extreme distribution and workshop methods meant a lot of French equipment was pretty expensive. The S35, again, was a pretty great tank, but it cost almost a million francs.
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Jan 18, 2021 20:35
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Tulip posted:it is still very much not a military history, if that's the subject you're really into. Am I mistaken about this, or is it...basically never military history? Especially ancient stuff. I'm not a historian but I've spent the past 4 years reading academic material about ancient East Asia with what at least I think is some dedication; I've read most of at least a dozen academic books and probably several times that in journals about ancient China, but I couldn't tell you more than the basics about the militaries at large, and almost no details about battles other than exceptionally famous ones like Changping. I feel like historians basically just never ever go battles and the like at all. It's a funny contrast with how the discussions tend to go on the internet.
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Jan 18, 2021 20:37
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Koramei posted:Am I mistaken about this, or is it...basically never military history? Especially ancient stuff. I'm not a historian but I've spent the past 4 years reading academic material about ancient East Asia with what at least I think is some dedication; I've read most of at least a dozen academic books and probably several times that in journals about ancient China, but I couldn't tell you more than the basics about the militaries at large, and almost no details about battles other than exceptionally famous ones like Changping. I feel like historians basically just never ever go battles and the like at all. 好 鐵 不 打 釘 好 漢 不 當 兵 "Good iron shouldn't be wasted on nails, Good men shouldn't be wasted as soldiers." This proverb is a useful illustration: generally the overlap of "literate men" and "military men" in China was very, very low, which is to say that the people who wrote down things (and thus became our POV for studying history) are not soldiers, and often have little regard for soldiers. This is a pretty strong contrast, at least to my understanding, to the West/Middle East, where military-aristocrats tended to be both soldiers and fairly frequently literate (not to mention sponsoring the most literate people in society). So you're right: histories of China tend to focus on intellectual first, dynastic second, then some priority of social, economic, diplomatic, and military tends to be VERY low on the list. There are genuinely good military histories of China, but I cannot say that I know of any that are broad overviews; I really like "The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes" for example, but it's VERY narrow in focus. I borrowed but forgot the title of a book that went through the major military manuals of China, but it was very light on the historical details save to give some historical context† and thus is kind of an intellectual history with a specific focus, more than anything else. Probably the best 'broad overview of Chinese military history' is The History Of China Podcast, which is an amateur effort to be clear but seems to have decent enough footnotes and has way more military focus than any other big project I've seen. It is a funny contrast to how internet discussions go. With China at least I'd guess that various Romance of the Three Kingdoms inspired video games are a lot of people's entry point to Chinese history (Age of Empires and Dynasty Warriors were probably the first and second places I learned about Chinese history, before I got to college). †"Besiege Wei to save Zhao" is a famous entry in the Thirty Six Strategems. It is incomprehensible if you don't know the battle it refers to, if you do then it really just means "if your opponent is really strong but over extended, attack a place they've left vulnerable."
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Jan 18, 2021 20:58
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Promise I’m not poo poo-posting I’m just in a rush and I promise I’ll make good on this in the evening but there are absolute poo poo tons of primary documents from soldiers in Chinese, I’ve read them, they just rarely get translated because “variety of geopolitical things and me vaguely gesturing at the Cultural Revolution.” And I don’t know who translated that proverb but it doesn’t read right. When is it from? It’s not Classical.
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Jan 18, 2021 21:28
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ChubbyChecker posted:much of its bad reputation comes from house rules. if played with official rules, it's not awful Oh yeah I didn’t like it until played with a group that removed all bills below $20 and kept a fast pace. Land on a property, you buying yes no? Ok pass the dice. We finished in maybe 15 minutes and it was fun. Doesn’t help that modern monopoly with all the licensed editions are pretty much funko pops. At a game store they had two versions of TMNT monopoly.
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Jan 18, 2021 21:38
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Tulip posted:I really like "The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes" for example, but it's VERY narrow in focus. I swear I think we had the same Professor for Ancient and Modern Chinese history classes too?  I guess if anything it validates the reading list he created, he was fantastic Professor, so I’m not shocked that he picked some top tier material.
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Jan 18, 2021 21:45
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