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As in the runup to WW2 the gambles ze Germans had to take to have a theoretical chance of winning should have tipped them off that they should probably rethink their whole approach to the problem of having other countries in Europe.
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 11:03 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 13:53 |
aphid_licker posted:As in the runup to WW2 the gambles ze Germans had to take to have a theoretical chance of winning should have tipped them off that they should probably rethink their whole approach to the problem of having other countries in Europe.
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 11:22 |
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Tulip posted:Kind of to reiterate, a lot of that potential was realized, at least in the window you're talking about. The USSR in the 60s and 70s was a very credible competitor to the US for most industrialized, and while there's frequent emphasis on the differences from the USA, the two countries had a number of major economic similarities. And as much as may be said about the USSR not adapting well to the material conditions in the last decade and change of its life, it was still #2 in GDP. I mean, you have to cherry pick your figures a bit to say that. If you choose GPD per Capita then the USSR was less productive per head than Spain from 1970. In fact 1960 is the point at which the Western capitalist countries all start breaking hard away from the USSR in terms of growth.
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 11:45 |
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My YouTube recommendations threw up some Pathe footage of the scuttling of HMS Implacable (ex-French Duguay-Trouin, present at Trafalgar and captured in the aftermath of the battle), and the last surviving seventy-four in existence. It turns out Pathe covered the old ship quite often in her last years: Some silent newsreel of Implacable undergoing maintenance/light restoration at Devonport in the 1920s The ship entering harbour during her move to Portsmouth in 1932 for use as a civilian cadet training ship, passing HMS Victory Newsreel with sound covering her sinking by explosives in 1949 A longer - and somewhat more bombastic - Gaumont newsreel covering the sinking Edit: The BBC Archive twitter feed has their own coverage (mostly with the same shots, but some unique ones of the actual sinking) https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1070369712238940160 I think the YouTube algorithim has finally noticed that I subscribe to Drachinifel and taken that as the cue to fill my timeline with archival navy footage. Going into more recent naval history, is this film All of One Company, covering an early deployment by HMS Coventry in 1980, made all the more poignant by the fact that the ship would be sunk in the Falklands less than two years after the film was made. The opening scenes of the ship leaving harbour also include a brief shot of Foudroyant (the ex Leda-class frigate Trincomalee of 1812) at her traditional anchorage in Portsmouth, where she would have been alongside Implacable in the 1940s. This was only the year after Warrior had been taken into restoration after sitting in Pembroke dock as an oil hulk for 50 years - it's always amazing how long these artifacts lingered along in some sort of service. Especially in the case of the British, it's pretty much the only way they made it into preservation, rather than by any active decision to keep them for historical value. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Feb 26, 2021 |
# ? Feb 26, 2021 13:59 |
Solid find.
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 14:08 |
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Reminder that this is a military history thread, not a modern politics thread. The only thing I want to read about Ireland is the Battle of Clontarf or how the British fleeced them over Comets or whatever.
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 14:50 |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHv5mncZxm8 Tank nerdery, courtesy of the Swedish tank museum.
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 15:05 |
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Weka posted:The PLA is almost certainly more corrupt than western militaries but I don't know about their procurement process. The article you linked says it's difficult to tell. If you or anyone else had any web based stuff on PRC military procurement, surrounding corruption or not, I'd be very interested. This is a decent quick intro. Establishing the JLSF was a huge first step to reforming their entire acquisitions system, but it is still relatively new and facing a LOT of organizational inertia. They're also seriously doubling down on this idea that civilian organizations have a major role to play in future military tech, which means a more focused partnership between the two halves (they call it "military-civil fusion").
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 15:41 |
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White Coke posted:How much of an issue was it for the Soviet Union that their demographic growth dropped very quickly after they came to power, and even more after WW2? According to Wikipedia the fertility rate for Russia dropped from 6.72 in 1926, to 4.54 in 1936, and 2.81 in 1946. And then it dropped below replacement levels in 1967 and hovered around there until they broke up. A planned economy isn't going to be dependent on a growing population to drive "endless" economic growth, but it'd certainly leave them falling behind since less people produce less stuff. It's an issue but also an inevitable consequence of transitioning from an agrarian, rural society to an urban, industrial society. You see similar trends in major Western countries as well (France, UK, Germany) during their transitions to more urban societies. Interestingly, those countries' birth rates all dropped to under replacement levels at about the same time as the Soviet Union's did. I think one major difference is that the Western European countries added immigration to sub replacement level birth rates. Germany pulled in all the Turkish gastarbeiter, France had massive immigration from Algeria and other parts of the Francophonie due to decolonization and later relatively pro immigration policies, and Britain was about the same as France.
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 15:45 |
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Nenonen posted:Also Paris was right there, they had reached it in 1871 (and would get within artillery range again) whereas Russia was a vastly larger country and you would probably have to reach for St. Petersburg in the north east and also for Moscow long ways in the east to really debilitate them. That's just not doable in a single season. Although there is no doubt that the Nazis badly underestimated the USSR, it is worth remembering that their fathers and grandfathers had defeated Russia within living memory. We regularly say people don't learn from history - but the lesson of WWI was "Russia can lose, even if you don't take Moscow." In WWI the Western Front was the main effort of the war, the Eastern front was largely seen as a holding action. But even then, they won battles against a numerically superior enemy, occupied vast areas of territory, saw the Tsar's government collapse, and forced the Russians to give up a lot of land at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Although yes, Germany lost WWI as a whole, by any meaningful measure they won in the East.
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 16:30 |
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PittTheElder posted:I'd suspect that it's more that English speaking governments have been the most deeply infected with neoliberal brainworms, and nearly everything has been privatized, meaning that our governments are now poo poo at planning, as none of the expertise is in house. When effective government action is avoided because it threatens private sector profit, government action won't be very effective. Pedestrian Observations (another post was linked by Tulip as well) brings up a long list of issues where most but not all are related to project management in some way. It seems to hold true in general though for major engineering projects that the customer needs to have significant in-house engineering resources on the project as well. If you don't, the supplier will almost inevitably rip you off, or you'll go and change requirements that require major redesigns and the supplier will happily charge you out the nose for it. Basically, you need to have deep knowledge of the thing you're ordering. I've seen references to studies calling this out as a key part of success in a whole bunch of different industries ranging from power grids and locomotives to jet fighters like the Gripen and the Rafale. In the case of the Gripen specifically they also went to great lengths when writing up the original contracts to prevent cost overruns, but the Swedish ordnance department has always had a great deal of engineering involvement in the design of Saab's fighters and it still has an in-house engineering department in the Gripen project office to this day. On a lot of other projects though that in-house resource has been replaced with consultants or removed entirely to varying degrees and then things also tend to become more expensive and/or delayed. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Feb 26, 2021 |
# ? Feb 26, 2021 16:49 |
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Fragility of Russian empire was to be expected if you looked at the mini-revolution after the Russo-Japanese war and understood that all of the tensions were still unresolved by constitutional reforms. It just wasn't so obviously predictable back then, nor just how clueless Russian command in Poland was. Hitler then expected precisely the same events to unfold in 1941 because history repeats itself, innit?!? Plus recent experiences from Poland and Finland had shown that Red Army had command and morale problems. But unlike Nicholas, Stalin had suppressed all opposition in all parts of society, and Soviet industrial base was much stronger despite having to evacuate to the Urals, and all of this changed the setting.
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 16:55 |
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aphid_licker posted:As in the runup to WW2 the gambles ze Germans had to take to have a theoretical chance of winning should have tipped them off that they should probably rethink their whole approach to the problem of having other countries in Europe. Hitler's ambitions and lack of foresight make perfect sense when you find out the regimen of drugs and other stuff he was on.
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 19:13 |
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BalloonFish posted:I think the YouTube algorithim has finally noticed that I subscribe to Drachinifel and taken that as the cue to fill my timeline with archival navy footage. Going into more recent naval history, is this film All of One Company, covering an early deployment by HMS Coventry in 1980, made all the more poignant by the fact that the ship would be sunk in the Falklands less than two years after the film was made. Yeah I also subscribed to him, and so (I think combining that with Smarter Every Day's Fast Attack Sub Series) YouTube has been hitting me up with a lot of Sub Brief videos. Pretty cool collection of declassified information on Cold War era submarines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c?SubBrief?videos
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 19:34 |
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^^^^ Video unavailable it seems. Ensign Expendable posted:Reminder that this is a military history thread, not a modern politics thread. The only thing I want to read about Ireland is the Battle of Clontarf or how the British fleeced them over Comets or whatever.
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 20:14 |
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Arquinsiel posted:^^^^ Link was broken, try this one https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9bMgCQyFNaMPsK9GtzM5dQ
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 20:18 |
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Speaking of WWI's eastern front, did any country besides Bulgaria manage to keep both it's capital and system of government for the whole conflict?
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 20:25 |
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Arbite posted:Speaking of WWI's eastern front, did any country besides Bulgaria manage to keep both it's capital and system of government for the whole conflict? Australia comes to mind. Gallipoli is in the eastern front, and Australia is an eastern country, right?
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 20:32 |
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Arbite posted:Speaking of WWI's eastern front, did any country besides Bulgaria manage to keep both it's capital and system of government for the whole conflict? Sorry. Read too quickly and thought you said WWII. Romania?
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# ? Feb 26, 2021 20:41 |
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Epicurius posted:Sorry. Read too quickly and thought you said WWII. Romania? It was occupied briefly after Russia fell so they didn't keep their capital. They did rejoin the allies at the last minute though, once Germany was collapsing.
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# ? Feb 27, 2021 00:28 |
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Cheers bewbies for the link, something to read tonight. I was wondering if anybody had a good source for the model of Toyota supplied by France to Chad during the Toyota war. I've come across variously only hiluxes or hiluxes and landcruisers, with no mention of new or what model or anything.
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# ? Feb 27, 2021 00:58 |
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Hitler's ambitions and lack of foresight make perfect sense when you find out the regimen of drugs and other stuff he was on. He thought that no one else in Germany, even the other Nazis, had the guts to exploit the opportunities he saw and worried that if he died Germany would be doomed because it wouldn't have a leader brave enough to take them to victory. I don't know how much of that was the drugs versus his fear of mortality, I think he had a health scare before the Sudeten Crisis, and he turned 50 in 1939.
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# ? Feb 27, 2021 06:01 |
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Midlife crisis makes us all do embarrassing things
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# ? Feb 27, 2021 13:18 |
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Everybody would have been happier if he had bought a motorcycle instead.
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# ? Feb 27, 2021 15:56 |
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Fish of hemp posted:Everybody would have been happier if he had bought a motorcycle instead. Eva would have been worried sick.
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# ? Feb 27, 2021 17:40 |
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ArchangeI posted:Eva would have been worried sick. He should have accepted his sexuality and taken Hess to the side car. Together they could have tripped through Europe and written Mein Kampf 2: Kampf meiner.
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# ? Feb 27, 2021 19:58 |
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Kampfing hard or hardly kampfing? A Führer for the male middle age. A. Schicklgruber, with a foreword by the famous medicinal Kräuterteefabrikant Heinrich Himmler.
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# ? Feb 27, 2021 20:04 |
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White Coke posted:He thought that no one else in Germany, even the other Nazis, had the guts to exploit the opportunities he saw and worried that if he died Germany would be doomed because it wouldn't have a leader brave enough to take them to victory. I don't know how much of that was the drugs versus his fear of mortality, I think he had a health scare before the Sudeten Crisis, and he turned 50 in 1939. That was partly sarcastic but a lot of that was in Hitler's personality before, the drugs exasperated it as substance abuse usually does, and he went full crazy cult leader after the Munich Conference, in that he totally bought all the propaganda about himself in a way he hadn't before. It's arguable that Hitler believed himself to be what the propaganda said he was before then but he really took on a messianic delusion when he kept inexplicably winning when he should have been losing. He was even in a lot of ways publicly a "volcel" because he believed he had to project an air of unapproachable manhood and strength. It's one of the main reasons he didn't marry Eva Braun until right before they died or publicly acknowledge her being his girlfriend. He wasn't only high on his doctor's supply but his own.
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# ? Feb 27, 2021 20:20 |
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IMO Hitler's doctor did more to stop the nazis than anyone.
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# ? Feb 27, 2021 20:50 |
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Weka posted:IMO Hitler's doctor did more to stop the nazis than anyone. Genuinely incredible quackery combined with stripping every medical cabinet in germany for the goods.
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# ? Feb 27, 2021 23:15 |
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Fish of hemp posted:Everybody would have been happier if he had bought a motorcycle instead. Kultur and the art of Zündapp repair.
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# ? Feb 27, 2021 23:31 |
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Imagine if Hitler had been given the medication JFK had got that made him extremely horny (allegedly) What kind of a world would contain Nymphomaniac Irish Hitler
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# ? Feb 28, 2021 00:30 |
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Blitzing to Paris in his stretched aphid_licker fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Feb 28, 2021 |
# ? Feb 28, 2021 00:36 |
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MikeCrotch posted:Imagine if Hitler had been given the medication JFK had got that made him extremely horny (allegedly)
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# ? Feb 28, 2021 04:03 |
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MikeCrotch posted:Nymphomaniac Irish Hitler “Hello, Netflix? I have a concept for a show. Yes, I’ll hold.”
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# ? Feb 28, 2021 04:31 |
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Been working my way through old linked milhist threads again and came across some forums history.
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# ? Feb 28, 2021 05:19 |
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Just finished watching this:Platystemon posted:The Royal Institution hosted a lecture about the history of nerve agents. The talk itself is good, the book might be of interest to people ITT. I didn't know that Japanese cult had the resources of a Colombian cocaine cartel. But two points of milhist: it does a good job at explaining why the Nazis never used nerve agent chem warfare, and it brings up a dude named Major (Later Lt. Col) Edmund Tilley, who was a top-flight intelligence interrogator who did lots of good work getting the truth on nerve agents out of various Germans post war. I'm wondering if anybody else knows about him, as the author of the talk above says he did great things and then dropped off the face of the earth. https://twitter.com/dankaszeta/status/1102264352424513541
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# ? Feb 28, 2021 18:58 |
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Comparative trials of the T-80, T-72, T-64, and T-62 Queue: German additional tank protection (zimmerit, schurzen, track links), Winter and swamp tracks, Paper light tank destroyers, Allied intel on the Maus , Summary of French interbellum tank development, Medium Tank T20, Medium Tank T23, Myths of Soviet tank building, GMC M10, Tiger II predecessors, Pz.Kpfw.IV Ausf.H-J,IS-6, SU-101/SU-102/Uralmash-1, Centurion Mk.I, SU-100 front line impressions, IS-2 front line impressions, Myths of Soviet tank building: early Great Patriotic War, Influence of the T-34 on German tank building, Medium Tank T25, Heavy Tank T26/T26E1/T26E3, Career of Harry Knox, GMC M36, Geschützwagen Tiger für 17cm K72 (Sf), Early Early Soviet tank development (MS-1, AN Teplokhod), Career of Semyon Aleksandrovich Ginzburg, AT-1, Object 140, SU-76 frontline impressions, Creation of the IS-3, IS-6, SU-5, Myths of Soviet tank building: 1943-44, IS-2 post-war modifications, Myths of Soviet tank building: end of the Great Patriotic War, Medium Tank T6, RPG-1, Lahti L-39, American tank building plans post-war, German tanks for 1946, HMC M7 Priest, GMC M12, GMC M40/M43, ISU-152, AMR 35 ZT, Soviet post-war tank building plans, T-100Y and SU-14-1, Object 430, Pz.Kpfw.35(t), T-60 tanks in combat, SU-76M modernizations, Panhard 178, 15 cm sFH 13/1 (Sf), 43M Zrínyi, Medium Tank M46, Modernization of the M48 to the M60 standard, German tank building trends at the end of WW2, Pz.Kpfw.III/IV, E-50 and E-75 development, Pre-war and early war British tank building, Available for request (others' articles): Shashmurin's career BT-7M/A-8 trials Voroshilovets tractor trials T-55 underwater driving equipment T-26-6 (SU-26) T-64's composite armour Light Tank T37 Light Tank T41 Oerlikon and Solothurn anti-tank rifles Evolution of German tank observation devices Jagdtiger suspension NEW
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# ? Mar 1, 2021 14:55 |
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Nebakenezzer posted:Just finished watching this: So, what were the reasons?
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# ? Mar 1, 2021 15:18 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 13:53 |
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Very cool! This in particular was a striking takeaway: quote:The hit rate was as follows: Though the focus was on the T80's fuel consumption, I didn't see much of a sense of how that fit into the context of the 70s USSR as a major oil exporter, or how fuel difficult/easy it was for the USSR to fuel their tanks in field conditions. I'd be interested in a comparison of the defensive capabilities but I have no idea how available that data is.
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# ? Mar 1, 2021 15:43 |