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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Rondel daggers came about in a time when the bits of mail protection started becoming really small. You can stab somebody through a mail shirt with a straight sword or larger dagger, but if you're trying to stab somebody under the arm pit you need a more specialized dagger. that was smug and insulting as hell without bothering to answer the question. I know what a free imperial city is. hit the bricks, jerk. rich italian burghers bought and sold land, improved it with irrigation and drainage, and treated it like an investment like modern capitalists. Or, they rented through long-term cash leases to prosperous renters who had then got an interest in improving their leaseholds, like modern farmers. They had access to credit from sophisticated banks. why didn't rich german burghers do that? They had the same kind of banks.
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Mar 10, 2023 16:01
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Adam Tooze has a lecture about agriculture in interwar Germany which answers some of the questions people are asking https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...DJxDK-zT5cJS2Tg
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Mar 10, 2023 16:59
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distortion park posted:Every time I see a picture of a modern soldier in gear it looks like it must be exhausting just to move around and do basic poo poo. I guess it was even worse back in the iron/steel armour days though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-bnM5SuQkI come for the guy running a full marathon and going up a rock wall in plate, stay for the pleasing trills of old french
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Mar 10, 2023 18:10
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DTurtle posted:As the person on the other side of that argument, I brought it up in the context of the current war in Ukraine and the irrelevance of the population difference between Russia and Ukraine. Ah, yeah, I hope you don't mind my bringing it here but I was genuinely uncertain where things stood factually, and in any event an argument about WW2 would have been a derail over there. I will say though that it seemed strange to say that manpower wasn't an issue at all during WW2 and the statistics about German deaths vs German population seemed a bit odd - yes, it might be a relatively small percentage of overall population but I imagine the statistics about the percentage of men of the traditional fighting age generation would look a good deal more skewed (and for that matter aren't Russian and Ukrainian demographics currently kinda funky-looking specifically because of that lost generation during WW2?). I was aware also from Tooze that German industry had constant labor shortages at the factories as well, made up with foreign conscripts from conquered territories. But I could also see the argument that industrial production was what prevented more divisions in the field, so...yeah, that's why I brought it here.
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Mar 10, 2023 18:17
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Part of the issue with manpower shortages is that you really, REALLY don't want to be handing every single guy in your country aged 18-30 a rifle, just for purely economic reasons and the associated military reasons. If you find yourself handing a rifle to a 28 year old skilled machinist who up until yesterday was making the rifles, you're in a bad situation. Same thing with farm labor, same thing with all the misc bullshit like clerks and store keepers and bus drivers that makes your civilian economy work. You can replace some of this labor with women or older workers, of course, but there are limits to that, mostly having to do with skills transfers. Sure, you can grab Rosie and train her to rivet in a couple of weeks, but unless she's been trained as a machinist for a few years you're not going to effectively replace the guy who has been making all the complex cuts for your greebles. If you're in a society with more gender parity and women in the workforce to begin with this isn't as huge a problem, of course, but if we're talking 1940 and you're trying to grab secretaries and housewives for factory work it's a consideration. Another option is to replace this labor with, well, slave labor, aka part of the German solution. That has its own set of problems even beyond being ethically and morally monstrous and indefensible. Put bluntly those aren't the most enthusiastic workers, and that's on top of any skill transfer problems you have. But even if you've managed to pull an Oskar Schindler and grab a bunch of skilled labor out of the Krakow Ghetto, you're still fundamentally dealing with people who don't want to be there. And, again, this isn't just the small percentage of extremely, highly skilled workers. You reach a point where basic poo poo starts falling apart and you can't train non-military-aged-male replacements fast or effectively enough. You see the economic impacts of manpower squeezes long before you actually run into problems getting dudes in trenches holding rifles. So really the crucial question isn't what the size of your draftable male population is, the crucial question is how much surplus labor do you have in that population. My grandfather is a good example. He joined the Army in 1940 because being a sharecropper loving sucked, the pay was pretty good for someone who never finished middle school, and he got free food. That's pretty much the platonic ideal of who you want in your military.
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Mar 10, 2023 18:30
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Tomn posted:Ah, yeah, I hope you don't mind my bringing it here but I was genuinely uncertain where things stood factually, and in any event an argument about WW2 would have been a derail over there. I will say though that it seemed strange to say that manpower wasn't an issue at all during WW2 and the statistics about German deaths vs German population seemed a bit odd - yes, it might be a relatively small percentage of overall population but I imagine the statistics about the percentage of men of the traditional fighting age generation would look a good deal more skewed (and for that matter aren't Russian and Ukrainian demographics currently kinda funky-looking specifically because of that lost generation during WW2?). I was aware also from Tooze that German industry had constant labor shortages at the factories as well, made up with foreign conscripts from conquered territories. But I could also see the argument that industrial production was what prevented more divisions in the field, so...yeah, that's why I brought it here. something like 1/3 of military aged German males died in WWII
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Mar 10, 2023 18:36
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I also think there's some serious misplaced causation. The German army didn't fall apart in 1945 because it was fighting in Germany and losing areas from which it could recruit, it fell apart in 1945 because the army in the West was torn apart in Normandy and the army in the East was torn apart in Bagration and Germany had no ability to reconstitute those formations. I'd also take issue with the description of the Wehrmacht being at its peak in 1944. I think the broad consensus is that it was never more powerful than when it launched Barbarossa in 1941, and every year thereafter it became less and less powerful as units become hollowed out and the force gradually demotorised.
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Mar 10, 2023 18:53
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Siivola posted:Okay so my bad, yes, obviously the rondel dagger solves the problem of there being armour in the way. Rondel daggers were developed for ergonomic reasons, not that they were the only way to pierce mail. You can pierce mail with anything with a good point, like a straight sword or a quillon dagger. But it's one thing to get a good stab on a guy who's entire torso is protected by mail, vs a guy who's pits are the only thing protected by mail. Trying to pin a guy down and stab him in the mailled armour actually became a common expectation for fighting somebody in conventional armour, and the old weapons became unwieldy. Rondel daggers are named after the large round handle, the blade is not particularly different. It lets a person get a better hold on the dagger, particularly if they're wearing thick gauntlets. If you are grappling with a guy and trying to stab him in the pit, which was accepted martial art in that day, it handles better than a quillon dagger and especially a sword. Plate is more or less unpiercable with melee weapons unless you get a big swing in with a specialized weapon. Greg12 posted:that was smug and insulting as hell without bothering to answer the question. I know what a free imperial city is. hit the bricks, jerk. You asked a question, but framed it around first confirming your wrong presuppositions, which was too annoying to answer politely. Like I said, Italy had even smaller average farm sizes around WWII, so whatever you suppose they did differently 600 years earlier, it had nothing to do with the problem of small unproductive modern farms.
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Mar 10, 2023 20:13
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Finland might also be an interesting data point here. During the 1941 offensive phase of the Continuation War, the degree of mobilization (including women) was some 16 % of the population, or 660.000 people. This meant that the industry lost approximately 50 % of its male workforce, and agriculture some 70% of the male workforce. Metal works were the best off, losing only some 10 % of the male workforce. The labor shortages were so bad that the army had to constantly juggle temporarily demobilizing people to meet needs of the agriculture, while not endangering the situation at the front. For the fall harvest of 1941, the calculus was basically "we need to demobilize between 5 and 10% of our military just or people will start starving." Note that this is just the agricultural sector. Come winter, it was the forestry sector that needed tens of thousands of men, and then you need even more labor to build fortifications etc. etc.
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Mar 10, 2023 20:25
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Alchenar posted:and every year thereafter it became less and less powerful as units become hollowed out and the force gradually demotorised. If that's what you wanna call eating the horses on the Eastern Front. In seriousness, the Heer was never fully motorized, and while it became more demotorized as time went on, even at its peak a significant chunk of mobility was provided by horses.
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Mar 10, 2023 20:31
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Tomn posted:Ah, yeah, I hope you don't mind my bringing it here but I was genuinely uncertain where things stood factually, and in any event an argument about WW2 would have been a derail over there. I will say though that it seemed strange to say that manpower wasn't an issue at all during WW2 and the statistics about German deaths vs German population seemed a bit odd - yes, it might be a relatively small percentage of overall population but I imagine the statistics about the percentage of men of the traditional fighting age generation would look a good deal more skewed (and for that matter aren't Russian and Ukrainian demographics currently kinda funky-looking specifically because of that lost generation during WW2?). I was aware also from Tooze that German industry had constant labor shortages at the factories as well, made up with foreign conscripts from conquered territories. But I could also see the argument that industrial production was what prevented more divisions in the field, so...yeah, that's why I brought it here.  My position isn't that manpower isn't important or isn't an issue. My position is that the population in a total war scenario has almost never meant that a country simply wasn't able to put warm bodies on the front line any more (War of the Triple Alliance possibly being an exception). Population is still important, because you do need people working in the factories, on the farms, etc. I know that that sounds really drastic and counterintuitive, but I will deliberately keep it that drastic. Please somebody cite examples of that position being wrong. I think that some counterexamples can help refine that position. Cyrano4747 posted:[...] Alchenar posted:I also think there's some serious misplaced causation. The German army didn't fall apart in 1945 because it was fighting in Germany and losing areas from which it could recruit, it fell apart in 1945 because the army in the West was torn apart in Normandy and the army in the East was torn apart in Bagration and Germany had no ability to reconstitute those formations. I said that the size of the German military was at its peak in 1944. Depending on the exact time, that might be untrue (1943 might be a tiny bit bigger), but production of military equipment hit its peak in 1944. How that translates into military "power" is of course a lot more fuzzier, as then things like training, etc. come into play. However, Germany was still able to mobilize an astounding number of people in 1944 and even 1945. Granted, especially in 1945 they were scraping the bottom of the barrel, but that still meant millions of people being mobilized (and killed). Typo posted:something like 1/3 of military aged German males died in WWII  That is deaths by cohort/year of birth. DTurtle fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Mar 10, 2023 |
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Mar 10, 2023 20:36
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Alchenar posted:I'd also take issue with the description of the Wehrmacht being at its peak in 1944. I think the broad consensus is that it was never more powerful than when it launched Barbarossa in 1941, and every year thereafter it became less and less powerful as units become hollowed out and the force gradually demotorised. I agree with this. Even in the 30's, the Nazi party was making fairly short-sighted policies -- basically, trading long-term economic resilience for short-term growth and military power. You can only do that for so long before your economy falls apart. And when your economy is dysfunctional, your ability to support an effective military is substantially reduced. As an example, when Germany conquered France, it pillaged the French rail system for cars and engines, because it desperately needed those vehicles to run its own (decrepit) internal system. No rails makes it extremely hard to move goods and people (especially, military equipment and soldiers) around inside your country. However, by stealing all those French vehicles, Germany also crippled the French economy, which in turn meant that they now had an entire country, that they were notionally responsible for, which was unable to support itself or contribute meaningfully to the war effort. I also agree with Cyrano's statements about the difficulty with sourcing manpower. You generally want your economy to be running at near the limits of its productive capacity...but that also means that nearly every person in that economy is doing something important that you'll lose out on if you have them be a soldier instead. There's only so much "slack" in a country's population that you can convert into military manpower, and it's not as much as you'd think. If you do have a substantial base of un- or under-employed people, then that suggests that your economy probably isn't strong enough to support them all as soldiers anyway...you'd be better off drafting those people and then putting them to work on farms or factories. In an existential, total war scenario, you can boost your fighting population at the cost of future economic capability. You don't care if there's nobody left to make rifles, if the war is going to end one way or another before your current stockpiles run out. But that's really not a bet you want to be making.
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Mar 10, 2023 20:38
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Cyrano4747 posted:You can replace some of this labor with women or older workers, of course, but there are limits to that, mostly having to do with skills transfers. Sure, you can grab Rosie and train her to rivet in a couple of weeks, but unless she's been trained as a machinist for a few years you're not going to effectively replace the guy who has been making all the complex cuts for your greebles. If you're in a society with more gender parity and women in the workforce to begin with this isn't as huge a problem, of course, but if we're talking 1940 and you're trying to grab secretaries and housewives for factory work it's a consideration. Doesn't this actually make the problem worse, or at least creates a new problem? When women are integrated into the workforce, there no longer is a reserve of able but non-working adults. When you take a guy out of a factory, sure, there are trained women who can do his job, but it's one less worker without anyone who could replace him.
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Mar 10, 2023 20:54
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I'm not sure what you're asking.
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Mar 10, 2023 21:02
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If it's 1940 and you need to take riveters to the front, Rosie, who is otherwise unemployed (ignoring for the moment her household obligations, which she almost certainly has in spades), can come in and take over Jim's job. The factory still operates on 100% of its pre-war workforce numbers. If it's 2023 and you need to take riveters to the front, Rosie can't take over for Jim because she'd already been working there anyway. The work that Jim would do has to be divided between other employees or left undone. (Obviously they can recruit the people who had been unemployed before, but those people are also getting drafted, so from the standpoint of an economy this resource is as limited as any other.)
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Mar 10, 2023 21:13
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Tevery Best posted:If it's 1940 and you need to take riveters to the front, Rosie, who is otherwise unemployed (ignoring for the moment her household obligations, which she almost certainly has in spades), can come in and take over Jim's job. The factory still operates on 100% of its pre-war workforce numbers. Implicitly this means that there was an option available back then ("get women into the workforce") which has, so to speak, already run its course and cannot be easily repeated, because it isn't like there's another 50% of the population in any given age bracket doing non-industrial work.
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Mar 10, 2023 21:21
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Tevery Best posted:If it's 1940 and you need to take riveters to the front, Rosie, who is otherwise unemployed (ignoring for the moment her household obligations, which she almost certainly has in spades), can come in and take over Jim's job. The factory still operates on 100% of its pre-war workforce numbers. Ah, when I said " this isn't as huge a problem" above I was talking about the retraining issue. If you have a theoretical society where there is full gender parity in all professions, yet you are still determined to only have men in combat, then you have a chunk of your population buffered from being pulled out. Basically your exposure to the problem of the men being mobilized is lower. If you have 100 machinists, all male, and they all get drafted you now have 0 machinists. If you have 100 machinists, half male half female, and all the men get drafted you now have 50 machinists.
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Mar 10, 2023 21:24
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A huge factor you need to consider here is well is the political and domestic economic considerations. From a thousand yards up and pretending things work like Hearts of Iron you can shift productive and military capacity around on sliders - in reality civilian business is going to be extremely annoyed if the army comes knocking on the door asking for half their staff, and depending on the current economic situation people might not be terribly keen on moving to the factories. A good example of the latter is the Nazis not wanting to dip into the pool of getting rural women into the workforce in a bigger capacity - on the one hand they were mostly already working to capacity anyway because of the aformentioned inefficiencies in German agriculture, but rural farmers were also a key constituency in the Nazi party base of support, and especially earlier on the war (before the fall of France) the Nazi's grip on power was actually fairly precarious and they couldn't afford to alienate their base. Even later there was something of a reluctance to impose hardship on certain sectors. The US in WWII was also a good example, where lots of decisions were made in tandem with business to determine just how much of the country's productive capacity and manpower would go to the army vs civilian business; a key concern for the USA specifically because they were not really in danger of being invaded and so did not have the existential threat to mobilize people in the same way other countries did. One concrete impact of this is that the US Army originally planned to draw up 215 divisions but ended up trimming that down because 1. this would murder the civilian economy by draining out all the workers and 2. the US was primarily limited by shipping so couldn't do anything useful with that many divisions anyway. At the end of the day the primary concern in all of this is how invested your population is in the war. Push your population too hard by imposing too much hardship and drafting too much of the populace and you're liable to end up like Germany in 1918. WWII can often be a bad trend-setter here, since in most cases wars are not existential fights to the death and so at some point, people are going to question whether more economic chaos and sending their sons off to war is really worth it versus a distasteful negotiated settlement.
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Mar 10, 2023 22:20
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Loezi posted:Finland might also be an interesting data point here. During the 1941 offensive phase of the Continuation War, the degree of mobilization (including women) was some 16 % of the population, or 660.000 people. This meant that the industry lost approximately 50 % of its male workforce, and agriculture some 70% of the male workforce. Metal works were the best off, losing only some 10 % of the male workforce. The labor shortages were so bad that the army had to constantly juggle temporarily demobilizing people to meet needs of the agriculture, while not endangering the situation at the front. For the fall harvest of 1941, the calculus was basically "we need to demobilize between 5 and 10% of our military just or people will start starving." Note that this is just the agricultural sector. Come winter, it was the forestry sector that needed tens of thousands of men, and then you need even more labor to build fortifications etc. etc. Comparing the numbers of the Finnish Army in 1939/40 and 1941 the latter paints a number of a pretty extreme level of mobilisation. But aside from the offensive phase of Operation Barbarossa and the Soviet offensive in 1944 for the Soviets the North Western Front was a relatively quiet one so there was room for a partial demobilisation. Like my great-grand-father was in for 1939/40 and 1941 and was sent home in 1942, perhaps because he was in his 40s and an industrial worker. Paternal grandfather was not demobilised but had help assigned to his farm.
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Mar 10, 2023 23:38
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The Lone Badger posted:Ok this one is confusing me. What's the difference in sharpening between a self-defence sword and a murder sword? It's not a million miles away from the arguments I've seen about what kind of gun you should or should not carry for self-defense today, but that's a modern-day  . Unless Cyrano et al have some juicy early 20th century examples I guess?Slim Jim Pickens posted:Rondel daggers were developed for ergonomic reasons, not that they were the only way to pierce mail. You can pierce mail with anything with a good point, like a straight sword or a quillon dagger. But it's one thing to get a good stab on a guy who's entire torso is protected by mail, vs a guy who's pits are the only thing protected by mail. Trying to pin a guy down and stab him in the mailled armour actually became a common expectation for fighting somebody in conventional armour, and the old weapons became unwieldy.
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Mar 11, 2023 09:52
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I've been reading about the Battle of the Atlantic in WWII and was wondering: what did convoy ships traveling outbound from the UK carry? Inbound cargo ships would obviously carry raw material, resources, war material, etc. I would guess that you have some ships heading towards different theaters of war and carrying needed material, weapons, etc., but what about ships going back to USA or Canada? Was there anything that the UK still regularly exported to North America? Or were many of the ships empty, and if so, did U-Boats generally avoid attacking westbound convoys? I would guess that passenger and troop ships would carry returning solders, civilians, POWs, etc. on the return journey, so my question is really focused on cargo ships. Another tangential question: I'm looking for good books on the high level decision making for BdU in the Battle of the Atlantic and COMSUBPAC in WWII in the Pacific. For the former, it looks like there are several books about Doenitz which might fit the bill. Any recommendations? On the latter, it looks like Vice Admiral Lockwood, COMSUBPAC for most of WWII, wrote a book: https://www.amazon.com/Sink-Em-All-Submarine-Warfare/dp/1985395959/. Is this book any good? Or does anyone have any other recommendations?
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Mar 11, 2023 23:58
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Cyrano4747 posted:Ah, when I said " this isn't as huge a problem" above I was talking about the retraining issue. If you have a theoretical society where there is full gender parity in all professions, yet you are still determined to only have men in combat, then you have a chunk of your population buffered from being pulled out. But military drafts are based on quotas to fill, no military actually drafts 100% of all available manpower. So in truth, a society with total gender parity using your example would draft 50% of men and women to get the same number of soldiers, and then you'd end up with 50 machinists, half of them men, half of them women. There's not actually a difference.
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Mar 12, 2023 00:28
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HisMajestyBOB posted:I've been reading about the Battle of the Atlantic in WWII and was wondering: what did convoy ships traveling outbound from the UK carry? Even empty ships would need ballast to be seaworthy. In some cases bombed ruins were the most available ballast, and they found use on the other side of the pond. https://jalopnik.com/how-the-ruins-of-europe-built-a-major-road-in-america-1487127149
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Mar 12, 2023 00:49
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Most ships in convoys heading west were empty (or 'in ballast' - bomb rubble was commonly used, as mentioned, and British civil authorities were glad to get rid of it,). There was a small but steady flow of foodstuffs from India, Australia and New Zealand which came to the US east coast via the UK, having travelled the long way around the world via the Cape of Good Hope. Some ships (such as refrigerated cargo liners, modern motor ships and the later turbine-powered Victory ships) had the speed and range when unladen to be allowed to travel independently across the Atlantic westbound, so the convoy traffic was not balanced in each direction. Later in the war the Allies were quite good at utilising large merchant ships so they were not travelling empty where possible. A ship might carry cargo eastbound from America to the UK, partially unload and take on a different cargo there, take that to West Africa, load with more cargo there and at the Cape, then take that to Iran, and so keep working eastward, always with cargo, until it ended up back on the US east coast and so didn't have to make up a westbound convoy. U-boats were officially told to prioritise eastbound convoys but westbound ones were still freely targetted: the U-boats were out to sink merchant tonnage, and the aim was to sink ships quicker than they could be replaced and so disrupt Britain's supply that way, not just by destroying the supplies in transit. That arithmetic was nixed by the Liberty Ship, which could be built with such little investment in materials, manpower and time that each one was considered to have fulfilled its purpose if it successfully made a single laden eastbound crossing. What happened to it after that was really not relevant to the grand Allied strategy.
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Mar 12, 2023 01:22
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Was any of the random ballast-rubble from something cool, and if so did they save it?
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Mar 12, 2023 03:20
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The discussion is a little frustrating because its working from a REALLY special case - WW2 - and trying to pull general rules from that specific case. "Manpower reserves" is a somewhat flexible concept as has been highlighted, with the people you're throwing into the meatgrinder ranging from "the poor fools who volunteered for this in the first place" to "unskilled but healthy men" to "oh no we're using men who we probably need in factories" to "I'm not fully confident this man can fight given his age" and even keeps going. And its only as discrete as your administrative ability to distinguish categories, which is going to change a lot, but ultimately the thing that's kind of frustrating is that wars are not generally fought like WW2. Usually surrender negotiations start well, well before "running out of men" really becomes a concern. Running out of the poor fools who volunteered early, sure, but running out of even "strapping young men who can be coaxed with a warm bed and promises of glory" is usually well after you're trying to surrender. The fact that Nazi Germany was not the sort of country that does that is part of what makes them so unusual.HookedOnChthonics posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-bnM5SuQkI This is so cool, everyone watch it, 10/10.
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Mar 12, 2023 03:37
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Tulip posted:The discussion is a little frustrating because its working from a REALLY special case - WW2 - and trying to pull general rules from that specific case. "Manpower reserves" is a somewhat flexible concept as has been highlighted, with the people you're throwing into the meatgrinder ranging from "the poor fools who volunteered for this in the first place" to "unskilled but healthy men" to "oh no we're using men who we probably need in factories" to "I'm not fully confident this man can fight given his age" and even keeps going. And its only as discrete as your administrative ability to distinguish categories, which is going to change a lot, but ultimately the thing that's kind of frustrating is that wars are not generally fought like WW2. Usually surrender negotiations start well, well before "running out of men" really becomes a concern. Running out of the poor fools who volunteered early, sure, but running out of even "strapping young men who can be coaxed with a warm bed and promises of glory" is usually well after you're trying to surrender. The fact that Nazi Germany was not the sort of country that does that is part of what makes them so unusual. Yeah, it goes to show how utterly hosed up industrial warfare really is. There aren't many examples before world wars where general demographics played such an important calculus in the outcome. French revolutionary wars/Napoleonic wars maybe, but those lasted for decades and really introduced the concept of mass national conscription for the first time. Later maybe the War of Triple Alliance? I don't know much about American Civil War, but I remember reading about how late in the war Confederates were playing around with the idea of conscripting slaves. That would show how desperate they were for manpower because you'd thing that arming slaves would be a huge risk and ideological compromise for them. Second Punic War is often talked about in this context, how Romans lost entire armies but wouldn't surrender and just built another to send against Hannibal in a war of attrition. Would be extremely interested in seeing estimates on effects of Second Punic War to Roman demographics, but that is of course really difficult to do because we are talking about ancient events. But I do know that it was the first time that Romans started to really loosening the restrictions in recruitment for legions, even if it was temporary. But even then, Romans weren't willing to give full rights to their allies and subjugated Italian tribes, and that really bit them in rear end when they started defecting to Carthaginians. It wouldn't be until Social War and Marian reforms before Romans started expanding their pool of potential manpower. Glah fucked around with this message at 11:06 on Mar 12, 2023 |
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Mar 12, 2023 10:52
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Watching The Fiddler on the Roof, and there's this shot of the russian army Those cigar-shaped things... is that gun powder plus some ammo?
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Mar 12, 2023 17:14
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busalover posted:Watching The Fiddler on the Roof, and there's this shot of the russian army A Georgian UFC fighter last night was wearing some traditional garb with nearly identical ornamentation on the chest. Maybe it's a Cossack thing? Not the pic or robe from last night, but similar enough for discussion: /cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22227428/1266531431.jpg)
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Mar 12, 2023 17:29
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazyr
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Mar 12, 2023 17:34
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Siivola posted:I'm not 100% sure but there was an English fencing guy by the name of George Silver, who wrote a whole tirade against rapiers around the time of Elizabeth, and his opinions may have reflected attitudes of the time. If I recall correctly, he argued that a) thrusting really is more often fatal than cutting, and therefore a thrusting weapon is meant to kill people efficiently, whereas a cutting sword can be used to disable your opponent and b) the fencer with the longer rapier has an advantage, so if you're going around with a particularly long rapier you're looking to win duels, which means you're expecting a fight and your game plan is to kill whoever steps up to you. I'd be careful about taking Silver at face value. His description of the rapiers he's criticising doesn't match up with Vincenzio Saviolo's book, who he calls out by name. I agree with him that cutting is safer than thrusting, but among fencers the opinion is split. I mainly cut with some thrusting with a broadsword. People who are more experienced with rapier or smallsword/foil think thrusting is safer. I think in the case of rapier, thrusting is safer. Savlator Fabris recommends thrusting right up to the hilt when you stab someone in the chest. At that point, your opponent would have a hard time getting you with their own rapier due to the length.
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Mar 12, 2023 18:51
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Hazzard posted:I'd be careful about taking Silver at face value. His description of the rapiers he's criticising doesn't match up with Vincenzio Saviolo's book, who he calls out by name.
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Mar 12, 2023 19:02
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Hazzard posted:I think in the case of rapier, thrusting is safer. Savlator Fabris recommends thrusting right up to the hilt when you stab someone in the chest. At that point, your opponent would have a hard time getting you with their own rapier due to the length. I think you are speaking of different kinds of safety. Siivola's argument is that you should use cutting in a duel, so your opponent becomes hurt and incapacitated, but they will not die. You are talking about thrusting the sworn all the way through the opponent, so they will die for certain and won't be able to use their own sword to attack you.
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Mar 12, 2023 19:03
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Saukkis posted:Siivola's argument is that you should use cutting in a duel, so your opponent becomes hurt and incapacitated, but they will not die.
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Mar 12, 2023 19:08
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It's been a while but IIRC there are also some pretty different judicial differences in areas where dueling is outlawed for "we caught you dueling, bad nobles, bad don't make me get the rolled up newspaper" and "you murdered The Honorable Lord Fussybottoms"
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Mar 12, 2023 19:08
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busalover posted:Watching The Fiddler on the Roof, and there's this shot of the russian army Saul Kain explained what those are. But even if those started as tubes of ammo and powder, I suspect by the era of the picture those are only decorative, I hope the cossacks wouldn't be carrying around actual gun powder.
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Mar 12, 2023 19:10
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Saukkis posted:Saul Kain explained what those are. But even if those started as tubes of ammo and powder, I suspect by the era of the picture those are only decorative, I hope the cossacks wouldn't be carrying around actual gun powder. I hope that Merab was carrying actual gunpowder tho
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Mar 12, 2023 19:12
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Sorry, I just realized I left out the conclusion from the post Hazzard quoted above. I think there was a moderately widespread opinion that saw the long thrusting sword as a weapon meant for murder, and the shorter sword with more edge and less point as a more legitimate self-defence weapon.
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Mar 12, 2023 19:13
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Russia moved entirely to smokeless powder rifle cartridges by the end of the 19th century, so past that they should be decorative. Certainly Wrangel wasn't walking around with a chest full of ammo either way.
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Mar 12, 2023 19:15
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Siivola posted:Sorry, I just realized I left out the conclusion from the post Hazzard quoted above. That Spaniards (awful, evil, not to be trusted) carry extra long swords is enough of a trope to set up a punchline in late 17th century English theatre.
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Mar 12, 2023 19:15
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