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Arquinsiel posted:As interesting as the parallel is for someone uninvolved in the situation that's far too recent for this thread man. It's just going to degenerate into bad feelings between posters, like it did earlier.
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Sep 5, 2014 04:46
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cheerfullydrab posted:This thread is dedicated to discussions about the times people group themselves into mobs to murder a bunch of other people, and the tools they use. It would be almost wrong if we didn't have some bad feelings sometimes. "No fighting in the war room"?
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Sep 5, 2014 04:51
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Well, I mean sometimes a country's rightful leader is deposed, it erupts into civil war, some territories that feel like being independent figure that this is their chance to have a go at it, and certain neighbours might be inclined to chop off a tasty morsel from the country that's too busy to defend itself. Naturally, I am talking about the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Russo-Polish war of 1919-1921.
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Sep 5, 2014 05:19
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Trin Tragula posted:The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > Let's Play! > World War I: Day-by-Day Arquinsiel posted:As interesting as the parallel is for someone uninvolved in the situation that's far too recent for this thread man. It's just going to degenerate into bad feelings between posters, like it did earlier. I think "Were there other historical situations where a country was trying to invade someone else without really trying to make it or call it an invasion?" is a legit question. We wouldn't be discussing the current situation in Ukraine beyond as a contextual backdrop.
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Sep 5, 2014 05:43
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gradenko_2000 posted:I think "Were there other historical situations where a country was trying to invade someone else without really trying to make it or call it an invasion?" is a legit question. We wouldn't be discussing the current situation in Ukraine beyond as a contextual backdrop.
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Sep 5, 2014 05:53
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The biggest problem about discussing recent events is that it summons roaming recent event discussers. And it's all downhill from there. Questions about Vietnam military: How did they manage to win so many wars after the Vietnam war? They ended the Kmer Rouge, they fought off China, and that's after a devastating civil war and conflict with France and USA. How? Also, how is their invasion of Cambodia seen today? From what I understood, it ended an act genocide that resulted in 2 million deaths or so.
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Sep 5, 2014 09:01
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gradenko_2000 posted:These continue to be fantastic! Please keep it up! So I've got a question. Are there any good English-language basic-overview books about theatres that weren't the Western Front? Any oral histories in translation? It's getting a bit annoying looking at the list of things that happened and going "don't know about that, don't know about that, don't know about that", and I'd like to be at least vaguely intelligent about things like the Isonzo, the Brusilov offensive, Serbia and Africa.
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Sep 5, 2014 12:03
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Well, Khmer Rouge was a mess as a regime, and the Vietnamese had Soviet support. China to some extent was not really trying, and in any case its military had degraded significantly since the Korean war. In general though, I'd say that the winners of civil wars tend to be really good at any immediately following international conflicts. Experience matters, as does all the reforms and streamlining that a civil war tends to lead to. See e.g. Alexander the Great's empire Roman imperial conquests Japanese invasion of Korea following the conclusion of the Senguoko Jidai British domination of Ireland under Cromwell Germany following the Spanish civil war Communist Chinese performance in the Korean war
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Sep 5, 2014 12:12
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Trin Tragula posted:So I've got a question. Are there any good English-language basic-overview books about theatres that weren't the Western Front? Any oral histories in translation? It's getting a bit annoying looking at the list of things that happened and going "don't know about that, don't know about that, don't know about that", and I'd like to be at least vaguely intelligent about things like the Isonzo, the Brusilov offensive, Serbia and Africa. I don't know if either of these have enough "view from the guys in the trenches" for you, but Norman Stone's The Eastern Front and Robert K Massie's Castles of Steel are both excellent basic-overview books about the Eastern Front and the war at sea, respectively. The latest thing I picked up from the former was that the Brusilov Offensive was so successful in part because a lack of manpower and materiel advantage forced the commanders in that southern sector to think outside the box: the offensive would have to be on a 30km-wide frontage at least to prevent it from turning into an easily-shelled-from-3-directions salient; reserves would have to be moved close to the front to allow for rapid exploitation of any gains, but also would have to be moved in secrecy to prevent the Germans/Austrians from identifying the schwerpunkt; likewise the initial attacking force would have to be as close as possible to the front to minimize troop fatigue on the way to the actual fighting, and so on and so forth. Many of the officers from Brusilov's staff, who also tended to be younger than their northern/center army group counterparts, would go on to be stars in the Red Army.
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Sep 5, 2014 12:35
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Arquinsiel posted:A while back it was strongly implied that people were actually being affected by the relevant events. If the thread wants to discuss it then it'll be discussed, but I'm just pointing out that the first lot didn't end well. It is also much harder to have a deep discussion of ongoing events. Most of the phenomena discussed in this thread have been studied for decades, centuries or even thousands of years, by dozens or hundreds of scholars. With current events we must resort to news, activists and various think tanks, and we can never be completely sure if their often unnamed sources don't have an axe to grind. On the other hand, trying to learn about current events based on history isn't controversial at all, even if drawing parallels to tactics used in Poltava 1709 or Russian Civil War might be misleading. One point of comparison that immediately comes to my mind are the Finnish 'tribal wars' of 1918-1922. After the Finnish civil war nationalist sentiments were high, and extremists wanted to add the Finnish speaking regions of Aunus (Olonets, or in Karelian Anus), Viena (White Sea) and Inkeri (Ingria or Ingermanland) plus the arctic harbour of Petsamo (Petjenga) to the new state, the latter because it had once been promised to Finland during the Grand Duchy in exchange for an ammo factory. Finnish government itself attempted to distance itself from such dreams because they had other worries like trying to get recognized by Britain and France, but didn't ban collecting funds and recruiting volunteers for various expeditions, and the expeditions were led by Finnish officers on leave (does this sound familiar?). Inkeri in particular was far fetched because it is located between Petrograd and Estonia and the expedition that landed there was promptly slaughtered. The Petsamo expeditions didn't go too smoothly either because they were outgunned by the "Murmansk legion" formed by Britain of Finnish civil war refugees who didn't want to join Russian bolsheviks. Meanwhile attempts to cut the Murmansk railway were unsuccessful as Russians could always bring in a trainload of troops to counter the meager Finnish forces that had to slowly plod through awful mud roads or ski through wilderness. The only actually successful acquisitions were the border villages of Repola and Porajärvi which were occupied by Finnish forces until the peace agreement of 1920 which gave Petsamo to Finland while Finland withdrew all forces from Karelia. 
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Sep 5, 2014 13:12
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Trin Tragula posted:Awesome stuff. You are awesome and your maps are awesomer.
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Sep 5, 2014 13:22
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I recently heard a very nasty piece of trivia. If you take ALL military casualties from European nations from 1814-1914, it does not equal the casualties from a single day of fighting during the large offensives of WW1 (Verdun, Somme). If true, that really puts those battles into perspective as to how they must have seen to the people of the time. Also, what's the consensus here about Douglas Haig? Arrogant general or butcher?
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Sep 5, 2014 14:57
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MA-Horus posted:I recently heard a very nasty piece of trivia. That's...hard to believe. I'm not sure where you'd find by-day numbers for each battle but being as there were about 400k casualties (casualties being defined as KIA or WIA, not captured) in the Franco-Prussia war alone I would place the odds of that being true at very, very long. quote:Also, what's the consensus here about Douglas Haig? Arrogant general or butcher? I made kind of an effort post about this some months ago; my conclusion is that he was a fairly competent though unexceptional commander who, like every other general in WWI, was beset by a very unfortunate combination of capabilities and limitations that made it very difficult to do anything other than what they did. A lot of Haig's reputation as a "butcher" was born in the 1960s, he was quite well regarded by his peers and contemporaries.
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Sep 5, 2014 15:27
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Nenonen posted:
I would disagree with this profoundly. There are tons of examples of historical topics that are still very, very politically controversial, especially when you try to hitch them to a current day political cause or event. Trying to examine the events of the early 20th century in the Levant to figure out who has the best, most equitably enforceable land claims today would be a prime example. That said, I do agree that directly (note this word, it is important) comparing contemporary events to events in the past is a fool's errand at best. Every event has a unique historical and cultural context and has to be viewed within that context. The Soviets peeling off parts of Poland in 1939 is very different from Putin playing grab-rear end with E. Ukraine today for all sorts of reasons. The fact that Poland isn't simultaneously overrunning W. Ukraine would be one of the more obvious ones. The fact that the current international political system isn't in the end stages of imploding would be another. All that is without even getting into the important stuff, like 2000 years of Ukrainians being Ukrainians and Poles being Poles and them having very different histories and historical relationships with their neighbors. Sometimes it can be instructive to look at a handful of case studies and search for patterns and similarities, but any time you try to draw a line of thought that goes "<lovely event now> is similar to <lovely event in the past> therefore <lovely outcome from the past> is likely" you get into really dicey territory. Remember: there is no reliable predictive component to the study of history. MA-Horus posted:I recently heard a very nasty piece of trivia. This is bullshit and it is trivially easy to figure out that it is. Just wikipedia any of the more major European campaigns from the 19th century. 138,000 Frenchmen died in the Franco-Prussian war. That is a purely KIA figure and it alone is 2x the total casualties (KIA, MIA, and WIA) for the Brits only on the first day of the Somme, one of the nastier pieces of single day slaughter in WW1. That said, there is a kernel of truth in the sentiment that the BS factoid is trying to evoke, namely that WW1 was a profound cultural shock to the people who witnessed it. The events of the 19th century led most to believe that future wars would be relatively quick and, while bloody, the casualties would be relatively low (compared to the millions dead in the 20-ish years of Napoleonic conflicts) simply due to the speed with which they resolved. WW1 was terrible in ways that most people today, even people who have been unlucky enough to have seen combat in western militaries, can't fully appreciate. It was a catastrophic event that led to tragedy on a scale that Europe hadn't seen since at least the 30 Years War, arguably precipitated even worse events 20 years later, and was was a major cultural shock to European societies that thought modern society had or would someday have scientific or industrial answers for all of the worlds ills. There is no need to exaggerate how bad it was for effect, it is already plenty awful. edit: I just re-read the above and realize it came across a bit harshly. My apologies, I'm not trying to directly attack anyone, I've just been doing a lot of lecture writing this morning and I'm very much in that kind of mindset right now.
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Sep 5, 2014 15:30
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Remember too that disease and infection from wounds or just poor quality of health used to half and half the Butchers list until the 20th century too! I personally hold the same sort of view reguarding Haig too. Considering the whole thing was a chaotic bloody mess alongside breakhrough and pioneering technologies it to me it seems pretty pointless playing the blame game. SeanBeansShako fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Sep 5, 2014 |
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Sep 5, 2014 15:33
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MA-Horus posted:I recently heard a very nasty piece of trivia. If we accept a million casualties for battle of Somme total then we get more than that from Crimean and Franco-Prussian wars alone.
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Sep 5, 2014 15:40
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is there a good book about the events in Germany 1918-1923 ? I'm re-reading Male Fantasies vol 1 and starting on vol 2 and realizing now how little of a grasp I actually have on the politics & factions of that period. The alliances seem to shift very dramatically. I'm interested in the military actions, not so much the economics or culture of this period. Just looking for books on "Weimar" turns up mostly cultural histories. also, this is outside Germany, I think, but why are the Freikorps fighting in the Baltic? Theweleit doesn't go much into actual military aims (since he's focusing on the Freikorps literature) shallowj fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Sep 5, 2014 |
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Sep 5, 2014 15:44
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I dug up my blurb on Haig for posterity's sakebewbies posted:I think that most criticisms of Haig and his contemporaries (I will include literally every senior commander involved in WWI in this because none of them are really any different from any other in this regard) are twofold: first, that they bore the responsibility for the static nature of the war because they were too stupid to figure out a way to attack anything successfully, and second, that they were responsible for an extraordinary number of casualties that could be traced back to their incompetence.
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Sep 5, 2014 15:58
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Are there any works regarding the weather effects (e.g. lofted particulates from fires for example) of WWI/II in the European theater? You always see the battlefields depicted under a lovely, overcast sky at best. Usually it's pissing rain. Pictures from the war occasionally depict a sunny day, but rarely do they depict a sunny day on the battlefield. They're usually showing sunlit ruins of cities. I assume this is largely a case of artistic license since it might draw the viewer out of engagement if they show a positively elysian plain stretching before a mass of charging/dying soldiers. I'm still intrigued, though. It seems like there might be some kind of seeding effect if you've got a bunch of soot and dust being blasted into the air over a relatively small area.
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Sep 5, 2014 16:09
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shallowj posted:is there a good book about the events in Germany 1918-1923 ? I'm re-reading Male Fantasies vol 1 and starting on vol 2 and realizing now how little of a grasp I actually have on the politics & factions of that period. The alliances seem to shift very dramatically. I'm interested in the military actions, not so much the economics or culture of this period. Just looking for books on "Weimar" turns up mostly cultural histories. You want JUST the military history? That's going to be some thin ground, mostly because you're looking at a bunch of intertwining military histories. There's no single volume on conflict in that era that I'm aware of. That said, my desktop go-to on the Frekorps as a general reference is Vanguard of Nazism. Keep in mind that at the same time you've got conflict basically all over E and SE europe. The Russian Civil War, the Russo-Polish war, various small conflicts in the balkans, all of E. Europe went pretty nuts. As for the Baltics that requires a bit of a longer answer. The short version is that the Baltics have always been quasi-german territory, going back to the Teutonic crusades. (edit: do not read this as an endorsement of anything, please. Between the various Baltic peoples, the Germans, and the Russians Baltic identity is complex to say the least, and in many ways comparable to the Balkans. I have a Latvian friend who would probably push my nose out the side of my face at the notion that the Baltics were German) There'd been a German minority there for centuries, and it was usually pretty wealthy and well established. Think the Hanseatic League, etc. Whether or not it existed as a pre-WW1 foreign policy goal is debatable, but it's pretty strongly established that once the war got underway at least expanding E. Prussia out to annex these areas became a pretty big issue for the Imperial German foreign office and the military. The administrative structure that they used in the occupied Baltics, for example, was completely different than how they ran WW1 occupied France and belgium and much more Imperial/Colonial in structure. If you want more on that I highly recommend War Land on the Eastern Front by Liulevicious. This, of course, all ties into why Brest-Litovsk was such a raw deal for the Russians. After WW1 the small arms situation in Germany was bug-gently caress nuts. Basically the whole imperial army walked home and self-demobalized in 1919, so people just had all sorts of crazy poo poo like heavy MGs, trench mortars, and light cannon sitting in whatever the german equivilant of a suburban garage was. It was so out of control that in an attempt to put a lid on the Freikorps poo poo the German government did a huge amnesty turn in where they offered a bunch of money for equipment. I forget the exact amounts, but I do remember they offered a couple hundred RM for MGs and in the low 4 figures for 75mm field guns - and had to pay out for that kind of ordinance. This was done in 1920 which is why to this day you see a bunch of WW1 era Lugers and G98s with "1920" stamped on the receiver above the actual date of manufacture; it was so that if they came across guns after the fact they'd know if they were leaking out of amnesty warehouses or if it was a weapon that was never turned in in the first place. It was also part of the general push to disarmament that led directly to the Kapp Putsch. Meanwhile the political situation in the Baltics was incredibly unstable and there were a lot of enterprising young vets who figured that they could carve out a chunk of the E. Prussian dream up there for themselves. Get together a bunch of demobilized vets, gather up some of that loose equipment, and march on up. gently caress, a huge chunk of the Iron Brigade and Freikorps Rossbach were made up of men who demobilized from the German army that was stationed in that area during the war. For a lot of them returning was a prelude to setting up a German-oriented government which would then either exist as a local entity ruled by the already-in-place Baltic German cultural minority or simply annex itself to the Weimar Republic if the political situation in Berlin came down in their favor. It seems a bit far fetched to us today, but they made a good go of it. They actually drove the Red Army out of the region, destabilized the gently caress out of the Latvian government, and would have probably had a credible go of things if the French and British hadn't finally leaned on Weimar so hard that they convinced the majority of them to come on back home. Not all of them did - a significant chunk just stayed up there and blended into the local Baltic German communities, others joined up with the anti-Bolshevik armies in the area. These guys had some serious firepower at their disposal. They had a no bullshit air wing - it was a considerably more sophisticated operation than a bunch of guys riding around in trucks with Mausers and MG08/15s fighting communists in the streets. All of this gets really interesting when you look at the Freikorps connections to the early Nazi party. Of course not all Freikorps guys were Nazis - Hitler rather famously had difficulties getting his local Freikorps on board for the Beer Hall Putsch - but a whole loving ton of the NSDAP OG Alte Kamraden cut their teeth in the Freikorps. Rohm, Himmler, Heydrich, that guy who ran Auschwitz (edit: Hoß? Something like that?). There is a very real, and I feel pretty compelling, argument that links the Nazi emphasis on eastward expansion to the "Drang nach Osten" sentiments that were embodied by a huge branch of the Freikorps movement. In particular there's been a lot of work recently on the resettlement campaigns of the early 40s where the Nazis tried to get as many ethnic German settlers as possible out to the Baltics in order to Germanize it, and a lot of that literature reads like a copy/paste of what the Freikorps guys were saying in the early 20s. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Sep 5, 2014 |
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Sep 5, 2014 16:15
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Here's the thing about Haig. He's nothing so much as a product of his time. For better or for worse, he's a shining example of the kind of man that the Victorian public-school ethos produced. A slightly strange man, but certainly one with a stiff upper lip, who believed in the Empire, and duty, and honour. The entire system of public schools, Sandhurst, the Army itself, and the cavalry within it, was set up to create and promote Haig and men like him, and he wasn't all that different from most of his contemporaries; certainly not the British ones. Certainly he was the only candidate to become Chief in 1915 once he succeeded in getting John French to carry the bag for Loos, and there was no obvious replacement for him through the end of the war. If you want to condemn Haig, you must be comfortable with condemning the entire system that produced him; it's unfair to single out any one individual when they're all products of the same system that produced men like him by design. I'm quite happy to do that, the British Empire was a rotten, oppressive, hypocritical bag of shite with no right to exist, a world leader in plunder and human rights violations for 300 years, and Haig is just one of the many carbuncles disfiguring its arse, and a relatively minor one at that, certainly when compared to those responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh or the Kenyan concentration camps.
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Sep 5, 2014 16:34
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Cyrano4747 posted:Freikorps stuff Yeah, this is why I find it hilarious the American right wing claim that the Nazis could have been stopped if only the German citizens had more guns to fight for freedom etc, and how this episode shows clearly the value of guns as a defense against tyranny...
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Sep 5, 2014 18:10
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Fangz posted:Yeah, this is why I find it hilarious the American right wing claim that the Nazis could have been stopped if only the German citizens had more guns to fight for freedom etc, and how this episode shows clearly the value of guns as a defense against tyranny...
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Sep 5, 2014 18:35
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Trin Tragula posted:So I've got a question. Are there any good English-language basic-overview books about theatres that weren't the Western Front? Any oral histories in translation? It's getting a bit annoying looking at the list of things that happened and going "don't know about that, don't know about that, don't know about that", and I'd like to be at least vaguely intelligent about things like the Isonzo, the Brusilov offensive, Serbia and Africa. I don't know how good it is but there's a book called Tip and Run by Edward Paice that came out in 2007 that I think fulfils your criteria for Africa. Any goons read it and would care to comment?
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Sep 5, 2014 18:54
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Having written all that above I feel compelled to point out to whoever it was asking for just the military history that you really, really can't study the military conflicts that took place in Central and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WW1 without also getting at least a passing familiarity with the political and cultural contexts that they took place in. Peukert's Weimar Republic is a pretty solid go-to on the basic history but there are entire libraries written about inter-war Germany that you can turn to. It's a really heavily researched period. Military history in general can't be lifted out and studied in isolation from the cultural and historical context within which the events that we like to sperg about took place, but that's doubly so for these small wars because they were usually fought by volunteers who were motivated by very specific agendas. You can kind of get away with looking at something like the Western Front in WW1 as a purely military affair since, ultimately, most of the people who are there are there because of the decisions of diplomats and statesmen. Not so much when you're talking about a few thousand dedicated communists shooting it out in some remote patch of woods with a few thousand nationalist conservatives from a country a few hundred miles away who came of their own accord. edit: and christ get into the true civil war situations and frankly you're better off pushing the battles to the side as an epilogue that just sort of happens, and steeling yourself for a heaping helping of trying to untangle a few centuries of bad blood and cultural conflict.
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Sep 5, 2014 19:05
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I think that's why WWII is so popular. There's a convenient narrative to set it up (Hitler bad, Japan bad, "enemy of my enemy") and then once that's gotten rolling you can forever roll around in the strict minutiae of tanks and rifles and tactics and pretend that Britain's experiences in WWI had absolutely no effect on Montgomery's command style once he hit the ETO or the aforementioned failure of Germany to fully utilise their workforce by excluding women etc. Many people do.
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Sep 5, 2014 19:12
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Thank you for the information on the Freikorps in the Baltic. so I'm assuming that region was claimed by the Soviets at that time? Is this part of why the Treaty of Rapallo so enraged a lot of (ex)Freikorpsmen? I was confused on this point, the wikipedia article implies Rathenau was murdered by the Organization Consul for signing the Treaty, but wasn't sure exactly why it was so important beyond the simple "ultra-nationalists get upset at any renouncing of territorial claims" So he was renouncing a German claim to a region many of them had already fought for, both before and after the war?
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Sep 5, 2014 20:47
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Finally, I too have historical drunken shenanigans to share! December 28th: Brigade scouts stole an accordion from drunken enemy officers in a restaurant in Narva.
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Sep 5, 2014 20:52
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shallowj posted:Thank you for the information on the Freikorps in the Baltic. so I'm assuming that region was claimed by the Soviets at that time? Is this part of why the Treaty of Rapallo so enraged a lot of (ex)Freikorpsmen? I was confused on this point, the wikipedia article implies Rathenau was murdered by the Organization Consul for signing the Treaty, but wasn't sure exactly why it was so important beyond the simple "ultra-nationalists get upset at any renouncing of territorial claims" So he was renouncing a German claim to a region many of them had already fought for, both before and after the war? Territorial claims between the Dnieper and the Vistula are a loving unbelievable mess between 1917 and 1922, hence the necessity for Rapallo in the first place. The really, really short version of it is that all the Freikorps guys were so mega-pissed about Rapallo because they were (virtually) all German military vets and they saw Brest Litovsk as being a binding surrender. Whatever else happened out west regarding ENgland and France, they had won in the east. As they saw it the settlement in the east was totally separate from the settlement in the west. France gets to declare herself victor in the west and take Alsace-Lorraine back? Fine, who needs it, we've just tripled the size of Eastern Prussia. And yes, they thought that they had re-secured and re-defended it after the war as well. The way many of them saw it, the central government had collapsed and a bunch of brave patriots had then marched east to keep the Russian Civil War from spilling over into a re-annexation of what used to be Imperial Russian territories in the baltics. A lot of them were banking on a German-dominated state out there, or annexation to the empire/republic once people back home figured out what the gently caress. The blanket renunciation of claims and agreement for everyone to walk away and leave the region to the various Baltic ethnicities was for a lot of them an almost worst case scenario. Wikipedia, but if you don't feel like plowing through books check out the entries on Ober Ost and the United Baltic Duchy for an OK tl;dr on the political situation out there ca. 1917-1922. edit: I guess the best way to kinda-describe this is to imagine how butthurt a lot of people would be if the South had won the civil war but then agreed to give up most of Texas. Not cutting the Texans loose to do their own thing, or back to the Mexicans, but to the Indians. Now imagine the general attitude of all the guys who had fought in the Texan War of Independence. It's a bad analogy but it gives you a bit of the flavor. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Sep 5, 2014 |
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Sep 5, 2014 21:56
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So my church, an old German immigrant parish, is having an Octoberfest a month early tommorrow (they do this every year to make it coincide with the pastor's birthday.) I'm making shirts 
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Sep 5, 2014 22:35
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Like the shirt but your parish is only doing Oktoberfest two weeks not a month early, as its name suggests.
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Sep 5, 2014 23:20
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mastervj posted:You are awesome and your maps are awesomer. I agree the maps are awesome but I cannot read "Rump BEF" without thinking "gently caress yes, please Rump BEF on rye with horseradish" and then I get all hungry  Reaching back to ironcladchat, can someone explain how the guns on the Monitor were reloaded? The guns are about 4/5 the diameter of the turret, and the only way I can geometrically see swabs and rammers being passed down them is if you run the rods out the shutters and then into the barrels. However, the shutters are always described as being closed during loading and I really can't see any way that it's possible to load them that way. Is this a lazy impression of the shutters' use in combat reloading, or were they only shut underway or something?
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Sep 6, 2014 01:45
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hogmartin posted:I agree the maps are awesome but I cannot read "Rump BEF" without thinking "gently caress yes, please Rump BEF on rye with horseradish" and then I get all hungry The Monitor's turret had a diameter of 20'. An 11in Dahlgren had an overall length of 13.5'. 
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Sep 6, 2014 04:33
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100 Years Ago There is precious little glory to be had on the Western Front of the Great War. The origins of the war itself are usually described as "dubious" at best. The vast majority of the battles consist in the popular imagination of hiding in trenches, getting eaten by lice, blown up by shells, gassed, ordered over the top to assault difficult positions, being patronised by callous generals, and all of it while wading through three feet of water (if you were lucky) or three feet of mud (if you weren't), and putting up with some romantic subaltern's fumbling attempts to deal with the horrors by writing poetry. None of this is glorious, or stirring, or makes a particularly exciting story, and this is generally an accurate picture. And then there's the Battle of the Marne. It has everything the rest of the war doesn't. Its entire existence is a last-ditch reversal of fortune, a final throw of the dice against a seemingly-unstoppable enemy. It's the French poilus with their backs to the wall, having been so heavily defeated in the early going, making their last bid to defend their homeland against an invading force. The battered BEF pulling itself off the canvas to once again play a small-but-crucial role in support of its ally. The weather is bright and dry. It's a naturally great story, a Hollywood ending to the tale of the German advance into France, a battle fought mostly in open country without time to dig more than the most rudimentary defences. Leaders of armies exchange emotionally-charged sentiments as battle is joined There's even a moment when it seems all is lost, before the good guys are saved by the most unlikely of reinforcements. If there is any kind of glory or honour to be won in this war, it happens on the Marne in September 1914. It begins in earnest today. The German 1st Army completes its redeployment and can now meet the French 6th Army in force. The 5th Army and the BEF are heading for the gap in the German line as quickly as they can march. Further east, the French 4th, 3rd and 9th Armies all advance and give battle. By the end of the day, fighting rages from Meaux in the west, all along the line of the River Marne (and its tributary the Ourcq), and as far east as Verdun and Nancy, to pin down the German Army and prevent them sending reinforcements west. The 6th Army is fighting as hard as it can on the line of the Ourcq (you try spelling it, it's a pain in the arse). Its commanders are painfully aware that they have to remain engaged long enough for their comrades to exploit von Kluck's temporary lowering of his lederhosen, but the battle is fierce and they're losing men fast. They need reinforcements from somewhere to maintain the pressure, and the only "where" available is the Paris defensive garrison under General Gallieni. He's more than willing to commit his men, but they're nearly two full days' march away, and by then von Kluck could be secure enough to pull his pants back up. The railways are full to bursting, and there are still men who can go forward. Also today, in Serbia (remember them?), the Battle of Drina opens. Someone did a nice blog post about the Austro-Hungarians getting hilariously and unceremoniously turfed out of Serbia at the battle of Cer in mid-August. Cer closed on August 24th, and now A-H is back to deliver the receipt (attacking Serbian positions on and in front of the Drina river); however, the initial attacks are successfully resisted by the Serbians.
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Sep 6, 2014 07:04
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 but that image is from Passchendaele!
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Sep 6, 2014 07:21
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Morholt posted:
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Sep 6, 2014 07:43
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I wanted to get a Fischer was Right tshirt but I was sure no one would get that.
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Sep 6, 2014 07:51
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StashAugustine posted:I wanted to get a Fischer was Right tshirt but I was sure no one would get that. Who wouldn't want this mug on a t-shirt ?  And a good excuse to wargame an amphibious landing in the Baltic in late 1915. Oddly enough, Fischer and Rickover look remarkably similar. 
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Sep 6, 2014 07:59
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StashAugustine posted:I wanted to get a Fischer was Right tshirt but I was sure no one would get that. HAIG DID NOTHING WRONG
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Sep 6, 2014 11:22
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hogmartin posted:I agree the maps are awesome but I cannot read "Rump BEF" without thinking "gently caress yes, please Rump BEF on rye with horseradish" and then I get all hungry Well, design wise they may have had just enough space to work rammers and such. But during the Monitor's battle with the Virginia, her shutters were jammed and the turret was too hard to start and stop, so they just kept it spinning so the guns would fire and turn away from the enemy while they loaded.
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Sep 6, 2014 19:36
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