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mllaneza posted:No deaths. Goddamn, that is some resourceful thinking in that crew. "Sure we'll have to close off half the boat to avoid chlorine gas, but if we time it right we'll end up with enough of the stern above water to cut an escape route with cold chisels and other hand tools." Badass factor 1000 after this quote: quote:"What ship?"
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Oct 31, 2014 17:09
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Yeah... yeah, I'd say that's pretty hardcore.
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Oct 31, 2014 17:12
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Any reason for Germans in particular? Artillery was the biggest killer in both world wars wars, iirc A disturbing thought occurred to me that a German Jewish soldier who got shot in World War I was more likely to die in the Holocaust than to die from that gunshot wound. I want to verify if that's accurate, since I've seen that 25% of German casualties were fatalities but I haven't seen a breakdown by injury type.
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Oct 31, 2014 17:21
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Slavvy posted:SPA 505
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Oct 31, 2014 17:49
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100 Years Ago There are some events in war that just beggar belief. You read about them, and you simply can't understand how the actions being described led to the situation that came after them. Every account seems to contain a row of giant question marks somewhere in the middle, where the gnomes successfully turned stolen underpants into profit, and they're not telling anyone how they did it. The critical intervention of the 2nd Worcesters at Gheluvelt is surely in this category. A tiny band of grubby, hairy-arsed Brummies win the most improbable of victories, when it seems that all the Germans have to do to win the battle and break the British line beyond hope of repair is to just keep walking up the Menin Road. Again, it's less "we won!" and more "we didn't lose!", but the consequences of losing this one would have been greater than most. It's also Saturday, by the way, and that means our weekly appointment with Mrs Eric Pritchard, custodian of the Telegraph's "A Page for Women". She's keeping the home front up with the latest developments in hat-fashions and jam. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Oct 31, 2014 |
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Oct 31, 2014 18:31
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This is a gigantic hypothetical but out of interest, given the nature of the USSR at that time, what would have become of Konstantin Rokossovsky if somehow, Operation Bagration had been a failure? I may be running into old WW2 USSR myths again but I was under the impression that the Soviets (and later to an extent, the Germans) were really harsh on failing officers? I may just be getting with stuff like the purges and the early days of Barbarossa.
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Oct 31, 2014 20:57
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:Can you provide the definition of destroyed by crew vs. enemy activity as given by the author? There are very clear-cut scenarios in either category (i.e. took a shell through the turret vs. completely broken down during a hasty retreat so its was blown up), but what about more muddled scenarios? A crew which detonates their own tank because they're in danger of being outflanked and can't be extracted by a recovery vehicle, for example. Would the author put that down to "enemy activity", because they have somehow lost mobility through damage and enemy movement prevents recovery, or is it "destroyed by crew" because a crewmember places a detonator so the tank isn't given away? An informative post by the way, thank you. There are much more detailed breakdowns where the losses are listed by date with a more specific explanation. My quick and dirty guesstimate puts about half of all 'destroyed by crew' as being because of running out of petrol. A good chunk are also because the tank gets stuck in a ditch/breaks down somewhere and they have no way of recovering it. A large proportion of losses due to enemy activity are because of artillery. To answer your question, 'enemy activity' seems to mean that the tank was destroyed directly by the enemy or simply abandoned and presumed to be captured/destroyed. Arquinsiel posted:This last bit makes me wonder how many Tigers "just broke, I swear Hauptmann!". Self ignition is mentioned like a dozen times across a bunch of battalions, I poo poo you not. An excerpt of badassery: 7 April 1944: 2 Tigers (Bolter and Goring) rush to the endangered 8 Jager-Division near Wadrino; a third tank is damaged by artillery. The enemy is supported by 30-35 tanks and assault guns. Within two hours, Bolter knocks out 15 enemy vehicles and Goring claims another 7. A third Tiger (Unteroffizier Sperling of the 3./schwere Panzer-Abteilung 502) destroys 2 more tanks but is knocked out himself by an ISU-152. 30 minutes later, the remaining Soviet tanks withdraw and the Tigers are resupplied. Only Bolter's tank is fully operational. 4 more antitank guns are destroyed. After 89 kills, Leutnant Bolter is awarded the Knight's Cross.
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Oct 31, 2014 20:57
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Slavvy posted:An excerpt of badassery: I have to wonder what percentage of those kills actually took place.
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Oct 31, 2014 21:01
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If you follow general practice of command, 50%. And likely many of those vehicle kills were upsized for propaganda purposes.
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Oct 31, 2014 21:05
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SkySteak posted:This is a gigantic hypothetical but out of interest, given the nature of the USSR at that time, what would have become of Konstantin Rokossovsky if somehow, Operation Bagration had been a failure? I may be running into old WW2 USSR myths again but I was under the impression that the Soviets (and later to an extent, the Germans) were really harsh on failing officers? I may just be getting with stuff like the purges and the early days of Barbarossa. (A) How on earth would Bagration have failed? From a strategic point of view, the disparity in force is insane. It would require a grotesque show of incompetence. (B) Assuming Rokossovsky didn't literally sabotage the operation, I doubt he would have seen very negative consequences. The Soviets were not that harsh on high level commanders. The purges happened ahead of the war, and was based on perceived disloyalty, not incompetence. Soviet doctrine accepted the existence of failed attacks, in any case. If a breakthrough was not obtained, an attack would at least cause attrition on the enemy, or cause him to divert resources elsewhere. Even Zhukov had several such failures. By 1944, Rokossovky had gotten himself into Stalin's good books. So Stalin isn't going to forget that in an instant.
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Oct 31, 2014 21:15
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wdarkk posted:I have to wonder what percentage of those kills actually took place. It seems reasonably honest, often entries like that are followed by four tanks being abandoned because of breakdowns/running out of gas the next day. It's really pretty depressing to read, like however well they fight they always end up just losing the tanks to circumstance and getting killed/captured. You're probably right though.
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Oct 31, 2014 21:25
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Slavvy posted:It seems reasonably honest, often entries like that are followed by four tanks being abandoned because of breakdowns/running out of gas the next day. It's really pretty depressing to read, like however well they fight they always end up just losing the tanks to circumstance and getting killed/captured. You're probably right though. I mean, a few days prior featuring these same people: quote:30 March: A Soviet battalion composed of women attacks, followed by several tanks. The soviet army was relatively egalitarian, but not *that* egalitarian. There were no battalions of women. This is bullshit. You can probably believe stuff about tanks being lost, but other stuff? Like crew-claimed tank kills in areas taken by the enemy that are clearly unverifiable, and are linked directly to promotion and advancement? Not really credible at all, not without corresponding Soviet records showing massive losses in the area. I believe the corresponding Soviet operation here is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Narva_%281944%29 and I find it rather incredible that the soviets lost 10% of their overall losses over the course of the entire operation, before the main phase of the offensive, to two tanks, in a few hours.
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Oct 31, 2014 21:42
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"I fired at the tank and then it wasn't there anymore so clearly I killed it."
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Oct 31, 2014 21:45
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SkySteak posted:This is a gigantic hypothetical but out of interest, given the nature of the USSR at that time, what would have become of Konstantin Rokossovsky if somehow, Operation Bagration had been a failure? I may be running into old WW2 USSR myths again but I was under the impression that the Soviets (and later to an extent, the Germans) were really harsh on failing officers? I may just be getting with stuff like the purges and the early days of Barbarossa. Rokossovsky was a bit of a special case because he'd been purged for about 5 years before getting back in the military. He was steadfastly loyal to Stalin though, so if he had bungled something catastrophically he probably would have been demoted, not put back into prison. The purges were a political tool, they weren't a punishment for government employees. Can't say for after the war though. Fangz posted:You can probably believe stuff about tanks being lost, but other stuff? Like crew-claimed tank kills in areas taken by the enemy that are clearly unverifiable, and are linked directly to promotion and advancement? Not really credible at all, not without corresponding Soviet records showing massive losses in the area. The monstrous Soviet casualty tally in that article is sourced to a book that is apparently ludicrously rushed and filled with nonsensical typos. I wouldn't surprised if the original sources were a bunch of German war logs.
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Oct 31, 2014 22:04
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SkySteak posted:This is a gigantic hypothetical but out of interest, given the nature of the USSR at that time, what would have become of Konstantin Rokossovsky if somehow, Operation Bagration had been a failure? I may be running into old WW2 USSR myths again but I was under the impression that the Soviets (and later to an extent, the Germans) were really harsh on failing officers? I may just be getting with stuff like the purges and the early days of Barbarossa. Zhukov had this little adventure, and he did fine afterwards. Smaller scale of course, but still.
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Oct 31, 2014 22:04
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wdarkk posted:"I fired at the tank and then it wasn't there anymore so clearly I killed it." I saw a ridiculously high Ferdinand unit kill claim against an infantry unit with only anti-tank guns. Kill claims in general are very iffy things.
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Oct 31, 2014 22:25
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Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago Tiny point but, Apparently General Lomax didn't actually die til 1915?
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Oct 31, 2014 22:32
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tankchat posted:
Further proof that there can be no objective historical reality (or at the very least not one that can be recovered), just various interpretations of variously flawed evidence.
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Oct 31, 2014 22:37
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the numbers, they are meaningless!
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Cyrano4747 posted:Further proof that there can be no objective historical reality (or at the very least not one that can be recovered), just various interpretations of variously flawed evidence. Yeah, but broadly I think overcounting kill claims is much more likely than undercounting casualties. At the end of the day, the local Soviet commander needs to explain to his higher-ups why a chunk of his tanks aren't there any more, and why he needs a ton of reinforcements ahead of the next attack. And like I pointed out, stuff like supposedly fighting an all-woman battalion suggest that log is full of exaggeration and/or distortion.
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Oct 31, 2014 22:42
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Fangz posted:Yeah, but broadly I think overcounting kill claims is much more likely than undercounting casualties. At the end of the day, the local Soviet commander needs to explain to his higher-ups why a chunk of his tanks aren't there any more, and why he needs a ton of reinforcements ahead of the next attack. And like I pointed out, stuff like supposedly fighting an all-woman battalion suggest that log is full of exaggeration and/or distortion. I broadly agree, but just for the sake of having a conversation, I can see casualty claims getting under-counted for political reasons, especially in a non-democratic system where the population at large doesn't really need to have a full accounting of where their sons went and where it's more possible to downplay losses. Think some of the games the Soviets played with Afghan war casualty numbers, especially early on. NOW filter that through 60+ years of data loss and whatever the current archival situation is, plus potential translation issues if we're talking about a historian estimating losses based on foreign (to him at least) records.
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Oct 31, 2014 22:49
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feedmegin posted:Tiny point but, It took him that long to die of his wounds, but he was mostly incapacitated, was almost certainly not going to recover, and spent the rest of his life in a nursing home. Close enough for jazz.
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Oct 31, 2014 23:03
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wdarkk posted:"I fired at the tank and then it wasn't there anymore so clearly I killed it." The wreck probably despawned, clearly showing that I killed it.
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Oct 31, 2014 23:06
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Cyrano4747 posted:I broadly agree, but just for the sake of having a conversation, I can see casualty claims getting under-counted for political reasons, especially in a non-democratic system where the population at large doesn't really need to have a full accounting of where their sons went and where it's more possible to downplay losses. Think some of the games the Soviets played with Afghan war casualty numbers, especially early on. Would the people whose sons are on the front be seeing those casualty records? Overclaiming kills is very useful for internal politics and is effectively free. Underclaiming losses comes at a severe cost as far as getting replacements goes, and in paperwork for internal use that wouldn't get distributed outside the miltary and government, I don't see much of a cost to being honest on casualty counts because that's important information.
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Oct 31, 2014 23:54
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Underclaiming casualties means that you hopefully get food and supplies (and, in an earlier era, maybe even more modern ones too, money) for all the men you say you have, so the men you actually have can get a bigger share. If I'm remembering right, in the Soviet system, units only received replacements when they were withdrawn from the line to rest and refit, rather than having replacements trickled in more or less continuously like the US military did during WWII. With such a scheme for replacements, it makes perfect sense to leave dead men on the muster rolls while on the line because to report them is just telling HQ you have less mouths to feed, not "send us more men".
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Nov 1, 2014 00:18
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Pornographic Memory posted:Underclaiming casualties means that you hopefully get food and supplies (and, in an earlier era, maybe even more modern ones too, money) for all the men you say you have... quote:...so the men you actually have can get a bigger share.
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Nov 1, 2014 00:24
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JaucheCharly posted:The wreck probably despawned, clearly showing that I killed it. The game says I have 18 kills but I got hatemail for only 3 of them.
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Nov 1, 2014 00:25
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JaucheCharly posted:The wreck probably despawned, clearly showing that I killed it. This is pretty close to the system used for calculating hits from the AP bombs used at Pearl Harbor. Basically they assumed that if you could see a flash, it's the bomb hitting something like the ground or water and making a crater rather than a hole. If you can't see the flash, it means that the bomb penetrated something. The effect of duds on this scoring system is left as an exercise for the reader.
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Nov 1, 2014 00:26
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Pornographic Memory posted:Underclaiming casualties means that you hopefully get food and supplies (and, in an earlier era, maybe even more modern ones too, money) for all the men you say you have, so the men you actually have can get a bigger share. If I'm remembering right, in the Soviet system, units only received replacements when they were withdrawn from the line to rest and refit, rather than having replacements trickled in more or less continuously like the US military did during WWII. With such a scheme for replacements, it makes perfect sense to leave dead men on the muster rolls while on the line because to report them is just telling HQ you have less mouths to feed, not "send us more men". This is a dumb theory because then you'd just be asking for all kinds of trouble. "Yes Comrade Major, our company is at 130% strength so we need extra rations!" *company (actually four men and a dog) gets to pave way in the next assault*
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Nov 1, 2014 00:33
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Pornographic Memory posted:Underclaiming casualties means that you hopefully get food and supplies (and, in an earlier era, maybe even more modern ones too, money) for all the men you say you have, so the men you actually have can get a bigger share. If I'm remembering right, in the Soviet system, units only received replacements when they were withdrawn from the line to rest and refit, rather than having replacements trickled in more or less continuously like the US military did during WWII. With such a scheme for replacements, it makes perfect sense to leave dead men on the muster rolls while on the line because to report them is just telling HQ you have less mouths to feed, not "send us more men". That works if the unit you are attached to doesn't have a Commissar, whose loyalty is not to you, but to the party. Stealing from the party ensures a very limited lifespan. If you somehow managed to mitigate his loyalty to the party with excess vodka rations, the next time you're executing joint recon with a unit you've been assigned to cooperate with, lots of difficult questions are going to be raised. From what I've seen, that isn't the case (at least with tank units, reinforcements are sent to join their comrades that have already taken up positions). Even if it was, telling your superiors that your tank platoon is down to a cardboard box and a steering wheel is likely to get you withdrawn for reinforcements. The Red Army was big on mobile reserves. If you form a hole, they could plug it. Ensign Expendable fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Nov 1, 2014 |
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Nov 1, 2014 00:58
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Nenonen posted:This is a dumb theory because then you'd just be asking for all kinds of trouble. "Yes Comrade Major, our company is at 130% strength so we need extra rations!" That'd make good TV though. 
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Nov 1, 2014 01:17
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Fangz posted:The soviet army was relatively egalitarian, but not *that* egalitarian. There were no battalions of women. This is bullshit. They're clearly time-travelers from the 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death.
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Nov 1, 2014 03:07
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Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago Would the result have been any different if it had failed? The Germans advance another 10km and then what? If Ypes falls, considering it's almost surrounded anyway, is that actually going to make much difference?
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Nov 1, 2014 03:10
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Bit of a guess here, but a salient takes a fuckton of men to properly enclose lest it become a breakin, which becomes a breakthrough, which becomes an "OH gently caress RUN AWAAAAAAAY!" and suddenly you've lost the war.
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Nov 1, 2014 06:53
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Saw Fury today. I was expecting something around a seven on the one to Windtalkers scale. I got Windtalkers.
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Nov 1, 2014 07:45
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Arquinsiel posted:Bit of a guess here, but a salient takes a fuckton of men to properly enclose lest it become a breakin, which becomes a breakthrough, which becomes an "OH gently caress RUN AWAAAAAAAY!" and suddenly you've lost the war. Well it was the allies steadfastly holding on to the salient, there must have been something in there worth protecting. I suspect it's railways, it's usually railways.
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Nov 1, 2014 07:49
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Is there anywhere I can find out how orders were conveyed at Waterloo (no comments about waving hats, please) - things like what rank of officer had access to how many couriers, mounted or on foot, and how long messages could realistically be, and how likely it was that messages went missing, any accounts of messengers having misfortune befall them en route, or officers straight-up ignoring orders,, and whether couriers rode/ran back to their original commander (with a reply?) or stayed with the commander they just delivered to. I realise this is oddly specific and vague at the same time, but I'm interested in the mechanisms of pre-radio large-scale warfare, and given its prominence, Waterloo seemed like a good place to start getting numbers etc.
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Nov 1, 2014 08:16
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Comstar posted:Would the result have been any different if it had failed? The Germans advance another 10km and then what? If Ypes falls, considering it's almost surrounded anyway, is that actually going to make much difference? AFAIR Trin Tragula mentioned that there are no natural obstacles beyond Ypres for a fair bit, so a breakthrough here would send the Allied line far, far back, and that could turn a retreat into a rout and seriously complicate the situation. The Germans could advance far further than just 10km, we might be looking at a repeat of August on a smaller scale.
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Nov 1, 2014 10:24
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Someone mentioned Michael Wittmann earlier. Dude was a reckless clown who got preposterously lucky one time, then got his men massacred a short time later because, as I said, he was a reckless clown.
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Nov 1, 2014 10:50
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There's two considerations here; loss of territory, and loss of men. On the grandest of scales, we're almost certainly still going to see an unbroken line from Switzerland to the coast somewhere and the start of trench warfare - there's too many French reserves who can eventually find their way north. It'll probably take another month or so for the front to finally settle, but it's not like this is a war-winning battle. However. The BEF at the moment is truly approaching its final breaking point. Attacks around Armentieres a few days ago had to be called off because the men who were supposed to be launching them were literally falling asleep in the trenches while waiting for the signal to advance. This might be stating the obvious, but blokes who are that tired don't march or fight very well, even after a day or two of sleep. Let's be pessimistic and say it takes the Germans until November 3 to take Ypres itself; there's a very real possibility that even if they get prompt orders, the units holding the southern parts of the line might not physically be able to retire quickly enough to avoid being flanked or encircled (the attacks in their sectors would almost certainly have been renewed during an advance to Ypres). The Indian Corps is still relatively fresh and professional, though unused to the ground and weather conditions, but most every other unit is either green-as-hell Territorials, or exhausted and massively below strength, or both. Not to mention that if they retire, they have to leave the half-decent trenches that they've been enjoying recently (and were only barely able to hold when under attack), and fight from much more vulnerable positions. There isn't the vast network of reserve lines and then reserves to the reserve line which made it so hard to break through in 1915; the Engineers are hard-pressed enough maintaining the ditches that exist without trying to dig new ones. There's a very real chance that regardless of what happens in regard to territory, the BEF could take so many casualties that it can no longer function as an effective fighting force. In terms of territory, it seems relatively easy to say "oh yes, the Germans would inevitably then have occupied the Channel ports (they're about three days' march from Ypres), and the front would have then settled down somewhere between the line of the Canche and the Somme", on a rough line Abbeville-Amiens-Peronne-Noyon. What people tend to forget when doing these counterfactuals is that there are a lot of French and Belgians north of Ypres. If the Germans can spare enough men to turn north as well as south and take the French part of the salient in the rear as they advance, their prospects are better; if not, that's a lot of men who have to be dealt with and aren't just going to sit and watch, even though they'll probably be cut off from the supply lines. Either way, all this is certainly going to have some kind of effect on the further course of the war. In 1915 the German strategy was basically to stand on the defensive in the west and let the Allies hang themselves up on the barbed wire, while large numbers of men were sent east to fight Russia and keep the Austrians from tying their shoelaces together. This came about at least partly because there were no successes in the west after the Marne; if Ypres can be presented as a victory, that changes the internal German politics. It's very feasible that the Germans could actively attempt to defeat France in 1915, and you can argue all day and all of the night about what would have happened. So many assumptions about the war were solidified by First Ypres that if you change its character, you're probably changing the lessons learned by all sides; this is just one of them. And, with the BEF being given a drat good kicking, you have all kinds of future questions. Does the rump get withdrawn from the Continent? How does this affect future Allied war planning? Does it mean Britain prioritises sending troops to alternative fronts, or getting boots back on the ground in France? Where do they go? What do the French think of all this? How punchy does the German navy get when it can potentially operate from the Channel ports and the Grand Fleet is stuck in Ireland while anti-submarine defences are built at Scapa Flow? Does Sir John French get the tin tack? Who takes over if he does? Haig's no longer the obvious candidate if he's failed to defend Ypres (there's a non-zero possibility that he gets killed in action while organising some last-ditch line of cooks and bakers and candlestick makers somewhere near Hellfire Corner). Would he even have become a better commander for having been decisively beaten? There's a million of these. (If you asked me to follow the rabbit hole just a little further, I think there's a non-zero chance of Joffre insisting that if a new BEF is sent over, it should fall under his direct command and not operate independently; at which point London goes "yeah right", and instead commits to opening other fronts where they can't be bullied into giving their train set to a bigger boy with a better moustache.) In any case we're chest-deep in counterfactuals, so I'll leave it there; but yes, it was absolutely vital for the line to hold because we're still at a stage of the war where a breakthrough can have major consequences on its future direction.
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Nov 1, 2014 11:55
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xthetenth posted:Would the people whose sons are on the front be seeing those casualty records? Overclaiming kills is very useful for internal politics and is effectively free. Underclaiming losses comes at a severe cost as far as getting replacements goes, and in paperwork for internal use that wouldn't get distributed outside the miltary and government, I don't see much of a cost to being honest on casualty counts because that's important information. The biggest reason to be "honest" with stuff like that is that it is a huge feeder into intelligence (or at least it was at one point). Overclaim all you want for propaganda purposes, but in classified intelligence discussions you HAVE to be honest if you want anything approaching a useful estimate. The best example I can think of for this is the Battle of Britain. German intelligence was consistently atrocious throughout the battle; one of its biggest blunders was taking pilot kill claims unmodified as the basis for assessing the strength of the RAF. This tended to get worse the larger the action; it eventually got bad enough that on several days, the Luftwaffe claimed more kills than the RAF had put planes in the air. This in turn meant that, when their intel guys would plot out a line chart dissecting RAF losses, it would always say "RAF will cease to exist by X date". They'd then promulgate this information to commanders, who would tell their pilots, who would be happy, until the next day when the RAF would have a robust response to their raid. It had a serious impact on morale and planning both and was a big contributing factor to the Luftwaffe's defeat. "The last 50 Spitfires" became kind of a morbid joke among bomber crews, as they were repeatedly told the RAF was down to just 50 planes, but those 50 planes kept fighting for over a month without apparent loss. The RAF on the other hand was a bit more restrictive with claims, but they still publicly reported amusingly inflated kill numbers (my favorite was claiming 185 on "Battle of Britain Day" versus the real number which was like 60), but for their intelligence purposes they tended to underestimate things. This discrepancy wasn't released until after the war.
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