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Personally, I'd love to see a movie covering all of that from the view point of a few Red Army conscripts and NCO's through the years.
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Nov 20, 2015 18:37
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SeanBeansShako posted:Personally, I'd love to see a movie covering all of that from the view point of a few Red Army conscripts and NCO's through the years. Well, my dream thing is basically a sprawling Red Army At War tv series following the careers of Rokossovsky, Zhukov, and say, Aleksandra Samusenko.
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Nov 20, 2015 18:41
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feedmegin posted:Well, not necessarily forced to fight for the Germans, in reality. I mean, the Soviets had already annexed their country once just a few years earlier, it was pretty obvious that it wasn't going to be sunshine and butterflies there after the Germans were defeated. There were volunteers, but most of the Balts in the Waffen SS were conscripted. The US Displaced Persons Commission in September 1950 declared that: "The Baltic Waffen SS Units (Baltic Legions) are to be considered as separate and distinct in purpose, ideology, activities, and qualifications for membership from the German SS, and therefore the Commission holds them not to be a movement hostile to the Government of the United States."
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Nov 20, 2015 18:42
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Ensign Expendable posted:Correct. Infantry goes in front of the tanks to sniff out AT guns and obstructions. The best way to support infantry for a tank is to knock out MG nests from behind, not serve as a fairly narrow shield. That said, armored sleds being towed behind a tank is a sweet way to swiftly transport infantry very quickly during the winter. Could you make a post about those sledges?
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Nov 20, 2015 18:51
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Fangz posted:Well, my dream thing is basically a sprawling Red Army At War tv series following the careers of Rokossovsky, Zhukov, and say, Aleksandra Samusenko. Oh god yes, even if it just highlights a few moments from each mans career that'd be good enough for me too.
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Nov 20, 2015 18:52
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While i'm here, a little elaboration on what would happen after the assault i described in my previous post. The initial push is only the beginning of the day for the Soviet dudes assaulting that trench, there is very little point to taking a trench and then stopping there for tea and crumpets. If they manage to reasonably secure a decent length of the trench, what would happen is a few squads would stay there to provide flank security, they would report their success to headquarters, and the rest would climb on the tanks and drive on. Part of the goal is to try and find juicy targets like artillery parks or local headquarters, but the main thing is to keep the Germans from just running back behind the next hill and plan their asses there. Their job is to go and secure a corridor a couple of kilometers wide and as deep as they can into the enemy lines, sweeping any residual resistance and proceed to dig in to the side of the corridor a few kilometers down the line to keep nearby units from closing the gap. They would then provide security while mobile reserves (TANKS!) would proceed down the gap they created and prevent the Germans from blowing up the supply trucks that will soon follow if the tanks are to keep moving.
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Nov 20, 2015 18:58
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Cyrano4747 posted:I'm actually a tad impressed by that, at least on an equipment level. Especially by the fact that the show the Germans using a mix of soviet weapons in there. I know I spotted at least one SVT40 and a PPSh41. Still disappointed the tank guns are just firing little puffs of white smoke with no simulated recoil or anything. I think for Beast of War they used water in front of blank shells to better simulate the actual appearance of a tank gun firing.
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Nov 20, 2015 19:50
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Apparently my step-grandfather was an air gunner on bomber planes during WWII (Red Army). Given his recent health issues (and the fact that he's 95), if I want to ask him anything, now is probably as good a time as any. Anything you guys in the thread would like to know? General questions worth asking?
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Nov 20, 2015 20:07
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Ensign Expendable posted:The best way to support infantry for a tank is to knock out MG nests from behind, not serve as a fairly narrow shield. That said, armored sleds being towed behind a tank is a sweet way to swiftly transport infantry very quickly during the winter. Eh, who needs the hassle of getting a sled? Just pile everyone up on there, maybe leave a handle on the tank if you're feeling generous.  How much do infantry march long distance these days anyways?
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Nov 20, 2015 20:10
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Xander77 posted:Apparently my step-grandfather was an air gunner on bomber planes during WWII (Red Army). Given his recent health issues (and the fact that he's 95), if I want to ask him anything, now is probably as good a time as any. Dumb question, but how often was he in position to actually use the turret gun? Was there a specific training they received or was it just "You there! Get in the turret and shoot anything vaguely Nazi looking!"
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Nov 20, 2015 20:18
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Xander77 posted:Apparently my step-grandfather was an air gunner on bomber planes during WWII (Red Army). Given his recent health issues (and the fact that he's 95), if I want to ask him anything, now is probably as good a time as any. Did he see any combat? How were they trained to shoot targets, potentially at high deflection? Did it get cold/boring/whatever? What did they do for most of the mission? How much did they interact with the other aircrew, and crew of other planes?
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Nov 20, 2015 20:20
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Xander77 posted:Apparently my step-grandfather was an air gunner on bomber planes during WWII (Red Army). Given his recent health issues (and the fact that he's 95), if I want to ask him anything, now is probably as good a time as any. Where did he serve and on how many sorties was he on?
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Nov 20, 2015 20:20
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Davin Valkri posted:But the way Kafouille describes how the battle should go sounds pretty cool and cinematic as is? It really wouldn't be remotely cinematic. We're talking about ranges measured in hundreds of meters and thousands of men spread out over a vast area, you can't just conveniently stand in one spot and see everything that's going on. I think that any large scale battle post-ww1 is virtually impossible to represent in a meaningful way in a movie, the scale is too big and spread out for you to get a neat summarised view of a bunch of dudes in a paddock fighting the way you can with romans or knights or w/e.
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Nov 20, 2015 20:23
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Tias posted:Care to elaborate? I mean, I know Russia didn't win just by throwing endless hordes of men at their quarry, but apart from that and rehabilitating their general staff, it's still kind of indistinct what exactly turned the tide for the Red Army for me. WW2 aside, I'm pretty sure "holy poo poo a horde of Asiatic Russians are coming to overwhelm and kill us all" was a pretty big dogwhistle going back well into the 19th century.
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Nov 20, 2015 20:58
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:WW2 aside, I'm pretty sure "holy poo poo a horde of Asiatic Russians are coming to overwhelm and kill us all" was a pretty big dogwhistle going back well into the 19th century. I'm not sure why it was a dog whistle, the Czars armies were enormous and were a major planning consideration for every European power
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Nov 20, 2015 21:30
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bewbies posted:I'm not sure why it was a dog whistle, the Czars armies were enormous and were a major planning consideration for every European power They weren't that big.
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Nov 20, 2015 21:34
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horde of asians is such an old racist trope, too: "there's more of them than there are of us" + "we don't understand their cultures so they must be robots/insects/a hive mind"
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Nov 20, 2015 21:37
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Look at those savage Slavics with their big hats and silly language, I bet they aren't very good at war.
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Nov 20, 2015 21:51
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my dad posted:They weren't that big. The German planning prior to WWI was literally pissing themselves at the possibility of fighting the 'Russian steamroller' to the point the entire reasoning for gambling everything on knocking out France first was because they considered defeat inevitable unless they did so; they estimated something like 18,000,000 Russian soldiers based on various statistics.
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Nov 20, 2015 21:55
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Raenir Salazar posted:The German planning prior to WWI was literally pissing themselves at the possibility of fighting the 'Russian steamroller' to the point the entire reasoning for gambling everything on knocking out France first was because they considered defeat inevitable unless they did so;
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Nov 20, 2015 22:03
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my dad posted:They weren't that big. And yet Russia had far greater capacity to (re)build armies than most European nations. Peter lost a whole army at Narva but poo poo happens, he bounced back and took Narva four years later, then crushed the Swedish army and brutalized the Finnish provinces. Meanwhile Charli XCX lost his army at Poltava and it was game over man. Sure, he got back to Sweden and went campaigning again before becoming KIA, but there was no chance of returning to pre-Poltava era for Sweden.
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Nov 20, 2015 22:26
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sweden's tiny though and had been punching above its weight forever thanks to french money and a psychopathic level of ambition, compare russia to an actual country like france or an empire like spain
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Nov 20, 2015 22:35
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Xander77 posted:Really? Even after 1904? An army's quality may be kinda piss-poor, but that can be fixed in time, and meanwhile a large population is forever. If I recall aright at least one of the reasons (some) German generals were gung-ho for kicking off the war was because they reasoned "Well, the Russians may be kinda poo poo now, but they're starting to get better and if we don't kick their teeth in now there'll be no stopping them once they've finished preparations." I don't think anyone was expecting the Russians to be quite as poo poo as they actually were, though.
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Nov 20, 2015 22:37
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I mentioned this in the GBS China thread, but some some of the contemporary English writers I've been reading like TT Meadows were frightened that the end result of the Taiping rebellion would be an anarchy that would let the Russians move in and set up the czar as the new emperor. At that point, the "fundamentally Asiatic" character of the Russians would allow them to easily integrate with China into an unstoppable Eurasian juggernaught.
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Nov 20, 2015 22:52
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Hogge Wild posted:There were volunteers, but most of the Balts in the Waffen SS were conscripted. The US Displaced Persons Commission in September 1950 declared that: "The Baltic Waffen SS Units (Baltic Legions) are to be considered as separate and distinct in purpose, ideology, activities, and qualifications for membership from the German SS, and therefore the Commission holds them not to be a movement hostile to the Government of the United States." That should be taken with a really big loving grain of salt. Yes, a lot of the Baltic formations were conscripts, but there were also a lot of volunteers. More importantly in the late 40s all those Baltic SS guys who ran the gently caress west became political refugees from the USSR and the communist puppet states that they had under their control. The US was not at all discerning in who they brought over and protected and a lot of no bullshit war criminals and people involved in the Holocaust ended up American citizens as a result. Of course the whole subject is intensely complex. A lot of the guys who signed up did so because the Soviets treated them like absolute poo poo in 1940. We're talking disappearances, siberian deportations, mass graves, just generally making GBS threads on the countries. On the other other hand a lot of those guys also weren't exactly too sympathetic towards Jews and ended up doing some pretty nasty poo poo on the path to making the Baltics judenfrei. My best friend from grad school wrote his dissertation on the Latvian SS, so I picked up a lot along the way. Both of his grandfathers were Latvian SS. He's done a lot of work looking at both why people like that got into it and what they did when in service. My knowledge is second hand, but I've spent at least a couple dozen hours talking with him about this stuff over beers in the last decade. At the end of the day the Baltic SS units are probably no more and no less dirty than any average Wehrmacht unit that spent a lot of time on the Eastern Front, but their post-war rehabilitation was all about giving shelter to people who didn't like communists and who still had family and contacts in the old country, rather than a true assessment of whether they did lovely things in the war. edit: to add another wrinkle to the whole thing the Soviets in the mid-late 40s were demanding all DPs in Western Europe who were from countries that were now in their area of control be returned to their countries of origins. That went really ,really loving poorly for some groups who had fought against Stalin and who ended up shipped back to his tender mercies. SO not only do you have the Cold War logic for giving those guys a pass to be relocated to the US as refugees, but you have a pretty rational belief that sending them home is akin to a death sentence. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Nov 20, 2015 |
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Nov 20, 2015 22:54
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Xander77 posted:Really? Even after 1904? The Russian Empire made massive gains possibly as a result of the debacle with Japan and it only made them scarier to the Germans.
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Nov 20, 2015 23:04
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18th and 19th century folks were prone to vaaaastly overestimating the wealth and size of distant empires. Hell, the Russian Empire used to think that Montenegro was a heckuvalot bigger and stronger than it really was (because, surely, they must be powerful if they're capable of fighting off the Ottoman Empire on their own!) resulting in some hilarious political hijinks, including, but not limited to, Montenegro being taken over by a man pretending to be tzar Peter the 3rd and Catherine the Great sending over an expedition to figure out what the gently caress is going on over there, aren't you supposed to be dead!?
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Nov 20, 2015 23:34
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MikeCrotch posted:Got a question for any serious air nerds out there. So I was always under the impression (I think from the Il-2 manual :sperg:) that dive bombers performed their dives by inverting over the target and pulling into the dive, so they would be pulling positives Gs. But when i've been reading about the Pacific war all US and Japanese dive bombing refers to a 'push-over point' and pushing the aircraft over into the dive, at something like 70% for a steep dive. Wouldn't this produce huge negative G, or is the pushover gentle enough so that you don't get any bad effects from it? Late answer, but it depends on training and pilot. The advantage to rolling over was that it was easier to leave the target area since, by rolling over, you invert your direction. However, at least one of my books specifically mentions the push-over point method for the Ju-87 Stuka. If you don't nose down fast enough, the G's don't really affect you as much since it's not very quick. Also, another thing that is important to factor in is the dive angle you are trying to achieve. A high angle dive (say 80% or so) vs a low angle dive (60% or so) require a different approach on target. And terrain features, among other things, are important aspects of the mission that need to be known. Dive-bombing targets in a fjord, for example, where space is much more confined will require the pilot to change is diving angle, method, or direction. Animal posted:It's a matter of doctrine. Its easier to aim if you roll inverted then dive, because as soon as you roll you can padlock your target from your current altitude then bring the airplane into the dive. As opposed to pushing over thus beginning the descent before you lock eyes on your target because your fuselage is blocking your view. This is why some dive bombers had windows under and between the pilots legs. Jobbo_Fett fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Nov 20, 2015 |
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Nov 20, 2015 23:34
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100 Years Ago There's more goings-on at Fourth Isonzo and at Salonika, and Flora Sandes has made a new friend at the field ambulance; but today is mostly about the most common shared experience of the infantryman's war. Today we're going to talk about working parties and get a few insights into the constant supply of manual labour that was required just to maintain a trench system in mildly inclement weather, even without the enemy sticking his nose in. This is what soldiers do in this war. Raenir Salazar posted:The German planning prior to WWI was literally pissing themselves at the possibility of fighting the 'Russian steamroller' to the point the entire reasoning for gambling everything on knocking out France first was because they considered defeat inevitable unless they did so; they estimated something like 18,000,000 Russian soldiers based on various statistics. It wasn't just the enormous army, although that was a big part of it. The summit that President Poincare attended in St Petersburg in July 1914 had been arranged a long time previously, among other things, to finalise all kinds of details about how the Franco-Russian alliance was going to function going forward; joint planning for future military co-operation in the event of a general war, and so on. There were also the details of one of the French foreign ministry's patented gigantic
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Nov 20, 2015 23:44
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my dad posted:18th and 19th century folks were prone to vaaaastly overestimating the wealth and size of distant empires. in the early 17th century, spanish literature is full of sad whining about how they are weak and declining and our economy sucks and only lots of reform can save them and france is SO STRONG DUDES and RIGHT OVER THERE french literature, on the other hand, is full of sad whining about how they are weak and declining and only just got out of a civil war/are intermittently still kind of in one and only lots of reform can save them and OMG THE SPANISH MONARCHY SURROUNDS US, WE'RE DOOMED both of them do this a lot
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Nov 20, 2015 23:58
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Although I think Army guys are always talking about how badass their opponents are before war, since it makes the political leaders more likely to give them more money, as well as making your eventual success look all the more miraculous. Not to mention overestimating tends to be safer than underestimating, as long as you don't go all McClellan (or whomever that American civil war general that had the loving Pinkerton's giving him inflated opposing troop numbers).
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Nov 21, 2015 00:04
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HEY GAL posted:everyone overestimates their enemies The grass is always less corrupt on the other side.
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Nov 21, 2015 00:15
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Tomn posted:The grass is always less corrupt on the other side. france: every now and then people in the government try to destroy each other, also the huguenots kind of have their own army spain: oh god finances 
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Nov 21, 2015 00:19
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Spain, 16th century: Worrying about inflation is for sissies.  Spain, 17th century: 
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Nov 21, 2015 00:25
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my dad posted:Spain, 16th century: Worrying about inflation is for sissies. "Sir! Silver is worth more than gold with all the gold we brought over! What do we do?" "Simple! Bring over silver instead!"
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Nov 21, 2015 00:28
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my dad posted:Spain, 16th century: Worrying about inflation is for sissies. then from the reign of philip II onward it's just 
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Nov 21, 2015 00:28
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HEY GAL posted:france: every now and then people in the government try to destroy each other, also the huguenots kind of have their own army what is the proper French pronunciation of Huguenots anyway? Something like 'oog-no'?
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Nov 21, 2015 00:30
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Grand Prize Winner posted:what is the proper French pronunciation of Huguenots anyway? Something like 'oog-no'? ugue-no Sort of like the "Hague, no" but swap the a for a u
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Nov 21, 2015 00:41
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Grand Prize Winner posted:what is the proper French pronunciation of Huguenots anyway? Something like 'oog-no'? It's pronounced "hérétique"
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Nov 21, 2015 00:44
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while i was learning german, i spent a while confusing the word for heretic (ketzer) and the word for candle (kerze)
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Nov 21, 2015 00:46
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