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Gnoman posted:My question was not "look at this cool idea I had!", it was "I think I remember reading something really bizarre, let me see if anybody else has heard the same thing, or maybe I'm just remembering something I came up myself while drunk." It does ring a little bell in my head: Tommy Robartes's "band prank". Basically a guy decided to set a trap for the Germans in their trenches by putting on a concert and advertising it to the Germans, and coordinating to skedaddle with the band a couple seconds before the artillery let loose to slaughter the music-loving Germans. Actually faking an advance without putting all the soldiers out there to get shot seems hard. Not sure how much effect that sort of action has anyways. They kill a bunch of people and add some more attrition to the pile, but it's land gains the belligerents were all looking for.
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Oct 11, 2018 00:34
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Gnoman posted:
this is basically describing reconnaissance by fire, and it is a really common technique. It was probably used most famously by the Chinese during the Korean War but I think just about every major conflict since the first world war has featured this technique to one degree or another
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Oct 11, 2018 00:57
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ponzicar posted:So you're asking if the attackers ever pretended to start an assault so that the defenders all grab their rifles, ready their machine guns, and run into the trenches, but instead of starting the assault, a bunch of artillery shells drop on them instead? Essentially, but with an actual attack, not a faked one. My vague memory is that somebody figured out that the vast majority of artillery shells were ineffective because the shelters were so good, and was looking for a way to get the shells to actually kill people. It seemed odd, because it would be rather hard on the first wave out of the trench, and generals were (from what I understand) aware that this was bad on morale.
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Oct 11, 2018 01:19
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Nebakenezzer posted:So about the T-55/T-72: how cramped are they? Sometimes I get the impression that the T-55 you just can't fit in if you are over 5'7; I know the T-72 is better, but it still seemed like in the gunner/commander position sitting in any but the default position will see you mangled by the auto-loader. I'm 6'1", I wouldn't do well in a T-72 in a fight. To be clear, I was obviously never in combat in a T-72. My unit captured a bunch of Iraqi vehicles in the 1st Gulf War and dragged them back when we left Kuwait. We loaded them onto ships and shipped them back to the States, and these were parceled out to different companies as trophies. (Put 'em on the lawn in front of the Company Office!) Later I was transferred to be an instructor at Amphibious Assault School. That unit had a pair of BMP-1s. A few of us instructors got the idea of cannibalizing them, swapping parts to get one of them into running condition. We did this, but were still a few parts short. My CO got the idea of contacting the Army's OPFOR unit on Fort Irwin; their specialty was using captured and "acquired" former Soviet vehicles and US vehicles modified to look like Soviet vehicles in huge training exercises out in the desert. We traded them some spare BMP parts for the parts we needed. While we were there they gave us a week-long course on "how to work Soviet stuff." We got to drive around in the vehicles they had. No, we didn't get to shoot anything, but it was fun enough. The T-72 is very small compared to the US vehicles I was used to, as was pretty much all of their stuff. It was also very crude. No, I'm not downplaying or mocking the Soviets here, it was as well made as it needed to be. For a comparison the US AFVs think "high-end car vs durable pickup truck." There's nothing wrong with crude if it works. In many ways their stuff made a lot of sense. For example, the various lines, pipes, and hoses were color-coded. A US crewman will get to know everything on their vehicle over time, to the point where they can look at any line and know what it does. (I.e., "that's the hydraulic line that goes to the rear plenum cover actuating cylinder.") But color-coding them really helps you get to know them quickly - blue is compressed air, brown is oil, yellow is fuel, etc. It's a great system for vehicles crewed by conscripts who will only spend two years in the military as opposed to long-term professionals. But at the same time, some of their systems were just bad. Loading the Sagger missile, for example, is just weird. In the turret there's a little hatch that opens up, facing the front. You swing a little lever to, open it, and reach out to try to snag the missile on the rail. Then you take a little stick - yes, a stick - to flip down the missile's fins before firing. It's just - wrong. Driving Soviet stuff was never comfortable for me. I always felt like I was lurching around, bouncing like a new driver trying to figure out a clutch and stick-shift, and I'd been driving tanks and AFVs for about five years at that point. They don't feel smooth; they snort and growl like a bulldozer. I'm guessing more familiarity with specific vehicles would have helped. Driving the BMP really stuck with me. It was even more "lurchy," and I couldn't help but feel bad for any (theoretical) infantry in the back. I tried to sit in one of the grunts' seats in the back and it felt like my knees were up in my ears. It was just bad, and that was when we were standing still. Combine that with lurching around, firing AKs from inside the vehicle, trying to do it in a gas mask - I pity the Soviet grunts who had to do that. Also, as we never fired the tank guns I never saw the infamous autoloader in action. It looked crude, just mechanical stuff close to the crew without any guards. (I don't think OSHA made much impact on the USSR.) I think the cold-war legends of "eating crewman" are exaggerated - you'd learn real fast to stay out of its way - but at the same time if you slipped, especially when driving, it could hurt you badly. In fairness this sort of thing is true of US tanks as well, AFVs will mess you up if you aren't careful.
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Oct 11, 2018 02:13
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Ensign Expendable posted:What year/factory production was this T-34? The standard primer used in all Soviet factories was lead oxide (железный сурик). Medium gray coloured primer was also occasionally used. Interesting! I know the owner did a lead-abatement when he had the paint stripped; I wasn't involved in that. I did see some of the sections where the paint was scraped back to bare metal before this was done and it looked like it was green all the way down to me. As to the year, I'm not sure. I get the impression that this particular vehicle was cobbled together, so there are probably parts from any number of T-34s of different dates on it. I can ask the owner if he's got a better handle on the specifics the next time I see him.
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Oct 11, 2018 02:18
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In sadder news Hark a Vagrant is ending and the artist is no longer updating the site. She didn't history all the time but there are some fun gems in there. With fun comics like: Napolean invades russia  Fenian raids Canada 1866  Woman suffragist 
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Oct 11, 2018 03:32
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Awww drat, end of an era. So glad I got her books when they were in print.
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Oct 11, 2018 04:20
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I'm sad now. I loved Hark, a Vagrant.
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Oct 11, 2018 04:55
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Her series on Benito Juárez and Emperor Maximilian I is my favorite, and not just because it gave me the line "I had fun once. It was awful".
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Oct 11, 2018 05:13
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Ensign Expendable posted:It's a long weekend, so have a bonus update: Can I request the 57 mm gun M1?
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Oct 11, 2018 06:07
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SlothfulCobra posted:Actually faking an advance without putting all the soldiers out there to get shot seems hard. Not sure how much effect that sort of action has anyways. They kill a bunch of people and add some more attrition to the pile, but it's land gains the belligerents were all looking for. The British Army called this sort of thing a "Chinese attack" or "demonstration", and after early 1915 there was one going on somewhere along the front almost every day. The idea is basic operant conditioning; once the enemy knows your preliminary bombardment lasts about 45 minutes, he then leaps up out of the dugouts and gets ready to fight. What you quickly start doing instead, then, is that during quiet periods you start a bombardment that feels heavy enough to be an actual preliminary bombardment, it lasts about the same time as a real one, it lifts, the enemy comes out, and then you shell them more, then you lift for five minutes, then you renew, then you lift, then you stop, then you give them a little more after half an hour just for shits and giggles. Often you also accompany this by having your own men shout loudly and fire rifles at nothing in particular during lifts, and so on. You also increase the number of these in the months and weeks immediately preceding the Big Push to keep things as uncertain as possible. The idea, and it's entirely psychologically sound and worked just about perfectly, is that you want to condition the enemy to remain in his shelters not just while shells are actively landing, but for a good long period after it, because now the most likely follow-up to this level of shelling is not that there'll be an attack, but instead that there'll be more shelling; in the meantime you send your men over, and they'll have enough time to get all the way across No Man's Land before the sou drops for the defenders that this isn't just another day up the line. So now it makes sense for defenders to wait longer below ground after shelling stops in case it starts again, and a whole lot of noise coming from across the way doesn't mean anything and is probably some clever trick, and you get used to waiting several minutes before bringing the men back out because you're too clever to fall for that one again, and then one day you're just about to bring them back out when instead some awful foreign rotter with a bucketload of grenades appears at the top of your steps, which is mostly a case of surrender quietly or die. There's no easy way to counter this; you can put periscopes in the dugout and send a few scouts out to hardened above-ground positions so you can watch for such mean and sneaky tactics, but they're always going to be only able to do so much.
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Oct 11, 2018 06:53
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It seems like there's some game theory there. If I rush out and it's a fake attack I get killed by shellfire. If I dawdle and it's a real attack I have to surrender to Mr. Grenades. Capture is better than death, so I should dawdle.
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Oct 11, 2018 07:15
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The Lone Badger posted:It seems like there's some game theory there. If I rush out and it's a fake attack I get killed by shellfire. If I dawdle and it's a real attack I have to surrender to Mr. Grenades. Capture is better than death, so I should dawdle. Shellfire just is the much more likely event since there are a lot fewer attacks than barrages. I would be extremely leery to count on the enemy to wait for me to surrender rather than just bombing the dugout and moving on.
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Oct 11, 2018 08:42
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:I have heard second hand that an art history teacher taught that medieval people were unable to see things in 3 dimensions, which is why their art looks weird. Yeah idk man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Period_eye the key word here though is "imagine:" the theory is that how you imagine something is conditioned by the biological reality of your eyes plus your culture edit: i sometimes engage in a similar argument in my own work, because what someone "looks like" is more determined by their clothes for these people than it is for us. like there are accounts of people dying on the field and the people they know not recognizing them until the bodies had been clothed again. We imagine the naked body "beneath" the clothes as the "real person" and my dudes, i think, did not. when i imagine their imaginations, it's of the clothed person as a series of shells, envisioned from outside in. Clothes, bodily movements, social position, habitual acts, scars, etc. Only after that the naked body, which even the people who know you intimately might only rarely see--and that in darkness far deeper than what we're used to with electric lights. I think what's going on is that most of these people have one suit of clothes each and wear them until they wear out. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 09:28 on Oct 11, 2018 |
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Oct 11, 2018 09:21
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I'm trying to imagine some poor peasant trying to do some medieval agriculture being only able to see in 2 dimensions. It's like a silent films comedy sketch. But with more deadly flailing implements well, flailing.
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Oct 11, 2018 12:35
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SeanBeansShako posted:I'm trying to imagine some poor peasant trying to do some medieval agriculture being only able to see in 2 dimensions. It's like a silent films comedy sketch. But with more deadly flailing implements well, flailing. That's why they were all cannibals.
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Oct 11, 2018 12:37
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If they traveled more than a field away from their village and it rained then they'd be lost forever because the houses would look different.
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Oct 11, 2018 12:54
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That's why those early medieval maps were just lines of cities. It's somewhat related to why early painters painted kids with adult faces: none of them had ever pivoted their heads down, so they had never seen how a child looks and imagined them to be adults, but smaller.
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Oct 11, 2018 13:15
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My god this is stupidly funny.
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Oct 11, 2018 13:16
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With all this WW1 talk, that reminds me of something I was wondering about before: Just how important was the average rifleman during a defensive action? In the stereotypical portrayals, you basically have hundreds of dudes standing shoulder to shoulder in the foremost trench on the firing step with their rifles at the ready to beat off the slavering Hun/perfidious Albishman. But with all this talk about rushing into and out of dugouts and suchlike, it seems like it might be undesirable to need so many dudes to supply the bulk of your defensive firepower. So under that perspective, it seems like it might be a better idea rely primarily on a relatively small number of machine guns to provide your defensive firepower while holding the riflemen back in case of a counterattack. So how did that actually turn out in reality, particularly in the more established and long-term parts of the line?
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Oct 11, 2018 13:19
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machine guns are the main strongpoints of your defense but what are you proposing, just having a bunch of riflemen hold their dicks in order to.........?
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Oct 11, 2018 13:35
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SlothfulCobra posted:There's not really concrete evidence as to exactly how the first currency developed. Tokens demarcating value were just one of the intermediary steps in the development of currency, and it's definitely plausible that the thing that got governments to issue uniform currency to be accepted for everybody's transactions would be to pay an army, which in the army's downtime or retirement would get traded around. It wasn’t just a linear development from barter to currency either. Coins had been in use in Korea since the late first millennium BC, and in Japan not too much later, but in both they would variously fall in and out of use as people would lose trust in their value after a famine or whatever, only for the government to then attempt to force them back into use, with varying levels of success. It went that way basically through their entire premodern histories. Most of the time it was a halfway system; not pure barter, but transactions done via something peasants would actually trust would retain its value whatever happened, like bolts of cloth measured by a uniform standard.
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Oct 11, 2018 14:00
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Perestroika posted:With all this WW1 talk, that reminds me of something I was wondering about before: Just how important was the average rifleman during a defensive action? In the stereotypical portrayals, you basically have hundreds of dudes standing shoulder to shoulder in the foremost trench on the firing step with their rifles at the ready to beat off the slavering Hun/perfidious Albishman. But with all this talk about rushing into and out of dugouts and suchlike, it seems like it might be undesirable to need so many dudes to supply the bulk of your defensive firepower. So under that perspective, it seems like it might be a better idea rely primarily on a relatively small number of machine guns to provide your defensive firepower while holding the riflemen back in case of a counterattack. The trouble with holding your troops in reserve is the development of artillery tactics aimed at cutting off the flow of reinforcements and resupply. EDIT: But see also the conversation about Soviet Machine Gun Artillery regiments. Fangz fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Oct 11, 2018 |
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Oct 11, 2018 14:07
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Epicurius posted:That's why they were all cannibals. 
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Oct 11, 2018 14:22
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Epicurius posted:That's why they were all cannibals. pfff they'll have to catch me first
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Oct 11, 2018 14:54
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HEY GUNS posted:that is a dumb popsci version of an interesting book, which asked what it meant when those people imagined things and how that was different in the renaissance So that's why Egyptian art looks like that. Except Akenhaten, the first Egyptian to see in 3d. But, like today it was a dumb fad and never took off and also they tried to erase him from history.
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Oct 11, 2018 15:47
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Without reading the book, those seem like they're extreme cases of symbolic drawing and accustomization. Kids and adults today will still draw without consistent structure or perspective if they aren't educated to, and probs everyone has had someone they know suddenly get a mohawk and failed to recognize them. Or is that exactly the point?
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Oct 11, 2018 16:54
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aphid_licker posted:Shellfire just is the much more likely event since there are a lot fewer attacks than barrages. I would be extremely leery to count on the enemy to wait for me to surrender rather than just bombing the dugout and moving on. I remember Barthas and his buddies captured a German dugout, the men were happy to surrender, although the German commanding officer had apparently caught a bad case of shovel to the back of the head before they arrived.
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Oct 11, 2018 17:07
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Koramei posted:It wasn’t just a linear development from barter to currency either. Coins had been in use in Korea since the late first millennium BC, and in Japan not too much later, but in both they would variously fall in and out of use as people would lose trust in their value after a famine or whatever, only for the government to then attempt to force them back into use, with varying levels of success. It went that way basically through their entire premodern histories. Most of the time it was a halfway system; not pure barter, but transactions done via something peasants would actually trust would retain its value whatever happened, like bolts of cloth measured by a uniform standard. Yeah and I suspect the role of the state in creating currency systems tends to be over estimated. Early money systems weren't that different from simple commodity trade, the main difference is it allows for some level of control over the face value and money supply. Commodity exchange system though were similar enough to currency that when western colonialists first visited the New Guinea highlands in the thirties where cowry shells were the primary medium of exchange, they simply treated them as if they were money. Jim Taylor posted:We we re the first to realize the real nature of shell in the highlands. Of course if you asked the New Guineans, most of them would have denied they were working for pay, which would have been very shameful behavior. Instead they'd say they were just helping out of kindness and to be friendly. The cowry shells of course were provided to them as gifts, as is proper of a host. It's definitely an example of what SlothfulCobra was getting at when he said pure barter systems were never really common anywhere. Unsurpisingly once European geologists started airlifting shells into the economy by the ton, the result was massive devaluation. Though rather than all shells losing value equally, the result was more that the shell trade began to be de-commodified, with people becoming extremely picky about which they would accept, rejecting those that were broken or with predatory snail boreholes.
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Oct 11, 2018 17:23
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We discussed evolution of tactics in the Civil War recently I came across this very good piece on it this morning. Some of these CGSC theses are pretty bad but this one is exceptional.
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Oct 11, 2018 18:01
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Re. WWI riflemen, in large part by the later war they were there to fight off trench invaders in close quarters with hand to hand weapons and grenades, while machine guns and particularly artillery did the rest. In the British Army at least there was serious discussion over whether there was any point in teaching marksmanship to rank and file troops, or whether they should be just trained in throwing grenades and stabbing with bayonets. This was A Matter Of Some Debate among senior British infantry generals in 1916-1917.
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Oct 11, 2018 18:17
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Alchenar posted:If they traveled more than a field away from their village and it rained then they'd be lost forever because the houses would look different. The rain would wash away their pheromone trail.
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Oct 11, 2018 18:31
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Poor guy goes to school to study medieval history, but there's a terrible scheduling mixup. Doesn't realize it till he gets a PhD in entomology.
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Oct 11, 2018 18:39
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"Don't you think it's time we put on some clothes and stopped worshiping this fire?" "Don't I think it's what?"
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Oct 11, 2018 18:41
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MikeCrotch posted:Re. WWI riflemen, in large part by the later war they were there to fight off trench invaders in close quarters with hand to hand weapons and grenades, while machine guns and particularly artillery did the rest. Whuh really? This seems hard to believe.
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Oct 11, 2018 18:53
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I can believe it. You aren't going to be sticking your head out of a trench to take long-range shots at the enemy anyway; they'll just shoot you with a machinegun or a sniper will get you before you get a shot off. And when it comes to clearing trenches on an assault, that rifle isn't going to be taking long-range shots. Instead you'll be using it with a bayonet, or you'll be fighting with grenades, sharpened shovels, and brass knuckles.
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Oct 11, 2018 19:39
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The conversation would have been 'What's the point in training guys up to the point where they can hit a 200 yrd mark 5 times in 60 seconds when that's not a realistic scenario they need to train for', not 'what's the point in teaching our recruits how to fire a rifle?'
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Oct 11, 2018 19:46
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I'm the officer with the sharp haircut.
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Oct 11, 2018 19:48
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WW1 soldiers would get lost in barbed wires and minefields as soon as they'd leave their home trenches 
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Oct 11, 2018 19:55
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Nenonen posted:WW1 soldiers would get lost in barbed wires and minefields as soon as they'd leave their home trenches Did they result to cannibalism due to their lack of 3D vision?
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Oct 11, 2018 19:58
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