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Armor is not awkward unless yours doesn't fit. There was a king of France who did backflips in his. Meanwhile, in New York: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/31/nyregion/subway-dancers-metropolitan-museum-art.html
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Nov 6, 2018 13:21
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On on hand it’s a Facebook link but on the other hand it’s a working B17 ball turret at a machine gun shoot: https://www.facebook.com/511357639/posts/10156768882402640/
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Nov 6, 2018 13:35
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Cyrano4747 posted:she describes the war as happening because a dumb event precipitated an almost inevitable chain reaction. full disclosure: it has been a long time since I read her book, but...is she wrong about this, broadly speaking? Not to say that any one of a thousand things along this chain of events couldn't have broken differently, but I remember my takeaway (and my current understanding, for that matter) being that a war resembling WWI more or less WAS inevitable given the geopolitical situation and the series of choices made by lots of actors over many years, and that the actual dumb event that caused it was an almost immaterial point along a decades-long timeline.
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Nov 6, 2018 14:28
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bewbies posted:full disclosure: it has been a long time since I read her book, but...is she wrong about this, broadly speaking? Not to say that any one of a thousand things along this chain of events couldn't have broken differently, but I remember my takeaway (and my current understanding, for that matter) being that a war resembling WWI more or less WAS inevitable given the geopolitical situation and the series of choices made by lots of actors over many years, and that the actual dumb event that caused it was an almost immaterial point along a decades-long timeline. i like to think of it as a ratchet, or a funnel into darkness. you start with a certain amount of options; with every click you get fewer. edit: between the peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the outbreak of the 30yw is 63 years, roughly comparable to the period between ww2 and now. Only in retrospect do things look terminally unstable. What if Rudolph II hadn't been semi-crazy? What if his brother had had children? And given that he didn't, what if he had picked literally anyone else for his heir but Ferdinand II? HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 14:46 on Nov 6, 2018 |
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Nov 6, 2018 14:35
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HEY GUNS posted:current historiography is pushing against that. Similarly, peter wilson and people who are into him are pushing against the corresponding argument that gets made about the 30 years war. Even in a tense situation, hostilities are also the result of conscious choices by the people who decide whether to go to war. This is why Wilson's interested in my work on Saxony, because as long as people assume the 30yw was inevitable, the Elector of Saxony's recurrent attempts to gather the moderates into some sort of peace coalition looks stupid. They look very different if you see war as one option among many, which ended up being what happened but didn't have to be I think I'm kind of saying the same thing....that by summer 1914, the options each actor believed available to them were so limited as to make war of some kind practically inevitable. That isn't to say that decisions made in years past (ie, reinsurance treaty) wouldn't have branched into some more peaceful Doc Brown timeline, but in the timeframe Tuchman was writing the various politicians were basically like Austin Powers trying to turn around that cart in the hallway.
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Nov 6, 2018 14:41
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bewbies posted:I think I'm kind of saying the same thing....that by summer 1914, the options each actor believed available to them were so limited as to make war of some kind practically inevitable. That isn't to say that decisions made in years past (ie, reinsurance treaty) wouldn't have branched into some more peaceful Doc Brown timeline, but in the timeframe Tuchman was writing the various politicians were basically like Austin Powers trying to turn around that cart in the hallway.
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Nov 6, 2018 14:42
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bewbies posted:full disclosure: it has been a long time since I read her book, but...is she wrong about this, broadly speaking? Not to say that any one of a thousand things along this chain of events couldn't have broken differently, but I remember my takeaway (and my current understanding, for that matter) being that a war resembling WWI more or less WAS inevitable given the geopolitical situation and the series of choices made by lots of actors over many years, and that the actual dumb event that caused it was an almost immaterial point along a decades-long timeline. The thing I took from Sleepwalkers was that it really wasn't. The specific conditions that led to WW1 were quite specific in many ways, for example, the UK's Foreign Ministry being extremely anti-German at the time.
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Nov 6, 2018 14:44
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HEY GUNS posted:According to Christopher Clark, when the whole thing began they still could have pulled it off. This is my point. I guess my take on that guy is it seemed like he was sometimes injecting modern sensibilities into historical actors. Like, our modern views on diplomacy were shaped in large part by that catastrophe, but he seems to expect the people from that period to behave as one would today. edit - I guess it is probably more accurate to say that the war was inevitable with those who were in charge being in charge. I'm sure some other politicians might have found more constructive solutions
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Nov 6, 2018 14:50
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The big problem with the inevitability narrative is that it removes agency from the only people who actually had some when it comes to national level decision making. Removing agency also absolves people of blame which is a HUGE deal in how we look at WW1 as a historical event. Like, think of how many times you’ve heard the phrase “after this event war was inevitable” in relation to any conflict you care to name. The problem is that no, it wasn’t. There is always another option. It might be unpalatable I’m the extreme (surrendering to Hitler) or just inconvenient (challenging domino theory) but you always have to make a conscious choice. What’s more those choices usually involve a ton of competing factors and interests. Tuchman points to the time tables as why everyone HAS to mobilize before everyone else but ask yourself this: if you’re Germany why are you mobilizing in the first place to help Austria-Hungary kick Serbia’s teeth in. What is at stake that you’re willing to go to war on two fronts over someone else’s dead nobility? The people who made those decisions had some very specific goals that they thought they could achieve via a nice, tidy European war. They miscalculated like WHOA but none of that was inevitable. Or take England. Why is Belgium’s neutrality worth getting into a continental war over? It’s not as simple as “we signed this paper we HAVE to do it.” What are the political calculations that lead to that decision. Hint: it has less to do with Belgium than the “empire” part of British Empire and unease about Germany’s overseas and Naval ambitions. You can do this with everyone. Why are the Russians so willing to go to bat for Serbia? Sticking up for their fellow Slavs doesn’t answer it as neatly as a lot of people claim. Why can’t A-H accept Serbia’s apology and various attempts to make it clear that the assassin was just a random loon? Why does France go so hard in the direction of supporting Russia? The point is that it’s not inevitable and every step along the way was consciously made by people who knew exactly what they were doing, thought they knew what they were risking, and knew what they hoped to gain.
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Nov 6, 2018 15:17
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It’s also worth noting that in the immediate aftermath people understood this which is part of why massive political change followed in every European power that fought. The bloodshed utterly bankrupted the authority of the people who made the decisions to go to war in a lot of people’s eyes. It leads to straight up revolution and regime change in some places, but even England basically had to expand the franchise. WW1 really breaks fin de sičcle politics HARD precisely because a lot of people looked back at the decisions of their leaders and ruling classes and said “what the everloving gently caress?” Edit: there is also a huge cultural element tied into those political currents as well. A lot of counter-culture artistic and cultural movements that predated the war break out under the influence of the post war hangover.
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Nov 6, 2018 15:24
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Phanatic posted:On on hand it’s a Facebook link but on the other hand it’s a working B17 ball turret at a machine gun shoot: The same guy that restored this did the nose turret of a B-24 as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_eQx_7J2Gk
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Nov 6, 2018 15:27
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HEY GUNS posted:Armor is not awkward unless yours doesn't fit. There was a king of France who did backflips in his. Meanwhile, in New York: What in the actual gently caress? But yes, armour that fits isn't awkward, it isn't encumbering (well too much anyways), and more importantly it doesn't impact your range of motion much...
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Nov 6, 2018 15:29
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TheFluff posted:Or, well, it's not 0.2 mils, it's 0.2 streck because in Sweden we do things a little bit better than everyone else, so we have 6300 mils to a circle - neither 6400 like the imperialist Americans nor 6000 like the imperialist Soviets. And to think you make fun of us for not using metric!
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Nov 6, 2018 15:40
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bewbies posted:full disclosure: it has been a long time since I read her book, but...is she wrong about this, broadly speaking? Not to say that any one of a thousand things along this chain of events couldn't have broken differently, but I remember my takeaway (and my current understanding, for that matter) being that a war resembling WWI more or less WAS inevitable given the geopolitical situation and the series of choices made by lots of actors over many years, and that the actual dumb event that caused it was an almost immaterial point along a decades-long timeline. I think "inevitable" is far too strong a word. It's more like, imagine that War is taking time out from his job as a horseman of the Apocalypse, and he goes down the casino, where he likes to play roulette on a wheel that is 100% honest. He decides to leave when he wins, and he always bets on zero. Each crisis is a spin of the wheel with War betting on zero. But, each spin of the wheel has the same odds as the one before it, and the one after it. Don't believe in the gambler's fallacy telling you that zero has to come up soon, because War's been in here for ages now eating free buffet food and drinking free beer, and he still hasn't won after 300 spins. None of those things have any impact on this spin of the wheel. It was always possible that there could be a war, but it was never guaranteed that there would be a war.
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Nov 6, 2018 18:50
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It is weird to realize that on paper, there's almost zero circumstances where there's no choice but to go to war. There are circumstances that make war more appealing than the actions required for continued peace, but there's almost never a circumstance where you have no option but war. Kinda leads me to consider what acceptable grounds for war there are. Usually even when you're attacked, there's the option to surrender, but maybe when a civilization is raided by people either unable (from not knowing the language) or unwilling to accept surrender, then there's no option.
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Nov 6, 2018 19:31
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SlothfulCobra posted:It is weird to realize that on paper, there's almost zero circumstances where there's no choice but to go to war. There are circumstances that make war more appealing than the actions required for continued peace, but there's almost never a circumstance where you have no option but war. Kinda leads me to consider what acceptable grounds for war there are. You make a drat good point. Can we honestly think of one war in the past lets say 1000 years that was absolutely needed? I mean we had WW2 and the need to eliminate Hitler and the Axis forces... for obvious reasons, but was it NEEDED to go to war? Did the economic sanctions in place against Japan work? Or did it just enflame the Empire enough to go to War? Its a drat good thinking point.
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Nov 6, 2018 19:35
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we needed to kick hitler in the dick
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Nov 6, 2018 19:37
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Im not sure if this is what you are asking, but there comes a point where someone has invaded someone else that the only way to stop them is to stand up and fight them and physically throw them out. We went through a very protracted period of diplomacy trying to avoid WW2 and it didnt really do very much to alter hitlers course. Did we have to fight Japan to stop them expanding in Asia and making everyone elses life hell? Yes we really did. There are several wars in which one side was very justified in fighting and indeed were left with no other option but to fight or to capitulate.
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Nov 6, 2018 19:39
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EvilMerlin posted:You make a drat good point. Yes we can honestly think of one war that was absolutely needed: the Great Patriotic War. Also, on the subject of the inevitability of WWI I can tell you that as late as 1912 Russian newspapers were publishing editorials commenting on how great relations were between Russia and Germany.
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Nov 6, 2018 19:51
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Polyakov posted:Im not sure if this is what you are asking, but there comes a point where someone has invaded someone else that the only way to stop them is to stand up and fight them and physically throw them out. We went through a very protracted period of diplomacy trying to avoid WW2 and it didnt really do very much to alter hitlers course. The issue is that it can be really tempting to frame what are merely crises as truly existential threats. Consider Neville Chamberlin in this light and in view of just how badly the decision to go to war in 1914 was viewed in 1938. Post WW2 he was vilified as the face of appeasement, but in 1938 the “peace in our time” line was earnestly celebrated. This gets even more complex when you reflect on how the lesson of WW2 became “never appease, ever” for a lot of people which in turn led to some truly bone headed Cold War diplomacy. There is certainly justification for war. People have been formulating definitions for what constitutes “just war” for as long as philosophers have tried to square morality with organized killing. The sticking point is how far do you inconvenience yourself to avoid fighting.
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Nov 6, 2018 19:52
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On the subject, how on the ball was Zack Twamley’s July Crisis podcast special?
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Nov 6, 2018 19:57
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EvilMerlin posted:You make a drat good point. I mean this depends on who you are talking about and what an acceptable outcome is. I mean you could look at various colonial wars against natives in the new world, where one side didn't really need to instigate, but the other it quickly escalated to "Fight back or we die out and our culture gets erased". For most of them it was not like they could negotiate, with many treaties being made being outright ignored if they were even brought to the table as soon as it was an inconvenience. I guess that is the tricky thing, war and its necessity is a sliding scale and what is an unacceptable and absolutely necessary action for one may not be another. I mean you could probably make a bad argument that WWII wasn't really necessary either. Jack2142 fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Nov 6, 2018 |
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Nov 6, 2018 19:58
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HEY GUNS posted:we needed to kick hitler in the dick
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Nov 6, 2018 20:02
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The problem is you don't have just one guy who has to make the final decision, it's typically a whole party of men with similar cultural backgrounds and it would be very difficult in those critical situations to just let your enemy take everything they want because first you'd need to persuade them all that this is not an ultimately suicidal proposal that will endanger the future of your nation. Convincing a whole group to change their minds on a whim is nigh on impossible. It would seem like withdrawing from Vietnam should have been the easiest job in the world history, but when domino theory was the commonly accepted truth it was quite a lot harder to rephrase the paradigm. The same is happening now in Afghanistan and Syria but instead of communism the concern is now about the spread of islamist terrorism.
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Nov 6, 2018 20:07
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Cyrano4747 posted:The issue is that it can be really tempting to frame what are merely crises as truly existential threats. Its true yes, im not trying to slate Chamberlain for this as i think he gets a lot more flak than he perhaps deserves for appeasement given the constraints he was under. Thinking back to Iraq 2003 as young as i was at the time i do certainly remember an air of crisis where the idea was put forward that we in the UK were under existential threat from Saddam with the whole 45 minutes dossier. But as Merlin phrased the question it was has there been a war in the last 1000 years that was needed, and it was really the case that the only option that was avialable other than just letting him run rampant in Europe for the UK was to fight. Not to mention affairs like Korea, Gulf 1, innumerable revolutions against colonial rule. Im just trying to fathom what their viewpoint is because I cant wrap my head around it. There are definitely demonstrable cases and lots of them where one side is so set on the accumulation or preservation of power that fighting is the only way to stop them.
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Nov 6, 2018 20:07
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Cyrano4747 posted:Consider Neville Chamberlin in this light and in view of just how badly the decision to go to war in 1914 was viewed in 1938. Post WW2 he was vilified as the face of appeasement, but in 1938 the “peace in our time” line was earnestly celebrated.
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Nov 6, 2018 20:13
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Right, I owe you lot this for auld lang syne, if nothing else. THE END OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR: A (Short) EFFORTPOST IN TWO PARTS In the English language, how the First World War ended is often significantly glossed over. It's very easy to understand why; we all know the standard portrayal of the Western Front, it's all about futility and gas and machine-guns and moving the General's drinks cabinet six inches closer to Berlin. If you spend most of your book/movie/whatever establishing all these things about the First World War, then in order to fairly portray how the war was won, you then have to stand in front of your own gigantic landslide with a hand raised, optimistically requesting that it stop. It makes absolutely no narrative sense, which is why it's also unsurprising that all the best First World War stories end before the Hundred Days. There's no way Blackadder Goes Forth or Valiant Hearts could have gone into 1918, it would have completely undercut the point they were trying to make. This can be easily combined with another wheeze, pioneered by Abel Gance in J'accuse, and since used both by history and fiction, which is to jump seamlessly from muddy deadlock to the post-war dead. For historians in particular, there is also the dangling bait of the Versailles Peace Conference to get stuck into, so why bother with all these inconvenient details when you can get to Clemenceau and Lloyd-George and Wilson and the Italians and the Japanese fighting like cats in a sack? So the Hundred Days gets ignored and quietly shuffled aside. But the moment when I knew I had to attempt to seriously learn and write about the First World War (and go from having about 10 books on my shelf to about 60, plus God knows how many more in electronic copies), was when I realised that for France, Ferdinand Foch may have been the fulminating dyspeptic idiot of 1912 who trained the French army to believe passionately in offensive á l'outrance and the shell-repelling properties of red trousers; but he's also an absolutely critical positive figure in 1918, both in the things he did physically in his role as the first Supreme Allied Commander, and in the things he did intellectually, by throwing out his own pre-war ideas almost immediately when they were proven to not work, and searching for new ones instead. There's a similar and striking thing for the BEF, which often gets squashed out of sight by maple-flavoured Anzackery. In 1916, the Battle of the Somme was planned and executed by Sir Douglas Haig as commander-in-chief and Sir Henry Rawlinson as the most important army commander. In 1918, the Battle of Amiens was planned and executed by Sir Douglas Haig as commander-in-chief, and Sir Henry Rawlinson as the most important army commander. That's a seriously hard thing to come to terms with if you want to talk about the war in terms of butchers and donkeys. It doesn't work. Donkeys can't be winners. So, how was the war won? IT'S THE ECONOMY, STUPID It is extremely hard to overstate how economically hosed the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires were by 1918. The painful detail is in Alexander Watson's Ring of Steel. In short: they were fast losing the ability to reliably feed their people, to say nothing of how difficult it was becoming to supply the army. By 1918, Scandinavia had been bullied into closing just about every official trading link with Germany, and a lot of unofficial ones too; by this point they'd lost both the Baltic and the Atlantic. Getting legitimate imports to Germany was all but impossible. This is a far more important factor than "we're going to run out of men". That might have been a serious problem if the war continues into 1919, and definitely by 1920; but fundamentally it doesn't matter how many men you've got if they don't have anything to eat or fire. One of the major reasons for the Spring Offensive going the way it did was that these elite vanguard steely-eyed Sturmtruppen messengers-o'death would eventually trip over someone's supply depot, find that it was stuffed to the gills with real food and not ersatz bullshit, and immediately drop everything to loot the gently caress out of it. (There's a striking personal account which I can't find again, but it gives the image of some men who had lived in fear of their classical Teutonic iron-disciplined platonic-ideal-of-a-sergeant seeing him come away from one of these places with three chickens stuffed under each arm, and you can guess what happened next.) The only Central Power which was still capable of giving a good account of itself in mid-1918 was Bulgaria; with good German support they're capable of keeping the Gardeners of Salonika in place, but they don't have the flexibility to do much else. And even they're starting to get sick and tired of this poo poo to prop up the Germans; incidents of open mutiny are slowly rising and the Germans are withdrawing more and more men to plug holes somewhere else. THE WORLD MOVES ON In addition to the basic problem of "mans gotta eat", outside a few specific fields, the Germans failed badly at innovating as the war went on. They had the world's best heavy machine gun, in world-leading quantities, in 1914; but by 1918 they had no answer to the new Lewis/Chauchat/Hotchkiss man-portable light machine guns. In 1915 they were merrily using both wires and ground induction to tap the Entente field-telephone networks; in 1918 they had no replacement once the telephone lines were improved. They had no protection to sound-ranging for their guns, no reliable weapon to stop tanks, no appreciation of how dangerous bomber aircraft could now be on rear-area interdiction missions, and so on and so forth. Could go into a lot more detail here, but brevity is necessary if I'm going to get to sleep on time. (I say "Germans", but of course the other Central Powers suffered from the same problems also. Would love to go into the particular issues with e.g. the Ottoman empire as the Middle East campaign moved inexorably from Eden to Armageddon, but must be getting on.) THE OTHER SIDE CAN WAR BETTER Both within and outwith the Western Front, the learning processes that all the Entente armies have been on since joining the war had matured by mid-1918. Some have learned more than others, but they all have a clear advantage over their opponents. The Italians have finally ditched everyone's favourite pantomime villain Luigi Cadorna and replaced him with Armando Diaz, who may not have been a shining military genius, but he most certainly was not a stinking military idiot. THE loving AMERICANS Yeah, these people were important too. They were absolutely not important in the same way that they were in another, later war, mind you (consider that it is Foch and not Pershing who gets the big chair, for instance). What they did offer more than anything was incredible peace of mind; their presence allowed Foch as Supreme Commander to plan freely without fear of exhausting limited manpower resources, because by this time next year there's going to be 4 million of the fuckers and we can send them off to die instead; therefore we can be bold and take risks now to put them in as good a position as possible when it's their turn to shoulder the load. American performance in the war is (unsurprisingly) a Matter of Some Debate. They certainly didn't win the war single-handed (comments about maple-flavoured Anzackery aside, the Canadians and Australians genuinely do have a That's about all I can think of right now. Grab a cup of tea and I'll get cracking on Part 2, the timeline. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Nov 6, 2018 |
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Nov 6, 2018 20:19
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HEY GUNS posted:yeah then he went back home and started arming up. non-brits totally misunderstand him because all we know of him is that speech, but he knew what was up by 38. 1938 is when the British realized that their army was kind of poo poo, yeah. Lots of tank programs were launched/expedited at that point, and then they all died as soon as they got Shermans.
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Nov 6, 2018 20:21
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EvilMerlin posted:Can we honestly think of one war in the past lets say 1000 years that was absolutely needed? I mean we had WW2 and the need to eliminate Hitler and the Axis forces... for obvious reasons, but was it NEEDED to go to war? Did the economic sanctions in place against Japan work? Or did it just enflame the Empire enough to go to War? Its a drat good thinking point. I'd hate to tell someone living in Japanese-occupied China "you don't need to go to war" or "no, sanctions will just make them mad" while the Rape of Nanking is going on. Cessna fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Nov 6, 2018 |
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Nov 6, 2018 20:25
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Trin Tragula posted:In addition to the basic problem of "mans gotta eat", outside a few specific fields, the Germans failed badly at innovating as the war went on. They had the world's best heavy machine gun, in world-leading quantities, in 1914; but by 1918 they had no answer to the new Lewis/Chauchat/Hotchkiss man-portable light machine guns. In 1915 they were merrily using both wires and ground induction to tap the Entente field-telephone networks; in 1918 they had no replacement once the telephone lines were improved. They had no protection to sound-ranging for their guns, no reliable weapon to stop tanks, no appreciation of how dangerous bomber aircraft could now be on rear-area interdiction missions, and so on and so forth. Could go into a lot more detail here, but brevity is necessary if I'm going to get to sleep on time. the apex or nadir of this is when we are told this of every single war germans were involved in all the way back to the 1680s, although since everyone is germans in the 1680s the narrative focuses on brandenburg-prussia, which will become prussia, which will become the second reich and then the third----not on the hapsburgs or any of the other five thousand german polities, which won't. i'm not kidding. it's terrible. so this book wastes time on small wars up in the baltic which is a sideshow to the Emperor and Saxony in Vienna in 83 HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Nov 6, 2018 |
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Nov 6, 2018 20:30
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HEY GUNS posted:this is interesting because what we are told as americans of ww1 is heavily filtered through germans' conceptions of themselves in ww2. they are the innovaters, they make up for lack of numbers with speed, they use new technology in lightning-fast attacks, they are the steely-eyed etc etc etc Honesty all of that just goes back to how the Prussians were thought of ca the second half of the 19th C. A lot of the dominant American stereotypes of Germans that don’t involve Oktoberfest are just retreads of the popular mix of awe and fear at Prussia. It’s not just military poo poo either. “Germans are good engineers, Germans have great schools, German science is top notch” - these all basically trace back to Bismarck’s era and then get projected back in time to explain gently caress near everything up to the Romans.
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Nov 6, 2018 20:40
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Cyrano4747 posted:Germans are good engineers, Ha! 
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Nov 6, 2018 20:44
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So how wrong is my general impression that the Germans were reliant on quick knockout campaigns that became less and less likely to succeed as time went by due to the effects of industrialisation?
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Nov 6, 2018 20:48
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You’re thinking of the Second World War from the perspective of summer of 1939. Hitler post czechoslovakia and pre Poland, maybe that’s an inevitable “have to kick hitler in the dick” moment. But there’s hundreds of years - or to be more practical, 20 years of actions and choices that led to there being “no option” but war. British foreign policy was largely about avoiding war throughout the 20s and 30s, and if that had been consistently applied, perhaps the situation that led to war would not have been generated. Perhaps Arthur Henderson’s policies of isolating Hitler by bringing Mussolini onboard lead to Hitler being wholly alone in europe, or Baldwin’s aggressive rearmament plan succeeds and Western Europe is made into an impregnable fortress, or MacDonald’s government formally supports the Soviet Union and we have a tripartite pact between Britain, the USSR and France, or instead of invading Russia to fight the communists, troops from Britain and France were deployed against the freikorps in Berlin (as if). There are hundreds of opportunities between 1939 and Versailles alone that, had different choices been made, the war might not have happened. Hitler in 1939, I don’t think there’s many people beyond absolute hardcore pacifists that would argue that war was unjustified. But that doesn’t mean it was wholly unjustified (by which I mean utterly inevitable, sooner or later has to happen) - had the political, social and economic policies pursued been different, there need not have been a war at all. Most pacifists argue that it is the system of politics and economics and the ideology of capitalism that precludes these choices from being made - hard core pacifists would say this makes all war unjustifiable, because an alternative will have existed, even if it was prior to war being on the horizon at all.
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Nov 6, 2018 20:51
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lenoon posted:Most pacifists argue that it is the system of politics and economics and the ideology of capitalism that precludes these choices from being made... these pacifists are wrong. there have been wars under every economic/social system on earth. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Nov 6, 2018 |
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Nov 6, 2018 20:55
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GotLag posted:So how wrong is my general impression that the Germans were reliant on quick knockout campaigns that became less and less likely to succeed as time went by due to the effects of industrialisation? I don't think that's a German thing. No attacking side in a war thinks, going in, it's going to be a long conflict.
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Nov 6, 2018 20:55
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Trin Tragula posted:Right, I owe you lot this for auld lang syne, if nothing else. This is one reason why I still like All Quiet on the Western Front because Remarque bothers to go right up until the end of the war and by the end he's shown you both that Germans on the home front are doing bad and that the soldiers are falling apart because they have no supplies. Like half the book is about finding food and by the end the narrator is saying they're just hiding in trenches with no food or bullets, and you understand why because when the protagonist went home on leave they had no food there either.
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Nov 6, 2018 21:04
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GotLag posted:So how wrong is my general impression that the Germans were reliant on quick knockout campaigns that became less and less likely to succeed as time went by due to the effects of industrialisation? Germany's position is unusual - they sit on the most valuable land in Europe, and a big part of that value is how centrally located it is. But being centrally-located also means being surrounded by lots of neighbors, and it also means not having any natural obstacles to create a secure hinterland (no oceans or ice shelves or deserts) so your whole territory is potentially at risk. It's a tough position to manage (as anyone who has played Diplomacy can tell you) and it requires a very adroit touch to handle it. Bismarck had it, Kaiser Bill did not, and Hitler had it for a while and then lost it.
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Nov 6, 2018 21:06
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Ensign Expendable posted:1938 is when the British realized that their army was kind of poo poo, yeah. Lots of tank programs were launched/expedited at that point, and then they all died as soon as they got Shermans.
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Nov 6, 2018 21:13
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FMguru posted:My understanding was that the reason Britain punted in 1938 was they were poo poo-scared of the Luftwaffe and what a strategic bombing campaign would do to London et al, and needed time to build up the RAF and their radar networks, more than worrying about their ground forces. if all ensignexpendable has is a history-of-tanks-shaped hammer, everything they read is going to look like a history-of-tanks-shaped nail
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Nov 6, 2018 21:15
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