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Cyrano4747 posted:Britain and France were both exhausted and Germany, while also exhausted, had just successfully concluded the eastern front which freed up a lot of soldiers. The US entering not only provided a whole country’s worth of fresh soldiers but also pushed up German time tables to force a decision before the US got fully on line in 1918-1919. Without the US it’s not unreasonable to think Germany could have held out a couple more years and forced a negotiate peace. I think the German home front was in really bad shape by that point thanks to the four years of blockade though. I legitimately dont know what effect Brest Litovsk had with respect to food supplies in Germany so pleass chime in if anyone does.
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Jun 14, 2019 16:29
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On the note of British descendency post WW1, how significant was the, uh, loss of the Lost Generation? I've been told that it helped lead to the fall of the empire by having so many young men die and reducing British willingness to fight for it. However I heard it from my father, who I've come to realize is quite frequently full of poo poo and I haven't done any research of the topic on my own.
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Jun 14, 2019 16:33
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I think the big thing that really clinched US dominance for a long time was the end of WW2. All the industry of Europe was in ruins, leaving a hole for American manufacturing to fill, and US dollars literally replaced gold as the backing for a lot of currencies for a while. I think that was also about when US media wound up taking over half the world, but I'm not really sure what caused that.
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Jun 14, 2019 16:35
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think the big thing that really clinched US dominance for a long time was the end of WW2. All the industry of Europe was in ruins, leaving a hole for American manufacturing to fill, and US dollars literally replaced gold as the backing for a lot of currencies for a while.
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Jun 14, 2019 16:39
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:I think British aristocrats were more favorable of a curtailing of US power and the creation of a check on the US than anything. There's plenty of accounts of Confederate leaders going to Britain and being upset that they weren't considered equals or even aristocrats by the British aristocracy. Plantation owners felt they were the equivalent of noble lords and loved to read Walter Scott, thinking their situation was similar to the nobles featured in his stories. I mean the large plantation owners were in fact members of the nobility and aristocracy of Britain by birth for the most part. Just that they'd forgotten that their ancestors were primarily the younger sons sent off to what their lineage in Britain considered minor family holdings, and that whole revolution business granted them even less respect. They'd forgotten that they were considered in the hierarchy as at best on the level of truly minor barons on poo poo lands back on Britain, because they were lords of all they surveyed on their fetid mosquito-choked tidewater lands where they tended to still fall dreadfully ill and die early. Their ancestors who had arrived directly from Britain understood their status of consolation prize land and "at least you're not a commoner and maybe your older brother will die so you can take the prestige land and title back home" status. The dwindling trickle of younger sons taking on the family lands in America in the intervening century or so before the revolution got it too. But those raised in several generations of slaveholding on top of quite a bit of power over the whites near their estates? They just didn't understand (or perhaps refused to, in some cases) how much of a small pond they were in. SlothfulCobra posted:
The Hollywood Movie as premier entertainment was well established by the late 20s, and in a similar time frame advances in mass duplication for recorded music also made Americans pretty dominant in international music export. And frankly the 30s saw things like the Nazis loving up the powerhouse that had been German media in Europe, and the war absolutely ruined the ability for much of Europe to have robust out of country media influence even tho there was plenty of stuff being produced for domestic play in wartime. fishmech fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Jun 14, 2019 |
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Jun 14, 2019 16:39
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FMguru posted:The US was literally 52% of the world economy at the end of WWII. It's nice to have your continent-sized industrial base several thousand miles (and two oceans) away from any active military theater. If I were the English, I would've simply moved the Isles west of the Canaries 
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Jun 14, 2019 16:42
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zoux posted:If I were the English, I would've simply moved the Isles west of the Canaries
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Jun 14, 2019 16:44
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I think one of the big factors in the decline of the British Empire was the cost of the empire and the world wars putting Britain so far into the red that they could no longer afford a global empire and the instruments they used for its control. For instance the only thing that really kept India in the black was the opium trade and once that was done away with, it was only a matter of time before keeping India became untenable. The same can be argued for other possessions, such as those in the Caribbean and Africa, as modernization rendered the old methods used there obsolete and the cost of maintaining and controlling these possessions outweighed their value. The imperial system of the Great Powers became obsolete and Britain was in no way able to cope with it due to the wars, the rise of nationalism in most European colonies, and the dominance of a robust United States and a seemingly robust Soviet Union. EDIT: Even without the world wars, if you look at a neutral power like Portugal, they were unable to maintain their own empire as well and withstand the rise of African nationalist movements. The United States too, which came out on top in every regard at the end of WWI, was unable to feasibly hold onto the Philippines due to the costs involved and decided to just let them go after a graduated independence process. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Jun 14, 2019 |
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Jun 14, 2019 17:39
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zoux posted:How much did the US help out in WWI actually? I mean we were in it for less than a year right? Declared war April 6th 1917; "in the war" in that sense for about 18 months, and see below for why I'd credit them with the full 18 months instead of timing it from when they actually got significant numbers of boots on the ground, much later. quote:Did the AEF make a significant difference? Yes, but absolutely not in the same way as they did in the next war. The presence of the Americans in the war was crucially important for the Entente's mindset on the Western Front. In mid-1917, the possibility that one side or the other would flat-out run out of fit fighting men was starting to move from a worrying but nebulous and indistinct future problem to "we've got to do something about this PDQ or else we're going to be completely hosed in the foreseeable future and we're already starting to feel the first preliminary effects of it". (Kind of like what's happening with climate change now.) Britain was instituting full-scale conscription; France and Germany had already been giving early call-ups to next year's conscript classes since 1915, and you can't do that for more than a few years before you end up drafting children. Both sides had also been steadily lowering their fitness standards, so men who would have been barely fit for garrison duty in 1914 began slowly moving closer and closer to active service until they ended up in first-line units. And then into that context of deep existential fear for the future of the war, here come half a million Americans by 1918, and three million by 1919. This is a massive relief to Foch and Haig and the other directing minds of 1918. They can now plan and execute the next offensive without having to worry about running out of men, and the goal for 1918 very quickly becomes to give the Americans vital experience of major operations in a supporting role, and provide them with the best springboard possible for 1919, when we will load them all into Renault FTs and point them at Berlin with the instructions "go get 'em, Tiger". This is an incredible relief and an absolutely critical reason for explaining why the war-winning offensives ended up being war-winning offensives when they were never supposed to be. It wasn't until October 1918 that most people who were in the know really allowed themselves to believe that these latest German peace overtones were actually sincere this time. In terms of military operations and the relative numbers of men, and the identities of senior commanders and the source of munitions and so on; sure, the AEF were supporting players in 1918. However, I don't think the psychological effect of having the USA in the war can be over-estimated. Without them, there's no guarantee of anyone having any appetite for the kind of relentless and bloody and sustained fighting that put enough pressure on the German and Austro-Hungarian armies (since what this also does is it makes things like the Army of the Orient a lot easier to sustain) to cause both empires to flat-out implode. It might still have happened, but it's the difference between seeing if a rickety old house is going to fall down on its own based purely on the wear and tear from the the weather, or bringing a few massive wrecking balls to the party.
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Jun 14, 2019 17:40
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How did the US forces acquit themselves operationally? Also, since it seems the primary contributions were in terms of materiel and morale, would it have made a big difference if the AEF got involved in say, 1916?
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Jun 14, 2019 17:42
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Cyrano4747 posted:coupled with two world wars Particularly this. Britain fought the entire length of two world wars (the only major country to do so actually) and that poo poo is expensive. Guess from which country Britain borrowed the money to fight those wars btw?
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Jun 14, 2019 17:59
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Germany comes pretty close to being in both for the full length.
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Jun 14, 2019 18:00
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zoux posted:Also, since it seems the primary contributions were in terms of materiel and morale, would it have made a big difference if the AEF got involved in say, 1916? Not materiel afaik - in fact the AEF had to be given French kit for anything bigger than small arms.
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Jun 14, 2019 18:06
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feedmegin posted:Not materiel afaik - in fact the AEF had to be given French kit for anything bigger than small arms. gently caress even then we were using chautchauts and just taking over England’s P14 order.
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Jun 14, 2019 18:08
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zoux posted:How did the US forces acquit themselves operationally? 1. Not particularly well or badly in a way that can't be chalked up to having to re-learn a lot of the operational lessons the British and French had learned 2-3 years previously but not having time to show off the results of learning the lessons. One example: Pershing and the US Army were committed to the idea of the large 'square division' that was absolutely huge even in comparison to 1914 Continental formations, which had been steadily shrinking as the war went on. What's the problem we know all offensives in WW1 ran into that caused inevitable collapse? Logistics collapsed almost immediately after going over the top. The first US offensives involved taking divisions far larger than the British or French thought right, compressed into a space far tighter than they thought sensible, then watching their logistics immediately fall apart as too many supply columns tried to traverse too few roads. 2. It makes a big difference but unclear how - basically the Allies either decide they have the breathing space to go slower or the mass to go faster at the Somme.
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Jun 14, 2019 18:09
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Belleau Wood and Devil dog: apocryphal or real
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Jun 14, 2019 18:16
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Cyrano4747 posted:gently caress even then we were using chautchauts and just taking over England’s P14 order. We could have had the Lewis gun in 30-06 but nooooooo.
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Jun 14, 2019 18:29
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:In the Corp thread we have talked about the CIA manual for wrecking - “simple sabotage” - and how it is basically indistinguishable from a lot of companies’ practices. I looked these up: simple sabotage posted:Insist on doing everything through channels. Today I learned every academic department is riddled with CIA trained saboteurs
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Jun 14, 2019 18:30
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zoux posted:Belleau Wood and Devil dog: apocryphal or real The Germans probably never used the word "Devil Dog." Don't tell an SNCO this, it will upset them greatly.
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Jun 14, 2019 19:01
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I'm gonna, and I'm also gonna tell him that the deck is "the ground"
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Jun 14, 2019 19:03
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Cessna posted:The Germans probably never used the word "Devil Dog." We also certainly never used "Teufel Hunden" like some marine-loving author apparently believed.
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Jun 14, 2019 19:27
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Libluini posted:We also certainly never used "Teufel Hunden" like some marine-loving author apparently believed. Understandable mistranscription of "Hundsfott".
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Jun 14, 2019 19:30
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zoux posted:I'm gonna, and I'm also gonna tell him that the deck is "the ground" While having your hands in your pockets. The US in WW1 - remember the end scene in Scarface? Pretend the Allies are Tony Montana (and also he doesnt die at the end). But the US wasn't the guns he came out shooting. No, the US was his giant loving pile of cocaine. "SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIENDS!!!", Tony screams as supersonic tiny olive drab clad men blaze from his guns
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Jun 14, 2019 19:43
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zoux posted:I'm gonna, and I'm also gonna tell him that the deck is "the ground" 
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Jun 14, 2019 19:46
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bewbies posted:I...don't see what the issue is with any of those excerpts? Slaves did manage to create a quite amazing culture under the worst of conditions, and southern planters did consider themselves as an aristocracy, and the south was significantly more militarily inclined than was the north. These aren't weasel words, they're just facts. The phrase "martial spirit" makes my eye twitch because I associate it with early 20th century conceptions about "national character," which were well and truly discredited by the 1980s, but sometimes persisted in fields outside of anthropology much longer than they should have. Plausibly McPherson meant perfectly well, but just seeing it raises my hackles. feedmegin posted:I mean, that never was a suggestion, really (slavery was last explicitly legal in Britain back during the Anglo-Saxon period), but then why would it be? Rainy fascist island isnt exactly suitable country for plantations. I mean slavery wasn't explicitly legal in Britain, but slaves were commonly kept in Britain in the 18th century and even bought and sold. Typically they were owned by merchants travelling from the colonies, but many were residents in places like London. Their legal status was ambiguous for a long time, although eventually the courts started ruling that slavery was not legal in Britain, and anyone brought there in bondage legally became free. RocknRollaAyatollah posted:I think one of the big factors in the decline of the British Empire was the cost of the empire and the world wars putting Britain so far into the red that they could no longer afford a global empire and the instruments they used for its control. For instance the only thing that really kept India in the black was the opium trade and once that was done away with, it was only a matter of time before keeping India became untenable. The same can be argued for other possessions, such as those in the Caribbean and Africa, as modernization rendered the old methods used there obsolete and the cost of maintaining and controlling these possessions outweighed their value. Looking at how the world changed after WWII, the end of the war left the United States essentially with veto power of European decisions in their own colonies, and frequently used that power to accelerate decolonization. For example I watched an interview recently with a British diplomat to the US in 1945, and he said Harry Truman threatened to cut off food aid to the UK if they didn't go through with the partition of Palestine. In the post-war period the US had enormous leverage over the European powers and often used it. The Marshall Plan wasn't just used to reconstruct Europe, but was also instrumental in coercing western Europe to get in line with US policy. In 1949, the Dutch were still determined to maintain their rule over Indonesia, and were fighting a fairly effective anti-guerrilla campaign. However the US came out totally against it, cut off all reconstruction aid to Dutch Indonesia, and threatened to cut the Dutch off from the Marshall fund. The Dutch quickly gave in under international pressure, and Indonesia become independent in December 1949. In the French Indochina war, something like 80% of the French war effort was paid for by the United States. In that case the US saw the French presence as useful, but if it hadn't, that war would have ended much sooner. Also while the Soviets had less influence on western Europe's colonial policy, they also have to be mentioned in a discussion of the end of the empires. If there is a single event that we can use as a death knell for European imperialism, I would pick the the Suez Crisis. Up to that point, France and Britain still thought they could posture as independent world powers in their own right. However the US and Soviets came together and swatted them down like annoying bugs. The whole fiasco was widely seen as humiliating for France and Britain, and marked the end of the period when those nations could set the course of global events independently.
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Jun 14, 2019 20:09
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Squalid posted:The phrase "martial spirit" makes my eye twitch because I associate it with early 20th century conceptions about "national character," which were well and truly discredited by the 1980s, but sometimes persisted in fields outside of anthropology much longer than they should have. Plausibly McPherson meant perfectly well, but just seeing it raises my hackles. The rule of thumb is that military history, as a field, is a decade behind whatever the most recent methodological turn in mainstream history is. Not always, but you will find a lot of milhist lit that lags behind in those respects.
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Jun 14, 2019 20:11
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Cyrano4747 posted:The rule of thumb is that military history, as a field, is a decade behind whatever the most recent methodological turn in mainstream history is. Not always, but you will find a lot of milhist lit that lags behind in those respects. yeah and I've seen that weird national character stuff pop up in other surprisingly recent military history stuff, for example in that "Why Arabs Lose Wars" article that's been discussed a few times itt. TBH I don't think military history is particularly unique or bad in this regard. Anytime writers or researchers have to reach outside their main field, you have to expect them to be a bit behind the curve. If you are not a field expert its hard to interpret the cutting edge research, and it's a safe choice to lean on older accepted works even if they are beginning to become out of date.
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Jun 14, 2019 20:42
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While we have some false flag debating in the news, how common were such ruses, or did they not exist besides Age of Sail trickery
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Jun 14, 2019 20:44
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Squalid posted:yeah and I've seen that weird national character stuff pop up in other surprisingly recent military history stuff, for example in that "Why Arabs Lose Wars" article that's been discussed a few times itt. TBH I don't think military history is particularly unique or bad in this regard. Anytime writers or researchers have to reach outside their main field, you have to expect them to be a bit behind the curve. If you are not a field expert its hard to interpret the cutting edge research, and it's a safe choice to lean on older accepted works even if they are beginning to become out of date. Eh, i had a doctoral candidate in a decent milhist program working a good federal internship try to explain to me why there was no racial component to the experience of black GIs in Vietnam two or three months ago. It’s enough of a pattern to be commented upon, including by a really good pair of Duke/UNC profs I took a cross taught intro milhist course with who basically said “don’t be that guy”
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Jun 14, 2019 20:47
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I also had a 70 year old military historian with three published books and tenure at a good state flagship explain that there was no racial component to the Eastern Front in WW2 because both Germans and Russians are white. That was about 2009 or so. That dude was a dick in many ways, though.
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Jun 14, 2019 20:50
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Cyrano4747 posted:Eh, i had a doctoral candidate in a decent milhist program working a good federal internship try to explain to me why there was no racial component to the experience of black GIs in Vietnam two or three months ago. Holy poo poo.
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Jun 14, 2019 20:50
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zoux posted:While we have some false flag debating in the news, how common were such ruses, or did they not exist besides Age of Sail trickery The Nazis did it all the time.
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Jun 14, 2019 21:02
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It seems like the whole "national character" thing isn't entirely wrong. I mean, obviously, if you're talking genetic or inherent differences that's crap. But different cultures do exist, and cultural values can shape behavior.
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Jun 14, 2019 21:06
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Fangz posted:The Nazis did it all the time. The Manchuria Incident is another prominent one from the same era. I’d mention the USS Maine but that’s not so much a false flag as just capitalizing on a disaster.
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Jun 14, 2019 21:13
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Fangz posted:The Nazis did it all the time. The War of Polish Aggression.
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Jun 14, 2019 21:20
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Epicurius posted:It seems like the whole "national character" thing isn't entirely wrong. I mean, obviously, if you're talking genetic or inherent differences that's crap. But different cultures do exist, and cultural values can shape behavior. The issue is when it’s either made deterministic or over used to explain things in a near monocausal way. This is pretty common when you see people taking about national character. You’re right that isn’t inherently hosed but nine times in ten it’s used in a hosed way.
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Jun 14, 2019 21:39
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Cessna posted:Holy poo poo. Yeah he was an idiot. He was also a white guy (like EXTREMELY white - and this is coming from a guy who speaks German) writing a dissertation about the US military in Vietnam. Me and a few other people made pretty bad fun of him. Chances are he will finish his diss and get a TT job at liberty U because that’s how the universe works.
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Jun 14, 2019 21:41
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think that was also about when US media wound up taking over half the world, but I'm not really sure what caused that. while all the major industrial nations contributed to the development of radio, film, and television technology, i would say that the large market for media consumption in america created a higher volume of exportable media goods which then overwhelmed other national cultural output. the most standout example here would be music, where american popular music ended up dictating world popular music taste for most of the 20th century, first via jazz, then via rock
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Jun 14, 2019 21:49
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Epicurius posted:It seems like the whole "national character" thing isn't entirely wrong. I mean, obviously, if you're talking genetic or inherent differences that's crap. But different cultures do exist, and cultural values can shape behavior. True, and I didn't really have any specific criticisms of those McPherson quotes. There was something very off however about their tone. Maybe he explained exactly what it meant and it was fine in context. It's just there's a lot of historical baggage with his tone and the way he was addressing things. It's not "entirely wrong" to ascribe differences in moral or recruitment to culture. However a lot of the ideas from the national character studies can be seen as a continuation of the 19th and early 20th century concepts of national race (IE the Anglo-Saxon race). This was a time when we were beginning to understand evolution and heritability, however it was before the mechanisms of inheritance like genetics were really understood. Throwing a little racism and chauvinism in and the result is a lot of people were very confused about what was a result of culture vs context vs unchangeable inherent personal traits. A phrase like "martial spirit" is in particular linked to a lot of weird racialist concepts. This is illustrated in the British Imperial system's classification of subject populations into Martial or non-martial races. In hindsight, these classifications were often nonsensical and arbitrary, but they were taken dead seriously for a long time. This way of talking about issues rapidly fell out of fashion after WWII, being attacked from a number of angles. The Marxist swing in anthropology in the sixties especially contributed a lot to tearing it down, but it was also attacked from other directions, as for example by the Chicago school of sociology. Culture matters a great deal to a lot of institutions, but you can't just use it to hand-wave away complex issues like southern military tradition.
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Jun 14, 2019 21:54
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The words affection and kindness in that McPherson quote should have a lot of asterisks on them. A kind slaver still has the option of cruelty and violence as well as a slaveowning society behind them to enforce it or inflict it on their behalf, and the enslaved knew that there could be dire consequences should they ever appear ungrateful. So even when the sentiments are genuinely felt by both sides, they are still poisoned by happening in a situation with the worst imbalance of power possible.
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Jun 14, 2019 22:10
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