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INTJ Mastermind posted:The Revolutionary War was won by the American Revolutionary Army. Led by generals and officers like Washington, that Polish guy, and some French dudes. It's basically the same army that the British fielded, with the whole lining up and blasting away, field artillery pieces, bayonet charges, etc. Individual farmers didn't really do that much. I think you mean it was won by the French army (and more importantly navy). The Continental Army got flattened most of the time in stand-up fights with the British, especially early on, as one might expect putting an experienced professional army up against a scratch-built force. However, once the French won the Battle of the Cape and were able to interdict supply and reinforcement by the Royal Navy there was no way to keep that army in beans and bullets or move it around at will. That, and Britain had been fighting for years in a remote colonial possession with no real end in sight and ambivalence at home about the rightness of its cause, while the locals were fighting for their homes and their lives - think Vietnam. As in a lot of cases, morale and logistics are at least as important as the straight-up fights.
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Apr 29, 2010 18:31
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Burning Beard posted:The Navy and the Air Force was decent, the Italian Navy actually gave the British a very good run for their money early in the war. Mussolini was unwilling to give up his Navy to major operations after Crete in 1940. The British took care the Italian Navy with one helluva of daring air attack in 1941. Italian submarines were good enough to be taken by the Germans after 1942 and used in the Atlantic War. Well, a caveat - their small boats were excellent. Their larger ships were handled very timidly, though in their defence Italy was also critically short of oil to actually fuel them.
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May 4, 2010 17:28
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Mr Crustacean posted:Yeah, in the cold war, both sides were to blame for exacerbating the tensions between them and both did terrible poo poo. But I tend to view the west less harshly since they acted due to misguided, crippling fear of the effects that communism had (gulags and poo poo). While the USSR seemed actively malevolent in some of its actions. The USSR was invaded in its early existence by pretty much the whole of the West; there was an intervention by Britain, France, Japan, America and a bunch of people - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entente_intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War#Foreign_forces_throughout_Russia intended to snuff their state out and impose a rightwing military dictatorship. They then got invaded again by the Germans and suffered horrific losses throwing them out - far more than the US suffered in the war, with the added bonus of having their civilians killed and thrown into concentration camps and their cities torched. Some misguided, crippling fear of invasion again by the West, and a desire to have buffer states in case that happened, seems reasonable to me without assuming malevolence. See here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:American_troops_in_Vladivostok_1918_HD-SN-99-02013.JPEG American troops on Russian soil, there to overthrow the USSR, in living memory of the people running the USSR post-war. If the situation had been reversed and Soviet troops had been marching through San Francisco in 1919, don't you think the US would be (even more) afraid of the USSR? feedmegin fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Jun 22, 2010 |
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Jun 22, 2010 19:18
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HeroOfTheRevolution posted:At that point there was great confusion over who Russians even were. A solid number of the Russians did agree to have those Entente troops on their soil; it's important to remember that there was a civil war ongoing at the time. Aside from the Japanese, the Entente powers didn't engage in direct warfare either. But the Russians who actually ran the country during the Cold War were the other Russians, who most definitely did not want foreigners intervening against them. Also, the West, Americans included, did in fact invade northern Russia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Russia_Campaign 'The furthest advance south in the conflict was a US Mission in Shenkursk on the Vaga River and Nizhnyaya Toyma on the Northern Dvina where the strongest Bolshevik positions were encountered. Allied troops were expelled from Shenkursk after an intense battle on 19 January 1919.' Also also, 'Russian soldiers being on what became US soil but was Russian at the time' is a bit different than 'US soldiers supporting the other side in a civil war', don't you think? The equivalent here is more like Britain and France intervening on the Southern side in the US Civil War. Edit: I'm not saying 1919 was the single major cause of the Cold War or anything, by the way. I am saying that memories of both 1919 and 1941 were more significant reasons for the Soviet Union to want buffer states than 'hey let's be as evil as possible'.
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Jun 23, 2010 18:09
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HeroOfTheRevolution posted:Okay, I get that you read Chomsky or Zinn but that has nothing to do with what we were talking about. The discussion was about setting up the Warsaw Pact. Yeah, the US's actions in South America and East Asia were, excepting Korea, generally bullshit, but that doesn't really have anything to do with setting up buffer states in Europe, and it happened well into the Cold War and not in the first days post-war. I thought we were talking about the Cold War in general actually. Setting up client states in eastern Europe wasn't 'nice' or anything, but neither, as you say, were the actions of the US in propping up client states in South America. The US just had the nous to be a little more hands-off and quiet about it. As for the Warsaw Pact specifically, that was set up after NATO as a counterpart to it, and that only when West Germany joined it (which sort of chimes in with my 'the Soviets didn't fancy being invaded by Germans again' theme).
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Jun 24, 2010 18:14
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College Rockout posted:With regard to this, I remember hearing from somewhere that NATO purposely kept their troops at a minimum so if the Soviets ever thought about attacking with their superior army then the only option NATO would have would be to go nuclear. NATO purposely only left themselves with only the nuclear option so if the USSR started expanding it would've lead to the death of every USSR citizen Eh, no, not really. NATO people generally spent the Cold War screaming for more money and not getting it because getting democracies to spend big on defence in peacetime is hard. This was particularly true of the smaller European countries. NATO only had the nuclear option because that's all NATO could afford, especially earlier in the Cold War.
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Jun 24, 2010 18:17
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Crackpipe posted:Also, can anyone comment on the book Red Army by Ralph Peters? It portrays a Soviet invasion of Western Europe during the 1980s, but his portrayal of NATO is often critiqued as either devastatingly accurate, or unduly pessimistic. It's about as far from the mind-numbing, Americans wave their magic wand and deliver a crippling blow against the enemy with their deux ex machina of Tom Clancy as you can get. I seem to recall that book comes with a foreword urging NATO countries to spend a lot more money on defence to prevent the scenario in his book from occurring, and the author was in the Army at the time. One suspects he had a vested interest in playing up the doom, much as the defence establishment of the time would publish books about the Soviet Union's new superweapons and/or incredibly huge hordes of tanks in order to get more funding. Still a good read, though.
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Jul 21, 2010 17:40
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Grand Prize Winner posted:*Cannon+pre-renaissance stone castle=lump of scenic rubble, but I don't know how effective anti-cannon countermeasures like Vauban-style star forts were, so I won't speculate. Pretty effective, and old-style castles defended with Vauban earthworks didn't work too badly either - most sieges in the English Civil War were more a matter of starving people out than blowing them up, and they had effective cannon at the time.
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Dec 20, 2010 17:43
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lilljonas posted:Later WW1 saw the first "modern" experiments with small flexible unit doctrine, afaik. That said, companies have been around for a long time (the word goes back to the mercenary companies of the middle ages) and platoons have been around since the 17th century - they just didn't generally operate as independent elements. (as an exception, small light cavalry units generally did operate independently for the purpose of scouting)
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Apr 18, 2011 17:27
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The Downfall posted:The one currently alive (97 years old) my great uncle served in(which he doesn't take much pride in) Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD. He was an officer (Hauptsturmfuhrer) he was in the occupation of Poland and the mass killings in occupied Russia. I speak with him on a near daily basis so if you have any questions let me know. Wait, this Einsatzgruppen? - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen Jesus Christ. I guess my questions would be why isn't he in jail, and how can he live with himself? Never mind 'don't take much pride in'!
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Aug 4, 2011 16:38
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Graviton v2 posted:Dude it was the biggest rumble ever with practically every nation/empire involved plus the use of nukes. Its pretty drat interesting! Plus it finished off the British Empire, the 2nd reich if you like, and left the world with the USA and the Soviet Union running things. You have an odd definition of 'finished off'. The war furthered the job the First World War had started of bankrupting the Empire, but it stuck around for quite a while afterwards. If you want the real death knell I'd say that was the Suez Crisis in 1957, when Britain and France basically encouraged Israel under the table to invade Egypt (which had just nationalised the British/French-owned Suez Canal), and then stepped in as 'peacekeepers' to secure said canal. Russia threatened to start World War Three in support of Egypt; the US told France and Britain to knock it off and financially blackmailed Britain by threatening to sell off its holdings of Sterling. Britain and France backed down, the canal stayed Egyptian, Britain learned that it pretty much had to suck US dick diplomatically speaking ever since. Even so, the British Empire didn't disappear in a puff of smoke; it has gradually shed its territory throughout the second half of the twentieth century. I was an adult when Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1999 for instance.
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Aug 4, 2011 17:45
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:The UK was in no state to hold on to any of the valuable/volatile parts of the Empire in a long-term fashion by the end of WW2. Same goes for France. Suez just hammered in the point. We were planning to give up India before the war even started, there wasn't really any 'salvaging' going on there. My point is that the British Empire in 1945 hadn't already been 'finished', or Britain wouldn't have been trying to suppress the Malayan Insurgency in the first place. It was rapidly declining, sure - I mentioned the financial issues, for example - but that's not the same as already gone.
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Aug 4, 2011 20:47
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Alchenar posted:Short answer: the Soviets so that their tanks could fire ATGMs, NATO because it turns out that fin-stabilised shells are more accurate than shells fired from a rifle so long as your smoothbore barrel is manufactured to the right standards. And the Challenger 2 still uses a rifled gun.
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Aug 24, 2011 21:01
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:Italy was totally unprepared for war. Well, it's more Italy was very well prepared for war - in about 1935. They militarised earlier than everyone else (the Fascists having come to power earlier, I suppose) and thus had obsolete gear in 1939 that would have been top-notch a few years earlier. The Soviets had something of the same problem.
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Sep 26, 2011 19:01
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Modern Day Hercules posted:It doesn't strike me as being too accurate, at least not for most of Rome's history. Greeks would sometimes just have single dudes fight and which ever dude won would decide who won a battle, but I know Romans did not practice that. Roman soldiers didn't even learn single combat ifaik, they only learned how to fight in formation.  Maybe in the Iliad. In the classical era wars were not decided by champions, whether Greek or Roman.
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Oct 26, 2011 16:08
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esquilax posted:Are there any grains of truth to champion warfare? Sure, I could believe it happened in the Bronze Age (which is the period the Iliad depicts). It's not an uncommon method of solving disputes among a variety of - I don't want to say primitive, as such, but perhaps less urbanised/smaller societies historically.
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Oct 26, 2011 19:08
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Ensign Expendable posted:I don't think any nation ever has had a problem with getting tank crewmen or pilots because everyone is too tall. Actually the Soviet Union specifically used as short as possible crewmen (5'6 or shorter) for their tanks. The more cramped you can make a tank, the smaller and lower to the ground it is, and therefore the harder to hit. So it could in theory become a problem.
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Oct 28, 2011 19:54
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Ensign Expendable posted:Soviet tanks were notoriously cramped compared to their Western counterparts. I haven't read anything that mentioned that they were having trouble coming up with sufficiently short crewmen. The only limiting factor I've ever read about was not being able to train enough of them. Yup agreed. Hence 'in theory' 
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Oct 29, 2011 03:38
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Cataphract Paladin posted:I remember reading that number somewhere in Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately I can't find the exact page at the moment. He wrote that in 1788 - there's been two centuries and change of historical research since, so you really, really need a more current source. History doesn't change as such but our interpretations of it certainly do as new research is done, and he is way out of date as a scholarly source. http://www.unrv.com/empire/roman-population.php seems reasonable, and pegs the Empire at ~50 million (it does actually mention the 120, or even 130m total, but with the note that that's rather extreme. As often in ancient history, there's simply no way to know for sure). feedmegin fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Nov 1, 2011 |
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Nov 1, 2011 15:45
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Retarded Pimp posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concise_list_of_Roman_emperors This isn't unusual - happened with the Janissaries too in the Ottoman Empire. They're heavily armed, they're in close proximity to the Emperor, and as mentioned they're the guys supposed to protect the guy so there's no other force to stop them. So the Emperor had better do whatever they say, or 
feedmegin fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Nov 2, 2011 |
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Nov 2, 2011 00:18
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Rycalawre posted:Even before William came over there was already a complete mess of people living in the British Isles so adding Norman to the mix wouldn't have caused that much more trouble than there already was. Plus the Normans were really cool. Ethnically true, perhaps, but with regard to England in particular not linguistically. Everyone spoke Anglo-Saxon, which was pretty much as homogenous a Germanic language as Dutch or, well, German. A bit of influence from Norse, but that's about it, and it had regional variations, but again, it's not like you don't see that in German too. Absent the Norman Conquest, and come the invention of 'spelling' and 'dictionaries' and such like in the 18th century, I imagine it'd be as regular as and rather similar to modern Dutch. As for calling the Normans cool - well, if you find a bunch of really vicious jackbooted psychopathic thugs cool, sure. Seriously, they pretty much razed the North to the ground.
feedmegin fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Nov 4, 2011 |
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Nov 4, 2011 18:13
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Deception posted:Also Greek wasn't the official language of the empire until the 10th century if I remember correctly and all of it's laws were written in Latin. e think I'm a byzantine fanatic, which I proudly say I am! It's also worth pointing out that the eastern half of the Roman Empire spoke Greek from long before the split between East and West (hell, clear back to Alexander's time before Rome was a power at all) - there's a reason the New Testament is written in Greek not Latin. Any educated man in Rome also spoke Greek. The Greek/Latin divide isn't really as big a point of delineation between the two periods as you might think.
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Nov 4, 2011 18:21
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Nenonen posted:Uniforms cost lots of money before industrialization (and even after that), especially the nice bright coloured stuff. I would suspect that the need to be able to distinguish men in the battlefield by their uniforms only became really important with much larger armies, and also only became practical in such scale once fabrics became more affordable. Until then, the hoi polloi that formed the majority of the forces would die in their rags while the elite, usually cavalry, would be wearing their finest silks and heaviest armour and look so dashing. It's on a tangent to the question, but the first time English armies wore a uniform in this manner was the New Model Army, formed in 1645 during the Civil War. Before this, armies were formed from regiments recruited by local magnates, who'd each dress their regiment in uniform colours, but in whatever colours they felt suitable. The New Model centralised the 'procuring uniforms' stuff and bought coats in the cheapest dye they could find, which happened to be red. Hence the first redcoats. (The Scots also did the cheapest-possible-centralised-clothing thing for their armies; in their case cheap ended up being Hodden grey).
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Nov 4, 2011 18:34
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zoux posted:This isn't strictly military history but since a lot of y'all know about Prussians: Preußen and yes - assuming you're talking about the Germans in Prussia and not this lot - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Prussian_language
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Nov 4, 2011 18:53
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Xiahou Dun posted:No, England was a mess. There were several vastly different dialects that were barely mutually intelligible. Also, you picking German and Dutch as examples undermines your point considerably : both of those languages have an insane amount of variation in them, including even a dialect continuum between them. The only reason that languages are ever stable is because of unification of a prestige dialect. That's fair enough, and I acknowledge I'm not an academic linguist so I guess I bow to your authority on this one - but would you acknowledge that modern standard German for instance does have a fairly regular orthography, which is not present in English? I mean, I acknowledge that there are huge differences in dialects, perhaps I didn't make that point enough in my post - but written standard German for instance is generally pronounced how it looks according to regular rules, which is not the case in English. Absent the Norman Conquest, why would this not have happened in England too? Again, not an expert, but it seems part of the problem to me is that our 'prestige dialect' for quite some time was French. Edit: 'Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue' looks pretty drat interesting though, I'll have to pick it up. Thanks for mentioning it. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Nov 4, 2011 |
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Nov 4, 2011 19:22
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Really? The Harrowing of the North was genocidal, absolutely, but treating the Normans as a race as somehow responsible is just ridiculous. Well, I was replying to 'Even before William came over there was already a complete mess of people living in the British Isles so adding Norman to the mix wouldn't have caused that much more trouble than there already was. Plus the Normans were really cool. ' - so I took him to be talking specifically about William and his pals rather than, I dunno, Angevin Sicily. But yeah, I wasn't trying to imply all Normans everywhere are literally  or anything. Nor did I mean to imply they were generally worse than the Anglo-Saxons or Vikings or whoever, who were as you point out also perfectly capable of all sorts of unpleasant things.
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Nov 4, 2011 21:00
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Deception posted:This. I was basically trying to say that in my sleep deprived state last night but wasn't able to string two sentences together. My old thread got some love but it's in archives now, I'd bring it back up if enough people were interested in talking Rome! Very much so. I've been learning Latin since I'm interested in mediaeval history, but I'm finding that's also making me much more interested in the classical period. It helps that Wheelock tends to use passages describing real historical events.
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Nov 5, 2011 00:10
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lilljonas posted:No. For example, the population of the Philippines was approximated at 9 000 000 in 1895, and 8 000 000 in 1908 after the extremely brutal Philippine-American colonial war. As many as 1 400 000 might have been killed, with General Jacob H. Smith famously ordering the death of any Filipino over the age of 10. This was just a century ago, not some Christopher Columbus era atrocity. Colonialism really sucked for the colonized people. I might add, the notion that it was only the European powers and not the United States that had a colonial empire is disturbingly common. The Philippines was as much a straight-up colony owned by the Land of the Free as, I dunno, Rhodesia was one of Britain.
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Nov 6, 2011 02:38
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Ensign Expendable posted:That's interesting. My great-grandfather had a Soviet WWII guerilla warfare manual, which didn't dehumanize the enemy at all [...] It was all about how to defeat the enemy, not convincing the reader that the enemy needs to be defeated. If it was written actually during World War 2, then that was presumably because its readership had all the evidence they needed of that thanks to their own eyes...
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Nov 6, 2011 23:28
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Nenonen posted:That wording is dodgy. Better economies, in which way? GDP? Inflation? After WWII, when? 1945? 2011? By victors, are we talking about USA or Russia or Britain or Brazil? The Allies that won WW2 were a diverse bunch of countries and it's hard to generalise them. When also matters. Japan was a serious economic force in the 80s, but not so much the 50s. Kind of hard to credit WW2 with that.
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Nov 21, 2011 18:11
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Edit: Summary-they would have kept Slavery until the end of time, regardless of the actual economic benefits, simply because so much of their wealth was based on the material value of the slaves themselves. Also, I imagine slavery would actually have been very viable economically as soon as Ford-style mass production came into vogue. When you set things up so that each worker on your production line is essentially a machine performing a single action rather than an artisan, you don't need your workers to be skilled or love their work or be well educated; an ideal fit for slaves. Hell, it's why China produces so much cheap stuff right now; they don't have slavery per se but they do have a non-educated workforce that they can pay very low wages. Not much difference between that and paying no wages but providing food and lodging.
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Nov 25, 2011 18:42
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Mans posted:I really can't see how zeppelin attacks can be dangerous to any moving object. You could see those fat bastards from a mile away and simply walk away from their path. They were better off sending Germans in glides with a grenade belt. I don't think the idea behind the poster is 'you'll be safer in the trenches than back home!' - because that's bananas. More that it's more honourable to die as a soldier than risk being killed like a bitch while shirking your duty to serve your country.
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Nov 27, 2011 23:53
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zokie posted:The idea is simply: If you want to vote and participate in ruling our country you better be ready to defend it! When Sweden adopted universal (male) sufferage in the eary nineties they wrote: I presume you mean the 1890s and not the 1990s!
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Nov 27, 2011 23:58
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duckmaster posted:France had conscription for hundreds of years, in the form of a feudal ballot system. The revolutionary government expanded this system upon taking power. The levee en mass, what I assume you mean when you say "modern conscription" was created by the dictatorial government of the Committee for Public Safety to put down counter-revolution, particularly in the Vendee (where up to quarter of a million Frenchmen died). I'm not sure I agree. Attempting to conscript in the Vendee was one of the causes of the Vendee revolt - you've got cause and effect precisely reversed. It was instituted because a poo poo ton of foreign powers were invading France to overthrow the (elected) National Assembly and restore the absolute monarchy. In practice the Committee of Public Safety acted as a dictatorship, sure, but J Random Frenchman didn't know that. They were a democratically-elected emergency government as far as they were concerned. They were to prove sadly disappointed, but a lot of the Frenchmen who were part of the levee and fought and died at places like Valmy did in fact believe they were fighting for democracy.
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Nov 28, 2011 00:05
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Nenonen posted:Beardo is Tirpitz. I don't know the third one - I would love to say Hitler, but... I think that's Hindenburg not Ludendorff actually. I'm drawing a blank on the third guy - there weren't many German high-ups who didn't wear a big ol' beard. Could be someone like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Manfred_von_Richthofen.jpeg I guess? (and the chances of them putting a random motorcycle despatch rider on a propaganda poster alongside the German high command are rather slim, don't you think? Not to mention Hitler had a hell of a moustache at this point)
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Nov 28, 2011 19:19
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:beep beep best ww1 poster coming through Disturbing when you think about it. 'Literally kill me right now and turn me into a drink for the sake of the war effort!'. Given the casualty rates in the trenches it's disturbingly apposite.
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Nov 28, 2011 19:57
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gradenko_2000 posted:
WW2 Germany won outright on the continent in 1940 or so, unlike in WW1, so they could loot food from Denmark/Belgium/the Netherlands/France/Poland etc. Until the end of the war when they lost that territory, of course.
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Dec 5, 2011 19:17
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Jeoh posted:What are some good introductory books to the three big pre-WWI wars (Crimean, American and Russo-Japanese)? I honestly don't know much about them despite their massive influence on the world. You'll want the Franco-Prussian war in there too, given its scale and seeing as it formed Germany as a state. Possibly the Austro-Prussian War, the various developments in Italy, and the Russo-Turkish conflicts too. The latter 19th century had more wars than one might think, even discounting colonial stuff
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Dec 13, 2011 17:36
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bartkusa posted:Is there anything interesting at all in Lithuanian military history? That's where my parents are from. I don't know much about the place. It used to be part of a regional superpower, the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian_Commonwealth They even invaded Russia and held Moscow for a time - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Muscovite_War_%281605%E2%80%931618%29
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Dec 21, 2011 17:58
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Oxford Comma posted:Wait. What? These chaps - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Brothers - though the OP seems to conflating post-WWII resistance to the Soviets with the Polish/USSR war in 1920, which is a different thing. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Dec 21, 2011 |
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Dec 21, 2011 20:55
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