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Could you give a brief (or maybe not so brief) overview of how infantry doctrines changed between the creation of rapid-firing firearms, through WWI and up to the end of WWII? Maybe tanks too, in case my existing knowledge has gaping holes I'm not aware of.
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Apr 29, 2010 02:57
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Admiral Snackbar posted:
Aw, but you were just getting to the good part  Great thread so far!
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Apr 30, 2010 01:41
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Thanks for quoting the links, I couldn't find them. How long is the whole thing?
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Jul 11, 2010 17:32
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Kingsbury posted:how effective were tanks in WW1? They would have been a lot better if they didn't end up being so poorly ventilated that it was impossible to breathe inside after a while. Also the non-British tanks had problems with tipping over. The Renault FT-17 was a pretty good model, but it came along very late in the war.
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Jul 20, 2010 20:55
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Wasn't Operation Barbarossa delayed a couple months to make room for the Yugoslavian campaign? If that is true then wouldn't the Germans have had an extra 2 months of campaigning time before the winter? It was delayed due to the campaign and also because manufacturing was slower than expected, I think.
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Jul 25, 2010 03:19
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Also remember that Russian partisans always tend to put up a fairly effective resistance, or at least harass the enemy convoys enough to slow them down significantly. During WWII, the USSR even airdropped instruction books in order how to fight lightly armoured forces without specialized (or often any) weapons.
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Jul 26, 2010 22:40
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Alpha was better during Soviet times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Storm-333
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Aug 5, 2010 18:23
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Kemper Boyd posted:Holding a grudge against Sherman seems kinda odd. The ACW happened 150 years ago, one would imagine that people in the South would get over it. It's not like he burned my house or your house. Go ahead. I didn't even know there was a Finnish Civil War.
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Aug 9, 2010 21:24
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Zionist_en_fuego posted:Really happy to see a thread like this pop up! I've been away from SA for about 3 years and I'm happy to have caught this thread at a glance... Tank battles, please.
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Aug 20, 2010 05:45
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Nov 23, 2010 02:03
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Graviton v2 posted:What happens when they jam in that situation, is the only option to take it completly to bits and clean everything? How long does that take? There's a button on the side called the Forward Assist, you can hit it to force the bolt to move forward all the way and guarantee you at least one more shot.
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Dec 11, 2010 19:16
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Nenonen posted:Then answer my earlier question regarding the logistical planning for Napoleon's campaign in Russia, damnit! How did the armies ensure that they wouldn't run out of gunpowder just prior to the decisive battle on long campaigns like that? Or could Nappy expect to receive supplies to Moscow if need be? Or did they just go in and hope for the best, like Napoleon did in Egypt? He did have supply lines, but those were intercepted by partisans and Kutuzov's army while Napoleon was sitting in Moscow. I don't know what the gunpowder situation was like at that point, but they were certainly running out of food.
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Dec 13, 2010 17:59
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Pyle posted:The Russian ground forces had stuff like T-55s, T-72s and BMPs. To Russians those are Main Battle Tanks and Armored Personnel Carriers. To everyone else, at least in the west, that equipment is only scrap metal. There are still T-55s and T-72s in service?  I thought the oldest stuff the Russians fielded were T-80s.
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May 30, 2011 23:59
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Panzer IIs could barely pierce T-34s with their lovely autocannons. They were pretty much relegated to anti partisan duties or converted into tank destroyers, engineering tanks or munitions carriers. Even Panzer IVs were ineffective against KVs until they got the long 7.5cm guns. The tactics when dealing with a KV involved shooting at the barrel of the gun, hoping to take it out, or taking out the tracks and waiting for 8.8cm gun support.
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Jul 18, 2011 14:40
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Acknot posted:Grand Prize Winner, Every vehicle since the T-72 was equipped to automatically seal itself and continue fighting in irradiated conditions, so nuking them wouldn't stop the forces not destroyed by the shockwave.
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Aug 19, 2011 15:16
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Like I said, every tank and APC after the T-72 had this capability. I don't know if all the units were fitted with this sort of thing, but it was available.
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Aug 20, 2011 04:58
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Admiral Snackbar posted:One of the things that doesn't get much attention is the fact that the Russian tanks being used by the Arab countries didn't have any kind of air conditioning. Just imagine being stuck in a large oven in the midst of battle and trying to fight effectively. I wouldn't necessarily say this was a design flaw, since, as you say, they were export versions and should have been appropriately equipped by the end users. drat, I knew export tanks were stripped down, but I didn't know they were that stripped down.
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Aug 23, 2011 04:09
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Kemper Boyd posted:The French used Panthers for a while after the war, and a bunch of German equipment was sold off to the Middle East, off the top of my head. The Syrians used PzIV's. Of course, Finland too kept PzIV's in use after the war. Israel, too! The Israeli army used German helmets and Kar98ks for a period of time, until they got their own industry going.
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Aug 24, 2011 01:01
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The BBC "World at War" series has some very good episodes concerning the Eastern Front. Aside from that, most of the material I've read and seen was in Russian.
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Sep 30, 2011 21:30
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Almost certainly shrapnel. A full powered rifle round should be able to pierce any amount of metal that it's reasonably practical to carry all over yourself for a few hours at a time.
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Oct 1, 2011 06:19
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Cracked is really bad at history in general. Take their historical articles with a giant grain of salt.
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Oct 17, 2011 04:55
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Nenonen posted:Do you think they would have played an important role? For pre-gunpowder and pre-combustion engine armies, manpower was the decisive element. This had a lot to do with nutrition of the people as a whole, but also the logistics of the armies. A starved army of strongmen would be of no match to a well fed army of weaklings. The importance of size probably hasn't played that important role other than perhaps morally, and maybe in how big a target a man has been to archers. Later there have been occasional technical limitations, like how big a man you can fit within the confines of a tank or a fighter plane. I don't think any nation ever has had a problem with getting tank crewmen or pilots because everyone is too tall.
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Oct 28, 2011 01:48
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No reason to develop your own interface when you can walk into a store and grab them for fifty bucks a pop. I am actually pleasantly surprised they didn't sink a ton of money into some terrible proprietary controller design.
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Oct 28, 2011 04:47
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feedmegin posted: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. 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.
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Oct 28, 2011 20:32
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Nenonen posted:Cruiser/Infantry tank doctrine wasn't unique. Soviets had an identical system with their BT (Blizhniy Tank = fast tank) and T-26 doctrine in the 1930's. Russians learned that it didn't work very well the hard way - lucky for them they had the T-34 available. Bystriy Tank. Blizhniy means "close". Also the BT series were pretty neat from a technical perspective. The Christie suspension allowed them to travel on roads without using up their track lifespan, so they weren't constrained by railroads having to deliver them over any significant distance. Also, as the name suggests, they were pretty fast, so instead of waiting for engineers to lay a bridge across a river, they could just find a bump and ramp over it. It's pretty impressive when you see a tank soar through the air like that. The Soviets' infantry/tank relationship is also pretty different. Since the USSR never made any APCs before WWII, infantry would ride into battle on top of the tanks. During the Winter War, T-28s were also used to lay a path through the snow for the soldiers, and even tow armoured sleds behind them.
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Oct 29, 2011 05:33
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Xiahou Dun posted:No idea about Russian, though. Never learned more than 10 words, so I only know basic typology stuff. I'm not a linguist, but the simplification that the Soviets implemented removed a few letters. The only one that I've ever seen in pre-revolution texts was the ѣ, which was pretty much identical to the letter е, but there were complicated rules on when you would write one or the other. Also, the hard sign was dropped from the end of words. The pronunciation of words didn't change, they just became easier to write.
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Nov 4, 2011 04:29
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Jiriam posted:My father was a regular army and then national guard officer in the sixties and seventies, and when he died I inherited boxes and boxes of guerilla warfare manuals and books of tactical problems that talk about 'the enemy' -but you can tell it's the soviets- in really dehumanizing terms. It's weird, and frightening to me. That's interesting. My great-grandfather had a Soviet WWII guerilla warfare manual, which didn't dehumanize the enemy at all. Most of it was on weapons maintenance, hand to hand combat, how to take out a tank with no anti-tank weapons and how to survive in the Russian wilderness. There were parts on interrogation, but all they consisted of were phrases you may want to ask, such as where the base is located, how many tanks they have, etc. It was all about how to defeat the enemy, not convincing the reader that the enemy needs to be defeated.
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Nov 6, 2011 19:12
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This page has several chapters from the Partisan's Companion, a book that was written to help Soviet citizens organize resistance against German forces. The chapters are as follows: Rank Insignia of the German Army Learn the Weapons of Your Enemy (brief maintenance instructions for common and uncommon weapons) Destroy Enemy Tanks! (how to fight a tank with no anti tank weapons) How Fascists Combat Partisans Rules of Interrogation How to Fight an Airborne Enemy Life in the Snow Hand to Hand Combat Camouflage Combat Arms (same thing as Learn the Weapons of Your Enemy, but for Soviet weapons) Travel and Campground Scouting
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Nov 14, 2011 23:00
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I translated the most interesting chapter (the anti-tank one) in the TFR milsurp thread a while ago, if you go through my posts in there you might be able to find it.
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Nov 15, 2011 17:10
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I found the translation I posted.Ensign Expendable posted:Here you go. The original is preserved as much as possible.
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Nov 15, 2011 21:53
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The descriptions make it out to be a lot more exciting than it really is. I would also challenge its effectiveness in training Iraqi guerillas. A large amount of the book such as chemical warfare, winter survival, weapon maintenance, and of the German specific chapters would not be applicable to combat outside of that specific theater. If I were to choose one, I would go with the Schmitt translation. The Grau and Greiss book seems to be pushing the popular history angle way too hard.
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Nov 18, 2011 05:16
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Mans posted:Not that it mattered much, after 1945 the Soviets would be vomiting ISs and t-54s while the Allies would be making GBS threads Pattons and Centurions. All the while their aerial power would keep rising while the Germans relied on 17 year old kids flying manned missiles. They certainly weren't vomiting T-54s and IS-3s, but they could have if the war had lasted any longer. Meanwhile, T-44s and IS-2s were more than enough to bash Germany's face in.
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Nov 24, 2011 17:30
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Pretty drat well. Even though the 122mm gun was selected for its HE performance in an infantry support role, it was enough to penetrate Panther and Tiger armour. Test reports say that a Panther tank was thrown back several meters after penetration, although I find that somewhat hard to believe. The did have an unfortunate fault of two-piece ammunition, which made reload times fairly long.
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Nov 25, 2011 17:45
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Nenonen posted:Still, nothing compares to KV-2. 152mm howitzer as the main gun in 1941?! With a turret the size of a Sandcrawler. The KV had a ton of problems. While its armour was impenetrable to anything short of the German 88mm AA gun, the transmission broke down frequtently, it was horribly slow, and the large KV-2 turret couldn't turn unless the tank was parked relatively flat. KV-2s stopped being made before WWII even started, although they are far more recognizable than the KV-1. Once the KV-1 armour was no longer impenetrable by German tanks, it really didn't offer much on the battlefield compared to the faster, cheaper and similarly armed T-34.
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Nov 26, 2011 00:28
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Mandatory service is down to a year, now. My grandfather keeps complaining how you can't learn anything in a year and that they should bump it back up to 3. Also being in university grants you an exemption, and then you start off as an officer, so all those poorly trained privates either failed out of post-secondary education or weren't smart enough to get in in the first place.
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Nov 26, 2011 18:56
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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. Lithuania used to be a pretty big deal in the 14th century, but not so much recently. I don't know a lot about that period, but they conquered a lot of lands and stood up to the Crusades, so they had to have something going for them.
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Dec 21, 2011 17:13
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Alchenar posted:In case anyone who isn't a troll is reading, it was actually fairly common for Axis soldiers to use captured Soviet weapons (especially a couple of AT guns). In quite a few photos from Stalingrad you'll see Germans with PPsH's, for example. The Germans were exceedingly fond of the 76.2mm ZIS-3 gun, to the point where they developed their own ammunition to use in the ones they captured. Also, the nice thing about captured PPShes and PPSes was they they ran passably on 7.63mm Mauser ammunition the Germans had a bunch of lying around. Also if you look at the upper handguard, it's obviously a Kar98k.
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Dec 26, 2011 20:30
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Were there any Italians in the east? I can't think of any battles where Italy was involved. I also recall Mussolini being less than enthusiastic about fighting the Soviets.
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Jan 17, 2012 17:38
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The Soviets were fully prepared to give up Moscow if they had to. Factories were evacuated, equipment moved past the Urals. Government was evacuated. Buildings were wired up to explode should the Nazis actually enter the city.
Ensign Expendable fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Jan 22, 2012 |
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Jan 22, 2012 04:21
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Yeah, basically the only difference if the Germans would actually take Moscow would be the hit to morale and Levitan's broadcasts wouldn't start with "Moscow is speaking" (not that he was speaking from Moscow in the first place).
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Jan 22, 2012 20:58
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