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bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe
The failure Spring Offensive was what truly defeated the Germans in WWI, not American participation. Granted, the Offensive was in direct response to the threat of American entry, but the actual American contribution to defeating the offensive was pretty minimal (this was when Pershing was refusing to play nice with the Allies). It was the French and Brits (particularly the Brits) who did the heavy lifting.

Germany lost almost a quarter million men (jesus) in these attacks. That said, their defeat due largely to the fact their supply lines were awful, but that doesn't change the fact that it was the Brits (and French sorta) who got the job done (using German tactics from the previous year ironically enough).

It is perhaps arguable that the follow-on offensive would not have been as effective without American participation, but Germany was pretty much done after losing so much of her best troops during Michael and Lys. It was only a matter of time at that point.

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bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Kingsbury posted:

How close was the RAF to losing the Battle of Britain?

Heh...I wrote my thesis on this. I'm assuming by "lose" you mean how close was Fighter Command to being destroyed?

The common retelling is that the RAF was on its last legs when the Luftwaffe shifted its focus from airfields and radar/commo nodes to London (this in early September). I don't really find this to be accurate; the RAF's fighter strength was increasing continuously increasing throughout the period and their pilot strength was remaining roughly steady (though they were still short and gradually getting less experienced). Short answer, there really isn't much evidence to suggest that they were particularly closet to breaking.

That said, they really should have lost the Battle...if the German command had been anywhere close to competent (as Fighter Command certainly was), Germany had the superior equipment and personnel; they really should have won, and fairly easily at that. Three major mistakes that the Luftwaffe made, in addition to countless minor ones:

1. The E-7 variant of the 109 had been widely introduced at the time of the Battle, and its belly shackle had been used to carry a drop tank. I'm sure we all know that the 109 was crippled by its lack of range; a lot of people don't realize that not only that the E-7 was available in fairly large numbers from the beginning of the Battle, but that the Luftwaffe used their E-7s to carry small bombs on meaningless single raids. Had they concentrated their E-7s in hunter/killer groups with directives to do nothing but engage RAF fighters they could have had a drastic effect.

2. German intelligence did not correctly identified the ridiculously vulnerable aircraft and aeroengine factories and had efforts made to shut them down. As has been noted, the RAF never suffered much as far as fighter attrition; had these factories been hit repeatedly then RAF numbers might have been a lot more critical.

3. Goering had not changed tactics halfway through the battle forcing 109 pilots to close escort bomber formations. Prior to this, though the Luftwaffe was losing a lot of bombers, they were putting a LOT more pressure on the RAF through fighter losses. Forcing the 109 pilots to stay with the bombers eliminated their initiative which they never really recovered.

tldr, the RAF was never particularly close to being destroyed, but they probably should have been.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

MrDutch posted:

What effect had ww2 on demographics, escpecially for Germany and the USSR. They lost millions of men. And I know they lost millions of civilians also, but with alot of men dead from the war. Did this cause a serious shortage of men for women?

The numbers are so huge it is pretty hard to imagine.

In Russia the differences weren't as pronounced because so many women died as well as men. In Germany, however, for a few decades after the war (as we saw after WWI also) there was a visible dip in the demographic size for the men born between 1910 and 1925 or so. Another major cost was care for the maimed solders...it was comparable to the American Civil War in that respect.

One thing about Soviet manpower that I've always found fascinating is how close they really were to exhausting their reserves. I've seen a handful of analyses that argued they would not have been able to fight against the allies (had Patton had his way, for example) as their manpower reserves were dwindling so badly due to their losses throughout Barbarossa. It is stunning to me that a country could lose that many soldiers.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe
I've always been kind of appalled that more hasn't been done on WWI. The nature of the combat was so visceral and personal in nature that it seems like it would be perfect for movies/TV. Instead we appear to need to cover every imaginable element of American involvement in WWII.

Up next: Gay, Sometimes: The Story of the United States Merchant Marine

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

asbo subject posted:

The literature and poetry written about ww1 was far superior to anything produced about ww2. I do agree that film and tv about ww1 is woeful though.

These are two good books

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-Bye_to_All_That

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_an_Infantry_Officer

A more modern novel about Sassoon and Graves is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_(novel)

I think the first two books are still in print, but if not 2nd hand paperbacks shouldn't be that expensive.

I'll add Now It Can Be Told by Phillip Gibbs to this list.

I found a battered old library copy in a used bookstore in Portland and I bought it on a whim ($1.50...woo). Turns out it is available for free online!

Anyway, Gibbs was one of the only "offical reporters" for the UK during the war and he spent a lot of time in the trenches as sort of a proto-embedded reporter. The book is unique because it was written in 1920, so it has a ridiculously near-term perspective and is unclouded by the events of WWII. It is a bit overly patriotic, but it doesn't compromise anything.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Cybor Tap posted:

Any good books I should pick up on the American Civil War?

The standards are things like Shelby Foote's anthology, The Killer Angels, Lee's Lieutenants, etc. If you've read those, some more obscure works are The Twentieth Massachusetts, which in my opinion is the single most interesting book on the war, and Fighting for the Confederacy, which was one of the first and remains probably the best memoir from the war. I also have a soft spot for Rifles for Watie if you can stand being seen with a "children's" book.


As for the South "winning" or anything close to it, I offer this appeal to authority:

"I think that the North fought that war with one hand behind its back. If the Confederacy ever had come close to winning on the battlefield, the North simply would have brought that other arm out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever had a chance to win that war."

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Chade Johnson posted:

Oh ok we murdered foreigners in later wars, so it makes it ok to murder Americans. These were people just trying to survive a war that was taking place hundred of miles away. They weren't soldiers or even guerilla fighters. The fact that some people see him as a great general is sickening. He wasn't pounding Baghdad with artillery from a computer, he was pillaging and starving his own people.

To be fair, about 10% of the suffering was inflicted by Sherman, about 90% was by the southern aristocracy who saw fit to send their underclass off to slaughter in unprecedented numbers to maintain their dreams of enslaving an entire race of people

Readman posted:

The other day, I was trying to remember where I read something to confirm it, and I thought that this thread might be able to help me.

Basically, I'd read that military technology didn't advance significantly during the 18th and early 19th centuries, and that innovation in that period was mainly in the form of changes in military organisation and tactics (driven by Marlborough, Frederick, Napoleon, etc.).

Industrialization (read: Civilization II, riflemen I think) was the driving factor. Prior to the 18th century, the vast majority of arms were made by a dude in his shop, which meant that standardization and modern logistics were simply not possible.

The British were probably the first to figure this out (during the English Civil War): by outfitting whole armies with like weapons, supply lines could be simplified dramatically and individual troops were far more effective for a given amount of supply effort.

In response to your next question, artillery prior to the 17th century was largely just things made in a random workshop and then made to work on the battlefield in whatever manner the commander could manage. After people figured out that standardization ruled, you started seeing more single piece units (the first real example I can think of was the Parrott Rifle in the American Civil War). Eventually, that evolved into "everyone use this gun, which uses identical parts and ammo as every other thing, I don't care what you would prefer to use".

Having seen the army's supply line issues firsthand, I can say that I cannot imagine how awful things were before standardization.

bewbies fucked around with this message at 12:58 on Aug 9, 2010

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

What would have happened if Lee sided with the Union rather than Virginia? Would the CSA even have got off the ground?

This probably isn't a super popular opinion, but I think that the South probably would have done just fine with the other generals they had (Jackson and Longstreet in particular). I'm also not convinced that Lee would have been the right commander for the Union, especially early in the war.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Canemacar posted:

There is a reason the man is reviled in the parts of the country he oh so nobly pillaged and ransacked.

I think the reason is more closely related to his kicking the crap out of the CSA army than the March to the Sea thing.

Seriously though, I can't think of another group of people that lost a war that has had such a tough time letting it go as the 'mercan south.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Chade Johnson posted:

Well he didn't personally shoot women and children in the face, thus the deaths from starvation and disease are not his fault at all. Anything that happened after he left the area is actually the fault of the people themselves for being born on the wrong side of an imaginary line.

Whatever Sherman's effect was, the decision by the southern aristocracy to start a war to try and protect their "right" to enslave people was probably more critical in that whole chain of events.

Let's not forget their sending off most of the farming population to fight and die, and their decision to plant more cash crops (to sell for money to fund the war) over food crops that had a far greater impact than anything Sherman did.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Royality posted:

Also, if any American goons who are up with the American Civil war want to explain why it happened, what it was and what happened during it I'd love to hear it (screw wikipedia!). As a Brit I've never heard about it, we only talk about stuff that we won or was so long ago it doesn't have any relevance (1066 for example!).

Here's the shortest dirtiest summation of the causes that I can manage.


Going back to the earliest colonial days, there were deep and fundamental differences between the northern and southern United States. The north grew in a way very similar to southern England in that period: an industrial capitalist base supported by efficient, small scale farming. While this was hardly a picnic for the urban poor, it turned the region into an economic monster.

The prewar south, on the other hand, was becoming something closer to manorial: it was an agrarian culture, wealth and particularly political power was concentrated among the large scale plantation owners, social mobility was nonexistant, and the basis for it all was the "free" labor of slaves. Slavery, more than anything else, prevented anyone but the wealthy slaveowners from accumulating disposable wealth, which meant that the vast majority of the population was left to subsistence farming or working for the plantation owners.

Slavery was seen as an elephant in the room from the earliest days of the US government, and the typical response at the time was to throw the dead cat into another room of the house and deal with it later. This worked reasonably well until western expansion began in earnest. By 1820, northern states had outlawed slavery and the abolitionist movement was gaining power at all levels of government, southerners were gradually getting more and more dependant on slavery to support their economy. This evolved into distinct "slave states" and "free states", which were, in general, completely different from one another culturally and economically.

The first flashpoint for the war was Missouri, specifically whether or not Missouri would be admitted as a slave state or a free state. This resulted in the "Missouri Compromise", which codified the slave state vs. free state status, as well as ensuring that any future state admissions would have be done in a 1 for 1 deal to avoid either group having an advantage in the Senate. By this point pretty much everyone knew that some sort of secession was an inevitability.

Various compromises and hissyfits were thrown over the next 30 years, and the divide between north and south continued to deepen: abolitionists in the north were becoming more and more militant, powerful, and violent, slaveowners were becoming more and more powerful in their own right. The period from 1830 to 1850 was a tremendously progressive time in the North, and this generated a lot of distrust/dislike/hatred on both sides.

It was again continued western expansion that finally brought open conflict about. The Kansas–Nebraska Act was the final flashpoint; it established these two new states, got rid of the tenets of the Missouri Compromise, and provided each state with the right to choose slave or free on its own. The Republican party (yes that Republican party) was created as an abolitionist group and became dominant in direct response to the K-N Act, and the "right to choose" its destiny caused Kansas to explode in violence.

It was this environment that Lincoln emerged from. He really wasn't a particularly militant abolitionist, but the power and reputation of the Republican party as an antislavery group terrified the South. When Lincoln was elected, the southern landowning aristocracy, who held literally all of the political power in their respective states, figured (probably correctly) that the election of an abolitionist party was the final threat to their slavery-based way of life. In response, they began to push for secession. The irony is of course that it was the poor non-slaveowning people who did most of the fighting and dying for the CSA, and that in staggering numbers.

I might write another quick summation of the war itself later, what a fun and fascinating war this thing was.

bewbies fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Aug 9, 2010

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

lilljonas posted:

The few times I've talked about the Civil War with "normal" (as in not history geek) Americans, they seem to think that the abolition of slaves after the Civil War was a progressive example of how freedom loving and democratic the US has always been. This is weird to me as I live in a country where slavery has been outlawed for 600 years, and given that it had been outlawed for a very long time pretty much everywhere in Europe by that time. Is that due to some kind of weird spin given to the war in US history classes, or what?

Well, there are two answers to this.

First, yeah, the US should be horribly embarassed that codified slavery existed within its borders for as long as it did. The UK, which was hardly progressive in its own right, was out capping mofos who were trading slaves a half century before the US figured out its business. Most of Europe had their business with slavery settled by the start of the 19th century, so by any reasonable measure the US was a half century behind the curve.

On the other hand, America's divorce from slavery was far more difficult than most of its peers in Europe, many of whom had not had slaves for centuries before officially outlawing slavery. The southern slaveowners were almost certainly the most powerful pro-slavery group on the planet, and they demonstrated their power by taking on the mighty USA in one of the bloodiest wars in history. That the US had the political will to prosecute this war to its conclusion (and it really was about slavery after the Emancipation Proclamation) is something to be proud of, in my opinion at least.


edit - to address how the Civil War is taught in American schools, in everywhere but the deep south it is portrayed as the heroes Lincoln and Grant bludgeoning the misguided southerners out of their foolish ways (which is a fair enough view in my opinion), in the deep south it is taught as a terrible blue invasion that robbed us of our fundamental rights, also slavery what? Let's put more confederate flags on things because of "heritage" or some poo poo. In general the fact that most other modern nations had long since abandoned the practice is not even discussed.

bewbies fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Aug 9, 2010

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe
Bored at work = more writing on the Civil War!

I figured I'd give an essay on the Battle of Shiloh, it is the most interesting battle of the war in my opinion. It was the first battle of the war that really showed how bloody the fighting would be, and it was the first battle that really horrified the public at large. It also featured two of the war's most interesting characters: we saw the rising star and near-failure of US Grant, and we also saw the death of one of the war's most interesting personalities (Albert Sidney Johnston).

The battle took place in southwest Tennessee, which was considered to be in the Western theater of the war. In contrast to the Eastern theater, which was defined mainly by massive pitched battles of relatively well organized armies (Antietam, Gettysburg, Overland, etc) primarily trying to defeat Lee, the war in the West has a very different character: less organized, more anarchical, grittier, and arguably more violent. Battles in the west tended to be more in the wilderness, where long range artillery and rifle fire inflicted fewer casualties and hand to hand combat was far more common. Shiloh is probably the archetype of this kind of battle. In a lot of ways, it was more medieval than Napoleonic.

US Grant at this time was seen as something of an enigma. He was known as a smart, capable officer, but he had battled with alcoholism and abject failure in civilian life (after resigning his commission prior to the war), and he did not have a particularly stellar reputation among Union officials or the public at large. He had, however, enjoyed some limited success in command during the early days of the war, which in view of the failures in the east, proved enough to get him command of an Army under the command of a general (Henry Halleck) who absolutely hated him. The day of Shiloh, Grant began the day miles away from the fighting, recovering from a fairly serious ankle injury that had resulted from a falling horse.

Albert Sidney Johnston, in contrast, at the time of Shiloh was widely seen as the most capable officer serving on either side (his only real competition was Lee, who was not yet in command). His biography is like a movie: grew up on the frontier in Kentucky and Texas, wrangled a shady appointment to West Point, left the Army as an officer to serve as a private in the Texas Army, rose to the rank of General there, got shot in a duel where he refused to fire on his opponent, served as a politician for the Republic of Texas, went back into the US Army for the Mexican War, got promoted to command the entire Department of the Pacific, refused to give San Francisco to the CSA when asked, then decided (when Texas seceded) that he would fight for the South (his journey back from the west coast is fascinating a nd a book in its own right). He was close with Jefferson Davis, and was seen by both sides as the most capable field commander then serving. After receiving his general's commission, he reported to the Western Theater and organized the Army of Mississippi. Johnston's objective was a lot simpler than Grant's. He was to defend Mississippi and the waterways around it, and he was to do this by destroying Grant's army.

The background for the battle was an offensive by Grant's Army of the Tennessee into western Kentucky and Tennessee. Grant was attempting to move down the Tennessee River and into Mississippi, with the ultimate goals of 1) destroying the CSA Army of the Mississippi, and 2) severing Memphis and much of the west from Richmond by taking key rail depots. At the time, this offensive was viewed as the focal point of the war (as little was going on in the East), and the attention of both nations was on these two armies.



Johnston was the commander who seized the initative. Grant was away from the Army that morning; his trusted subordinate Sherman was in immediate command and was encamped at a place called Pittsburgh Landing in rural southern Tennessee. Sherman and Grant both were convinced that Johnston's army was 15 miles away, across the Mississippi border in a town called Corinth. Johnston, however, knew of Grant's location, and had devised a plan to conduct a surprise attack. His army crept, totally undetected, all the way up from Corinth, camped only a couple of miles from Grant and positioned themselves for an early morning attack. Grant's army had no pickets, screens, recon, or anything else going on to warn them of this attack, and they were taken completely by surprise as a result.

It is here that what I'll call "the clusterfuck" begins. Johnston's army had positioned itself during the night, and lines between whole divisions were confusing and mangled. In addition, his battle plan was totally ignored by his subordinates (particularly PGT Beauregard, "hero" of Fort Sumter). The result of all this is that approximately 45,000 Confederate soldiers, poorly equipped, poorly led, and not uniformally dressed, waded into around 48,000 sleeping Union soldiers. When the fighting started, no one knew what the gently caress.

Confederate units were all over one another and were unable to tell friend from foe (some estimates place 25%+ of CSA casualties as fratricides), Union soldiers were even more confused as they were being ripped out of their bivouac by a marauding army, inexperienced officers on both sides had no idea how to rally or organize their troops, and everyone was scared to death as few men had seen any combat to this point. The result was something that looked more like a medieval slash 'n' hack festival than two modern regimented armies. The scope and proximity of the fighting only made things worse.

Grant, who somewhat amazingly did not panic nor overreact to this surprise attack, moved quickly down to the field. Sherman, who had been so embarassingly surprised, had effectively rallied a couple of divisions to conduct a determined defense, and in doing so was wounded and had at least 3 horses shot from under him. Grant arrived about a mile behind the main line and began organize available units to reinforce the line, and he did this with remarkable effect.

That said, Grant probably would not have had time conduct this rally had two Union divisions not conducted one of the most epic fights of the war, at a place now known as "The Hornet's Nest". These two divisions aligned along a road (inaccurately called the "sunken road") and were pounded on ruthlessly by most of the Confederate Army, which was so disorganized by this point that no one realized that all they had to do was go around the stubborn defenders, instead of trying to uproot them. After 7 hours of what was perhaps the most brutal fighting of the war, around 25,000 soldiers and 50-odd cannon finally got the Union to abandon the position. Over half the Union casualties occurred here, but those 7 hours it took to move them meant the survival of the Army. It also cost the CSA their commander, as Johnston was mortally wounded, probably by his own troops, as he was attempting to organize the attacks against the forces on the road. The first day ended in roughly this position.

The second day was wholly predicable. Grant brought up reinforcements enough to nearly double the size of his army, Beauregard (now in command) informed Richmond that he had won and would finish things up in the morning. Both armies poised to attack, and did exactly this early the next day. The CSA's defense against a force now twice its size was impressive, especially considering that no divisions, corps, or army organization existed any longer, but they were eventually overwhelmed and retreated back to Corinth.


The aftermath of the battle is fascinating. The Confederacy mourned the loss of Johnston, who may well have been placed as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia (the CSA's main army in the east) had he survived Shiloh. As it was, the Army of Mississippi was in terrible shape, Memphis and all of Mississippi (to include the iconic Vicksburg) was now open to the Union.

Despite what was a fairly impressive performance as a commander, Grant was absolutely mangled by the Union press, who falsely accused him of being drunk during the initial attack. Lincoln, to his credit, mostly ignored these reports, saying "I can't spare this man; he fights." Sherman was the main Union hero; this battle was the first major victory in what would be a spectacular (and controversial, if you read this thread) career.

Sherman, however, was very nearly lost while on a recon-in-force mission a few days after the battle. Sherman was in command of around a division-sized element when he found and attacked a cavalry battalion led by one Nathan Bedford Forrest. Despite the long odds, Forrest's response to seeing a huge force attacking him was to charge straight at it. They very nearly made it to Sherman before they began to fall back. Forrest, however, didn't realize that his troops had retreated, and continued to charge until he was completely surrounded by Union soldiers. In a scene that I assume was something like "Braveheart" or "The Last Samurai", Forrest hacked away at the horde surrounding him until someone shot him in the spine, then despite this serious wound he snatched up a Union soldier and put him on his horse to cover himself as he ran from the Union army. He trundled around for a week with the musket ball in his lower back until it was finally removed (without anesthesia).

The casualties from the battle were obscene: from around 111,000 soldiers engaged, nearly 24,000 were casualties with around 3,600 KIA on the field. This was more battlefield casualties than all previous American wars put together, and it made First Bull Run (which had so shocked everyone at the time) look like a slapfight. Interestingly, everyone thought of this battle as an aberration; no one imagined that far worse was to come.



Finally, there is an interesting point of discussion: weapons vs. tactics. The traditional retelling of the Civil War states that weapons like the rifled musket and rifled artillery made Napoleonic tactics (eg, closely packed regimental formations) obsolete, but since no one realized this, casualties were ridiculously high. I disagree with this somewhat.

The major tactical innovation that needed to occur was the concept of fire and maneuver. That is, the modern "fire team" concept, soldiers at good intervals moving individually from cover to cover, incrementally providing suppressing fire from covered positions. While this works very well, my contention is that it would not have worked in the Civil War, for two reasons. First, the rifled musket required a soldier to either be standing or to have a shitload of room on the ground (which slowed him down a lot) in order to load it. Thus, in order to maintain the highest rate of fire, a soldier had to be standing up, and this made movements to cover an impossibility. Second, the rate of fire of these weapons was extremely low. Even though their effective range was further than that of the smoothbore musket, they still had the same very low ROF, which necessitated larger groups of soldiers firing in concert to generate an effective weight of fire.

In short, I think that the tactics used during the war were really not all that far behind the weaponry. It was instead the nature of the weapons themselves that caused the ridiculously high casualties: having weapons that were lethal at hundreds of yards, yet required the firer to remain standing and in a formation in order to maximize their firepower was the real culprit.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Bagheera posted:

Money, not liberty or equality, is what drove the abolitionist movement.

Do you have a source for this? This has been an area of emphasis of mine for a long time and I've never seen any work that really effectively argued that economic forces were the main driver of anything relating to abolitionism. A factor? Possibly, but not the main driver.

My understanding is the movement started with British Quakers (who essentially took it to the house in the UK more or less by themselves) and was taken up by the same in America; from there it became an upper class christian crusade in northern cities. Since upper class christians ran everything (including government and the press) it gained a lot of political steam very quickly, along with the temperance movement, the Second Great Awakening, etc, all of which were religious movements form the mid 18th century. Abolitionism of course was not a movement carried by a large part of the population, but you must remember that most of the population at this time was not politically active nor politically powerful.

A good case in point is that the most popular novel of the period (Uncle Tom's Cabin) was, of course, an anti-slavery work. I don't really get how you can argue that the population (or at least the literate, politically powerful population) was disinterested in abolition on moral grounds when this was most popular literature of the time. You are right of course that racial equality is a different issue entirely, but I think your assertion that abolitionism was an economically driven isn't really correct.

bewbies fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Aug 16, 2010

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Averrences posted:

Very interesting thread, I do have a question though: does anyone know how the one full -scale encounter between the surface fleets of the Royal Navy and the German Navy was fought in the First World War?

Since the key to British world power was supposed to be the Royal Navy, why did they then have such a struggle to even draw with the Germans at Jutland in the North Sea?

The High Seas Fleet is an interesting story. Its history is about like me using a huge portion of my salary to buy a nice new house over a 20 year period, and then refusing to move into it because I'm afraid to get it dirty. I just finished a book on this period (George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I) which really explored why Wilhelm and Tirpitz went on their building spree and how the Brits reacted to it.

Essentially, Tirpitz realized early on that he had no hope of every truly "catching" the Royal Navy in terms of outright sea power. However, Germany (along with everyone else on the planet) was entranced by Mahan's theories about the importance of sea lanes, and so they assumed that in order to be legitimate (if somewhat late) players in the colonial game they had to do something about British sea power. The plan Tirpitz came up with was to create a fleet that, even if it couldn't beat the Brits outright, it could be large/powerful enough to hurt them badly in the open seas and perhaps defeat them in German home waters. Thus, the Germans could protect their colonial sea lanes with this sort of inferior deterrent effect and never actually have to catch up to the Brits in terms of outright power.

They started on this process in 1897 roughly, then had a decade of building completely undone by Dreadnought when it launched. They literally started over again, and by spending fairly massive amounts of money (a quarter of the national budget) they were able to acheive what they thought was a "close enough" status to the RN to meet Tirpitz's strategic requirements. This is sort of the background for Jutland...the Germans knew (or thought they knew at least) that they could not defeat the RN in a straight up fight, and so they were hesitant to engage completely even though this fleet represented a huge national investment.

Tactically though, the Germans probably could have won Jutland if they would have had experienced and competent commanders. Their capital ships were superior in just about every respect (particularly targeting and armor) and several British capital ships were essentially useless (very vulnerable) due to an awful armor scheme and poor gunpowder/gunpowder handling (they lost three of these: Indefatigable, Queen Mary, Invincible). Germany did very well in ship-to-ship combat as a result, and had their fleet attacked aggressively I think they probably could have beaten back the RN. However, this was in direct opposition to the "goal" of the High Seas Fleet, which is why they disengaged and sat in port for two more years after beating the hell out of the British when they had the chance.

bewbies fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Aug 16, 2010

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe
Apologies in advance, this is going to be one of the nerdiest posts made so far in this thread.

Zorak of Michigan posted:

Bewbies, I'm not sure I agree with you about German fire control. What I've read suggests that the German stereoscopic rangefinder could get onto target much faster than the coincidence rangefinders used by other navies, but it was more sensitive and more fatiguing. After a few hours of harsh ship to ship pounding, the advantage starts to go the other way.

This is a good point and you're mostly correct about the differences between the systems. This is my assessment of the entire targeting issue:

German rangefinders were, on the whole, superior. You're right that the stereoscopic system was fatiguing and sensitive, but it was also much more accurate and more importantly, could find ranges in conditions where single lens systems could not (in fog, smoke, or into the sun for example). The Brits did, however, have some brand new 15ft rangefinders on their newest ships which were probably superior in turn to the Germans.

Almost all British ships had centralized firing systems, meaning that the ship's entire battery could be fired in concert. This was a major advance at the time that the British really didn't take full advantage of, because of --->

At Jutland, the Germans used the superior "ladder" system of firing (single salvo at different distances) versus the British "bracket" system (multiple salvos at different distances). Ironically, the ladder system coupled with centralized firing would have been ideal, and eventually the British adopted the German system.

The Germans also had a much more refined data distribution system. The calculations for naval gunnery even at this time were very complex, with data being taken from several different parts of the ship. The Germans had better procedures for collecting and inputting this data.

In the end, in a best ship vs. best ship (say, Koening vs. Valiant) shooting contest in a controlled environment, the Brits probably would have won. However, the Germans had three important factors working in their favor: 1) they were able to get shots on target more quickly. At this time, having salvos falling around your ship greatly decreased gunnery accuracy, so as a result, British accuracy fell significantly after the Germans had found the range. 2) The poor visual environment in the area at the time made the stereoscopic systems worth the extra hassle. 3) Not all RN ships had the best equipment. BCs in particular lacked most of the top of the line stuff (direction finders, good rangefinders, centralized gunnery), and so their gunnery was absolutely abysmal, especially compared to the ships like the QE class.

That is just my assessment though. I know there has been plenty of debate on the issue, I'll cite both "A History of Seapower" and the much worse "To Rule the Waves" as a contradictory source.

quote:

Tirpitz's riskflotte theory sounds great as a geopolitical exercise, but it ignores the human dimension. What kind of fleet is going to gleefully sail headlong into a lost battle, purely in the hope that they'll inflict so much damage that the other side will give up after?

Well, it wasn't exactly a good plan.

I think it was based primarily on the threat that they would go through with some sort of suicidal bloodbath more than any actual intent to do so. Whether the British ever realized this or not I don't know.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

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Bagheera posted:

It´s quite well established that the majority of Americans in the north were bigoted against African-Americans. It´s likely that a majority of northerners opposed the enslavement of blacks. But at the same time the majority did not believe that blacks and whites were equal.

You seem to be confusing two different issues: society-wide racism and abolitionism. Ironically enough the two coexisted in the Northern states for decades prior to the war, and of course the former continues to exist in a somewhat limited form. The critical flaw, however, is that final connection you're trying to make between economic prerogatives (especially among the lower class) and the abolitionist movement. Quite simply, it was not there in any meaningful way.

There is, interestingly, a fairly recent and very well written book on this exact subject: Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. In particular, he addresses almost your exact point in Chapter 9 (forgive me for not typing this in its entirety, paraphrasing is probably easiest for everyone). His main points:

1) There were extremely strong ties between the most radical abolitionists and the Republican party despite the fact that the Republicans were not absolutely opposed to the existence of slavery. This went as far as sharing speeches and data between abolitionists and Republican politicians, as well as many shared goals regarding the mobilization of the public at large. Of course, eventually many key antislavery radicals ended up joining the Republican Party.

2) He directly addresses the historian who has most famously made your argument, a writer named Charles Beard (here is a good critique of Beard's thesis). Foner's main point here, and I think it is a great one, is that even though the Republican Party was a new and rather factionalized group at the time (particularly on economic issues), their one defining and shared characteristic was their work against slavery. In other words, they fought bitterly on economic grounds (which you, in contrast, suggest was their uniting force), while agreeing almost completely on the slavery issue. To me, this implies that economic issues categorically could not be a main driver of the abolitionist movement.

If you're interested in reading more on this there is a book preview here, or just buy the book and read it in its entirety, it is one of the better (and most exhaustively cited) topical historical essays ever written on this period.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

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coolatronic posted:

I have heard that the United States originally became involved in Vietnam because the French refused to join NATO otherwise. Even if this is true, I am sure it was only one of many reasons for US involvement over there, but can anyone confirm or deny that there is a link between the US in Vietnam and France joining NATO?

At the risk of being called an "apologist" or something similar I'd like to talk about this, because it is one of the more fascinating bits of foreign policy in American history.

As early as late August of 1945 (read: before the war was even officially over), de Gaulle had imparted to Truman that France (the Fourth Republic in this case) intended to reestablish control over Indochina. Ironically enough this was sold as a vehicle to "decolonize" which didn't make any goddamn sense at all, especially with the dedicated decolonization designs that were already under design at that point. During the war, the Viet Minh (the predecessors to the North Vietnamese that we'd eventually spend a decade fighting) had actively worked with the Allies during the war and had done quite well against two Japanese incursions into Indochina, and Ho Chi Minh was so sure that the US would support him instead of the French that he quoted the Declaration of Independence almost word for word as he declared Vietnam's independence as the Japs left. Viewed from this perspective, the US had some strong incentives to support both Ho and Vietnamese independence. However, the Allies had agreed as far back as 1943 that Indochina would return to French control after the war, at first intended as an anti-Japanese measure, later as a concession to the French. This wouldn't have been a big deal postwar, however, had a major conflicted factor not existed: the Marshall Plan.

As we all know, after WWII the US took the leading role in helping Europe rebuild, and France was, in a lot of ways, the centerpiece of this effort (incidentally, the total aid offered was around 5% of the US GDP at the time which is mind blowing to me). The relevant backdrop to this is that the Fourth Republic was woefully unstable from its inception...due to any number of factors this government teetered around like a drunken amputee throughout its blessedly short life; this was the government that the US was having to deal with as they attempted to restabilize European politics and economies. De Gaulle essentially demanded tremendous concessions in various areas in exchange for his cooperation with the Marshall Plan, and one of the big ones, as mentioned above, was the return of Indochina to French control. So, Truman had a pretty big decision to make. At the time, the Marshall Plan was seen not only as critical to establishing a peaceful, stable Europe (remember, they had fought two massive wars over the previous 3 decades), as well as resisting the increasingly belligerent Soviet policies in the region (remember, the Berlin airlift occurred at this time, among other things). Truman chose to back the French, which included backing their policy in Indochina, and this was the seed that eventually grew into the Vietnam War.

So, off went the French (and the Brits as well actually) to do battle with the Viet Minh and retake what was "rightfully" theirs. This is where the quagmire of Vietnam really began: the French military was extremely competent (in contrast to their historical reputation) but were underequipped and underfunded due in large part to the French government, so almost immediately American support was required to prop up the campaign. At the same time, almost immediately French communists (who were massive in number) and other groups both left and right wing began heavy public protests of the war. Elections began to be run on antiwar platforms, and very strange political alliances began to emerge in the French legislature (ultra right wing + communists working together). The immediate result was to further magnify the instabilities of the French government (there were 17 different French governments during this ~8 year period), and that coupled with the fact that much of the opposition was COMMUNIST (who were, in large part, funded by the Soviets) caused something of a panic for both the French republicans and the US. Not only was France becoming unstable, but it was COMMUNISTS who were doing at least some of the destabilizing.

The predictable response was for the US to decide that the stability of the French government was now tied up in Vietnam...if they left, the COMMUNISTS (in France, we really didn't care much about Ho and his buds) would win, and so we shouldered the financial burden of what was a surprisingly expensive war. Of course, eventually the French lost, and their government did indeed collapse somewhat due in part to their involvement in Vietnam.

Personally, I don't fault the US much for their decision making during this time period, they were essentially having to choose between the loyalty of a powerful and critical ally and a somewhat marginal and not well known group of freedom fighters in a very strange nation. The very high tensions between the US and USSR (and the somewhat real threat of a major communist movement taking hold in French government) added to the defensive nature of the decision making, and in a proper historical context it is difficult to criticize what Truman, et al chose to do. That said, had we simply supported Ho, the French probably would have capitulated and we would have had a second Marshal Tito in Southeast Asia, complete with one of the most effective militaries in the world and a serious bone to pick with the Chinese (and the Soviets, somewhat).

bewbies fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Aug 23, 2010

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

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Saint Celestine posted:

I'll have to double check, but I recall that it might have been Churchill or other allied leaders who distinctly had the goal of knocking the Ottomans out of the war with the Gallipoli campaign. From the Ottoman perspective at least, they were all ready to abandon Istanbul if British dreadnoughts showed up at the horn.

There were a lot of reasons for the campaign. Knocking out the Ottomans was certainly one of them, but you must remember that the Ottomans were really not much of a threat to anyone other than maybe the British forces in Iraq (even the Russians managed to beat them in a rather horrifying war in eastern Anatolia). The biggest reason was really to open the supply lines to Russia through the Bosphorus, as they were more or less cut off from Britain and France by 1915.

In addition to that, Churchill in particular was also hoping that some south Europe countries (mainly Greece) would join the Allies in exchange for the chance to nab some Ottoman territory, which would then open up a third front on the Central Powers and force Austria-Hungary to defend itself more directly.

One of the more interesting strategic debates of the time was whether to try and open the Bosphorus or just invade Germany near Bremen/Wilhelmshaven (Fisher was the proponent of the latter). Given how Gallipoli went I can't imagine a direct invasion of Germany would have gone much better, but it is an interesting thing to think about.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

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Shimrra Jamaane posted:

I'm going to try this question again since the only response I got was a lovely attempt at trolling.

How badly did the Sack of Baghdad by the Mongols set back Islamic civilization and Western civilization as a whole?

This isn't something I've studied much personally but I'll give it a shot.

First, the background: Hulagu Khan was the aggressor (I believe he was a great-grandson of Genghis). He was a fairly typical Mongol raider, and was granted the far southwestern portion of his grandfather's empire which put him in a position to raid and eventually conquer a large part of what is today the Persian Gulf region. Baghdad was one of his early campaigns, and it was not intended as a territory grab but rather as a wealth-stealing kind of expedition, and possibly as retribution for an ambassador being killed by the muslims.

The Abbasids were the defenders, we know these guys best as the caliphs who oversaw a lot of the Islamic Golden Age. The Golden Age is one of the most glossed-over historical events in Western schooling; without going into too much detail, the ay-rabs managed, during the heart of this Golden Age (roughly 300 years say, 800CE-1100CE) to invent, create, and envision more useful things than the rest of mankind had done collectively in his entire history to that point. I can't cite this, but I've heard claims (albeit from middle eastern scholars) that nearly all of our modern sciences were really born in this era. The wiki page is just as unreadable as any other historical wiki, but you can get an idea of how many modern concepts these guys were responsible for just by glancing at the page.

In this context, the Abbasids were entirely comparable to the Medicis or Charlemagne when it came to facilitating this environment. They maintained a relatively peaceful empire despite its massive size (remember, Europe was in a near-constant state of war at this time), they facilitated sharing of knowledge through books and schools, and much of this was done at their capital in Baghdad.

In Baghdad, there was one place in particular which was, at the time of the Mongol invasion, almost certainly the single most important building in the world: the Great Baghdad Library, the "House of Wisdom", or "Bait al Hikma" in Arabic (people in the middle east still use that term in various ways). The library was a place where people from literally all over the world (to include England and China, for example) came to have important texts translated into arabic, which was the de facto lingua franca for a huge part of the world at this time. There was a small army of scribes ready to copy these works into manuscripts, and as a result the library probably had more books in it than the rest of the world put together. This, coupled with the breadth of the topics was what made this building so important.

So, long story short, the mongols invade, take Baghdad without much of a fight, and destroy the entire city with great loss of life. They went to great lengths to destroy the Library, the oft-repeated line being that "the river went black with ink from the books" or something like that. So, this incalculable loss of knowledge occurred and that is awful; also bear in mind that books were arguably the most valuable commodity in the world at this time, the financial cost of this event is likewise staggering. Yay war.

This event is often cited as the end of the Islamic Golden Age, in much the same way as the Bonfire of the Vanities is seen as the end of the Italian Renaissance. I've experienced two different intepretations of this event. The first, from a middle eastern historian, is that the IGA was well in decline by this point anyway, due to Crusades, the loss of power in by the Caliphs, increasing xenophobia/religious conservatism, etc, and that this particular event was not only not significant as a bookend, but that it almost certainly would have happened anyway with or without the Mongols. Western historians almost always take the opposite view, that the Mongols crushed the flower of intellect which was still in full bloom, and this was the singular event that started the downfall. I don't know enough on the subject to have a strong opinion of my own.

In addition to the loss of knowledge, this event helped to relegate the Arabs to the underclass of the world, instead of the world leaders they had been prior. Persian usurped Arabic as the lingua franca of the region, power in the region moved mostly to the very, very strange Mamluks in Egypt, and soon after, Europe unfucked itself sort of and took hold of the world. A few more Crusades and the eventual colonization of the Middle East finished off this amazing society, and the strange postcolonial middle east is all that is left.

Anyway, after typing all this I've realized I have no idea how to answer this question. It was probably the most significant destruction of knowledge that the world has ever experienced, but to be able to contexulalize that is far beyond my knowlege or ability. I think you can certainly argue that the somewhat retarded development of much of the middle east can be attributed, in part at least, to this particular event, as it most certainly certainly caused a dramatic retraction into religious conservatism by what was at one time the most liberal and advanced society on the planet. As for the knowledge lost, who the hell knows. Maybe we'd be living like Star Trek right now?

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

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Jerrith Jaleal posted:

I learned about the Flying Tigers back in middle school (years ago) and the teach kept on telling the class that they were key in slowing the Japanese's warmachine advance into China. Did they make that much of an impact on the over all war, once we entered it as a nation?

The AVG is a bit of history I've always found pretty fascinating. For all of America's tendency to overstate its role in WWII, these guys (who were of course not a part of the US military) really did something pretty astonishing considering their tactical situation, their size, equipment, supplies, and personnel. The whole thing was hilariously commercial: their leader (Claire Chennault) was almost certainly functioning as much as a salesman for Glenn Curtis as he was as a military consultant, everyone's pay was absolutely ridiculous for the time and place, and pilots even collected a substantial bounty for each Japanese plane they downed.

Chennault was quite a character; he was generally regarded as a colossal rear end in a top hat and a mediocre officer during the first phase of his military career, which began as a pilot during WWI (he didn't fly in combat) and didn't progress much over the next decade. He resigned his commission (as a captain...after 27 years of service) after a slapfight with a bunch of other AAC officers (the issue was said to be the vulnerability of bombers to fighter attack; Chennault was right), and found a very lucrative (pay in modern terms was about $175k, or four times what he was getting paid by the army) job as an "advisor" to the Nationalist Chinese, who were just getting started in their showdown with Japan. It is generally also thought that he had been recruited by Curtis aircraft to try and sell their new Hawk 75 fighter to the Chinese; Chennault was given one of these aircraft to fly over there and the Chinese did indeed buy a bundle on Chennault's recommendation, despite the fact that the plane was a piece of crap.

Long story short, the war went very poorly for the Chinese, especially in the air. Chennault had proved to be very competent as an advisor and trainer, and the Chinese asked him to help create a more functional air force than the terrible thing they had going. The Chinese Air Force at this time was almost completely nonfunctional: the US and Italy, ironically enough, had been vying for the right to supply and train the KMT and this had generally resulted in a completely ineffective fighting force. Chennault realized this, and decided that a mercenary force would be a lot more effective than a retrained KMT air force. Thus, he left China to try and put something together.

While he was gone, one of the more interesting and overlooked units of WWII did their thing: the Soviet Volunteer Group. This was a horde of fliers and ground crew from the VVS, who came to China in very similar circumstances to the AVG. Flying decidedly unmodern aircraft (with the exception of the excellent Polikarpov I-16), the SVG engaged the Japanese in the northern and western fronts of the war, suffering heavy casualties over the period of about 18 months and most famously conducting the ultimately failed defense of Nanjing. This involvement was in the context of a much larger Soviet operation in China, called Operation Zet, where the Russians spent nearly a quarter billion dollars and employed tens of thousands of soldiers performing all manner of military services on behalf of the Chinese. The SVG was withdrawn just prior to the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact being signed in early 1941, and this opened the door for the AVG.

The SVG, though it had been pretty badly pummelled at the hands of the Japanese air force (this was the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force, not the Navy Air Service that the USN and USAAF fought for most of the war), had effectively held the line and performed very well. The air battle during this part of the war was absolutely critical to both sides: Chinese supply lines and infrastructure were just awful; most units were supported by only one main road or line, and were supplied largely by horses and small vehicles. As such, the supply lines were extremely vulnerable to air attack, and cutting off a single supply line could effectively neutralize a huge number of already undersupplied troops. Japanese tactical bombers were becoming very skilled interdiction type missions, and so the threat to the Chinese Army was very real.

Chennault assembled the AVG in view of this situation. He knew that a fighter unit could effectively defend these supply lines against the bombers, and he also knew that the US would have nothing to do with open hostilities against the Japanese. However, Lend-Lease was getting started and pretty much everyone in Washington knew that the Chinese resistence was critical to the general survival of Asia. Chennault and the Chinese embassy successfully lobbied for materiel support, which came in the form of a hundred Curtis P-40 fighters (only available because they were so lovely the RAF had rejected them despite their desperate need for single seat fighters), and Chennault filled the personnel requirements by throwing gobs of money at qualified pilots and ground crew currently serving on active duty. They all got on ships and wound up in China right about the time of Pearl Harbor.

Nearly all of the AVG's action was in Burma, which might be the single most confusing theater of the war. It featured at least seven different countries, a couple of whom switched sides during the fight, a good dose of strange colonial objectives, freedom fighting, genocide, all taking place in some of the worst terrain of the war. The AVG first defended Rangoon (probably their best known battle), keeping the Burma road operational and taking a fairly big chunk out of the IJAF in the process. Rangoon was eventually lost; after this the AVG moved deeper into China and continued to support the losing cause in Burma for the rest of their tour. Their claims of victories ranged pretty wildly; "officially" it was 297, some researchers put it more like 100, the real number is probably somewhere in between. If we take 200 as the number, that represents around 30 aircraft destroyed per month they were in action, which was more than the entire Japanese industry was producing at the time. It also represented somewhere around a quarter of the IJAF's group numbers that were operating in the area at the time, and these numbers were never really recovered. It was a pretty significant contribution for this group of a couple hundred guys who just wanted to get paid. It was also the first real setback the Japanese had suffered during the war, which has its own significance I suppose.

A lot of credit for the success should go to Chennault: he was a very capable leader and a particularly adept tactician. He was one of the first air leaders to start seriously assessing the capabilities and limitations of his equipment versus that of his enemies, and as a result he was able to effectively tailor his group's tactics to match the strengths of the P-40 versus their competition (the inferior Ki-27 and the superior Ki-43). They also had a couple of all-world characters in their ranks, most famous among them being Tex Hill and Pappy Boyington, both of whom would go on to forge brilliant wartime careers of their own in different capacities, and Charles Older, who eventually wound up being the judge at Charles Manson's trial.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

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Phyzzle posted:

There were plans, but the Canadians were prepared.

That is awesome, if that war had happened in that time period it would have been one of the most inept showing of arms by both sides in human history.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

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The biggest impact from losing Hawaii as a base would have been the loss of the submarine bases. For most of the first two years of the Pacific war American subs were the most effective fighting force we had, and most of their sorties came out of Pearl. Had we been forced to use only Australia and the west coast as our sub bases, there would have been a HUGE impact on the overall effectiveness of our sub forces, which would have in turn had a huge impact on how effective the Japanese supply lines were. Any assumptions that we make on Japanese efficiency has to be taken in this light...having an extra 100k tons of shipping a month available to them would have made a big difference.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

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Zorak of Michigan posted:

I thought our torpedoes were crap and the sub force rendered much less efficient until 1943. Did I get it wrong?

No you're right, but even with the lovely torpedoes the US sank around 20% of the total Japanese merchant fleet in 1942, this around twice the rate they were being replaced. This number doubled in 1943 as the problems with the Mk14 got ironed out.


quote:

In any case the sub facilities would be a big loss in the case where the Japanese make air attacks to finish off Pearl Harbor but then pull back. If they invaded Pearl Harbor, then our subs would only need to be able to patrol out past Hawaii to interdict supplies and reinforcements from the home islands. Subs based on the west coast could patrol effectively at that distance.

That would have only taken care of the supply lines to Hawaii, which was only a tiny part of the total Japanese supply system, and even then it would not have been an ideal tactical situation as the sea is so wide open around Hawaii.

The biggest impact would have stemmed from our inability to hunt in and around the Phillippines, particularly the Strait of Luzon, where we were able to very successfully interdict supply flow coming from the East Indies going back to the home islands. US subs sunk gobs of Japanese shipping here and it would have been all but impossible to do this if Hawaii had been lost.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

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wins32767 posted:

You don't think they would have built up Darwin or Perth or even Celyon as a sub base? Yes the logistical tail would have been much longer to the base, but those are all closer to the East Indies than Pearl.

That supply line would have been more than just long, it would have been horrifically vulnerable. To the west, they would have sailing through 8000 miles of Japanese controlled waters with Hawaii right in the middle. To the east, they're sailing 20,000+ miles, through the Atlantic U-boat hunting waters, and then again through the Japanese controlled waters south of Sumatra to get to Australia. Neither option would have been very effective; in fact, this is why we didn't base more subs out of Australia even though it was far closer to the Japanese merchant lanes than was Pearl or Midway. Alternatively I suppose they could have tried to set up arms and parts manufacturing in Australia, but that would have taken years to gear up.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

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wins32767 posted:

Australia is well south of the Japanese perimeter, even if it includes Hawaii. Just send them down the cost of South America and then across in the roaring 40s. It would certainly increase the fuel requirements and the transit time but given that the British Far East fleet based out of Ceylon (at the end of a horrifically vulnerable supply line) I don't think that it's out of the question. Certainly it made a lot more sense for the US to base the subs out of Hawaii in the real war, but in this counter-factual I'm not sure the US would just give up on it's attempts to interdict the Japanese oil supply which was so important to their Navy.

I didn't say the US would have given up the sub campaign, just that it would have been a lot less effective which would have been a very, very bad thing. Also, let's remember that the Eastern Fleet was not exactly the most effective fighting force of the war.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

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Tetrix posted:

What were the Germans using to shell the beach during DDay?

Pretty much everything imaginable. Fortified batteries on the coast held mortars and gun emplacements ranging from 50mm mortars to 150mm gun turrets taken off of warships. Behind the beaches there were all manner of indirect fire platforms, most were probably one of the three varieties of 150mm howitzer or lighter 105mm emplacements. Behind that, there were super heavy (210mm) guns as well as rocket launchers.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

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DarkCrawler posted:

U.S. Navy is pretty ridicolously huge though. Is it mostly a legacy of the Pacific War, or was there a concentrated effort to create such an overwhelmingly huge navy in peacetime?

A lot of the modern force can be traced back to the 600 Ship Navy, which was a Reagan-era campaign platform back in 1980. Basically it was a part of power play trying to press the Soviets into matching our defense spending; the Soviets were never close to parity in naval power. A bunch of carriers and most of the Los Angeles and Ohio class subs were ordered and/or built during this era.

I suppose though our current position of naval supremacy can be traced back to WWII, but it has been sustained through some pretty insane defense spending.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

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Alekanderu posted:

Speaking of Brewster Buffalos: it's quite interesting to note that while they performed abysmally in US service, the Finns were quite happy with theirs and used them to great effect against the Red Air Force. I'm not sure if that's indicative of poor usage by the Americans or of a vast difference in quality between Japanese and Soviet airmen and planes (of the time), though.

It was a bunch of factors. Mainly, it was aircraft...the Buffalo was a lot like the A6M and Ki-43 (lightly built, low wing loading, very maneuverable, mediocre speed/acceleration) but was just slightly inferior in every respect. It simply didn't have an advantage that could be used tactically (like the P-40s dive speed, or the F4F's toughness and armament), and that is a tough situation to be in. It also suffered a lot in the environment; its engine was prone to overheating to begin with and lost a lot of power in the tropical temperatures which made a bad situation worse. British and USN/USMC pilots were also pretty marginal at this time, and they were facing very well trained Japanese.

In the Winter War though, they were facing generally inferior aircraft (mostly I-15 and I-153 biplanes) being flown by incompetent Soviet pilots. Plus, the cold environment helped performance a lot, both in terms of overheating and in engine power, and the Finnish pilots were pretty outstanding in their own right.

There are a bunch of situations where equipment (typically American) was sent to Allied or other nations because the US military hated it, and the recipient wound up loving it and using it to very good effect. I think Americans were just whiny about their gear.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

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Jabarto posted:

How effective were muskets in the earliest stages of their existance? I ask because I was reading a tabletop gaming forum and there were discussions on how to balance early firearms against bows and crossbows. There's a fellow who drops into each and every thread on the matter and loudly berates people who say that bows were in anyway comparable to even the most primitive guns, with lines like,

"This is only said by toxophiles who can't bare the fact that gunpowder weapons outclass any kind of bow in every aspect except rate of fire. It was for more than political reasons that virtually all the major powers of Europe bankrupted themselves to adopt the new technology."

I would argue that firearms didn't truly surpass the longbow in terms of outright firepower man for man until the introduction of the Minié ball in the middle part of the 19th century.

The main reason for this is the longbow's amazing effectiveness at useful combat ranges. This is due to several factors: its rate of fire (a trained longbowman could fire 10 rounds per minute at a maximum, with a useful ROF of 6 rpm), its accuracy at distance (a platoon of longbowmen could reliably hit a man size target at 300m, and the arrows carried their energy more efficiently to that distance), and the effectivness of the projectile (for a given amount of energy, arrows were generally much more effective than contemporary bullets). Basically, if you put a platoon of longbowmen and a platoon of Napoleonic soldiers in a field and had them battle to the death, I think the longbowmen would win without casualties.

That said, in terms of operational military application, firearms were pretty decisively superior from the introduction of the matchlock onwards. The biggest reason for this was the simplification of training: it took decades for a longbowman to become militarily useful, but it took only a few minutes to train a conscript to use a firearm. Ammunition was lighter and easier to carry, and firearms were better suited than were bows to martial combat (especially after the adoption of the bayonet).

This of course is why we saw the rise of the conscript army and the professional officer soon after the introduction of military firearms (the New Model Army being the most prominent example).

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

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Rodrigo Diaz posted:

While you are correct about rate of fire, your point about accuracy is mostly false. In the tests shown in Strickland & Hardy's "The Great Warbow" only the lightest of arrows could even reach that far, and even then without enough energy to kill. I think you mean 200 metres. It was not a man-sized target that they practised on but one at least 2 metres in diameter. A man-sized target would be, given the parabolic trajectory, an even smaller target than if firing straight on.

I should have been more specific: I was referring to a unit equipped with Edwardian-era bows, the 200+ lbs draw weight. In the Strickland and Hardy book, their tests were conducted with a 150 lbs bow, which was still able to shoot a full weight arrow 250m. The biggest bows (eg, not like the ones recovered from Mary Rose) could easily kill even lightly armored troops at 300m, and could fire a lighter arrow out past 400m.

As for accuracy, I was not describing a single archer hitting a man-sized target, but rather a fire platoon element. They would have had no difficulty scoring a hit on a man at 300m, let alone a tightly packed formation.

quote:

Arrows were less affected by drag, it is true. However, Alan Williams' tests in "The Knight and The Blast Furnace" show that guns imparted absolutely tremendous amounts of energy by comparison, to the point that it really doesn't matter out to the maximum range of these arrows, because the gun will still kill you quite readily.

The issue wasn't really energy so much as accuracy. At the maximum range of a 200 lbs longbow, a smoothbore musket, even fired in volleys, was simply not an effective weapon.

First, to discuss the oft cited Hanoverian test, I've not yet seen a proper explanation of these results. Quite simply, we do not know what "33% at 300 paces" really means: does it mean that 33% of the balls hit the target at 300 paces, or does it mean the formation firing a volley hit the target collectively 33% of the time? Considering that the British, during the Brown Bess era, thought "as a general rule, musketry fire should not be made at a distance exceeding 150 yards and certainly not exceeding 200 yards, as at and beyond that range it would be a mere waste of ammunition to do so", I must conclude that the latter is the case.

So, essentially what we are looking at, if we again assume the Hanoverian tests are accurate, is that a formation can hit a 20 ft x 6 ft wide (I think, this is from memory) target with at least one ball at a distance of 230m approximately a third of the time...and this in test conditions, presumably using patched balls, well maintained equipment, and not while under fire. Compare that with the oft-cited directive from Henry VIII that no archery range was to be shorter than 200m, and compare it with even the most reasonable estimates of the effective ranges of longbows. Quite simply, I see absolutely no way that a musket-equipped platoon could close to within the 100m or so they would require to be effective without taking catastrophic casualties.


quote:

I mostly agree with you, though it didn't take decades to train a serviceable longbowman, but closer to half-a-dozen years, if that.

Is there a definitive source on this? Most longbowmen were trained from childhood (much as knights were), which is what I was loosely quoting; if you have something more concrete on how long it took to train a previously untrained adult I'd like to see it.

quote:

I really do not think this is the case, as longbowmen often carried personally-acquired secondary weapons, such as swords and bucklers or war hammers. In some arrangements they were even given pikes as weapons for close fighting, which are undeniably superior due to reach alone to muskets mounted with bayonets.

I cannot find a record of a substantial force of bowmen fighting with pikes; I'm sure this was done in a limited capacity (although in that case I would argue they become more like heavy infantry with bows rather than bowmen, and the effectiveness of them as longbowmen would have been accordingly reduced due to their having to carry a massive pike in lieu of ammunition). In any case, I think by any reasonable measure that a musket/bayonet armed force was more dangerous in CQB, due both to the power of the firearm at close range and due to the effectiveness of the bayonet/musket combination as a hand to hand weapon; longbowmen and their "personal weapons" would have been very ill-suited to taking on a well disciplined Napoleonic platoon at hand-to-hand ranges. Also of particular note, bayonet-equipped infantry was less vulnerable to cavalry, which of course was the greatest threat to the bowman.

bewbies fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Oct 19, 2010

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Rodrigo Diaz posted:

Could you please present a source for the 400m point?

Sure.

First, from a purely theoretical standpoint, I calculated a max range for a 200 lbs bow with a 32" (81cm) draw (as big and bad as bows get, essentially) firing a 1100 grain arrow. Assumptions as follows, based off of data/formulas from this site, which is pretty cool by the way:

Bow energy: 890n
Arrow weight: 1100 grains (71 grams)
Arrow BC: .06 (this is a pure but low-end estimate, based off of a BC of .04 at the tip and .12 on the fletches)
Air density: 1.2 kg/m3 (20 degree C at sea level)
Bow efficency: .9 (a simple bow is generally more efficient than a modern compound bow, which usualy has efficiency levels of between 80 and 90%)


Using these inputs we get a initial velocity of 76.8 m/s (for reference, a 445n bow with a 30" draw gives an initial velocity of 52.4 m/s). That is good for a max range of around 470m, which is using (I assume) a fixed drag curve model.

As for written sources, the two that I have are "Bowmen of England The Story of the English Longbow" by Donald Featherstone, and "Longbow – A Social and Military History" by Robert Hardy. Both loosely cite maximum ranges of 400 yards, and the Hardy book specifically cites the Henry V's household bowmens' practice range length at 600 paces, which if we again assume a 30 inch pace, is 460m.


quote:

I have not seen any sources claiming that as an engagement distance in war.

Well, this is something of a different issue. 400m is a long goddamn way, even for a modern rifle. At that distance, people look very, very small, and there is a really good chance of terrain, vegetation, or atmospheric conditions prohibitively interfering with accuracy. That said, the 300m range that I cited was what I was considering the maximum useful range.

quote:

I also question, somewhat, your point that they could kill lightly armoured men at 300 metres. What do you mean by 'lightly armoured'?

Essentially any sort of leather, mail, or light plate armor that was less than 1mm thick. The typically cited penetration of a proper arrow at 300m was an inch into oak, which would have been sufficient to penetrate any of the above. Thicker plate armor is obviously a completely different monster of course.

quote:

Fair enough, though I haven't seen reference of archers being organised by platoon. For the sake of argument, what size of group are we talking about?

I was thinking of a modern platoon size, 40 firers or so.


quote:

That is certainly true, but that does not mean it was harmless. Consider the battle of Killiecrankie, where the initial engagement distances were at least 400 metres and MacKay's troops were firing uphill no less. The damage done was, obviously, minor, but it stands that they were not forced to close with the Jacobites in order to fire upon them.

I'm not totally sure what your point is here. Of course a smoothbore musket is physically capable of shooting long distances, but it isn't a militarily useful tactic.

quote:

I say half-a-dozen years based on the medieval and early modern precedent of 14 years of age being legal adulthood, at which point Henry's law expects them to practice with bows, and men of 18+ years commonly participating in military activity. I'm not thinking of a good archer at all, merely one who is serviceable.

This is probably a good estimate; that said, in speaking of the monster bows with which I did the calculations above, I would bet the training would have to be almost daily in order to get the necessary strength in a 4-6 year time period.

As an aside, the strength of those guys must have been pretty amazing. Has anyone ever gotten to try a full sized longbow? I've never shot a bow in my life so I don't really have any frame of reference for just how difficult it must be.


quote:

I am not so sure about the ineffectiveness of archers in a melee. While this was certainly true of earlier groups of bowmen the Plantagenet longbowmen seem to have taken part in quite a lot of close-in fighting.

I suppose I'm operating under an assumption that Napoleonic-era conscripts would be somewhat categorically more formidable in CQB just due to the fact that they would be in a proper formation and as such they could conduct a coordinated charge. If we're talking about 1 v 1 kind of fighting my money would probably be on the medieval soldier.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe
Well it has been almost a month since anyone posted in here so it looks like me and Rodrigo Diaz done killed it. :(

Anyway, I just finished reading Follett's Fall of Giants, which is relatively light reading but very fun and pretty well written (in other words, Ken Follett. Also, I read the thousand pages in roughly 3 days so it is quite a page turner). It had some of the most vivid and accurate depictions of infantry warfare in WWI that I've read in a novel, which was kind of surprising to me, and since that is an area of history I'm extremely interested in I was pretty engrossed.

Anyway, it got me reading on the Somme again, which I've written about before quite a while back. To me at least, it is one of the most interesting battles mankind has ever fought; it perfectly encapsulated WWI in a number of ways, along with highlighting the problems with the dying European class system (Follett uses the battle as a framework for this discussion).

The British at the Somme were just...lol. Somme was really their first all-out assault, one which they carried out largely themselves (along with the Commonwealth of course). The French by this time had actually evolved their tactics somewhat and were pretty much disinterested in major offensives; the British, on the other hand, were raring to go and saw this particular offensive as their chance to redeem themselves after being pretty badly mauled in most of their other major efforts (in particular the defense of Paris early on in the war). They did learn quickly though, and wound up accomplishing something (killing a lot of Germans) at the end of it all.

Early on, just about everything they did was terrible. They bombarded the German trenches literally for weeks beforehand and accomplished very little in the way of suppression or attition; all it really did was tell the Germans exactly where the assault was coming (the Germans were well dug in and only around 5% of the British shells were designed to do anything but explode on the surface).

The infantry assault followed this bombardment, but not very quickly, so the Germans had plenty of time to man their machine gun positions. This battle was probably the best example of what we all think of when we picture the lines of soldiers being mowed down by machine guns; this is exactly what happened for the entire day on July 1, 1916, when the British suffered 57,000 casualties with 20,000 KIA (for reference the US lost ~57k soldiers in the entirety of the Vietnam War).

Eventually, smart and more experienced British officers and particularly NCOs (nearly all of whom were from common backgrounds) figured out that small unit actions, which involved quick movements supported by suppressive fire, was a hell of a lot more effective. They went about fighting like this throughout most of the rest of the summer, actually gaining territory and succeeding a bit, before Haig took over and decided it was time for another BIG PUSH (more on why later). This BIG PUSH happened in late September, using a "creeping barrage" and huge formations, and 82,000 more casualties were exchanged for less than a mile of territory. Finally, the tank was introduced (it failed), and by November Haig was ordering meaningless attacks (it was too late in the season to exploit any gains) in order to brag to the French and provide good copy for British newspapers.


A couple of interesting tactical dynamics came out of the Somme which influence operations up to this day. First, the ineffectiveness of massive, long term artillery bombardments was demonstrated pretty clearly. Initial casualties from a major bombardment might be heavier as the enemy is surprised, but once he has a chance to dig, little damage will be done regardless of how many shells are fired. The effect of these bombardments was continuously undercut by the fact that the initial bombardments were usually light (as not all the guns and ammo were in place), which gave the enemy a chance to dig in and survive the heavy bombardment that came later.

In related news, the ineffectiveness of the "creeping barrage", considered to be the pinnacle tactical development of the time, was demonstrated clearly. The idea was the infantry walked right behind an artillery barrage that slowly moved forward, which left the infantry to just clean up what was left, but in reality the defenders would simply take cover as the shells went by and then shoot the infantry as they approached.

The really bizarre thing was that the British commanders simply didn't understand (or refused to understand) that these methods were ineffective. Their soldiers would go out, get shot all to hell, report that the Germans were still there and that the shelling did nothing...and the British commanders would simply rinse and repeat the next day. The whole thing was mystifying.


Second, it displayed the modern tendency to move to smaller and smaller formations. During the Napoleonic/ACW era, a battalion (~500 soldiers) was usually the smallest element that maneuvered individually on a battlefield, and regimental movements were far more typical. By the time of the Somme, the French and Germans had both started operating with platoon (~40 soldiers) sized elements, but the British insisted that nothing smaller than a company (~120 soldiers) could operate effectively. Ironically, it was the slaughtering of their companies that eventually led to the British figuring out that smaller formations were indeed more effective (in other words, attacks with companies at 30% strength were as or more effective than attacks by companies at 100% strength), and so began the basis of their transition to something approaching reasonably modern tactics.


Third, a couple of isolated battles showed the way of the future. Specifically, the fight at a little village called Guillemont looked a lot more like a WWII battle than a WWI battle. With the German defenders dug in, a couple of Commonwealth regiments attacked and cut off the town, then fought the Germans down to the man in brutal small unit actions; in this way it looked a lot more like Normandy or Barbarossa; it was also similar in that it resulted in the complete destruction of the defending unit, something that was surprisingly rare in WWI. The tank also had some limited success, showing that it could in fact roll past dug in infantry, but instead of being used to attack rear echelon areas, the tanks were just parked along the trenches and used to shoot at dug in infantry.

Anyway, this post was kind of rambling, I forgot what my initial point was.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

dividebyzero posted:

No way, keep it up! There's nowhere near enough out there about WWI and I had no idea about the evolution of small unit actions from that war. Please go on.

Very well then!

The great irony surrounding the tactics used by all of the great powers is that they represented a pretty amazing regression from what the Prussians had figured out during the Franco-Prussian War.

The basic idea from the time firearms started populating the battlefield was that infantry was most effective in large, disciplined formations, as their fire would be massed and they would be well prepared for close-quarters action. This is what we're all familiar with from the Napoleonic Wars and the American Civil War; giant monolithic hordes of soldiers being marched around in parade ground formations, attempting to gain localized superiority of fire and then eventually charge, with the goal of "breaking the line" of the enemy which would then precipitate a retreat. Artillery was kind of secondary in this equation, it could be locally devastating but its primary role was to provide direct fire support for the infantry in much the same way that machine guns would in later conflicts.

By the time of the Franco-Prussian War, however, small arms (particularly the Chassepot rifle, which was one of the more devastating infantry weapons ever) had become so effective that mass fires were really no longer necessary to conduct either attack or defense (I'll argue briefly this wasn't the case in the ACW due to the musket's low ROF and the fact that it was muzzle loading). The French hadn't really figured this out yet but the Prussians did, and the way they employed their forces throughout the war was pretty strikingly modern. Generally speaking, they avoided strongpoints, kept pressure on the enemy's flanks, employed smaller, more autonomous, more mobile units, used their artillery to support the infantry, and pretty consistently kept the French off balance and on the defensive despite the French having a vastly superior infantry weapon (in fact, in the few cases where units matched fires, the French absolutely slaughtered the Prussians). The Prussians eventually won of course, and so set the table for WWI.

Early on in WWI, the Germans, particularly on their drive to Paris, fought pretty much exactly how they had in 1870. The French and particularly the British moved vey slowly in response, and the Germans used their rail network, horses, and primitive trucks very effectively in moving men and material. They continually outflanked the northern end of the Allies' line throughout Belgium and thus got almost all the way to Paris very quickly before finally running out of steam at the Marne (due largely to stretched supply lines). The Allied counterattack was pretty similar, continually trying to flank the Germans (against mostly to the north), which worked sort of, but the Germans didn't give much and eventually they just started to try flanking each other over and over and over until eventually they reached the ocean. Both sides dug in, and so we have the class WWI trench lines as we all remember them.

It was at this point that traditional military tactics began to break down. The old school Prussian concept involved turning the flank of an entire army: one fixed one's opponent at one point, and then went round him at another. This action was conducted by large forces (thousands of soldiers), with the key objective being destroying the enemy's forces where they stood (this is an important point). This is how both sides thought, and no one could come up with any better ideas.

This is what created the sort of regression to static trench warfare. Since both lines went from the Alps to the sea (and thus there was no chance of "outflanking"), commanders thought that they had to "break through" (frontal assault) the enemy's lines at a particular point in order to "flank" (sort of), envelop and destroy the opponent. However, the power of bolt action rifles, machine guns, and particularly modern artillery (this, not the machine gun, was the major game-changer tactically during WWI) made large scale frontal assaults completely ineffective.

The commanders' response to this was to try and make frontal assaults as effective as possible. If a week of artillery preparation wasn't enough, why not try a month? If HE isn't killing enough enemy soldiers, why not use gas? Two divisions couldn't break through? Let's try five! So on and so on it went, with the intensity increasing constantly until you had bloodbaths like Verdun and Somme that were so bad it threatened to break the backs of entire armies. In particular, the weeks-long artillery bombardments were testaments to sheer stupidity, as they let the enemy know exactly where an attack was coming and gave them time to move thousands of men and their required supplies to reinforce the line at that point.

Defensive concepts at the time reflected these offensive tactics. Essentially, there was little defense-in-depth as there was so little threat of an actual breakthrough: the defenses were designed to be as strong as possible everywhere, which was thought to minimize the chance of an actual breakthrough. This, of course, made reserve forces/reinforcements much more difficult to come by, which would eventually be a major undoing for the Allies.

Finally, eventually, people (first cold and hungry Russians, then slightly less hungry German junior officers and NCOs) figured out something about lines: they are funny things, especially in a war like this where the lines were so static for so very very long. You could shell an enemy trench for weeks on end and when you charge it they'll still be able to shoot you all to hell, but you can send a squad or platoon across no man's land on a trench raid (amusingly enough usually to try and steal food, or clothes and guns/ammo if you were a Russian) and they'll come back unharmed most of the time. They put this thinking to use, and figured out that surprise and speed were much more effective force multipliers than artillery or gas could ever be, and thus infiltration tactics, a sort of precursor to blitzkrieg and even modern combined arms tactics, were born.

The evolved infiltration tactics that the Germans very nearly won the war with went something like this:

- very brief but very accurate artillery bombardment on a small section of the enemy line suspected to be a weak point, designed to suppress the enemy rather than kill him

- fast moving infantry attacks the weak point quickly and violently, bypassing strong points and seeking out command/communitation/supply/mobility nodes in the enemy's rear in order to disrupt reinforcement and movement

- heavier units move up through the breach and dig in to defend territory gained

- enemy is confused and starts abandoning strong defensive positions as they are now very vulnerable to flank attacks

- follow-on attacks are conducted that mop up any enemy soldiers who haven't bugged out yet


Essentially, they figured out that local numerical superiority is worth a whole lot more than overall numbers: in a particular sector you might be attacking a 13,000 man division with a 10,000 man division, but at the point of attack, you can bring a thousand man battalion against a 200 man company: since the enemy has spread his forces equally across his entire section of front, you can concentrate your forces on a single point and overwhelm him there. Once this is accomplished, you can attack key positions in the rear, and once his C2 is compromised, his numerical superiority means little as he cannot effectively communicate to nor move his forces as necessary to defend against your follow on attacks.

Once they figured this business out the German attacks were incredibly effective. They began using modern suppression/movement techniques (eg, one unit moves while the unit next to them fires, and vice versa) despite the relative lack of mobile machine guns (the ideal suppression weapon), and eventually they just did away with the rifles entirely and started using shitloads of grenades as their primary weapons. Thus, the stormtrooper was born.

The effect of these tactics must have been devastating for the Allies: you're sitting in your trench like you have for years, knowing nothing is going to happen because there hasn't been a weeklong preparatory artillery barrage, then all of a sudden a quick artillery mission gasses you and damages all of your fortifications, then instead of a massive slow moving horde of retards occassionally taking inaccurate rifle shots before getting blown up by your artillery you have a bunch of angry gas-mask wearing dudes running at you really fast and heaving thousands of massive grenades as they're running, then they all run past you and your machine gun position to god knows where, then your phone line to your company CP goes dead and you hear all sorts of poo poo happening behind you, and oh dear what do we do now. This was how the Spring Offensive generally went, and the Germans very nearly won the war because of it. Fortunately the Americans showed up to save the day.

Amusingly the late war German offensive, effective as it was, suffered quite a bit because hungry German soldiers would stop and eat delicious British and French rations instead of pressing their attacks. Also, the Allies figured out defense in depth and the Germans' supply lines failed (again).

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Grand Prize Winner posted:

Agreed. Can you tell us anything about the role of the Ottoman Empire in WWI?

It has been a while since I've read anything on this but I'll contribute what I know; I do know that that there have been a couple of very well regarded books about it published very recently (the ridiculously expensive Erickson book is most prominent, plus The Ottoman Army 1914-1918: Disease and Death on the Battlefield work which has gotten a lot of attention as a study on battlefield disease), but I've not read either.

The Ottoman's had a really important role in bringing on WWI; in fact, their Balkan campaigns during 1912-1913 very directly set the stage for the Serbian nationalist movements that eventually resulted in the assassination of the Archduke. In a broader sense, they held an enormous amount of influence over trade in the Black and Mediterranean seas, which made them a point of focus to both the Brits and the Russians (and eventually the Germans), and this contributed a lot to the tension that arose between them in the years leading up to the war.

Anyway, to preface a bit, the Ottoman Empire was, in my opinion at least, the most powerful and influential empire in the world from the time they took Constantinople until roughly the early 19th century; they didn't really respond well to the changes in the global economy from the industrial revolution, and at the same time a bunch of their imperial territories (especially in Europe) started getting all uppity. This ultimately resulted in the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, which essentially ended absolutism in the Empire. There were several more revolutions/coups throughout the next few years which further undermined Ottoman authority, and their loss in the Italo-Turkish War doomed the Young Turk government and made all their European holdings all uppity. This in turn resulted in the First Balkan War, which was basically the Ottoman European holdings breaking away from Ottoman rule.

Anyway, to summarize this, the flashpoint of WWI was a result of Balkan (Serbian) nationalism, and this in turn was a direct result of the decline of the Ottoman Empire. I've heard an interesting argument that if the UK/France had taken more of an interest in supporting the Ottomans rather than undermining them that this Balkan clusterfuck wouldn't have happened and thus WWI would have looked totally different, which is an interesting notion.


Now, looking at the eve of WWI, in general, the Ottomans were viewed as a dying empire with a lot of valuable potential colonies, and perhaps most importantly, control of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus. Specifically, the major powers thought the following about the Ottomans:

UK: collapsing empire with lucrative holdings in the Mediterranean; responded by "peacefully occupying" some territories and the Ottomans couldn't do anything about it

France: didn't really give a poo poo except for a strange interest in Armenia which was driven mostly by Armenian immigrants, and also the Russians hated the Ottomans and they were France's closest ally

Germany: wanted a close relationship with the Ottomans as they saw the building of a railway through Turkey and the Persian Gulf region as a key colonial expansion project and also as a way of pissing off Russia

Russia: really hated them because they held their Black Sea trade by the nuts and also they had been fighting constantly for 300 years

US: completely disinterested, never even bothered to declare war on them


Initally the Ottomans couldn't decide whether they wanted to be friends with the Entente or the Germans; honestly they probably would have been better off with the Entente but they liked pissing off the Russians so much (by my count the Russians and the Turks fought 16 separate wars between 1500 and WWI) that they decided the Germans would be better buds. This also gave them a chance to try and regain some territory they had lost to Russia in the Caucasus nearly a century before (Turks never forget) in the event that Russia and Germany threw down, though the Turks actually weren't really itching for another war just yet (they'd just lost a couple in a row and their government and military wasn't particularly stable at the time).

This made the Germans happy. From the German perspective, they had gained a very useful ally: the Turks would almost certainly open up another front on the Russians in the event the eastern war broke out; they would strangle Russian trade in the Black Sea, and they ensured Austria's southern flank was secure. The Germans started work on their railroad and started helping the Turks with their navy (the Turks really, really wanted a modern navy) and their army, and the Turks started harrassing Russia almost immediately by restricting traffic out of the Black Sea, among other things (this also made the Germans very happy). The Ottomans also liked the arrangement; they got a European superpower to help them with their military, it looked like they were going to get another chance to tangle with Russia, and all of those stupid uppity Balkan states now had the elephants of Austria-Hungary and Germany to worry about as they continued to try and move towards independence.

One of the more amusing episodes of the war kicked off hostilities between the Ottomans and Russia: two German ships that had been given to the Ottomans (but were still captained and crewed by Germans) started shelling a Russian port without any sort of order from the Ottomans. It has been speculated that both the Russians and the Ottomans may have wanted to avoid hostilities, but the Germans kind of forced their hands with this action.

Throughout the rest of the war their results were somewhat mixed militarily. In his book, Erickson argues that the Ottoman military was a lot more effective than we give it credit for, but for some reason he didn't examine the Caucusus campaign which was a military disaster on par with anything in history. The Turks did extremely well at Gallipoli, and indeed pretty much everywhere else they fought the western Allies on the subcontinent, but taking on the Russians in the Caucusus they were absolutely slaughted, both by the usually incompetent Russian military and by horribly poor planning that left their armies in the mountains in winter without clothes or food (unsurpisingly most of this army died of disease and exposure). They also did very poorly against the British and friends in Palestine and Iraq, most prominently losing the Arab Revolt in pretty embarassing fashion.

Ultimately, they really didn't do a whole lot in the greater context of the war; their campaigns against Russia did next to nothing, they pissed off the British a lot (and got Churchill fired) but ultimately lost most of their territory to the Brits, they contributed comparatively little to the war effort in Europe, and eventually they just decided that killing their own people was easier than killing the enemy.

To that end, let's discuss the Armenian Genocide, which continues to be one of the more repugnant and intriguing events in all of history. If you're not familiar with the events, a quick synopsis: after the Ottoman army was destroyed in the Caucusus, Armenians (both Turkish and Russian) started arming themselves to defend against both Russian and Turkish armies who had been fighting across their homeland for almost two years. The Ottomans didn't like this and started actively trying to undermine what they thought was some sort of rebellion/treason by rounding up "threatening persons" (literate people), this eventually turned into a rounding up of every Armenian they could find living in Turkey who were then either shot, burned, gassed, or marched to death, or if they were lucky they were worked to death in exterminatinon camps. Proportionally it was significantly worse than the Holocaust (low-end estimates are half the Armenian population was murdered, most estimates put it at closer to 2/3rds), yet Obama won't call it a genocide because of I don't know. Also, with the fact that Turkey to this day refuses to acknowledge the Ottomans' actions makes me dislike them, a lot.

Anyway, to conclude, you could write a dissertation on what happened after the war; I'll keep it short and just note that a lot of the issues we have with territory in the middle east were borne from decisions made in partitioning the Ottoman empire.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

BeigeJacket posted:

How much did the introduction of the tank affect the nature of the war? There was a BBC drama-documentary about the sommme a while back which posited that 'massed' tanks and the creeping barrage (which you disparaged in your previous post) were game-changing and effective devlopments after British command were forced to change their tactics.

I'm of the opinion that tanks really did not alter much at all in the first war. The main reasons for this have been touched on (mechanical reliability, unbeliveably awful to operate, etc); another key point is that they were simply not used effectively. Armor is most effective when it is allowed to move quickly into rear areas while supported by equally mobile infantry; armor as it was used in WWI was more like a semi mobile land battleship that plodded along with dismounted infantry. More than anything they were just used as sort of portable fire support, which can be accomplished just as easily by a light machine gun and light mortar section. In addition, moving as slow as they did eventually made the British tanks horribly vulnerable (their armor was really quite thin and once the Germans figured this out their attrition rate was very high).

As for the creeping barrage, if it was executed well it could work fine as a suppressive element, but it really wasn't because of the "creeping" part: the important factor was timing the barrage with the attack of the infantry. This could be accomplished just as easily with a concentrated barrage on a single point, and without the unintended effects of warning the enemy of an impending attack.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Hiridion posted:

I often find that there is a tendency to overrate German achievements in connection with the territorial gains they achieved in March 1918. Putting aside the fact that these operations did not bring victory, that the Ludendorff offensives left the German army in a worse position strategically than it had been in at the beginning of the year, and that the Germans were only able to retrain a small part of their formations in the new stormtrooper doctrine, these tactics were also unable to significantly negate the defender's firepower advantage and were therefore doomed to fail. I think Holger Herwig's comment that the attack on 21 March was more of a gambler's desperate last throw of the dice that a well conceived and integrated operation that had any chance at victory is the most accurate assessment.

The storm troopers relied on mass, manoeuvre and portable firepower to negotiate the enemy's defences. However, the German army of 1918 did not have the technical sophistication, equipment and training to neutralize British defensive strength completely through these means. Furthermore, the German gunners were particularly deficient at counter-battery fire and were not nearly as adept as the British at locating and neutralizing the enemy's artillery. The gains against Gough's Fifth Army in March were indeed large, and did cause tremendous concern among the Allied leaders, but once the situation stabilized they also became meaningless as the Germans had struck against an overextended defender protecting a strategically unimportant zone. The real test of the new German tactics came in Flanders in April when they made a similar effort against the much stronger British defences that guarded the channel ports. Then the inability of the Germans to master British firepower soon resulted in the collapse of the attack, its failure revealed the feebleness of their bid for victory. Historians are therefore wrong to give too much credit to German tactical genius and overlook British accomplishments, especially if, by comparison, one considers how easily the British Commonwealth forces penetrated the Hundenburg Line- the strongest defensive position on the western front- and within a few hours made the position untenable for the Germans

I don't think I necessarily disagree with anything you've said here, excepting that I think that I hold the German tactical advances in much higher regard (for example, I would argue that the Germans could have done far better against the British defenses had they 1) had a clear strategic objective and 2) had a more mature supply system, or even just enough food).

Also, I think that the Spring Offensive, even if it was mishandled badly on a strategic level, was absolutely the right decision. They had a slight numerical advantage thanks to their units from the east, they knew that the arrival of the Americans coupled with the superiority of the British/French economies would eventually beat them, so it made a lot of sense to try and force an armistice before both of those things went down (remember, the notion of "unconditional surrender" wasn't really on the table during this war). They gambled and lost, but not by much, and I can't think of a better (in strategic/military terms at least) course of action for them.

Also on the Somme, has anyone read Three Armies on the Somme? I glanced at it on the bookstore on BLACK FRIDAY and the author was trying to make an interesting argument, essentially that the British did a lot better than we give them credit for and the battle was more of a strategic victory than history remembers. I might check it out but I'm not at all sold on that thesis personally.


Count Sacula posted:

This beats the crap out of the whole "archers vs musketmen" argument.

:mad:

Seriously though if you don't like nerdsperging debates on military history then :getout:

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Red posted:

Exactly why is Rommel (his book, strategies) still taught in officers' school in the U.S.?

I went through officer education and now teach officers and Rommel is not a part of any curriculum I'm aware of. It might be on reading lists or something, I dunno. It obviously isn't terribly relevant anymore except for general ideas.


Konstantin posted:

Supplying an entire military operation the size of the coalition forces in Afghanistan entirely by air is extremely expensive. I don't think we have enough cargo planes for an operation of that scale. They drive it across the borders from friendly countries, that's part of the reason why we are so worried about angering Pakistan, since it is the only way to get things there by sea without going through clearly hostile nations (Iran) or thousands of miles through Russia and central Asia.

Edit: Some quick googling and math shows that coalition troops eat about 655,000 pounds of food every day. The cost of flying all of that in adds up very quickly, even if we could do that.

Funny you ask, there was recently a huge change to this. We used to fly through Germany and then across central Asia but the land of Borat and Russia just opened an air corridor that will allow flights straight from Alaska to Afghanistan. It is a pretty big deal logistically speaking, it allows polar overflights now and allows the planes to fly each leg without refueling.

That said, most of the poo poo still has to come in by land, and most of this comes through the Khyber Pass, which you might have heard of as it is a big deal. This is mainly stuff landed at Karachi in Pakistan and then trucked through the mountains. I don't know how accurate it is today but something like half of the shooting engagements in theater a few years ago were here for obvious reasons.

This obviously isn't an idea position, so the coalition is trying to open some new supply lines. One is from the Baltic Sea to Riga, then by rail through Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan and then trucked into Afghanistan, the other through the Dardanelles/Black Sea, Tbilisi, through Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, shipped across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan, loaded onto rail again through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, then trucked into Afghanistan.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Julio Lopez posted:

How would a modern infantry battalion fare in WWII? Say a US Ranger battallion (no Bradleys). Like literally teleported in, with no modern air support or GPS (no satellites).

They'd have a bit more firepower and the body armor and night vision would be nice additions, but the really decisive differences between now and then is C4I and fires, which I'm guessing isn't present in your hypothetical.

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bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Julio Lopez posted:

Thanks. I googled what C4I is, but what do you mean by "fires"?

They'd basically be a couple of notches up from a WWII infantry battalion, but not a real game changer.

Well, I don't think a battalion sized element would ever be strategically decisive unless it was a battalion of jedis or something. Maybe a whole BCT with reasonable logistical support in the perfect situation (Stalingrad?).

edit - "fires" means fire support

bewbies fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Dec 4, 2010

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