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wdarkk posted:Fuso was destroyer torpedoes, Yamashiro was basically "all of the above, at once". Has anyone found/bothered looking for the wreck of the Fuso? I've always wondered if that split in two and both halves stayed afloat story was true or not.
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Nov 14, 2013 21:29
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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:I don't think the World Wars taught as much as you think. The Bomb is the reason World War II was the last direct fighting between superpowers, not any particular lesson. I'd say a lesson that should have been learned is "don't base your doctrine on the outcome of the last war", but that's one that few nations ever follow. I dunno, not letting a morphine addict run your war industry is a pretty good lesson from WW2.
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Nov 15, 2013 09:45
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Arquinsiel posted:Tell me about WWI artillery strategy. How was it planned, coordinated etc, what patterns of hits were they trying for and what kind of "on call" fire support was available? Artillery doctrine in WW1 was awful and is a huge contributor as to why it devolved into trench warfare. There was no on call fire support until after the Somme and even then it depended on telephone wires to the rear not being damaged or cut which they nearly always were. Modern artillery shells were still new at the time and not well understand yet. Thus generals believe that if one fires enough shells, you'll blast the enemy away allowing your troops to waltz over no man's land. However, trenches and dugouts render this ineffective despite weeks long bombardment of enemy lines. When troops go over, the enemy simply leaves his dugouts, remains his machine guns and mows down your troops as they try to scramble through what was once a field filled with wire and bomb holes. Meanwhile your artillery has begun to bombard the enemy's second trench line as the theory assumed the front line would be easily taken, which it usually was actually. So you got your troops in the enemy's front trench, they're supposed to begin assaulting the second line so artillery moves onto the third line. Except hardly anyone is dead in the second line and thus reman their trenches quickly and the attack bogs down. At this point someone usually runs back, reports about needing help at the second line and artillery is shifted there, killing Germans and friendly troops as well since their usually hugging the lip of the second trench line. German reinforcements rush forward and retake the first trench and the whole shitshow starts over again. After the Somme things like creeping barrages begin to see usage which allows the troops to basically be walked in by a wall of shell fire which does actually work quite well. Unfortunately, generals are still attacking on too narrow of a front, with no overwhelming superiority in men or material and with no element of surprise. Which works for gradual pushing back of small sectors of the front but is never going to result in the strategic breakthrough needed for a return to mobile warfare.
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Nov 16, 2013 00:51
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gradenko_2000 posted:I could be completely wrong on this, but I thought the lesson that the Entente needed to learn was to attack on a narrow front. Broad offensives would just get thrown back by the second echelon of the German defense-in-depth, but if you just took a small slice of trench and held on tight you could stay there. Was I getting it backwards? I should have phrased it better but of the three things I listed you need at least one, ideally two. If you're attacking on a narrow front you need either surprise or material superiority in order to achieve a breakthrough before reserves can be shifted. Allied generals were pretty bad at concealing where their next offensive is going to be allowing the Germans to shift enough reinforcements to deny them superiority. Since surprise is out and there isn't enough allied troops until the AEF arrives for the superiority aspect, the best bet is to launch a front wide offensive to tie down as many German divisions as possible and then exploit local success as they occur. With enough speed and boldness the small success can be turned into strategic gains.
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Nov 17, 2013 01:22
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Fangz posted:I'm not sure if the Germans ever developed a good anti-mine method. I believe anti tank mines did for a lot of German tanks at Kursk. Their most hilarious anti-mine method from the Germans was zimmerit. Having developed a mine/bomb a soldier could attach to a tank via magnet, the Germans begin pasting ridged clay onto their tanks, adding days to construction time. The ridges would prevent the mine from sticking to the hull and the tank moving was expected to shake it off, as they assumed the allies would also use magnetic mines. They never did.
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Nov 17, 2013 04:58
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Ensign Expendable posted:It also didn't work.  Oh nazis you never fail to amuse.
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Nov 17, 2013 05:53
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EvanSchenck posted:In practice when the Vistula-Oder Offensive finally commenced the Germans in Warsaw did pretty much what you suggested, and Hitler was super pissed and fired some generals for failing to resist Soviet forces that probably had 10 times the combat power of their played-out and pathetically understrength formations. And thus began the most distinguished military career of one Heinrich Himmler. quote:On 25 January 1945, in spite of Himmler's lack of military experience, Hitler appointed him as commander of the hastily-formed Army Group Vistula (Heeresgruppe Weichsel) to halt the Soviet Red Army's Vistula–Oder Offensive into Pomerania.[156] Himmler established his command centre at Schneidemühl, using his special train, Sonderzug Steiermark, as his headquarters. The train had only one telephone line, inadequate maps, and no signal detachment or radios with which to establish communication and relay military orders. Himmler seldom left the train, only worked about four hours per day, and insisted on a daily massage and a lengthy nap afterwards.[157] He was unable to devise any viable plans for completion of the military objectives. Under pressure from Hitler over the worsening military situation, Himmler became anxious and unable to give him coherent reports.[158] Hitler was unwilling to admit that his choice of commander had been inadequate....
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Nov 18, 2013 08:57
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wdarkk posted:Kurita at least was hosed by several factors, including For anyone wondering about these two, Kurita's first flagship was sunk under him on the way to the the Philippines by American submarines. He transferred his flag from the sunk cruiser to Yamato and then stayed awake for the rest of the battle due to being shaken the gently caress up from that and near constant air attacks. Also not having a recognition book for CVEs is the least of his problems there as none of his sub-commanders can tell the difference between a DE and a heavy cruiser (about 300 feet and 13000 tons for you at home). Also who's this motorcycle courier y'all are referencing, is it Hitler? I knew he was a courier but I've never heard of him having a motorcycle before.
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Nov 18, 2013 18:26
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Unluckyimmortal posted:It's funny, every time I read about WWII in the Pacific for any reason I am again shocked at the waste of resources represented by the Yamato and Musashi, particularly in light of Japan's serious material disadvantage and the fact that neither ship actually managed to engage the enemy to any effect that even remotely justified their existence. Hey at least Yamato and Musashi got to shoot at things, even if they were tin cans and planes. The third member of the Yamato class was not so lucky. quote:In June 1942, following the Japanese defeat at Midway, construction of Shinano was suspended, and the hull was gradually rebuilt as an aircraft carrier.[41] She was designed as a 64,800-ton support vessel that would be capable of ferrying, repairing and replenishing the airfleets of other carriers.[42][43] Although she was originally scheduled for commissioning in early 1945,[44] the construction of the ship was accelerated after the Battle of the Philippine Sea;[45] this resulted in Shinano being launched on 5 October 1944 and commissioned a little more than a month later on 19 November. Shinano departed Yokosuka for Kure nine days later. In the early morning on 29 November, Shinano was hit by four torpedoes from the USS Archer-Fish.[41] Although the damage seemed manageable, poor flooding control caused the vessel to list to starboard. Shortly before midday, she capsized and sank, taking 1,435 of her 2,400-man crew with her.[41] To this day, Shinano is the largest naval vessel to have been sunk by a submarine
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Nov 18, 2013 20:05
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Also wasn't Halsey's communications officer literally the only one, out of dozens of radio stations that recieved it, to leave the padding in like an idiot?
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Nov 18, 2013 21:12
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Man thank christ we had Ike, Marshall and Nimitz, I shudder to think of the alt histories without them. e: and King too
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Nov 18, 2013 21:51
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ArchangeI posted:King hated the Brits and did everything he could to get more ressources into the pacific, which was very much the secondary theater. Not exactly the most rational of leaders. He did send the Yorktown to assist the Brits though, no doubt sniggering at the burn. True but I would argue that the Pacific was the right place to be putting those resources and assets. Uboats are never going to be able to end the war on their own, and while carriers are great at an ASW role in the Atlantic, they have a better role in the Pacific, killing enemy carriers. If there was a need for capital ships before D-Day in the Atlantic, the Royal navy should have been able to handle it. ArchangeI posted:People should also remember that pretty much everyone in these stories operates on maybe 4-6 hours of sleep a night plus the enormous pressure that high-level command brings with it. I mean I don't know I would have reacted if I was running a battle against three enemy forces at once and had to conduct an amphibious landing and then suddenly get a message from my CO going "Hey man where are your battleships, the world wonders! This would be a decent defense of Halsey if the night before he hadn't received information that Kurita was coming back through the strait and that Ozawa's force was a decoy. Halsey saw the glory in sending the IJN carriers to the bottom and went after it with everything he had. It is a miracle for him that the battle off Samar didn't end in disaster or he would have been shitcanned so fast.
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Nov 18, 2013 22:45
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Someone else will have to go into more detail but it was pretty much that and that the Finns wouldn't actually help take Leningrad or stop the soviets getting supplies in by lake.
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Nov 19, 2013 02:35
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As a humorous note, the Japanese invasion transports carried a distillation plant or two with them because of that message.
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Nov 19, 2013 05:44
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Cumshot in the Dark posted:David Fromkin asserts in A Peace to End All Peace that the primary reason for the Ottoman alliance with Germany during WW1 was due to the fact that Enver and Talaat made a secret offer to hand over the Sultan Osman in the event of war, since the Ottomans (according to Fromkin) could not really offer anything else of value to Germany to justify an alliance. (Of course, Churchill seized the Osman anyways.) Is this a view that is accepted by most other historians? I'm just curious about the political calculus of it all. I have never heard of this before. Everything else I've read shows the British treating the ottomans with complete disdain while Germany begins pumping money into them to make the Berlin to Baghdad railway. In the beginning you see Enver trying to stay out of the war but as both sides pressure him, german economic aid and the "gift" of Goeben and Breslau weighs better than British threats. Add in turning the Caucasus and Middle East into new fronts and its a match made in heaven for the central powers.
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Nov 20, 2013 00:57
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Or if you don't have time for that, watch the death of the Japanese navy episode of dogfights. It's pretty much the made for TV movie version of last stand of the tin can sailors.
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Nov 20, 2013 18:31
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Why was the idea of a permanently neutral Belgium not repudiated after the First World War? Belgium not being able to coordinate with the allies until after a declaration of war against her was a major hindrance so why not remove it when the Germans are incapable of preventing it?
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Nov 22, 2013 21:59
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I dunno, it just strikes me as one of the things France would have pushed for during the peace conference.
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Nov 22, 2013 22:57
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Anthony Beevor also has a book on the Spanish Civil War which is pretty good but he can get bogged down into the X regiment was at Y hill details a bit too much.
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Nov 24, 2013 20:34
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sullat posted:What is the consensus on the international brigades in Spain, then? The Condor Legion or the various pro-Republican forces were organized seperately from the locals, I think. Does the Geneva Convention treat ”adventurers” or foreign volunteers as lawful combatants? Hahahaha the Geneva convention being followed in Spain, that's a good one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Spain) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror_(Spain) If you were captured by the other side in the Spanish civil war the odds were fairly good you'd be dead in a matter of hours.
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Nov 26, 2013 00:42
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Having been to Berschtsgarden, the idea of the alpine fortress is goddamn hilarious to me. Yeah there are mountains but it's not Tora Bora, you could easily control the valleys while letting the Germans freeze and starve to death up in some cave.
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Nov 27, 2013 02:14
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Trench_Rat posted:after the fall of France the UK was offered an armisitce by Germany. Was the this delivered official through diplomatic channels or like radio propaganda broadcast. If i understand correctly it involved handing over some colonies to germany and retaining a symbolic army/navy Hitler made a peace offer by radio propaganda broadcast on July 19th 1940 but I can't recall his terms. Hess wasn't carrying a peace offer from anyone higher than him in the German government, he hoped to convince the British of coming to the negotiating table somehow. Unsurprisingly, Churchill was unwilling to talk to such a lunatic that didn't even have a real offer with him. E: a travelling HEGEL posted:
The dude that thought he was the reincarnation of a roman legionnaire had mind problems? Get outta here. a travelling HEGEL posted:Is the 20th century so different from all earlier periods, or is he just wrong? Well he's kinda right and kinda wrong. In WW2 if you were relying on a fortress holding out to save your empire, you'd lost the war by that point already and the fort is going to fall eventually. Forts as a strongly defensible position was still true and worked well as seen at Verdun. If Patton had been at Verdun in WW1 he probably wouldn't have said that. E2: as long as you knew how to use forts they were still useful in the 20th century, it's just that Patton and later the French at Dien didn't know how to fort. Raskolnikov38 fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Nov 28, 2013 |
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Nov 28, 2013 21:16
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Anyone who's educated in military matters who can think about fortresses without being awed by the intellectual work that went into them has mind problems.
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LeadSled posted:I've been on a book binge lately, and having burned myself out on the second world war was wondering if anyone had recommendations for books on WW1. My knowledge of that conflict doesn't extend much beyond trenches and mass slaughter, and it can't be much more depressing than Beevor's Stalingrad. The guns of august is fantastic.
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Dec 3, 2013 03:16
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Rent-A-Cop posted:I challenge you to find any book ever written more depressing than Johnny Got His Gun. It's not a book but "The Hell Called Treblinka" is pretty goddamn depressing for only being a chapter.
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Dec 3, 2013 05:59
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ArchangeI posted:For most of the war, the allied tactic was basically: 1. Attack and get beaten back, 2. attack again and get beaten back again, 3. assemble an overwhelming advantage in material and attack, then go back to step one. Monty skipped steps one and two and focused on step three. Rather he would replace step one and two with lying about what his army was capable of and setting too grand of goals he couldn't achieve, endlessly pissing off Eisenhower. He didn't have an ego problem, he had a setting reachable objectives problem.
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Dec 4, 2013 18:46
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Of course when Monty does focus on the Scheldt he fucks that up constantly and takes forever to clear it.
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Dec 4, 2013 19:50
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Slavvy posted:On a broader WW2 note, why did the germans just...not give up? It seems that when the advantage is so overwhelming and you're being pressed from both sides, why not just surrender unconditionally to the western allies so the soviets don't end up with half your country? Why bother fighting right to the very end? Well the reasons depend for what groups of Germans you're looking at. Nazi leadership and OKW/OKH heads didn't want to surrender because they knew the gallows awaited them should they do so. German generals didn't, blaming the oath they swore to Hitler or some bizarre ideal of honor prevented them from doing so. Really they were afraid of the soviets as much as anyone else in the reich and knew a surrender in the west without the allies joining Germany would cause a morale collapse on the eastern front. The average German soldier was more than happy to surrender to the western allies provided he was presented with a good chance to do so. Not so much in the east as they knew what had been done in the occupied territories and that the soviets would show no mercy if they didn't shoot them out of hand.
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Dec 4, 2013 23:13
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Really the correct solution is to drain the fuel from the Shermans and have the crews Molotov the gently caress out of the M1. I know it has protections against that but surely it can't withstand being constantly bombarded with flaming petrol.
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Dec 6, 2013 20:35
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A bit off topic but how do you get thread stats like that?
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Dec 8, 2013 03:06
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Are there any accounts of German soldiers, having broken through the Allied lines during the Spring Offensive in 1918, marveling at the seemingly limitless supply of artillery shells, food, and other provisions and then for the first time coming to the conclusion of "yeah, we're hosed"? I seem to recall reading ones before but I might be confusing it with something else. Maybe when the Germans broke through during the Battle of the Bulge. I haven't recalled reading anything about the average german soldier thinking that in WW1, though since it did happen in WW2 its very likely some German units were 'demoralized' upon finding Allied stocks. The "oh gently caress we've lost" statements mainly come from high command when reports of the offensive breaking down, because the starving German troops are looting food rather than fighting, finally trickle up to them
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Dec 9, 2013 08:08
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:1914 infantry: Ah les les pantaloons rouge, the pants that got hundreds of frenchmen killed. You'd think someone would have learned about the color red on the battlefield from the American revolution but not France  .
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Dec 10, 2013 18:24
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a travelling HEGEL posted:
Oh yeah I'm not saying the British lost because they wore red. Just that between 1776 and 1914 the idea that red is probably not the best color to wear on the battlefield should have trickled up to french high command but welp.
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Dec 10, 2013 18:42
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Panzeh posted:Come now, they couldn't be more versatile than Spanish M48s. I though those were Chaffees not Pattons. Time to watch Patton again I guess.
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Dec 11, 2013 18:21
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So Franco just loaned out his tanks to anyone that showed up in Madrid with a movie camera then?
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Dec 11, 2013 18:29
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Azran posted:
Two questions: First who still owned an Austrian machine gun from the first world war and was willing to loan it out. Second, how was it not infinitely easier to find a proper MG34/42
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Dec 11, 2013 20:40
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According to the internet firearms movie database (why does this even exist) it's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzlose_MG_M.07/12
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Dec 11, 2013 20:55
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SeanBeansShako posted:Got to bad at something. Generals weren't enough for them?
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Dec 14, 2013 21:03
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SeanBeansShako posted:To be fair Mediocrity covers that in my general opinion. The bloody war before that sort of killed a majority of promising people as well as crippled the budget. It's a pity Monty gets all the glory of the British army in WW2, Slim and Dempsey were much better generals that hardly anyone knows about.
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Dec 14, 2013 21:54
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Grand Prize Winner posted:When did the Brits give up their shell weight measurements in favor of metric bore (shell?) diameters? Wikipedia is giving me after Hungarian rebels drove a t-54 onto the British embassy during the Hungarian revolution and examined it, that they decided to ditch the twenty pounder. In 1959 they begin releasing centurion mark 5 armed with the royal ordinance 105mm.
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Dec 15, 2013 06:11
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Sorry Ipad + it being late = bad posting. After WW2 the main British tank was Centurion which came armed with a twenty pounder gun, as they upgraded the base model the new variants would be mark 1-13. During the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the revolutionaries somehow got their hands on a soviet T-54A and drove it to the British embassy grounds. There the British military officer attached to the embassy examined the tank and sent the data such as hull thickness back to the ministry of defense in the UK. There it was determined that the twenty pounder currently mounted on the Centurion Mk. 4 was inadequate for dealing with the new soviet tank. Thus development was accelerated on 105mm gun that the Royal Ordinance factories had been working on for a few years and which was first mounted on Centurion in 1959, becoming the Centurion Mk. 5.
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Dec 15, 2013 17:25
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