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  • Locked thread
Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Rabhadh posted:

Roughly what proportion of the French and English 100 years war armies were mounted? Is the answer basically "as many as possible" or "more as time went on"? Was there an idea ratio of mounted to unmounted that armies of this period strove for? And by mounted I don't just mean knights on destriers, I mean guys who are mounted for mobilities sake. Finally, does this apply to the rest of Europe or was the 100 years war a unique microcosm in regards to horse use?

The Chevauchees, like most raiding/pillaging operations, were conducted by mounted soldiers. It's possible to maintain that level of "mounted-ness" because the groups that launch these raids are small in the first place. It's also because you gotta go fast when you're raiding within enemy territory.


For big armies, you aren't going to get a straight answer. Nobody took the effort to set up a proper man:horse ratio when the responsibility of mustering troops was delegated to about a thousand different dudes with varying capacities of horse-ownership. The statistics for the French at Agincourt and Poitiers are ridiculously lopsided towards men-at-arms, soldiers who probably owned horses, but in both circumstances the French outright barred their own infantry from participating in the battle so it doesn't mean so much.


On the grand scheme of things, trying to put your entire army on horses to try and move faster isn't going to give amazing results. It's one of those things that you need to be prepared to do in the first place, not just made possible through policy. The horses that a European leader would be trying to press into service wouldn't be the same as a steppe pony.

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Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

I Demand Food posted:

During this same time, the French were still heavily class-centered and favored the mounted knight, while lacking any real sense of cohesion. Various lords fought with or against each other as they saw fit and even when they were all on the same side, some would refuse to follow orders from the nominal commanders. Early on, they were also reluctant to embrace common soldiers. That's a large part of the reason why, at Crecy, a French army made up largely of armored cavalry suffered a massive defeat at the hands of a much smaller English army made up of longbowmen and dismounted men-at-arms/knights. Even when the French began to dismount, such as at Poitiers and Agincourt, they still found themselves unable to cope with large numbers of longbowmen raining arrows down at them from a distance because they lacked enough archers of their own.


Crecy is just the biggest joke of a battle. The French go out of their way to gently caress up their own crossbowmen, throw a hissy fit when said crossbowmen can't deliver, and then spend the rest of the day charging up a hill towards the clearly fortified English positions.

What I'm saying is, the problem the French faced wasn't that knights were ineffective, it was their blistering incompetence.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012
If you try plow your horse into a bunch of dudes who aren't giving, two things happen.

1.
Your horse is ill-trained and it freaks the gently caress out. It does its best to not follow your commands, so you probably veer off. In the worst case, it rears up in front of these angry infantry dudes and you get your rear end beat.

2.
You bowl over whoever is in your path, and probably one or two more guys behind him. You may or may not take a grievous wound in the process. If it's just you, you aren't going to last so long in a sea of infantry because now you're surrounded by angry dudes who are stabbing the poo poo out of you and your horse. The best case scenario is that you break through to the other side in the inital charge, without terrible injury.

If a whole unit were to charge in an infantry formation, you would get better results. Still, it's just not a good idea to be surrounded by a swarm of infantry. Even the best armoured knight would get unhorsed if he loses his mobility.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Elissimpark posted:

See, this is what I was thinking and was wondering why infantry would ever run from cavalry, unless horribly, horribly outnumbered. I was picturing some early modern General Melchett sending wave after wave of cavalry over the comically large piles of dead horses, because after 18 charges, it'd be the last thing they'd expect.

The Wikipedia article on Cataphracts talks about the Parthians pummelling the Romans with arrows from horse archers so the Romans would loosen their formations and therefore be more vulnerable to a charge from the cataphracts themselves. So the lesson here, I guess, is that you want to be able to break out the back of the infantry formation if you're going to just keep charging.

What about infantry charges (pre-guns)? Would you be running to get into hand-to-hand, or would it be more a brisk walk?

The Romans actually tightened up when faced with horse archer attack. They did the famous testudo that Hollywood tends to misuse, and then were scattered by the cataphracts when they charged.

It helps to note that the Roman infantry were armed with short swords that would have made it very difficult to fight cavalry, especially such heavily armoured cataphracts.



As a dude on the battlefield, you run from cavalry because you don't want to die? It's not exactly intuitive thought to stand perfectly still while a big man on a big horse comes at you with a big lance.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Farecoal posted:

The testudo is meant to protect from missile attacks, right? How does Hollywood misuse it?

They just use it whenever. The only movie I can name right now is "The Eagle", where they go all testudo against a bunch of Britons who are just running at them, not even throwing javelins or anything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae9Pj2JIero

VanSandman posted:

I've always wondered why the Romans didn't adopt the phalanx in the east. That would have been a great counter to the cataphract, and it's not like they lake the discipline or the manpower to pull it off.

Well the Seleucids were avid phalanx users, but the Parthians kicked the poo poo out of them all the way to Syria.

Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Nov 15, 2013

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Mans posted:

I never quite understood how planes could fit cannons and machine guns right next or even behind the blades of the engines without blowing said blades to hell. I guess there's a delaying mechanism that stops the blades when you shoot, but how do you make sure the blades don't stop in front of the guns and wouldn't said delay cause the plane to lose speed and energy?

He was such an engineering genius that he reached immortality? :iiam:

The interrupter gear doesn't stop the blades when you shoot, which would disastrous. It syncs the gun with the propellor so that shots can only be fired when the blade is in a certain, non-blowupabble position. This way you can change the speed of the propellor without having to worry about getting your shots off.

Fokker figured this out around 1916. Before then, like a lot of WWI tech, was a bunch of insane ideas that people tried to use. The French were partial to the SPAD A.2, which featured a gunner's seat sited directly in front of the propellor. Another French invention was the "deflector plate" which was just a hunk of steel on the propellor blade so that any bullets would plink off.

The British would tape their propellors and then just shoot through them. The tape prevented catastrophic splintering.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Nenonen posted:

Another even kookier approach used in French and German interwar designs was to place a gun within the engine, to fire through a hollow propeller hub. Here's Bf-109 with two synchronized 13mm mg's and a 20mm autocannon firing through the propeller axis.



That doesn't really seem so kooky to me. On that diagram are two machine guns that are successfully synchronised anyways.

I wonder if it's a quirk of an autocannon? I can't think on an example of a plane with a synchronised one of those.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Grand Prize Winner posted:

Bah. GURPS 3e sourcebooks are cleary the best historical texts you can get.

So what's the deal with Japanese castles? They look relatively indefensible to my Western eyes (relatively low stone escarpments under what appear to be wooden ceilings and paper walls). But presumably they worked else the daimyo wouldn't have kept building the drat things.

I think you may just be looking at the preserved keep, and not the complex as a whole. Japanese castle construction was about clearing a big-rear end stretch of hillside, and then piling on fortifications until you got a castle within a castle, perhaps within another castle. Most of them haven't survived in their entirety to the modern day, and quite a few were decorative ones built between the Sengoku Jidai and the Meiji restoration.

Here's how Himeji castle was meant to look like.




The concept is kind of like a star fort, where you're just trying to make as many favourable angles for the defenders as possible. The irregular construction of defenses was meant for confusion. Also, those stone walls are steep as hell and real tall. You can't just leisurely climb them, like in Shogun 2.

Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Nov 26, 2013

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012
I understand that you don't want to actually kill people, but what's the point of re-enacting a pike push when you're not going to use your weapons at all.

Give them big foam pike heads or something.

a travelling HEGEL posted:

[*]With a lot of leeway between people, you can actually "fence" with your pikes, and it can be as graceful as someone hefting a fifteen-to-eighteen-foot long thing of wood can get. Which is not very.[/list]


I'll say.

Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Nov 27, 2013

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

steinrokkan posted:

I would have a question related to pikechat: Once I read somewhere that the janissaries were so effective largely because of their ability to employ very individualistic tactics, basically infiltrating rigid European pike formations, and breaking them with swords. While pikesmen would be paralyzed in such close quarters combat, the janissaries, trained to fight on their own, without need for a formation, would thrive in the chaos they caused.

Of course, I can't quite retrace this argument, and some of the stuff Hegel's been writing about makes me doubt this hypothesis.

There's also the fact that janissaries did in fact fight as compact units, even developing modern tactics parallel to Europe at least up to the volley fire revolution, and the notion of them as loosely organized warriors seems at odds with that.

The Spanish at the advent of the Tercio liked to put dudes in their pike blocks armed with bucklers and swords. These guys disappeared realll early on.

The problem that arises is infiltrating a pike block in the first place. It's rigid, but it's like 6-layers-of-spear-rigid. How is a dude with a sword going to get close enough to the first rank of pikemen at all? The Spaniards had their own pikes to lock it down, giving their swordsmen an opportunity to move in. The Janissaries don't have that option.

You're right about the Janissaries being well-trained and capable of unit warfare. I dunno if they were individually skilled, but it's reasonable. The Ottomans employed many irregulars that would roam around the battlefield and mostly pillage, but they weren't capable of going head-to-head in frontline combat.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

ArchangeI posted:

Get on his knees and crawl. Someone post the video again.


Right, that's the one with the 80 Years War? You can't do that if all the pikemen are looking at you.

Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Nov 27, 2013

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

a travelling HEGEL posted:

Here is the part in the thread where historians try to do math.

Who was that dude that was doing some regiment organization and ended up counting 29=30?

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012
The rear armour of the M1 is like non-existent or something.

People like to quantify modern MBT armour in terms of RHA steel, like WWII tanks. But it doesn't work on the same physics. But you can be sure that a WWII tank isn't going to be able to do damage to an MBT, unless they hit one of those unarmoured areas.

Also, the quality of optics and targeting in a modern tank is miles above the stuff 60 years ago. Range-finding is the biggest thing, a Sherman crew has to figure it out just by lobbing shells and seeing where they land. The M1 has a computer.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

gradenko_2000 posted:

Why didn't the British have tank destroyers, apart from the ridiculous Archer? As well, why didn't the assault gun concept catch on with the Western Allies? Is it somewhat accurate to assume that the infantry-support-role thing of the Shermans and Churchills and whatnot was the assault gun equivalent?

The Germans did it because it was cheap to just make tank hulls and put guns on them. Turreted tanks are also naturally more suited too going on the offensive, so the Allies didn't need those hidey-shooty-turny Stugs.

Stugs totally rocked the Allies though. They were so small that they could hide pretty much anywhere, and whenever a Sherman got knocked out from somewhere unseen, people assumed there was a Tiger around or something.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Mycroft Holmes posted:

So, I was re-reading my copies of Harry Turtledoves Worldwar series and I had a question. How would Gulf War era technology (minus stealth) fare aginst WWII circa 1942? In the book the humans can't keep up with the alien forces in technology, but they manage to eke out a white peace, trading most of the world for their independance. The wiki article has more information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwar

A novel about WWII era nations beating alien with superior tech isn't actually proof they could do it, you know?

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Slavvy posted:

It's reasonably well thought-out, I guess. The idea is the aliens are very slow and cautious in their social development and assume everyone else is the same. They send a probe which takes 500-odd years to return to their planet with data. They see that earth is basically in the middle age and assume nothing will change in the brief timespan of several centuries it takes them to get here. Bringing gulf-war-era weaponry and tech is, from their standpoint, being extremely over-cautious and over-prepared.

So okay, you invent spaceships and poo poo, but when you go to war you're gonna dig out some surplus equipment that's maybe a millenia old instead of using your actual ready military?

I really don't like Turtledove. I don't think slamming him on historical plausibility is fair, because it's just schlocky genre fiction, but he really isn't a good writer anyways. That wiki article of World War, a book about lizardmen aliens in WWII, has a freshman English essay slapped on there that physically pains me.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Cumshot in the Dark posted:

I've been looking at some illustrations of the Franco-Prussian and was wondering when European armies decided to abandon close order infantry formations. It must not have happened until well after the wide scale introduction of smokeless powder, correct?
edit: Ignoring specialty troops like skirmishers.

It, uh... didn't end until WWI

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Fangz posted:

Well, slow, with heavy all-round armour tends to be more of an infantry tank thing. The gun was good, but the large calibre made it suitable for firing HE - the smaller calibre guns you see in the Panthers are better for anti-tank roles. I guess I was a bit overambitious in drawing the parallel.

The distinction between Cavalry and Infantry tanks gets lost after like 1941, when everybody realized that you want at least passable performance fighting both tanks and infantry.

Except for the British.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

gohuskies posted:

No, this applied to the Germans as well, look at their tank guns. Look at 1942 and early 1943, where they have the Panzer III with the longer-barreled 50mm/L60 for use against tanks and the early Panzer IV models with the short barreled 75mm/L24 for lobbing HE. Same kind of split as in Allied armies - one specializes against enemy armor, one against enemy infantry and fortifications. I don't know why people forget about the German tank guns early war and then accuse the Brits and the US of doing something that the Germans were just as guilty of.

The Germans invaded the USSR and immediately realized that infantry and cavalry tanks are total bunk. It takes until 1942 to upgrade the guns on the Panzer IV, but the idea is there.

The Americans have the troubling issue of TANK DESTROYER DOCTRINE, but the Sherman is mobile and the 75mm gun was pretty good for 1942. This stands in direct contrast with the Brits, who have the Churchill (40t, 25km/h) and the Crusader (20t, gofast) in their armoured divisions.


I understand that British armour development was hindered by wartime shortages and desperation, even though I made a joke about their early tanks being a little dumb.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Squalid posted:

Yeah independent campaigns by local officers against the explicit instructions of civil governments were a common feature of European colonialism. When you have operational independence and victories are a prerequisite for career advancement, there's a huge incentive to behave aggressively, even when doing so is technically insubordination.

What really interests me is the government history. How the hell do you extend administrative control across territories larger than any European country in only couple decades? It's freaking me out.

You don't, really. You coerce local governments, or install your own. Maybe your territory is mostly empty and you just ignore the unprofitable bits like French West Africa. Or maybe, you can divert all your resources into a single area that you can access easily, like the Congo river, rather than the entire territory of the Congo Free State.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

cheerfullydrab posted:

What really is the difference between a castle and a fort? Be honest, there actually isn't any.

Isn't fort short for "fortification"? Like, a castle is a type of fortification.


The last few pages prompted me to check out some famous fortifications.



This is Douaumont, one of the three fortresses at Verdun. At a glance, it's similar to those star forts posted on the other page, without the star parts. That's understandable, with modern war and all that, but I'm a bit puzzled about how it managed to hold out during the Great War.

I can't really find any ground-level photographs of the forts at Verdun, probably because active military installations don't usually get photographed by civilians, and the little battle there did them in. There seems to be a lot of open space in that fort, which I can't imagine was pleasant under artillery barrage. I just don't see how it would have served better than the trenches.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

AATREK CURES KIDS posted:

The key difference between sport and military training is that athletes fight in a way that doesn't kill or maim the opponent. I think an elite modern soldier would win a fight against an elite ancient soldier, and an MMA fighter would beat a pankration fighter, but either athlete would lose to a soldier who knows how to cripple or blind his opponent rather than subduing him.

edit: Lamadrid is right, the rules make a huge difference. When there are no rules, the dirtiest fighter will win.

Pretty sure military training includes "Ways to kill people".


So many sweeping statements of "This mans could beat these guy", kinda reminds me of Deadliest Warrior.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Raskolnikov38 posted:

What's up with the Catalan enclave on Sardinia?

Sardinia used to be owned by the Aragonese, who probably settled soldiers or something there. They had a bunch of fortifications on the island.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Zorak of Michigan posted:

We should have told them to gently caress off the moment they fired on us during Torch. Their partisans did useful work during D-Day but after that the Free French were mostly just a pain in the rear end. On the other hand, I don't know French postwar internal politics well enough to know how badly we had to worry about them ending up neutral or tilting Soviet during the Cold War.

Are you sure you're thinking of the right army? The Free French were pretty important on the Western Front, they held their own in Alsace-Lorraine while the Ardennes Offensive was being ground down.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

ArchangeI posted:

I still wonder why they didn't chose to mass produce the Achtacht when the B 29 attacks started. The Mg 42 and the MP40 were also massively superior to whatever Japan was using at the time, and neither of them was particularly difficult to create. The Mg 42 in particular was designed to be very economic for a light machine gun.

Military equipment isn't produced in RTS conditions where somebody can hand over a blue-print and have a whole factory spitting out Flak 36s by the end of the day. I did some wiki research, and apparently , the Japanese did make a copy of a (different) German 88mm AA gun. The real issue for the Japanese is the production numbers that they achieve, with their main AA weaponry rounding out at like 3,000 units. Their total production of artillery pieces is 13,000, with is about 4 times less than Canada's.

You're also discounting operational differences between the two armies of Germany and Japan, as well as ammunition sizes, and maybe a million different things in the procurement process. An MG42, heavy and a notorious ammunition hog, wouldn't be useful in poorly supplied jungles and islands. The MP40 would be useless in the Pacific, it jammed easily with dirt and mud.

The 88 would also have been powerless against the B-29. They flew too high to be hit with 88mm flak.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Squalid posted:

Assuming there still are Napoleonic Wars in this universe. Not necessarily inevitable if Britain quashes the revolt before French involvement.

Let's say Napoleon happens. Also Bismarck.

Would Hitler have defeated Russia if Britain still had the 13 colonies?

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

This has already moved into some serious Turtledove poo poo.

Now let's say Hitler wins the war and gains the 13 colonies, do they revolt, and is George Washington a car salesman in this scenario?

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

SlothfulCobra posted:

So long as we're in gay black Hitler territory, what does everybody think about this quote about WWI from Bertrand Russel, renowned not-a-historian? Yea or nay?

France would be humiliated and driven further into crazed nationalism, Austria-Hungary's problems would only really have been put on a burner, and a strong victorious Germany could only butt heads with a strong, unscathed Britain.

It would just lead to another great war down the line, or maybe a horrible '30s hybrid of a World War.

I don't see how Spanish Flu would have been avoided.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:

At least in England, a lot of that art and literature was written by upper class sons of privilege who'd spent the prewar years listening to nothing more violent than their servants cutting meat in the kitchens of their manor houses. Except when shooting partridges or going on fox hunts, I suppose.

Meanwhile, the "lower classes" who lived four families to a tiny tenement house in the East End with holes the floor and no heating beyond burnt newspapers found trench warfare much less traumatic for some reason.

This is absurd. When it rains in London, it doesn't come with shells

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

InspectorBloor posted:

Shhhhh :smith: the Ottomans would like you to acknowledge their legendary logistic skills.

I was under the impression that the Ottomans had a lot of dedicated looters in their army, or is this just the sickly 19th century Ottomans I'm thinking of?

quote:

Starship Troopers

The movie is better than the book. Also, some phenomenal sfx work.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

The Entire Universe posted:

I think I'm doing a bad job of asking the question. I'm not asking for when the cavalry charge stopped being a thing, I'm looking for (if any) a doctrinal evolution from old bearded men with monocles micromanaging tactics on a continental map to a separation between the strategy end of things in the headquarters and the tactical end of things in the field.

I only meant to use mounted cavalry charging emplaced guns as an example of high command 's orders being highly specific actions, versus commands being more objective-based. Was it ever doctrine for tactical decisions to be made by whatever supreme command was there? If so, was there an evolution from that way of doing things to strategic command and tactical command being executed by different people in different places, with multiple levels of both? If that's also the case, is there any writing detailing that evolution in warfare and its causes?

It's strictly a German thing for a while. You see it become noticable under Moltke the elder, because his way of command was entirely strategic in nature. Moltke was generally more interested in railway timetables and infrastructure getting a Corps around, rather than the specifics of their march on the battlefield.

For the longest time, a separate strategic and tactical command wasn't important. The army was self-sustaining in the field, and you could wander around and make those choices as you had to, rather than coordinate a specific axes of attack. By Napoleon, gigantic armies can no longer "forage" effectively, so you start having multiple formations taking different roads, and having different objectives and so on. I guess that would be the beginning of the whole separation, but nobody was extremely good at it for a while.


I don't think the Charge of the Light Brigade really counts as a definitive example of order-based command. The original order isn't very specific at all (Which is standard for light cavalry), the clarification was when the brigade was misinformed, and the miscommunication came from the courier, not the general. The bizarre drama between the two officers in command that ordered and led the charge doesn't help to make sense of things.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Mans posted:

I wonder why it became so infamous though. Didn't they actually manage to rout the Russian artillery, even if at an heavy cost? Was it that rare for cavalry to suffer heavy casualties or something? I never got the fixation for that particular situation.

It was a particularly stupid way to go about it, and the casualties are like 30% of an already small unit.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

The Entire Universe posted:

Klocz hasn't served watch yet, that's rich.

E: thank you all for the effort posts on the terrible horrible no good very stupid cavalry charge in question, as well as the evolution of a strategic-tactical hierarchy in command structure. I assume, then, that it boiled down to decorum (of the pro patria mori variety as well as conspicuous deference to superiors) as to why the charge was made in the fashion it was? Or did the brigade not know they were charging towards active guns?

Well, it was sort of an order, and officers can be very dumb. This really has never changed.

It would have been very obvious on the ground that it was a bad idea. The guns they were actually supposed to capture were on the hills directly overlooking the charge's path...

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

ArchangeI posted:

A man who does not understand the difference between "entering the war" and "sending troops" shouldn't comment on military history. Especially someone who should understand the role the Royal Navy played in British strategy. I read that yesterday and was completely flabbergasted. Has that man ever even read a book on WWI?

Yeah, he wrote one.

I like that his main point is that if Britain didn't join in WWI, they would've kept the old empire? That's a solid, bias-free and inoffensive stance.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

bewbies posted:

It is? Where are you seeing this?

I mean, honestly, I'm not seeing what is so extraordinary and/or offensive about anything that guy says, at least based on the posted article.

Ferguson seems genuinely wistful whenever he speaks of the empire and its offputting. I've read The Pity of War by him, and in one section covering the casualties sustained Commonwealth and colonial forces, he beams with patriarchal pride when he talks about how many Australians died in proportion to their population. It seems very inappropriate to take that attitude, when discussing thousands dead out of state obligation.

He also claimed that the Brits and Germans in the trenches hated the poo poo out of each other. He dismisses letters and accounts of mercy and humanity as freak occurrences that happened to get logged. But his proof that the trench war was a frenzy of bile and rage... is a bunch of letters and personal accounts.



According to his book, the highest proportional losses suffered by any state in WWI was by Serbia, with 24% of 17-45 year old men dead. Here's a thing from earlier in the thread? Or the last? It's about the problematic tactics of Austria-Hungary in the Serbian campaign.

https://archive.org/stream/howaustriahungar00reis#page/n0/mode/1up

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Rodrigo Diaz posted:

Absolutely. "problematic tactics" is not the same as "repeated atrocities" or "frequent war crimes" if you want to moderate your tone a bit.

I'm not a Habsburg apologist. They are indeed war crimes.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

AATREK CURES KIDS posted:

Was it Soviet doctrine that caused a lack of improvisation, or inexperience and fear of failure? Pop culture has this picture of Soviets as rigidly following doctrine while the Americans cherished innovation.

I think that is Citizen Soldiers that makes that argument?

Generally speaking (I know), if an analysis of a complicated issue, like mid-level military leadership in a very large state, boils it down to a few bullet points about romanticized cultural values, it's not going to be a totally accurate account of things.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012
The Americans were helped along by horrendous reliability problems in German AFVs, but I think a lot of american deficiencies were made up for with an artillery battery for every battalion.

Tanks ahead? Shell the poo poo out of the area! Tanks attacking? Shell the poo poo out of the pre-designated area!

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Cardiac posted:

Didn't a lot of the Germans fight with the commander hatch open?
Carius did it a lot and he said that the Russian would have had a lot less losses if they had been doing that as well?
From what I read about Yom Kippur, the Israelis lost a lot of commanders to artillery fire, since they were fighting with the commander's hatch open, so it must have been in practice for a long time.

The commander isn't the one shooting. He could be standing on the back of the tank with a radar receiver and it still wouldn't help the gunner acquire targets. Imagine looking at a Where's Waldo book under a honey-encrusted microscope, somebody who can't actually see where you're looking barking descriptions at you, and you're a Panther gunner.

And to be fair, the Panther was pretty inept at fighting infantry. It's on the stupid spectrum of "high-velocity needle gun" and it's too big and clunky to hide and maneuver at close ranges.

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Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

GenericRX posted:

In that picture of the Tiger above, would any crew be able to survive that or would spalling get them all? Not even going to ask about the Panzer IV :v:

If nothing else killed them, they'd get their necks broken from flying around in tiny metal box. Tanks don't have seatbelts, and that Tiger has been flipped over with force.

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