|
aphid_licker posted:Man I didn't realize that Göring went to Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Ernst_G%C3%B6ring I forgot about this until I played Kaiserreich and wondered why Goring was the head of German Africa.
|
#
¿
Aug 23, 2019 01:13
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 21:03 |
|
|
HEY GUNS posted:i think this came up in the discord and i think what chitoryu12 said is there was a historically significant number of teetotalers in the us from early times The teetotaler Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels banned alcohol from Navy vessels in 1914. He also banned non-necessary work on Sundays and vessels setting sail on Sundays. They did institute Beer Days at some point after his tenure though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_day I've been told as well that when Beer Days happen, they open the beers too so you have to drink them there.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 23, 2019 14:43
|
|
|
The Soviet Union was pretty antisemitic in general due to wanting to stamp out Zionism as a nationalist movement and Judaism as a religion. The rise of Israel as an anti-communist bulwark in the Middle East also soured the USSR towards Israel, Zionists, and observant Jews. It wasn't the same as Nazi antisemitism but more based on militant atheism, a suspicion of ties to a foreign power, and that constant push to create a Soviet nationalism. quote:Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists have teamed up for anti-communist activities with Israeli Zionists. The wolf and the fox: separate ancestry, same habits. This cartoon from a 1977 Ukrainian humor magazine Perets illustrates that pretty well.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 23, 2019 15:43
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:I'm not sure this really tracks. Israel early on was actually kinda lefty (kibbutzes are socialism in action, for one very obvious example) and I'm not sure you could generally count the Arab nations in the middle east as communist. I mean some of them are literally kingdoms, the others were more nationalist or even fascist depending what you think of the Ba'ath party. Also, early on Israel actually got most of its support and military gear from well known Eastern Bloc nation France... Yeah, I think it would be better to term them as an anti-Soviet nation by way of how alliances formed. As Israel became more and more of an American ally, the Arab Socialist and Baathist nations became more and more Soviet aligned.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 23, 2019 16:43
|
|
|
SeanBeansShako posted:I strongly suspect it is more of a case of them trying to squirm away from bad PR and paying the survivors descendants/Indian government money. This is usually the case with previous Japanese governments too, although both the PRC, ROC, and ROK absolved Japan of all responsibility at different points through treaties and agreements.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 10, 2019 22:03
|
|
|
There have been apologies, statements, made but nothing like the reparations campaign West Germany did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements_issued_by_Japan Allegedly Hirohito tried to apologize formally to MacArthur but he wouldn't admit Hirohito, so it couldn't be accepted.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2019 00:09
|
|
|
Platystemon posted:Göring‘s daughter was totally into it, too. I was looking into that last night out of curiosity and that was not there. Are there any deep cuts for Albert Speer Jr.? He seems like he has a pretty moderate, though anti-Nazi, view of it.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2019 14:05
|
|
|
Let's see what Carmen Franco had to say about things...Wikipedia posted:Franco chaired the Francisco Franco National Foundation, which is under criticism for its revisionist opinions e.g. by calling the Spanish coup of July 1936 an "armed referendum". Yikes feedmegin posted:I mean at least Hitler isn't rocking this, built by enslaved Soviet POWs, though. Wikipedia posted:In 2018, after new Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez promised that Franco's remains would be removed from the Valley of the Fallen, the Foundation collected a petition with 24,000 signatures to oppose the proposal, with its leader, General Juan Chicharro Ortega, calling the site a "monument to reconciliation". Double yikes.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 12, 2019 14:01
|
|
|
Squalid posted:The Japanese occupation of the far east and Vladivostok during the civil war turned into a domestic political disaster for the Japanese government. It was nearly bankrupting the government even when the army was just sitting around and nobody was entirely sure what the objective was. Also motivating the withdrawal I think was the fact that WWI had exposed the inadequacy of Japanese military preparedness, and that sense of insecurity would motivate Japanese leaders to try and deescalate conflict with their neighbors. This is around the same time Japan signs onto the Washington Naval treaty. It's my understanding it was mostly for this reason they never seriously considered an invasion of the USSR too. They couldn't properly equip soldiers for Siberian winter and unlike their campaigns in SEA and China, you can get past the heat but you can't just tell people to do the same in conditions where people quickly die from being outside, unprotected for a long time. I was reminded of how horrific the Battle of Chosin Reservoir was recently when I read the account of the assault on Funchilin Pass. The Marines were expecting Chinese soldiers to be there but it was seemingly deserted, the PVA soldiers had frozen to death in their foxholes waiting for the UN breakout to reach them. While the generals of the Kwantung Army were crazy enough to do it, I doubt they would have considered a campaign with a strengthening China on their border. They would have given it even more pause with the stalled out war in China that they promised would be done quickly when China came to the peace table. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Sep 12, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Sep 12, 2019 20:30
|
|
|
zoux posted:I think every submariner in the Kriegsmarine had a no bueno 1944 Especially those piloting the single occupant submarines, the Neger and Biber, and even more so for those who were test candidates for D-IX. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-IX I think it's been brought up before in the thread but I can't see most test subjects not coming out of this with a drug addiction and heart problems. This is all while doing several day solo missions in hastily designed single occupant subs with torpedoes strapped to the hull.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 18, 2019 16:44
|
|
|
I feel like the guy on the bottom left in the light blue coat is wearing the fire department (feuerpolizei) stahlhelm, which had a mohawk bump, but it's too small to tell. If so, that's awesome.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2019 22:51
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:In their attempt to recapitalize their military, at one point the Russians were going to end conscription and move to the western model of smaller forces better by weight, greatly expand NCO responsibilities, etc. I've no idea if they succeeded, failed, or just went back to the Soviet style. The Russian conscription model is pretty useless as it is, it only lasts a year, so they could only improve on things by changing it. It does inflate Russian military numbers to make their forces look much larger than they practically are. EDIT: I had heard an expert say that most conscripts are barely out of basic training by the time they're done and a little research found that there is no uniform system of basic training for conscripts. https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/NCO-Journal/Archives/2019/March/Russian-NCOs/ I don't really understand the point other than inflating Russia's military numbers to intimidate armchair generals and pundits. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Oct 30, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2019 13:33
|
|
|
Cessna posted:That was the US system in Vietnam, and it didn't work well. US draftees were required 2 years active service, 2 years inactive, and 2 years inactive reserve. 2 years was enough though for a servicemen to be fully trained and do a full tour in Vietnam.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2019 15:22
|
|
|
The Chinese weren't very big on naval exploration because to their immediate east was Japan, a resource poor, to the southeast, an undeveloped island full of pirates and polynesian islanders, Taiwan, and beyond that the Philippines and Indonesia, islands that didn't appear to be too impressive to China. Chinese merchants also made their money off of selling their goods to foreign powers so Zheng He's expedition wasn't just showing the flag and the resurgence of the Han people, it was also telling them that they were open for business. The imperial government or merchants didn't really have an incentive to find new sources of commodities so the development of naval based exploration and later colonial expansion never took off. EDIT: wdarkk posted:Random thought that popped into my head, probably inspired by the Japanese American Revolution book. Was there anyone writing on the 30 years war in China? It’d be interesting to see what they thought about it (other than “poor barbarians”). It probably wasn't brought up due to the Catholics dominating interactions during that period. The Jesuits mostly focused on broad, philosophical, geographic, and scientific information. The Jesuits were only really valued for their scientific knowledge, Christianity was viewed suspiciously, so I doubt they were going to talk about the war going on in Europe, which they were trying to sell as a nice place. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Nov 5, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2019 04:35
|
|
|
zoux posted:I think this was discussed before but how did racism play into unit conduct in the Pacific vs the ETO? Were Pacific theater troops more brutal to the Japanese they killed and captured than their counterparts in Europe? Generally it was because of the sentiment that the Japanese Empire never ratified the Geneva Conventions and the Japanese set the tenor in China, where their atrocities were very well known by 1941, and continued it early on in the Philippines and early battles. Racism was a factor but the Japanese military's behavior and a sense of tit for tat was probably a bigger one.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2019 16:58
|
|
|
The raid at Harper's Ferry was meant to start a slave uprising in the South but it failed because Brown believed that the slaves would instantly find out about the raid somehow and come to him to receive their weapons. His goal was to destroy slavery, also the South in the process, but he wasn't sane enough to accomplish this in a meaningful fashion. John Brown was well meaning, and honestly a step above most abolitionists in his views, but he was very obviously deranged. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Nov 25, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Nov 25, 2019 16:22
|
|
|
Epicurius posted:It wasn't "somehow". Brown's plan was to grab the guns, and then send people to nearby plantations to recruit slaves from there. When he had enough people, he planned to head south with a slave army, growing along the way as it attacked plantations and recruited slaves from them, as well as seizing more weapons and supplies. I was under the impression that he believed that the initial slaves would have been brought to him by God or something. I can't find the source but I remember reading that his initial plan didn't have the numbers he needed because Harriet Tubman and Fredrick Douglass refused to help him because the plan was terrible and incredibly unlikely to succeed. He thought that God would give him the initial men because he believed he was on a mission from God. The whole thing was suicide.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 26, 2019 00:25
|
|
|
One of the reasons the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was because they were delaying for as long as they could in the hopes the German troops would revolt, there would be a revolution in Germany, and/or the Red Army would be capable of fighting the Germans. None of those worked out for them and Trotsky resigned as Commissar of Foreign Affairs because he believed the most in those scenarios. The Germans would have probably crippled the Red Army to the point that the Whites would have beaten them if fighting continued.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2019 14:18
|
|
|
Rockopolis posted:Anything notably MilHist to see in Taiwan, or Shanghai? I need something to take my mind off the butterflies in my stomach before my flight. The Republic of China Armed Forces Museum is great. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China_Armed_Forces_Museum Lots of nice exhibits and they have rotating special exhibits. When I went, they had one on the Flying Tigers. The officer's club, which is nearby or connected, I forget, has some great murals like one of the Battle of Jinmen.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2020 14:19
|
|
|
Baron Porkface posted:Did the French Enter WWII believing they could defeat Germany on land? Yeah, it could be argued they missed the one place they, and the British, didn't have covered, the sky. They also didn't close the meth gap. EDIT: For a longer, more serious answer, the French believed that the Maginot Line would have given them enough time to mobilize themselves and their allies to take on a German invasion. The French high command was also focused on winning WWI again, not winning a contemporary war. Contrary to popular belief and Axis propaganda, the invasion of Poland wasn't an entirely a cake walk either, they did have help from the USSR after all. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Jan 7, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2020 06:23
|
|
|
I think Spain during WWI, at that point in the midsts of political turmoil, watched Portugal get dragged into the war by Britain and decided they were better off just cashing in on the war. The war was disastrous for Portugal from the start and they only got the Kionga Triangle for their trouble. The war wasn't even that beneficial overall for Spain too because their economy went bust after the war ended due to the amount of over speculation and debt incurred during the boom, not to mention the Spanish Flu, which wasn't even from Spain. Germany was never really going to threaten Spain and its remaining colonies weren't really close to Germany's so there was no real valid reason to jump in. Spain didn't have an alliance either to drag them in either.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2020 04:25
|
|
|
sullat posted:It was pretty funny how Germany tried to drag Mexico into the war. If the Mexican Revolution wasn't going on or Madero somehow survived the coup against him and his assassination, I could see him buddying up to Germany but that's crazy Turtledove level nonsense. Germany, bad at diplomacy, bad at spies.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2020 05:24
|
|
|
My main point about Madero was that his assassination was pretty much carried out with obvious help from American agents. Mexico didn't have much of a chance but I could see them making a neutral, but as close to the line as possible, pivot towards Germany but this is all something that requires Mexico not to be incredibly unstable and for a leader to survive a coup that he had no chance of surviving. The United States would have probably just invaded anyways before they did anything because that's just basic Monroe Doctrine, gunboat diplomacy in peace time if a Central/South American or Caribbean government decided they would do the slightest thing that upset a company, let alone start down a path of anti-US diplomacy.FMguru posted:My favorite WWII/Spain story is the Blue Division, which was a 'volunteer' unit of the most zealous dedicated anti-communist Phalangists sent to the eastern front to help fight the eternal crusade against Bolshevism (and as a token of Spain's support for Hitler). Sending the people most likely to be disappointed or upset by any post-civil war compromises necessary to get Spain back on its feet, the people most likely to complain and cause trouble at home over not doing enough to support Germany in the fight against the Red Menace, several thousand miles away to fight and die in a meatgrinder war on someone else's behalf was a pretty savvy move on' Franco's part. Franco was pretty savvy and I honestly don't think he was married to Phalangism as an ideological movement or anything other than a tool to enact his personal vision of Spain. I can totally see him send off enemies and potential rivals/critics to die in the USSR to make the most extreme fascists at home and abroad happy. He seemed to like keeping a big tent going of nationalist/monarchists and keeping himself in charge while keeping Spain a monarchy on paper. I could be wrong but wasn't he even reluctantly given leadership after Sanjurjo died and then when Mola died and there wasn't really anyone to challenge him? Spanish Nationalists, bad with planes. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Jan 15, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2020 14:27
|
|
|
Phanatic posted:We made up for it with all the fun we let the German POWs have in Phoenix. I always loved the fact that they assumed the river that was on the map would be there. This is also after ignoring the fact that Mexico had been a member of the Allies since 1942.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2020 15:15
|
|
|
Banzai, wansui in Mandarin, means 10,000 years and is the equivalent of vive la in that it means long live and is used in a similar context. 10,000 is usually a stand in for forever or an extreme amount in East Asian languages. For instance in Mandarin, 10,000 li, a unit of distance, usually means immeasurable.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2020 19:49
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:Scroll up. I saw, I was just giving a more definite definition. EDIT: It's a pretty common phrase and it gets used a lot in Chinese communist propaganda. It's on the gate to the Forbidden City for instance. 
RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Jan 30, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2020 19:58
|
|
|
Kangxi posted:The PLA had planned an invasion of Taiwan, but their (improvised) landing fleet near Guningtou was destroyed by the Nationalists' destroyer Chung Lung. That ship had stayed behind because it was running a smuggling operation on the side, and only luckily was there in time to influence the events of the battle. To add to this, a lot of the Golden Triangle drug trade has its roots in NRA, the ROC army's, drug smuggling operations to fund their insurgency and destabilize China. You can still find old Chinese guys in the countryside flying the ROC flag who use to run drugs in Thailand.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2020 05:08
|
|
|
Cessna posted:Parts of the scenario look really dated or odd today (Iran is our bestest buddy in the Middle East (oops), at the start of the war the Marines are sent to invade Yugoslavia, etc.). I was confused about the US invading Yugoslavia but then I looked it up and read that it was to aid Yugoslavia against the USSR and that made sense. I really hope the original version had Tito still alive, as he intended to live forever.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2020 00:41
|
|
|
LatwPIAT posted:The Rarest Tank in the World I guess if they had enough notice, they could have them airlifted in by a combination of Singaporean and ROC C-130's but the whole thing just sounds unfeasible.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 26, 2020 18:40
|
|
|
LatwPIAT posted:It'd almost certainly have to be a boat: the Centurion weighs far more than the maximum load of a C-130. It's having 80% of them in storage in Singapore that really makes the whole thing work. Bringing the school tanks over would be useful, but a slightly understrength tank brigade is nothing to scoff at! That's true, I forgot they have all the rest mothballed somewhere. I feel like regardless of tank numbers, a ground war in Singapore is going to be over fast, especially if it's Malaysia invading. Not just because of the size of the city but also for its lack of natural resources. The water situation is better than in WWII but I can't imagine it being a long siege. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Apr 27, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2020 01:42
|
|
|
Nessus posted:I imagine it's also that they're the only plausible enemy. Who the gently caress else is gonna invade Singapore? Yeah, just the ability to cut off the land border, part of the water supply, and presumably bombard the city and the port, which would be messy due to the density. Singapore is entirely islands so it would probably hold out longer than Hong Kong but I wouldn't put money on them beating back an invasion force based in Malaysia. Indonesia was also a plausible enemy during the Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation but they would have a harder time with invading. Singapore's early history was rough.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2020 13:39
|
|
|
Squalid posted:Reading about this stuff gets me interested in thinking about the villains of women's history. In terms of the harm they have done to America I would rank the Daughters of the Confederacy right along side the Ku Klux Klan The United Daughters of the Confederacy were pretty much the engine behind the second founding of the Klan in 1915. In the lead up to the founding, the Daughters were making big promotions of the Klan as a heroic force that kept the South safe from the "degradations" of Reconstruction. Laura Martin Rose, a UDC historian, wrote the The Ku Klux Klan, or The Invisible Empire with the express purpose of it igniting violence against black people. The UDC would go on to endorse it nationally and push for it to be added to the school curriculum. They only backed down from their open promotion of the Klan in the 30's when it became politically unpopular to openly support them. The UDC was and is one of the most destructive organizations in American history and they should no longer be allowed to exist as a state funded nonprofit organization.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2020 17:12
|
|
|
Alchenar posted:UK left wing twitter is currently doing 'actually life in the DDR was pretty awesome, look at all the socialist policies they had' and they're getting a pretty hard 'so good they literally had to build a wall to stop people escaping, also the Germans voted to dismantle the whole thing the first chance they got' response. It's one of the reasons why socialism is so popular in the former DDR today! National Socialism  The NVA also had big manpower issues and had to implement the Construction Soldier program because the state/military were so unpopular. The only one of its kind in the Warsaw Pact too. They led the world in children's programming though. I remember this documentary, the Lost World of Communism, having a good overview of what life was like in the DDR for those interested  https://youtu.be/znb_X48WXUg. The other two episodes are on Czechoslovakia and Romania respectively.EDIT: Parts of the documentary aren't work safe due to the discussion of nudism and sex show stuff. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Jul 3, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2020 17:43
|
|
|
Carth Dookie posted:Wasn't there a huge case of the vapours in the south recently because a daughters of the confederacy museum got broken into and a confederate flag (like, not a replica, an actual period flag) was torched as part of recent BLM protests? I seem to recall that happening but I didn't make the connection of the daughters of the confederacy museum to the daughters described in the last few pages. Yeah, I think it was Stonewall Jackson's battle flag. Someone threw an incendiary device through the window of the library and it destroyed some materials.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 5, 2020 18:38
|
|
|
Squalid posted:sooo I'm lacking a bit in knowledge about the end of the soviet union, but why did literally everything collapse again? And I don't mean politically, i mean like physically, organizationally. How do you end up in a situation where projects like the Buran worth billions of dollars are just abandoned? What happened to the people responsible for maintaining institutional knowledge in the military, where did they go? How did an authoritarian state find itself in the position of being unable even competently run a conscription program? There were periods of time in the 90's where soldiers and sailors weren't being paid for months at a time. It's one of the reasons why the Russian fleet is in such bad shape, other than it always getting the short end of the stick in terms of focus and budget. I believe the Buran got abandoned because it was an arguably over engineered boondoggle that cost more to maintain and run than the Soyuz capsules. It's not uncommon for prototypes like that, if they don't end up in a museum, to be left in some hanger somewhere, sometimes field for tanks, to maybe go back to. They at least put it into a hangar, where it was destroyed after 14 years of neglect, and by then confirmed that space shuttles weren't that great operationally.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 13, 2020 13:45
|
|
|
Molentik posted:Didnt they make those horrible porcelain figures right up to the end of the war? Yeah, Allach porcelain, and it had to do with their weird concepts of racial art or awakening the "race soul" of the German people by making art objects representing an idealized past. This, as with most other stuff, was just seen as another dumb Himmler project. As stated before, Himmler was the most interested in the occult while the other high ranking Nazis were opposed to religion, especially Hitler. The opposition was mainly on the grounds that religion undermined the people's devotion to the state and generally opposed the programs of the Nazis. Hitler mostly tolerated Himmler's crazy beliefs but the other Nazis generally found them weird, annoying, and/or laughable but they all generally seemed to hate each other. Hitler always gave Himmler passes and free reign because he knew Himmler was always his guy, his personal attack dog that was unquestionably loyal to him. Himmler's beliefs were very much in line with theosophy style beliefs in that he believed that there were root races and that some races were inferior or superior to the others. It's a kind of mysticism that combines pseudo scientific racism with a belief in there being hidden secrets to the world that you have to work at unlocking, often through the help of immortal wisemen. Again, I don't think we know exactly what he believed or how strongly but he generally wanted the SS to be a 20th century, neopagan version of the court of Charlemagne, with himself as Charlemagne and I guess Hitler as the Pope, again, it's weird and half-baked. There was also a lot of Norse stuff in there, like things, but most high ranking Nazis seemed to think this stuff was stupid, just theater for weird ol' Himmler. We do know that Hitler wasn't a big fan of paganism or a lot of this type stuff because of his response to The Myth of the Twentieth Century it's the swastika. The book lays down a lot of the stuff that gets attributed to the Nazis, the Aryan superman brought low by Semitic forces type stuff and it was very anti-Christian. For those reasons its ideas never really caught on, despite it being a good seller due to its writer being the editor of the main Nazi newspaper, and the writer himself never really rose in the ranks. The Nazis also tried to make a state Christian church, Positive Christianity as it was called, but it never really caught on. It tried to combine Nazi ideology and Christianity but they never moved to make it the sole Christian denomination in Germany.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2020 20:21
|
|
|
Lawman 0 posted:If MacArthur didn't insist on it would it have been wise for the allies to skip the Philippines and any other areas during the WW2 island hoping campaign? It's hard to tell the impact something like that would have but it would be bad for propaganda and general morale since it was still a US territory at that time, it was actually supposed to achieve independence during the period it was occupied, and the occupation was incredibly harsh on the Filipino people. Bataan had become a household name in the US and avenging it was something most Americans would have supported regardless of the cost. It was also another way to tie up the Japanese military, which was being spread thinner and thinner, and this would be beneficial to China and Great Britain and most likely to an invasion of the Japanese home islands. Do you mean a bombing campaign of Mainland China or do you mean an actual invasion? The Nationalists were using a scorched earth strategy so a bombing campaign wouldn't have been worthwhile since all the industry was on the Japanese home islands, Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria. Most supplies had to be taken to China over the Himalayas so it's not like they could move troops to China easily either. Outside the USSR, no other Allied power really had an easy avenue to invade occupied China but I imagine once the situation in SEA was done, the Allies would send troops to fight in China but I'm sure Chiang would have been very uneasy about that.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 20, 2020 20:38
|
|
|
Solaris 2.0 posted:I'm not gonna defend the glory of MacArthur but was Taiwan more strategic and would taking it have been easier? I feel like Taiwan would be harder invasion with a potentially hostile local population. While the Taiwanese weren't too happy with being second class citizens, Taiwan was treated much better than Korea and the Taiwanese weren't too excited about joining up with the ROC. The Philippines had a pretty active resistance movement to the Japanese and there were also "famous" American POWs to be liberated. EDIT: It should be noted that Taiwan itself is relatively large, much larger than Okinawa for instance, mountainous, and was underdeveloped until after the war. The coasts are rocky and easily defended, you have to travel the circumference of the island to go from one side to the other during that period, and most the development is in the north. You could very easily blow all the roads and infrastructure on the eastern side too and pen in an invader. If you landed at Kending or took Gaoxiong, it's a literal straight march north where you'd be penned in with the mountains to the west. The central area of the Taiwan is pretty treacherous too, especially Taroko, where 212 people died making the highway the ROC built and the highway is still unsafe due to falling rocks and rockslides. Taking it from the north or the west just seems unfeasible too unless unless you control the coast of China or some of the islands in the strait as a base. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Aug 20, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Aug 20, 2020 22:57
|
|
|
Groda posted:What about the homefront propaganda? Did anyone in the US even remember him saying that in 1943? The loss of the Philippines was a pretty big deal and the Bataan Death March was big in propaganda against the Japanese. There were thousands of America POW's in the Philippines and Gen. Wainwright had been taken prisoner too, although he was eventually moved to Manchuria and large numbers of POW's were shipped off to be slave labor. The Philippines had, and still has, close to a third of the population of the US so it's not even close to Hawaii in terms of scale. EDIT: You have to remember as well that the US had a home field advantage in the Philippines and some of the officers had even fought rebellions in the Philippines before or were posted there previously. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Aug 20, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Aug 20, 2020 23:28
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 21:03 |
|
|
Milo and POTUS posted:Woah. Given their colonial record, how'd they swing that Japanese colonial policy was schizophrenic and the foreign ministry essentially came to the conclusion that Chinese and Taiwanese, as in indigenous peoples who aren't descended from mainland Chinese transplants, were incompatible with Japanese culture. For that reason, they, and the Pacific Islanders within the empire were given an outsider status. In Korea, the foreign ministry task force came to the conclusion that Korean culture was so close to Japanese culture that the Korean people were prime for assimilation. The Japanese army also ran Korea throughout it's occupation while Taiwan was primarily governed by civilian governors. The Japanese initially embarked on a violent, counter-insurgency of the island of when they took over and effectively crushed most resistance to their rule while creating an infrastructure that increased their ability to control the island effectively. The economy in Taiwan was also good and situation seemed much better to residents than the alternative of the chaos of China. Even when the Chinese Nationalists were ceded Taiwan, they didn't incorporate Taiwan back into China economically because the local economy wasn't facing the hyperinflation that mainland China was facing due to the war. There were Chinese and Taiwanese nationalists present on the island but the government was very good in censoring, silencing them in the same way they did to detractors on the mainland. While the Taiwanese had an ambivalent opinion of the Japanese, they welcomed the Nationalists initially and this welcome was repaid with the February 28 Incident, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_28_incident, and a campaign of terror that would continue largely until the end of martial law on the island. One of the last Japanese holdouts, Teruo Nakamura, wasn't even Japanese, he was of Taiwanese Amis descent. While one man doesn't really signify Taiwan's dedication to the Japanese Empire but I would imagine the combo of a benign colonial rule and most likely foreign, American, invaders would have been enough for the Taiwanese people to support a resistance to the American invasion. Not to mention the fact that Taiwan is relatively huge and perfect for a guerilla and mountain fortress resistance. EDIT: While I don't think the Japanese were capable of something like the Gothic Line for a number of logistic and doctrinal reasons, I could see it very easily turning into a stalemate if the Japanese commanders didn't decide to just suicide charge until they won. Let's be honest, they're going to send wave after wave of men into the American lines until they "win." These assumptions on taking Taiwan haven't even addressed the amount of garrison troops you'd need. Taiwan in 1940 had a population of 5,872,000. The Philippines just seems even better for that reason alone. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Aug 22, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Aug 22, 2020 17:00
|
|