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Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

HEY GUNS posted:

where did Grenrow go? they did their MA on 18th and 19th century Indian personal combat but I haven't seen them around recently.

Still here, just lurking mostly. Those small metal shields were definitely used by Indian soldiers, which the British sometimes found hard to deal with. A lot of the anachronistic equipment people dismiss when looking at colonial warfare (swords and lances against muskets and artillery, superior European weaponry tech, bla bla bla) was stuff that the British viewed as a big problem in hand to hand fighting. Indian cavalry wearing mail shirts were always pains in the rear end to fight. I forget which source this is in, but one officer explicitly talked about how an Indian infantryman with a tulwar and shield actually had really good chances or even an outright advantage against a Brit cavalryman in a direct fight if the cavalryman wasn't able to just pull away and charge again.

It's not 100% to clear to me whether the British just noticed it more because it was unusual to them, or whether Indians really did just put a lot of stock into this in their traditional swordsmanship, but Indian swordsmen in general seemed to have a strong preference for having something in their off hands. Shields, sometimes a dagger or another sword, or (once more Indians started being recruited into EIC regiments) bayonets are frequently referenced as being used in the left hand in contemporary accounts. Gurkhas recruited into regimental service, for example, always preferred their kukris in the right hand and used their bayonet-mounted muskets in the left as parrying sticks. This might have to do with how tulwars don't really have great hand protection and the broader cuts they made (with their wrists locked) weren't as effective for the kind of parrying contemporary Europeans were used to. So having something in your left hand to serve as a blocking/parrying implement was probably especially valuable for them.

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Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

Squalid posted:


On the subject of unverified accounts journalistic accounts from wars, there are a bunch of extremely cool but also extremely unreliable descriptions of duels from the Russo-Japanese War.



There's a bunch of these stories of officer's challenging each other and then fighting it out in front of their men like they were playing Dynasty Warriors or something.

Not vouching for the accuracy of this story as it relates to the Russo-Japanese War, but this was an actual thing that happened in the 19th century for British officers fighting in India. It seems to be more concentrated to the late 18th-first half of the 19th century, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear of it in later periods of the Raj. I would love to know if any of these are true about the Russo-Japanese War. It would be a pretty wild thing if Dynasty Warrioring your counterpart on the enemy side was just a Thing you did in 19th centuries armies across Europe.

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

Schadenboner posted:

:shrug:

Einstein said something like "We should only prohibit homosexuality in cases where it endangers children" which is a fascinating statement because it meant that these two practices were commonly understood to be linked to an extent that while expressing tolerance for the activity involving consenting adults he felt he had to specify "no, I'm not cool with prostitots".

From this (and other similar expressions) I suspect in a lot of cases the primary experiences of a lot of non-upper class people involving nonstandard sexualities may well have been slumming nobs trying to hire prostitutes or just abducting and raping (counting on the illicit nature of the acts themselves to prevent the victim from speaking out, beyond the already large taboos against victims of sexual violence doing so). That doesn't excuse these attitudes (indeed, it's not our place to "excuse" historical actors, even if we had the power to do so, which we don't) but they emerge from a cultural context where the popular understanding of nonstandard sexual behaviors was probably of them as a form of decadent upper-class leisure-consumption, one closely tied to criminality, exploitation, and harm suffered by the lower-class recipients of these affections.

What the gently caress is this entire post? Poor people are just as frequently queer as any other group in the population. Are you really arguing that homophobia in the USSR comes from a righteous backlash against "the decadent upper class" committing sexual assault? The proletariat experience with "nonstandard sexual behavior" probably was more from, you know, the people who did this kind of thing that they knew and interacted with in their own communities. Dudes who want to gently caress other dudes have existed forever in every society, even if they identify themselves or categorize their behavior completely differently across cultures and time periods.

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

HEY GUNS posted:


the night wallenstein was assassinated, piccolomini swore up and down an uncanny storm blew up. was it because wallenstein was a wizard? or because it was february in what is now the czech republic? the answer may surprise you

Obviously it's because he was a wizard, right?

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

axelord posted:

Belgium rolling into the Congo chopping off hands. Belgium: "This is awesome"

Germany rolling into Belgium shooting civilians. Belgium: "drat this sucks"


If you think that the German invasion of Belgium was linked in any way to the brutality of Belgian colonialism in the Congo or that random Belgium civilians had it coming because of said colonial brutality, I have some bad news for you about Germany's general outlook on Africa and its policies there.

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

zoux posted:



Also their dicks are too big!

The guy being quoted here...wasn't a historian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Wallingford_(d._1214)

And why is this dude who was born in 1152 being quoted as a source on the viking era, which would have been centuries earlier?

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

crazypeltast52 posted:

It’s not about those Vikings, it’s about the current Danes that stole his girl.

But this same quote, usually not attributed to anyone specific, is always trotted out whenever vikings are being discussed as evidence about Norse culture, and we know for sure it's not from this guy because he didn't write any chronicles or histories.

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

Arcsquad12 posted:

Are there any examples of the use of fabian tactics that weren't immediately met with opposition from idiots convinced that decisive battles were the way to go? Fabian got countered and that led to Cannae, Dowding got fired after the Battle of Britain over the debate between the Dowding System and Leigh-Mallory's Big Wing nonsense.

You would think with how effective Guerrilla warfare has proven to be over the centuries at loving up conventional armies that more people qpuld be enthusiastic about employing those tactics. I mean, plenty of countries and organizations do use those tactics and they're a primary cause for decades long hellwars that humiliate imperialist nations with their big guns and huge numbers.

Is it like the rich's inability to comprehend how the poor survive? Modern military branches just fail to understand how guerrillas with pipe bombs and kalashnikovs continue to operate even after thirty trillion dollars of explosives are dropped on them?

It's really easy to say, "well obviously we should just concede all this ground to the enemy and retreat until we can find a better time to fight them" if you are looking at a campaign purely through lines and colors on a map. But when you're ceding ground to the enemy, you are giving up your countrymen, your towns, your economic production centers, your cultural sites. If your country works on any kind of representative basis, the constituents of the places you're advocating to abandon will certainly not be as casual about throwing away their own friends and family as you are. This isn't a class thing. There will be plenty of poor people who will not survive in the areas you're advocating to abandon to the enemy.

Also, it's pretty dismissive to describe the guerrilla forces that have succeeded against larger armies as only having pipe bombs and AKs. Most successful insurgencies (and the vast majority of them do not succeed, and tend to die horribly) have a neighboring state providing a safe haven and generally supplying them weapons, training, facilities for camps and bases, all of the things you need to able sustain your guerrilla force after "thirty trillion dollars of explosives" are dropped on them. The insurgents that only have improvised pipe bombs and AKs tend to be the dead ones.

Grenrow fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Jul 27, 2020

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

evil_bunnY posted:

Turns out you gently caress with former superpowers at your own peril and they get to gently caress with you forever. Except if you're finland, where little green men are kill on sight.


Please let us know how you think Ukraine was "loving with" Russia.

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

Nebakenezzer posted:





The author is critiquing some stuff in Vietnam's air war and his mouth is writing checks his butt can't cash. For example, he's critical of the USAF staging out of Thailand even though for the past few hundred pages he's shown very effectively that security in Vietnam is a shambles. Now he's criticizing the USAF for not being ready for not being ready for North Vietnamese air raids. The reason why the USAF was not prepared for this is because the North Vietnamese lacked this capability and it never happened

I hate when authors frame really basic concepts as mind-blowing insanity. "Fighters jets have a bunch of different parts and you need a computer to keep track of them efficiently!" No poo poo, that's why everyone uses computers to keep track of their poo poo nowadays. "The engines can't let anything get sucked up in them and you need to police the area to make sure there's no foreign objects being left around the runway!" Yes, is this not an obvious thing to do? Military and civilian planes have been downed by a bird getting sucked into the engine. Why wouldn't you maintain a policy of strict discipline about foreign objects on the runway to make sure a mechanic didn't leave a wrench behind by accident? That's not even a specific thing for military jets. I don't think you can design any kind of jet engine that's going to be okay with having random objects sucked up inside them.

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

Ensign Expendable posted:

I see this a lot, usually in "mythbusting" articles. "Heh, you might think that X tank was a good tank, but actually the fighting compartment was full of fumes and it had to go through maintenance often! It also had to interact closely with infantry to be successful in battle!" Yeah, no poo poo, you just described every tank ever.

I think people who haven't been in the military or haven't looked at the logistics side of armies don't understand how much maintenance helicopters, tanks, and planes require just on a routine basis. So when they first look into it for a particular thing, they see "X hours of maintenance were required for every hour of operational use" and take it as unique to that army or system, because that seems so inefficient. What they don't realize is that all armies are massively inefficient beasts no matter what era, culture, or technology level.

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

Greggster posted:

What is it about military vehicles that makes it require that much more maintenance?
Is it because, since your life literally depends on it working, you want it to stay at top shape for that time you actually need it?

A lot of it comes down to the fact that you are generally operating equipment in combat or on long stretches of not-combat under non-optimal conditions. You're driving your tank off-road, your helicopter is sitting outside getting sand in all the important parts while you load it up, your fighter jet is being flown as many hours as possible. In actual combat, you're going to do whatever you need to do to get the job done, maintenance guidelines be damned. It's better to burn out a machine gun barrel than it is to preserve the barrel but die because you let your position get overrun, for a simplified example. On top of anything you do while actually fighting, there's the time involved in getting from point A to point B, even if your unit is fairly static once you get there. You could never take any enemy fire or suffer casualties at all in some posts, but you might be burning out your engines if you have to constantly patrol for that period. Everything will eventually wear out if you put enough hours on it. Rifles might not get fired but still be hosed from an armorer's POV from grunts dropping them in the mud, doing stupid poo poo, etc. for years and years.

Grenrow fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Aug 16, 2020

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

Dejan Bimble posted:

The Separatists were able to capture a few tanks and more light armored vehicles. What allowed them to checkmate Ukranian forces was putting out bait so that the furious Ukranian generals would send tons of unprepared armor into one spot with the idea of rooting out any separatist positions and being invulnerable to anything but rpg teams and mines, and there was heavy bombing from the Ukranian air force to supposedly support this, but it was indiscriminate enough not to matter.

What allowed them to checkmate the Ukrainian forces was the actual Russian army, equipped with tanks, artillery, and air defense systems, invading Ukraine.

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

Raenir Salazar posted:

I can't speak for others, but personally I think the problem is the degree of editorializing you go into; when if you were more matter of fact about it I think no one would've batted an eye.

Essentially to me the crux is your phrasing:


After reading multiple paragraphs about how Chinese soldiers routinely tied captured enlisted Indian soldiers in wire and executed them, in order to enable their aggressive expansionist war to seize Indian territory, what bothers you most here is that Polyakov is being too mean to the dear little PLA?

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

Raenir Salazar posted:


Like if the Indians had better commanders is like positing what if the CSA didn't make the same mistakes, or what if Hitler listened to his generals. If they had made better decisions then it's reasonable to suppose that perhaps the PLA does something different in response; it's not exactly Alien Spacebat Nehru but it feels like the sort of example I feel like makes aspects of your write up here problematic when you give a little too much credit/benefit of the doubt to one side and don't lend the courtesy when it's reversed. There isn't a reasonable basis to assume the PLA would make the same risks in the face of a more competent Indian command anymore than the idea that the Germans would be more competent without Hitler's micromanagement.

Thought experiment: what if you didn't spend so much time defending the integrity of a dictatorship on the internet?

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

SeanBeansShako posted:

I mean Dunkirk was a long drawn out affair with all sorts going on, you sure the guy didn't confuse them with either warning shots or the cases of horses being shot?

Could be a garbled story, warped from being passed from secondary source to tertiary source, about friendly fire incidents, assuming it's not outright mythology to begin with.

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

bewbies posted:

I wound up having a long discussion with a historical fighting enthusiast yesterday and I'm curious how true/well sourced some of the stuff she said was. I don't know anything about her academic background but she's a brilliant mixed martial artist and also seems very passionate about recreating old styles and techniques, so that's about all I have to go on for her credentials.

Claim 2: By the time Europeans started writing stuff down, pretty much everyone was wearing at least some armor and most people who cared about such things carried weapons. As a result, European martial arts focus very heavily (though not exclusively) on the use of weapons and more powerful-but-clumsy techniques designed to beat a single armored opponent. These are of very limited practical use now in MMA but live on in fencing, et al.


This is totally wrong. Many European fencing manuals of the period where we actually start having lots of them (so late medieval/early modern) are written with at least partly civilian contexts in mind. Civilians went around armed all the time as well, and they weren't going to be wearing armor all the time. Even when just looking at armored fighting techniques, a lot of that is basically wrestling, which could be used unarmored as well. If you're good at putting someone in a chokehold, you're not going to stop doing that if the other guy doesn't have armor on. All of this business about European martial arts being "powerful but clumsy" is some pretty outdated bullshido as well. Every martial art is going to be training to do their techniques powerfully and quickly. If someone is taking big wild swings, that's probably just them loving up and being out of control, not the goal of the system. You're not trading strength for speed like it's a video game.

Modern fencing also doesn't have anything to do with armored fighting techniques. By the time the original systems that would evolve into modern fencing (like foil/smallsword, French dueling epees, cav saber) started to became more codified in the late 18th/19th century, armor was mostly gone from European battlefields.

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

CommonShore posted:

Preamble - I'm an MMA dork with quite a bit of training experience, and I have some academic credentials on top of this. I've seen a few academic presentations on 18th century boxing too. TL;DR is that your friend is not entirely wrong, but he's not so far from wrong for me to say that he's right.


This is something that gets tossed around a lot and has for some time, but it turns out that it's basically a half truth. Wyoming has recently started to sanction bare-knuckle boxing matches and many experienced fighters are able to head hunt and KO opponents without breaking their hands. Meanwhile, Floyd Mayweather has been known to break his own hands wearing full-weight competition boxing gloves, and he's not known as a hard puncher. Some fighters are better at taking punches on the crown of the head - allegedly Nick Diaz broke both of BJ Penn's hands like that (4 oz gloves).

Honestly I've hosed my own hands up once or twice with big rear end puffy 16oz gloves on. The gloves make a difference but less than having toughened up your own hands and having good punching technique. If we put 4 oz gloves (mma gloves) on someone who has no experience and told them to go hit a heavy bag as hard as they could, they'd probably hurt themselves. At the point I'm at, with years of practice, I can tear into a heavy bag bareknuckle and I'm fine so long as I don't cut the skin on my hands.


Many Japanese martial arts claim descent from Bodidharma. Whether this is true who the gently caress knows. Martial arts are full of liars and braggarts, and they always have been, and they're always trying to one-up each other on being the most ancient and secret. None of this can be tracked because everyone used to be super secretive. Really it all goes back to 19th-20th century nationalism. Look at Muay Thai though - from what I know it doesn't claim Chinese heritage, though its history does have a nationalist legend. All of the Okinawan martial arts claim to be anti-authoritarian in their origins.

The other thing to consider is that there are only a finite number of ways to attack someone. In my experience competition rules have a greater influence on how a martial art looks than anything.

Regarding "pancrase" as being the channel through which asian martial arts came into MMA? That's not true. There were pancrase fighters at UFC 1, and there were Kempo Karate guys. Japanese martial arts came to the West largely in the first half of the 20th century, with a gigantic resurgance following WW2.


From what I understand, Greek Boxing was different from modern boxing. The version of boxing that came out of 18th century England, credited to Daniel Mendoza, is based largely on fencing footwork. If you look at illustrations of old boxers they're not doing a bad job of guarding their faces with their hands - their hands are up at chin level but away from the face to protect from straight punches, and they'd defend hooks with head movement. Edwin Haislet's boxing manual (available for free online) has some about this.


Some fighters have used open handed slaps. Go watch Bas Rutten fights from early Pancrase, where closed fists were not allowed. Go watch Bare Knuckle bouts (BKFC). Nick Diaz's striking style has been compared to Daniel Mendoza's. The 4 oz gloves don't make that much of a difference in striking. You'll see less of a difference between BK boxing and MMA than between MMA and boxing or MMA and K1 or Glory kickboxing. The big puffy gloves that the pure striking sports wear make a bigger difference to stance and hand position. Some really high level kickboxers have come to MMA and tried to shell up with the gloves to protect themselves and the thin little gloves split the guard and that's all she wrote. gently caress, go watch some Lethwei. That's bareknuckle with headbutts allowed. Their hand position is relatively similar to that you see in MMA.

The reason that the old boxers kept their hands out like that was for defending double leg shots. On the pre-queensbury rules, it was legal to throw your opponent to the ground. In some of the old rulesets, that counted as a knockdown.

That's really interesting, thanks! Do you know of any good books on 18th century boxing?

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

Siivola posted:

In this case I think they’re meaning tension throughout the limb. Because muscles can only contract, you need to train to relax some muscles so that others have room to move your limbs. Imagine trying to throw a punch while relentlessly clenching your bicep – you'd rob your punch of both speed and power because a key muscle is not participating. The same thing happens when you squeeze the life out of a fencing sword.

Yeah, it's the same thing as if you were playing tennis. Death-gripping your sword or racket inhibits proper technique, which is where your real power comes from.

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

How often would anyone trained with a sword ever actually fight with it the way historical martial arts do? I've always assumed that with a few exceptions (classical rome i see u) anyone trained with a sword is either commanding or fighting mounted (and often with a spear and/or bow and the sword still as a sidearm), and isn't ever expecting to duel some dude on foot with it unless it's ritualized.

Depends on era, what period are you talking about? For medieval people, sword and buckler play was a common recreational activity in England, common enough that they tried to pass laws to prevent people from doing it in the streets of London. Even in the 19th century, it was probably more common than you think, especially so in the colonies. But even in the Napoleonic wars, British officers of the grenadiers and light infantry companies found themselves mixing it up enough that they started opting to buy sabers for themselves because they felt that the infantry officer pattern spadroon wasn't a good enough fighting weapon. This was so prevalent that by 1803, they made it an official regulation pattern, the 1803 Flank Officers sword.

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

bewbies posted:

wasn't there some British colonial adventure where officers were told to get to work on their swordsmanship before headed over?

Yes, the advice from experienced India hands to younger officers preparing to head out (known as griffins once they arrived) was 1) learn to sword 2) learn Indian languages as much as possible.

Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

Schadenboner posted:

According to the only legitimate source for such matters* British cavalry swords of the Victorian era had bad grips or something, like they were made of metal?

:shrug:

*: Flashman book #69: "Being colossally racist to someone-or-other"

No, grips were made of varied materials (for officer swords, they'd be sharkskin/rayskin, most likely). There were a million complaints about swords in 19th century britain, everything from the design to materials to maker was complained about. Some of this is the age-old issue of soldiers blaming equipment failures for their own lack of skill, or just overexpectations of what weapons should be able to do. If you're repeatedly parrying swords or bayonets, swinging through bone and flesh, and generally bashing your sword around in intense fighting, even a well made one is going to break sometimes. Some of them were legitimately not great designs, like the pipe-back blades of the 1820s were notorious for not being very strong. The 1845 pattern was imo very good, but obviously that's subjective. One issue people had is that while the government established an official pattern via regulation, officers bought their own weapons. So you could go to a number of retailers who would be offering swords and some were better than others. Some of the shadier tailors would try to sell you all your kit in one big package, uniforms and gear, and would cheap out by buying cut-rate swords and pistols from no-name makers.

The premium brand was Wilkinson, but some people didn't have the money for that and had to make do. There are definitely accounts where some dude's Wilkinson will break and he'll be pissed off about it, but like I said, what do you expect from a metal implement you're cutting through bone and bashing on metal with? There's a lot of barracks mythology and received wisdom about X or Y pattern being good/bad/etc, not all of which is based on anything. Experienced swordsmen and good fencers would often have the pattern swords tweaked to their specifications and buy a custom blade on the regulation hilt. There's some that are like narrow rapier blades and I saw one on a sales site once that was basically a big chunky backsword looking blade on a standard 1845 pattern hilt. So my guess would be that the backsword one was probably an officer who had seen some real hand to hand combat and wanted a beefier blade.

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Grenrow
Apr 11, 2016

Cessna posted:

And sometimes the gear you are issued is garbage.



I hope you didn't buy your tank's M85 at a disreputable outfitters' shop before embarking on the steamship to Saudi Arabia, Lt. Cessna! Absolute griffin move.

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