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Edgar Allen Ho posted:The same dudes who thought bright red berets were more tactical than green helmets: a good source Yeah, looking ally is always more important than personal safety, why is this controversial
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Aug 26, 2019 07:27
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chitoryu12 posted:This reminds me of the great Wolfgang the Bratty Man of the Cold War. Time to repost the canonical Wolfgang story, from ARRSE. Includes mild punctuation/typo-fixing. (I like to imagine the three main British characters as George, Baldrick, and Blackadder.) quote:As a brand new Troop Commander [Royal Corps of Transport] on my first exercise [on Soltau]. On the first night move into a harbour area, everything seemed to be going swimmingly. Good light discipline, no bumps. Total silence, less the roar of the Drops. Marvellous.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:45
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Since when did the Boston Massacre have anything to do with police? Modern police hadn't been invented yet. The peace was being kept by the army, about as well as soldiers have ever managed to keep the peace. Or am I missing some fabulously subtle irony at play here?
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Aug 31, 2019 09:31
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quote:We have extremely complex rituals designed to keep us from killing each other. Virtually every public space is going to have someone around who will have the explicit responsibility of interrupting public violence when it occurs. Start a fight at school, in a restaurant, on a bus, at an office and there will be a teacher, manager, bus driver, or somebody whose job it is to stop it. You sure about that? If we went out into a high street round where I live, I'd be willing to bet that fewer than half the restaurants you'd see would have the staff break up fights inside, and far fewer than half the buses would see the driver take more notice than pulling over and maybe calling for police. The cultural status of violence is not as universal as you seem to think it is. Squalid posted:That's true, but then you're kind of stepping away from the original point. It's not so much then that most people really don't want to kill, but that in one specific context they don't do it often and over time there seems to be a decreasing tendency towards violence. That doesn't say much about people in general so much as it says something about the society in which we live. What I'd argue, at least within my own cultural context, is that it's not nearly so much that violence itself has decreased within living memory, as the position of violence within society has completely changed. As late as the 1950s it was acceptable for respectable newspapers to carry leering articles gloating over how much fun it was to see the lower orders fighting each other. The start of public outrage and "What is to be done???" as the only socially acceptable response to people scrapping in public I would trace pretty starkly to the Mods and the Rockers on Brighton beach in 1964, and I'd say it's absolutely no coincidence that this is also when we were at the end of the process of recognising teenagers as a distinct Thing. There's always been young men fighting, but it's only very, very, very recently that the only polite response has become full-throated disapproval. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 15:32 on May 8, 2020 |
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Sep 1, 2019 22:37
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golden bubble posted:I'm surprised the man who sought everlasting vengeance for the Amritsar massacre decided to assassinate the former Lieutenant Governor of Punjab who implicitly approved of the massacre instead of the Colonel/acting Brigadier General who directly carried out the massacre. Michael O'Dwyer was a slightly easier target than Colonel Dyer in 1940, as Dyer had had the unusual foresight to die thirteen years previously and have his ashes scattered in private
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Sep 11, 2019 15:32
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Milo and POTUS posted:
Soldiers, obviously 
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Sep 18, 2019 22:53
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Sergeant goes along the line on inspection. Comes across one man whose turnout he doesn't approve of. Takes his pace stick and jabs the brass firmly into the offending soldier's chest while offering some strong words of advice. Finishes up by declaring "there is poo poo on the end of my stick, Bloggs". To which Private Bloggs responds, "Yes Sergeant, but not at this end".
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Sep 18, 2019 23:20
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Laddie, have ye ever considered joining the Royal Arse Hortillery?
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Sep 26, 2019 01:08
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:hello old chap, precise rifle fire is exactly what's needed to give jerry planes the business Spike Milligan once downed a plane just by shouting at it quote:One freezing dawn we were awakened by a Lockheed Lightning repeatedly roaring over our camp. , probably.
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Oct 6, 2019 21:23
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Nebakenezzer posted:So on the Western Front in World War one, was serving in the Royal Flying Corps always a volunteer position, or did people get assigned to it? (Feel free to answer this for any other Air force of the time because I'm curious now that it has come up, but I'm focused on the RFC.) The RFC (and the RNAS) expanded from its pre-war establishment via targeted recruitment and abstraction of skilled tradesmen as ground crew in the same way that those men were identified and specifically recruited into other mechanical and engineering positions. Until 1916 there were only wide-scale opportunities for transfer in as flying crew for officers with a civilian pilot's ticket, although some were able to get in as wireless operators or observers and then retrain; towards the back end of the Somme, things were relaxed and they started training pilots from scratch (for a given definition of "training"). New flying crew without existing piloting skills came mostly by seconding officers from the wider Army; they would learn to fly by going up as observers and then be trained as pilots later. As the war went on the Army began directly recruiting all grades into the RFC and initially training them for flying duties instead of general service, as well as taking transfers and secondments. I don't think it was ever necessary to do wide-scale forcible transfers to the RFC, going tiddly-up-up has always been a Gucci job and there's always been more applicants than posts ("there's nothing cushy about life in the Women's Auxiliary Balloon Corps!", especially when it means you get to live in a shed instead of a hole in the ground), but there are isolated stories of canny or well-connected battalion commanders bouncing a useless or unpopular officer into applying for the transfer with a glowing recommendation and thus making him someone else's problem, in classic style. There were also written examinations and medical tests before anyone was accepted, the stringency of which varied depending on how many flyers had been shot down recently. (The Blackadder depiction of how to get into the RFC and the inadequacy of the training is one of the many things in that series which are satirically inaccurate in detail, but accurate in spirit.)
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Nov 5, 2019 20:45
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sullat posted:The High Seas Fleet is very well preserved in Scapa Flow. As ever, I encourage everyone to visit the Teknikmuseum in Berlin, where they have the world's saltiest display of High Seas Fleet ship models, lovingly crafted to depict every last one resting gently on the bottom at Scapa Flow
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Nov 16, 2019 20:06
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chitoryu12 posted:Oh hey, someone on Reddit scanned part of that page from the ship in battle and uploaded it! Oddly enough, it's the font that I remember most clearly
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Nov 18, 2019 23:49
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ButtHate posted:Verdun question. Academic opinion these days is tending more towards "well, you would say that now, wouldn't you?", especially since English-language scholars have dared to go into German archives and see what they thought they were doing at the time.
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Nov 23, 2019 21:53
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Their men were getting perilously close to the "falling asleep while actually being shot at" stage of exhaustion, their boots were literally falling off their feet after a month of relentless marching. They didn't have gently caress-all fight left in them, and the grand strategic plan was based around a massive encirclement, not a breakthrough, that was almost certainly beyond the limits of their men's endurance to actually carry out.
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Dec 10, 2019 23:00
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Hold on a moment, I'm marking out the long runilmucche posted:Ok cool. Thought it might be kind of like that. This comes in two parts: the rhythm of life, and what happens within it. To begin with, everyone who's in the infantry is actually in a constant process of motion. (It is one of the fantastic ironies of the war is that both sides are constantly moving around, but they're going nowhere.) Come out of rest billets and go "up the line", into a trench of some sort. Four days in the rear trench. Four days in the middle trench. Four days in the front trench. Four days in the middle trench. Four days in the rear trench. Possibly rotate forward and back one more time, possibly not, depends where you are. Then, from the rear trench, back out to rest billets in a farm a few miles away. Spend as long in rest billets as you just did up the line. Back up the line again. This goes on for about 3-6 months. Then it's time to move. Give a handover to whoever's replacing you. Possibly you move via a training camp at the rear and spend some time looking for Mademoiselle from Armentieres, possibly you just go directly to some other part of the front. Either way you're probably getting a few weeks of solid rest, hopefully closer to a few months, before you go back in. And then you get to the new place, you find your new rest billets, you get a handover from whoever's going out. In a few days, it's time to go up the line again, and the whole thing starts over. This pattern holds whether you're in a quiet sector or at the tip of the spear on the Somme. The people in charge, contrary to what Blackadder might have you believe, do actually know that trench life is stressful, you can't just put people there and leave them, and also that any kind of combat is exhausting. It's totally uncontroversial who's been in combat gets relief and rotation to the rear as soon as possible. Unfortunately, when the Big Push is on, "as soon as possible" can be an extended period of time; units get left out on a limb in all the trouble as their relief gets confused or left behind or shelled and broken up en route or diverted to plug some other more urgent gap somewhere. This is where attacks tend to break down before 1918; with the technology available it's just not possible to react to changing circumstances and deploy the right manpower to the right place to maintain the momentum of an attack. When not in battle (which is extremely rare; a man would be somewhat unlucky to see actual bombs-and-bayonets combat during an offensive, and extremely unlucky to see bombs-and-bayonets fighting in two separate offensives), trench life is routine. Each trench has its sentry-points and lookout posts-from which to raise an alarm; these are manned 24/7 and falling asleep on post is technically punishable by death, although only two people were executed for that offence. For everyone else, there are constant working-parties. Repair this, shore up that, dig a new latrine because the old one flooded last week. There's always supplies that need to be fetched and carried and distributed and taken away again and tidied up. Every so often a shell lands in the wrong place or an enemy sniper gets a good shot off, and there's a casualty or two to take to the aid post. Raids are far more rare than you might think (it does also depend on individual personalities of the lieutenants and captains who'd lead them and the brigadiers who'd order them). What's much more common at night is leaving the trench for patrols and wiring-parties. For obvious reasons it's not possible to repair your own barbed wire defences during daylight hours, so this is all done at night. Scouting parties push forward to find out as much as they can about exactly where the enemy trench is and how best to advance to it, and where the gaps in the wire and safe pathways are. Very quickly people realise that if they take control of No Man's Land at night, they can gain an advantage by interfering with the enemy's attempts to scout and repair their own wire; and constant aggressive patrolling at night tends to be an Entente and particularly a British thing. There is probably shelling of some sort. You can't entirely relax, although people learn very quickly when to dive for cover and when to casually look up and remark "hmm, that one's going to land about 300 yards away". If you're somewhere chill like (say) Foncquevillers, there'll likely be a bit of desultory shelling to keep appearances up, just make sure you keep your head down and don't show any stupid lights or smoke, and you'll be left to get on with it. Go somewhere a bit more interesting, somewhere the big nobs are thinking they might attack in a few months, and you'll probably get used to it being more lively. Snipers will be on constant lookout, and the other side's mortars will be waiting to drop some bombs on them if they fire. You'll have intermittent barrages dropped on you from time to time; an hour or so of shelling, a five-minute lift, another 20 minutes of fire, a ten-minute lift, another 5 minutes of fire, a 20 minute-lift, another hour of shelling, and then silence (or something like that). The idea here is basic thought conditioning; you're trying to lodge the idea in the enemy's head that they can never be quite sure when the shelling is going to restart, so they have to stay safe in their dugouts for as long as possible. Then, when it finally comes time for you to attack and you lift your own barrage to facilitate this, you can hopefully get across No Man's Land and capture or kill the enemy in their own dugouts before they feel they can safely come out, at which point they'd raise the alarm and start shooting back. There might be a few stunts or decoy attacks to take part in or fend off; do everything you would do if you were going to attack, make some noise, release some smoke...and then do nothing, just so the other lot can never be sure which is the feint and which is the real attack. If you're very unlucky you'll get dicked with a full-on diversionary attack to distract the enemy from something more important that's happening 50 miles away. Go to one of the notorious posts like Ypres or Vimy or the Argonne, and now it's almost constant shells flying both ways, constant alert, squabbling over shell craters and 20 yards' worth of trench. Every so often, bigger unplanned skirmishes and fights and counter-fights break out and die down again. Just getting up and down the Menin Road is fraught with danger. There are only a few places like this, but if you stay in long enough, you'll eventually get the short straw and have to go to one of them. When out of the line, you're probably able to relax a bit, but if you're fighting for the British Empire there are always working-parties to be done. The universal military experience of the 20th century is not anything to do with combat or bravery or glory, it's going on a working-party. Carry this, repair that, build a new shed, put a new roof on that barn, chop some wood. The padre's coming. Captain Donoghue can give an improving lecture about history or geography or literature. The medicos can give a lecture about personal hygiene. The quarter-bloke can demonstrate how to keep your rifle clean and the bombs dry. Let's put on some three-legged races and swimming competitions. Kick a ball around, keep your eye in for the Brigade football matches next month. Have a good old sing-song. British officers are told in no uncertain terms that they must keep their men busy and doing something, anything to occupy their time. If they don't, the men get bored and start looking for ways to amuse themselves; the thread veterans can surely spin us a few dits about what happens when squaddies create their own entertainment. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Dec 14, 2019 |
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Dec 14, 2019 17:28
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ilmucche posted:So mostly it was keeping your head down and fixing stuff. Did artillery units move with infantry or did they move around less because the equipment is harder to move? Yeah, this is a point I was considering bringing up earlier and didn't for time. The artillery tended to stay in one place, and they would spend all their time at the gun lines; they wouldn't be constantly going out and back, they'd be watching the PBI constantly going forward and back. They'd generally only move for major redeployments before/during/after offensives, and/or to have their guns repaired/replaced. Their experience of the war was very different. quote:When fighting over shell holes and whatnot, surely those changed regularly with more bombings. Did they keep maps? How big was the average shell hole out in no man's land, ignoring big craters from mines. Mapping and re-mapping efforts were constant and another reason to go out on patrol. There's no such thing as the average shell-hole, but a shell-hole worth its name could generally conceal as many men as wanted to hide in it. For someone trying to cross to the other side, it could be a minor inconvenience or a major hazard. quote:With wiring parties I'm assuming they would leave gaps in so they're own side could get out. I've seen that picture of the massive like cube of razor wire, and read somewhere that occasionally it was literally walls like 10 foot high. Part of the creeping barrage was to destroy that so guys could get through yeah? Not really. In early 1915, entanglements were small enough that they could be cut by a short "hurricane" bombardment immediately before an attack, but by the middle of the year there was so much wire that to cut it with artillery you needed a days-long overwhelming bombardment, and even then it wasn't guaranteed to do anything. Rolling and creeping barrages are far more to keep the enemy's head down than to remove wire. To get through enemy wire consistently, you eventually settle on some combination of finding out where the gaps are through patrols and raids before the battle, and then once the battle starts, one of the major duties of tanks is to use grapnels to pull entire sections of wire out of the way at once. quote:I read somewhere else that machine gunners tended to not last very long in an actual engagement. Where did you read that? I've not seen any indication that being a machine-gunner was any more hazardous than any other infantry job. quote:I'm guessing because they're static, very loud and very dangerous. Let's think about assumptions involving machine-guns. At the start of the war, yes, a machine-gun is a big heavy water-cooled thing that needs to be emplanced and assembled and disassembled and needs a crew to serve it; things like the British Vickers, the German MG 08, the French St Etienne and Hotchkiss Mk I, all heavy machine guns. However, by mid-1915 it was clear to British and French thinkers that what was needed to complement the heavy weapons was a lighter air-cooled weapon that could be man-carried forward and used by a single operator to provide supporting fire during the advance. This results in the Lewis gun and the Chauchat, which are both light enough to be slung over the shoulder for marching fire and can provide useful covering fire from a bipod as soon as you decide where to stop. However, iconic though they may be, it is critically important to remember that two-thirds of all casualties during the war were caused by artillery. Every phase of combat, certainly by 1917, is designed to take advantage of things that explode. You're trying to get your guns as far forward as is safe so they can attack and break up the enemy's reserves while they move. You're trying to get your mortars forward so they can break up the enemy's reserves while they wait to counter-attack. And the men themselves, when it comes to trench fighting, it's not rifles or machine-guns or bayonets that are going to make the difference once you've broken in and not been killed, it's all about getting a steady flow of grenades flying into the neighbouring fire-bays and down dugouts. Machine-guns are still important things, and they can do serious damage in the right conditions, but they are fundamentally far less important than things that explode. The iconic events north of the Albert-Bapaume road at zero hour on the first day of the Somme, which genuinely were all about futility and machine-guns mowing people down, are completely unrepresentative and cast far too long a shadow over the entire rest of the war, and even over the rest of zero hour on the first day of the Somme. If you look south of the road, you've got a totally different picture of what that day was like. quote:How much actual cover was there crossing no man's land? I'm assuming it varies heavily depending on where you are, and is a bit less of always an empty muddy field. Oh, you could be in anything from a Mordor smashed hellscape to a rather bucolic field, particularly when trying to follow up initial success. I'm moving this down below machine-guns, because it leads nicely into the one place where machine-guns really come into their own. Here's a story for you: Your battalion draws the short straw and has to attack on Day 1 of the Big Push. You go over the top, you hurry to keep on the heels of the rolling barrage. The enemy's heads are kept down, the wire's been cut well enough by the pre-battle bombardment, the enemy mostly surrenders in their dugouts and get packed off to the rear. There's a few booby traps and outbreaks of sporadic resistance, but you achieve your primary objectives and sweep right through the enemy trench system with light casualties. Now you push on towards the second line. For the initial attack you had an extensive planned bombardment. You had jumping-off trenches dug out so you'd only have to cross about 100 yards of ground in the open. You had maps and aerial photography and raid reports to help you find your way through the trenches and identify the enemy's strong-points. Now you're looking for the second line, which is "there-ish". You're covering ground that hasn't been cut up nearly so bad, it's smooth and there's low grass and little cover. The second line has been put about 400 yards behind the crest of a hill, on a reverse slope. As you crest the hill you're silhouetted against the skyline; now the enemy's machine-guns open up. The zero hour attack is very often much less dangerous than the attempt to follow it up. quote:When you say it was unlikely that any individual soldier would be involved in an attack, how we're units chosen? Was a day picked and then it was "oh too bad for x division that's their day"? That would be almost a P2C2E. If you're in a crack unit like a Guards battalion, you're more likely to be involved in the Big Push; if you're in the 2/6th Blankshire Part-Timers who recently got a bad kicking near Aubers from a surprise enemy attack, you're less likely. A couple of threads back, there was an excellent series of posts from the war diary of the 13th King's Royal Rifle Corps, which will probably give you a better sense of all this than going question-and-answer. quote:Again, I guess Vimy kind of covered a piece of that where they said units were specifically called back and given detailed training on the terrain and individual roles. Was that really the first time individuals were given more responsibility in an attack? Was it really also one of the first major uses of creeping barrage or that mostly canadian forging-of-the-nation type propaganda? Extensive training on the ground to be attacked over (often with comedy relief maps drawn in the mud with stones) was a thing by Loos in 1915, although it had got much better by 1917. "First major use" is both sort of true and also propaganda; it was the first major use by the BEF, but the basic concepts had been developed by the French during 1915 and used extensively in 1916. One of the key figures in its development was Robert Nivelle, who started the war as an obscure artillery colonel, and by 1917 he was French commander-in-chief and architect of the major French offensive at the Chemin-des-Dames that Vimy Ridge was a supporting operation for. quote:How does modern day trench warfare look in comparison, given it still seems to be used in the eastern European conflicts for example. Surely smartbombs/modern artillery and jets have made it a lot more difficult to hold a position in the same way. Pass.
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Dec 16, 2019 19:40
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You can't use a machine gun to drop fire on the enemy's supply routes. Hellfire Corner did not get that name because of machine guns.
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Dec 16, 2019 20:39
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CMS posted:Does anyone have a handy source for retaliations, revanchist reactions, or preventative measures in response to the Christmas truce in WWI? Nothing specific, it's the sort of thing that gets mentioned in passing in other books. You'll probably find some stuff in Fritz and Tommy, which I haven't got round to, but is by good people.
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Dec 18, 2019 02:19
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aphid_licker posted:What's up with Clark's Sleepwalkers? Is he just sort of an outlier? The point of Sleepwalkers (an incredibly poo poo title, the conclusion where he explains why that title is one of the most unsatisfying ends to anything ever) is not so much about minimising German actions and responsibility, and more about saying "yeah, they were cocks, but everyone else was cocking around too". quote:The outbreak of war in 1914 is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over the corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol. There is no smoking gun in this story; or, rather, there is one in the hands of every major character. Viewed in this light, the outbreak of war was a tragedy, not a crime. Acknowledging this does not mean that we should minimise the belligerence and imperialist paranoid of the Austrian and German policy-makers that rightly absorbed the attention of Fritz Fischer and his historiographical allies. But the Germans were not the only imperialists and not the only ones to succumb to paranoia. The crisis that brought war in 1914 was the fruit of a shared political culture. But it was also multipolar and genuinely interactive - that is what makes it the most complex even of modern times and that is why the debate over the origins of the First World War continues, one century after Gavrilo Princip fired those two fatal shots on Franz Joseph Street. To which I tend to say, yeeeeeeees, but what about the blank cheque? I'm fine with writing the key players all off as a bunch of roughly-equally-useless blundering clots, but as I see it, the blank cheque* is the one domino whose fall knocks down all the others. It's the first truly key decision, and the only domino that isn't having to resist the weight of any other dominoes falling into the back of it. This doesn't mean we all have to join Lieutenant George in his uncompromising stand against the villainous Hun; but it is fair to say "y'all were drunk and making stupid decisions, but it was definitely Bill over there who pushed you into all playing chicken on the line". *the 6th of July assurance of unconditional support to A-H from Germany for war with Serbia as long as they pull their fingers out and get on with it while memories of the assassination are still fresh
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Dec 26, 2019 02:22
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Aside from what's been said above (except, yes, given the way Bethmann-Hollweg was thinking in the OTL Septemberprogramm I am certain he would have been able to keep everyone else fastidiously respectful of alt-Belgian neutrality); on the one specific point ofLibluini posted:Now let's not get hasty, if Belgium had said to Germany "Yeah sure, let's go ahead", there's no reason for Britain to get involved Balls. The 1912 conventions between Britain and France had led the French navy to be deployed in the Mediterranean and committed Britain to support France with a 6-division BEF and a fleet in the North Sea in the event of war with Germany; for the French this was settled fact and it was unthinkable that anything else might happen. There was a whole lot of undignified froo-frooing around at the end of the July crisis once the Cabinet had thoughts for anywhere that wasn't Ulster, and most of it was done before they all realised quite how thoroughly their trousers had been nailed to the mast by the 1912 convention. There was a clear moral necessity to support the French, and the answer to the British question was academic as soon as the relevant people all realised it.
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Dec 27, 2019 02:35
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Nenonen posted:If gay hand-amputated Albert had sided with Kaiser instead of fighting him, it would have been the French by themselves along a long front. Would they really have the forces to fight the Belgian army as well as covering more frontage? While the British probably would have had to intervene, this might also have delayed their arrival to the continent. Who knows where the front would be by then. You'd need more than just gay handless Albert for that, you'd need to go back to the 1830s and have Belgium gaining its independence on totally different terms (and that in its turn totally alters everyone's strategic thinking ever after). The whole point of creating Belgium is that it is created to be perpetually neutral. Their position was in no way shape or form one of having to show a claim to anything that was in any kind of dispute, their neutrality had been a settled question for 80 years. aphid_licker posted:This is kind of a hot take and I'm sorry but once losing a war stops meaning that they kill you for your winter stores of smoked ham idk if capitulating can't be said to pretty often work out better? ... At least you should seriously consider just going eh we're sitting this one out case-by-case. Well yes but absolutely nobody who was making the decisions was raised to think like that. poo poo like national honour and the right to maintain an empire was important to them. It's like complaining that Scott Joplin never laid down any bitchin' hip-hop beats.
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Dec 27, 2019 16:40
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Xander77 posted:Anyone got a review of Mud, Bloood and Poppycock from someone who actually knows anything about WWI? Like the goon who would chronicle the war on a day-by-day basis? Mud, Blood and Poppycock is a great example of what I think of as Sheffielditis: a progressive disease in which one starts off making excellent, timely, and much-needed points about just how inaccurate the Blackadder/Oh What a Lovely War picture is, and then somewhere along the line you get terribly confused and start writing genuine editorials about how actually the war was both good and necessary to defend liberal* democracy** from the scheming designs of the villainous Hun and his sausage factory in Tanganyika. *for a given value of "liberal" **for a given value of "democracy" So it is with Corrigan, ex-Army officer and sometime member of the Hong Kong Jockey Club (and also prone to being taken in by walts). There's a lot of very dull and worthy stuff, but then every so often, he takes a right turn at Albequerque and writes something like this: quote:Despite the tales of rats, lice and general filth, cleanliness and hygiene in the trenches were strictly enforced. The army paid a great deal of attention to its latrines, as indeed it had to. Wow! They understood what a latrine was! And they hardly ever flooded in bad weather! Truly this is a luxurious war. There then follows a long paragraph about the exact luxuriousness of trench khazis, and then a long half-right-but-all-wrong digression about how Actually That poo poo Shute Was Right, which seems to mainly serve as an excuse to be patronising to the Navy; it also completely misrepresents who was actually in the Royal Naval Division, in a way he squeals blue murder about when it's the oiks failing to show proper respect to how awfully brave it was of 2/Lt Rupert Chinless-Wonder to go over the top armed only with his stick. He then attempts to point out that "rats were rarely a problem in the trenches" (lol), magnainamously concedes that "lice sometimes were" (in the same way that fishmech was sometimes disruptive), and then pulls out the creme de la crap... quote:On coming out of the line troops had their uniforms fumigated, laundered and ironed, and if necessary exchanged, to reduce the risk of infestation. ...as though there were some legion of quartermaster-sergeants waiting faithfully at the gun-lines with a never-ending supply of lemon-soaked fresh kit who never once said "stores are for storing, not for issuing" to anyone. Back in reality, well, the Army tried its best, but the whole thing was pursued with about as much adherence as the withdrawal method and had a similar rate of effectiveness. He ends up seriously saying with a straight face: quote:The firing line was not a fun place to be, but however unpleasant it might be on Tuesday, the soldier knew that on Friday he would be back in a comfortable billet out of range of anything but a speculative shell; in the warm, eating hot food and with a hot bath and clean clothes available. Did he bollocks. The trouble is, the book really has no reason to exist; everything Corrigan's saying that isn't patent bollocks or stretching a point had already been said by others, so he went with the OVERTURNING MYTHS angle to give the book a reason to exist and then pursued it into ridiculousness. (He then tried the same thing again with a CHURCHILL WAS SHITE book and got slapped down hard by better historians, after which he seems to have quietly gone back to less bombastic and better-researched works.)
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Jan 1, 2020 20:32
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Camrath posted:Unrelated to this post exactly, but I finally sat down to read ‘1914: These are our masters’ over Christmas, and frankly your book kept me sane through family drama and the usual Christmas stress. I loved your blog posts, but somehow having them all together in book form makes them even better. Probably no chance of doing anything in 2020 unless some things go better than expected. Hopefully back to at least being able to skeleton things out by this time next year. The problems will come in resisting the urge to go back and revise 1914 and 1915 first (there's been a real deluge in the past four years of good books on underappreciated topics) and then in just the sheer weight of work required; the 1915 master file is about 325,000 words long and there's no way that's getting shorter.
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Jan 1, 2020 22:21
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HEY GUNS posted:sabotage can be done without talking to anyone, at which point they tell you they're a german spy Could this be where "if you ask an undercover cop if he's a cop, he has to say yes or everything else he does is illegal" comes from???
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Jan 16, 2020 00:34
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Weka posted:I'm interested in examples of socialist antisemitism if you have any. Would sir care to start with the traditional Doctors' Plot in the Soviet Union, or the current monotonous cavalcade of British idiots in the left of the modern Labour Party and left-of-Labour politics who will go to the wall to defend their right to call anyone who is insufficiently pro-Palestinian a Zio Mossad stooge?
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Jan 21, 2020 00:55
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aphid_licker posted:Not sure how those tiny trees are supposed to come into this It was carefully pruned out
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Feb 1, 2020 19:07
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Do you know any good books about the late AHE government? I'm writing a story set in a state with a government held together more-or-less Franz Josef style and I'd like to learn more about the original and all it's myriad malfunctions. Can't book rec, but from what little I can make out, you've basically got the Austrian and Hungarian governments both doing their own thing, with the Hungarians trying to poke the Austrians in the eye at every opportunity and the Austrians trying to pretend the Hungarians don't exist as far as possible; and then the three k.u.k. ministries trying to impose some sort of order and jointery, and mostly failing.
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Feb 20, 2020 12:13
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Grimnarsson posted:I recall the talk about the movie 1917 some pages back, how propaganda might explain the depiction of the relentless German and I saw this lecture on youtube about soldier's newspapers in WWI: Trench newspapers are brilliant, but it's important not to over-emphasise their importance or their reach and go too far the other way from "everyone swallowed the propaganda" into "everyone was blowing wet farts at the propaganda in unison"; most soldiers would never have seen a paper regularly, or at all, the people who wrote for them aren't necessarily representative of The Blokes In General, and the people who read them may have been far more interested in the purely silly bits like the adventures of Herlock Shomes and the search for the Division's missing rum, or the misadventures of the brigade's collection of illicit pornography.
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Mar 7, 2020 21:01
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HEY GUNS posted:flora sandes took a few bulgarians prisoner with some hand grenades, i thought I recall the grenades. I don't recall the prisoners.
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Mar 15, 2020 00:39
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Tias posted:So I read a neat comic depicting Arthur Currie as a real gamechanger for the Canadian Corps in WW1, implementing "rapid action" and "Canadian tricks" Currie was one of the better generals of the war; for whatever reason, he had the mental flexibility to realise at a very early stage that winning the war would require a complete revolution in tactics, while not becoming obsessed with red herrings and tactical dead ends. He was able to recognise both that bite and hold was the only way to get anything done in the conditions of 1916 while adapting his thinking again in 1918 to realise that more ambitious objectives were now possible. There's a lot more I could go into, such as how he had an unusually high recognition of how important it was for sustaining an offensive to push logistical elements forward as close as possible behind everyone else; there are relatively few "we was stuck out there for two days with no reinforcements and no rations and no ammunition" stories, and relatively many "we took the objective and then the food came up six hours later after the next wave came through" stories. Like with John Monash, his abilities are often over-valued by people trying to make a nationalistic point by blahing him up into a military genius, which he wasn't, and insisting on only ever comparing him to clowns like Hunter-Weston or Townshend to make him look as great as possible, but he genuinely was unusually good at his job.
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Apr 12, 2020 18:14
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GotLag posted:How does Hew Strachan rate? I watched his World War 1 series and I'm curious as to how accurate it was. Strachan's fine, you're not going to go too far wrong.
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Apr 29, 2020 13:19
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Nessus posted:Didn't the artillery policy of WW2 across all the nations get heavily informed by how everyone sort of realized that all that explosive they threw around in WW1 did, in fact, not accomplish a lot beyond provide a bounty of scrap metal and exciting death risk to future Belgian and French farmers? 65% of all casualties (and 100% of gunners) would question the idea that throwing shitloads of high explosive everywhere achieved very little. I'd say that the biggest single reason that most people couldn't accomplish what they wanted was because the artillery was so good at accomplishing what they wanted. Trench warfare happens because sufficient quantities of QF artillery can poo poo out enough fire at a long enough range to render an attacking force militarily useless before it comes into contact with defensive positions. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 00:46 on May 5, 2020 |
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May 5, 2020 00:42
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Gnoman posted:Everything I've ever seen about the war suggests that artillery barrages of more than a few minutes did little - by then everybody was snug in a shelter and only a direct hit from a heavy gun would injure them. Correct, which is why everyone eventually figures out that what the guns should do is long-term operant conditioning (barrage for 20 minutes, lift for 4, barrage for 30 minutes, lift for 7, barrage for 15 minutes, lift for 3, barrage for 50 minutes, go for lunch); when the attack comes you then drop a rolling bombardment on the position you're attacking, the defenders hide in their shelters, the defenders don't immediately rush back up out when the barrage rolls off them because they've learned that if they rush straight back up out they just get shelled again a few minutes later, and that buys the attackers enough time to cross No Man's Land and take the position before the defenders can get back out and defend it. Suppression is just as valuable as actually causing casualties when properly exploited.
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May 5, 2020 01:25
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Mr Enderby posted:I understand this is still true in much of Northern Europe. Ah, perkele.
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May 6, 2020 00:55
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InediblePenguin posted:i have been sent here to ask trin tragula to tell me about wwi tanks It's kind of a big subject, would you like to narrow that down some
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May 8, 2020 10:30
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Apropos of nothing, I was flicking through some old folders, and I found this:   Nothing new under the sun!
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May 8, 2020 15:31
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Naval ranks in the USN and their Army equvalents are: One of the many WWI memoirs I've read, can't remember which one now, has an amusing little anecdote where a captain of infantry is sailing somewhere near the end of the war, and the ship he's on mistakes his rank for that of a captain (RN). He doesn't rush to correct this error.
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May 14, 2020 08:48
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Mr. Grapes! posted:Pardon if it is slightly off topic, but can anyone recommend any good WW1 or WW2 novels? I've been reading a ton of dry history books lately and wanted something a little different. My quarantine stash has run dry. The Road Back is an excellent companion piece; it's about the transition from total war back to civilian life and how difficult it can be even where PTSD and the like isn't necessarily a factor.
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May 18, 2020 04:21
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Young Officers: universally a Bad Thing
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May 20, 2020 17:27
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 22:19 |
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Raenir Salazar posted:I thought one of the major fuckups regarding galiopoli was that they also landed in the wrong spot and didn't coordinate with the leadership of the Arab uprising who could've opened the door to them or something along those lines? You're confusing Gallipoli with the Mesopotamian campaign. Which, after that nasty mishap with going for Baghdad by accident, was actually a very successful wartime campaign which achieved all its objectives and seemed to have set up the Middle East rather nicely for British and French interests after the war. This was done by allying primarily with a chap called Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, who started a mass revolt in the Middle East on the understanding that he would have European support in establishing a pan-Arab state with himself as the King. Where this backfired was after the war; they pissed off Hussein by locking him out of the League of Nations and then establishing totally-not-a-colony mandates in what he thought of as his back yard; and then it turned out that actually Hussein didn't have nearly as much popular support as his main rival, Abdulaziz ibn Saud, who quickly supplanted Hussein and went on to found Saudi Arabia. ibn Saud never forgot that he wasn't the first choice of the British to be top man in the region, and when it turned out he was sitting on a fuckton of oil that nobody had known about before, he took his revenge by giving preferential treatment to the Americans instead.
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May 30, 2020 08:33
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