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Nessus posted:I bet they hated American artillery barrage noises. Wasn't most German field artillery sort of laughably antiquated as well as being in short supply? bewbies posted:I can't imagine the average German soldier was particularly concerned about strategic bombers, but I imagine hearing engines of fighter bombers and tactical bombers coming from a ways away was far more terrifying than any machine gun.
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Dec 22, 2019 05:59
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It’s sort of post-military history, but this song popped up in my Spotify: https://youtu.be/WRiJITAE0Hw and it got me thinking I know very little about the end of the war and couple years after WW1 especially in Germany. Is there a good book about this time period? I’ve never quite understood how a sailor’s strike/mutiny turned into the collapse of the German Empire, and I know lots of Germans at the time felt the same way. It’s only just struck me that it was an armistice on nov 11, 1918, not an unconditional surrender. When did the troops leave the trenches? Presumably not on Nov. 12? What was demobilization like, especially in Germany and how did that turn into the chaos of freikorps and socialists and basically civil war? Any recommended reading on the end of the war and following 3-4 years? Any recs of books or youtubez about the naval war in WWI would be great too. I’ve read ‘Castles of Steel’ and ‘Dreadnaught’ but it’s been a while and they’ve really been my only insight into the naval war. E: I should clarify a little-obviously the arrival of a million Doughboys made the war unwinnable for the central powers, but did a collapse of the home front make the military situation even more untenable or was the obvious hopelessness of the military what caused the home front to break down etc? Kaiser Schnitzel fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 20:25
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Squalid posted:Then there are also Chang and Eng the Siamese twins, the first Thais in the US. They didn't fight in the civil war but their kids did on the Confederate side. It's like they didn't even care about miscegenation with Asians in the south in this period. Very interesting stuff about asians in the antebellum/CW south,-thanks for sharing! Kaiser Schnitzel fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Dec 27, 2019 |
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Dec 27, 2019 01:20
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Milo and POTUS posted:I think it's called warping And it was pretty slow and arduous work. As I understand it, get the anchor into one of the boats, boat pulls as far a way as the anchor cable, drops anchor. Ship cranks on the capstan and pulls itself over the anchor and the anchor up, put anchor back in boat, repeat. The ship maybe moves a few hundred yards every time this operation happens, and it obviously only works if you have good ground to anchor in. Otherwise you can tow the ship with oarsmen rowing in the ships boats, but I think the physics of this are very bad, especially if there is much of a sea. Some smaller ships had big huge oars (sweeps?) that could be put out of the gun ports and used to row the ship itself very slowly like a galley.
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Dec 30, 2019 18:35
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Comstar posted:Can someone suggest a site/book that covers Napoleonic tactics and strategy? Ideally something that goes from skirmish -> Battalion -> Brigade - > Division -> Corps -> Army. The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon https://www.amazon.com/dp/0253202604/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_RsofEb7MD8WTK Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300082703/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_LsofEbAJR1VBT David Chandler’s ‘Campaigns of Napoleon’ is also a fantastic book. It deals obviously with some tactics, but covers a lot of the operational/strategic stuff of Napoleon’s campaigns. Fairly weak on the peninsula (because Boney rarely commanded there himself) and definitely focused on Napoleon himself, but it is very well written, beautiful prose. E: It makes the point that Napoleon was not at all a tactical genius-he often greatly outnumbered his opponents-but his real genius was at the operational level of making sure he always brought his scattered opponents to battle against his concentrated force to ensure he would wield the superior force. Kaiser Schnitzel fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Jan 7, 2020 |
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Jan 7, 2020 21:09
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habituallyred posted:Can anyone link me a good effort post on the Monte Cassino debacle? I remember the basics but I could use a refresher. Probably starting with how to spell the ex-monastery's home. Video not a post, but this is a great video of Roger Cirillo on that part of the italian campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f67NeL_iSm8&t=1s He cracks me up and I wish there were a million videos of him (there are a few more of him floating around youtube) or I'd love to find out he wrote some books or something, but he doesn't seem to have.
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Jan 8, 2020 14:36
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Cythereal posted:Also, poor in natural resources and surrounded by bigger, stronger powers. Spain, Portugal, and Britain are all largely irrelevant outside of their colonial empires for the last four or five hundred years. Britain at least parleyed their empire into becoming a center of finance and whatnot, and even that's starting to crater thanks to Brexit. surf rock posted:I guess population-wise they were a lot smaller than even Italy, so it's not the biggest surprise, and geographically they're out of the way. Kind of a depressing record over the last few centuries, though.
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Jan 15, 2020 00:52
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Randarkman posted:Spain actually had pretty substantial silver and gold deposits back during the Roman era, but these were mostly depleted as the Romans exploited the country ruthlessly for its mineral wealth, mostly carried out by slave labor working under abysmal conditions in mines. I don't know much about the specifics of ancient mining techniques, but I do remember reading something about the processes they used producing a staggering amount of toxic fumes, to the extent that it could kill or knock out birds flying overhead and that you can identify this activity from deposits in polar glaciers. Might be part exaggeration, especially as I can't remember exactly where I read it. In the New World, the Spanish came up with the Patio process where you basically mix the silver ore with mercury, salt, water, and some other stuff and let it cook in the sun for a while and a chemical reaction takes place binding the silver and mercury together. Then you burn off all the mercury and get pure silver. The 'cooking off the mercury' part is not exactly OSHA approved, but works out okay if you have a large population of basically enslaved heathen indigenous workers. This worked out well for Spain because, in addition to discovering new deposits of mercury in Mexico, Spain itself had accessibly mercury deposits.
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Jan 15, 2020 01:58
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Weka posted:I have a feeling that I read that Spain not being forced into WW2 was in part due to its usefulness as a neutral trading partner, I'm presuming for Germany at the least. Confirm/Deny?
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Jan 15, 2020 02:21
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mllaneza posted:It's honestly one of the top ten history books of all time. Most of her stuff is pure gold, you should read more Tuchman than you have. Her one about the gilded age (A proud tower?) is really good as well.
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Jan 16, 2020 04:39
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E: oops, meant this for the Airpower thread Kaiser Schnitzel fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Jan 16, 2020 |
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Jan 16, 2020 18:37
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Comstar posted:I'm getting into wargaming in the Napoleonic era, and I am puzzled. If cavalry can move a lot quicker than infantry or artillery, why don't any battles I know of be decided by a long range Calvary unit going around the enemy army far enough to cut its line of communications? Most of the battles took 1-3 days which seems ample time to do it. Was it a lack of being able to communicate once the distance became more than a days march? The Peninsula is very complicated. Napoleon never sent his best troops there except for the few months that he personally was there (and handily and rapidly kicked Sir John Moore out of the country) and the French were basically besieged on all fronts. This is the war where the word 'guerilla' came into common use, and the French used as many or more troops trying to pacify a huge, poor, hostile country as they did fighting the British/Spanish/Portuguese. It didn't help that French troops were used to living off the land (i.e., stealing from the peasants) and much of Spain was so poor the peasants barely scraped by in the best of times. Spain at the time was also one of the worst places in Europe to try and use artillery. The roads where bad enough for infantry but even worse if you're trying to pull a 1-ton 12lber over them. Wellington mostly waged a fairly 18th c. campaign of sieges for much of the war, sieging down the garrisons of Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo rather than fighting in the open field. The canonical legend about the British vs. the French in the Peninsula tactically is the story of infantry in line vs. column. The British would wait on the reverse slope of a hill in line, negating any French advantage in artillery, and as the French infantry in column appeared over the crest, the 'thin red line' would hit them hard and fast with a few brisk and devastating volleys of musketry, and then charge into the French with fixed bayonets through the smoke and carnage of those first quick volleys, carrying all before them. How much of that legend stands up to reality and modern scholarship, I couldn't say.
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Jan 18, 2020 15:15
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I was actually thinking more of some of the big Federal cavalry raids in the ACW as far as deep penetration raids with some useful effect. It makes sense that the Union, with it's abundance of resources, could afford to send several big raiding parties deep into the south without leaving their armies blind. Wilson's raid in Alabama in 1865 was very effective with the destruction of N. Alabama's many iron works and the capture of Selma, once of the south's last arsenals. Grierson in the Vicksburg campaign succesfully distracted a big chunk of the confederate forces and Sheridan in the valley caused all kinds of havoc. By contrast, Forrest caused much chaos but probably would have been more useful if he stuck by the main confederate forces in the west, and Morgan's huge raid into Ohio caused a big scare but ultimately was a nothingburger. However, all were still raids, and nothing like the mobile envelopments and deep operational penetrations the internal combustion engine would later allow.
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Jan 18, 2020 16:11
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Comstar posted:Part of it I think was that the small German army after WW1 trained their members to be able to lead 3 levels up and 3 levels down and were trained to be able to lead the incoming conscripts when the army started to expand after '33. British training had Sargent's yelling "WHAT ARE YOU DOING PRIVATE YOU'RE NOT PAID TO THINK" so lower level's of the army wasn't as free to do things tactically. This was a feeling on the British side in North Africa after losing several times and part of Montgomery's training to was to try to improve that.
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Jan 23, 2020 15:11
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JcDent posted:This is the only worthwhile measurement and everything else can go to hell. I demand for it to be declared an ISO standard. T(55)EU
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Jan 23, 2020 20:48
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I'm looking for a chart or some data on world shipping capacity/tonnage from like, 1900 to 1950 but my google-foo is weak? Mostly just interested in both how the world wars and associated commerce raiding/submarines/massive merchant shipbuilding programs affected total tonnage. I'm imagining both world wars added substantially to that total, but no idea if that actually is the case or if losses balanced some of that. I imagine the pre-ww2 Japanese merchant marine for instance was much bigger than I think and was much more devastated than I think, with similar stories for Britain and Germany .
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Jan 24, 2020 03:23
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:I’m currently on a Napoleon kick having read the recent biography by Andrew Roberts (yes I know about the guys political poo poo) that’s pretty gushing on him and I’m currently reading the even more recent biography by Adam Zamoyski which is definitely more critical but still very complimentary regarding his tactical military skills. And I’m planning to read Campaigns of Napoleon by Chandler after. I have heard it occasionally argued (though I can't remember where) that Napoleon was needlessly bloody as a tactical commander, especially later in his career, and only won his battles because he almost always outnumbered his opponent. That's all well and good, and not entirely wrong, but it ignores the fact that Napoleon's real genius was at the operational and logistical levels to make it all work-his opponents were constantly surprised that a corps showed up on their flank that they thought should still be 35 miles away. He outnumbered his opponents because he was so darned good at making sure he outnumbered his opponents at the critical point. In the same way he concentrated his artillery and sent in the Guard at the critical point on the day of battle, he made sure to concentrate his corps locally for that decisive stroke. At least early in his career, his opponents could never master the same trick. Grimnarsson posted:I wonder about this difference between armies having better supplies vs living off the land. It seems to me, after reading Peter Englund's histories of 17th century Swedish wars, that "living off the land" is a matter of time more than anything else. The French in late 18th/early 19th going in immediately "foraging" far and wide is a factor for their corps mobility. But I doubt it's a matter of training, I think it's something that comes from higher up, either as a matter of policy or strategy. In either case, the soldiers have to eat, and they have guns and the peasants don't.
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Jan 26, 2020 02:02
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SeanBeansShako posted:Sadly on the most recent ones set in India are on UK Netflix at the moment. I desperately wish the Aubrey-Maturin books would become the hot new millions of dollars Netflix megaseries
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Jan 26, 2020 04:23
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dublish posted:Wilson's Europe's Tragedy started out as an essay on military-civil relations in 1650s Franconia. True story. Is this as good a starting point for the Thirty Years War as any? I’ve gotten about a quarter of the way through it 3 times and then I get distracted reading something unrelated
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Jan 27, 2020 17:47
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Elyv posted:The first 30% or so of the book is entirely about explaining why Europe is where it is in 1618 Yeah my problem wasn’t that the book was too dense, I’d just get distracted by another book and it would wind up at the bottom of the pile and then in 2 months when it re-emerged I’d forgotten all the detail and would have to start over. I really enjoyed all the setup-very enlightening about a period of history I don’t know much about. I listened to CV Wedgewood’s book on audible and it’s definitely less academic and much more narrative/personality based, but it did at least help give me some broad brush overview.
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Jan 27, 2020 18:59
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What was the state of naval radar in WW2 among the belligerents? I know the British had it from early in the war, but who else had it? Was it used for naval ship-to-ship/shore gunnery or just air defense?Anywhere it really made a huge difference in combat?
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Jan 30, 2020 02:09
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GotLag posted:Was labour more expensive in the USA than in Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries? A friend of mine's research is on construction of buildings (esp. big plantation houses) in the antebellum South and it is amazing how a ton of builders/carpenters/joiners are Irish/English/Scottish/German because there just weren't any native born American carpenters in Alabama/Mississippi in 1855, despite a huge building boom. Similarly, where furniture production moved into factories with lots of machines and basically assembly lines in the US starting in the 1850s, there were still cabinetmakers in the East End of London 'mass produding' by hand furniture for UK stores into the 1950s in basically the 'putting out' system of cottage industry.
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Feb 2, 2020 03:13
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HEY GUNS posted:that makes so much sense I would recommend “the greatest benefit to mankind” by Roy Porter to anyone interested in medical history. Long story short, we have actually been pretty decent at surgery and wound treatment (as long as it didn’t get infected-It usually got infected) for quite a long time, but were completely hopeless at dealing with disease until 150 years ago. It’s especially ironic too since historically surgeons were always considered much inferior to physicians. Speed was crucial and much valued in pre-anesthetic surgery-Napoleon’s chief surgeon Larrey could have an arm off and sewn up in 90 seconds- and surgeons were pretty good at the actual surgery part, they just were hopeless at preventing infection because nobody really has any concept of germs and the transmission thereof . Still probably a better bet than the physician who was going to rebalance your phlegmatic humors by giving you a mercury enema once a week though.
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Feb 4, 2020 04:59
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feedmegin posted:In the specific case of Norway, look at a map. It wasn't blocking the invasion of Germany, why attack it rather than put more divisions in the Ruhr?
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Feb 5, 2020 20:25
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Xiahou Dun posted:That is some super dated documentary commentary. "And now more news from the front! We hear that Hitler is a real bad egg!" Lead melts at around 600F and that is also a good temperature to temper the hardened steel to. Presumably the molten lead, being a liquid, conducts heat into the blade faster than the air in an oven would so the tempering can be done faster, and probably more consistently over the length of the blade than in an oven. The whole pot of lead is 650F or whatever where a big 3’ long oven is going to have hot and cold spots.
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Feb 15, 2020 06:29
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Yes, that's the quenching medium. I'm not sure why whale oil was chosen, precisely, but it probably has low enough viscosity that it makes a good quenchant. The flash point of the oil could be another reason. Cost or toxicity might also be a factor. Manufacturing is cool because there are tons of little considerations. I would not be completely surprised if whale oil was cheaper than a refined petroleum product in 1965 Britain.
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Feb 16, 2020 00:21
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JcDent posted:Maybe somebody asked it already, but what's the deal with Japanese 25mm? I kind of have enjoyed reading these last few pages of naval AA chat because it has been like a modernish version the old broadside weight of metal measure of age of sail warships, except orders of magnitude higher. Instead of an 800lb broadside every 3 minutes being a big deal in WW2 it’s like 3000lb/minute or something. How did flinging a ton and a half of ballast off a ship every minute gently caress with its handling qualities? I guess not much when the vessel weighs thousands of tons, but still, that’s a lot of weight flying off the decks.
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Feb 20, 2020 21:29
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I just did the back of the napkin math and an Iowa firing all its 5” guns and 40 and 20mm guns can theoretically throw 38,000 pounds of metal and high explosive into the air per minute. That’s two orders of magnitude higher than HMS Victory’s broadside of ~1100lb every 2-3 minutes.
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Feb 20, 2020 21:43
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Cyrano4747 posted:Well, to start with you have this guy:
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Feb 21, 2020 18:48
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BalloonFish posted:The 1945-51 Labour government had 'responsible self-rule' for India and Burma as part of its manifesto, but that policy rapidly accelerated to full partition and independence by 1948. Labour was supposedly generally committed to fostering self-government and eventual independence in the African colonies but ended up imposing much stronger direct control from London over many of them and a much heavier military presence since they were seen as important Cold War strategic assets. There was also the rather awkward situation where a lot of Labour's progressive domestic policies were bankrolled by oil and rubber exports from the (unpopular) newly-created Malayan Union. Also very little of the massive pot of Marshall Aid money the UK received was spent domestically; instead it was spent on the military, weapons projects, colonial development and overseas policing. To add to this, post-war britain REALLY needed to keep it's colonies in the empire and on the pound (that it could control) so that it could buy all their produce (esp. oil and rubber from Malaya and metals from their African colonies) in sterling and then sell them to the US for hard dollars to try and pay off their massive debts after two world wars. While the British empire was certainly extractive pre-war, immediately post war it all started really getting squeezed very hard to pay for the war, and this provoked lots of bad feeling in the colonies that might not have happened quite so quickly without having to pay for the war. John Darwin's 'Unfinished Empire' is a really great look at the British empire, including (but not specifically about) decolonization.
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Feb 22, 2020 15:05
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It's the old story of the winners write the history books, but in this case the losers were only the losers for 10 years and then they became the winners again and got to write the history books. Especially in the south, the war was hugely traumatic in terms of human and economic loss in a way that Americans had not (and luckily have not) had to deal to deal with before, and the Victorians generally were all about statues and monuments. It's my understanding that many villages in Europe have monuments to the dead of WW1, and the south (and to a lesser extent the north) went through the same process of memorialization and grieving with the ubiqitous confederate soldier at the court house square, and the losses hit the South's small population especially heavily-very few families escaped unscathed. While we in hindsight see many of those statues as monuments to racism (and this was certainly part of the intent of their erectors) they were also monuments to brothers, fathers and sons who went off to war for the same reasons young men have always gone off to war-because their friends are doing it, because they've been sold some patriotic narrative, because 'they are here.' The monuments to confederate generals were absolutely intended as symbols of a resurgent, white-dominated south, and they do seem to me without parallel in the rest of the world (maybe existing monuments to Stalin/Lenin and soviet nostalgia in the post-soviet world are close?). The big monuments at Vicksburg/Gettysburg are especially interesting I think-they're like the huge Soviet monuments to the Great Patriotic War but they let the Germans build one too across the road. I think many people in (and outside) the south really grabbed onto confederate apologism (nostalgia?) hardcore in the turbulence of the 60s and debate over how to interpret those monuments has been one of many proxy wars in the Urban vs rural/traditional vs modern culture wars that have simmered and flared up in the US over the last 40-50 years. There's probably more confederate flags per capita in Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia that never really seceded than there are in Alabama or South Carolina. It's strange too in that the modern approach to rebuilding a country post-civil war is very much reconciliation between the formerly warring parties and bringing everyone back into the fold/government, and the post-reconstruction consensus did basically that very well. For the most part the Unites States became fairly well United again. However, it also allowed the propagation of the 'Lost Cause' narrative and failed to successfully deal with the issue of a bunch of freed slaves and allowed a low-level insurgency to continue against a minority population for many years afterwards. My understanding has been that by and large Northern whites were not particularly any less racist than southerners and were perfectly happy for freed slaves to be second class citizens, especially if it kept them in the south and out of their communities, but I'd love to know more about why reconstruction failed. It seems like there just wasn't the political will in the post-war north to follow through with it, but any book recommendations on Reconstruction generally would be appreciated.
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Feb 27, 2020 19:15
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bewbies posted:I was getting more at...the honoring of an act of rebellion, in the country in which said rebellion took place.
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Feb 27, 2020 19:43
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SeanBeansShako posted:Eh partly. Gross Prussian militarism and the armies who's kings went through that phase, the ever evolving tactics of warfare showed that such drills are only useful in certain situations and terrain. A few other reasons too. IIRC the regulation 18th c British marching step was sort of the opposite of a goose step-the sole of the shoe was supposed to remain parallel to the ground at all times so as not to show the bottom of the boot, but I can't find the book that I think mentions that (Richard Holmes' Redcoat) In browsing Wikipedia I came across something saying 18th c. recruiting standards included a "minimum number of teeth required to operate flintlock muskets" and couldn't figure that out until I remembered of course, you have to bite the cartridge and ball and need at least 4 concurrent teeth top and bottom to do that.
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Mar 5, 2020 04:04
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Kylaer posted:I'm thinking more about the time some French magazine/newspaper published a negative review of one of his short stories, and he proceeded to do a literal dictionary translation of their French version back into English, which of course made no sense, and then blasted them for ruining his story with bad translating. His speech "Thoughts on the Science of Onanism" is still one of the funnier things ever written, and I can only imagine being in the room when it was delivered. http://www.ralphmag.org/onan.html
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Mar 17, 2020 14:30
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ChubbyChecker posted:Yeah, there are a few of those kinds of forests: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/visingso-oak-forest The US Navy bought a bunch of land around Pensacola in the 1820s as a live oak timber reserve. A chunk of it is still federally owned and part of Gulf Islands national seashore. Hurricanes have gotten most of the big ones, but I think they did harvest some to use when they restored the Consitution.
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Mar 17, 2020 16:31
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Gnoman posted:Part of that was an age problem. It takes a long time for an oak tree to grow tall enough to be suitable for a mast, particularly something like the mainmast of a first-rate ship of the line. To make matters worse, only a small percentage of trees would be suitable in the first place. So even a well-replanted European forest would have supply problems for a long time after a naval surge (such as the one that happened for the Seven Years War). You can put together a mast from multiple trees, but those weren't as good - more likely to break under strain. Oak wasn't really used for masts. It was mostly used for planking and frames/knees. Conifers like pines and firs were mostly used for masts as they actually do grow tall and straight, and also offer a better strength/weight ratio than oak and many other hardwoods. The huge virgin stands of white and yellow pine on the eastern seaboard of the US are what really got the British excited. Lots of different woods were used for shipbuilding and in quite specialized ways-elm was used for pumps because it doesn't split (and so you can hollow out a whole tree into a pipe and not have it fall apart) and doesn't rot if it is continually submerged. Black locust is an American wood that is exceptionally hard, rot resistant, and strong and was much valued as a shipbuilding wood, and southern live oak was generally reckoned superior to most European oak The Spanish made entire loving galleons out of some of the finest cabinetmaking wood ever- Cuban mahogany. The British in India also very quickly fell in love with teak-the real king of shipbuilding woods.
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Mar 17, 2020 23:38
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T___A posted:My favorite take from LindyBiege is the one where he said that the reason American Civil War casualties were so high is that both sides did not charge often enough.
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Mar 21, 2020 17:30
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Obviously, the fifth wave at Fredericksburg would have broken through! Cold Harbor and Shiloh definitely win the award for spookiest. There is a trail along the Confederate lines at Cold Harbor I walked a few times in college that has a very eerie feeling about it. Vicksburg has one of the prettier cemeteries, and there are books to be written about all the huge monuments on the battlefield.
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Mar 21, 2020 23:42
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Cessna posted:You'll be fine. John Keegan’s ‘The American Civil War’ is good too for a briefer overview, but ‘Battle Cry of Freedom’ is a much, much better, more in depth look at the whole war in context.
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Mar 24, 2020 18:33
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hard counter posted:does the american civil war have a good rep? it looks like i'll have time to read both but i've run into problems with keegan's work before what with stuff like a history of warfare I don’t actually know about it’s reputation, but there wasn’t anything in it that I, a person with a moderate but amateur understanding of the subject, found way out of line. My main reason for recommending it is as a shorter book that covers most of the important stuff but doesn’t go into a ton of detail. Keegan does concisely explain some strategic stuff that McPherson doesn’t get that into, but if you have the time Battle Cry of Freedom is a much better, in depth book about the war as a whole, not just the military side. Kaiser Schnitzel fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Mar 25, 2020 |
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Mar 24, 2020 19:08
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