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zoux posted:It's interesting thinking about that fable from a Sunday school perspective and then later after knowing some history. Goliath is portrayed as arrogant and dismissive, the sling is supposed to be some incredible coup that no one saw coming, but any warrior of the era would know exactly how dangerous a slinger could be. While this story didn't happen obviously, lots of that kind of pre-combat champion duels did happen, they were supposed to be tests of arms that inspired the winner's army and unmanned the loser's: do we know of examples, historical or apocryphal, where a guy goes out there with a bow and arrow and "cheats"? I am sure bows were used for pre combat displays of prowess but it would be both people using ranged weapons.
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Oct 31, 2024 13:24
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Hunt11 posted:I am sure bows were used for pre combat displays of prowess but it would be both people using ranged weapons. Right, it's just funny that it's portrayed as this humiliating defeat of the Philistines when they would've been like "BOOOOO, THAT'S AGAINST THE SPIRIT OF SINGLE COMBAT"
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Oct 31, 2024 13:26
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Milo and POTUS posted:I just want to point out that goliath lost. imo naming it after goliath was apt; it's a big slow thing that carries its mine to the target david should be able to sling its mine
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Oct 31, 2024 13:26
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ChubbyChecker posted:imo naming it after goliath was apt; it's a big slow thing that carries its mine to the target David is the name of the mortar
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Oct 31, 2024 13:54
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Milo and POTUS posted:David is the name of the mortar David's Sling is also the name of Israeli long range SAM system.
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Oct 31, 2024 14:36
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zoux posted:It's interesting thinking about that fable from a Sunday school perspective and then later after knowing some history. Goliath is portrayed as arrogant and dismissive, the sling is supposed to be some incredible coup that no one saw coming, but any warrior of the era would know exactly how dangerous a slinger could be. While this story didn't happen obviously, lots of that kind of pre-combat champion duels did happen, they were supposed to be tests of arms that inspired the winner's army and unmanned the loser's: do we know of examples, historical or apocryphal, where a guy goes out there with a bow and arrow and "cheats"? There might well be a historical reason to be arrogant - if I recall correctly slings are generally considered a weapon of the lower class (the weapon of peasants and shepherds etc), so it might have just been sheer social snobbery. “What, they couldn’t find a real warrior?” sort of thing.
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Oct 31, 2024 15:30
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The biblical account of David does emphasise his status as a lowly shepherd, but slings were not universally disrespected. For example Balearic slingers were famed mercenaries.
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Oct 31, 2024 15:39
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and king tut was buried with a sling
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Oct 31, 2024 16:21
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ChubbyChecker posted:and king tut was buried with a sling Did they build the tomb around the place where his remains landed then?
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Oct 31, 2024 16:39
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Nenonen posted:Did they build the tomb around the place where his remains landed then?
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Oct 31, 2024 16:51
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Oct 31, 2024 20:03
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I recently watched a youtube clip with Christopher Lee schooling Peter Jackson on what sounds a man makes when he is stabbed in the back, because he apparently did that during WW2, and it was implied that he was involved in clandestine missions that are still classified to this day. Can that really be? Are there still things and happenings from WW2 that are classified or kept under lids?
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Nov 2, 2024 15:07
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That might have been still classified when the film was being shot in the early noughties. It is probably out now or will be soon if not.
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Nov 2, 2024 15:17
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Dumb Sex-Parrot posted:I recently watched a youtube clip with Christopher Lee schooling Peter Jackson on what sounds a man makes when he is stabbed in the back, because he apparently did that during WW2, and it was implied that he was involved in clandestine missions that are still classified to this day. Lee apparently got up to some real cool poo poo during ww2. He is cousins with Ian Fleming and is supposedly one of the inspirations for James Bond. That dude lived.
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Nov 2, 2024 15:24
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It might not even have been officially secret any more, but he would keep it to himself as a point of principle. Christopher Lee strikes me as a man who, if told to keep his mouth shut, would drat well keep it shut until officially told otherwise.
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Nov 2, 2024 15:29
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Dumb Sex-Parrot posted:I recently watched a youtube clip with Christopher Lee schooling Peter Jackson on what sounds a man makes when he is stabbed in the back, because he apparently did that during WW2, and it was implied that he was involved in clandestine missions that are still classified to this day. Yeah, Christopher Lee did a lot of implying. Put me on record as believing that while Christopher Lee served honorably during the war the claims about his special forces exploits are bullshit and that he never knifed a man in the back. I don't think he ever specifically claimed to have run around behind enemy lines doing snake-eater poo poo, but he did say things to deliberately cultivate that impression and never disabused people of their misapprehensions and he came as close to the stolen valor line as it's possible to go without stepping across it. You'll find lots and lots of stories claiming he was in the SAS, but he wasn't. He was at one point attached to the SAS as a liaison officer from the RAF, but that's not at all the same thing, and "RAF intelligence officer" doesn't mean "special forces" or "spy," it means "guy who reads and compiles reports and feeds information to his unit for purposes of mission planning." Vincent Van Goatse posted:Christopher Lee strikes me as a man who, if told to keep his mouth shut, would drat well keep it shut until officially told otherwise. Except that when you start talking about how you know what sound a man makes when you stab him in the back, you're not keeping your mouth shut anymore.
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Nov 2, 2024 15:45
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There's enough known specifics about his war service that he almost certainly was not running around doing any SF stuff himself. e: in fact it would be hard to come up with a speculative time where he might have being doing any of that stuff. His set of postings is pretty clear. In 1942 he's attached to an air group. In 1943 he comes down with Malaria six times, he's definitely not doing anything active that year is he? In 1944 he's on exchange with the Gurkhas, that's probably his most likely opportunity to have seen someone get knifed. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Nov 2, 2024 |
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Nov 2, 2024 15:59
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SeanBeansShako posted:That might have been still classified when the film was being shot in the early noughties. It is probably out now or will be soon if not. It seems equally absurd for WW2 things to remain classified in the year 2000. It's still possible he stabbed a dude in the back during WW2; it may just have not been part of his official duties. Maybe he was flirting with his girlfriend or owed him money.
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Nov 2, 2024 16:11
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Or he might have learned that particular tidbit by some other method, like someone with experience saying that it sounded just like some sound familiar to everyone, like stabbing a pig in the neck.
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Nov 2, 2024 16:19
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More likely he was associated with a tangled web of operations connected with a bunch of dudes who got super involved in the post war cold war Intelligence. But the combat stuff Lee knew was being also taught to commandos in training manuals at the time too.
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Nov 2, 2024 16:19
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He never said that he did it just that he knew exactly what happens when someone gets stabbed in the lung.
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Nov 2, 2024 18:56
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A lot of people working secret projects in WWII, especially the rank-and-file workers, were just told "you can never talk about this" afterwards without any specific timeline, so that was that. Apparently a lot of Bletchley Park codebreakers kept completely quiet about their work until some books about it started to get published in the 80's or 90's and they said "wait, does that mean it's okay to talk about it now?" e: now I wish I could ask my grandma what kind of secrecy constraints they were given in her codebreaking office; for as long as I can remember it was known in the family that she did codebreaking work during the war so it clearly wasn't that secret. I need to re-read Code Girls to see if it goes into any detail there. Wingnut Ninja fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Nov 2, 2024 |
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Nov 2, 2024 19:13
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Do you have to physically declassify stuff or can you just declare Like if secret files from WWII got lost or accidentally destroyed would they remain classified? It probably isn't near as much of a mess as German or Russian records at that time, but I am guessing that very little of it was digitized since that seems to go against the idea of it being 'secret'. Wasn't there some goon that had pics of WWII grandpa doing mysterious stuff with airplanes and photography that were stamped 'Property of the Crown' or something like that? How did that ever end up?
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Nov 2, 2024 20:01
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I'm up to the battle of midway ww2 day by day. Why did the Japanese think midway was gonna really do anything? The top command knew the issue was going to be America's industrial output was just gonna end up overrunning them rather than the individual fleet or strategic location. Did they just think if they had seized midway and managed to sink the rest of the pacific fleet America would just shrug and think it wasn't worth it anymore, instead of building another eight carriers and a handful of battleships by September and trying again?
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Nov 2, 2024 20:06
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Defenestrategy posted:I'm up to the battle of midway ww2 day by day. Why did the Japanese think midway was gonna really do anything? The top command knew the issue was going to be America's industrial output was just gonna end up overrunning them rather than the individual fleet or strategic location. Did they just think if they had seized midway and managed to sink the rest of the pacific fleet America would just shrug and think it wasn't worth it anymore, instead of building another eight carriers and a handful of battleships by September and trying again? Not getting into a completely hosed war with America wasn't an option by that point, and negotiating a peace was still politically impossible. Because assuming the US has an infinite CV and logistics capacity glitch doesn't present any useful paths, you try to construct your most plausible theory of victory and then also go for the Aleutians.
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Nov 2, 2024 20:13
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If I recall correctly, the strategy was "bloody the Americans enough that the public decides the war isn't worth it and forces the government to pull out". It's not an amazing strategy, but it wasn't completely without merit. There were plenty of isolationists in the USA.
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Nov 2, 2024 20:18
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Defenestrategy posted:I'm up to the battle of midway ww2 day by day. Why did the Japanese think midway was gonna really do anything? The top command knew the issue was going to be America's industrial output was just gonna end up overrunning them rather than the individual fleet or strategic location. Did they just think if they had seized midway and managed to sink the rest of the pacific fleet America would just shrug and think it wasn't worth it anymore, instead of building another eight carriers and a handful of battleships by September and trying again? The point was to inflict a devastating defeat on the remainder of the US fleet, and that a large scale defeat would force the US to concede defeat and start peace negotiations. Coupled with this is a belief that the US Navy and population were thoroughly demoralized by the outcomes of battles thus far. This is the immediate reasoning for the invasion plan; clearly the US is too demoralized to come out and fight, so the only way to make them do this is to seize some important location and force them to respond. Plus by the time the USN gets out there they should have this nice island they can base a bunch of land based air assets from. So yeah, the whole thing is based on a bad misreading of the US will to fight. Industrial capacity won't matter if the US public is tired of sending their boys off to die in the Pacific.
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Nov 2, 2024 20:53
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Defenestrategy posted:I'm up to the battle of midway ww2 day by day. Why did the Japanese think midway was gonna really do anything? The top command knew the issue was going to be America's industrial output was just gonna end up overrunning them rather than the individual fleet or strategic location. Did they just think if they had seized midway and managed to sink the rest of the pacific fleet America would just shrug and think it wasn't worth it anymore, instead of building another eight carriers and a handful of battleships by September and trying again? Japanese strategy against America was entirely about getting in the first couple of punches and scoring a knockout. The goal was to win decisive battles, and be in such a dominant position afterward that the Americans wouldn't have the stomach to dig them out. It doesn't matter if you can build a replacement fleet in six months when your government throws in the towel in four. If they'd managed to take Midway (which would have been incredibly hard to do), the US would be operating out of Hawaii. That's an extra 2300 kilometers of defensive depth. If they were able to keep Midway supplied, Japan could station G4M bombers that had enough range to harass anything in the area and A6M fighters to cover their movements - Bettys stationed on Midway would have enough range to bomb Hawaii if they wanted to, and a Zero could fly more than halfway there and have enough fuel to fight. Meanwhile, they expected to still have their strong right arm in the form of their carrier fleet. So, assuming that things went the way Japan planned, the fleet the US put together to replace the one destroyed at Midway would be under constant harassment as soon as it sailed, and well before it got to Midway the Japanese could hit it with massive land-based and carrier-based strikes. On paper, this looks like something that has an excellent chance of producing a string of defeats that makes the soft and decadent Americans give up. In practice, this had no real chance of working. Midway would have been extremely difficult to take with the troops Japan had even if they successfully swept the American fleet from the area. Even if they did take it, American submarines would throttle the supply lines. And even if they kept it up the American civilian population would probably just have gotten more and more pissed off with every fight - the most likely effect would be giving up the fight against Hitler to take down the Real Enemy. But it isn't hard to see how Japan thought it might work.
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Nov 2, 2024 22:13
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It is difficult to predict how exactly a foreign government and population will react to that type of thing. You can easily get lulled to the fantasy that they will quickly fold in the face of a "shock and awe" attack and even if things get grim your elan will get through all hardships. Fascists also don't think much of democratic governments. Add to this the former war experiences of Japan (never mind those border skirmishes with the Soviets) and their interpretation of the latest events in Europe, and it's easy to get why they would want to strike as France and Netherlands are down and British and USSR are tied up by Hitler.
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Nov 2, 2024 22:45
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It's important to put the Japanese plan in historical context. In 1904-05 they had gone to war with Russia. In VERY tl;dr terms they opened the war with a surprise attack that had seriously hurt Russia's Pacific fleet. Russia then sent their Atlantic fleet to fight in the Pacific and it got wiped out in one of the most decisive defeats in Naval History. Russia, despite being gigantic, was never really able to get it's poo poo together and was forced to sign a humiliating peace treaty. This is what Japan was hoping to do again in WWII.
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Nov 2, 2024 23:16
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Cessna posted:It's important to put the Japanese plan in historical context. Yea. In addition, I don't know if Japanese leadership had a full understanding of what US submarines could do to their supply lines. Or what long range bombers could do to their cities. If they were expecting fleet operations to decide the war rather than hitting strategic targets and logistics, they got it brutally wrong.
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Nov 2, 2024 23:32
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Much of the Japanese leadership had a pretty clear understanding that they could not win an attritional war with the US and so the decision making process had the objective of making the war as short and decisive as possible.
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Nov 2, 2024 23:55
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Cessna posted:It's important to put the Japanese plan in historical context. And IIRC US naval planners recognised that a scenario like that would be Japan's best bet against the US so they planned their strategy with that in mind, deny the Japanese any decisive battles near Japan. But the Army had different ideas and wanted to fortify the Philippines which the Navy opposed because if the Philippines came under siege the President might feel compelled to send the fleet there to relieve it.
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Nov 3, 2024 16:29
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Grimnarsson posted:And IIRC US naval planners recognised that a scenario like that would be Japan's best bet against the US so they planned their strategy with that in mind, deny the Japanese any decisive battles near Japan. But the Army had different ideas and wanted to fortify the Philippines which the Navy opposed because if the Philippines came under siege the President might feel compelled to send the fleet there to relieve it. Yeah the US war plan ironically was to do pretty much want Japan hoped they would do, even more ironically the Pearl Harbour attack was so successful that the navy obviously could not send the carriers out to contest the Philippines.
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Nov 3, 2024 16:41
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I got into a debate about the atomic bombing of japan with someone, and they replied to me "This is a false gotcha because Japan had already agreed to the surrender conditions they got anyway." They then linked the following video as proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go. I've been listening tot he video, but their sources seem to mostly be Primary rather than postwar analysis, aside from Racing the Enemy - Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. I am currently doing more research on their sources, but would appreciate any information that could counter their argument.
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Nov 3, 2024 22:44
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midnight77 posted:I got into a debate about the atomic bombing of japan with someone, and they replied to me "This is a false gotcha because Japan had already agreed to the surrender conditions they got anyway." They then linked the following video as proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go. I've been listening tot he video, but their sources seem to mostly be Primary rather than postwar analysis, aside from Racing the Enemy - Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. I am currently doing more research on their sources, but would appreciate any information that could counter their argument. I've got no interest in watching the video, but this blog lays out some answers. https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2022/05/02/did-the-japanese-offer-to-surrender-before-hiroshima-part-1/
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Nov 3, 2024 22:55
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ponzicar posted:It seems equally absurd for WW2 things to remain classified in the year 2000. According to the US National Archives, the US only has a few very specific things from WW2 still classified. The UK has some documents that were marked as secret for 100 years that will unseal in the 2040s, including the interview with Rudolph Hess when he fled to the UK. There's rumors of a lot more document still being secret, but I don't think there's been much confirmed. The US ones seem to be very specific info on code breaking, presidential safety, and Fort Knox which sound like they might still be relevant (I imagine the physical structure of Fort Knox is still the same for example), while the UK seems to have used '100 years' as their 'this is very secret' timeframe when the US used 50 or 75 years. quote:The Federal Government's current system of marking and controlling security-classified information dates from World War II. Very little pre-1941 information still meets the criteria for continued classification. Only very specific information dating from before 1942 controlled by the National Security Agency regarding signals intelligence, by the United States Secret Service regarding the protection of the President, and by the U.S. Mint concerning the gold bullion depository at Fort Knox remains classified.
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Nov 3, 2024 22:57
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I do sometimes wonder if Japan had limited it's December 7 1941 attacks to British/French/Dutch possessions in Asia and had left Hawaii and maybe even the Philippines alone, that they would have been better off in the long run. Everything I've read about American public opinion in WWII tells me that Americans were really, really pissed off about Pearl Harbor being a sneak attack, and that sustained America's willingness to take losses and pour resources into the Pacific theater. I know there are reasons (doctrinal, cultural, historic) why Japan did what it did, but if Japan had just gobbled up a bunch of stuff closer to home and then dared the US to come and do something about it, would the US public have supported spending years sending waves of men to capture little coral reef islands, one after another, without such an rage-inducing causus belli?
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Nov 3, 2024 22:59
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I get the feeling that once Japan seizes british or french possessions its game over with the americans eventually saying give that poo poo back and pay reparations or else once they enter WW2 against hitler. Japan might get away with just seizing bits of china and the netherlands?
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Nov 3, 2024 23:03
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Defenestrategy posted:I get the feeling that once Japan seizes british or french possessions its game over with the americans eventually saying give that poo poo back and pay reparations or else once they enter WW2 against hitler. Japan might get away with just seizing bits of china and the netherlands? America didn't enter the war against Hitler, Hitler declared war on America on Dec. 10, 1941. A really odd strategic move a week after his advance elements had started falling back from Moscow. The isolationist element in America would probably have lost out eventually, and for the same reason they lost out in WW1: German submarine attacks killing Americans. That doesn't necessarily get the USA to declare war on Japan, but even if they do it buys Japan a lot of time to wrap things up in the Far East and maybe get a peace settlement with the UK.
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Nov 3, 2024 23:14
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