|
Slim Jim Pickens posted:Give examples then. Sure, if you exclude enough examples ahead of time then there won't be any examples because horses are cheating or ambushes don't count or whatever. Anyway, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cajamarca Battle of Cintla would be another. Can't find a wiki page for it but it was a few hundred Spaniards vs an army of thousands where Spanish casualties were something like 2 wounded and no dead. Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend has a lot but I haven't read it in a while and would need to dig it up to remember actual locations / names.
|
#
?
May 16, 2021 00:42
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 00:12 |
|
|
OctaviusBeaver posted:Sure, if you exclude enough examples ahead of time then there won't be any examples because horses are cheating or ambushes don't count or whatever. Lol at Cajamarca the Incas weren't even armed because they were there for diplomacy. e. rephrasing to be a bit more productive and less toxic - This is what we've been talking about : there are very few battles where when you interrogate what happened that the Spanish won because of the technological advantage. Either it's something like Cajamarca, where it's better described as a massacre of unarmed enemies, or other battles where there are tens of thousands of indigenous allies. It's not that the Spanish didn't win these battles, it's rather that these battles don't support the claim that horses, steel, and gunpowder allowed the Spaniards to steamroll the indigenous population CommonShore fucked around with this message at 01:00 on May 16, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 16, 2021 00:56
|
|
|
Didn't the Inca have metal maces?
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2021 01:20
|
|
|
Nenonen posted:Now that we're talking about native Americans (first nations or which ever cover term is preferred?), is there any estimate of when their population and the Euro colonist populations were at equilibrium? Is it even possible to estimate as mestizos make up a major part of contemporary South American populace? What about Australia or New Zealand? About 1860 in New Zealand. https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/maori-and-european-population-numbers-1838%E2%80%931901 Pakeha means European or not Maori variously. OctaviusBeaver posted:Battle of Cintla would be another. Can't find a wiki page for it but it was a few hundred Spaniards vs an army of thousands where Spanish casualties were something like 2 wounded and no dead. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potonch%C3%A1n
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2021 01:57
|
|
|
CommonShore posted:Lol at Cajamarca the Incas weren't even armed because they were there for diplomacy. Fair, I messed up on that one. Though I think walking around unarmed with 8,000 people and no scouts around people who are notorious for backstabbing and without scouting is pretty bad at war. quote:It's not that the Spanish didn't win these battles, it's rather that these battles don't support the claim that horses, steel, and gunpowder allowed the Spaniards to steamroll the indigenous population I think we're having different conversations then because Slim Jim specifically wanted to exclude Otumba because the Spanish steamrolled the Aztecs with horses. I agree that their tactics and diplomacy were a huge part of their success but I don't think that anyone argued against that. Their raw combat power was also a huge factor and they were able to consistently take on larger native armies and win. If they couldn't do that the none of those states would have a reason to support the Spanish in the first place. Nobody wants to ally with a loser. I think there's some confusion of cause and effect going on. Yes the Spanish had lots of native allies against the Aztecs, but they got those allies by winning battles and then negotiating alliances and tributes and peeling away vassals from the Aztecs. The Aztecs couldn't stop this because they were reluctant to fight the Spanish in a pitched battle that they thought they would lose. If Cortez hadn't already been militarily successful before then those states would never have joined him to fight the Aztecs because it would be a suicide mission. It was their military strength that allowed them to form a coalition, not the other way around. And then from there it snowballs. Maybe we don't disagree that much and are just emphasizing different things.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2021 02:01
|
|
|
aphid_licker posted:What's really impressive is that these dudes who are half a planet out of their element and for all intents and purposes just fell off a tree on mars and landed in Tenochtitlan managed to exploit all these internal divisions and poo poo. Like how do you even figure out that these divisions exist The Aztecs at least were REALLY unpopular among their neighbors, the Tlaxcala being the most famous. Turn the camera around and it looks less like the Spanish orchestrated a new conspiracy than that they fell into the Napoleonic Wars on the anti-French side.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2021 03:07
|
|
|
This whole time whenever I saw "GWOT" in this thread I thought it was some in-joke calling it Gulf War Overtime. I just saw someone else use it in a different place and looked it up and realized it's actually just the official acronym. Very disappointed.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2021 14:24
|
|
|
Koramei posted:This whole time whenever I saw "GWOT" in this thread I thought it was some in-joke calling it Gulf War Overtime. I just saw someone else use it in a different place and looked it up and realized it's actually just the official acronym. Very disappointed. It is a joke, just not a funny one.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2021 15:59
|
|
|
Koramei posted:This whole time whenever I saw "GWOT" in this thread I thought it was some in-joke calling it Gulf War Overtime. I just saw someone else use it in a different place and looked it up and realized it's actually just the official acronym. Very disappointed. I mean, but now every time I read some official DoD thing about how Operation Triumphant Freedom is going to ensure that our Warfighters dominate the Combat Space and secure an advantage in the GWOT I'm going to think about Gulf War: Overtime. So I'd count that one as a win if I were you.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2021 16:09
|
|
|
GWOT is the noise a boot filled with water makes each time you take a step.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2021 19:26
|
|
|
OctaviusBeaver posted:Fair, I messed up on that one. Though I think walking around unarmed with 8,000 people and no scouts around people who are notorious for backstabbing and without scouting is pretty bad at war. The Incans knew nothing of the Spanish. Atahualpa and Pizarro had negotiated around Cajamarca for a while, and he only agreed to meet him after several assurances of safety. The Incan Empire was already suffering from smallpox epidemics and had just concluded a civil war, and thus Atahualpa was looking for possible allies rather than destroying an entirely new people. He basically went to Cajamarca planning to receive an envoy, and much of the 8,000 were there to put on a show. However, Pizarro was a psycho and decided beforehand to ambush the diplomatic procession. All the conquistadors were psychotic, but Pizarro's band was unusually so, which is why he ended up getting murdered by a partner. For the future Incan resistance, they were opposed by the many subjugated Andean peoples as much as the Spanish. The Neo-Incan state continued to exist and fought for 50 years after the conquistadors seized Cuzco, but they spent most of their time fighting their former subjects OctaviusBeaver posted:
The prelude to Otumba was the Spanish getting murdered in Tenochtitlan by an angry mob so I don't know where this supermen concept is coming from. And I have to say again, the main factor in the battle was that the Aztecs didn't know how cavalry worked. What does this have to do with steel, or superior tactics? They just brought some horses with them and surprised people who never seen a horse before. The infantry combat was hopeless and even the conquistador sources don't even claim they were winning it. After Otumba, its notable that Cortes ran back too Tlaxcala, and settled in for a year of collecting other allies and besieging small Aztec allied city-states. In the meantime, Tenochtitlan suffered a smallpox epidemic, which was ruinous to such an urban population. When the siege of Tenochtitlan proceeded, Cortes came with upwards of 100,000 allied Mexica, and whenever he lost their confidence the progress of the siege halted. This also comes from the Conquistador sources. You mentioned Cintla, which I am familiar with as the most laughably inflated claim of Bernal Diaz' account because he claims that a small Mayan town raised like 30,000-60,000 soldiers overnight. If you can't speak of these examples of Spanish "dunking" on natives without trawling wikipedia, what is informing your opinion here? I think you're ignorant of how many wars the Spanish were forced to fight for decades or centuries after the conquest of Mexico or Peru, and these are impossible to explain if their military power was so overwhelming. Much poorer people than the Aztecs and Inca literally defeated the Spanish, like the Chichimeca or Mayans or Mapuche.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2021 19:36
|
|
|
Koramei posted:This whole time whenever I saw "GWOT" in this thread I thought it was some in-joke calling it Gulf War Overtime. I just saw someone else use it in a different place and looked it up and realized it's actually just the official acronym. Very disappointed. It really needs to be called The War Against Terror.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2021 20:54
|
|
|
Combined United Nations Taskforce fighting The War Against Terror.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2021 20:58
|
|
|
MrYenko posted:Combined United Nations Taskforce fighting The War Against Terror. Initiated by Dick & Bush.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2021 21:10
|
|
|
Nenonen posted:Initiated by Dick & Bush. Add Colin Powell and you’ve got a George Carlin bit from 1992.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2021 21:16
|
|
|
So, somebody tell me about mid-century/Cold War mercenaries. How were they formed, and how were they hired? Were they usually decommissioned WW2 veterans looking to trade on their skills? Were they hired en bloc where possible by approaching demobilized units, or formed out of whatever the employers could pull together, or assembled based on one guy contracting to find enough old war buddies to form a useful force? How large were these mercenary forces generally, both in absolute terms and relative to their employers/opponents? Were they generally hired to act as major combat formations, or more in some kind of specialist role as trainers/officers etc? Keep in mind that my previous knowledge has been pretty much occasional references to their existence here and there and the Jagged Alliance games so I'm starting with a pretty low knowledge base.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2021 11:36
|
|
|
No lack of unreconstructed Nazis in the 50s and 60s willing to work for apartheid South Africa or various Friends of Democracy in SE Asia or the Middle East or Central/South America.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2021 12:06
|
|
|
SoF classified ads
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2021 12:09
|
|
|
Phobophilia posted:No lack of unreconstructed Nazis in the 50s and 60s willing to work for apartheid South Africa or various Friends of Democracy in SE Asia or the Middle East or Central/South America. Former Imperial Japanese troops too in the SE Asia. And former ROC soldiers. Iirc many of the local drug cartels were established by them too.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2021 12:28
|
|
|
You might find this an interesting read.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2021 12:47
|
|
|
I don't have numbers, but I think that former colonial powers' soldiers were the biggest source for mercenaries, eg. this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Denard
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2021 13:17
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:You might find this an interesting read. loving LOL, Mark Thatcher's dumbfuck attempted coup of Equatorial Guinea apparently copied this book's plot! Goddamn that's some Heat/North Hollywood Shootout energy.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2021 14:57
|
|
|
Tomn posted:So, somebody tell me about mid-century/Cold War mercenaries. How were they formed, and how were they hired? Were they usually decommissioned WW2 veterans looking to trade on their skills? Were they hired en bloc where possible by approaching demobilized units, or formed out of whatever the employers could pull together, or assembled based on one guy contracting to find enough old war buddies to form a useful force? How large were these mercenary forces generally, both in absolute terms and relative to their employers/opponents? Were they generally hired to act as major combat formations, or more in some kind of specialist role as trainers/officers etc? In the Time-Life series Epic of Flight, they have a whole book dedicated to flying mercinaries. Just flipping through it, I found this guy: Carl Gustaf von Rosen, a Swedish Count/mercenary.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2021 15:12
|
|
|
ChubbyChecker posted:Former Imperial Japanese troops too in the SE Asia. And former ROC soldiers. Iirc many of the local drug cartels were established by them too. That's actually pretty interesting! I hadn't heard of this before but I suppose it would make sense. Do you have any books on the subject?
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2021 18:44
|
|
|
Tomn posted:That's actually pretty interesting! I hadn't heard of this before but I suppose it would make sense. Do you have any books on the subject? Oh, I haven't read any books about it, it might have been mentioned in an earlier thread. Perhaps someone else here has better links? Here's one guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khun_Sa
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2021 18:51
|
|
|
Re: Tenochtitlan. Camilla Townsend claims in her recent "Fifth Sun" that the usual population claims of the city are wildly exaggerated, and 50,000 would be nearer the mark. This was in a podcast interview so I can't speak to what she's basing it on.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2021 20:01
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2021 07:53
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:In the Time-Life series Epic of Flight, they have a whole book dedicated to flying mercinaries. Just flipping through it, I found this guy: Carl Gustaf von Rosen, a Swedish Count/mercenary. Sweden has a really unusual amount of amount of early-mid 20th century contact with Ethiopia. Especially regarding aviation. Nobody in Sweden really reflects on why, though.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2021 11:49
|
|
|
Ooooh, Ethiopia and aviation mentioned! This guy was quite something.quote:Hubert Fauntleroy Julian was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1897. His father, Henry, was a cocoa plantation manager in Toco. Julian caught his first glimpse of an airplane on 3 January 1913, when Frank Boland performed an exhibition flight, ultimately crashing and dying. The shock of the crash stayed with Julian who, after World War I, left his island home for Canada. There, in November 1920, he flew for the first time during a joyride with Canadian flying ace Billy Bishop. Shortly after this he designed and patented what was labeled an "Aeroplane Safety Appliance."[1]  quote:During the first half of the 1930s, Julian made three trips to the Ethiopian Empire. It was during his second visit when he crashed Haile Selassie's favorite plane, causing the emperor to ask Julian to leave his kingdom. But the Black Eagle would return on the eve of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, gaining a military commission to help defend the African kingdom. It was during this third trip when he would come to blows with John C. Robinson, the Brown Condor of Chicago, over jabs in the press which Julian attributed to Robinson. Once it became clear that the forces of Fascist Italy would prevail, Julian left the country.[5] Julian returned to Ethiopia as a volunteer in the East African Campaign of 1940-41. quote:During the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union, Julian, along with many other American volunteers, left for Finland in order to help provide assistance. He was there for several months without seeing action, before departing back for the United States.[8] At least the Finnish Air Force's assessment of Julian was not flattering: on practise flights he got lost in clear weather and stalled at landing.  quote:After the end of World War II Julian become a licensed arms dealer. His first contract was with the Arbenz government of Guatemala. He defied the FBI when, after being asked to cease his dealings, Julian continued selling. His second contract was with the Batista government of Cuba as it tried, and ultimately failed, to combat Fidel Castro's revolutionaries. His third, and final, contract was with Moise Tshombe, leader of Katanga during the Congo Secession Crisis of the early 1960s. Julian was detained by United Nations forces for questioning and was in the end jailed for four months before being released. He retired upon his return to the United States.[9]
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2021 15:57
|
|
|
Nenonen posted:Ooooh, Ethiopia and aviation mentioned! This guy was quite something. drat interesting
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2021 16:12
|
|
|
Eat your heart out, very good novel "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" https://twitter.com/Sharon_Kuruvila/status/1394501507177984000 Now THAT'S a loving alternate timeline
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2021 17:56
|
|
|
Crosspost from the airpower thread, but it's deserving of both places. I didn't think I'd wake up today and discover an entire new way that Senator Joe McCarthy sucked but here we are. Today I found out that in 1949 he was waging what was described as a "one man crusade" on behalf of, get this, the Germans convicted as war criminals for the Malmedy massacre. Yes, the Malmedy massacre where American POWs were machinegunned and then survivors finished off with pistol shots to the head. Why? Something about him thinking that their confessions were coerced was the official reason, but I kinda suspect it was tied up with him hating communists given his later behavior. That's just conjecture on my part, though.  What the gently caress McCarthy?
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2021 02:26
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Crosspost from the airpower thread, but it's deserving of both places. Lotta Germans in Wisconsin.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2021 02:45
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:What the gently caress McCarthy? I'm not sure if this was linked in this thread or a previous one, but McCarthy wasn't the only American who's Hot for Peiper. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/us/joachim-peiper-nazi-photo-apology.html
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2021 03:07
|
|
|
It's cool that some French villagers loving murdered that Nazi when they realized he'd settled amongst them. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/19/archives/war-heros-statue-bombed-in-france.html What's shocking is that some Gladio cell did a bombing in the loving 70s.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2021 03:48
|
|
|
And what kind of absolute collaborationist bitch names yourself after an occuping army that would routinely massacre your civilians? Ah, the french right. Their harsh terms against Germany in the Great Depression managed to secure the Nazis position in Germany, and they kindly repaid their harshness with power in Vichy France.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2021 03:52
|
|
|
Is there a decently priced/available overview of air cavalry doctrine, especially one which covers the JGSDF or one which has a notable Japanese translation that might be assumed to have been relied upon by Japanese commentators? I'm translating an adventure novel where a transition from dragoons to ornithopter forces is underway, and I'd like to first have an overview of the potential in order to explain it better to the readers, and second if possible understand not just air cavalry operations but also what the (presumed Japanese-monolingual) author understands about them in order to not inadvertently contradict what they're taking as fact.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2021 20:43
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:
Yeah, McCarthy's first stab at fame. The extra-weird thing is that this cause remained sort of a thing among the era's fringe Birchers. Like the immediate postwar "AMERICA USED BIOWEAPONS AGAISNT MARXIST NATIONS", it was a cause that just hung around because it was tradition? There's no loving way I'm searching for this, but I remember contrarian troll Ann Coultier was defending McCarthy for taking such a brave, principled stand. I think you are right, btw, as to the reason why. I think the Ayn Rand/Bircher axis adopted an anti-communism that was basically Communism/Marxism (real or imagined) but opposite. You can sorta see that in the cold war generally, but in the paranoid style of American politics they reached that point immediately. Also, I just wanted to emphasize Mr. Tulip is right about : quote:The final brother in this Grimm story of warcrime and magic ducks is metaphysics, IE the use of knowledge or perspectives that are by definition impossible. Because hahaha, I thought I implied it, I didn't realize I just stated it like that, my bad, this is wrong. The eggbeater missed that one.
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2021 00:28
|
|
|
Question about the American Civil War - as I understand it the US has traditionally (prior to WW2 anyways) had an aversion to and distrust of standing armies. Given that, what was the social status of professional soldiers before and after the ACW? Like, if someone had declared he intended to make a career as an officer of the regular army in 1860, say, how would his friends and family have responded? Conversely, if he'd made that declaration in 1866, what would the response have been? Were they respected and honored, or somewhat looked down upon?
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2021 12:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 00:12 |
|
|
Tomn posted:Question about the American Civil War - as I understand it the US has traditionally (prior to WW2 anyways) had an aversion to and distrust of standing armies. Given that, what was the social status of professional soldiers before and after the ACW? Like, if someone had declared he intended to make a career as an officer of the regular army in 1860, say, how would his friends and family have responded? Conversely, if he'd made that declaration in 1866, what would the response have been? Were they respected and honored, or somewhat looked down upon? Before the War of 1812 there wasn't much of a professional army to speak of, partially because of a distrust of armies, but also because of a lack of resources. After a ...mixed... performance in that war most people came around to the idea that a professional officer corps was probably a good idea and so turned West Point into a proper military academy instead of just a place random dudes went to study engineering or coastal artillery for a few months. In that era there was still very much an "officer as gentleman" mentality and military officer in general was as respected a vocation as any other, but the public didn't really see much of the army back then. Duty stations tended to be isolated out on the frontier and the army was very small anyway and so really wasn't a big part of American society. Enlisted soldiers tended to be pretty...rough around the edges. Military service was a pretty common way to avoid legal repercussions or escape something else unpleasant. It was probably in everyone's best interest that they were out on the frontier. The Mexican War raised the profile of the military quite a bit. It was arguably the first major thing the US military did well, and it was obviously a huge news story and did a lot for the relative prestige of military professionals. Another important thing from that era that is often forgotten nowadays was the military's role in civil engineering. USMA was literally the ONLY engineering school in the country for quite some time, and military-run civil engineering projects were both high-profile and very popular with the public. Top graduates tended to gravitate towards engineering, and that group as a whole was very widely admired, though they still didn't get paid very much. After the war, military officers were among the most famous and respected people in the country, but ironically enough, the USMA suffered a serious decline in that era...it was not a good time to enter military service. As the Civil War generation of officers retired/died and the military gradually retreated back to a state of semi-relevance, prestige etc declined right along with it. Eventually, the post-war military looked a lot like the pre-war military: a bunch of underpaid officers and roughneck soldiers scattered around isolated frontier outposts. And so it stayed, more or less, until the west was "settled" and modern war came around.
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2021 14:42
|
|
