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Previous posts. Introduction to the Nagorno Karabakh Conflict. Karabakh clashes intensify and governments start collapsing. 1989-1992. My website on which these posts reside. Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict: Irregular warfare, ethnic cleansing and governments still collapsing, 1992. So last we came to this we were just starting to get to the stage of military fighting. In as much as the semi formed largely amateur militias that scrounged weapons from the USSR’s depots could be called a military but that is the armies that both sides had. Armenia had more trained combat soldiers willing to fight for them for a number of reasons that we covered in the last post so their professionalism levels were somewhat higher, though we have former Soviet forces siding with both sides. We have Armenian strongpoints in Stepanakert which was the central hub of Nagorno Karabakh surrounded largely by Azeri ethnic villages and the country as a whole is a patchwork of ethnic areas dominated by one group or the other. This post will largely cover the end of the low intensity portion of the conflict which has been running since the turn of the decade. Khojali and Maragha Massacre  Yellow line is approximately the post war border of N-K. Armenia had cut off a large Azeri enclave in Khojali, an area that had been heavily resettled by Azerbaijani, this was previously supplied from Aghdam through a mountain pass land route, however this was closed by Armenia meaning that the enclave of around 6000 people was supplied only by helicopter over the hump of the mountains. Conditions there were miserable for the civillians who had no electricity, no clean water or heating oil in the winter. Some efforts had been made for the evacuation of the citizens but by the time of the 25th of February around 3000 remained with perhaps 160 or so lightly armed OMON police units commanded by Alif Hajiev, formerly commander of the airport garrison. Armenia would begin its assault on the fourth anniversary of the Sumgait pogroms in 1988. The attack would be comprised of Armenian militia units supported by armour from the Soviet 366th Regiment. They surrounded and quickly destroyed the defences of the villiage. Hajiyev would try to evacuate as many civillians as he could with what remained of his soldiers, they made for the woodlands and tried to escape via the Gargar river through ankle deep snow. Unfortunately for them as morning broke they were near the Armenian villiage of Nakhichevanik which was fortified by Armenian militia who opened fire. A horrifically mismatched fight ensued between the sparse Azeri OMON troops in the refugee cluster and the Armenians where the civillians were caught in the crossfire and hundreds died, not only of gunshots but of frostbite as they scattered and tried to get away. The precise figure will never be known but the subsequent Azerbaijani investigation is regarded as reliable and puts the toll at 485 with over 1000 taken prisoner. This would be the single largest massacre in the entire conflict. While there were armed Azeris in the group it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that there was deliberate murder of civillians by the Armenian militia, the possible defence that the Azeris fired first seems extremely unlikely given the vast disadvantage at which they found themselves. There was a certain amount of dissembling and evasion of responsibility on the matter in the aftermath, but among the Armenians were a significant quantity of people who had fled from the Pogroms in Baku and in Sumgait. In an interview after the war an Armenian militia leader Serzh Sarkisian had the following to say. “But I think the main point is something different. Before Khojali, the Azerbaijanis thought that they were joking with us, they thought that the Armenians were people who could not raise their hand against the civilian population. We were able to break that [stereotype]. And that’s what happened. And we should also take into account that amongst those boys were people who had fled from Baku and Sumgait.” Which speaks of a brutal attitude among the Armenians, that they had something to prove and that there were so many scores to settle that were among the causes for this massacre. Militia, as they so often are, comprised of angry young men with very little to lose. And that is depressing but not surprising given the amount of bad blood that had accumulated in such a short time. This massacre would trigger the fall of Azeri president Mutalibov. An account from a survivor Salman Abasov shows the negligence with which the situation had been treated. “Several days before the events of the tragedy the Armenians told us several times over the radio that they would capture the town and demanded that we leave it. For a long time helicopters flew into Khojali and it wasn’t clear if anyone thought about our fate, took an interest in us. We received practically no help. Moreover, when it was possible to take our women, children, and old people out of the town, we were persuaded not to do so.” In the four months that Armenia had the area under siege no significant effort had been mounted to evacuate the civilians or relieve the area. Video footage of the aftermath of the massacre was shown in the parliament building and Mutalibov resigned. This bolstered the hand of the Azerbaijan Popular Front who were widely regarded as a certainty to win the new presidential elections scheduled for June. In a war that involved hundreds of small-scale engagement there were many such similar incidents. At the village of Maragha there was the massacre of nearly four dozen Armenian villages after the Azerbaijanis overtook the area, international observers were to find beheaded and scorched bodies of many the villagers after the Armenians retook the village. 50 more were taken hostage and 20 of those would never return. Siege of Stepanakert For its own role in Khojali the 366th regiment was ordered out of Stepanakert at the start of March. However it was blocked from leaving with its heavy equipment by local Armenians. Eventually they would be airlifted out and their regiment disbanded but their tanks remained and were quickly claimed by the Armenians. They had many retired Soviet officers in their ranks who had experience with tanks. However they had some issues, the first was when they claimed the 8 operational T-72’s left in Stepanakert (Of an original 10 one had no engine and another had been disabled by the Soviets) they discovered that they had nobody in their ranks that had driven a T-72. Gagik Avsharian who was to oversee training had served in a T-64 and they didn’t have enough veterans with even that experience to crew the tanks and BMP’s that they claimed. However with Azerbaijan closing in they had little time, the crews went straight into battle on the 6th when the Azerbaijanis attacked at Askeran. They couldn’t work the autoloaders so had to hand load shells. The people they had crewing the BMP’s weren’t even that familiar, they didn’t know how to load the main gun so low comedy ensued when they sent a guy running to a nearby village who did know how to load it and brought him back so he could demonstrate the loading process. The Armenians would beat off the Azerbaijani attack at Askeran but the Azerbaijanis had command of the heights surrounding the city. As the siege started to establish the Azerbaijan Popular Front militia commander, Rahim Gaziev, would bring up two BM-21 Grads to those heights near Shusha and fired indiscriminately into the centre of Stepanakert. The majority of the architecture at the time was high rise soviet flat blocks which presented a very easy target with whole walls getting torn away from hits from the rockets. The 55’000 citizens of the city would spend their nights in bomb shelters and the day dealing with the hazards of a city with no power and little food and heat. However outside in the war of the villages the Azerbaijanis were being pushed steadily back by Armenia. Their positions as the spring of 1992 wore on were focused around the town of Shusha. Assault on Shusha  Shusha itself is a long standing fortress area, it had withstood the Persians on many occasions when they invaded and most importantly sat astride the major route from Armenia into Nagorno Karabakh and so enabled the ongoing siege of Stepanakert. However Shusha itself was in trouble, its own supply line went close to Armenian territory and could be easily cut off or harassed. Attempts at helicopter resupply were curtailed after Armenian AA covered the fortress. Attempts to sally out and secure nearby territory were bloodily repulsed, with an entire company of Azerbaijani troops being killed or routed in an attempt by Tajedin Mekhtiev, Azerbaijans second defence minister, to capture the village of Karintak. He was sacked shortly afterwards. Unity was a considerable problem among the forces there, there were four distinct groups there comprised of police, armed forces and militia, none of whom trusted each other or the commander that had been nominally put over them. Mekhtiev was replaced by Rahim Gaziev, who was not a soldier but a former maths lecturer, who would leave after a month to be appointed the new minister of defence and was replaced again by Elbrus Orujev, who was an army officer but had been given responsibility for 3 other towns as well as Shusha. (Lachin, Kubatly and Zengilan). As shown on the map that is an absurd quantity of front to give over to one man. Morale was such that columns of militia were observed leaving the area and the defenders were thinning out until the defence was hollowed out and consisting of only a hundred or so people. Nobody had taken responsibility directly for Shusha and as such the defence was pretty much doomed.  The Armenian commander, Arkady Ter-Tatevosian had a simple plan for taking Shusha, he was a veteran of the Soviet army originally from Georgia. The Armenians had taken the Khojali airstrip which enabled the landing of the neccesary supplies. The plan was to take the surrounding villages and hold them to draw the garrison out of the town itself in an effort to retake the villages. The skirmish at Karintak was one example of this plan functioning, another was an assault on the 26th heights just outside of the town itself. As the conflict went on into May Orujev would make a desperate appeal for help which went almost completely unanswered, his own brother would lead an attempt at a diversionary assault from Aghdam but it was too far out to make a difference. The Armenians scaled the cliffs around the town on the morning of the 8th of May. There was a tank battle between Gagik Avsharian (Armenia) and Albert Aguranov (Azerbaijan) near the TV transmitter when they came upon each other at a range of 350 meters. Avsharian would lose the fight managing to leap clear before his tank was destroyed, though his driver and gunner were not so fortunate. Assaulting Shusha was proving to be a very bloody affair on both sides. But as the days fighting ended Orujev found he had barely any troops left and with no sign of help incoming ordered a retreat that evening. Aguranov would be killed during this retreat by an unknown sniper. Armenia would move into the fortress unopposed the following day. They would discover huge stockpiles of weapons, including dozens of crates of Grad rockets which they simply had not had the manpower to use and certainly had they done so it could have made life very very unpleasant for the attacking Armenians. What they found was somewhat indicative of the ethnic cleansing that went on, and I don’t mean that purely in the sense of the death of the people who lived there, but in the sense that both Azerbaijan and Armenia were trying to wipe the others cultural influence off the map. As we established in earlier posts there is an intense cultural rivalry for whose the land is. They found that Azerbaijan had stripped the place of much of its heritage as it related to Armenia. They had destroyed the statues outside of the Christian church and sold off its bell (The bell would later be found for sale in a market in Donetsk in Ukraine and would be bought and returned). When the Armenian Karabakis took the place they would also try to wipe out the Azeri influence in return, they burned one of the two mosques and returning Armenian locals stood infront of the other to stop them shooting it with a BMP, while others barricaded themselves in the town museum to stop it being looted. However much of the town was burned regardless. The loss of Shusha itself was very much the end for Azerbaijan in this area of the front, it was their last significant holding in Karabakh as well as a place that held great emotional significance as a long standing fortress for centuries and one that had significant importance in Azerbaijani history. It also destroyed the chance at a negotiated settlement. Armenia and Azerbaijan had both been on the way to Tehran for peace talks, they had signed a general understanding for a peace agreement in Tehran on the day before the assault between Armenian leader Levon Ter-Petrosian and Azerbaijani leader Yaqub Mamedov. The news of the assault on Shusha however would destroy this effort and would plunge Azerbaijan into internal chaos. Azerbaijani coups and counter coups. Conspiracy theories roiled in Azerbaijan people blamed various figures for the loss accusing them of having been bribed or in conspiring to embarrass Mamedov and to bring back Mutalibov to power. None of these are particularly credible as the fall of Shusha is a simple tale of complete incompetence. However it gave the remainder of the former communists a pretext for what they were to do next. When parliament reconvened on the 14th of May 1992 the communists announced that Mutalibov was exonerated of all guilt into the events at Khojali and hence his resignation was unconstitutional. Mutalibov then returned to the chamber and accepted his return to the presidency and cancelled the 7th of June elections. This would spark a brief struggle, the Grey Wolves paramilitary group would spearhead an attack on the parliament building on the 15th of May with tanks that would remove Mutalibov from power. Isa Gambar who was a veteran politician and part of the opposition block would become head of state and Hamidov, head of the Grey Wolves would become interior minister. They dissolved the parliament, rescheduled the election for the 7th of June and vested its power in a different legislative body, the Milli Shura or National Council. In order to consolidate power however many forces had been withdrawn from Karabakh, back to Azerbaijan proper, this meant that Azerbaijani defences were even more depleted than usual, particularly in the last remaining obstacle between Nagorno Karabakh and Armenia, the town of Lachin. In theory it should have been well defended with nearly 3000 fighters in the area and the town being set up on a hill in a very defensible position, but again there was no commander in charge and so they evaporated and the Armenians largely let them vanish into the hills, on the 18th of May Armenian forces would take and burn the town and would finally link Nagorno Karabakh to Armenia proper. It would be one of the last easy Armenian victories of the war, which still has nearly two years to go. They had to this point been fighting largely disorganised and poorly supported Azerbaijani soldiers in a war that had been largely fought with light infantry with quite sparse heavy equipment, fighting around Stepanakert notwithstanding. Conclusions Azerbaijan has suffered from political inaction which has caused this but with the final settling of who holds political authority they will make a much better showing of their prowess in the coming war. It held so many advantages over Armenia that honestly if it had managed to get its act together even 6 months earlier than it did then it would have likely inflicted a fairly crushing defeat. But we will in the next post explore what exactly those were and what the affect that they will have in prolonging the conflict. Azerbaijans delicate political unity that it has achieved will not last long but will I think provide a good indication of how the war might have very plausibly gone different. Armenia itself is fighting quite a disjointed war, so far it has kept a reasonable hold on the N-K forces that fight alongside it, however cracks are starting to show, the burnings of Shusha and Lachin were not things ordered by Armenias government or military, nor speculatively was the assault on Shusha itself as that directly frustrated the peace agreement that they had just signed and deeply embarrassed Iran who was an important country that Armenia was courting. This lack of control would exacerbate the humanitarian effects of the war as it would stretch on, the massacres we covered here could be interpreted to be tragic accidents of war, but the deliberate cleansing of Azerbaijanis from occupied areas would intensify as the war continued. We will also explore the role of the newly emerging Russian Federation in this, as you may imagine they would be up to their necks in it. Much like the origins of the whole conflict, how it would develop would have its roots in the actions of the USSR stretching back the last 30 years. Russia itself is less than a year out from the 1993 constitutional crisis and its actions will reflect that, seeming disjointed and confused, largely because any hint of good governance had long since left. Which was a problem because they were really the only nation who were capable and willing to insert enough forces to keep the two nations apart and form any kind of peacekeeping force. The international response is very confused as well, we covered briefly the attempts by Iran and the RF to mediate, but there are also attempts from the Organisation for Secuurity and Cooperation in Europe (then the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe) had just admitted both Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1992 and as such also tried to mediate. There was also an attempts from the UN headed by former US secretary of state Cyrus Vance, these competing missions just added confusion and muddle and resulted in the entire process being used as a platform to launch bombastic press releases from either side with no real negotiation happening and zero chance of a negotiated settlement, this was a war that would end up being fought until it ran out of steam. Bibliography and Further reading Black Garden: Thomas de Waal The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict: Heiko Kruger Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in the South Caucasus: Ohannes Geukjian. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Feb 8, 2021 |
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Feb 8, 2021 16:30
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Ensign Expendable posted:Torsion bars are the most noticeable thing, you can tell when a tank burned out because they visibly sag. Sufficiently hot fires can compromise the hardening of the armour as well. If the fire is small enough, then you can scoop out the internals and replace them, salvaging the hull. Obviously there are different fires, but if you're to the point of "replace the internals" it is generally not efficient to salvage the tank. Once the fire is big enough to burn the powerpack everything else will be compromised so badly that it isn't practical to go through the process of trying to do anything but maybe salvaging what you can for spare parts. Maybe - MAYBE - if this happened under conditions where you have a LOT of time and manpower available to do what is essentially a full rebuild you might want to consider it, but more often than not it isn't worth it.
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Feb 8, 2021 17:14
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SlothfulCobra posted:I've been reading a couple fantasy stories, and I started wondering what kinds of tactics would an army use to fight like a non-humanoid threat. I know that there's like group hunts of boar, but what if there was a stampeding herd of like a thousand boar, or if they were a herd of giant pigs that if an army couldn't stop, they'd go destroy a city? Would like a shield wall be good? Maybe a pike square? Or would it be better for a bunch of mounted cavalry try flank and divert the herd like a bunch of cowboys? What if they were like wolves or velociraptors? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump North American plains tribes came up with some pretty good tactics for handling herds of bison which probably could be adapted for the "stampeding herds" questions. Other hunting techniques they used included putting up visual barriers which would funnel them into killing areas. There is also video out there of how African bush tribes hunt elephants. In short, they sneak up on them, wound them (the example I saw featured an axe stroke to calf), and then harrass them until they die.
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Feb 8, 2021 17:25
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Libluini posted:Some authors thought about this. In one case, I remember a fantasy Roman army fighting insectoid monsters, and the monster army managed to adapt by attacking with sickle-like claws from above, which avoided the shields and hit the fantasy Romans directly in the head, with gruesome results. I think they adapted back by improving their helmets or something? I wanna say that this is a riff on the Romans encountering some guys in the Balkans peninsula who had weird curved hacking swords. They updated something about their armor on the fly in response. Falxes? e: cool-seeming writeup here: https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Falx aphid_licker fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Feb 8, 2021 |
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Feb 8, 2021 17:50
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Libluini posted:Some authors thought about this. In one case, I remember a fantasy Roman army fighting insectoid monsters, and the monster army managed to adapt by attacking with sickle-like claws from above, which avoided the shields and hit the fantasy Romans directly in the head, with gruesome results. I think they adapted back by improving their helmets or something? Why not just: 
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Feb 8, 2021 18:02
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Cessna posted:Why not just: Because you can't really fight when you're in that position, can you?
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Feb 8, 2021 18:16
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Cessna posted:Why not just: Thatoneguyintimecommanders.jpeg
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Feb 8, 2021 18:35
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Epicurius posted:Because you can't really fight when you're in that position, can you? Yeah, there's NO WAY that someone could lift their shield to block something coming at their head and still fight. Better redesign their helmets.
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Feb 8, 2021 18:47
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The more questionable aspect of "just redesign the helmets" is that helmets tend to be priority #1 for iron age equipment sets, on account of head injuries being super bad and helmets being considerably easier/cheaper to make than nearly any other piece of armor. You tend to make helmets as protective as possible, up to the point where you start getting tradeoffs with vision, communication, or breathing. Scyther from pokemon doing a big chop is not fundamentally different from "dude with axe doing a big chop" which is a pretty normal threat for Romans to worry about. CommonShore posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump Poisons are also very useful for hunting huge animals.
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Feb 8, 2021 19:03
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I don't know why people haven't mentioned probably the biggest element yet. Dig ditches. Dig lots of ditches.
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Feb 8, 2021 19:10
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Tulip posted:The more questionable aspect of "just redesign the helmets" is that helmets tend to be priority #1 for iron age equipment sets, on account of head injuries being super bad and helmets being considerably easier/cheaper to make than nearly any other piece of armor. You tend to make helmets as protective as possible, up to the point where you start getting tradeoffs with vision, communication, or breathing. Scyther from pokemon doing a big chop is not fundamentally different from "dude with axe doing a big chop" which is a pretty normal threat for Romans to worry about. Agreed. A Roman helmet is a well designed piece of gear; it protects your skull, a lot of your face, and the back of your neck, but lets you see and hear:  I don't see how "hit from above" is something that this just didn't anticipate. Add in the fact that, yes, you can lift your shield with one arm and use your sword with the other and I'm not seeing much value in that book.
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Feb 8, 2021 19:10
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Cessna posted:Agreed. A Roman helmet is a well designed piece of gear; it protects your skull, a lot of your face, and the back of your neck, but lets you see and hear: There's popular claims/theories that the Roman helmets were reinforced in response to the Dacian Falx, so the author of the bug thing was probably making an analogy to that.
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Feb 8, 2021 19:17
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Anyway Cessna used the wrong image, but covering yourself from the above with the Scutum while stabbing the enemy from under the shield is a very standard technique. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veK-HDPzmww
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Feb 8, 2021 19:18
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aphid_licker posted:I wanna say that this is a riff on the Romans encountering some guys in the Balkans peninsula who had weird curved hacking swords. They updated something about their armor on the fly in response. Falxes? Yeah that's the story I've heard about falxes. And I don't think it's like they just avoided shields by magic. They just pierced the Roman helmets reliably compared to sword and spears. The Romans responded by adding some braces onto their round helmets
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Feb 8, 2021 19:19
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Cessna posted:Agreed. A Roman helmet is a well designed piece of gear; it protects your skull, a lot of your face, and the back of your neck, but lets you see and hear: And the part in the back is already there for exactly that kind of scenario. with the big rear end shield in front of them, one of the ways to get around it is for the attacker to get over the shield and rake their weapon along the legionaries back/neck. With their head down, the big thing on the back of the helmet protects that exact spot.
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Feb 8, 2021 19:19
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I thought we knew very little about Roman tactics and fighting methods
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Feb 8, 2021 19:19
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Cessna posted:Agreed. A Roman helmet is a well designed piece of gear; it protects your skull, a lot of your face, and the back of your neck, but lets you see and hear: This is a helmet that starts showing up after the Dacian Wars, where falxes enter Roman imagination. The little ridge on the forehead was added to address the falx issue. Falxes were basically like picks, though they were curved blades ending in a point, rather than a pick head. All the force gets impacted on that point and it's quite good at penetrating metal. zoux posted:I thought we knew very little about Roman tactics and fighting methods No, we know a decent bit about how they fought, just less about how the details of how the military operated as an organization.
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Feb 8, 2021 19:24
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Cessna posted:Agreed. A Roman helmet is a well designed piece of gear; it protects your skull, a lot of your face, and the back of your neck, but lets you see and hear: Yes yes, but how many stampings did it take to manufacture?
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Feb 8, 2021 19:25
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Where my mind is going with the 'how would a premodern military fight fantasy creatures' is kind of coming around to like 4 tiers of fantasy creatures (and I'm mostly thinking about like, DnD Monster Manual stuff): 1. Stuff that reduces to real world threats without a lot of difference. A lot of stuff is basically "weird looking horse" or "weird looking bear" or "weird looking elephant," and a lot of stuff like Orcs and Dwarfs is basically just "an ethnic group." Not a lot of speculation here. 2. Similar to a real world threat but with a significant twist. Mostly I'm thinking about things like Ogres that are both large and intelligent - I'd call this a fairly significant twist because a lot of the anti-elephant tactics rest on the fact that elephants are much worse behaved in combat than even horses, and my fantasy intuition is that it's not really reasonable that an ogre can be defeated by basically scaring it into either running off the field or back through its own forces. Not super interesting? 3. Stuff that's wild but not incredibly powerful. Stuff like blink dogs, rust monsters, small salamanders, gelatinous cubes. Maybe even some of the less crazy undead would fit in here since it's not like you can demoralize/shock zombies off the field. I think a lot of this really just comes down to the specific monster - tactics good against blink dogs aren't going to be useful against basilisks. 4. Stuff that is wild and incredibly powerful. Your dragons and liches and poo poo that are probably more like strategic level threats than tactical ones. Fangz posted:I don't know why people haven't mentioned probably the biggest element yet. Dig ditches. Dig lots of ditches. Never underestimate the humble shovel. zoux posted:I thought we knew very little about Roman tactics and fighting methods We definitely have some gaps in our knowledge (Tod's Workshop did a couple videos about plumbata, which we know a decent amount about but there's definitely still room for speculation) and occasionally stuff like "Legio XXII just kind of fades out of the record with no specific mention of what happened to it" but it's generally safe to say that we know more about Roman tactics and fighting methods than nearly any other premodern military. A relatively literate society, organized around its military aristocracy, that has been studied in extreme detail by historians.
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Feb 8, 2021 19:47
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Tulip posted:The more questionable aspect of "just redesign the helmets" is that helmets tend to be priority #1 for iron age equipment sets, on account of head injuries being super bad and helmets being considerably easier/cheaper to make than nearly any other piece of armor. You tend to make helmets as protective as possible, up to the point where you start getting tradeoffs with vision, communication, or breathing. Scyther from pokemon doing a big chop is not fundamentally different from "dude with axe doing a big chop" which is a pretty normal threat for Romans to worry about. Roman metallurgy was not really that good. They didn't produce reliable steel, I don't think they fully understood the process. Maybe all the slave labour didn't help. Helmets were important, but ultimately the best defense was just having a big rear end shield to hide behind and some reliable buddies along. Axes were not very common weapons in the classical world. Spears were the most common by far, but the quintessential Gaulish weapon was the sword, not the axe. The only people that seemed to use axes a lot, at least based on conventions at the time, were Lydians in Anatolia. Epicurius posted:Because you can't really fight when you're in that position, can you? Those guys are literally using their sword hands to hold up their buddies shield lol The testudo in Roman military handbooks is like exclusively for receiving a bunch of missile fire and nothing else. Hollywood and nerds love the formation for some reason. Maybe because it's one of the few documented ones? For actual combat the Romans didn't huddle together, they had a decent amount of space between then and they used their shields for personal protection. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Feb 8, 2021 |
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Feb 8, 2021 19:50
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:This is a helmet that starts showing up after the Dacian Wars, where falxes enter Roman imagination. And here's the helmet from Colchester:  Which is dated from the Boudican revolt of 61AD, which was decades before the Dacian wars. The eyebrow ridge and neck protection definitively predate them. Cessna fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Feb 8, 2021 |
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Feb 8, 2021 20:11
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:
I think it's just one of those things where it's famous and recognizable, while also looking aesthetically pleasing and seeming "clever". Like it obviously has serious limitations if you think about it, but it makes sense as a dumb Hollywood trope because it's something that seems "smart" to everyone and they can understand it. Kind of like how often protagonists in medieval war movies independently derive the schiltron. But I'm just guessing.
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Feb 8, 2021 20:16
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Cessna posted:And here's the helmet from Colchester: I'm imagining that this had a whole bunch of organic material features that are now gone that made it look entirely different, perhaps like those hats from the 90s that had ridiculously long brims, and then some kind of floppy ears.
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Feb 8, 2021 20:26
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CommonShore posted:I'm imagining that this had a whole bunch of organic material features that are now gone that made it look entirely different, perhaps like those hats from the 90s that had ridiculously long brims, and then some kind of floppy ears. It's not cast in a single piece like a modern helmet; I'm pretty sure they just copied a pattern and then attached whatever else they needed as they went along.
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Feb 8, 2021 20:31
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CommonShore posted:I'm imagining that this had a whole bunch of organic material features that are now gone that made it look entirely different, perhaps like those hats from the 90s that had ridiculously long brims, and then some kind of floppy ears. I'm no historian but I'm assuming it at least had fur/feathers/horse-hair/as much ridiculous bling as could be found without loving with function.
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Feb 8, 2021 20:32
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CommonShore posted:I'm imagining that this had a whole bunch of organic material features that are now gone that made it look entirely different, perhaps like those hats from the 90s that had ridiculously long brims, and then some kind of floppy ears. IIRC, there are references to it being worn over a leather cap at minimum in some historical writing.
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Feb 8, 2021 20:40
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Tulip posted:We definitely have some gaps in our knowledge (Tod's Workshop did a couple videos about plumbata, which we know a decent amount about but there's definitely still room for speculation) and occasionally stuff like "Legio XXII just kind of fades out of the record with no specific mention of what happened to it" but it's generally safe to say that we know more about Roman tactics and fighting methods than nearly any other premodern military. A relatively literate society, organized around its military aristocracy, that has been studied in extreme detail by historians. Huh I wonder where I got that idea from, I remember thinking it was odd that we wouldn't have Roman manuals or whatever. So we know how they arrayed troops on the battlefield, how they changed lines, small unit tactics, stuff like that?
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Feb 8, 2021 20:45
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Cessna posted:And here's the helmet from Colchester: I was actually mistaken about the purported modification, it's actually crossguards on the top of the helmet like so. This ones is theorized to be a field modification from a site in Berzibos, Romania (Dacia in Roman times), because its kind of lovely work that was slammed onto the existing decoration.  Anyways like I said, I don't think the Romans were surprised by people swinging for the head, but the story of the falx goes that it was just a horrifying weapon that could pierce their helmets easily. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Feb 8, 2021 |
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Feb 8, 2021 20:52
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zoux posted:Huh I wonder where I got that idea from, I remember thinking it was odd that we wouldn't have Roman manuals or whatever. So we know how they arrayed troops on the battlefield, how they changed lines, small unit tactics, stuff like that? Yes and no. We know a lot, but there's a lot we don't know. I had a History prof use the analogy of "trying to study the US Army in the 70s through Beetle Bailey cartoons." Like - in the Republican era we know they used the "triplex acies" - three lines of troops (plus skirmishers out front) that would move up, fight, then let the next line move up and fight, etc. But how EXACTLY this worked we don't know. This is probably because to the ancient authors, well, everyone already knew, so why bother explaining the boring stuff? This leads to some oddities. For example, not once in Caesar's Gallic Wars does he mention his troops wearing armor. Because to him, well, why mention it? It would be like a modern author covering the fact that, yes, modern soldiers do wear shoes. Nonetheless, in the past there was speculation that maybe they didn't wear armor which - well, no, they did. There are also weird "received knowledge" gaps. Like, we can look at Trajan's column and see the cool designs on the Roman shields. But - what color were they? did Roman shields in the Republican era, centuries before, have similar designs? Or no decoration at all? We can only guess.
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Feb 8, 2021 21:01
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You want at least an interior liner because somebody bonking an iron pot that's around your head is still going to suck pretty bad compared to getting some wool/leather in there. Also I think testudos have a certain amount of popularity these days both because of holywood and because protest movements over the last few decades have found them pretty useful for dealing with a lot of crowd dispersal techniques (flash bangs, pepper balls, that sort of thing). Cessna posted:It's not cast in a single piece like a modern helmet; I'm pretty sure they just copied a pattern and then attached whatever else they needed as they went along. It's a small thing but it was very definitely not cast. Europe got into the cast iron game so late that there's wrought iron cannons. Looks like this. zoux posted:Huh I wonder where I got that idea from, I remember thinking it was odd that we wouldn't have Roman manuals or whatever. So we know how they arrayed troops on the battlefield, how they changed lines, small unit tactics, stuff like that? I really don't know where you got that from yeah. The Romans definitely made pretty recognizable military manuals. (e: Cessna's answer is better) Slim Jim Pickens posted:Roman metallurgy was not really that good. They didn't produce reliable steel, I don't think they fully understood the process. Maybe all the slave labour didn't help. Helmets were important, but ultimately the best defense was just having a big rear end shield to hide behind and some reliable buddies along. The slave labor probably if anything did help (iron's better with some working, which here means 'dudes with hammers') but yeah the Romans were not uniquely talented at producing iron. I don't have any particular reason to believe they were worse than any of their neighbors - there's evidence that some Indian smiths were very good at making steel but that's not a neighbor. My point however was more that the Romans probably had their helmets about as good as could be made without advances in metallurgy that wouldn't happen for centuries. Also yeah spears are good, most societies tend to center spears as the weapon of choice, they take a lot less material to make and you get a lot of reach.
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Feb 8, 2021 21:09
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I was actually mistaken about the purported modification, it's actually crossguards on the top of the helmet like so. This ones is theorized to be a field modification from a site in Berzibos, Romania (Dacia in Roman times), because its kind of lovely work that was slammed onto the existing decoration. Those things kinda make it look like they weren't worried about the helmet getting pierced but rather split? Like most of the top of the helmet still is as pierceable as it ever was.
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Feb 8, 2021 21:14
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Tulip posted:It's a small thing but it was very definitely not cast. Europe got into the cast iron game so late that there's wrought iron cannons. Looks like this. Absolutely; I was just making the point that it wasn't made in a single uniform piece like a modern helmet. One more example of how "what we know" can lead to oddities in Roman stuff. This is from Trajan's column:  Yeah, they're wearing something that's pretty clearly armor. But what was it made of? Back in the 19th century the interpretation was that those "straps" on their shoulder were leather, like a Roman military belt (cingulum militare). But then in 1899 archaeologists found armor at Carnuntum, a Roman fort in Austria, that followed that pattern, but in metal. Nonetheless, a lot of cultural inertia in the form of Victorian illustrations or Bible stories with Roman soldiers showing them wearing leather armor in that pattern, which was never really a thing that happened: 
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Feb 8, 2021 21:21
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Cessna posted:Absolutely; I was just making the point that it wasn't made in a single uniform piece like a modern helmet. Oh that's a fun picture, since the guys in the foreground are wearing just like, bag leather arrayed like armor but the guys off to the sides are wearing what looks like pretty hardened leather. And yeah that is why finds in archaeology can be so exciting for premodern stuff. There's been some incredible finds in the last couple decades around beer and bread due to better sample collection & mass spec, but there's also been some pretty cool finds about the paint on marble statues in addition to stuff like clothing and tools/weapons.
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Feb 8, 2021 21:31
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aphid_licker posted:Those things kinda make it look like they weren't worried about the helmet getting pierced but rather split? Like most of the top of the helmet still is as pierceable as it ever was. Yeah, the falx is this thing  while some have more of an extreme curve that ends with an almost pick-like point, they were known as extremely powerful cutting swords, and given that ancient roman helmets would not be made like modern steel replicas, there seems to have been a rash of them getting straight up hewn in two by falx or rhomphaia.
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Feb 8, 2021 21:31
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aphid_licker posted:Those things kinda make it look like they weren't worried about the helmet getting pierced but rather split? Like most of the top of the helmet still is as pierceable as it ever was. WoodrowSkillson posted:Yeah, the falx is this thing More common were one-handed falxes with smaller blades but basically the same shape. Yeah, with these things the difference between piercing a helmet or splitting a helmet was just a matter of how it hit. 
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Feb 8, 2021 21:35
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In the end, the Romans still won, so it's not like falxes were the One Weird Trick that defeated the roman legions.
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Feb 8, 2021 21:37
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It is fascinating that the romans managed to create this weird hybrid army thats run at the top by aristocrats looking for political fame whom every so often gently caress everything up disastrously, but then at a certain point not very much lower than the top it suddenly gets extremely professional and standardised. Like, Roman professional staff work was a thing to the extent that people sat down and drafted military manuals.
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Feb 8, 2021 21:52
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aphid_licker posted:I wanna say that this is a riff on the Romans encountering some guys in the Balkans peninsula who had weird curved hacking swords. They updated something about their armor on the fly in response. Falxes? That would either be an amazing coincidence or an amazing act of research for an author who freely admitted he wrote that series because of a bet he couldn't combine Roman legions and Pokemón.  Cessna posted:Why not just: Because it's hard to fly and use magic when in this formation
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Feb 8, 2021 22:02
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Alchenar posted:It is fascinating that the romans managed to create this weird hybrid army thats run at the top by aristocrats looking for political fame whom every so often gently caress everything up disastrously, but then at a certain point not very much lower than the top it suddenly gets extremely professional and standardised. This accurately describes the US military today.
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Feb 8, 2021 22:04
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Cessna posted:This accurately describes the US military today. Well at least people aren't directly purchasing commissions or raising regiments and proclaiming themselves colonels anymore.
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Feb 8, 2021 22:05
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