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White Coke posted:Pistols were useful in the 16th/17th century as anti-cavalry weapons. They were basically improved lances, with better range and armor penetration as a trade off for having to aim and reload them. Against infantry they weren't as effective because a musket has better range and armor penetration than a pistol, and the infantry are probably not going to be as heavily armored anyway. As for why they didn't use them much by the Napoleonic Wars I'm not so sure. I think they would still fire them with a charge at least. I don't think it's really true that cavalry ditched carbines and pistols during the Napoleonic Wars. Perhaps for shooting up formed infantry, but IIRC Napoleon actually deliberately asked for more carbines for his cavalry for the 1812 campaign in Russia, due to the need for them in not-so-pitched battles.
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Dec 8, 2020 10:14
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Alchenar posted:I think the main difference is that Europe doesn't have the vast empty spaces that the US continent does, so while full blown independent Cavalry raids and expeditions are a thing in the ACW, when it comes to the Austro-Prussian war or the Franco-German war they exist much more as a screening and scouting force. The Russians actually paid a lot of attention to cavalry in the ACW and sought to develop a cavalry arm as an independent raiding and striking force.
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Dec 8, 2020 18:40
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Cyrano4747 posted:Uh, yeah, they do that all the time. The US even experimented with having the HQ element of an armored cavalry squadron in Vietnam be airmobile to allow maximum flexibility in its positioning during dispersed operations.
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Dec 8, 2020 20:13
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Cessna posted:I deliberately avoid collecting US Paratrooper stuff as they are - or, were, when I was actively reenacting and going to events - disproportionately popular, especially in reenacting and collecting. If I wanted to re-enact US i'd be like, the 106 ID that way my being bad at basic military skills would be very justified.
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Dec 16, 2020 18:12
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Dance Officer posted:Yes but the French had too small a professional army at the start of the war for all the things it needed to do, like train recruits and man the borders. This was done knowingly by the French government because it feared making the army too strong would lead to a military coup. Yeah the rapid buildup of the army made the french infantry divisions really poor and sluggish- it's why you see situations where there's these wide open avenues of counterattack and the attack never materializes or materializes late. These divisions are under-trained and completely raw, even though they have a relatively modern MTOE. The DLMs and DCRs are serious business, but the weakness of the infantry made the cordon around the Ardennes intensely porous. The cavalry also proved to be a non-factor as the 1940 armies really had no experience resisting blitz attacks this way. The main antitank weapon of the time was the antitank gun and the French deployed theirs in an even way, as most everyone did in 1940, thusly a road column of tanks could break through this defense fairly easily after maybe losing a single vehicle. This kind of thing really hammered the Soviets in 1941, too.
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Dec 17, 2020 13:45
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OctaviusBeaver posted:The Germans had an absolutely massive column of vehicles and troops heading into the Ardennes. Hundreds of miles long IIRC attacking at a very narrow point. As it happened the French weren't expecting it but if they had a couple of divisions in the right spot it could easily have caused the worlds biggest traffic jam, and if they didn't keep air supremacy it would be a massive target. They only had a few months of fuel reserves (~6 months) which eased after they beat France since Romania fell into their orbit, but if France holds out then Germany is on a ticking clock. The French and British can import whatever raw materials they need from the rest of the world and can buy manufactured goods from the US while Germany can't. I think if France survived the initial confrontation then their chances started looking quite good in the medium to long term. The way the French Army was, for the most part, they had to guess fairly correctly for it to work- anything requiring quick countermoves is just not going to work for such a raw force, particularly the infantry divisions. The idea with the Ardennes was that the cavalry cordon could slow such columns enough to give the rest of the army time to respond, but it turns out the cordon offered almost nothing as the troops that were sent had very meager anti-tank weapons, even for 1940. Given the performance of french infantry divisions in 1940, i'm not that hopeful about their odds when they have to rush into positions in the Ardennes, but it certainly wouldn't have been quite what really happened, which was almost wide open daylight once they crossed the Meuse. That being said, if the French guessed correctly, or simply opted to be willing to fight in France and chose a more cautious approach, there's a chance Germany has trouble with resources as you say.
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Dec 18, 2020 03:03
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Comstar posted:What made the rifling and heavier artillery in the ACW possible compared to the Napoleonic era? Vast improvements in industrial steel production technology.
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Dec 22, 2020 14:31
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FPyat posted:Something I've been wondering about the American Civil War - did the proximity of the two opposing capitals have interesting effects on the war's strategic balance? That's a bit of a vague question but if you're wondering about how it affected both sides strategy- the answer is, "extensively". The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia was prioritized heavily in a way that often left the other Confederate forces in the cold for that very reason. A severe defeat on either side left the capital open, and both sides kept sizable garrisons at their capitals(though Davis was less stingy about releasing bits of the Richmond Garrison than Lincoln was about the DC garrison). Early, with a weakened corps in 1864 made it all the way to Fort Stevens outside Washington which drew a heavy response from Grant, whereas Sherman.. well.. Sherman posted:"drat him! if he will go to the Ohio River I'll give him rations! The nearer the rebels come to us, the easier it will be to kill them." This is in reference to Hood's late 1864 attempt to counterattack by getting in behind Sherman after Atlanta fell. That all being said, Sherman did send troops to Tennesee to stop Hood, but the defense of capitals, especially on the US side, was a huge concern. For example, the need to keep a strong force between Richmond and DC was one of the reasons Irvin McDowell was very reluctant to leave his position on the Rappahannock while McClellan was fighting his way up the James to Richmond. If you take a look at a map, you'll find a huge number of battles(and some of the largest) basically took place in a fairly small geographical area in Northern Virginia, with Antietam and Gettysburg being outliers in the East, both representing Confederate invasions northward, past DC.
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Jan 6, 2021 14:37
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:the economics of killing off a poo poo ton of slaves every year are extremely unrealistic I believe there was a Roman estate management text that suggested that slaves be pushed as hard as possible then changed out every two years
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Jan 7, 2021 15:05
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Italians did some licensed production of German fighter engines, put them in some decent fighters but didn't build very much of them. Also the Germans were incredibly stingy about giving equipment to their allies until much later in the war. The Romanians did get some gear in 1942, but it was a pittance, and only as Soviet forces moved across Ukraine did the Germans provide the Romanians with Panzer IVs and Stugs for their 1st armored division. The Germans later provided some for the Hungarian armored divisions as well. The idea behind Romanian participation in the first place was that they would provide oil to be paid for in military equipment but the Germans were very flighty about paying for the oil, and it's one of the contributing factors to their defection.
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Jan 18, 2021 10:28
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Tias posted:Just played Steel Panthers where I could purchase a stand-alone "Anti-Tank platoon" of 8 pairs of anti-tank men with PTRD rifles, and it had me wondering, how did the Red Army in WW2 organize their anti-tank groups? I know the rifles were supplemented with men hurling molotovs, but how and where were these units organized in relation to the normal infantry squads and platoons? The soviets had ATR companies everywhere in their organizations, especially early in the war, and it varied a lot depending on the situation. Generally, at lower levels ATRs would be parceled out to squads, but they could sometimes be split into small tank hunter teams with HEAT grenades and molotovs as well as the ATR.
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Jan 19, 2021 15:53
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bewbies posted:There were basically three ways into the deep south (we'll use Atlanta as our "deep south" target) from the western side: Nashville --> Chattanooga --> Atlanta (the way they went), Memphis -- Chattanooga -- > Atlanta, and Vicksburg --> Jackson --> Birmingham/Montgomery --> Atlanta. That is a lot of miles to cover, but two armies probably could have done it, especially if they developed interior LOCs. They also had a lot of favorable terrain to make use of, either the mountains and rivers along the TN/GA border, or all of the rough terrain and waterways between Birmingham and Atlanta. If they'd fought a defensive campaign focusing on inflicting casualties in battles and raiding the long and vulnerable Union supply lines, it would have been a serious challenge for the Union armies to get through before their political willpower ran dry. Johnston's approach was probably the closest to this, but...he got fired for having insufficient panache, and indirectly handed the election to Lincoln. A lot of the problem with the CSA is that most effort had to be expended in the area where the two capitols were not far apart. This meant transfers of men and material from East to West was always going to be rare. This meant that in the area with the most strategic width, the Confederates were much more limited in their ability to operate in the field due to their lack of numbers. The dispersed geography combined with the rivers meant that Union numerical superiority counted for more, and Davis couldn't reinforce them. I actually think Davis was justified firing Johnston. Johnston's approach offered only a slow loss- he did a decent job delaying and inflicting casualties on Sherman but that was simply insufficient. Davis needed a general who was going to try to inflict a serious reversal, and as ill-fated as Hood was as a general, he was not insubordinate the way Johnston was. Davis's worst personnel decision by far was not firing Bragg when his subordinates petitioned for his removal. Either Buckner and all of the others had to go, or Bragg had to go, but Davis did neither, which directly resulted in disaster at the siege of Chattanooga. Oh, and abandoning the Mississippi was absolutely not in the cards- in particular, once the river was closed, percussion cap production would taper off, then nose dive as some of the materials needed were mined in Mexico.
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Feb 4, 2021 11:30
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bewbies posted:I've never heard of this -- if true, how did they get percussion caps after the summer of 63? A very aggressive reclaiming of distilleries got enough copper to make caps through 1864. The CSA did manage to find a chemical substitute for the mercury but copper would've still been a problem had the war continued. I heard about it in Porter Alexander's book. I don't think a central approach, simply defending the routes Atlanta would really have been politically feasible, it's sort of like "what if Lincoln stripped the entire DC garrison to go all out at Chancellorsville" to me. Sure, but it doesn't make sense given the politics of it. The needs of state governments in fact drove the CSA to engage on campaigns to try to eliminate US coastal enclaves to meager success. Also, my civil war hot take is that I think Davis made significantly fewer mistakes in his role as a wartime president than Lincoln. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Feb 4, 2021 |
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Feb 4, 2021 16:58
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White Coke posted:How important was Kentucky to controlling the Mississippi? I've seen a Lincoln quote about how he needed to have Kentucky in order to win the war, but there are lots of Lincoln "quotes". Didn't they declare neutrality? It was fairly significant, though not critical- the main appeal of controlling KY was to control the routes into TN, which allowed access to much of the rest of the South. The CSA ended up invading Kentucky to occupy a fortress to guard the Mississippi river. The US invaded afterwards to take Paducah, but the KY legislature only demanded the expulsion of Confederate forces. Pretty much any state with Mississippi coastline had relevance in controlling the river as fortresses could hold up Union naval attacks and allow the Confederates the use of at least parts of the river, keeping the west and east connected. This is important, especially with respect to the aforementioned copper imports from Mexico which were a vital part of the CSA war effort.
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Feb 4, 2021 20:55
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bewbies posted:My recollection was that it was the loss of the copper mines near Chattanooga that really put the CSA in a panic about its copper supply. Do you have some more info on Mexican imports? I'd never heard they were so much more important than the copper basin production. I need to dig into it, my source is Porter Alexander's book, but it's very possible he could've been mistaken(as by that time he was in the field). EDIT: You're right, it looks like most of the copper was produced in the Chattanooga area, though there were some imports from Mexico, it wasn't an on/off switch or anything for copper production. I'm still not certain a wholescale abandonment of the western theatre other than the route to Atlanta was at all politically viable, but it's more militarily viable than I thought. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Feb 4, 2021 |
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Feb 4, 2021 21:35
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White Coke posted:Can you elaborate? I don't know much about the ACW, but what I do "know" is that Davis was supposed to have been a much worse president than Lincoln, so much so that some people think if they had switched jobs the South would have won. Sure. So, first off, I want to say, I don't think any Confederate president really changes the outcome of the war. It's just too lopsided for that. Davis had a practically impossible task. I think what actually happened is a bit of an outlier. That being said, Davis' handling of his one direct command worked out well enough, though he did give an 'if practical' order to Johnston that ended up working out anyway, since Johnston didn't use it as a chance to be cautious. Lincoln was, I think, inexperienced in the task of managing generals and giving good strategic guidance. Lincoln put up with an enormous amount of rank insubordination from almost every CinC he had, whereas Davis was generally able to maintain a healthier relationship with his army commanders. Lincoln and his cabinet tended to oscillate between letting generals do what they wanted and putting intense pressure on them to move- instead of finding generals who agreed with his strategic direction, he let them act incredibly insubordinate(especially McClellan). As I said before, I think Davis had one huge gently caress-up, and that was not firing Bragg when his division commanders petitioned Davis for this- when this happens, one of the groups has to go, and it's far easier to replace Bragg than several division commanders. Instead, this dysfunctional command situation was allowed to continue to disastrous results at Chattanooga. His firing of Johnston for insubordination was somewhat reasonable, as while Johnston wasn't wrong that it would be almost impossible to inflict a reversal on Sherman's forces, offensive action was really the only thing that had any hope of actual victory. By this point, Sherman was way too close to Atlanta for a delay to matter. He needed a Chancellorsville-esque miracle and Johnston was simply not up to the task. It turned out, neither was Hood, but hindsight is 20/20. This is not to say Lincoln was a bad president and Davis good, but I think Davis was a better manager of the war than Lincoln. Lincoln's handling of domestic affairs was much better than his handling of military affairs. Also, I think one of the reasons for the Army of the Potomac's poor performance is that the CiC had too many corps reporting to him- it resulted in more difficulty coordinating the dispersed operations they were trying to do. The ANV had 2-3 corps, which made it so Lee wasn't so overburdened directly managing so many subordinates. Sherman had it right, when he organized his forces with the three armies so he had only three direct reports as opposed to the old AoP's 7-9. It's not that he didn't manage corps, but that he didn't need to at all times.
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Feb 6, 2021 03:03
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White Coke posted:What was the name of the book/author that pushed the myth of Sherman tanks being completely terrible? To put it in perspective, the author was trying to use that to make a hagiography of US tank crewmen, in a sort of more crass "Citizen Soldiers" book.
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Feb 6, 2021 11:45
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fat bossy gerbil posted:How did the Stug-III fare against tanks in a head on confrontation? I know they made tons of them and generally used them in an ambush or support capacity but if they were face to face with a t-34 or Sherman were they up to the task? Sure. Their main problem is that they had a very limited degree of rotation on the gun. The vehicle could be rotated, but that would cause the gun to shake sigificantly, taking time to settle down and requiring re-aiming. Turreted tanks had less of an issue with that on traverse. However, in the context of just rolling up to fight other tanks, it would pretty much come down to who stopped and engaged first. At longer ranges, the stug's armor might prove somewhat effective in resisting the AP shells of the earlier T-34s and Shermans, though meeting engagements almost never happened at these ranges. The stug battalions were Germany's answer to the need to get armor in the infantry formations. Though they never reached the level of, say, the US having 1-2 independent tank battalions for each infantry division, they provided valuable armored support in both offensive and defensive engagements for an increasingly poorly trained infantry arm.
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Feb 20, 2021 12:28
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Tree Bucket posted:What's the job of the bloke in front with his head next to the gun, and more importantly, how does he not die instantly of claustrophobia? That's the driver.
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Feb 25, 2021 11:23
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xthetenth posted:E: Is that the Leo 2's commander, or is the gunner in the loop of that? And is it just putting the crosshair on the target, holding while it gets a solution and when the turret gets there it fires? If so, fully sick. I think given the difficulty of using the technology, and based on some reading of how engagements went, that the fire control capability of ww2 era tanks were more based on crew experience and training than technology, as they required a lot more human input into the parameters. That's how you get Panthers at Arracourt being an absolute joke while 2nd Panzer Division's Panthers on the way to Bastogne wrecking the 9th and 10th AD's tanks. Even in similar situations in the Bulge, there's a difference between the performance of 2 Pz which had spent months in the strategic reserve preparing and, say, 12th SS which was hastily formed, where crews had barely any chance to practice firing the cannons on their brand new Panthers and jagdpanthers.
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Mar 2, 2021 15:01
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Carillon posted:Fantastic thanks for posting! Two questions I had from the video that may be dumb or you might not know, but at around 6 minutes he says the goal is to have the 7th armored cav regiment find the enemy, but left the 1st infantry division move forward to do the fighting, why would the goal be to have the desired outcome be to have the infantry division fight a tank division rather than the armored or armored cav groups present? Also why are the 7th armored cav regiment advancing first with the Bradleys in front if there's expectation of fighting? Are the optics that much better that it makes sense for the Bradleys to be up front of the Abrams if you're not expecting truly heavy fighting? In the end it seems that both were able to withstand the Iraqi T-72's so maybe it wasn't all that important, but the ordered switch had me thinking about it. Keep in mind that the 1st infantry division is an infantry division in name only. By this time, the difference between a US infantry division and armored division is somewhat notional. The true blue infantry divisions in the US army were the various 'light' infantry brigades.
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Mar 3, 2021 11:26
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Keep in mind that if you removed all motorization from a force it would effectively be unable to field any kind of artillery, not even 81mm mortars unless they had an NLF-style unit seeding the combat area with caches full of weapons and supplies beforehand. If you're wondering how units fighting modern style conflicts with no motorization and big units worked.. Even then, the people making the caches had motorized transport.
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Mar 4, 2021 00:23
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'm currently reading through a history of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment in Operation Market-Garden, and specifically their involvement in seizing the bridges over the Waal River at Nijmejen, and the difficult task (to put it mildly) of launching a river crossing, in canvas boats, in broad daylight, against active opposition on the other bank. The 82nd airborne was also tasked with securing the Grave bridge, and since they needed to keep a line of communications open with the drop zone to stay supplied, particularly with artillery ammunition, a location between the Nijmeghen bridge and grave bridge makes sense. Having the same DZ for both legs of the operation reduced the amount of troops needed for maintaining the DZ and allowed more men for the actual taking of objectives. There's a tendency to second-guess the drop zone choices in the op but the only one that I think was truly badly planned was the 1 AB's. The others largely make sense given the tasking of the divisions involved. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Mar 4, 2021 |
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Mar 4, 2021 14:33
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Alchenar posted:The big hmmm one is where someone caught up with Sobel and his version of events was "yeah they all refused to fight under me, but not because I was incompetent but because I'm Jewish". And you do have this oddity of this guy who everyone accepts is an extremely effective trainer of men somehow being uniquely unsuitable as a combat leader. For some reason. That nobody living will admit. While antisemitism probably did play a role in it, the US had the high-profile example of Lloyd Friedendall as someone who was much more suited to training and building military organizations than actually leading them.
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Mar 22, 2021 15:02
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Alchenar posted:Sobel could also have been bad at his job, but it's suspicious that the narrative that the show settled on is the one where the heroes get to be fairly clean heroes. The main criticism of Sobel as a leader was that he was 'petty and vindictive', which happens to be exactly how someone giving him anti-semitic abuse would describe him. Also the basic problem with training scenes in movies is they tend to focus on narratively interesting things like Sobel's discipline rather than technical training like small unit leadership and stuff. It's not hard to come off of the training scenes like the battalion and company would have had no real tactical training, and every instance of it being seen in the movies is in the context of a dig at Sobel. The US Army had a lot of problems with low level initiative in its regular infantry units and this was a common part of remedial training in the field, but the airborne divisions did not have the same problems as, say, 28th ID's infantry platoons.
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Mar 22, 2021 15:24
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Keep in mind that in the 1980s, the USSR was trying to upgrade their tank fleet with improved FCS (the "B" models of T-72, T-64, and T-80). The new model tanks were coming out, but they still had a huge fleet to replace and actual tank-usable IR sights are an incredibly expensive effort and still part of the next stage of upgrades which would've taken even longer. Given the limitations of their budget, going all in on improving their night optic capability just seems wasteful when most of your fleet still doesn't have laser rangefinders.
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Mar 29, 2021 21:48
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The invasion in 2003 was more fraught than I think it's made out to be. Many of the problems were somewhat overshadowed by the disaster afterward, but the units assigned to it were such a light footprint that they suffered a lot from militia units being left behind them in easy range of vulnerable truck convoys. Many of the logistical assets were simply not present because Rumsfeld picked a lot of the OOB himself based on what he thought the needs were. While none of this resulted in disaster, a more effectual Iraqi resistance in 2003 might've inflicted some serious losses on US forces given how risky some of the maneuvers were with how strung out the troops that were there were. A lot of this overstretch would come up after but even in the direct aftermath of fighting, they didn't have a ghost of a chance of securing the Iraqi army's supply dumps and armories before they were looted thoroughly.
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Apr 1, 2021 02:13
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Hannibal Rex posted:Thinking about this has led me to a question of my own: if the Central Powers had had enough foresight to consider the war unwinnable by that time, could they have used a magnanimous treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a diplomatic signal for better peace terms for themselves later on? I don't really think the Entente powers cared much about the Bolshevik government's peace and the military situation was such that the German military was never going to give the Bolsheviks much room to maneuver and Lenin was in no position to force anything. The thing about Brest-Litovsk is that no one really took it very seriously, not the Germans(they were strongly considering ousting the Bolsheviks themselves), not the Entente(who repudiated it). Even if it was kind, I think a peace made with Kerensky's government in 1917 might have had more weight, but the Entente powers would never have allowed it to happen, and Kerensky was much more sensitive to their desires than Lenin. Some of the German parliamentary socialists groused about the Bolsheviks suddenly being uninterested in self-determination when they tried to play hardball at the treaty but it was more a matter of the divisions in socialism at the time than anything else, and probably reflective of some of the animus between the German socialists and the Bolsheviks.
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Apr 6, 2021 22:35
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Cessna posted:Skip this one. It's chock full of historical inaccuracies. It's the "Stephen Ambrose" of Vietnam. Yeah, it, and a lot of media focus has really gotten people thinking Vietnam was covered in tunnels which vastly overstates what they were and their extent. I mean, it makes for a very claustrophobic, striking movie scene but most movement, both operational and tactical by VC units were done on the ground, by roads, trails, just like anyone else who went around in that country.
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Apr 12, 2021 16:40
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EggsAisle posted:Anyone have thoughts on Vo Nguyen Giap? Military genius or not, strengths and weaknesses, basically I'm interested in the guy in the context of military theory and wondering where he fits in. Sure, so, the first thing to understand about Giap is that almost his entire impact was on the French Indochinese war- once the country got split in half, a lot of shuffling in the Northern camp left both him and Ho Chi Minh in largely ceremonial posts. Giap had more pull than Ho, and had some say in the organization of the PAVN throughout the US part of the war, but they were both relatively marginal figures in terms of actually making strategic or operational decisions at that point. Giap played a large role in building the Viet Minh as a conventional-ish light infantry force, giving them enough striking power to threaten positions while also being able to evade enemy offensive action. Much of the 'big war' during the French period took place in the north of the country, where they could hide in the highlands and receive supply from the PRC. The first few years of the war were a bit less intense, but once the Communists gained control of China to the Vietnamese border, the Viet Minh were able to take a more conventional stance and gained access to tools like artillery. This led them to launch offensives that often didn't go all that well. Through 1950-52, Giap tried offensives against the French with mixed success- the de Lattre line(a large scale fortified perimeter around Hanoi and its environs) stymied him every time he challenged it but he was able to maintain control outside it. I think this experience is what would lead Giap to later advocate a more passive strategy once the Americans arrived- their ability to defend lines like that would far exceed the French and their capacity for airmobility dwarfed what the French could do, making anything like Dien Bien Phu impossible. Which, speaking of, Giap made a fairly effective strategic pivot into Laos after finding the de Lattre line to be difficult to breach, forcing the French to respond with the forces they could. The problem for the French was that they already had a fairly limited amount of force available, and it would not really be feasible to launch a truly solid incursion into Laos from land, given their needs elsewhere. Knowing this, the French decided to make a play to cut Viet Minh supply to possibly allow for offensive operations from the de Lattre line. Giap sniffed this out fairly quickly but it took time for the Viet Minh to get into position to punish this dispersal, and this did end up being his finest moment as a general. As I said before, once the North gained independence, Giap had less of a say in strategic decisions, he definitely made some organizational choices in the years between the French and US direct involvement, but Le Duan and the politburo made almost all the real decisions. Giap unsuccessfully advocated a pause in offensive activity while the US made its presence felt. It is difficult to tell what a more protracted approach would've led to. It's very possible that it would have allowed the VC to remain a significant part of the war for longer, giving Hanoi more options later in the conflict, though it's also possible that a passive approach would've made it easier for Westmoreland to claim he was making progress. Regardless, Hanoi took a more aggressive approach, launching offensives throughout 1965 and 1966, only pausing in 1967 to prepare for the Tet Offensive. After that, Hanoi had far fewer options for offensives as their semi-conventional VC main force units no longer existed as such, thusly they had to focus more on conventional attacks along more predictable lines. I would say Giap was a capable general, given the instruments he had at hand, definitely very astute, though given the limitations of Vietnamese sources, we're not really sure what involvement he did have during the US period of the war, though it is very likely that it was not much.
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Apr 12, 2021 23:46
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Solaris 2.0 posted:This is all really fascinating thank you. We never really got a version of the Pentagon Papers for Hanoi, so we don't have a great deal of understanding of their high level decision making. Hanoi's War is the best resource on it, but there's still plenty to find. The archives are generally quite accessible, but the translation and scale of the task is difficult. There are some major parts translated, like the PAVN official history, but it's tough to tell what you don't have when you don't really have as much of the archive translated. The logistics of getting that done are quite difficult. It's very possible that there's some Pentagon Papers-esque stuff in the archives, but I kinda doubt it's accessible. There's plenty of intra-party beefs and such as well, and the PAVN official history definitely has some distortions based on that. Anyway, there's still a lot of work to be done with Vietnamese archive material. Of some interest is that there's also a lot of South Vietnamese government documents and records in the Vietnamese archives that would be of interest to historians.
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Apr 13, 2021 00:04
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EggsAisle posted:So we'd need someone to dig out and sort through the documents in the first place, which is a lot of work in of itself, and then a (team of) Vietnamese Ensign Expendable(s) to translate it. Seems like a long shot. There was a shakeup in 1954-55, and the main beneficiaries were southerners who didn't have to sit through the purges and arrived just in time to get into Politburo positions, Le Duan being the biggest one. Giap and Ho were too prominent to outright be purged out, but they no longer had executive power.
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Apr 13, 2021 04:17
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iv46vi posted:It’s not quite milhist, but is there a general overview of the power structures during/post Vietnam war. Who was purging who etc.? Nothing like that, much of what we know we know mostly by inference. There's no Vietnamese Pentagon Papers. If the Pentagon Papers didn't exist, we'd have to lean a lot more on inference for Johnson's decision-making, too. Grimnarsson posted:It's fairly interesting, in the recentish documentary by Burns, they said this somewhat. That Giap and Ho were sidelined by the Southern communists who wanted to focus on unification, as opposed to the Northerners who wanted to draw back the military involvement in the South and focus on the economy instead. And they brought Giap back, after the disasters of -68? The doc is alright, and it has a better read on politics than other takes, though I think playing up the Northerner-Southerner thing is probably trying to heroize Giap and Ho. Giap did have a genuinely different strategic take, but there's not really a genuine change of strategy until into 1969 when the NLF decides to stop doing small offensives as the mini-Tets mostly served to drain manpower with little strategic effect. If Giap had more influence then, he'd be mentioned more in the official history. You wouldn't really see the fruits of that strategy until the 1972 Easter Offensive, as the NVA was distracted in Cambodia and after that had to put all hands on deck to deal with Lam Son 719. That being said, it's certainly better than other books and docs on the war, but Ken Burns still kinda has the Vietnam as American Morality play vibe you get, however they actually feel about US involvement. Either "We could've defeated them with this One Weird Trick, usually the Savannakhet plan, a 4-division invasion of Laos to block the Ho Chi Minh trail", or "They defeated us with this One Weird Trick we hadn't encountered before, guerilla warfare"
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Apr 13, 2021 11:35
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Nebakenezzer posted:So with the Tet offensive, did the Vietnamese Politburo actually think this offensive is what would cause a general uprising? Did their commitment to big offensives have anything to do with the fact that it was potential rivals who were doing the fighting? Most of the dying in the offensives was done by soldiers who wouldn't really be threatening any future regime anyway. In fact, for example, an offensive in Tay Ninh in 1966 was commanded by a man who would later run a corps in 1974 and a military region in the war with Cambodia. We can't truly know what Le Duan thought, but I believe that they genuinely thought it would work- that offensives reaching into the urban zones would be able to take them and cause a Dien Bien Phu-like military disaster that would force the US out. Tet(and the offensives) as a subtle way to purge some kind of splitting faction seems not very plausible as an explanation for that strategy. I believe they genuinely thought they would be able to inflict some kind of disaster on US troops. In retrospect, we know the US operational mobility really prevented anything like that, but at the time, it would be difficult for anyone to know that.
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Apr 13, 2021 13:34
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ChubbyChecker posted:How good were the WW2 rifle grenades and platoon level light mortars? Why did some countries use them and why others did not? And what did their enemies think about them? They were somewhat hit or miss- there was a definite need they were filling, reflective of the reality of ww1 combat. Many countries were quite disappointed with platoon mortars, though, and ditched them at the platoon level. The US 60mm was quite good but wasn't really used like a platoon mortar and was a bit unwieldy in that role anyway. The only countries that were truly satisfied with theirs were the British, Italians, and Japanese, with the 2-in mortar, Brixia grenade launcher, and knee mortar respectively. Germany began with a 50mm mortar but largely eliminated it later in the war, same for the Soviets, though both systems were quite a bit heavier than the 2-in and not semi-automatic like the Brixia. The knee mortar ended up being considered very useful in the IJA, so much so that the Chinese copied it and used it extensively(partly because the Chinese forces were very deficient in artillery and skilled personnel).
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Apr 16, 2021 09:39
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Yeah, for as much as Japanese failures of leadership and tactics are discussed in this thread, the knee mortar was a very clever piece of hardware which did what it was supposed to do quite well. We ended up doing what it did in an even more handy package with the M79 later on. The Germans in ww2 experimented a lot with grenade launchers with conversions of AT rifles to full-time grenade launching duty and pistol-sized launchers, but they weren't widely used. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Apr 16, 2021 |
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Apr 16, 2021 10:03
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Greggster posted:Would mortars be of any use as a more direct weapon in a pinch, or is there something to the physics of the mortar shells that requires them to fire in that high arc? The Chinese forces in ww2 liked to use US-supplied 60mm mortars at short ranges but they did this so that they could self-spot more than anything else.
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Apr 18, 2021 03:40
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Lawman 0 posted:Hey so serious question (don't laugh) why didn't Italy try and force a crossing of the Adriatic instead? These sorts of amphibious end arounds, given the technology of ww1, had a very poor success rate. Even if the A-H fleet could be neutralized, the most likely outcome is a Salonika-esque enclave as ww1 armies didn't have the sealift capacity to maintain any kind of serious operations without a port so the quest for a port would be the entire op- by the time it's all secure, the landing is bottled up fairly comfortably. And that's the optimistic view. Also, the Adriatic coast just wasn't that suited for it anyway. Churchill was denied that for similar reasons during WW2(it might've been possible in that war given the availability of LSTs, but the strategic usefulness would be pretty minimal).
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Apr 23, 2021 15:32
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Tiger Crazy posted:What were the landing boats like at Gallipoli? It doesn't seem that there was a boat similar to the Higgins boats. It was usually just normal ship lifeboats rowed ashore.
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Apr 23, 2021 18:58
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:Y'all, Fangz is not implying that the QM is a landing ship of any sort. They're responding to a post Generally, convoys containing troopships like that were well-escorted and fast, and the Allies were more willing to abuse their cryptographic knowledge of U-boat patrol zones to dodge them to avoid that. IIRC the Torch invasion fleet, going from the US had a fairly absurd escort.
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Apr 29, 2021 08:29
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