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Can anyone shed more light on HiWis/Russian collaborators etc? Some questions I had: - How exactly were they recruited? I am aware that the Germans raised specific Ukrainian/Baltic units for volunteers where guys would sign up to go hate on Stalin or get 3 square meals. These were often higher quality than the usual PoW cannon fodder divisions because the Baltic troops were defending their homelands against Stalin rather than 'fighting for Hitler'. But how was recruitment handled in PoW camps? Did most Soviet PoWs have a chance at joining, or was it more ad hoc? Did a staff officer roll into a PoW camp and just say "Hey I need 1000 guys, who wants to eat?" Did combat units recruit directly from soldiers that they had captured, before sending them back to some centralized depot in the rear? It sounds crazy, but then it also sounds plausible in that some frontline infantry battallion wants to get the replacements and extra help themselves right now, and not have them get sent to go off and do antipartisan sweeps 1000km away. I read that something like 25% of the German combat strength in Stalingrad was made up of HiWis at some point. I know that there were huge numbers of these guys in the Wehrmacht but I feel like info about them is sparse. I assume all of these guys got the gulag or bullet-in-the-head treatment if they were recaptured by the Soviets. Was there any effort at bringing them back into the fold? As a child I had a neighbor who was a Soviet soldier who got captured and then put into the Wehrmacht. He surrendered to the Americans in southern France and he claims they kept him around in the unit because he was a cobbler in peacetime and he kept their boots in good repair. Apparently at the end of the war some officer pulled some strings and he was able to move to the US. Sounds wild, but he did show me photos of him and his buddies in Werhmacht uniform, and all of them were clearly non-white (central Asian guys) so his story at least partially checks out. Is that plausible that an American unit could just adopt a German (though non-German) PoW and campaign with him for months?
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Sep 17, 2021 07:24
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From what I understand it was pretty grim to be a 'liberated' Soviet soldier even if you stayed loyal and did not work for the Germans. Many of these men got put into punishment units as well? Seems really harsh, especially if you get captured in some giant pocket where you never even see a German before the general in charge of you all surrenders the whole unit. I guess it is rather impossible for the Soviets to know, though, as everyone would probably try to tell a story about fighting to the last bullet and then getting wounded and waking up in a PoW camp, rather than actively throwing down their weapons or running away.
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Sep 17, 2021 12:35
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Does anyone have any good info on any high level assassinations from WW2? I am aware of the details of giving Heydrich the old what-for, but were there any other 'big fish' caught by assassins, rather than battlefield violence/random luck with artillery and airstrikes? Any high profile hits against the Allied side? I am sure that Stalin and Mao had a lot of guys offed but I mean something definitively organized by an opposing nation, rather than factional gently caress overs within the same team.
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Sep 22, 2021 07:28
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Armacham posted:I've always wondered about this. I've heard a few stories of this happening in WW1 but they seemed to reek of British grandstanding and repeating some myth of an apocryphal German general complaining about UK bullet artillery. Seems more like something to pump up your boys about how badass they are.
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Sep 22, 2021 08:13
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I guess it wasn't rifle volley sights per se. The stories I heard involved Brits firing machine guns in an indirect role just blasting away into the air to supposedly act as area-denial to prevent the Germans from using a specific road or route.
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Sep 22, 2021 08:57
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:My grandfather successfully noped out of the 1943 Dniepr offensive by having massive liquid shits. Awesome! My grandfather was in an anti-tank unit in the German army and was in the Stalingrad suburbs when he got kicked in the torso by his own horse which got spooked. Broke a bunch of bones and got to skip out on the rest of the Eastern Front hellscape. He always says that stupid horse saved his life. I'm sure someone ended up eating it.
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Sep 24, 2021 09:25
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HookedOnChthonics posted:is this person really making cozy ~vibes~ fanart of.... nazi night attack squadrons Yes, but you can probably put away the pitchfork. He seems like he mostly just likes planes and his portfolio has loads of Allied warbirds and non WW2 stuff too.
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Oct 8, 2021 11:14
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Pyle posted:I would like to know more. I read the article quickly, but I couldn't find the information on how exactly Wehrmacht treated soldiers' mental problems like shellshock during WWII. I have understood that after WW1, Germans had a good beginning at understanding shellshock and it's treatment. (PTSD was recognised in 1980s). Right after WW1 and during 20's - 30's, they had some ideas how to treat the war-related traumas and it was categorized as a mental illness. Then as Nazis came to power, all of this previous talk of shellshock or battle fatigue was just cowards trying to escape from their duties. Not being able to fight was simple cowardice, cured quickly with a bullet. I'm not a historian, but can provide a single anecdote about it. My grandfather was in the Wehrmacht in an anti-tank unit. He personally claims to have 'lost his marbles' after a particularly brutal battle. He was not a Maps And Dates guy but he claims that they were holding defensive positions in the winter of 1943 against repeated assaults from the Soviets. When the spring thaw came, countless bodies got uncovered from the snow and started to rot, complete with an army of scavenger rats. He claims that this was the straw that broke the camels back and he became immensely reckless and semi-suicidal, just not even taking cover when artillery hit and sometimes just falling into lethargic spells where he couldn't talk. His commander took pity on him and sent him to the rear - he spent a few weeks in a convalescent zone and when he felt better he volunteered to go back to his unit. He died years ago, but Grandma claims he would sometimes 'get like that' at times, and do reckless things like driving like a maniac or riding a horse at high speed in the middle of the night through the woods (he was a farmer after the war). So, Grandpa may have gotten different treatment if he was shellshocked in Berlin 1945, but I don't think it was automatically considered to be cowardice. He said there were other 'crazy' casualties in the rest camp too, and there was a general idea among the low rank soldiers themselves that they need to get over it ASAP to return to their units, but I think that was more of a ground-level macho thing that was probably pretty common among the other nations as well. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Dec 1, 2021 |
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Dec 1, 2021 08:42
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^ Yeah, that's the reason a show like Band of Brothers would only really work with a unit like the 101st Airborne. If one of them got wounded they would eventually find their way back to their unit. Also, they spent a good part of the Active War behind the lines instead of getting chewed up. A show about a regular US rifle company would need constant recasting due to the immense casualties and the fact that even lightly wounded guys would get shuffled to a replacement depot and probably end up in some new unit with less cohesion and be even less likely to survive as a 'replacement'.
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Dec 1, 2021 09:49
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Nessus posted:It's probably pretty hard to measure, especially since arguably the Nazis were doing the war so they could do the Holocaust. Also some of it was an economic 'positive' for them in that while they had to tax normal citizens, Holocaust victims were looted of every single thing they owned, including their gold teeth. Many were also used for slave labor too, which was certainly inefficient for all the reasons you'd expect, but I guess still better than nothing. There is also the terrible thought that the Holocaust helped boost the fighting spirit of Nazi Germany, because many of them rightly felt that Germany was gonna get pretty hosed in any peace negotiations due to all the horror. Enjoy the war, because peace is gonna be rough. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Dec 2, 2021 |
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Dec 2, 2021 02:41
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How common was it for nations to 'trade' PoWs in WW2? Did they 'want' them for extra labor, or did they consider it a burden to feed and care for them? I'm mostly asking about the Allies, because I assume for the Axis that burdensome PoWs had a worse experience. My grandfather was in the Wehrmacht and in the closing days of the war, he went out of his way to find a Canadian unit to surrender to, because he heard that they were 'nice guys'. He did not want to end up in a Soviet camp. They made sure the surrender went smoothly by singing songs in English really loudly as they approached enemy lines. I'm sure that was probably a memorably weird experience for both sides. He said that him and his unit were with the Canadians for a few days and it was rather jovial, he tells a story of showing the Canadians how to fire the 75mm Pak and that they had fun blasting away all the spare ammo at some disabled vehicles before they were forced to spike the guns and move on. The Canadians then passed him and his guys onto a British unit, where they mostly hauled crates of supplies around for weeks and played football a lot. He then somehow ended up on a ship to the US, where he finished out his PoW camp and then just never left the US afterwards. Is this sort of thing common? Did units often just toss PoWs onto other nations on an ad hoc basis? Obviously the way he told the story it seemed kind of casual, but was there high level deals going on with Churchill or DeGaulle or Truman where they haggle over who has these prisoners? Was this different for 'special' prisoners, like those who had unique skill sets or experience, or those wanted for warcrimes? For reference, my grandfather was just in a very run-of-the-mill antitank unit, so I assume most people didn't really care. Would it be different for a general? Pilots or skilled naval crewmen? Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 10:17 on Dec 3, 2021 |
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Dec 3, 2021 10:14
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Alchenar posted:For the Allies the simple answer is that by 1942 England's POW camps are overflowing and the country is filling up with US servicemen, so the obvious solution was to ship them out to North America where nobody is going to try and escape. For my gramps at least, his hometown wasn't even in Germany anymore after the border got redrawn, and his family was all scattered anyway. He says life in the US PoW camp was pretty easy, the guards were pretty chill. A story I do remember is that he was very shocked how racist the US was - he expected it to be very different because the Western Allies represented some sort of idealists to him, but then he got there and black people are treated like poo poo. He said lots of the camp guards were black, and they would take him and his buddies into town sometimes. The black guards wouldn't be allowed in certain places, so they'd give him money to go buy them ice cream. He found it crazy, but hey, he got lots of ice cream. He says there was a pretty clear divide in the camp among Older PoWs who got captured early in the war, they were often hardcore Nazis who couldn't believe Germany lost. The guys who came in from 1944/45 were pretty happy to be done with the whole war thing. A lot of the prisoners worked on local farms, and he said it was pretty common to have girlfriends among the local girls. This is how he met grandma. I assume the family helped him with all the citizen-paperwork, but I'm not really clear on the details and it would not have been a question I would have asked him when he was still alive because at that age I was more concerned with Prison Camp Escapades and War Heroics and not paperwork. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Dec 5, 2021 |
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Dec 5, 2021 02:03
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Cessna posted:A German rifle squad had the MG 34/42, directed by the squad leader, but everyone else had crappy bolt action rifles. Their main job was to carry ammo for the machinegun and keep it from being overrun. All support the leader and his weapon - you know, fascism. I'm wondering: Wasn't the consensus that the German type of squad organization was more effective? That rifles, no matter who wielded them, caused only a few casualties and the majority of the killing in the infantry platoon was done by machine gunners/mortarmen? Also the idea that even if a squad is at less than full strength, which is pretty much all the time in an active war, that the German squad would still maintain the majority of its firepower as long as the machinegun was active. A reduced German platoon that is down to 10 men could still maintain a pretty good defensive perimeter with 3 MG's, while the same could not be said about a democratized rifle platoon? It also seems that putting the most effective weapon in the hands of the most experienced/gung ho sort of soldier makes it more effective, in that you are relying on the lesser soldiers for lesser tasks like feeding/carrying ammo, pointing targets, suppression, observation etc while most of the killing is done by the hardass with the big gun? A separate but related question: How well did the US armories do on actually equipping every rifleman with an M1 semiauto Garand? I seem to recall lots of units still using bolt-actions in Italy and in the Pacific. Did the Marines have a higher/lower access to semi-auto rifles? I imagine some branch got the short end of the stick with equipment. Similarly, how did the Soviets distribute semi-auto rifles? Were they parcelled out a little bit to everyone, or did favored units get whole formations equipped with them? I know the Soviets did like to have SMG-only units. Yet another question: How many spare weapons would an average infantry division be carrying as replacements? Like, if each company had X machineguns, how many are just sitting in the back of a truck somewhere to use as replacements for stuff that gets lost/stolen/broken? I realize this can be wildly different for nations and time periods, but let's say the US in 1944 if that helps. For example, a US Weapons Company heads down the wrong road and gets ambushed and wiped out in the Battle of the Bulge with all the equipment lost. How screwed is the rest of the battallion on weapons? Does the parent unit have enough to redistribute, or do they have to wait for a lengthy supply request pipeline? Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Dec 9, 2021 |
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Dec 9, 2021 03:14
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^ Is this because of the general idea of the Marines always getting shafted? I imagine that with all the close range jungle-fighting and amphibious assaults they are doing that it would be more crucial to be able to spew bullets faster than in 'traditional' engagements vs Germans and Italians.
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Dec 9, 2021 03:48
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:It's not a general idea, it's just what happened. Keep in mind the Marines weren't the extra-double-badass generic infantry they are seen as today. Did the cavalry have any horses, or was that purely armored cars and halftracks sort of 'cavalry'?
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Dec 9, 2021 04:39
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LatwPIAT posted:It makes 100% historical sense that the Waffen-SS in Fury are a bunch of teenagers with no tactical sense who'd try to attack a pointless objective. It's 1945 and the entire German state is scraping the bottom of the barrel for troops so hard they've gone beyond pulling up splinters and have started excavating the soil. It's only "unrealistic" in the sense that it's not optimal thinking--but the Waffen-SS were exactly the kind to storm a heavily defended position from the front with masses of infantry in 1941, let alone by 1945. There's basically no "hardened soldiers" left, because they all died, charging things from the front. The problem with Fury is that it wants to have it both ways. Fury actually depicts fanatical Hitler Youth troops with no sense (the dudes who suicidally ambush and blow up Brad Pitt's commander) and also impressed conscripts who are forced to fight (the teenagers in town who give up easily because they got dragooned by some Nazi shithead). If it wanted to portray the Waffen SS column in the end as a bunch of idiot teenagers, then perhaps they could have just done that? Instead, we see columns of fit grown men armed to the teeth with Panzerfausts (which mostly disappear when they encounter a tank), and some have war medals (implying previous combat experience/heroism). We all now know the Waffen SS having any consistent reputation at all isn't really true. It can be teenage conscripts fresh off the farm, it can be hardass right wing nationalists from Western Europe, it can be a bunch of former Soviet citizens organized into anti-communist units, it can be a bunch of poorly trained and disciplined PoWs organized into anti-partisan bandit gang, it can be a bunch of hardened veterans given the best equipment at the expense of their brother units due to being someone's pet project. The movie chose to depict them as Badass Heavily Armed Tough Guys in their introduction, then portrayed them as hopelessly inept and idiotic in the same way that videogames depict unarmed Soviet human wave assaults, neither of which is historical. The reason the finale of Fury sucks is because most of the rest of the movie is actually pretty well done. It is just a massive tonal shift. We are also supposed to believe that Brad Pitt's crew are the ultimate survivors who will do anything to get through the war, yet they pointlessly sacrifice themselves to protect their disabled tank? They never do the teary-eyed flag-waving or discussing Why We Fight, the theme of the movie seems to be hanging onto survival in the face of violent madness. Brad Pitt threatens to kill his own men for putting his safety at risk, then willingly volunteers for a pointless suicide mission because the movie needed to have a cliched last stand. Even if they really believe this little SS company is totally going to gently caress up all their friends, experienced soldiers would know it is better to go warn your friends of the impending attack instead of just dying in place. This is also the same movie that shows how tank crewmen are the precious resource, more than the actual tank, because they are assigned some useless untrained guy simply because of attrition there is no one else left. It's like they made a cool nihilistic WW2 movie, then remembered at the end that they have to abide by genre conventions and have yet another scene where our outnumbered heroes must die heroically one by one while the enemies give them time to make goodbye speeches. The movie is at war with itself. It opens with a screen declaring that America is facing the most fanatical resistance yet - in April 1945. Yes, the month where they were taking 60,000 prisoners A DAY. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 06:20 on Dec 14, 2021 |
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Dec 14, 2021 03:49
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This is really cool. Love how pissed off the guy seems. Do you think the person interrogating him is some British traitor? The part where he mentions the salute seems to imply he thinks the interrogator is some British SS jackass?
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Dec 14, 2021 04:04
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Beefeater1980 posted:What amount of money is RM 5,000 in this context? I can only think “Ringgit” which doesn’t make sense for what’s presumably a conversation taking place in the UK. I assumed it was Reichsmarks. My thoughts were that this was happening in some PoW camp. That maybe the Germans got some British traitor to go into camp and try to recruit other guys to be spies/British SS or something.
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Dec 14, 2021 14:20
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PittTheElder posted:Well keep in mind that Mussolini was never in the control of the Western Allies, he was freed by the Gran Sasso raid just days after the allies landed at Salerno. Even if they had possession of him, it's unlikely they would have summarily executed him anyway; consider the Nazi high command who all got trials. As for why Victor Emmanuel et. al. didn't have him shot I'm not sure, but it seems like the light treatment was designed to prevent any Mussolini loyalists (not that there were actually a ton of them left at that stage) from resisting his removal from power. How much independence did Mussolini have after his rescue? Did he just straight out become a German puppet or did he still try to steer the ship in some way? I know he kept the war going for the Fascists but how much was he actually in charge of? Was he making plans or did the Germans just pass him bills to put his big stamp on to conscript troops or send supplies wherever?
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Jan 17, 2022 11:16
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SMERSH Mouth posted:And even then sometimes your deputy Fuhrer will gently caress right off and do just that. Black people didn't suffer so much under the Nazis because the racism was different. Their hatred of Jews was often based on the idea that Jews were some sort of insidious parasite that could worm their way into the highest echelons of society. Anyone could be a Jew, really! They have international connections and lots of money and blah blah blah, this makes them a threat! There really weren't lots of powerful or influential black people in Germany. It was quite obvious from first sight who was black and who wasn't. They considered them inferior, but just in the usual 'blacks are of course inferior' way that most white people thought back then, they didn't believe that black people were an existential threat that was undermining their society like the Jews. The Nazis were really against the idea of racial mixing so black people were 'okay' as long as they stayed in their lane, while Jews must be exterminated because they are corrupting societies from within.
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Jan 20, 2022 11:48
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Hyrax Attack! posted:I’m wondering if a Black American in uniform would have been safer and had more success checking into a hotel, riding a bus, and going to a restaurant in 1938 Berlin as opposed to 1945 Mississippi. My grandpa was in the German army and ended up in a US POW camp at the end of the war. He said that the black guards would bring him and his comrades into town sometimes for an outing to blow off some steam. The black guards would give grandpa and his buds some money to go into the shop and buy ice cream for them, because the guards themselves were not allowed in. That's right - dudes in Nazi uniforms in the 1940s were more welcome in certain shops than the American soldiers that were guarding them. I could not believe it at first, but now I totally do. Imagine having to ask enemy prisoners to go buy you snacks because you weren't allowed in the shop.
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Jan 20, 2022 11:59
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Silver2195 posted:Nazi policies towards black people weren't particularly consistent, but they did, among other things, forcibly sterilize mixed-race Afro-Germans, and there are documented cases (though not a general policy) of summary execution of black POWs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_black_people_in_Nazi_Germany Yeah, they were still racist shitbag Nazis. Just in the racial hierarchy of who they hate, black people were far less a target than Jews/Roma/Slavs etc. The Nazis had black soldiers, but as far as I know they would not consciously employ Roma/Jews (with the exception of mixed-heritage people who denied/hid their ancestry, like Milch). I cannot place the source whatsoever, but I recall reading of Roma Wehrmacht soldiers being sent to concentration camps while still wearing their uniforms.
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Jan 21, 2022 04:31
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Modern day cast: Jonah Hill as Goering? Bendersnatch Cumperdink as Goebbels? Elijah Wood as Himmler?
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Feb 1, 2022 04:01
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^^^^ Isn't that Mrs Goebbels? Anyway, with all the alt-his talk: Is the most plausible Nazi victory scenario the one where the UK and the USSR go to war? How close was the UK to actually fighting the Soviets? I know they toyed with the idea of backing Finland in the winter war, and Churchill seemed to be really excited about bombing the Soviet oilfields in the Caucasus. What stopped him? Or was it just a flight of fancy and something he wanted to do but was never ever going to actually try, like Patton wanting to team up with the Germans to smack Ivan? Was anyone in the UK pulling for war with the Soviets after they invaded Poland? If both Germany and the USSR are fighting the UK simultaneously, that could really push the UK to secure a peace favorable to the Axis. Somehow I feel that Hitler would somehow still find an excuse to backstab the Soviets at some point even if they are working together.
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Feb 4, 2022 04:49
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Yeah, most racists aren't too particular about who they're going after. A big reason you don't see too much dehumanizing anti-German/Italian propaganda in WW2 is that a huge percentage of the US population was ethnically German or Italian so going on about how inferior the German race is sounds a bit weird when you're being led by German-named guys like Eisenhower and Nimitz. People basically already were racist towards Asians so it was more about transferring all the Yellow Peril stuff towards the Japanese. The anti-European Axis propaganda was more aimed at insulting specific figures like Hitler/Himmler/Goebbels/Goering/Mussolini rather than their nations as a whole. Generally the idea was that The Average German was an okay guy, but that he had foolishly let himself follow those rotten Nazis. I also wonder if the anti-German stuff got toned down after WW1 when it was discovered that there really wasn't any major genocide going on in Belgium or anything and that overdoing it again might backfire. Oops too bad the Germans really are doing all the stuff they got accused of in the first war this time...
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Feb 14, 2022 07:05
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So, the minor Axis nations are often considered something of a joke (besides Finland). Are there anything that they were notably good at, or battles in which they particularly excelled? Completely anecdotal, my grandpa was a German anti-tank gunner on the Eastern Front and he was always saying how the Croatians were tough as nails and never surrendered. I know the collaborationist Croat units had a 'reputation' in Yugoslavia itself, but were they considered notable in other ways? Were the Croatian units assigned to domestic anti-partisan warfare (warcimes) recruited/trained differently than the ones going toe to toe with Ivan on the front? I suspect the answer is 'probably not' as evidenced by people from Commonwealth nations being obsessed with the idea in both wars that the Germans thought their specific outfit was the Fightinest, when in reality the Germans generally weren't always aware of the nationality of the little specks they were shooting at from a trench. I know that the Stalingrad counteroffensive seemed to deliberately target the German allies because of the perception that they would break a lot faster than the Germans, which turned out to be true. I know that in comparison to the Werhmacht these guys had worse training/equipment, but were any of the Axis minors actually 'good' at something? I'm aware that the Finnish were tough nuts to crack, and that some of the foreign SS units were considered higher quality to the usual hapless conscripts, but what about other Axis minors fighting under their own flag rather than in the German army apparatus itself?
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Feb 21, 2022 10:01
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feedmegin posted:I mean, equipment counts for a lot if you don't have it. One reason Italy gets an unfair reputation for having crap soldiers is because they actually had decently good soldiers rocking equipment that was state of the art in 1931. Doesn't matter how much elan you have if you're fighting a Sherman in a tankette. This seems... partially true? Italy was getting its rear end kicked by Greece before the Germans bailed them out, and the Greek wasn't notably better equipped.
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Feb 22, 2022 02:11
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Tomn posted:Ran into a hot take that the surrender of France in WW2 was good actually (for the French) because it spared the French nation the suffering that it would have undergone and the pain of full German occupation had it tried to resist to the end. Just going by casualties you could argue it was 'good', in that France lost about 220,000 soldiers killed in WW2, which includes Free French who did continue the war. In the initial invasion they lost about 90,000 killed. Compare that to WW1: In the battle of Verdun alone the French suffered about 400,000 casualties, with almost half of them fatalities. Verdun was a French victory! So, in a sense, yes, far fewer French people died in WW2 and they mostly got to avoid the brunt of the fighting. The Nazis did plenty of awful poo poo to France, but it was nothing on the scale of what was going on in Poland/USSR with relation to warcrimes. German soldiers could not just murder people at will in France, but they could on the Eastern Front. Civilian deaths in WW2 for France were much higher than WW1, but all told the losses of WW2 were not even half that of the first war. All told, about 600k French died in WW2 compared to 1.8 million in WW1. Huge numbers of Frenchmen had to do enforced labor for the Germans, but they did get liberated eventually and one could argue that a couple years working on a factory/farm is better than suffering in a muddy trench while getting blown up. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Feb 26, 2022 |
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Feb 26, 2022 08:17
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Were rifle grenades effective against tanks? I thought they were not. In the video he claims they can bust holes right through the hull. I assumed they might get some damage going on but not punch through like an AT shell. I guess if they're facing Panzer 38ts or something, but would it be able to slam through a Panzer IV? Maybe in the rear? I imagine it's probably a good idea in your training/propaganda videos to emphasize "Just try anyway" because telling them their weapons are useless isn't really helpful if you want the infantry to hold the line.
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Mar 1, 2022 08:05
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Do we know when it happened that the general idea of 'Commandos' were tiny groups of individuals or solo operatives became commonplace? Was it the Arnold movie in the 1980s? Because in WW2 it seems that British Commandos would deploy in rather large formations of hundreds or even thousands of men. They were 'good', but not elite killing machines and would often get pretty shot up, or they would fail for reasons that the modern audience would consider to be minor pitfalls. There are loads of commando missions where they get ashore and just get lost in the fog, or get shot up by the first random Wehrmacht patrol they encounter, or they got lost, or something. I know that this is the hallmark of every complicated military operation but I'm wondering where the cultural idea of these guys being supreme badasses came about? Wartime propaganda? Movies? Do we know when the cultural conception of 'Commando' changed?
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Mar 3, 2022 03:05
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Vahakyla posted:And if you, or anyone had any dreams of German tanks being good, ”Tigers in the Mud” will dispel all of that. The dude reams all notions of German superiority in terms of tech and argues that the successes were despite their tech. The book isn’t very political otherwise, and it isn’t doctrinal analysis either. It’s a book about being a tank commander of a Tiger in the East, and that’s all it really is. It rambles, circles back, talks about roadwheels, then ponders about horrors of combat, and goes off on another tangent. Yeah I second this. It's been a few years since I read it but it was certainly not the Ubermensch Kruppstalh Tigerchamps. There is a whole long section in the book about an entire tank attack being held up by a single fallen log on a muddy road or something. Lots of scenes of fending off Russian counterattacks while everyone screams at each other on the radio about how the hell they are going to move this goddamn log. I think after a full day or two they just end up pulling back. The log remained.
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Mar 8, 2022 03:47
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A related question: We often see photos of WW2 partisans wearing military uniforms, or at least something like it. Often in the East and Yugoslavia. I understand a lot of pro-Soviet 'partisans' were just regular Red Army guys who managed to escape death/capture and slip away into swamps or whatever when their units were destroyed in Axis advances. Are these guys usually just wearing these for propaganda photos? How likely would they be just wearing them in their day to day lives? I imagine that's an easy way to catch some Nazi bullets. Or were they actually frequently wearing these uniforms and just relying on surviving in isolated and rugged terrain rather than posing as civilians? Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Mar 18, 2022 |
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Mar 18, 2022 03:23
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When did halftracks get totally phased out? Or, am I wrong, and someone out there is still using them?
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Mar 21, 2022 08:53
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How well did old-timey firearms work in the rain? Obviously this covers a wide time period and technology. I suppose I'm looking at around 1500-1700. Were certain firearms impeded enough that armies would take advantage of this if they were lacking in firearms compared to their enemy?
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Mar 24, 2022 05:22
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So I am aware of Operation Greif. For those who aren't, the basic idea is that German commando Otto Skorzeny released a bunch of English-speaking troops wearing US uniforms to go cause chaos in the rear of the US positions during the Battle of the Bulge. Arguably the greatest success of it wasn't by his own men, but by the confusion that the idea of this caused, as American soldiers became really paranoid and harassing other American units to prove their bona fides. For example, US General Bruce Clarke got held up at gunpoint by his own men who demanded he answer baseball trivia questions to prove he wasn't a Nazi. Panic spread even further when one of the commandos got captured and he claimed he was on a mission to kill Eisenhower. Ike then got put into security lockdown for awhile as his men had to prepare for this nonexistent threat. My question: Are there more instances of large scale use of enemy uniforms in war? I know that individual spies and such would likely wear them, but what about whole units like Skorzeny's men? I'm also interested in answers from wars other than WW2.
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Mar 31, 2022 10:18
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Glah posted:If you are a movie buff, then Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows is a must watch about French Resistance. It is based on experiences of resistance member and on the director's own history in the resistance. Gives an unglamorous view on the matter and how utterly paranoid one becomes (and to be frank, needs to be) in a situation like that. Yeah as I understand it the greatest danger to an aspiring resistance member was not always patrolling Germans with uniforms, but getting ratted out by random collaborators, NIMBY types, or even other resistance groups that are opposed to yours. There's a lot of different groups operating in WW2 that get swept into something called 'The Resistance' when they were often at odds with each other. Just asking around looking for a group to join could be incredibly dangerous.
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Apr 1, 2022 10:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:If your starting point is “oh Germany and France fought a war in 1940?” Then sure. Back in the day I got interested in history in no small part because of Dynamix flight sims. I think some games do it well. Decisive Campaigns Barbarossa is a game which gives you, you guessed it, control as Halder over the invasion of the USSR. What is nice about it is that it is relatively easy to mass some panzers and smash through a front line. What is hard is to actually turn that into victory over the Soviet Union. You are constantly low on fuel and supplies and are always striving to secure supply lines from enemy forces, partisans, and your own rear end in a top hat superiors. Goering will come in and demand more fuel for his Luftwaffe, and if you piss him off, he'll gently caress you over when you come asking him for help. Goebbels will demand propaganda film crews accompany your troops and actually slow them down, but if you refuse him, he won't let you petition Hitler for winter uniforms for the men because it is 'defeatist'. You can get assigned an absolute drunken useless moron as a chief of staff but you might have to keep him because he's related to some Nazi bigwig and you risk all sorts of consequences by giving him the boot. The Train Nazi and Truck Nazi are always squabbling and you can never make either of them happy, as your trucks are breaking down at a rapid pace and the train tracks are being cut by partisans because the rear end in a top hat sadist governor that got installed in Minsk is massacring people. It does a really good job of teaching you that Logistics Is Everything, and that the Nazi leadership was a pack of loving jackals who were jockeying for position and loving each other over for some breadcrumbs from Hitler. It does a good job of puncturing the myths that the Germans just needed some BIGGER TANKS or whatever to win - the game cares very little about the actual equipment used and is more about dealing with constant chaos and crises that all hit at the worst times. There's no way to produce troops - you get what you're given, and Hitler will even take formations away from you for no apparent reason even if they might be essential, because that's what you get when you work for Mr. Hitler. It has some great moments like going to meet the Fuhrer and some of the generals are demanding you tell him all the bad news in the hopes that he'll finally loving get it, while others ask you to just downplay everything in the hopes that sucking up to him will give you more operational freedom or supplies. The game even trolls you by giving you Primary Objectives at the start of the invasion, which you plan for, then woops, in October Hitler sends you a message to ignore those and here are the REAL objectives. Do you believe him and reorient? Or might he change his mind back? No one knows! It is also a game that does not shy away from war-crimes. They absolutely are happening, and you can raise a stink about it and piss off your superiors who will then find ways to get even, or you can just wash your hands of it because it's 'easier' to just keep Goebbels happy when you might need to ask him for help later. At the end of the game it will even give you the result of your trial for crimes against humanity. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 12:02 on Apr 27, 2022 |
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Apr 27, 2022 06:16
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So, how does repatriation work in WW2? I looked up Armin Faber (German pilot who accidentally landed his plane in England) and it said that he was repatriated during the war due to ill health. - How was this done? Like, logistically where do you actually send the guy? To a neutral country or do they just march him to the front lines? - How often was this done? I feel like 'ill health' would be pretty common among PoW's. How ill did you have to be? Did he get a special treatment because the Allies were happy he gave them an intact plane?
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May 4, 2022 11:48
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Do we know who/when started painting the Shark Faces on airplanes?
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May 26, 2022 03:06
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Not trying to be a dick at all, but how could Brotheridge be the first casualty? I figured German flak probably chewed up plenty of guys before any paratroopers touched the ground.
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Jun 4, 2022 09:09
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