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I am just so incredibly amused by this.
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Dec 8, 2020 05:34
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Wasn't the Japanese request to keep the Emperor a lot more than merely keeping the Emperor, but also wanted the Emperor to retain veto over occupation policy? That feels like an important detail. Does Shaun make any reference to McNamara and Fog of War? I always found that segment to be hugely compelling when contextualizing WW2. As an aside, there's an interesting parallel I feel between what it must be like to be an official in WW2 Japan and modern politics today; and despite knowing better and what needs to happen you're probably like, shrugging your shoulders about how it can't be helped. The people with the power are going to do what they're going to do and there's nothing you can do and the people who could do something are either deadlocked or disinterested. All the while a cataclysmic, overwhelmingly powerful enemy is bearing down on you and if you wanted to avoid that onslaught should have made better decisions over a decade ago.
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Dec 13, 2020 02:52
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I'm not sure but it seems like it was presented to the thread as, "Hey look at this interesting video by a prominent youtuber about this milhist topic, I think its neat." And posters in the thread from there could take it or leave it to either engage with it or not, I don't think anyone was like, "Hey is this specific argument made in this video valid?"; and even if that were the case I mean, what good is having a bunch of posters with expertese if you know, they don't get to stretch those legs every once in a while to "peer review" for lack a better term, a presented video? In D&D terms that video would be something like a 9,000 word long effort post spanning 3-4 pages and would spark off healthy debate so all in all I agree with Xiahou Dun that it seems like harmless content in a slow moving thread? Like my response to it without seeing it, "Huh I wonder if he references X, that'd be interesting". Also I mean like, it's also a little ironic like if the topic was addressed before wouldn't it be fairly easy for the relevant people to link back to those posts, like a kind of citation or such, to respond to something specific that caught their eye? It's not like tank destroyer doctrine aficionados opining about the wonders of tank destroyers every other page forcing a dead horse to rise from the grave. You took a brief look at it, noted the problems with it from a scholarly perspective and took note and listed them off and then chose to disengaged at a point fair is fair you decided you had enough with either the poor methodology or evidence being used to determine the rest is presumably a waste of your time; but I on the other hand still took enjoyment from your post and I'm sure others do too.
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Dec 13, 2020 05:19
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Platystemon posted:I always roll my eyes at the suggestion that “they should have dropped the bomb over the ocean and let Japanese leadership watch with binoculars. Not commenting as to whether that was a good idea or not, but wasn't that actually one of the suggested plans at the time?
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Dec 13, 2020 06:09
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Allied planners had no real reason to discount it, in hindsight the status of Okinawans as second-class citizens who could be freely coerced by the IJA was a big factor in the civilian casualties during the Battle of Okinawa. Regarding overall casualties, troop density and quality was much higher on Okinawa than on the Home Islands, purely due to the difference in size. Additionally IIRC the Japanese surmised correctly where the landings would take place, so the Allied landings would likely face full resistance?
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Dec 14, 2020 01:04
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Cyrano4747 posted:This isn’t an ADMIN VOICE RED STAR DIRECTIVE but just a friendly suggestion from shitposter cyrano who reads this thread: I have a question, what about videos that someone just wants to share because they seem cool or otherwise interesting and just want to share so others can be entertained but not with any particular intent to discuss anything about it, would that be fine?
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Dec 14, 2020 22:42
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Gun Jesus seemed quite smitten by it though. 
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Dec 15, 2020 03:00
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Memento posted:He's firing a later model, look at the difference in the grip. Early top, later bottom. Slightly more of a question to Nebakenezzer's/Cyrano's post where the take away that I got was that it was a bad gun overall when I vaguely remembered Forgotten Weapons to have been very glowing in their review of it and I basically forgot about your post about the grip watching a man very happily being at peace with the world. As an aside to Nebakenezzer, any chance can you edit out that one bad word in the post you quoted? e: He does test fire the first pattern FG-42, apparently it's because it was meant to resemble the grip of the mauser rifles and is fairly comfortable when prone, unless I misheard. But so far watching the video he seems to like it as well. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Dec 15, 2020 |
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Dec 15, 2020 03:09
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:it clearly cannot be that good as they replaced after 2400 units Clearly, but that's still a little more nuanced than being completely garbo.
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Dec 15, 2020 14:48
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Aren't HALO drops also a thing?
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Dec 15, 2020 21:31
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Harry Turtledove had a very interesting series about what would happen if Germany attacked with the original plan. I liked how wargame-able that scenario was.
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Dec 18, 2020 02:18
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White Coke posted:If the Soviet Union wanted to it could prop up Germany for awhile, at least regarding raw materials. Then you have the possibility that the Soviets will be dragged into the war directly. The French considered bombing the Baku oilfields but the British shot that idea down. IIRC reading some vintage der spiegal(?) magazine in my school library I think Nazi propaganda between 1940-41 was bragging about the resources they were getting from the USSR.
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Dec 18, 2020 02:22
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Comstar posted:What’s it called and what happens? The War That Came Early I swear turtledove is just making the titles of his books all sex jokes Basically the war begins in 1938 because some Nazi party bigwig is assassinated by a Czech nationalist. Hitler no longer satisfied with the Munich Conference settlement demands more prompting the British and French to refuse, Germany invades and immediately embroils itself into war with England, France and the USSR who had a defence pact with Czechoslovakia at the time. The first interesting things here is since Poland refuses the USSR transit privileges to come to the aid of the Czechs, the USSR decides to go through Poland, so Poland allies Germany along with Italy. Germany invades France through the Low Countries after they clean up Czechoslovakia ala the Schiffelin Plan 2.0 and push into France and get pretty close to Paris just like WW1 but are stalled out here since they failed to encircle the British/French militaries; and eventually have to switch forces east because Poland is desperate for help. Another thing that's different is some Spanish nationalist general who was in charge prior to Franco survives his plane trip and so instead of the Republicans losing, they are able to drag it out long enough (and hold Madrid) for the war to start and from there actually gain military support from Britain and France (not much but some) and from Czech soldiers in exile who arrive later after fighting first in France after being interned in Romania and then in Spain after UK and France at some point I think its mid 1940 agree to stop fighting Germany and to help Germany fight the Soviets after Churchill is assassinated. The Germans trounce the disorganized post-Purge Soviet army in Poland and push them out, but get stalled west of Smolensk and never get close to Kyiv. During this time Japan is mostly focused on fighting the USSR around Vladivostok, eventually taking the city from the distracted Soviets until a cease fire is signed allowing the Soviets to focus on Germany in the West. Japan eventually still picks a fight with the US anyways. I think the US fleet gets mauled trying to fight the Japanese navy in Japanese waters so it takes sometime before the US fights Japan properly. I don't quite remember what Japan does, mostly just sits on Wake island and Guam and not much else; they use a gently caress tonne of germ and chemical warfare against the US though, experimenting on captured Soviet troops in Unit 731. The pacific theatre is largely forgettable with large amounts of waiting around for nothing to happen. There's a coup in both the UK and France by the militaries who secretly negotiate with the Soviets to defect their forces and extricate them back out via the USSR and reinvade the German occupied low countries. Germany is a lot slower in implementing the holocaust in this timeline and only gets as far as ghettos before its stopped. Hitler is successfully assassinated by the military and a civil war breaks out between the Heer and the SS, the former eventually beating the later. Republican Spain eventually wins the Civil War and is allied to the USSR. Towards the end the USSR and US are close allies and are preparing to take on Japan together as the UK and France being revolving door allies kinda miffed the US quite a bit who were caught in a bit of a lurch. Anastas Mouradian and the two Czech snipers were the best characters in my view. Basically it would fit very much at home in the Hoi modding community as it comes across very much like it was meant for a video game. World War would make a good game as well come to think of it. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 09:32 on Dec 18, 2020 |
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Dec 18, 2020 09:30
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I also think that maybe the material to make inflatable dummy tanks with was a material they were probably short on.
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Dec 19, 2020 16:52
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Jobbo_Fett posted:This is also 100% true I loved reading Samurai! as a kid. It seemed super interesting to read about "the other side". I dunno how much Sakai whitewashed his account of the war or if he as a navy airforce pilot was lucky to have been posted far enough away from where the IJA/IJN was committing atrocities, but it was a really interesting book. Also interesting was that it had all sorts of unicode errors, so there was a lot of corrupted wingdings instead of what the actual characters were supposed to be. It got me obsessed with playing the Zero in games like Aces High for a long time. But the Zero being paper and having like virtually no ammo (and me not having a proper joystick) soured me on the zero.
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Dec 20, 2020 05:26
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It's one of those very interesting oddities where you'd think they'd have worked out a standard but instead its like that one XKCD comic and there's 15 standards instead which is why issues still crop up. Playing some old Japanese games on windows is a similar pain because it can't read the filenames right half the time and it takes some combination of extracting it from the rar with the right encoding and having windows set to the right unicode region or some combination thereof.
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Dec 20, 2020 05:50
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I think I distinctly remember the 1916 number as well from Paul Kennedy's work The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and how from an outside observer perspective, Russia's population growth in 1910, its industrialization and railroad construction, and the size of its military and navy expansion programs were scaring the General Staff shitless and causing them a constant amount of sleepless nights over it. Paul goes into all the ways Imperial Russia was extremely actually very fragile of course but its easy for the contemporary Germans to gloss over weaknesses that are harder to observe from the outside. SlothfulCobra posted:I feel like blaming Germany solely for WW1 ignores (or worse, purposefully plays down) the fact that all the great powers had been readying up for war for a while and had set up a system of alliances specifically to escalate whatever conflict came next into something where somebody gets to destroy their rival and be the star power of the next great rebalancing of Europe. IIRC I remember the German ambassador to Russia begging his counterpart to stay out. And also how very briefly there was a moment where the Kaiser and Tsar Nicholar were exchanging letters to maybe figure a way out for both. I think from what I remember of the July crisis its yeah, it was a multitude of things although I think like, on balance though there was a factor of Germany "loving around and finding out" to it though. I don't think it was Germany trying to get a war with France though, I think the Kaiser had encouraged Austria to go in thinking if Austria could act quickly enough world opinion would back them up, but Austria took a long time to get its house in order and military preparations complete. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Dec 27, 2020 |
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Dec 27, 2020 18:46
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In the Canadian Forces we also have history classes about Canada's participation in military conflict, I think it started with the Boer War.
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Dec 28, 2020 21:21
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White Coke posted:I once got into an argument with a Canadian who was claiming that Canadians were the ones who burnt the White House, and after I said that it was done by British Army regulars, he said they were honorary Canadians. After I asked him why Canadians shouldn't also be considered responsible for every war crime committed by the British Army before independence (which I said should be considered 1931, although 1982 is probably a more correct date), he proceeded to call me a Trump lover. We were involved since the US invaded Canada during the war, it's unclear to me if there were any Canadian troops serving in those specific regiments (whether they settled in Canada after the war or if any of those regiments were raised in Canada or transferred from Canadian militia's to regular British army service) that took part in Cochrane's operation. So while its probably not the specific case of specifically Canadian troops burning down the white house there were Canadian forces engaging with American troops during the war of 1812 (I can see the argument of the troops serving in those regiments being "honourary" canadians if for example, they had largely en mass resettled in Canada afterwards, like the Loyalists who fled to Canada). As for the question as to, whether war crimes by the British army (or at least shared responsibility exists) I think that's a more complicated question. Are Ukrainians just as responsible for what Russian troops did during WW2? Are Native troops serving in the US military during WW2 share in responsibility? That seems like a complicated question because there's probably innumerable examples of subjugated/integrated peoples serving in a broader empire's military service (think about all the different nationalities serving in the Austro-Hungarian military!) . Also to quibble, 1867 is when Canada is largely recognized as becoming a "country" even if under Dominion status. We weren't truly independent until 1931 and yes the Constitution Act was in 82', but I think its fair to share in both the glories and responsibilities and to be accountable for all conflicts we were involved in from at least 1867.
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Dec 30, 2020 10:36
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The USSR did I believe attempt strategic bombing of the transportation hub at Warsaw early in the war and at Berlin, but both were likely more like symbolic attacks than really trying to leverage value out of it.
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Jan 1, 2021 09:25
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Italy I think iirc did licence German equipment IIRC, probably planes/engines? e: Ironically Germany did "provide" (re forced) Italy to use the enigma which I think contributed to Italy's worsening performance in the Med? Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Jan 18, 2021 |
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Jan 18, 2021 06:12
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Tias posted:I guess that explains why Romania, Finland and others were actually furnished with German tanks and planes - they had the right enemy? Italy did send something like 250,000 troops to fight in Russia.
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Jan 18, 2021 07:28
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Weka posted:Is just a presumption or is it something on record? Like has anyone actually molotoved an abrahms? Of course! It's what they call the tool they use to change those bricks that make up the treads!
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Jan 21, 2021 00:44
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bewbies posted:do you ever watch a thing, and afterwards, wonder what the gently caress was that i just watched This feels like what a live action adaption of Girls Und Panzer would look like.
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Jan 22, 2021 00:07
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I'd imagine a stalemate on the Western front would be pretty catastrophic for Germany because that means losing a lot of equipment and manpower that they won't have if/when they do turn on the USSR who has more time to prepare and rearm. A lot of Germany's problems are because of the massive unprecedented casualties and loss of equipment in 41' (and especially Typhoon) that IIRC they basically never recovered from? So fighting for a year or two in France that's a real struggle I can't imagine helping Germany be prepared for a war in the east. If the war in France lasts until say, 41, that means no Barbarosa until summer of 42 at a minimum, possibly 43? That's a huge deal. With the US probably dragged into the war still.
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Feb 4, 2021 01:54
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Xiahou Dun posted:The documentary Princess Mononoke would seem like a good start. I really wanted to find and post that map of the wild boar populations that looks like the wild boars occupied all of Canada and were invading from the Southern US. 
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Feb 8, 2021 22:42
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At the end of the day we're all subs.
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Feb 18, 2021 16:49
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:The nominal quality-over-quantity thing is pretty interesting because you can see this mindset in Japanese naval procurement and design, in particular. Of course it was always the case that the IJN had to be better on a "man for man" basis. An older post but it's been on my mind the comparisons with modern day US procurement where the US attempts to maintain a similar "man for man" capability gap, at least as an outside observing layman.
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Feb 18, 2021 19:22
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IIRC there were attempts at introducing "Fordism" to German factories during and before the war; iirc it was mentioned in the thread in the previous iteration that you'd have factory owners and so on bragging to Hitler about how much like Ford they managed to make their factories, so it wasn't a totally unknown thing either.
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Feb 19, 2021 01:58
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How can a system be corrupt when it can produce such an awesome shovel!?  bewbies posted:PLA procurement is probably worse and certainly more corrupt than anything in the west despite a highly centralized system. We can I imagine I suppose that we can only really observe from the outside and that limits our information; but looking at the equipment the PLA has been fielding and producing, their tanks, afvs, apcs, missile defence, planes, and of course their new ships, doesn't it seem like a functional system though? They seem to be at the least, are making progress in advancing and producing new systems and catching up in capability? I feel like if they were more corrupt or worse, that there should be at least some observable failures? Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Feb 25, 2021 |
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Feb 25, 2021 18:55
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Before WW1 IIRC wasn't the German High Command kinda scared of Russia? That could play into a reluctance to switch gears to a defencive war in the West while smashing Imperial Russia first because they were far less confident of victory.
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Feb 26, 2021 00:50
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:As I recall, this was based on analysis of Russia's demographics and economy and then projecting its growth potential and going "holy poo poo this country could be loving huge" (edit: I see Acebuckeye responded while I was writing this, yeah). I guess this is at best milhist-adjacent, but it seems like that potential they saw either wasn't there or was not well-realized. Is there a decent summary of why that is? I can spitball a few things -- most notably, they had an absolutely ruinous WW2 and then pretty much immediately got into a military-industrial pissing match with the USA. But also the country is just huge and highly-distributed, and I gather a lot of its territory is economically marginal. Not very. Stalin and the Soviet period helped "overindustrialize" Russia beyond what a country like that would normally be, and we're seeing Russia currently degrade downwards from that as it becomes increasingly reliant on natural resource extraction instead of surplus value from manufacturing. Basically without a massive centralized push to industrialize we'd see Russia embrace the same sort of thing that plagues other resource rich countries; an overreliance on capital from exporting raw resources, the starvation of capital for major investment in industrialization and modernization, and dutch disease. Imperial Russia would be slightly better off than the equivalent democracy because of its imperial interests and the need to maintain a strong military mandates a certain investment into a military-industrial complex, but they're never going to push as hard as the Soviet administration would even post-Stalin at industrializing. You have things like the massive literacy campaigns and so on that were absolutely required for a modern nation that I don't see Imperial Russia pulling off which would further hamper their efforts at building up their industry and supplying the millions of trained and educated people necessary for such a society and economy.
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Feb 26, 2021 01:57
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Pryor on Fire posted:You can read story after story about Tiger Is and IIs and Elefants and everything else getting massacred by the USSR's 85mm gun so it's not like they were even that effective in WW2 IIRC in terms of its K/D ratio wasn't the Elefant fairly effective or am I thinking of the Nashorn?
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Mar 2, 2021 02:24
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Jobbo_Fett posted:I don't think the Panther is a bad tank but even the "Best until mid-1950s" is a pretty big yikesarooney. Especially when the T-54 was around! There's just no way I think the Panther is at all a better tank than even the early T-54.
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Mar 2, 2021 04:08
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It kinda looks like the seat is adjustable?
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Mar 4, 2021 23:07
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I was watching random clips of Man in the High Castle since apparently it's ended and so my youtube reccomendations have blown up with them, but how plausible is it that into 1962 Japan doesn't manage to produce their own atomic bombs when IIRC in the real world Japan had made decent progress but was probably mostly constrained by the same lack of resources Germany was dealing with due to fighting the second world war? How does Japan need twenty years and borrowed designs to finish their own? China coming out of the civil war and occupation needed 20 years but Japan it seems like shouldn't need that long?
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Mar 8, 2021 00:19
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Pryor on Fire posted:It's been awhile since I watched Man in the High Castle but a big part of that show is how the rivalries and infighting between generals and admirals is just ten times as bad as it was during WW2 and this causes lots of drama and civilization-wide issues in both Japan and Germany. idk a lot of that show doesn't make sense but it gets really silly and science fictiony in the later seasons so that's fun. You have hilariously the Imperial Japanese Army court martial'ing an Imperial Japanese Navy admiral at one point.
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Mar 9, 2021 03:53
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Polyakov posted:We've just been over this at some length, the RN does not need to force entry to anything, it can deny the IJN from achieving anything with a great degree of ease, the Japanese are not taking the rubber of Malaysia or the oil of the DEI in the face of RN opposition. This is not Tsushima, the RN has one of the worlds biggest logistics base to replenish and sortie from in Singapore and the entirity of India and Australia from which to draw supply, the worlds biggest/second biggest shipbuilding capacity to fight the war on (A capability that far exceeds the IJN's). It doesnt need to give the Japanese a decisive battle because it wins the long war (with some echoes of the WW1 naval conflict) and Japan isnt successfully threatening anything that the UK considers vital, it loses Hong Kong and thats really about it. It has no bases to threaten even half the SCS from the air and honestly badly loses the long term air production war against the UK as well as the sea one. Their logistical and backup organisation is a lot less developed in the theater which means their actual ship readiness rates will also lower. Sending spitfires and hurricanes that are now not being used in Europe to base in SEA suddenly means that instead of making GBS threads on buffalos and vildebeasts they are now having to fight proper modern land based fighters with well trained and motivated crews which will quickly be backed up by the development of a radar network and has a far better training and replacement program itself. Their risky invasions are now suddenly facing multiple thousands more troops. Japan will very quickly start running out of resources and time as it feared would happen unless somehow the US starts up shipping resources again. On the other hand, this assumes Churchill doesn't decide to order the RN to go on the attack because holding back in a naval equivalent of Fabian tactics might not be popular at home with a populace that maybe wants the war won quickly?
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Mar 9, 2021 17:26
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Polyakov posted:Distant blockade is how the UK has fought naval wars for centuries. I feel like comparing wars involving age of sail ships and 20th century aircraft carriers makes these very different problems and involves a large degree of oversimplification and generalization as to how Britain fought those wars and undersells problems they encountered. The distant blockade of Napoleon provoked war with the United States in order to sustain it. Also Britain failed to "distantly blockade" Revolutionary USA in the end. While on the other hand we have very recent evidence of Churchhill as recent as WWI insisting on getting the RN right up close of the enemy in search of opening up a decisive front, and I'm sure there's probably other similar examples during WW2.
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Mar 9, 2021 17:52
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Polyakov posted:Where is the somme of this hypothetical war? An endless grinding land war with mounting casualties and no appreciable change in the front. Its just not there. Using a bunch of obselete capital ships to try and force the dardenelles does not somehow indicate that everyone involved would take leave of their senses and act like an absolute moron, even if he did somehow get it into his head he almost certainly didnt have the political capital to overrule the entire Royal Navy admiral corps. A better example from WW1 is that of RN strategy versus the Germans where its just keep them there and let their trade dwindle and choke them to death. The Germans sought a decisive battle because they needed to in order to win, time was not on their side, Jellicoe sought the opposite, he preserved his fleet, didnt seek silly engagements for the sake of his own ego (looking at you Beatty) because he had a very good appreciation of what he needed to do to win and an appreciation that if he took risks he might well lose. Similar strategies are adopted in the war of independence, the war of 1812, the Crimean war and indeed every single war that the UK fought against anyone with a coast even against vastly inferior naval opponents like Argentina, Russia or Venezuela. This is not just some invocation of Nelson from the early 1800's, this is systematic documented RN strategy that you see in each case and exists in the record of planning for a war with Japan in the far east in the 1930's. The Pax Brittanica century is in a large part based on the fact that if you wanted to go anywhere on the sea you did so because the UK could and occasionally did decide to just stop you if they didnt like what you were up to. Again though just because something happened a certain way in a war 300 years ago doesn't mean it's guaranteed to continue to carry on that way. And you're still comparing wars with vastly different technological basis and vastly different geography which I don't think is all that predictive for how a war in the pacific would go. Like, how do you know there wouldn't be a Somme somewhere? Anything can happen. Also as KYOON GRIFFEY JR notes blockading Germany is a very different ask from attempting to blockade Japan. Japan has vastly more freedom of movement to attempt to ambush British task forces that are operating distantly apart to enforce such a strategy while Germany could only really run head first into the RN. A large number of wars had upsets because of people acting like absolute morons, it isn't out of the question that someone in the early phase, especially due to racism might make some outrageous error. It's meaningless to compare wars against adversaries who didn't have competitive navies which is a majority of those wars that you're listing. The best evidence would be British war planning in the 30's but no plan survives contact with the enemy, even if they broadly decided that was the strategy they would go about in this hypothetical 1v1 there's no guarantee that it plays out as expected.
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Mar 9, 2021 18:30
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