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Previous threads: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3297799 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3585027 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3785167 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3872282 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3896814
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Dec 6, 2020 20:33
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Argas posted:The tl;dr is that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not justified, the bombing did play a role in getting Imperial Japan to surrender (Shaun posits that the bombings also gave Imperial Japan a scapegoat to pin blame on rather than their military's performance). Japan would've surrendered without the bombing but it certainly accelerated events. The main thing the video takes time to debunk is that popular sentiment the bombs were justified to save American lives and that Imperial Japan surrendered to save the lives of Japanese people. I'm not gonna watch the video, perhaps this guy does actually mention this, but I really despise how the narrative focusing on saving lives tends (really often) to forget about Imperial Japan's victims when weighing up the calculus. Someone on AskHistorians recently did some napkin math implying something on the order of 250,000 deaths a month as a lowball at this point in the war, i.e. well more than both bombings put together. I understand the fascination around the only military use of nuclear weapons, but the way the bombings have so often framed Imperial Japan as though they were victims is so frustrating.
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Dec 13, 2020 00:48
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Terrible Opinions posted:He specifically makes a note of Imperial Japan not caring about it's civilian population and that they were at fault for the whole thing in the first place. I meant victims as in the 250,000/monthly dead in mainland Asia and the Philippines, not Japan; the ones that (like these past few posts) get constantly forgotten about. My stance on the bombings is, frankly, we should stop caring. There are vastly more important and far more tragic things that happened in the Pacific theater, and the atomic bombs have had a damagingly oversized presence in the narrative.
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Dec 13, 2020 02:01
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Alchenar posted:It's also an area where you run into problems being lax on defining 'not peer' in terms of actual capabilities. Iran is not a peer competitor to the USA, but if a war starts with a carrier group transiting the straits of Hormuz then you are going to see a lot of US ships on fire. Yeah I feel like characterizing the Argentines as some completely backwater nothing entity mischaracterizes it a bit. Didn’t they have completely state of the art anti-ship missiles?
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Dec 30, 2020 17:22
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There's a good and pretty recent Harvard series in 6 parts: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/collection.php?cpk=1338 Maybe overkill but imo the region kind of justifies more than 1 book if you want to touch on everything. For covering it broadly in a sensible way and not even attempting to be comprehensive, I also like Gina Barnes' The Rise of Civilization in China, Korea, and Japan (make sure to look for the 2015 one; there are older editions that are more out of date) which covers history up through the 1st millennium in the sort of cross-national way that gets neglected way too much in East Asia studies.
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Jan 18, 2021 20:00
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Tulip posted:it is still very much not a military history, if that's the subject you're really into. Am I mistaken about this, or is it...basically never military history? Especially ancient stuff. I'm not a historian but I've spent the past 4 years reading academic material about ancient East Asia with what at least I think is some dedication; I've read most of at least a dozen academic books and probably several times that in journals about ancient China, but I couldn't tell you more than the basics about the militaries at large, and almost no details about battles other than exceptionally famous ones like Changping. I feel like historians basically just never ever go battles and the like at all. It's a funny contrast with how the discussions tend to go on the internet.
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Jan 18, 2021 20:37
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Cyrano4747 posted:But you can 100% just learn that without getting the paper, the same way that you can teach yourself to play guitar or draw. The key is recognizing the difference between the historian versions of the self taught artist who has actually taken the time to develop the skills that other people learn at art school (or from a mentor etc) vs the person who traces anime all day and rejects any criticism because “that’s my style.” Are there books you'd recommend to develop (at least some of) the skills properly? I definitely feel like I'm very slowly picking things up by just reading a lot of academic texts, but then it's easy to feel more competent than you are.
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Jan 29, 2021 16:30
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There are some serious hacks that seep through the cracks even beyond just getting published. I've found Wontack Hong and Covell & Covell (prominent advocates of what veers more into Korean pseudo-history, basically) on the shelves of one of the best universities in the US.
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Jan 29, 2021 18:52
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This whole time whenever I saw "GWOT" in this thread I thought it was some in-joke calling it Gulf War Overtime. I just saw someone else use it in a different place and looked it up and realized it's actually just the official acronym. Very disappointed.
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May 16, 2021 14:24
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I mean you're talking about "a loophole in the law" and applying it to an entire social class in a thousand years of history and a hundred different polities over an entire region. I could definitely imagine that kind of thing having happened, but to say "medieval knights did this," especially while talking about "a loophole" as though it applied to all of them, sounds immediately spurious.
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Jun 18, 2021 14:43
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The blog ACOUP (which is run by a genuine historian) has a bunch of posts touching on LOTR stuff, particularly these long series on The Siege of Gondor and Helm's Deep which will probably be basically perfect for what you're looking for. I'd never studied much military history so maybe this isn't actually super rare knowledge, but his explanation of the difference in strategy/operations in those posts especially was kind of mind blowing to me; obvious though it seems in retrospect I'd really never conceptualized how important the greater motivations/goals should be in how everything else plays out (or is planned to play out, at least) until I read it (and considering how most fiction is I know I'm not alone). He also goes pretty deep into logistics, and touches a lot on what he thinks the real world inspirations Tolkein and Jackson drew on for the various powers were. And lots of other things too, the posts are super long. The blog is actually partially tailored towards "world builders" (i.e. people creating settings for stuff like RPGs, games, and books) so you'll find a lot of other posts that are relevant to you if you go digging; he has a list of a bunch of them here. Not listed there but I'd also really recommend his one on iron production, which covers a lot of the realities of it (e.g. huge iron objects are unrealistic in the premodern period, and just how much fuel it takes) that were totally new to me. One of these days I kinda wanna have some discussion of some of the author's stuff itt because I think a lot of people here would be extremely into it, but I should probably try to condense the points down into something quickly readable because the posts are universally extremely long. e: oh dang extremely beaten. I've been mainlining the blog over the past few months though; it's mostly about challenging how pop culture portrays history, and it's totally transformed how I view a lot of things. Koramei fucked around with this message at 15:11 on Jun 22, 2021 |
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Jun 22, 2021 15:06
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Yeah, I wondered at points if he was maybe reading more into the implications of the quality of war-planning (particularly re: Saruman) as being important for the characters than Tolkien had actually intended, but either way it's remarkable how much the actions of the factions in the book actually seem to make sense.
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Jun 22, 2021 17:02
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Holy poo poo, I can scarcely even imagine what 60,000 planes looks like. The scale of WW2 is a bit staggering sometimes.
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Jun 26, 2021 00:08
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Effective-Disorder posted:I've been to the hospital caves at Haebaru in Okinawa, I've been to Hiroshima. Between the two, I have a hard time imagining what was 'best' about either of those situations extrapolated in scale to encompass the entire scope of the country. What about the hundreds of thousands that were dying every single month to Japan's aggression, entirely outside the apparent "scope of the country." It's ridiculous that the bomb occupies this much presence in the present day discussion, and I think entirely forgetting about the people the war was impacting the most of all while simultaneously virtue signaling says a lot about what's wrong with that.
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Jul 4, 2021 01:05
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Effective-Disorder posted:You're telling me I'm forgetting about the people the war was impacting the most of all and that I am virtue signalling? I was over the line saying you were virtue signaling, sorry, but your quip about "Okinawa or Hiroshima" (and not the Philippines, China, Korea, Vietnam, Burma--I could go on) set me off a bit. Discussion of the atomic bombings gets way too much press for what I would frankly agree with Captain von Trapp is not actually that high on the list of the ills of even just WW2. I say this every time this discussion comes up these days but, well, the discussion plays out basically identically every time, so--the way it's, in modern America, gone to frame Imperial Japan as though they were the victims in the war has been incredibly damaging. Anyway rather than continuing to fuel a discussion I kind of object to on principle, I have a book recommendation request: does anyone know of something like frequent-thread-recommendation The Unwomanly Face of War but for a period (or longer general coverage) other than WW2?
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Jul 4, 2021 02:00
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Bret Devereaux (ancient military historian) of ACOUP pretty frequently brings up the point that a society’s military institutions tend* to be structured as a mirror of its civilian institutions and to be honest I never quite got what that meant but it seems pertinent to bring up here *iirc he actually says it’s universal but I’m not confident in that
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Sep 28, 2021 01:50
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Nenonen posted:I don't know the answer, but 'medieval European' is close to a tautology. The fall of Western Rome or the beginning of renaissance don't bear historical importance outside Europe/Mediterranean so talking of medieval Korea or medieval Madagascar would be wrong. So you can just say 'medieval navy'. Medieval Korea gets thrown around pretty regularly, usually referring to Goryeo from ~900-1400. Yeah the timeline in East Asia isn’t based on the same events as in Europe, but there are relatively epoch-defining things going on at similar enough points in time that it’s still useful. Early Modern is likewise used all the time (I’m reading a book atm with it in the title, even!) — people in Korea may not have cared much about Gutenberg or whatever directly but the ideas permeating in Europe were transmitted across Eurasia (and Chinese thought back to Europe too at this time) and had a big impact.
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Nov 14, 2021 07:24
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ponzicar posted:My knowledge of the subject is limited to Sluys and Chibi, but has chaining ships together in battle ever been a good idea? I've actually been really curious about this for the retreat of the Yuan-Goryeo fleet after the second invasion of Japan. The conventional take I remember reading a whole bunch of times on various internet boards is that the Mongols foolishly ordered the ships lashed together in the open sea for safety, and the Japanese samurai nimbly rowed out small boats in the night and massacred them for it. Then a bit back I stumbled on the only academic work I've actually seen on the subject ("Yuan Campaigns in the Eastern Sea" from China as a Sea Power) which states the total opposite (completely matter of factly, not even acknowledging the conventional account, which did have me puzzled) -- that it actually worked very well, the Japanese were basically repulsed on the sea, and a good chunk of the fleet made it back home. I'm under the impression the whole invasions are a subject that've been re-evaluated in scholarship a bunch of times and not in a way that's close to being settled though, so who knows what actually happened.
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Nov 16, 2021 07:47
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Xiahou Dun posted:
Super cool posts, I really enjoyed reading them. Out of curiosity, was Classical Chinese any more consistent for the other East Asian countries? When I see it mentioned in e.g. court documents for Joseon it just seems to get mentioned as “written in Classical Chinese since that was the prestige language” and left at that. Since it was (maybe?) more consciously taught as a special non-indigenous thing might it have been more standardized? Although there would still have been Chinese texts learners etc read from that spanned thousands of years of Chinese history. For Joseon’s first half there were state-run schools throughout the country to teach it; in the latter half private local schools headed by random scholars won out, not that I have any idea if that’d impact things.
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Nov 24, 2021 05:04
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This week’s ACOUP might be interesting to a bunch of people here, he goes over the development of artillery and then their impact on fortifications (particularly star forts) https://acoup.blog/2021/12/17/collections-fortification-part-iv-french-guns-and-italian-lines/
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Dec 21, 2021 06:03
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something like that is going down in the current season of The Expanse, but I think the space UN doesn't have very many parallels in history
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Dec 30, 2021 06:35
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The blog ACOUP (run by a professor of military history) has a really interesting post on the whole standing army / non-standing army thing. It’s uh, in the context of talking about Uruk-hai attacking Helms Deep, but still. Pertinent to the present discussion, he marks a distinction between fully modern standing armies as in many developed nations and ones made in imitation of them in nations that don’t actually have the state/institutional capacity to keep them, but do it as a matter of prestige anyway. The kind of “whoah” point (for me) was that while your drilled standing army in e.g. modern China or the USA has major advantages over a militia, in polities that don’t have that level of state capacity (e.g. Isengard), the militia and its community-based ties and motivation usually actually results in a more effective army than the substandard standing army. So just because near every nation today has a standing army doesn’t actually mean every nation today has the same kind of standing army, I guess is my takeaway. I’m on my phone or I’d try to link some choice quotes; he puts it a lot better than me, being an actual historian and all.
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Jun 7, 2022 02:09
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I know nothing about the linguistics of this, but as I remember in one of the recent ACOUP posts, Devereaux mentions “shock” as more proper terminology for hand-to-hand fighting, in battles anyway?
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Jun 28, 2022 18:14
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What actually did end up happening with them? How much of a problem was PTSD in postwar Germany compared to the Allies?
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Jul 11, 2022 21:48
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I mean it's the military history thread, this isn't remotely off topic. I really don't have a stake in Finland's innocence nor any understanding of the Continuation War beyond the complete fundamentals, and there were clearly some extremely deplorable things done, but I feel like you sliding in g there as an afterthought is a bit bewildering when it can kinda just do the lifting by itself. These guys just launched a brutal invasion of your country, are you not going to try to retaliate when you get the chance? It means aligning with some extremely horrible people too but one of them just tried to invade you and the other didn't. Whatever people did after that is worth all the scrutiny and condemnation that can be piled on, but the mere act of Finland aligning with the Axis sounds entirely justifiable, from my simplistic understanding of their position. I don't think this needs a multi-bullet or even Cold War propaganda to have an appreciation for the logic behind it.
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Jul 12, 2022 20:27
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Koramei fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Jul 21, 2022 |
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Jul 21, 2022 00:29
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SerCypher posted:So yes, Empires can demonstrably raise large multi-ethnic armies to fight their wars. Often times joining said army is not strictly voluntary, but they still manage to be effective. I missed the start of this discussion but this made me do a small double take, I’m almost puzzled that it needs stating. I feel like it’s been a trend in the past few years as the broad notion of empires in every sense have been (largely rightly, to be sure) getting increasingly condemned that there’s this disbelief that anyone could have possibly willingly supported one if they weren’t the ruling ethnicity. I guess it’s just another example of how we all usually view the past through our modern lens.
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Aug 3, 2022 01:05
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Was it here or the ancient history thread where we had elephant chat a few weeks back? In any case I remember there being a lot of wondering about why the Romans described elephants as being a useless gimmick in war and the fact Rome and China spurned their use even when they inherited the infrastructure to rear them, if they were still clearly used in India and Southeast Asia into the early modern. Iirc the answers were generally around it being some combination of easier to get and support elephants close to their natural habitats + much stronger associations with prestige — I’ve been reading Kenneth Chase’s Firearms: A History and he kind of glances on another reason: quote:Elephants were used in warfare, but horses were scarce. Ma Duanlin relates the following story about a shipwrecked Chinese official: That quote was about Southeast Asia but he mentions in the India section that near all its warhorses were imported from the Middle East rather than raised locally. Basically, elephants were used not because they were good, it’s just that horses were scarce. One of the reasons anyway.
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Aug 7, 2022 19:05
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Why not fire the kedge anchor out of a cannon to go faster
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Aug 9, 2022 17:50
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Do riggers on tall ships go harness-less even these days?
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Aug 10, 2022 00:32
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The recent ACOUP series on logistics is maybe his very best imo; so much about why armies acted the weird ways we hear about starts to fall into place when it becomes clear just how many constraints there were on how they could move around — and how nomadic armies, by getting to ignore a good chunk of them, could be so disproportionately powerful.
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Aug 26, 2022 01:35
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Tulip posted:Tell me if I'm wrong here but you're suggesting that some prior Qing army - like lets say the Kangxi era when they beat Russia - would have stood a reasonable chance at defeating the Victorian British Army? Because I really don't think so. The British had by that time made some incredible leaps in artillery, shipbuilding, small arms, tactics, communications, etc. that I don't think the Qing had until at least well after the First Opium War. There’s been some interesting pushback in recent years (on the pop-history side, I know this is all relatively old in actual scholarship) as less Eurocentric models for historical development have gone from fringe to dominant in history nerd haunts and people are more willing to look towards at least East Asia’s early modern history as every bit as rich and dynamic and meaningful in its own right as Europe’s. Which is obviously great on the one hand, but then means there’s also a willingness to just like, throw out literally all prior assumptions and assume all European innovations were bullshit or something. I guess this is just the metaphorical pendulum I’m finally old enough to be noticing but it’s a weird feeling when I remember arguing vehemently against Eurocentrism a few years ago in basically the same context as I’m now on the opposite side of.
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Sep 24, 2022 00:55
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I’ve definitely seen the latitude-tied crop thing a few times tangentially, does anyone know something (other than GGS) that goes into it in more depth? I have no idea how true it is but i remember reading for instance that it wasn’t until the early Middle Ages that cereals could be grown even north of the Mediterranean with close to the same yields as in more ancient agricultural heartlands, this apparently being one reason Mediterranean civilization flourished so much earlier. Would be interesting if this level of limited range in early crops is backed up by actual evidence.
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Sep 24, 2022 20:31
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Nessus posted:I remember an Ars Magica sourcebook say that sometimes the return looked like 4 bushels of wheat for every bushel sown, which is uh, not great. This is one of the biggest advantages of rice agriculture. The actual numbers totally escape me but it’s a kind of jaw dropping yield/sown compared to crops like wheat and barley. And yeah for real, a central source for all this would be amazing. It’s the kind of thing I’ve seen in 2-sentence snippets dispersed over so many different books, enough to give me a few “holy poo poo” moments (like aforementioned rice yields, or the versatility of potatoes), but for something so central to the human experience it’s a shame if there’s not something covering it all. I’d love an interactive map website like all those ones that show Paradox-game style borders but for various crops over time instead.
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Sep 24, 2022 20:57
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We’ve had a few discussions in the ancient history thread lately-ish about plagues, and one of the more prominent points that keeps coming up is that there isn’t actually any record of large scale widespread pandemics until within the past couple of thousand years, after both widespread urbanization and established trade links that link Eurasia.
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Sep 25, 2022 20:22
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The slave trade (and reorientation of local economies around it) was immensely disruptive to the kingdoms and left them much weaker than they otherwise would have been, but it’s the discovery in Europe of an inoculation against malaria (so allowing European armies to venture into the region when they hadn’t been able to sustain operations there before) that caused the sudden shift from no conquest to total in such a short time.
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Sep 25, 2022 20:50
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Tulip posted:and honestly it would take a lot but I could see ROK becoming a basketcase ally again. Not that you’re like, objectively wrong or anything, but a this is a slightly hosed up statement to just slip in there.
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Oct 3, 2022 18:26
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Not the most distant in absolute terms, but Joseon* had a network of mountain signal towers running down the spine of the peninsula to send messages quickly in case of attack. I’m forgetting the explicit details but iirc how it worked was that a few commoner families were tied to each beacon as a hereditary duty, and an adult man from each would have to staff it something like 6 months of the year. Alone, on a wretched mountaintop mostly isolated from everyone and in every kind of weather. I think originally the network was meant to have been tested a few times a year, but at some point that stopped happening. It was so notoriously a wretched duty that by the time it was actually needed in the Imjin War, like half the posts had been deserted and the whole thing was mostly useless. *I think Goryeo too. Also the Anglo-Saxons (and uh, Gondor) famously had a similar system, although I have no idea how that one worked.
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Oct 11, 2022 03:17
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Does anyone know a good book about/that covers the archaeology of Europe east of the Rhine prior to late antiquity? A few times I’ve realized I barely even have a conception of what the societies were actually like there beyond Gladiator and what’s on Wikipedia is pretty sparse too.
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Oct 11, 2022 23:24
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MikeC posted:The core question is whether the Germanic tribes got better or whether it was the Romans who got worse and that's why the military equation equalized. IMO, the evidence suggests the latter, Not something I personally know much about (hence previous question) but Bret Devereaux seems to suggest the former. I think he's brought it up a few times, but grabbing an example quickly in his Decline of Rome series for instance: quote:That was actually part of the Roman security problem: familiarity had begun to erode the Roman qualitative advantage which had allowed smaller professional Roman armies to consistently win fights on the frontier. The Germanic peoples on the other side had begun to adopt large political organizations (kingdoms, not tribes) and gained familiarity with Roman tactics and weapons.
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Oct 12, 2022 13:16
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