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Perhaps, in desperation and bloodthirst, they loaded the cannons with hardtack.
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Dec 12, 2020 05:57
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Alchenar posted:Invasion casualty projections are all speculative, but it seems odd to dismiss the hundreds of thousands-to-millions projection given that the closest reference point is the Battle of Okinawa and we know for a fact the Japanese defence plan was to put a bamboo spear in the hands of every civilian and expect them to die for their Emperor. Those numbers seem entirely plausible. 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. The biggest fear for the Allied planners was not armed civilians, but just more kamikaze attacks on troop carriers and lighter warships. These were devastating at Okinawa, and that was with the kamikazes flying in from Japan itself. With the planned landings at Kyushu, the troopships would have been moored within the maw of airbases located in all of Japan.
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Dec 14, 2020 00:27
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White Coke posted:I tracked down the quote. It's from A World at Arms by Gerhard Weinberg. He says: Worth noting that a French light mechanized division is basically the same as a German armoured division, the two motorized divisions would also be equipped with the most modern weapons. The key thing about the German breakthrough is that they burst through Sedan with an armoured corps. The French had a single shoddy reserve infantry division there, and so they had to scramble reinforcements from Belgium while the Germans sprinted for the channel opposed by practically nothing. The presence of an armoured and modern French mobile force really changes the equation here. In practice, French and German armoured forces tended to obliterate each other on contact, but that slows the Germans down and keeps their BEF and French 1st Army intact. Still would have lost though, but would take out more Germans on the way out.
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Dec 17, 2020 04:47
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Nenonen posted:As a bonus you can then trust on Britain joining the war even if they otherwise didn't. The German navy is somewhat competitive against the French, but the U-boats dont have the range to threaten French routes to the Biscay ports or Mediterranean. German trade is mostly continental. There was China, but the Japanese invasion put an end to that. Oceanic trade is mainly with the UK, US, and France, and so itll likely dry up without much intervention unless cursed Albion betrays France. Uncle Enzo posted:This is "Gay Black Maurice Gamelin", but was there any plausible way for France to hold out in 1940? Barring perfect knowledge of the future I mean. If France had held on even partially the war would have gone wildly, totally unpredictably different but I have to believe that would be a better timeline than the one we got. France could have turned the Western Front into another brutal quagmire imo, but they would still be losing on account of having a bad air force and communications suite. Nazi Germany was surprisingly fragile in the early war, so a long war in France had a modest chance of seeing some officer's coup.
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Dec 17, 2020 22:19
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ChubbyChecker posted:I checked the numbers. The Swedish iron ore was higher grade than elsewhere, so about 60% of the prewar iron for Nazi Germany came from Sweden. It had the most importance during the late -39 and early -40 after the West had stopped trading with Germany and before Germany had conquered Belgium and France. During that critical period about 75% of the German iron came from Sweden. For the rest of the war the percentage was about 20%. Sweden stopped the iron ore trade only in November 1944, so they definitely didn't mind collaborating with the Nazis. Strategic bombing wasn't very effective at hindering the Nazis war machine, but since Sweden was trading with Germany to make profit, they might have stopped it earlier if they had had to account the cost of rebuilding their cities. And the Allies bombed France killing 70k people, so bombing collaborators wasn't off the table. Sweden was a neutral country, and neutral countries are allowed to do things like trade. They weren't an occupied country like France. That would not be bombing Germany with Swedish collateral damage, but simply declaring war on Sweden. Operationally, the Swedish iron mines are at out of range of 1940 bombers, and attacking baltic shipping means traipsing into German airspace and doing low-level attack. Not really viable. Cythereal posted:That's a curious way of saying "The Serbian government knew about the plot to kill Franz Ferdinand and refused to admit it, and had a long history of officially denying corruption, revanchist terrorism, and ethnic cleansing in their territories to outside observers." When you don't understand what "citation needed" means but know exactly which defunct regime to defend
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Dec 27, 2020 18:07
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I see, so you play geopolitical games until Russia betrays you in a foul geopolitical game, then you accuse random people of being Serbs, and then you get the money?
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Dec 27, 2020 18:24
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SlothfulCobra posted:
Denmark and Norway were not victims of local rivalries, they were just small countries that were overrun by a large hostile one. Finland was given hefty support from Sweden. Also, not exactly threatened by Germany Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Dec 27, 2020 |
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Dec 27, 2020 18:49
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Fearless posted:When the Harper gov't rolled out that ludicrous War of 1812 bicentennial as a way of trying to gin up Canadian nationalism, a part of that was a lapel pin that all CF members were expected to wear. The LCdr that I worked for showed up for work not long after they were issued without his and when questioned he said his pin had been accidentally smashed with a hammer and thrown into a field. Crying and weeping and thanking that man for his service here
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Dec 30, 2020 06:27
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Nessus posted:Question about War War 2: Did the Soviets have much strategic-level bombing capacity? They had a limited amount of heavy bombers in the Pe-8, like a hundred or so. A number so low that they were incapable of sustained bombing operations. The VVS was had its hands more than full with their frontline interdiction and close air support missions so there weren't many resources for expensive 4-engine bombers production. Even if they had a bunch of heavy bombers, bombing death camps is mostly going to kill the inmates, and blowing up the rail line is very temporary. Then there is question of whether or not the Soviets even knew of the death camps. Most victims of the holocaust in the Soviet Union were simply shot by the Einsatzgruppen.
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Jan 1, 2021 04:45
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zoux posted:Was the Spartan system chattel slavery Helots definitely weren't, but the Spartans kept other slaves
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Jan 9, 2021 00:49
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Arquinsiel posted:How could you not post this gem? The radar operators will be sleeping
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Jan 13, 2021 02:54
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Eventually there will be UAVS that shoot down other UAVs on the cheap, and the world will need a sneaky guy with binoculars and talent for CQC again
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Jan 13, 2021 20:57
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Alchenar posted:Because you want to be there in 24 hours from now, not in the 8 weeks it's going to take to get a heavy brigade onto ships from wherever it is stationed, sail it to wherever you need to go, and now you actually have to fight to establish a SPOD because you gave enough notice that even a third world country can prepare to put on a best possible fight, oh and also you have to bring the large and expensive logistical baggage you need in order to get the thing to actually do anything. Speed matters. Not sure if there great results for light infantry forces deployed 8 weeks ahead of resupply or reinforcement. Not really sure what kind of objective requires a whole airborne unit to land somewhere but not any other part of an army
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Jan 14, 2021 00:29
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Polyakov posted:The initial precursor to Desert Storm. The 82nd arrived in the KSA within 48 hours of kuwait getting invaded. Of all places in the worlds, a high-altitude plateau filled with escarpments seems like one of the worst to conduct a paradrop operation
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Jan 14, 2021 01:58
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Stairmaster posted:what if the mountains supply the water for over 3 billion people. Then you drive a whole a whole army up there on the highway. Incodentally, the reason why China and India had that melee skirmish last year is because China wanted to use the area to finish a highway between Tibet and Xinjiang. Attaining nebulous control of a few mountain streams probably didnt even cross their mind Polyakov posted:Airmobile forces dont need to be dropped out of a plane, its more that if you have a group of people who are prepared to be dropped out of a plane they have light gear they are trained to use and to be able to operate with a minimum of resupply, which is fantastic if every ounce of weight you can cut helps get your resupply helicopter over that mountain ridge or makes room on your resupply drop plane for another box of bullets. This is describing light infantry in general, and in these particular circumstances, alpine infantry. When fighting in mountains, alpine infantry are superior to airborne infantry because you can't airdrop donkeys. Or yaks.
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Jan 14, 2021 14:29
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Polyakov posted:Helicopter supply and airdrop supply was and is a major part of fighting in the himalayas so i dont quite know what to tell you. Im trying to point out that this is a very useful job that they can do, in addition to their other uses such as being able to go anywhere in the world on incredibly short notice. Yaks could best be described as ponderous in their maximum velocity. I was under the impression that you were talking about paratroopers, not just light infantry who get moved around by helicopter. The result of a paratrooper deployment in the himalayas is a whole bunch of them getting torn around mountain valleys by strange crosswinds, followed by guys landing hard on 45 degree slopes.
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Jan 14, 2021 20:55
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Italians did some licensed production of German fighter engines, put them in some decent fighters but didn't build very much of them. Tanks-wise the Germans didn't have enough, and trucks-wise the Germans definitely didn't have enough. No point running an armoured division on horses so it wasn't going to work. Must be said too that Germany and Italy were mostly Allies out of having common enemies, furthered by Mussolini's instincts. He thought WWII was just about over in 1940, and wanted to nab some concessions from France and Britain, while also getting on Germany's good side so they wouldn't point the barrel at Sudtirol next. While Hitler got along with Mussolini personally, the other Nazis were ambivalent about Italy and didn't really care about working together. You can see the end-state of this in what the Germans did when Italy surrendered in 1943. Rolled the army down the peninsula, killed a bunch of them, and dragged the PoWs back to Germany to be slave laborers. At Sicily, the Luftwaffe's Herman Goering Paratrooper-Armour Division was around to support the defenses. That's how they got Panzer IVs onto the fight in Italy, through German units. Also yes, you read that unit name correctly.
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Jan 18, 2021 07:22
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If you fart over the exhaust of an Abrams does it make a fireball?
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Jan 20, 2021 20:24
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PittTheElder posted:Yeah I don't see how Germany beats France at all without beating them the way they did. Taking the decisions of French leadership into account, it was only a matter of time until they made another strategic fuckup. The most comedic turn of events would be Mussolini backstabbing Hitler but getting owned in the Alps anyways
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Feb 4, 2021 09:38
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Cyrano4747 posted:Does that even count as a failure mode? I thought de-tracking is just "yep, tank gonna tank" There's throwing the track and there's getting track wheels blown up. They're on the exterior and not really armoured so more things are capable of damaging them. Mines in particular are more likely to blow up the track wheels than to penetrate the hull.
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Feb 6, 2021 05:04
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aphid_licker posted:I wanna say that this is a riff on the Romans encountering some guys in the Balkans peninsula who had weird curved hacking swords. They updated something about their armor on the fly in response. Falxes? Yeah that's the story I've heard about falxes. And I don't think it's like they just avoided shields by magic. They just pierced the Roman helmets reliably compared to sword and spears. The Romans responded by adding some braces onto their round helmets
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Feb 8, 2021 19:19
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Cessna posted:Agreed. A Roman helmet is a well designed piece of gear; it protects your skull, a lot of your face, and the back of your neck, but lets you see and hear: This is a helmet that starts showing up after the Dacian Wars, where falxes enter Roman imagination. The little ridge on the forehead was added to address the falx issue. Falxes were basically like picks, though they were curved blades ending in a point, rather than a pick head. All the force gets impacted on that point and it's quite good at penetrating metal. zoux posted:I thought we knew very little about Roman tactics and fighting methods No, we know a decent bit about how they fought, just less about how the details of how the military operated as an organization.
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Feb 8, 2021 19:24
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Tulip posted:The more questionable aspect of "just redesign the helmets" is that helmets tend to be priority #1 for iron age equipment sets, on account of head injuries being super bad and helmets being considerably easier/cheaper to make than nearly any other piece of armor. You tend to make helmets as protective as possible, up to the point where you start getting tradeoffs with vision, communication, or breathing. Scyther from pokemon doing a big chop is not fundamentally different from "dude with axe doing a big chop" which is a pretty normal threat for Romans to worry about. Roman metallurgy was not really that good. They didn't produce reliable steel, I don't think they fully understood the process. Maybe all the slave labour didn't help. Helmets were important, but ultimately the best defense was just having a big rear end shield to hide behind and some reliable buddies along. Axes were not very common weapons in the classical world. Spears were the most common by far, but the quintessential Gaulish weapon was the sword, not the axe. The only people that seemed to use axes a lot, at least based on conventions at the time, were Lydians in Anatolia. Epicurius posted:Because you can't really fight when you're in that position, can you? Those guys are literally using their sword hands to hold up their buddies shield lol The testudo in Roman military handbooks is like exclusively for receiving a bunch of missile fire and nothing else. Hollywood and nerds love the formation for some reason. Maybe because it's one of the few documented ones? For actual combat the Romans didn't huddle together, they had a decent amount of space between then and they used their shields for personal protection. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Feb 8, 2021 |
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Feb 8, 2021 19:50
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Cessna posted:And here's the helmet from Colchester: I was actually mistaken about the purported modification, it's actually crossguards on the top of the helmet like so. This ones is theorized to be a field modification from a site in Berzibos, Romania (Dacia in Roman times), because its kind of lovely work that was slammed onto the existing decoration.  Anyways like I said, I don't think the Romans were surprised by people swinging for the head, but the story of the falx goes that it was just a horrifying weapon that could pierce their helmets easily. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Feb 8, 2021 |
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Feb 8, 2021 20:52
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aphid_licker posted:Those things kinda make it look like they weren't worried about the helmet getting pierced but rather split? Like most of the top of the helmet still is as pierceable as it ever was. WoodrowSkillson posted:Yeah, the falx is this thing More common were one-handed falxes with smaller blades but basically the same shape. Yeah, with these things the difference between piercing a helmet or splitting a helmet was just a matter of how it hit. 
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Feb 8, 2021 21:35
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Pryor on Fire posted:Do you really need to apologize for joking that poland was the actual cause of all the 20th century's problems in the history thread, are people truly that loving dense? Will I get probed for making a joke about the Boeing 737 crashing in the aviation thread because that's next on my agenda this morning It also wasnt a good joke, for which i will accept an apology
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Feb 12, 2021 15:51
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Greg12 posted:actually, saying a really over the top stupid and wrong thing is a good joke if it is done well, and the greatest comedic character of the last forty years, Homer Simpson, is proof. and the spartans replied (laconically) "if"
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Feb 14, 2021 00:58
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bewbies posted:What's your metric for this? The U-boats sank a lot more tonnage in a far less permissive environment despite being less than half the displacement of their American equivalents. This is a really silly comparison point, there were just far more Allied merchant ships to sink period. The Germans sank around 21 million tons of shipping, which is more than double what the entire Japanese merchant fleet could account for. On "permissive environments" ai wouldn't discount how ~7 million tons or so were lost while either Britain or the US completely neglected convoy defence. Valtonen posted:HOWEVER pz4 Did go from design of 18 tons to What, 25-26 tons by the H model- and had similar increase in firepower. It is still the only tank that started production two years before the war and was kicking to the bitter end. That in itself is a testament to the foresight in design (and desperation at 1944 but that is an entirely another story) The 1945 models of Panzer 4s were tremendously overweight and broke down constantly, at similar rates to Tigers and other famously fragile vehicles. The late models of the Panzer 4 were really just a desperation move because the Germans had no other chassis around that wasnt totally obsolete.
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Feb 18, 2021 01:01
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bewbies posted:This is all cool info, but you're really talking past my point. You're absolutely right that American fleet boats were Cadillacs compared to U-boat Fiestas, but that isn't a valid comparison. They're not the same class of vessel. You keep harping on the Type IX, but their successes werent particularly better than the Type VIIs. And those were not esigned to fight across the whole Atlantic, they were supposed to operate around Britain using German ports as bases. What some Type IXs benefitted from was entirely circumstantial. The Type IXBs were the only German subs that operated freely during both "Happy Times", the first when the French Atlantic bases opened and the British suddenly had to defend 10 times the shipping lanes, the second when the US joined the war with absolutely dire convoy security. While the Type VIIs maxed out in the mid-Atlantic, the Type IXBs cruised around the coast of Merica sinking choice targets, against the backlighting of American cities who hadnt adopted wartime blackout measures. These times did not last, because convoy security tightened up and air umbrellas increased, and the late 42 attempt to escalate the submarine offensive saw greatly increased sub losses disproportional to the increase in operations The later Type IX models were unpopular for their longer dive times and greater size, and many were sunk without due success. The successes of 41 and 42 were never matched. Neither were they accomplished with efficiency. The Type IXs that prowled the American seaboard could only make the trip crammed to the brim with fuel and supplies, as well as being obligated to maximise fuel efficiency during transit by crawling across the Atlantic at minimum speed. The tally achieved by those subs was not the result of their design, nor of any particular foresight.
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Feb 18, 2021 03:15
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bewbies posted:I agree with most of what you're saying, but if the U-boats' success was due entirely to "circumstance" then the same applies -- more prominently -- to US subs. Or really, to any weapons system ever that took advantage of favorable circumstances. You are singling the Type IX as praiseworthy in the context of design. It clearly wasnt an optimal design for the circumstances where it succeeded, the most successful Type IX subs were Type IXBs, who had to trundle across the Atlantic at 5 knots to make it to the American seaboard. A Gato in the same situation is theoretically twice as efficient, because it can make the trip cruising at a regular 10 knots while carrying more torpedoes As for the circumstances, you can look at the Type IXC, which actually had the same range as a Gato, but ended sinking less tonnage per sub than the Type IXB. The reason for this is undramatic, the Type IXC only started coming into service in mid 1940, and didnt get the chance to sink any shipping during the lax security of the early war and First Happy Time.
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Feb 18, 2021 22:21
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The Lone Badger posted:Is radar a useful thing for tank situational awareness? radar generally isn't useful if both target and emitter are at ground level. Too much random stuff like bushes and trees and elevation changes at the same level that the radio waves bounce off of. Most tanks don't have much AA capability so pointing a radar set skyward isn't much good either.
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Mar 5, 2021 01:33
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Pyle posted:Thanks for the link. I'll check the book at some time. I would like to know more on the subject of tank fights on the Western front. Especially these engagements of M4s vs. Panthers and TDs vs. Panthers. The thread has corrected me already with the understanding that German tanks have been overglorified and Shermans have been mocked too harshly. What are those battles you mentioned, where Panthers and TDs met? Are there any quick online sources available? A bunch of engagements during the Battle of the Bulge. Went pretty well for the American TDs
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Mar 6, 2021 18:15
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PittTheElder posted:Zhukov at least was already in the west, he had been made Chief of the General Staff in February '41. Divisions get pulled from Siberia, but I think the consensus is that they ultimately weren't as crucial as the story-book version would have it. Siberia doesnt even begin until you travel 1000km from the Soviet-Japanese border. The hopelessness of a Japanese invasion of the USSR becomes clear when you see that the Warsaw-Moscow distance that Barbarossa could not clear is the same distance that Japan must cross the reach the first semblance of industry in Irkutsk. This is through frigid hills and ridgelines with no roads too
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Mar 10, 2021 20:08
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Cessna posted:
Doable but now theyre at war with the Soviets while theyre already experiencing the mother of all manpower crunches in China. And they can sit on Vladivostok but it doesnt benefit them or really hurt the Soviets. More lendlease will just end up going through Persia.
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Mar 15, 2021 18:52
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Tulip posted:So this is why I kind of feel lost when reading counterfactuals, because now I don't even understand what the premise is. Wasnt aware of the specifics of any counterfactual here, but the point remains that for the Japanese to extract any meaningful resources from the Soviet Far East they need to do something besides sit on Vladivostok. Even that is a bit of an ask, the Soviet garrsion in the Far East is large as the Kwantung Army
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Mar 15, 2021 20:49
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Cessna posted:Japan already owned a decent chunk of China: They need to end the war they start, which taking Vladivostok doesn't do. Strategically, they needed more than a bit of extra coastline. Being at war only exacerbates the Japanese oil crisis.
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Mar 16, 2021 18:44
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Weka posted:Just as a minor pedantic note, an empire doesn't in any way imply an emperor or empress. The cambridge dictionary defines empire as "Empire" is one of those terms that the user should do some work defining if they want to use it. The dictionary definition is not helpful because it doesn't describe about the how and why of what rulership means here. Solaris 2.0 posted:To be fair this alt-discussion of "How does Japan win a war against the Soviet Union and is capturing Vladivostok enough?" is only equally insane as the real-life scenario of "Nazi Germany and its allies invade the Soviet Union with the plan of advancing to the A-A line and then.....stop?" Well in one scenario the invaders occupy like 70% of the USSR population, most of the agricultural land, a ton of industry, military infrastructure, and has probably defeated most of the military to get to that point. Vladivostok is just a single port city. The Soviets will miss it, but it's only going to make them angry, the Kwantung Army will have its hands full fighting the Far East Military District and then who knows what will happen in China. Meanwhile the oil reserves keep ticking down and Japan has declared war on the world's second biggest oil producer. PittTheElder posted:In fairness this (really just taking Vladivostok even) would have been enormously detrimental to the Soviet war effort, assuming the German-Soviet war is occurring. About half of all Lend-Lease shipments to the USSR came in through Vladivostok. Most of that volume would just transfer to the Iran route. Vladivostok was just the most convenient route, and with Japan letting it happen there was no downside. It also let the Soviets put some of their ancient and slow cargo ships to some use, the loss of which would still be minor in the grand scheme of things.
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Mar 17, 2021 23:53
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Ah yes, I'm zure Iran and the USSR totally have the logistics to triple throughput on that route, and sailing to Iran from eastern US is just as easy as sailing to Vladisvokistock. It just takes longer. You'd never do it if Vladivostok was an option, but it wasn't as if the US couldn't spare the fuel or crews for it. The Brits and Soviets took over Iran to use the railways, the ports involved were all over Western Asia. I don't think it was at capacity at any point. Besides, the biggest bulk of lend-lease came in 1943, by which point there's no way the Soviets could lose. Solaris 2.0 posted:I mean the Japanese defeated the Russians before without needing to take Moscow so it stands to reason why they think they could do it again. The problem is that they don't want or need Vladivostok, but the Soviets had already demonstrated in 1918, and during the numerous border skirmishes of the '30s, that they could project significant forces in the area and were willing and capable of fighting there. The stuff Japan wants is deeper in the Far Eastern Military District, so how much are they going to enjoy duking it out in Siberian wasteland with an equivalent Soviet force for god knows how long? In comparison ,Russo-Japanese war was only possible because the Japanese knew that the Trans-siberian railway wasn't finished. It ended like in Irkutsk or something, so they knew the Russians would be hard-pressed to respond by land because they had to trek armies 600km by foot. They also lucked out with the 1905 Revolution, the Russian Empire was preparing to just brute force the supply problem before that happened.
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Mar 18, 2021 00:55
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PittTheElder posted:Yeah it seems really dubious that all that traffic could have been rerouted. If it was possible, I don't know why they would have bothered continuing the Arctic convoys. Because they were shortest, and during the Winter, they were reasonably safe. Summer convoys were cancelled after PQ 17.
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Mar 18, 2021 01:01
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MikeCrotch posted:I don't believe loft bombing was used in WWII, you either need advanced computers to calculate your trajectory or to be lifting something like a nuke (or both). The FW-190 didn't have anything like that so I doubt it was ever used in that fashion. Has to be mentioned that Stukas were big slow targets even in like, 1940. The pace of aircraft development during WWII left designs like the Stuka in the dust. The FW 190 wasn't the best fighter-bomber, but it could dive, drop a bomb, and zoom back up to a reasonably safe altitude, or just zip away at high speed. Stukas basically could only dive to the dirt and scurry away slowly.
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Mar 23, 2021 23:52
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