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Punkin Spunkin posted:this was mind-blowing to learn though. Imagine declaring war on THIS country. 93%! eh from a militaristic nationalist perspective I can totally see why this would almost demand a war to seize the dei. not one to one, but imagine the pushback you'd get in America if you suggested harmonizing foreign policy to match china because of their critical role as a supplier. to jingoist imperialists the very fact that the country depends on a larger foreign power to function is an argument for war in and of itself
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Jul 25, 2024 20:04
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:How did militaries choose how to respond to losing contact with a unit? i don't know how frequent the complete annihilation of an independent element tended to be prior to mechanized warfare. losing contact with your calvary corp patrolling a few days march ahead of your army is a fairly frequent annoyance throughout history, sometimes to disastrous effect, but the concern isn't usually that they've been defeated so decisively that not even stragglers will make it back. I think for any element small enough for this to be a concern they'll be so close to the main body that you won't have much time to worry about it
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Aug 28, 2024 19:38
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vuk83 posted:So part of hitchhikers guide to the galaxy where he makes really good sandwiches. that's the bad book we don't talk about
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Aug 29, 2024 07:08
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vuk83 posted:Why not? uh the book adams wrote during a depressive period where fenchurch disappears at the beginning and everyone dies at the end, and he regretted and was working on a retcon of when he died? the hitchhikers guide only has 4 books in my opinion
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Aug 29, 2024 07:39
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when reading clausewitz some years ago, i was struck by his handwaving of supply lines and baggage, with the assumption that troops on the march could subsist off the land as a given, when i knew that a few decades later during the american civil war supply and baggage would frequently shape large operations. grant at vicksburg and sherman's march to the sea are frequently cited as notable for cutting loose from their supply lines, with sherman's march being particularly famous for foraging in the manner clausewitz seemed to think almost went without saying would be how an army would operate on the march i've always wondered if this was a particular quirk of clausewitz ("on war" not exactly being all inclusive) and his contemporaries would have hotly disagreed, or if military orthodoxy had simply changed between post-napoleonic and the american civil war due to lack of conflicts involving field armies, or if there was something particular to the american civil war that made large baggage trains a necessity over living off the land (i'm not aware of blanket political policy of non-requisition after the initial phase of the war) maybe not a question that can be answered, but it also struck me as a bit odd.
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Sep 4, 2024 22:07
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ok, so i know why colonel is pronounced with an "r" when spoken despite being spelled with an "l" (dumb dudes jerking it to latin and the speaking public ignoring them), but what's with the lieutenant vs leftenant split between american english and the common wealth? some quick googling suggests the explanation isn't clear?
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Sep 21, 2024 06:20
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after today's rumor that a ukranian f-16 shot down a russian su-34, i'm wondering when the last time a nato platform had an air to air kill against russian pilots. did russian trainers take a hands on role in vietnam or would you have too go back to the korean war?
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Oct 12, 2024 20:45
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:You only have to go back to 2015 when a Turkish F-16 shot down a Russian SU-24 that violated its airspace, and that was piloted by a NATO country. Prior to that the previous confirmed kill of a Russian/Soviet piloted plane by a Nato piloted aircraft was in 1953 in the Korean war. It's commonly believed that some planes in Vietnam were piloted by Soviet air crews, but it's never been confirmed and probably won't be. Pakistani F-16s shot down a Soviet-operated bomber during the 1986 Afghanistan war, so that's a recent 'NATO-made-but-not-used-by-NATO incident, though I'm not sure it's the latest (I looked at F-16 history since that seemed the easiest way to find something quickly. oh right, i completely forgot about that incident with turkey, duh. the pakistani one is new to me though
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Oct 12, 2024 22:07
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spacetoaster posted:Is there a movement to reform Benedict Arnold in American history? I'm seeing some social media posts calling him a hero that we need to forgive. What was the Washington quote? Bury his leg with full honors
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Oct 28, 2024 07:57
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theoretically, if the japanese had just seized the dei oil fields intact and enough british possessions to secure a route to japan, could it have even fully replaced the supply being purchased from america?
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Nov 4, 2024 08:05
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The Lone Badger posted:Foot infantry seems so mindbogglingly slow when you’re looking at the scale of an entire country. Like the war will be over by the time you get there. eh, at the start of ww1, the right flank and the center of the german infantry managed to cover something like 200 miles in about 30 days during the invasion of belgium and france. seems fast enough to me. that did push the men involved past the point of human endurance though
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Nov 11, 2024 09:05
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ThisIsJohnWayne posted:What anti-colonialist struggle have the US historically supported though? When they supported their own it famously was so the americas could be colonised harder, but by Washington how quickly we forget the brave mujahideen
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Nov 19, 2024 07:15
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midnight77 posted:Are WWI trenches big enough to use a sword in? Like, in a trench raid, could you use a sword? I think its hard to say, depending on the purpose and condition of any given trench it could be tight enough that two men would have difficulty passing each other to wide enough for several men to easily pass at a time. frequent mention of combat knives, specialized punching daggers, brass knuckles, and improvise billy clubs suggests to me that hand to hand fighting was probably happening often enough in fairly confined spaces that you wanted your melee weapon to be fairly compact
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Nov 20, 2024 01:37
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I suppose if they were dismounted cavalry they might have sabres but I don't know jack poo poo about WW1 cavalry ops or if dismounted cavalry even participated in trench warfare so not really pertinent, but always love an excuse to post this old film reel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3BShfhygbk surreal to see the last true vestiges of such an ancient form of arms right as it vanished forever
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Nov 21, 2024 05:23
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Defenestrategy posted:During the ACW, how complicated do emplaced defenses in the field become? varies by the year in question and the level of experience of the troops. the later in the war and the more experienced the troops, the more involved the field fortifications. the most basic fortification would be downing trees and brush and piling it up in a way to provide cover while making it difficult to charge through. with more time you'd sharpen the outward branches while trying to pile enough large logs to make full on breastworks. siege works could get even more elaborate
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Jan 13, 2025 01:25
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Nine of Eight posted:Good enough that I seem to remember Guderian mentioning in his biography that after the Sudetenland seizure they were examining the defensive lines and sweating about how hard of a time they’d have had trying to get through. in his autobiographical account, moravec, the head of czechoslovakian military intelligence at the time, was very insistent that their fortifications could have held the full german army for weeks if not longer, that all the info supporting this was available prior to the crisis, and that britian and france chose to ignore it because it was more convenient to hope that hitler would be satisfied once they threw czechoslovakia under the bus of course he had his own biases, namely having to go into what turned out to be permanent exile after the german invasion, and was writing the account with the benefit of hindsight
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Jan 28, 2025 02:48
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part of rommels stop them at the beachhead plan for France was based on his experience with north africa towards the end of the campaign when the allies had air supremacy and his belief that a large mobile reserve towards the rear would just be interdicted by fighter bombers
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Jan 28, 2025 16:03
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the massacre is a major part of the final episode of the old bbc documentary 'world at war'. i think anyone who follows this thread should track it down and watch it if they've never seen it
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Jan 28, 2025 16:39
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ninjahedgehog posted:It's also the very first scene in the series, iirc. i haven't sat down and rewatched it in years, but i'm assuming the actual content is rather dated given how old it is, but it being a bbc production done well within living memory of the event i think gives it an sort of emotional weight that few if any documentaries i've seen have been able to capture ContinuityNewTimes posted:It's an incredible series and the narration by Laurence Olivier is great. his narration and the opening and closing theme are what makes the series edit: started watching the first episode, and boy this bit about hitler rapidly seizing control of the totality of government does not make me feel great GhostofJohnMuir fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Jan 28, 2025 |
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Jan 28, 2025 23:47
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Mister Speaker posted:Just watched Napoleon, it was all right. An exchange near the end at the battle of Waterloo got me wondering something. sedgwick is the obvious go to then there's the potentially apocryphal account of harold the saxon dying at hastings to an arrow to the eye wasn't in a battle, but william the second was killed by an arrow while hunting fredrick the first of the holy roman empire died via drowning while on crusades, either because he tried fording a small river in full armor or because the cold water after weeks marching in the desert caused him to go into shock
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Feb 4, 2025 00:01
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Cyrano4747 posted:A USN Admiral in charge of a big task force in the Atlantic in 1942 including the Wasp and a few battleships was swept overboard in bad weather. oh yeah, that reminds me that admiral yamamoto unarmed transport was unceremoniously shot down when the usn got intel on his movements edit: russian admiral makarov was rallying the fleet in port arthur when his flag ship hit three naval mines and sank in the span of two minutes. he was killed and after that no russian officer remaining had the initiative to try to break the blockade, resulting in the fleets total destruction once the japanese were able to get land artillery coverage of the bay GhostofJohnMuir fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Feb 4, 2025 |
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Feb 4, 2025 00:27
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stonewall jackson was shot by his own troops
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Feb 4, 2025 00:36
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Arbite posted:When did the Entente forces of WWI become known as The Allies or Allied Nations? The other side called itself The Triple Alliance but became known as the Central Powers. Italian fuckery notwithstanding, how'd the names come to stick? not enough of a history buff to know for sure, but the treaty of versailles tended to refer to the victors collectively as "the principal allied and associated powers". the name might spring from that
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Feb 4, 2025 02:33
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the apocryphal account of pancho villa's final words after being gunned down in an ambush probably fits the bill, quote:"don't let it end like this. tell them i said something"
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Feb 4, 2025 04:20
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ContinuityNewTimes posted:That Buckner fellow sounds lovely. i remember reading about him while falling through a wikipedia hole a few months back, and noting that his father was a confederate general, which tracked for how lovely he was
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Feb 4, 2025 21:48
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Mister Speaker posted:Remembering another moment from Saving Private Ryan, that sort of ties into the impetus for my last question (the sniper saying he has a bead on Napoleon): Mellish tells Upham that "every time he salutes the Captain he makes him a target for the Germans." Historically how often would sharpshooters seek out behaviour like this (I doubt they could read rank insignia through their scopes) and use it to target officers? Has it ever been made a policy in the field to not salute because of it? i mean snipers developed as a concept specifically because targeting key figures on the field could have a huge multiplier effect orders of magnitude beyond what a bog-standard infantryman could accomplish. the most valuable role is degrading command and control, which is primarily done by targeting officers, especially as technology as rendered couriers obsolete. picking out the guy with the fanciest hat is as old or older than the idea of the sniper, any fleeting moments of chivalry aside. the other roles of suppressing heavy crew serviced weapons (field artillery in napoleanic times, machine guns in more modern conflicts), or suppressing squad level advances were always distinctly secondary
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Feb 4, 2025 22:36
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clausewitz has a good bit in "on war" where he discusses the theory of a calvary pursuit of routed but not trapped force in the napoleonic era. basically, by that point physically running them down wasn't so much what inflict significant casualties on a retreating body. the attrition came mostly from keeping the enemy on the move in poor order, and the men and equipment that would simply fall out of the chaos of the retreat. any guns or supplies that got left behind you could scoop up, and the exhausted men falling out of the column or becoming lost in the confusion would either be separated from their unit for days or weeks, surrender, or gently caress off and go home. keeping your cavalry corps on the enemies heels for as long as possible, convincing the enemy commander that instead of regrouping where he stood he had to pick a more defensible spot another day's march away over and over again, prolonging the attrition inherent to an unorganized army, was the key to maximizing the impact of your victory the risk is that if the routing force ever manages to assemble a scratch rearguard of infantry actually stand and fight, they'll likely be able to stall a purely cavalry force. if an element of your own infantry can manage to keep pace behind the cavalry that's when you can ensure that routes will become particularly extended. of course, the tension underlying the whole thing is that if your enemy rallies faster than you anticipated and you've thrown out stretched out your corps in both pursuit and reforming after the battle, suddenly you risk defeat in detail
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Feb 5, 2025 08:39
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the talk of pows in japanese captivity reminds me, i was in new orleans recently and decided to splurge on their collection vault tour at the ww2 museum one piece that was brought out was a canteen carried by a pow from the surrender at bataan. pows were stripped of most of their personal effects, but because they might be used as labor and the japanese didn't want to supply tin cups, they were generally allowed to keep their canteens. american soldiers would occasionally scrimshaw on the metal portion of their canteens to pass the time, but in this instance the pow used his canteen to track his captivity  based on my past collection tours at other museums i was expecting to merely look at some interesting objects pulled by the curator, but to my delight it was super hands on. was not expecting to ever get the chance to handle an mg42 (won't be posting any of the weapon pics because my goony rear end is grinning in all of them) the most surprising pieces they brought out was the trench art reusing discarded artillery shells, a bit of downtime activity i don't recall ever seeing or hearing about before  the best was this ash tray made of a 105mm shell and some .50 cal machine gun rounds. a real statement piece finally, it turns they didn't have any loose chocolate bars, but they did have this tantalizing emergency ration when i asked about any candy in their collection  i really have to wonder what the balance was on that sucrose-citric acid tablet. was it like a sugar cube with a little tang to it, or was it sour enough to make you pucker? anyway if anyone happens to be heading to new orleans (an amazing city) and hasn't been, i would recommend carving out most of a day for the ww2 museum. and i found the vault tour to be totally worth it, i got to handle a ton of cool stuff that i don't want to spam up the thread with, and the curator had a fun or enlightening story to go with each
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Feb 6, 2025 17:23
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Defenestrategy posted:I'm finally at the D-Day in WW2 DBD and finishing up Part 2, So the allies have basically assured their breakouts on most beaches and some beaches have decided to head inland. Maybe it was done, stated or will be stated, but why do the various beaches seem to be acting alone? From what I can tell, the idea is, get on the beach, clear exits off the beach to siege or destroy remaining strong points in your sector, and then exploit forward to link up with paratroop units who are theoretically somewhere in front of you cutting off reinforcements or holding transport lines for further exploitation. My question is, once units are off the beach why didn't they send units from other beaches to destroy strong points in other beach sectors? For example, sending units you have already got off the beach in juno and cleared their sector to flank strong points on sword instead of just exploiting their one hole. to make an overly broad generalization, on an operational level, getting into the enemies rear is more valuable than flanking and destroying enemy strong points and the loss of momentum can be detrimental to the operation as a whole. this was a lesson learned and implemented late in ww1 pushing forward into the rear is worth it as long as your flanks aren't too exposed because the disruption to lines of communication has a a geometric effect. see the german campaign in france at the start of the war for a practical example, caen was a day 1 objective in the common wealth sector but the allies couldn't make enough headway to secure it within the first few days and thus you'll probably be hearing about it regularly for the next several months worth of episodes. also pushing inland has the benefit of pushing back the artillery which has the beach exits dialed in and are taking a toll and adding to the traffic jams trying to get off the beach
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Feb 18, 2025 09:42
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Chamale posted:I was looking at an 1897 Pearson's Magazine and it had an interesting article on developments in weaponry. The author talks about the next great European war that everyone knows is coming, and wrongly predicts that rifles will be the difference-maker rather than artillery or machine guns. wow, 125 years later and pop sci magazines are still pretty much the same
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Feb 20, 2025 16:49
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Mr. Nemo posted:Some quick notes on aspects of the war that i feel aren’t covered enough in the material I’ve looked at so far, I’ll have to look these up later. texas and it's surrounding has some small campaigns in the low thousands of men, often in swamps for some reason, with some skirmishing and almost no pitched battles. further west slavery support wasn't strong enough to overcome the token federal frontier garrisons beyond the few ironclads, the south had a few privateers who got up to interesting but ultimately insignificant raiding around the globe. the last confederate to hear of the surrender was a raider trying to destroy the northern Pacific whaling fleet, who was informed by a would be prize that everyone else laid down arms weeks ago. th confederates were u able to do more than slip a few small ships past the blockade, it was very effective at strangling the southern import export based economy
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Feb 22, 2025 00:37
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the german infiltration operation during the battle of the bulge and the american ad hoc effort to identify them through trivia questions is fairly well known, but i'd never seen this anecdote before and thought it was worth sharingquote:General Omar Bradley was briefly detained when he correctly identified Springfield as the capital of Illinois because the American MP who questioned him mistakenly believed the capital was Chicago. to any non-american's who don't know, our state capitols tend to be third-string cities no one outside the state has ever heard of. makes memorizing all 50 state capitols even more of a challenge. today if you asked a random american they'd probably still answer chicago
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Feb 26, 2025 18:27
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Cyrano4747 posted:It's like this because most of the states had their capitols set down in the 18th/19th centuries and it was important for it to be roughly as far for all the delegates. Keep in mind this is before the big population transfers to major cities, so even if e.g. Philadelphia is big and important you can't just plop it there. If you look at the capitols they more or less map to being approximately in the middle of a population distribution map for the era. i also heard (probably apocryphally) that even when the population concentration was still mostly the same as today, the rest of the state was loathe to let the biggest city also claim the mantle of the state seat and the influence it would add. like why they put the nations capitol in an empty swamp
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Feb 26, 2025 23:30
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FPyat posted:Question about Cold War armies - given the theoretical usage of tactical nuclear strikes, would advancing forces have been expected to march around the epicenters, or drat the risks and run right into the mushroom clouds? It's hardly a close analogy, but I think of how it's believed that the troops in the Battle of the Crater should have gone around the hole, not into it. advancing quickly and immediately exploiting the gaps left by tactical nukes was definitely doctrine on both sides, and they were equipped as such many armored vehicles had nuclear, biological, and chemical protections in their design. generally filters, positive pressure from an internal air supply, or something of that nature dismounted infantry would have gas masks, highly binding chemicals washes such as tecnu to physically remove fall out from their skin, and similar, but being dismounted in that environment would have been a last resort as to the battle of the crater, the real problem was that the unit which had been training to be the first through the crater, with an emphasis on rapidly exploiting the confusion to extend the breach in the line, was a black unit. there was a racially motivated decision to remove the unit from its role very late in the planning, and the unit which replaced them had no specialized training, and simply took positions in the crater for the ~15 minutes it took confederate forces to regroup. there's a significant chance that if the unit specifically trained for the operation had been left in its role the battle would have been a union victory, or at least not such a costly defeat
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Mar 1, 2025 08:25
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Yaoi Gagarin posted:what I'm getting out of this conversation is we should do more wars we should do more wars* *in which the bulk of the dead are foreign, and all non-domestic global industry is obliterated, and we win
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Mar 3, 2025 22:21
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Nessus posted:what I dimly recall from previous bouts of tonk chat was that nobody's guesses on what tanks would be "for" were unreasonable, it was just that the Germans (whose tanks were decent but not amazing, on mass) found the most effective tactical concepts and had the benefit of going first. i might be misremembering, but during the campaign in poland and then the low countries and france wasn't the bulk of german armor still panzer ii because of production delays on the iii and iv?
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Mar 14, 2025 18:55
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gonna go slightly off topic, but i've recently started reading "guns and stamps", a manga about a logistical company in a war between an imperial russia analogue and a turkish republic analogue during a weird ahistorical mashup of wwi through the immediate post wwii era. the thing i really love is the author spotlighting all the lovely white elephant projects each side loves to produce. massively over-gunned and over-engineered boondoggles trying to fill every role, or overspecializing in a niche no one asked for. the number of different gun calibers and the amount of exclusive ammunition types is a great running gag. if you have a soft spot for ugly and nonsensical interwar tank designs, it might be up your alley 
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Mar 25, 2025 23:14
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SlothfulCobra posted:In the wake of the massive earthquake in Myanmar during their civil war, I'd like to ask if there's been any other famous cases of devastating natural disasters in the middle of a war? typhoon cobra in dec 1944 was a super storm that halsey decided to sail straight through. it sunk destroyers, killed 800 men and banged up the usn carrier fleet so badly that the tempo in the pacific notably slowed. did more damage than the japanese were capable of inflicting at that point in the war
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Mar 29, 2025 07:10
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if the ottamans had decided a great power war was absolutely not in the cards the could have just been like greece a year later and strongly protested as different forces did as they wanted, and then shrugged
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Mar 30, 2025 05:17
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von mackensen has a pretty good record with the asterisk that he had a lot of structural advantages in most of his campaigns going up against overextended russians and overmatched minor powers for the entente it's probably some canadian or aussie I've never heard of but who every school child in the country in question learns songs about in grammar school
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Apr 14, 2025 19:00
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