Milhist Thread: Ok, so get this: we name the army groups 1, 2 and 4...

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Milhist Thread: Ok, so get this: we name the army groups 1, 2 and 4...

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Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Platystemon posted:

How were people not plotting to overthrow the government while toiling on the wall?

I guess the difference is, if you need to desperately build a wall to protect your nation or you need to invent something for the people to do so they don't get any ideas. If the latter, then you can keep the toiling at a level not too rebellion inciting.

The people would need to be toiling anyway to get some food in their mouth, either farming or other work. If there is no work available that could be a cause for rebellion, so it's better to invent some work, just don't make it bad enough to cause a rebellion. Even better if you can get something usefullish out of it. And if it's something the workers could few as being for their protection too it could easily have morale boosting efect.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2020 20:45

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 21:38

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Yooper posted:

I'm looking to read about the Soviet tank design process pre-WW2. Can anyone recommend a good book?

Expanded on this, are there any comparative books on the progress of tank technology? When was any of the pieces of the tank puzzle invented, by whom, and when did other nations follow? "Nation A has invented Thing X, this was a smart idea, good job." "Nation E is trying out Thing W, this is idiotic, they are completely on the wrong path."

How did tank factories and production facilities function? This question again came to my mind from the recent T-44 article where it discussed problems finding a production facility that wouldn't disrupt T-34-85 production. From the blog I have gotten the impression that US was operating efficient production lines and USSR wasn't that far behind, but Germany didn't manage to reach the same level. If a factory was using line production, how serial or parallel were them. I would assume if you want to achieve high production you need several parallel and independish lines, there's a limit how much you can expand and increase workers on a single line. If you have ten production lines it would seem conceivable to switch one of them to T-44 production and reduce T-34-85 production by only 10%. And when that one line is running smoothly you start switching the next line.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2021 17:13

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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I guess monarchy was ruled out because history should be full of nice kings. They didn't have to kill anyone since their grandpa did all of that for them and they would be able to leave the throne for their son without any undue effort.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2021 12:09

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Tias posted:

I really like how representatives from both states are like 'haha what a darling mistake, but no, seriously, put it back'

I hope he's uncooperative, just so we can see the border commission at work.

# ¿ May 5, 2021 00:30

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Much of the border between Finland and Sweden is defined by the deepest course (thalweg) of the Tornio river. It is surveyed every 25 years and the border will move.

quote:

The border is agreed to be regularly inspected every 25 years. During the independence of Finland, inspections have been made in 1926�1927, 1956�1957, 1981 and 2006. These inspections include inspecting the course of the border, repairing the border signs if needed, and defining the location of the deepest parts of the river through aerial and terrestrial photography. Especially in the wide, sandbanked areas of the rivers, the deepest parts shift in location. If the deepest part has shifted, the border may be shifted accordingly. For example, in the 2006 inspection, the border was shifted in many places, usually by 10 to 20 metres, but in some places up to 100 metres. A similar total area was moved from one country to another in both directions.

# ¿ May 6, 2021 03:09

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Tulip posted:

The Traversierschritt is funny because the OG form of it in the Prussian military had people march diagonal - as in face forward and cross your right leg over your left when you were stepping forward. Other countries looked at this and went "hm" and and their units wheel 45 degrees, march to the location, then wheel 45 degrees again.

Thank you for answering all the questions the term "oblique step" raised and revealing it was exactly as ridiculous as I had dreamed. Wonder what the casualty rate was for soldiers stumbling over their feet and bayonetting others.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2021 14:11

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Tulip posted:

Heck even ACW battlefields are still typically recognizable as fields even after heavy fighting, which is a pretty radical contrast to 50 years after that when WW1 artillery could alter the physical terrain very rapidly. TNT wasn't invented until 1863 and it still took a while to make it useful for most battlefield applications.

Bret Devereaux did a post on his A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog about how movies and videogames show non-WW1 battlefields wrong.

Collections: The Battlefield After the Battle

# ¿ Jun 9, 2021 18:06

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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GotLag posted:

Here are some links to a blog that came up recently in this thread:
https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/
https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-i-bargaining-for-goods-at-helms-gate/
https://acoup.blog/2019/10/18/collections-the-battlefield-after-the-battle/

Hah, I was about to post same list of links, but would have also included this one.

Collections: Gondor Heavy Infantry Kit Review

# ¿ Jun 22, 2021 15:01

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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When I was a forward observer in the finnish army in '97-98, pretty much the only tools that wouldn't have been available in WW1 were the laser range finder and device for sending coordinates as encrypted text messages. We never touched a GPS. Optical range finders still existed, but we didn't train them anymore.

The job was all about accurate, calibrated sighting compass. Most positioning was done by starting from intersection or other known location and with the hand compass, 50 meter steel cable and drawing your path on a millimeter paper. I'm not as familiar with the artillery end, but I don't think they needed anything more advanced.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2021 23:24

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Oberndorf posted:

In a live fire situation, how reliable would SMS messages be? I can�t imagine the cell network would survive more than trivial shelling. What was the alternative means of distributing coordinates?

It wasn't SMS, it was a dedicated device SANLA M90 you could plug in to either the LV 217 radio or the field telephone network.

And on this old promo video at the 25 second mark, we see the forward observer giving the traditional greeting for arriving shells by Heiling.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2021 00:02

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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feedmegin posted:

Not sure what you can do about indirect fire given the communications limitations in a mobile war - no radios!

I've occasionally wondered about the communication capability. I remember one exercise in the late 90s in finnish army when I was part of a forward observer team of a platoon. During the foot march we built about 8 kilometers of phone line behind us. The only thing about that setup that didn't feel like 19th century technology was the plastic coated paired wire. At what point in time were there wire available that could transmit telegraph for few kilometers while laying on the ground? That was a standard practice during my time. As soon as the platoon had chosen a camp site couple guys would go off to build a phone line from the company headquarters.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2021 05:12

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Raenir Salazar posted:

Considering these are ongoing events for the current season maybe we should put it into spoiler tags?

Might also specify what the spoiler concerns, either Expanse or LoGH in this case. Because on the forums spoiler tags are for jokes, not spoilers. I read that spoiler without a second though and just assumed I was reading a LoGH spoiler, a series I'll probably never watch.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2021 20:24

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Wingnut Ninja posted:

I visited the Seabee museum at Port Hueneme this week, and one of the main takeaways is that Seabees have looted a shitload of stuff from the various places they've been deployed. The museum has a bunch of fairly standard trophies like pistols and knives and stuff, but also some pretty bonkers items. I didn't grab a photo of it but they've got a ~6 foot long model of a U-Boat from a German shipyard that someone helped himself to at the tail end of WWII.

They've also got Uday Hussein's gold-plated Dragunov:

So what is the legality aspect of such trophies?

# ¿ Jan 15, 2022 21:34

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Cyrano4747 posted:

Oh and if anyone is interested: all of this here is why "De-Ba'athification" was such a clusterfuck. Tl;dr on that is that a bunch of morons heard once that Denazification was a thing and just assumed it meant that you went balls out with kicking out everyone who was a Nazi and said "hey, that worked in Germany, Iraq's the same right?"

Problem: The Ba'ath party had been in charge of Iraq even longer and those problems with required party membership were even more profound. Like, oh for a random example, all military officers needing to be Party members. So now you have an occupation where all the people with prior military training - many of whom weren't exactly ride or die for Saddam - are now ineligible to do any kind of work and have a lot of time on their hands and are bitter at not being able to get a job and oh hey they have connections and military experience and look at all these militias that are hiring!

Just. . . goddamn. If you're going to base your occupation of another country off what was done 60+ years earlier, loving phone someone who has spent their life studying how it worked and ask them what the gently caress denazification was actually about. From what I can tell they never bothered to look beyond the most shallow understanding of what it actually entailed.

Ages ago I saw a documentary about all the mistakes made in the occupation, it was probably No End in Sight.

quote:

According to No End in Sight, there were also three especially grave mistakes made by L. Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA:

- Stopping preparations for the formation of an interim Iraqi government
- Bremer's first official executive order implementing "De-Ba'athification" in the early stages of the occupation, as he considered members disloyal. Saddam Hussein's ruling Ba'ath Party counted as its members a huge majority of Iraq's governmental employees, including educational officials and some teachers, as it was not possible to attain such positions unless one had membership. By order of the CPA, these skilled and often apolitical individuals were banned from holding any positions in Iraq's new government.
- Bremer's second official executive order disbanding all of Iraq's military entities, which went against the advice of the U.S. military and made 500,000 young men unemployed. The U.S. Army had wanted the Iraqi troops retained, as they knew the locals and could maintain order, but Bremer refused as he felt that they could be disloyal. However, many former Iraqi soldiers, many with extended families to support, then decided that their best chance for a future was to join a militia force. The huge arms depots were available for pillaging by anyone who wanted weapons and explosives, so the former Iraqi soldiers converged on the military stockpiles. The U.S. knew about the location of weapon caches, but said that it lacked the troops to secure them; ironically, these arms would later be used against the Americans and new Iraqi government forces.

The film cites these three mistakes as the primary causes of the rapid deterioration of occupied Iraq into chaos, as the collapse of the government bureaucracy and army resulted in a lack of authority and order. It was the Islamic fundamentalists that moved to fill this void, so their ranks swelled with many disillusioned Iraqi people.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2022 20:04

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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A practical question, how would a modern general/commander conduct a battle? How do they receive the information they need and how do they relay their commands.

I assume no general would be close enough to see the actual battle, unless they are receiving real-time drone footage. Do they look at a computer screen with a map and unit icons, or do they get written or spoken descriptions of the battle.

Do they speak commands to their underlings, call unit leaders, send written commands or click on the units on a screen.

How much of a battle would need to be simulated until the general can't tell if they are in a shooting war or a war-game?

# ¿ Apr 26, 2022 18:48

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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I'm a bit surprised by the attitude of Nenonen, Valtonen and Vahakyla, since Finland had a policy of bringing the fallen back to their home parish almost from the start. Burying them in Belgium or France would have been unacceptable.

After Winter War started the Defence Forces' original plan was to quickly bury the soldiers near where they had fallen. Because of resistance from families and soldiers, after two weeks a permit was given for transporting the deceased back to their homes. And in under two months an order was given to establish Evacuation Centers of Fallen on all battlefronts. When I was researching this just now, couple times I saw a claim that Finland was the only WW2 belligerent with a policy to return the fallen back home, and this wasn't the first time I had seen it.

In the thread there were mentions about Finland doing search and recovery of remains, but based on a quick research this seems to only apply to Russia. I didn't find any info about such cases in Finnish side, I guess all that could be recovered were done soon after the wars. The only recent case I found was an article about an archeologist whose group had found a mass grave of six Russian soldiers in Hankoniemi. Their remains were returned to the embassy and then buried in a cemetery of Russian soldiers in Hanko.

During Soviet Union repatriation wasn't possible, but within months after Soviet Union's collapse Finland negotiated with Russia about mutual repatriation. After 1992, about 1400 remains have been recovered and 400 have been identified.

# ¿ May 5, 2022 23:54

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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If you don't have trucks for everyone, then bicycles are probably the next best thing. A long line of bicycles is quieter and harder to ambush than a truck. And I'd much rather carry a full backbag on the bicycle than my own back. And those heavy single-gear army bikes can make surprisingly good distance. The oath march at the end of my rookie period was three days on bicycles. First day 40 kilometers, second 50, and the last day was return to the barracks, 110 kilometers in about 12 hours.

# ¿ May 16, 2022 00:34

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Randomcheese3 posted:

The problem with this plan was that the main force of the German invasion was coming through the less well-defended gap between these mobile forces and the Maginot Line in the Ardennes. This area was seen as an unlikely target for the Germans because it had few roads on which supplies could flow forward (and indeed, the German logistical tail ended up in a massive traffic jam) and good defensive terrain.

The thread had a lot of discussion about Ardennes just a week ago.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2022 10:06

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Have you looked at Vietnamese texts, they have so many diacritics it's painful to look at.

I guess they try to show the correct pronunciation for every character, but what do they plan to do when language evolves? "Here are the 148 words you write slightly differently this year."

# ¿ Jul 28, 2022 17:05

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Koramei posted:

Do riggers on tall ships go harness-less even these days?

I visited G�theborg this summer and I noticed thinner modern rope, that I assumed was safety line, at least on some of the rigging.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2022 01:20

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Scratch Monkey posted:

They also mix blood and milk. I remember watching how they bleed their cows in a documentary. They lightly shoot an arrow very close to the animal�s neck and catch the blood that comes out. It�s very interesting to watch

Why an arrow? I don't understand what benefit that that has over a knife, sharpened bone or stick.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2022 18:02

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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There was an English language publication about the find.

A glimpse of the Finnish civil war 1918 � a weapons cache at Kourla Manor, Vihti

# ¿ Sep 19, 2022 16:33

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Tulip posted:

The Great Divergence is a really sprawling work, owing to its primary mission and technique. The core question it is asking is why, of the various dense, urbanized, developed, complex, iron age economic clusters that existed at the early modern era, one of them (western europe) got onto a much more rapid growth track and was able to dominate the world by the mid 1800s. The fundamental technique is to look at the many, many explanations that have been popular over the years - market formulations, looting the western hemisphere, this or that technological innovation, demographics, education systems, etc - and ruthlessly saw through their rib cages to see which hypotheses survive. It is plodding and methodical and brutal and I love it for that, the only comparable book for me was and forgive them their debts.

Bret Deveraux just did a blog post about why industrial revolution started in UK. His argument was that the only economical use for the Newcomen steam engine was pumping water out of coal mines, for any other use transporting the coal would have been too expensive. And deforested England was the only place with as much need for coal mining.

Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?

# ¿ Sep 22, 2022 05:51

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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I can't really say how valid the arguments are, but what I find interesting is that my reading of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" some years age was largely opposite of what has been discussed here. I understood the premise as Eurasia got really lucky with geography and Europeans didn't do anything to deserve their later success and domination. It would be fair for other people to be lucky for a change.

I got the sense that geography didn't as such determine that Europe would rule the world, but it more determined that Africa didn't have a chance and Americas didn't have much chance either. That then leaves the question why Europe and not China, and I have seen the idea it was because of the fragmented nature. Thousand years ago China had a clear upper hand. They were much bigger empire, their treasure fleet started earlier and was bigger. But China was an empire with an emperor who decided he didn't care about it, and that was the end of chinese colonial endeavours. Columbus could hop to the neighbouring country if his ruler wasn't supportive. Chamale's post mentions Europe wanting better trade routes. No European country could dominate over the others, so they were forced to outside for resources and expansion.

Maybe everything would have been different if Roman Empire hadn't collapsed. Would the 15th century Caesar have been content to toodle around Mediterranian, occasionally butting heads with vikings and mongols. And given chance for the praerian tribes to launch their fleets towards east.

zoux posted:

"Kathleen Lowrey argued that Guns, Germs, and Steel "lets the West off the hook" and "poisonously whispers: mope about colonialism, slavery, capitalism, racism, and predatory neo-imperialism all you want, but these were/are nobody's fault. This is a wicked cop-out. [...] It basically says [non-Western cultures/societies] are sorta pathetic, but that bless their hearts, they couldn't/can't help it"

It's very important that we hold people who have been dead for 500 years accountable for some reason. More legitimate criticisms hold that it's overly broad in its conclusions and ignores contradictory evidence, but I don't think that accounts for the bitterness that some hold in regard to this book.

Europeans are clearly guilty of colonialism and all its ills and owe all manner of apologies and reparations, but should they have been expected to know better? For millenia everyone has been killing and conquering their neighbours, why would it be so wrong to do that to people far away. Except for the unfair advantage you have over people who don't have centuries of experience fighting against you. If the Inkas or Africans had similar technological headstart would they not have colonized equally harshly. I fear colonialism is one of those things you need to try in massive scale before you learn why you shouldn't do it.

Magnetic North posted:

This made me curious: From Wikipedia:

Can't imagine why people were a little resistant to attribute Haiti's issues away from the sphere of the political.

That's not a good example. The chapter compares Haiti and Dominican Republic, two countries sharing an island, and a significant difference in forest cover. The most meaningful difference between the countries was that Dominican Republic had a dictator who considered forest conservation important and severely limited logging. Japan was another example where the shogunate recognized the importance of forests and restricted their use.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2022 21:02

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Tomn posted:

But to the key bulk of your question, your argument seems to state that "a successful invasion only consists of major cultural and ethnic changes." This seems...strange. From the perspective of whether or not the sea hinders invasions, what do I, the King of Northumbria, care if the the Kingdom of Wessex will eventually survive and grow to take over all of England if the Viking invasions destroy my state and my dynasty? Surely from the perspective of practical military planning, it's whether or not my particular polity survives that matters, not the greater cultural or linguistic grouping to which I belong to?

Maybe dynasties could be a useful metric to evaluate this question. What was the average duration of dynasties on English and French soil and the land mass they held. A dynasty that ceases to exist would clearly count and one that loses their homeland probably too.

Tribal societies could maybe be excluded, they seem too willing to abandon their homeland and move away.

There was also discussion about England in the comment section of the latest ACOUP blog post. One poster succested a different kind of dynamic that the sea would cause.

Simon_Jester posted:

I�m not saying England was isolated. I�m saying that England had fairly clearly defined �natural frontiers,� and that once an aspiring king of England bumped up against those frontiers, any subsequent expansion started to get a lot more difficult.

The vast majority of the English border was ocean. The land borders with Wales and Scotland were difficult to force. They could be (and eventually were) forced, but to do this required precisely the kind of centralized English state we�re talking about.

Likewise, the possibility of raiders from the sea creates a need for a centralized state, because you need to make sure the raiders can�t find weak points and carve out new blobs of Danelaw (or whatever) for themselves.

So rather than try to subjugate new territories to become stronger, or cultivating personal relationships with their overlords, English kings in the first half of the Middle Ages (roughly 500-1000 CE) had to concentrate on building up structures.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2022 13:34

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Someone needs to create a timeline of US parties showing their alignment and opinions. I could never understand how Democrats and Republicans could switch sides and this is just incomprehensible.

Why do the current parties seem so enthrenched? Why aren't they falling apart or get erplaced by another party? Has something changed in the election systems?

# ¿ Oct 22, 2022 17:00

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Tulip posted:

Just blooming iron requires 1150C, which wood is just not gonna hit, so you need charcoal, which is a very material intensive process. You no longer need a trade network for tin that extends across all of europe, but now you need an entire local industry of woodfelling and charcoaling just to get to making the bloomeries. And of course it must be said that, contrary to what you see in movies, this does not allow you to cast iron. You get a sponge of iron that you just have to beat into shape.

Deveraux did a series of articles on ancient iron production that addresses this issue. First number I found was about 100kg of wood for 1kg of iron.

quote:

To put that in some perspective, a Roman legion (roughly 5,000 men) in the Late Republic might have carried into battle around 44,000kg (c. 48.5 tons) of iron � not counting pots, fittings, picks, shovels and other tools we know they used. That iron equipment in turn might represent the mining of around 541,200kg (c. 600 tons) of ore, smelted with 642,400kg (c. 710 tons) of charcoal, made from 4,620,000kg (c. 5,100 tons) of wood. Cutting the wood and making the charcoal alone, from our figures above, might represent something like (I am assuming our charcoal-burners are working in teams) 80,000 man-days of labor. For one legion.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2022 22:45

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Hazzard posted:

I think in the case of rapier, thrusting is safer. Savlator Fabris recommends thrusting right up to the hilt when you stab someone in the chest. At that point, your opponent would have a hard time getting you with their own rapier due to the length.

I think you are speaking of different kinds of safety. Siivola's argument is that you should use cutting in a duel, so your opponent becomes hurt and incapacitated, but they will not die. You are talking about thrusting the sworn all the way through the opponent, so they will die for certain and won't be able to use their own sword to attack you.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2023 19:03

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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busalover posted:

Watching The Fiddler on the Roof, and there's this shot of the russian army

Those cigar-shaped things... is that gun powder plus some ammo?

Saul Kain explained what those are. But even if those started as tubes of ammo and powder, I suspect by the era of the picture those are only decorative, I hope the cossacks wouldn't be carrying around actual gun powder.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2023 19:10

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Scratch Monkey posted:

Mail wouldn�t have been as common if making larger plates of iron weren�t so much more difficult

The question wasn't whether there are better armor in existence, it's about whether mail was worth manufacturing. Judging by how much resources was spent on it apparently it was.

# ¿ May 7, 2023 14:31

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:

No offense to him, but I don't think Ensign Expendable was a twentieth century salvage diver.

Two discussions are getting mixed. Ensign Expendable was a guest on this KV-2 video by Military History not Visualized.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2023 10:11

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Is there a blog-copy of those somewhere? Both of those posts deserve to be un-paywalled.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2023 13:10

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Does sound like the armorers should manufacture water jackets for the M2s to use in these training sessions.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2023 00:45

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
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Cessna posted:

But everyone plays the game.

And no one is going to be the first company commander to say, "naah, gently caress my career, hold the inspection at the regular barracks on Del Mar, the one with the crappy cars in the parking lot, piles of beer cans spilling out of the trash dumpsters, and black mold growing in the pipes."

Why does this sound like Russia?

And I was reminded of the time I was training some rookies in the barracks and noticed movement on the corner of my eye. The base commander with some general in tow had just waltzed in through the back staircase.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2023 18:59

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

Cessna posted:

So, what's the next step? "Make a rule saying, "Your must shoot at realistic targets?" Okay, sure, we do that a lot of the time. "You must shoot at realistic targets with X percent of your ammo?" I guess. Then you end up messing up someone's career because they couldn't find an opening to book time on the "Realistic Target Range" before the end of the year. Etc, etc - it's an endless spiral.

I would base the ammo budget on the 10 month average consumption, the months with least and most consumed excluded. At least it would require a bit more planning to game the system. The same system I would use for the departmental budgets at work.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2023 00:25

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

The best part about ACOUP posts is the beginning.

quote:

This is the third section of the third part of our our planned five part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb) on the structure of the Roman Republic

# ¿ Sep 12, 2023 13:08

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

Chamale posted:

The best example of this is that standard American military IDs spelled the word "identification" wrong. The WWII vet and historian Paul Fussell wrote that a German spy was caught because a suspicious guard noticed that his identification spelled the word correctly.

That is so inhumane. Can you imagine the mental anguish the German forger must have gone through while pondering that word. Before deciding to write it correctly and hoping for the best.

# ¿ Sep 30, 2023 15:52

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

Xiahou Dun posted:

Is that the "same" population, or were they effectively doing atrocities to one population to scare the other. Wouldn't that be more analogous to how the Blitz affected idk Crete rather than the UK?

I don't have a horse in this fight and am just playing with the hypothesis though.

The dynamics are probably different when every city is a fortification. The defenders are inside the walls and they know they will be butchered if the walls are preached, unless they play nicely with the attackers.

What could the people of Bucha have done differently? The soldiers that gave Russians a hard time had probably retreated out of the region a while ago already.

Mariupol was maybe more similar to traditional siege, but there too the larger city had already been conquered during the siege of the metal works. And everyone had forgotten how a proper siege works. The traditional way would probably have been to start executing the citizens of Mariupol in front of the defenders.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2023 08:09

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

Usually the prisoners are significantly outnumbered by your own fighting forces, but also you usually want to ship them away from the front lines to pose a less of a threat and at that point they are probably easier to feed than your own troops at the front lines. Extreme example those German prisoners who were shipped to prisoner camps in continental US and ended up as farm workers somewhere in Oregon.

Cyrano4747 posted:

This more or less fits the family story of a guy I used to know. His dad was scooped up in Tunisia in WW2, ended up in a POW camp in Oregon, and basically got rented out to farmers. He was a farm kid from rural Germany so he took to the work and had a good rest of the war. Got shipped back to Germany in 46 or so, saw what a mess it was, and hosed off back to the US at the earliest opportunity. Ended up back in OR, showed up on one of the farmer's doorsteps and got taken on as a farmhand. Eventually met a local girl and started a family.

Biffmotron posted:

My favorite WW2 POW escapade is the Great Papago Escape. The wikipedia article is pretty good, but the short version is that Camp Papago Park is located in central Phoenix. Most of the German POWs there were of the opinion that a POW camp in Arizona in December 1944 was a pretty decent place to spend the rest of the war. What are you going to do: escape, walk to Mexico, somehow make your way back to Germany, and die in the ruins of Berlin?

Well, U-boat captain and 'super-Nazi' J�rgen Wattenberg thought that was a great plan, and got enough of the other POWs to go along with him, spending months building a 178' long tunnel out of the camp while covertly dumping the spill in a volleyball court. Wattenberg and 24 other POWs broke out of camp. Two of them had built a collapsible raft with a plan to float down the Salt River and Gila River, both of which are mostly dry arroyos. The rest split up and proceeded on foot, where most were captured, a handful making it to within 10 miles of the border after walking through over 100 miles of the Sonoran desert.

Wattenberg went north instead of south and hid in a cave north of Phoenix for a month with two other officers, one of them trading places with a prisoner who worked outside the camp every few days to get information and food. This ruse was finally discovered after a month, and the entire escape attempt recaptured. Everyone who participated was limited to a bread and water diet for as many days as they had been outside the wire.

The image of a couple of Kriegsmarine POWs secretly building a collapsible raft out of scrap wood, carrying it through a tunnel and a couple of miles of Phoenix to the river, only to find a dusty gulch instead of water, just makes me crack up.

Saukkis fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Dec 14, 2023

# ¿ Dec 14, 2023 00:09

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 21:38

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

alnilam posted:

So, did leaders actually give stirring speeches to assembled soldiers just before a battle, and if so, here is my main question: how the hell did the soldiers hear it? What did it look like in practice?

Do they need to hear it. The troops see the general sitting on his horse in front of the elite unit, then they see and hear the unit getting excited and loud. Must have been a great speech.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2024 20:56

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Milhist Thread: Ok, so get this: we name the army groups 1, 2 and 4...

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