History buffs, strut your stuff!

[SckizoBoy]

Read up a bit on the French Revolutionary Wars...

Who knew that the nation that re-legalised slavery after being the first to codify its abolition had the first black four star general (equivalent) in western history...?!

And it's kind of a shame that he's so unknown, to the extent that the most famous picture of him is actually his son, glammed up, Napoleon deliberately sidelined him and made sure as best he could so that no-one could help his widow...

And why is he still not part of the Legion d'Honneur?!?!

 

[Thaluikhain]

A couple of questions for the tank fans, how much truth is there to the idea that the lower calibre Allied tanks needed an approximate 4:1 advantage in order to successfully create enough distraction to enable their mobility to get a tank behind a heavier German tank in order to attack the weaker armour? The ratio is one I've heard, and while I know the US could churn out Sherman's at a huge rate it still seems like a ratio you'd never achieve in practice.

I'm led to believe that the ratio normally given is 5:1, but that's not a quality thing, that's because you always want to send more than is adequate, and US tanks operated in units of 5. One enemy tank, send more than one US tanks, which meant 5.

If it's a matter of distracting them to get round them, a fixed ratio wouldn't seem to make sense. It'd depend on the terrain (amongst other factors), and why must the distraction be in the form of other tanks?

 

[Barbas]

(Snip).

Fire-storms in some bombing raids were so intense that people were dropping dead in their thousands from lack of oxygen in the streets and being charred to cinders, the road surfaces were melting and people were sucked right back into buildings they were trying to escape from. Reads like a living hell, and on top of that, there were tragically few air raid shelters - even if you could find one, you'd probably have died from lack of oxygen.

 

[rcs619]

(Snip).

Fire-storms in some bombing raids were so intense that people were dropping dead in their thousands from lack of oxygen in the streets and being charred to cinders, the road surfaces were melting and people were sucked right back into buildings they were trying to escape from. Reads like a living hell, and on top of that, there were tragically few air raid shelters - even if you could find one, you'd probably have died from lack of oxygen.

The worst part of it all is that that's exactly what fire-bombing is designed to do. They dropped specific kinds of bombs in specific ratios to try and generate a firestorm... and the whole point of creating that firestorm was to kill as many German civilians as possible. The fire-bombing campaign against Japan was also pretty bad. If I remember right, more Japanese civilians were killed during the fire-bombings than in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

That's one of the reasons why it's so important to study history though, so we don't forget how horrible war actually is. Even the goodguys in World War II were still known to intentionally target civilian population centers if they thought it would have *any* positive impact on the war.

 

[Thaluikhain]

(Snip).

Fire-storms in some bombing raids were so intense that people were dropping dead in their thousands from lack of oxygen in the streets and being charred to cinders, the road surfaces were melting and people were sucked right back into buildings they were trying to escape from. Reads like a living hell, and on top of that, there were tragically few air raid shelters - even if you could find one, you'd probably have died from lack of oxygen.

The worst part of it all is that that's exactly what fire-bombing is designed to do. They dropped specific kinds of bombs in specific ratios to try and generate a firestorm... and the whole point of creating that firestorm was to kill as many German civilians as possible. The fire-bombing campaign against Japan was also pretty bad. If I remember right, more Japanese civilians were killed during the fire-bombings than in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were big deals in that they were attacks by one nuclear device each, something unheard of at the time. In times of death and suffering they weren't that big (by the obscene standards of WW2). I'm told more Chinese civilians could die in a month by Japanese sword, bayonet, disease and starvation than Japanese soldiers died in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

 

[TwistedEllipses]

Also, Harald Hardrada, king of Norway and one of the three claimants to the throne of England in 1066, had served as the commander of the Varangian guard in his youth. He was able to acquire a great deal of wealth from his time in Constantinople which he used to secure the throne of Norway later.

I had to look this up, it was too intriguing. Y'know how I said the Varangian guard were there because it was thought they wouldn't get involved in factionalism, well...
Harold earned his position in the guard under emperor Michael IV. Michel had two co-rulers as his successors, the emperor's former wife Zoe and his nephew Michael V. Harold fell out of favour with Michael and for unclear reasons gets himself arrested. The next time he shows up, he's free and helping Zoe with a revolt, along with most of the Varangian guard!
Now Zoe is empress and Harold is wealthy enough to press some claims, so Harry asks to leaves. She refuses. He leaves anyway. Where does he go? Kievan Rus! Harold promptly marries the daughter of the ruler. Shortly afterwards Kievan Rus (unsuccessfully) raids Constantinople, probably based on insider info...

Correction: The sources got muddled so the bit about Vlad & Chersonesos should be attributed to a later Vlad

 

[rcs619]

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were big deals in that they were attacks by one nuclear device each, something unheard of at the time. In times of death and suffering they weren't that big (by the obscene standards of WW2). I'm told more Chinese civilians could die in a month by Japanese sword, bayonet, disease and starvation than Japanese soldiers died in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Pretty much, yeah. The atomic bomb wasn't a big deal because of how many people it killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was a big deal because it meant that it only took one plane to kill an entire city. Planes that the Japanese were completely unable to stop. They just didn't have any fighters that could climb up and intercept a B-29 flying at full speed and at altitude.

But yeah, that's the thing about World War II though. When you really look into it, the amount of death and destruction is almost impossible to properly wrap your mind around. From Europe, to Russia, to China and the Pacific, it's just a titanic, unimaginable heap of corpses. The holocaust was shocking because of the industrial scale and efficiency of it... but in terms of overall death-tolls, it's barely a blip on the radar compared to what went down in Russia or China.

Something like 60 million people died in World War II (almost certainly more than that, in all honestly). That was something like 3-4% of the *global* population at the time. If that happened today, that'd be somewhere around 200 million people dead (the United States currently has a population of a little over 300 million people).

 

[Barbas]

(Snip).

Yep. Bomber Harris had a bit of a dark reputation when it came to the raids on Germany; he seemed to think that the whole country could be brought to its knees by bombing alone. I think it was him who said, "Every German city is not worth the bones of one British Grenadier", which echoed a very similar quote by Bismarck - that the Balkans were "not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier". Sure gives an insight into the man's priorities, I guess.

(Snip).

Wasn't Little Boy (Hiroshima) later calculated afterward by American scientists to have been a largely inefficient design? That's a disturbing thought considering what it managed to do anyway.

 

[rcs619]

So, onto something more upbeat, after the mountain of corpses talk.

Apparently Airbus got access to the only complete Me-262 a few years back (I believe it was a two-seat training variant from a museum in the US) and they completely disassembled it to make molds of all the parts. They then used this mode to make several replica Me-262's to fly at various airshows. Also included in the following video is a Focke-wulf 190-A8. Because 190's are just damned sexy


For those who don't know, the Me-262 was the world's first operational jet fighter. Besides being incredibly sexy, it was also way ahead of its time (the brits were further behind on jet research, and the US largely considered jet aircraft a pipe-dream until later on). Its development was also hilariously sabotaged by none other than Hitler himself.

See, Hitler had a massive hard-on for vengeance strikes. So when Messerschmidt came to him with this fast, new, exceedingly well-armed jet fighter, Hitler demanded that they also develop dedicated bomber variants so that he could resume bombing England. ...The issue is that, by this point, the allied bombing raids were already taking their toll. If they didn't stop the bombers (which the 262 was designed specifically to do) they were going to lose the war. Even then though, Hitler demanded his jet bombers, and when Hitler demanded, he tended to get. So, Messerschmidt was forced to come up with a modified bomber-variant and retool part of their production lines to accommodate it, which pushed back the deployment of the fighter variant by many valuable months. Even after the fighter-variant 262's were in service, the order that they also build bombers only leeched away what few resources germany still had left at the time.

By the time the Me-262 came into service, the german industrial base looked roughly like the surface of the moon, and the Luftwaffe had been so bled of its experienced pilots that it was hard to actually find competent combat pilots to fly the things.

Hitler had a habit of micro-managing everything and constantly second-guessing his military officers and advisers. This got so bad that the allies actually wound up discontinuing their assassination program against him because they figured he could do more damage to the german war effort alive than killing him would have.

 

[DefunctTheory]

A couple of questions for the tank fans, how much truth is there to the idea that the lower calibre Allied tanks needed an approximate 4:1 advantage in order to successfully create enough distraction to enable their mobility to get a tank behind a heavier German tank in order to attack the weaker armour? The ratio is one I've heard, and while I know the US could churn out Sherman's at a huge rate it still seems like a ratio you'd never achieve in practice.
Flipping from heavy armour to really light armour, is there any truth to American tanks using anti-infantry HE shells on Japanese tanks? I'd heard a story that the armour on Japanese tanks was so thin that AP shells were found to pretty much go straight through the tank, often without hitting anything which would disable the tank.

The ratio was less defined by 'how many tanks it takes to kill another tank,' and more 'maximum firepower as doctrine.' I don't think there's a military that ever existed that had, with doctrine, intentionally put themselves at a numerically inferior disadvantage whenever they could help it.

(Snip).

Wasn't Little Boy (Hiroshima) later calculated afterward by American scientists to have been a largely inefficient design? That's a disturbing thought considering what it managed to do anyway.

Most nuclear weapons are, by their very nature, inefficient.

The Little Boy was known to be particularly inefficient prior to it being dropped. It was a 'gun' type bomb, that initiated fission by essentially firing one small piece of uranium into one big piece of uranium. That's about as primitive as fission gets. Less then 1.5% of the uranium in the bomb actually went off.

There was some confusion on the exact yield years after the bomb went off. Visual estimates (Eyeballing by the bomber pilots) led to a higher initial speculation on the explosive power then it actually was, but this didn't surprise too many people.

 

[MCerberus]

[quote="thaluikhain" post="18.934307.23512674
If you are a WW2 infantry commander, and you call for armour support, you want tanks. Whether or not the design is superior is secondary to whether or not there are enough tanks around for some to be actually sent to support you.[/quote]

Which is why troops liked the introduction of the M24, which was a light tank with the same high explosive payload as most M4s (certain variants of the up-armored Jumbo had a howitzer, which aside from having the biggest boom was put on a tough SOB). The M24 replaced the M5 which was near-useless for infantry support. And again, the M24 was a light tank which couldn't compete with current variants of mediums, but the troops loved it.

It should be noted that for vehicular combat, the best combat records go to the M18 Hellcat and the StuG3, a tank destroyer and artillery vehicle.

As for the T-34, oh that thing was actually pretty awful. For one, yes the lack of ergonomics got a ton of crews killed. The crew, armor, and component layout was pretty deadly to the crews. The early 76mm variants didn't have a radio so without coordination they were knocked out in droves by inferior tanks. Their suspensions and engines had the operating life of a mayfly. And if we're looking for kill rates, the only tanks the T-34 did better than were either outdated Czeck-designed light tanks or the Panzer 4 ausf. F1, which was equipped with a howitzer.

OT- I'm a trivia sponge, so it's really stuff like "The JFK assassination conspiracy theories were a soviet conspiracy"

 

[Guffe]

Sabaton is mine!
New album usually includes listening to a song and finding out as much as possible about that event while the song is playing.

Spoiler: A few of their songs

 

[Robert B. Marks]

When I was doing my MA at Royal Military College, I had a class in signals intelligence. One of the assignments I had was to do a presentation on some signals work in World War I, and I came across this story, recounted in an engineering journal (as I recall), shortly after the war ended...

So, during WW1, one of the ways you located U-Boats was to wait for them to surface and transmit, and then triangulate the signal. You might not know what they had said, but you knew where they were.

One day, an Austrian U-Boat surfaces and transmits. The British signals post triangulates the signal, and then sends a quick transmission to HQ in the clear: "U-Boat at position X." Almost immediately after they've sent their transmission, the signals post receives a transmission in the clear from the U-Boat: "Thank you - we had gotten really lost there."

And this, the article concluded, is why you NEVER transmit information like this without encoding it first.

EDIT: On the same subject, learned from the official history of the British signals corps...the signals men in the British army disliked the Germans, but they REALLY hated the British tank corps. Basically, they'd keep laying signals cables, telling the British tanks not to drive over them because the tank treads would tear them up, and then the tank drivers would drive over the cables and tear them up.

 

[Robert B. Marks]

Also, from the pocket watch sub-reddit, possibly one of the earliest end-user license agreements in history...for a pocket watch: http://i.imgur.com/OAw34rt.jpg

This one dates back to around 1908.

 

[Robert B. Marks]

Das Boot is a good WWII movie too.

Interesting point about that: if you read Michael Gannon's Operation Drumbeat, you'll read about how U-Boat veterans REALLY hated that book and movie. Apparently, it got a LOT wrong about what it was like to be in a U-Boat.

 

[Josh123914]

There's a few that Dan Carlin goes over, but on this day roughly 750 years ago the Mongols sacked Baghdad, ending the Abbasid Caliphate.

I find this so fascinating, it's literally worlds colliding. I mean these were the heavyweight champions of their time, but for thousands of years the East and West didn't come to blows directly.
Then suddenly on one side was the scourge of China, and on the other an ancient empire that was one good jihad away from extinguishing Christianity were at each other's throats... and the winners were the side led by a man who's grandfather was an irrelevant horselord wedged between Siberia and then the greatest empire in the world.

 

[Silvanus]

America and the UK bombed the city of Dresden, Germany, in 1945. They killed 25,000 people and razed the city.

SNIP

This is one reason the German bombings were not added to the list of charges for the defendants at Nuremberg. It would have been something of an embarrassment for the victorious allies, and may have offered the defendants a platform for criticism.

 

[Barbas]

America and the UK bombed the city of Dresden, Germany, in 1945. They killed 25,000 people and razed the city.

SNIP

This is one reason the German bombings were not added to the list of charges for the defendants at Nuremberg. It would have been something of an embarrassment for the victorious allies, and may have offered the defendants a platform for criticism.

Not sure if this is distasteful to add, but Britain had the better hangman.

 

[Silvanus]

Not sure if this is distasteful to add, but Britain had the better hangman.

Not quite sure what you mean by this. D'you mean it wouldn't have much mattered if the defendants shot back at the trial, because most of them were undoubtedly going to be found guilty at any rate?

 

[Barbas]

Not quite sure what you mean by this. D'you mean it wouldn't have much mattered if the defendants shot back at the trial, because most of them were undoubtedly going to be found guilty at any rate?

No idea, I mean they had the more efficient hangman (Albert Pierrepoint).