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The Even Cooler Stuff From [History] Thread

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Posts

  • Rhan9Rhan9 Registered User regular
    Probably not.

  • BurtletoyBurtletoy Registered User regular
    Trace wrote: »
    Scooter wrote: »
    I liked Dan Carlin's take on the modern historical trend of focusing on the couple of good things the Mongols did and ignoring the tens of millions of people they killed (and that a lot of the good things that happened were side effects the Mongols weren't really trying for). In a thousand years from now, will historians be trying to rehabilitate the Nazis, with "at least they made the trains run on time" being the new "at least you could walk across the steppe with gold on your head"?

    rocketry is about the only good thing the Nazi's did

    Haber Bosch process.

    I think there was even a write up in the last thread about it.

  • RiemannLivesRiemannLives Registered User regular
    Every time I hear things about the Aztecs, my brain rebels and thinks, "No, that has to be all made up stuff to highlight the savagery of the heathen lands or something."

    Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to the Americas if the Aztecs hadn't been such giant dickbags. Still ravaged by smallpox, obviously, but maybe Cortés wouldn't have been able to ally with the subjugated tribes of the Empire and overthrow Tenochtitlan.

    And sometimes I also wonder what would have happened to the Americas if the Spanish hadn't been such giant dickbags.

    total civilizational collapse throughout all the Americas was guaranteed as soon as there was contact. Even if the Spanish had been peaceful traders or explorers or whatever every civilization in the Americas was doomed.

    There is no system that can withstand rapidly losing 80-90% of its population.

    Attacked by tweeeeeeees!
  • Knuckle DraggerKnuckle Dragger Explosive Ovine Disposal Registered User regular
    Extra History: The Sengoku Jidai (Part 1 of 6)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDsdkoln59A

    Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.

    - John Stuart Mill
  • Donovan PuppyfuckerDonovan Puppyfucker A dagger in the dark is worth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered User regular
    Rhan9 wrote: »
    I wouldn't consider being an effective monster to be particularly laudable.

    I never said that their aptitude in atrocities was a good thing? Show me where I said that.

    However, pretending that "the nazis were only good at rockets" is disingenuous at best.

    Do not confuse my assessment of their industrial and organisational prowess with admiration.

  • Donovan PuppyfuckerDonovan Puppyfucker A dagger in the dark is worth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered User regular
    Richy wrote: »
    Rhan9 wrote: »
    I wouldn't consider being an effective monster to be particularly laudable.

    Not when you're staring him in his highly-efficient monster face and feeling his highly-efficient monster breath on your neck, no. But in, say, 800 years from now, when the threat of Nazi tanks rolling through France is as laughable to people as the threat of Mongol bowmen riding through Asia is to us, and all that's remembered about Nazi are a handful of talking points like "they were highly efficient" in the same way as all most people remember of the Mongols were "they pacified Central Asia", will people's attitude be different?

    Hopefully our vastly more detailed records of the era will bring to light a little more about the 20th century to future generations than we ourselves know about our past.

  • ElldrenElldren Is a woman dammit ceterum censeoRegistered User regular
    Every time I hear things about the Aztecs, my brain rebels and thinks, "No, that has to be all made up stuff to highlight the savagery of the heathen lands or something."

    Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to the Americas if the Aztecs hadn't been such giant dickbags. Still ravaged by smallpox, obviously, but maybe Cortés wouldn't have been able to ally with the subjugated tribes of the Empire and overthrow Tenochtitlan.

    And sometimes I also wonder what would have happened to the Americas if the Spanish hadn't been such giant dickbags.

    total civilizational collapse throughout all the Americas was guaranteed as soon as there was contact. Even if the Spanish had been peaceful traders or explorers or whatever every civilization in the Americas was doomed.

    There is no system that can withstand rapidly losing 80-90% of its population.

    The only reason the Spanish were even able to conquer the civilizations of the Americas is the chaos caused by the continental pandemic

    every other advantage pales in comparison to that one

    fuck gendered marketing
  • cckerberoscckerberos Registered User regular
    edited February 2015
    Extra History: The Sengoku Jidai (Part 1 of 6)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDsdkoln59A

    I'm sorry... I usually like their stuff, but that was just terrible. It included so many inaccuracies and popular misconceptions, especially when it came to the big picture stuff. I was going to give them props for actually starting their coverage of a period that begins in 1467 in 1467, but they then do what almost everyone does and skipped over nearly a century of history to jump straight to Nobunaga. I also wonder at what point they realized that they had misspelled the name of the Imagawa clan (they must have, right?).

    Was their Punic War series this bad and I just didn't know any better?

    cckerberos on
    cckerberos.png
  • lonelyahavalonelyahava Call me Ahava ~~She/Her~~ Move to New ZealandRegistered User regular
    so I've finished up the Secrets of the Castle. And decided to go forward in time a bit. Onwards to the Tudor Monastery Farm!

  • RMS OceanicRMS Oceanic Registered User regular
    cckerberos wrote: »
    Extra History: The Sengoku Jidai (Part 1 of 6)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDsdkoln59A

    I'm sorry... I usually like their stuff, but that was just terrible. It included so many inaccuracies and popular misconceptions, especially when it came to the big picture stuff. I was going to give them props for actually starting their coverage of a period that begins in 1467 in 1467, but they then do what almost everyone does and skipped over nearly a century of history to jump straight to Nobunaga. I also wonder at what point they realized that they had misspelled the name of the Imagawa clan (they must have, right?).

    Was their Punic War series this bad and I just didn't know any better?

    Each of their "Regular" EH stuff has a "Lies" video after the main series where they own up to oopsiedaisies and also give extra information that didn't fit in the video proper. I'm not sure if your particular grievance is addressed though, but I give them credit for such an endeavour.

    Also they do admit that their history leans more towards Great Man stuff.

  • SkeithSkeith Registered User regular
    Richy wrote: »
    Rhan9 wrote: »
    I wouldn't consider being an effective monster to be particularly laudable.

    Not when you're staring him in his highly-efficient monster face and feeling his highly-efficient monster breath on your neck, no. But in, say, 800 years from now, when the threat of Nazi tanks rolling through France is as laughable to people as the threat of Mongol bowmen riding through Asia is to us, and all that's remembered about Nazi are a handful of talking points like "they were highly efficient" in the same way as all most people remember of the Mongols were "they pacified Central Asia", will people's attitude be different?

    Hopefully our vastly more detailed records of the era will bring to light a little more about the 20th century to future generations than we ourselves know about our past.

    That's assuming the records last. The overwhelming majority of the paper that's been made since the Industrial Revolution is really acidic, so accordingly most books don't last long compared to those printed on acid free paper. University presses have been trying to make the switch to acid-free, but there aren't a whole lot of producers because it's a pretty niche market. I've handled books from the 1600s that were in better shape than books from the 1920s. It's not cheap to neutralize that acid, and on top of that the paper just does not compare in quality to the old, handmade, small batch stuff. Electronic records aren't a whole lot better because of how quickly formats change, but the jury is still out on that.

    aTBDrQE.jpg
  • President RexPresident Rex Registered User regular
    Trace wrote: »
    Scooter wrote: »
    I liked Dan Carlin's take on the modern historical trend of focusing on the couple of good things the Mongols did and ignoring the tens of millions of people they killed (and that a lot of the good things that happened were side effects the Mongols weren't really trying for). In a thousand years from now, will historians be trying to rehabilitate the Nazis, with "at least they made the trains run on time" being the new "at least you could walk across the steppe with gold on your head"?

    rocketry is about the only good thing the Nazi's did

    No?

    The nazi war machine was incredibly efficient. They made excellent armaments, they built excellent machines, they were extraordinarily efficient at suppressing discontent, and managed to almost wipe out the Jewish peoples in a few years.

    They were monsters, but they were very good at what they did.

    I'm going to have to disagree with you on most of the points here, but since I have limited space I'll mostly focus on the war machine, armaments and machines.

    Efficiency in thought
    There are many measures of efficiency, but dedicating a fair portion of your combat-aged ground forces to monitoring "undesirables" is a horrendous waste of manpower. They also had excessive levels of bureaucratic fluff (here for example). As with just about every country, there was a ton of infighting between doctrines and just personal differences between main leaders. Speaking of leaders, there was also excessive turnover (in large part due to Nazi cronyism/favoritism).

    Their training structure was also pretty terrible, especially as the war wore on. The Luftwaffe, for instance, tended to keep pilots running sorties until they died, whereas the US would cycle out veteran pilots to train new pilots (see this list? There's a reason there's a ton of Germans at the top, but it's not because they're necessarily any better than American or British or Soviet aces. The Kriegsmarine tended to do a bit better in that department (still a bunch of dead u-boat 'aces' though). The Soviet Union also suffered from this to an extent, but they had a bit more flexibility in manpower to make up the difference in terrible decision-making.

    Efficiency in resources
    Not entirely sure where it fits in your list, but due to projected resource shortages, poor planning, Allied bombing, Soviet scorched earth strategy, or other reasons, the German logistics system was wildly inefficient. This also led to things like the use of horse-drawn supply vehicles (both from lack of mechanization as well as lack of available oil), excessive use of non-automatic (or non-semi-automatic weapons), delayed rationing (Hitler put effort into trying to maintain national spirit by reducing the extent of rationing, since it killed morale in WW1), sowing dissent by abusing local populations (goes back to that poor use of manpower (also that suppressing discontent stuff - they'd have been much better off waiting to oppress people after the war)), and other things.

    Efficiency in production
    I'll also point out that Albert Speer is probably one of the reasons Germany is associated with ruthless efficiency. Once appointed armaments minister in 1942 he basically tried to trim out a ton of useless fat (side projects, civilian production, Wunderwaffen, poor supply chain management, etc.). And still wasn't wholly successful.

    (Some people ascribe the whole success of German economic production to him, but that really leaves out the fact that German was still making a lot of civilian goods and focused on different areas militarily before he was appointed.)

    If you want to talk about lack of efficiency, German submarine building is a perfect example (some info here, but more in books). The Type VII submarine was basically constructed piecemeal from individual sections with very limited standardized components (especially before 1943). Like the US today, production of individual parts was basically spread throughout the entire German Empire in the most inefficient way possible. There was basically no assembly line manufacturing involved initially, and each boat was essentially machined from scratch. This also involved a lot of wasted logistics effort, such as moving heavy steel from the Ruhr to manufacturers in Saxony and Bavaria before shipping those engines to the north to the actual shipyards.

    The same problems were basically present with tank production. Aircraft production had similar problems. Both vehicle and aircraft manufacturing suffered similar problems of overly specialized production (to be fair, other countries also suffered from this problem). Germany actually had several teams performing research on rocketry (...and nuclear energy) in parallel, duplicating work that would have benefited from unified teams. Never mind the fact that Nazi Germany is basically famous for dozens of specialized weapons that saw research and production efforts but never bore enough fruit to offset the cost (the Komet, the Maus, railroad artillery, the Hochdruckpumpe. And lets not forget tons and tons of wasted production on things like an aircraft carrier that never sailed (including designing specialized aircraft for it), producing super expensive Tigers instead of focusing on cheaper (but nearly equivalent) Panther tanks, and other production inefficiencies.

    The Tigers (and tanks in general) also provide a neat counterpoint to considering Nazis excellent at building machines. Much of the equipment tended to be over-engineered and prone to failure (the Tiger is also kind of neat for its interleaved tread wheels, which were a huge time sink to repair as well). I could probably also do a write-up of German early war tank production, strategy and bureaucratic issues.


    But there's a bunch of stuff I can't do justice to in a short period of time.

    There were also a lot of random bureaucratic problems with the holocaust and setting up death camps and concentration camps. It's fortunate they didn't have the Wannsee Conference earlier. And that they weren't even more fastidious about recordkeeping. I think they still get the "committing genocide efficiently" point.

    I'm not saying they Nazis were bad at these things, but the Nazi administration was riddled with corruption, cronyism, mismanagement and all-around poor decision making. They were certainly excellent with propaganda and warmongering. Decent at governing (...if you weren't considered undesirable; especially if you preferred nationalism over individualism). They probably get points for luck and ability to militarize a nation.

  • jothkijothki Registered User regular
    I kind of get the impression that the ability of a particular group to form an empire is based almost entirely on how assholish they are compared to their neighbors. You don't need resources, technology, or even population, you just need to be more willing to kill everyone else than everyone else is willing to kill you.

  • V1mV1m Registered User regular
    jothki wrote: »
    I kind of get the impression that the ability of a particular group to form an empire is based almost entirely on how assholish they are compared to their neighbors. You don't need resources, technology, or even population, you just need to be more willing to kill everyone else than everyone else is willing to kill you.

    Well it helps to be culturally coherent & distinctive from your targets, also good logistics help a really lot.

    Also ideally, your local hegemonic rivals drive out most of their educated/engineering/science demographic right into your arms for retarded religious/dogma reasons.

    (Thx France for all those Hugenots that knew about textiles and glasswork and clockwork and metalworking, much appreciated!)

  • HefflingHeffling No Pic EverRegistered User regular
    V1m wrote: »
    Richy wrote: »
    Thomamelas wrote: »
    Trace wrote: »
    Morat242 wrote: »
    cckerberos wrote: »
    Morat242 wrote: »
    But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

    I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.
    I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

    Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

    Boy did that ever bite both of those two countries in the ass.

    Eh, the Italian Navy was terrible. It just would have had a chance to show off that terribleness even more. The French Navy ends up in tatters for various reasons but it wouldn't have prevented France from falling.

    Indeed, a Navy is a pretty useless tool to have when your enemy is invading by land without going anywhere near the coast. A French navy would have had no significant role in WWII.

    Frankly, I don't know that more ships would have helped the Japanese, either. One big US advantage was better intelligence, which allowed them to outmanoeuvre the Japanese navy. Another advantage was way more resources: the US could just keep fighting on and on while the Japanese were running out of food, ammo, and fuel. More ships on the Japanese side might have prolonged the war in the Pacific or made it bloodier, but with everything else stacked against Japan it would not have changed the war's final outcome.

    The basic mistake that the Japanese made was Pearl Harbor. If they'd played up the "grrr we're just fighting European colonialism" angle for even another 6-9 months and maybe built a few more subs meanwhile, they could have made things a fuck of a lot tougher in the Pacific.

    Actually if they'd just gone with invading China and left the western interests alone, quite possibly no one would have really cared for a long time.

    Another effect that Pearl Harbor had was that the Japanese sank a lot of our old war ships, many of which had been in service for two decades (or more). That forced the US navy to modernize in the Pacific theater.
    DarkPrimus wrote: »
    Japan was used to winning their wars very quickly with a singular decisive battle to decide it for them. Pearl Harbor was supposed to be that decisive strike, to hobble the United States' naval power and to scare them into avoiding war with Japan because of how costly it would be. They miscalculated America's resolve.

    Somewhat ironically, this lead to the US nuclear strikes against Japan, because we didn't want to continue a long, drawn out war. That was our decisive battle.

  • HefflingHeffling No Pic EverRegistered User regular
    Scooter wrote: »
    The 'not getting robbed' thing only lasted for a couple decades, and I'd hardly say improved crime rates justified the insane body counts they racked up, not to mention they probably deserve a large part of the blame for the Middle East being as fucked up as it is today. They took established civilizations and left rubble and corpses.

    Edit: It's also worth pointing out that crime rates were low because the punishments were extreme. Your options were 'death', 'death', and 'super-death'.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMMHUzm22oE

  • KrieghundKrieghund Registered User regular
    Eh, the Nazis will be remembered for the same reason the Mongols are. Better tactics and weapons than their opponents. Think of the weapons that the Germans pioneered that we still use. Assault rifles, ballistic missiles, and jet fighters. Blitzkrieg was insanely effective, wolf pack submarine tactics. Now you could say these all eventually got countered, but so were the Mongols. The time span was just much shorter, thanks to industrialization and two of the enemy nations being on the other side of some pretty big water obstacles.

  • ThomamelasThomamelas Only one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered User regular
    edited February 2015
    17HsDfcl.jpg

    The above is the USS Sable. Arguably one of the most important US carriers during the war. She's a bit on the small side, displacing 6,500 tons compared to the 19,500 tons of the Big E. Her and her sister carrier the USS Wolverine spent the war patrolling back and forth in most dangerous waters.
    VqlmUGB.jpg
    Keeping us safe from the evil forces of Canada
    Providing floating training platforms for carrier landings.

    As President Rex mentioned above, there were serious issues with the Luftwaffe training. And the IJN suffered from similar issues. Keeping aces out in the front line as well as having limited resources for training. One of the big issues the IJN faced is that carrier landings are hard. So you want to practice them. But practicing them requires an aircraft carrier to practice on. But if you're the IJN you need all of the carriers you have for fighting the various navies in the Pacific.

    The US Navy had a similar issue. But it realized there were ships that couldn't be sent in to either ocean. So two steamships were converted into small aircraft carriers. Small enough for a pilot to land on and take off from. The allowed the Navy to have much less on the job training, which starts to lead to casualty rates for individual engagements dropping. Over 35,000 pilots were trained with the Sable and the Wolverine. 116,000 landings between them. Pilots were required to practice with their cockpits open. Not particularly pleasant on the Great Lakes during the winter. 200 or so accidents occurred with 8 pilots lost.

    During training flights, each pilot would make 20 or so practice passes until the LSO finally signaled for them to land. Once the plane was down, sailors would swarm over to it and begin pushing it aft. Then the pilot would have enough runway to take off.
    wsOsb7a.jpg


    Thomamelas on
  • AngelHedgieAngelHedgie Registered User regular
    Heffling wrote: »
    V1m wrote: »
    Richy wrote: »
    Thomamelas wrote: »
    Trace wrote: »
    Morat242 wrote: »
    cckerberos wrote: »
    Morat242 wrote: »
    But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

    I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.
    I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

    Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

    Boy did that ever bite both of those two countries in the ass.

    Eh, the Italian Navy was terrible. It just would have had a chance to show off that terribleness even more. The French Navy ends up in tatters for various reasons but it wouldn't have prevented France from falling.

    Indeed, a Navy is a pretty useless tool to have when your enemy is invading by land without going anywhere near the coast. A French navy would have had no significant role in WWII.

    Frankly, I don't know that more ships would have helped the Japanese, either. One big US advantage was better intelligence, which allowed them to outmanoeuvre the Japanese navy. Another advantage was way more resources: the US could just keep fighting on and on while the Japanese were running out of food, ammo, and fuel. More ships on the Japanese side might have prolonged the war in the Pacific or made it bloodier, but with everything else stacked against Japan it would not have changed the war's final outcome.

    The basic mistake that the Japanese made was Pearl Harbor. If they'd played up the "grrr we're just fighting European colonialism" angle for even another 6-9 months and maybe built a few more subs meanwhile, they could have made things a fuck of a lot tougher in the Pacific.

    Actually if they'd just gone with invading China and left the western interests alone, quite possibly no one would have really cared for a long time.

    Another effect that Pearl Harbor had was that the Japanese sank a lot of our old war ships, many of which had been in service for two decades (or more). That forced the US navy to modernize in the Pacific theater.
    DarkPrimus wrote: »
    Japan was used to winning their wars very quickly with a singular decisive battle to decide it for them. Pearl Harbor was supposed to be that decisive strike, to hobble the United States' naval power and to scare them into avoiding war with Japan because of how costly it would be. They miscalculated America's resolve.

    Somewhat ironically, this lead to the US nuclear strikes against Japan, because we didn't want to continue a long, drawn out war. That was our decisive battle.

    No, not really. By the time of the atomic bomb detonations, Coronet was pretty much off the table (and that's a good thing - we're STILL working through the Purple Medals manufactured in preparation for it.) No, we dropped the bomb because of the Soviet entry into the Pacific Theatre. By that point, the Soviets had taken the Kuriles and Sakhalin, and were preparing to invade Hokkaido. Our attacks were just as much a warning to the Soviets as they were to force Japan to surrender.

    XBL: Nox Aeternum / PSN: NoxAeternum / NN:NoxAeternum / Steam: noxaeternum
  • RiemannLivesRiemannLives Registered User regular
    edited February 2015
    Heffling wrote: »
    V1m wrote: »
    Richy wrote: »
    Thomamelas wrote: »
    Trace wrote: »
    Morat242 wrote: »
    cckerberos wrote: »
    Morat242 wrote: »
    But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

    I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.
    I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

    Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

    Boy did that ever bite both of those two countries in the ass.

    Eh, the Italian Navy was terrible. It just would have had a chance to show off that terribleness even more. The French Navy ends up in tatters for various reasons but it wouldn't have prevented France from falling.

    Indeed, a Navy is a pretty useless tool to have when your enemy is invading by land without going anywhere near the coast. A French navy would have had no significant role in WWII.

    Frankly, I don't know that more ships would have helped the Japanese, either. One big US advantage was better intelligence, which allowed them to outmanoeuvre the Japanese navy. Another advantage was way more resources: the US could just keep fighting on and on while the Japanese were running out of food, ammo, and fuel. More ships on the Japanese side might have prolonged the war in the Pacific or made it bloodier, but with everything else stacked against Japan it would not have changed the war's final outcome.

    The basic mistake that the Japanese made was Pearl Harbor. If they'd played up the "grrr we're just fighting European colonialism" angle for even another 6-9 months and maybe built a few more subs meanwhile, they could have made things a fuck of a lot tougher in the Pacific.

    Actually if they'd just gone with invading China and left the western interests alone, quite possibly no one would have really cared for a long time.

    Another effect that Pearl Harbor had was that the Japanese sank a lot of our old war ships, many of which had been in service for two decades (or more). That forced the US navy to modernize in the Pacific theater.
    DarkPrimus wrote: »
    Japan was used to winning their wars very quickly with a singular decisive battle to decide it for them. Pearl Harbor was supposed to be that decisive strike, to hobble the United States' naval power and to scare them into avoiding war with Japan because of how costly it would be. They miscalculated America's resolve.

    Somewhat ironically, this lead to the US nuclear strikes against Japan, because we didn't want to continue a long, drawn out war. That was our decisive battle.

    No, not really. By the time of the atomic bomb detonations, Coronet was pretty much off the table (and that's a good thing - we're STILL working through the Purple Medals manufactured in preparation for it.) No, we dropped the bomb because of the Soviet entry into the Pacific Theatre. By that point, the Soviets had taken the Kuriles and Sakhalin, and were preparing to invade Hokkaido. Our attacks were just as much a warning to the Soviets as they were to force Japan to surrender.

    I disagree with this. The Soviets were starting to see successes against Japan on the mainland but had no pacific navy or troop transports or the capability to build them quickly. They were a ways off. First needing to build infrastructure to bring their main forces to bear against the Japanese in Manchuria and then probably quite a while getting bogged down in rooting them out of Korea and northern China. And starting up a pacific navy from scratch.

    On Okinawa (on which the fighting ended only weeks before the dropping of the atomic bombs, and I think the death toll of which must have been at the forefront of everyone's mind) it was made clear that Japanese forces could not be expected to surrender merely due to starvation or lack of ammunition. Anyone invading the home islands, be it US or Soviets, was going to have to slaughter their way through.

    edit: Proving to the Soviets that nuclear weapons worked and the US had the capability to manufacture more than one of them (eg: was not limited to plutonium bombs) was definitely a Thing. I just don't think the Soviets actually occupying mainland Japan was.

    RiemannLives on
    Attacked by tweeeeeeees!
  • KanaKana Registered User regular
    One of the things about the purple heart is that while it's true a whole heap of them were manufactured, WW2 was the first major war where purple hearts were a thing, they came after WW1. So of course we made a ton of them, up until then we hardly had any. Far easier to fill a couple of warehouses with them and be done with it than like, making them to order.

    We had talked about this in the Middle East thread and I keep meaning to do an in-depth post on it, but there were heaps of reasons why the US decided to drop the bomb, the foremost being "because we had it." Indeed it's kind of a misnomer to even phrase it "decided to drop the bomb", as it suggests there was one single moment where the US leaders actually sat down and officially decided to use the weapon, when the goal from the beginning was to deliver a weapon that could and would be used.

    Preventing casualties from an invasion were never one of those reasons though - after all, the Americans had complete air superiority and a tight naval blockade of Japan, why did they even need to invade when they could destroy Japan at their leisure? Invasion plans were already well off the table even before the first Atomic bomb was tested - much to the frustration of General MacArthur, who would have been in command of the operation.

    A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
  • RchanenRchanen Registered User regular
    @Qingu @Kana I summon thee. From the Stygian pits of historical argument over the necessity of dropping the atomic bomb I call upon thee. Thee who delight in citation of historical references. Gorgo, Mormo, Thousand Faced Moon, look favorably on our thread.

    The thread has gotten to the place we got to in the Middle East thread.

    As far as my opinion goes: The invasion plan was shelved. We have enough historical evidence of that. But if the plan then becomes to bomb Japan into submission, I could see an argument for "We have the biggest baddest bombs in creation. Lets drop them."

    Which is kind of cold and callous. But fuck these are the same guys who dropped incendiaries on wooden buildings. They meant unconditional surrender.

    I definitely agree that showing the Soviets our big new dick was part of it.

  • RchanenRchanen Registered User regular
    edited February 2015
    Dammit Kana. Just because it took me a while to write that up...

    Rchanen on
  • HefflingHeffling No Pic EverRegistered User regular
    Heffling wrote: »
    V1m wrote: »
    Richy wrote: »
    Thomamelas wrote: »
    Trace wrote: »
    Morat242 wrote: »
    cckerberos wrote: »
    Morat242 wrote: »
    But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

    I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.
    I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

    Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

    Boy did that ever bite both of those two countries in the ass.

    Eh, the Italian Navy was terrible. It just would have had a chance to show off that terribleness even more. The French Navy ends up in tatters for various reasons but it wouldn't have prevented France from falling.

    Indeed, a Navy is a pretty useless tool to have when your enemy is invading by land without going anywhere near the coast. A French navy would have had no significant role in WWII.

    Frankly, I don't know that more ships would have helped the Japanese, either. One big US advantage was better intelligence, which allowed them to outmanoeuvre the Japanese navy. Another advantage was way more resources: the US could just keep fighting on and on while the Japanese were running out of food, ammo, and fuel. More ships on the Japanese side might have prolonged the war in the Pacific or made it bloodier, but with everything else stacked against Japan it would not have changed the war's final outcome.

    The basic mistake that the Japanese made was Pearl Harbor. If they'd played up the "grrr we're just fighting European colonialism" angle for even another 6-9 months and maybe built a few more subs meanwhile, they could have made things a fuck of a lot tougher in the Pacific.

    Actually if they'd just gone with invading China and left the western interests alone, quite possibly no one would have really cared for a long time.

    Another effect that Pearl Harbor had was that the Japanese sank a lot of our old war ships, many of which had been in service for two decades (or more). That forced the US navy to modernize in the Pacific theater.
    DarkPrimus wrote: »
    Japan was used to winning their wars very quickly with a singular decisive battle to decide it for them. Pearl Harbor was supposed to be that decisive strike, to hobble the United States' naval power and to scare them into avoiding war with Japan because of how costly it would be. They miscalculated America's resolve.

    Somewhat ironically, this lead to the US nuclear strikes against Japan, because we didn't want to continue a long, drawn out war. That was our decisive battle.

    No, not really. By the time of the atomic bomb detonations, Coronet was pretty much off the table (and that's a good thing - we're STILL working through the Purple Medals manufactured in preparation for it.) No, we dropped the bomb because of the Soviet entry into the Pacific Theatre. By that point, the Soviets had taken the Kuriles and Sakhalin, and were preparing to invade Hokkaido. Our attacks were just as much a warning to the Soviets as they were to force Japan to surrender.

    The Soviet entry is a big part of why we didn't want a long, drawn out war. Operation Downfall (made of up Operation Olympic and Operation Downfall) was scrapped only after the dropping of both nukes and Japan's surrender. Cornet wasn't set to go into action until Spring 1946, which would have been enough time for the Soviets have some involvement.

    Additionally, the Japanese had shown a distinct unwillingness to surrender. When starvation and lack of ammo don't stop you from fighting, you have to find something else. Japan was used to the big, decisive strike, and the US use of nukes in the manner of such a strike helped lead to peace.

    There's no one reason the nukes were used, but I think it's fair to say that the Japanese wouldn't have surrendered so early without them.

  • KanaKana Registered User regular
    I'll try to write up a proper post about the bomb on Friday or Saturday, I'm rpg'ing tonight. As more internal documentation has come out from both sides of the war it's provided a really interesting record of how the narrative has changed over time. It also says a lot about how attitudes about the bomb have changed since the war, and in turn what has been considered necessary justification and how government figures have changed their explanations for their decisions to reflect those changing attitudes. Rather than being one new wave of modern revisionism, it's been more of a never-ending stream of revisionism from the very beginning.

    A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
  • QinguQingu Registered User regular
    Oh jeez. Do I have time in my life right now to follow another thread?

    I do think it's true that the conception of what nuclear weapons are has changed dramatically since the 1940's. The US barely had any idea what they'd created. This is a photo of Operation Crossroads, a nuclear test in 1946:

    SIA2010-0973_large.jpg

    Those little black shapes are spare destroyer ships. The few that weren't destroyed, later, were scrubbed down by sailors in short sleeves, with no protection whatsoever from the blanket of totally radioactive water that had just washed over the ship's deck.

    We tested the hell out of this thing before the Soviets got their own. My thought is that we were just fascinated by the possibilities. I'm sure "because we want to show off our fancy new weapon" was a major factor in the decision to use nuclear weapons on Japan, and in retrospect, knowing everything we know now about the dangers of nuclear weapons, that's horrifying.

    At the same time, how could you not be fascinated? Every single thing we experience in our lives revolves around the electromagnetic force and chemical reactions; nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is an entirely different entity. Before the 1900's, humans knew literally nothing about nuclear energy; we had no clue there even was such a thing. American scientists and government officials knew they had unlocked a new era and they wanted control of it.

  • cckerberoscckerberos Registered User regular
    If you want to read a really great back and forth on the A-Bomb issue, I recommend this roundtable about Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's book Racing the Enemy (scroll down). I haven't followed the literature for the last couple years, but as far as I know Hasegawa's is still the most recent "big" book on the issue and the first (in English, at least) to draw heavily upon Russian sources. Hasegawa contributes to the roundtable, as does Alperovitz (essentially the father of A-Bomb revisionism), Frank (whose book Downfall was the first to make extensive use of the MAGIC intercepts), and Bernstein (perhaps the most widely published and respected scholar on the subject).

    Reading scholarly discussions like this have made me very wary about anyone who feels there is a simple answer to this. I'm personally inclined towards the view that both the Soviet declaration and the Hiroshima bombing were needed to cause Japanese capitulation. It's been a few years since I've really studied the question, though.

    cckerberos.png
  • cckerberoscckerberos Registered User regular
    Kana wrote: »
    Invasion plans were already well off the table even before the first Atomic bomb was tested - much to the frustration of General MacArthur, who would have been in command of the operation.

    What's this based on? I'm familiar with Frank's argument that Nimitz was going to withdraw his support from the invasion, but I've never seen anything suggesting that the plans had already been scrapped.

    cckerberos.png
  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    There are very few things in history that happened for a singular reason.

  • Gabriel_PittGabriel_Pitt (effective against Russian warships) Registered User regular
    so I've finished up the Secrets of the Castle. And decided to go forward in time a bit. Onwards to the Tudor Monastery Farm!
    The Monastary Farm was great. I really wanted to see the Pharmacy series, but it doesn't seem to be online anywhere.
    Skeith wrote: »
    University presses have been trying to make the switch to acid-free, but there aren't a whole lot of producers because it's a pretty niche market.
    I'm pretty sure that current paper making methods have pushed a good portion of paper to be acid free, just because that's the most efficient way to make it.

  • programjunkieprogramjunkie Registered User regular
    edited February 2015
    If nothing else, it certainly didn't hurt.

    Though I think where a lot of modern unease comes from is not very justified. Even under a modern conception of only using WMDs to respond to the other side using WMDs, Japan had been going hog-wild using biological weapons to murder hundreds of thousands of people for quite some time, and already had planned biological attacks on the continental US (albeit never realized). Our use of nuclear weapons was a defensive use in an already defensive war.

    The question of the effectiveness of the bombings goes substantially to how you weight various substantiated factors, but I'd argue if nothing else, using NBC weapons against targets of a substantially military character after persistent use of NBC weapons by your enemies is undeniably justified, particularly when said enemy has multiple NBC weapon development programs actively working to unleash further horrors.

    Edit to add: This is intended to be contemporary reasoning, and not an attempt at capturing and justifying thought at the time.

    programjunkie on
  • ThomamelasThomamelas Only one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered User regular
    So the Hiroshima bombing managed to produce some of the most horrifyingly inappropriate advertising of all time. One of the buildings heavily damaged during the bomb blast was the Teikou Bank. Inside the Teikou bank were three vaults. Two of them had their doors blown off. The third however was undamaged. During the post bombing survey done by the US Military, this vault was discovered and someone wrote to the Mosler Safe Company. The following is what they claim the text of the letter was:
    …In visiting the remains of the City of Hiroshima, I found in one of the three structures still standing, four large vaults built by the Mosler Safe Co. of Hamilton, O. The vaults were entirely intact and except for the exterior being burned and rusted there was no damage. Across the room from the American-made safes were two vaults made by the Takeucho Co. located at Tokyo. These were completely destroyed, their doors blown off the hinges, and the sides crushed. To me this was a very positive demonstration of the superiority of American equipment. No other test than that of the atomic bomb could have been more severe or exacting.

    I assume some copy editor punched that text up. If not fabricated a bit.
    KQO2J1x.jpg
    SWkpfDr.jpg

    Much of this ad copy would be reused and slightly altered by many banks using Mosler's Safes. It starts dropping off during the 60's and by the 70's it disappears. The company submitted various safes and items for testing during cold war nuclear weapons tests. Most of them were undamaged but the closest ones were destroyed to the point of no remains to be found.
    Q75BUMN.jpg

  • AngelHedgieAngelHedgie Registered User regular
    Arthur Chu on Andrew Jackson, why he's one of the worst Presidents we've ever had, and why his position on the $20 is an utter travesty.

    XBL: Nox Aeternum / PSN: NoxAeternum / NN:NoxAeternum / Steam: noxaeternum
  • KanaKana Registered User regular
    This is a story I really like, by /u/reedstilt from an answer in this thread. The narrative of native American encounters is so often one of agency-less victimhood, often implying a sort of childlike naivete being taken advantage of by the cunning of civilized men. Which is really a disservice to both worlds, as the natives were neither fools or naive, while the westerners were neither uniquely clever nor uniquely brutal.
    In the 1540s, Quigualtam was the dominant power in the lower Mississippi valley, part of a subset of the larger Mississippian traditions known archaeologically as the Plaquemine. As with so many historic Mississippian polities, the name Quigualtam is used for both the polity and its leader, so I'll be using it interchangeably for both here. We're not sure where Quigualtam's capital was. The Holly Bluff site is one option, though it appears to have been abandoned a generation or two earlier. If not there, then one of the neighboring sites in the Yazoo basin are the next most likely candidates.

    The reason for the confusion is because, while de Soto and his expedition interacted with the Quigualtam polity and its outlying vassals, there's not confirmation that they actually managed to reach its capital.

    The Spanish and Quigualtam officially made contact in 1542 (though in all likelihood, Quigualtam was well aware of the Spanish before this). At the time, de Soto was camped among the Guachoya, a lesser Mississippian polity on the west bank of the river that were vassals of Quigualtam. There, de Soto became too sick to travel. Through a Guachoya messenger, he had a messenger sent to Quigualtam. In this message, de Soto declared himself to be the son of the sun and demand that Quigualtam cross the Mississippi to pay his respects and offer tribute of whatever was most highly prized in his lands.

    The messenger returned with Quigualtam's reply: he was unaccustomed to being summoned and, quite the contrary, everyone he knew was obligated to come to him, to serve and pay tribute. If de Soto came in peace, he would be welcomed by Quigualtam. If he meant to have war, Quigualtam would be waiting for him all the same. As the son of the sun, Quigualtam added sarcastically, de Soto should have no trouble drying up the Mississippi to ease his arrival. While this enraged de Soto, he was too sick to do anything about it. Before long, he'd be dead and his men were looking for a way back to Mexico.

    No wishing to face Quigualtam, they attempted an overland crossing through Texas but soon had to turn back when they realized they could not sustain themselves foraging and pillaging in that region. Left with no other option, they built ships and took to the river in the summer of 1543.

    On July 4th, they encountered Quigualtam's fleet. It consisted of some 100 war canoes. The largest canoes carried 70+ men - two columns of armed paddlers on either side, with a column of warriors in the middle. Some of the larger canoes also carried the fleet commanders, and could be distinguished by their colorful awnings. In fact, awnings or no, it seems like all the larger canoes were color-coded: the canoe, its oars, its crew, and their weapons were all either painted in or wearing the same color. The whole fleet moved in well-practiced formations, singing to set the pace for the oars.

    When the attack came, some of the crew of the larger canoes jumped overboard. Of these, a few positioned themselves to steady the canoe to serve as a more stable platform from which those still on board could fire their bows. The rest swam to the Spanish boats, staying underwater most of the way to hide their approach, and boarded. The initial clash consisted of a small portion of the Spanish fleet attempting to disperse Quigualtam's fleet, and failing miserably, while the rest of the Spanish fled. Four of the would-be conquistadors managed to escape back to the main body of the Spanish fleet - the other 20 or so men were either killed, captured or missing. Regardless, they were never heard from again.

    Quigualtam's fleet pursued the fleeing Spanish for the rest of the day. After the initial assault, they kept their distance. Circling the Spanish, they fired arrows on each boat in turn but never came closer than bow-range, though they could have easily overpowered them had they tried. Perhaps they were concerned that Spanish were holding their more fearsome weapons in reserve and were keeping a safe distance. Alternatively, perhaps they were less interested in wiping out the Spanish than they were in sending a message that Quigualtam was not to be messed with.

    As night fell, it seemed that the Spanish had finally escaped Quigualtam's pursuit. But in the middle of the night, the war chants and songs began again. The chase kept up until noon the next day, when Quigualtam's fleet turned back. The Spanish finally had a moment to breathe a sigh of relief. But just a moment. Soon a second fleet of another fifty war canoes picked up where the main fleet left off. This fleet made several close-quarters attacks and managed to rescue or claim as their own (we don't know their motives) some of the native captives held by the Spanish.

    When the Spanish finally escaped this second fleet the next day, a third (though substantially smaller, only consisting of seven war canoes) awaited them. While the canoe fleets became smaller and more infrequent, this pattern essentially kept up until the Spanish reached the mouth of the Mississippi around July 16th. As they approached the mouth of the river, the man among the last fleet delivered this final warning (translated for the Spanish by one of the Native captives they still had with them):

    Thieves, vagabonds, and loiterers who without honor or shame travel along this coast disquieting its inhabitants, depart from this place immediately by one of the two mouths of the river, if you do not want me to destroy you all and burn your ships. And see to it that I do not find you here tonight, for if I do, no man of you will escape with his life. If we possessed such large canoes as yours, we would follow you to your own land and conquer it, for we too are men like yourselves.

    A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
  • KanaKana Registered User regular
    And on an unrelated topic:

    http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/html/search/search.html

    An awesome digitized oral history project, you can search interviews with veterans by gender, war, branch, POW status, the type of material and more.

    So for example it has, lessee... 279 different WW2 POW interviews in mp3 format, all available for free download.

    A pretty amazing resource

    A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
  • RchanenRchanen Registered User regular
    cckerberos wrote: »
    Kana wrote: »
    Invasion plans were already well off the table even before the first Atomic bomb was tested - much to the frustration of General MacArthur, who would have been in command of the operation.

    What's this based on? I'm familiar with Frank's argument that Nimitz was going to withdraw his support from the invasion, but I've never seen anything suggesting that the plans had already been scrapped.

    @Kana yeah I wanted to ask about this. I am not familiar with that time frame (other than the broad strokes) so I wiki'd it. It definitely appears that the invasion was put off till late 1945-early 46. No way we are invading during typhoon season. (There being a difference between a difficult invasion and a "Are you out of your fucking mind??" invasion.)

    And Nimitz and King were going to push to scrap the whole thing. Which might well have pushed Truman to scrap it.

    But I don't see anything about it being completely off the table.

    But if it was that would make sense. I mean we were able to run 3000 bombers over Japan and not lose a single one. So I can see the air force/navy going, "why bother with an invasion?"

  • EchoEcho ski-bap ba-dapModerator mod
    Though I think where a lot of modern unease comes from is not very justified. Even under a modern conception of only using WMDs to respond to the other side using WMDs, Japan had been going hog-wild using biological weapons to murder hundreds of thousands of people for quite some time, and already had planned biological attacks on the continental US (albeit never realized). Our use of nuclear weapons was a defensive use in an already defensive war.

    I read a book called Plague Wars, that went through the history of biological warfare. And the shit Japan did is just horrendous. Unit 731 in particular. Live vivisections, freezing people to death, chopping people's arms off and attaching them to the other side for science, draining your blood and replacing it with animal blood... the list goes on.

    And then the people directly involved got an amnesty.
    Among the individuals in Japan after their 1945 surrender was Lieutenant Colonel Murray Sanders, who arrived in Yokohama via the American ship Sturgess in September 1945. Sanders was a highly regarded microbiologist and a member of America's military center for biological weapons. Sanders’ duty was to investigate Japanese biological warfare activity. At the time of his arrival in Japan he had no knowledge of what Unit 731 was.[41] Until Sanders finally threatened the Japanese with bringing communism into the picture, little information about biological warfare was being shared with the Americans.

    The Japanese wanted to avoid the Soviet legal system so the next morning after the threat Sanders received a manuscript describing Japan's involvement in biological warfare.[42] Sanders took this information to General Douglas MacArthur who was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers responsible for rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupations. MacArthur struck a deal with Japanese informants.[43] MacArthur secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731, including their leader, in exchange for providing America, but not the other wartime allies, with their research on biological warfare and data from human experimentation.[10]

    American occupation authorities monitored the activities of former unit members, including reading and censoring their mail.[44] The U.S. believed that the research data was valuable. The U.S. did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons

  • Captain MarcusCaptain Marcus now arrives the hour of actionRegistered User regular
    I've never understood why we couldn't have taken them out back and shot them after they told us what we wanted to know. The fact that they all died surrounded by grandchildren after successful careers as Mitsubishi middle managers or whatever is yet another reason why Douglas MacArthur is The Worst.

  • RchanenRchanen Registered User regular
    I've never understood why we couldn't have taken them out back and shot them after they told us what we wanted to know. The fact that they all died surrounded by grandchildren after successful careers as Mitsubishi middle managers or whatever is yet another reason why Douglas MacArthur is The Worst.

    There are so many reasons MacArthur was the worst. Its actually hard to pick just one.

    What a prick.

  • That_GuyThat_Guy I don't wanna be that guy Registered User regular
    edited February 2015
    Here's something I have been thinking about for a while. Big picture, all things considered, who killed more of whose people? Europeans after contact with Native Americans, or Native Americans after contact with Europeans.

    On one side we have the utter apocalypse that was Euro diseases. Some 90% of the population of the Americas was wiped out. The remaining people had literally gone tribal by the time the first Euro settlers showed up. Some 50-90 million people died as a result of diseases like Smallpox, Measles, Malaria and Influenza.

    On the other side, you have some of the worst venereal diseases that have ever been seen by man. Syphilis still remains incurable with no known vaccine. In 1990 alone Syphilis killed some 250,000 people worldwide. Syphilis has been blamed for the downfall of many noble houses in Europe leading to breakups in power. Polio and Hepatitis have also been big killers throughout history.

    Thinking about it, the new world diseases are slow painful killers. The old world diseases sweep through and wipe out all in it's path quite quickly. What do you guys think? What side has done more damage in body count?

    That_Guy on
This discussion has been closed.