World War II is, in some respects, a world-wide replay of the American Civil War. A capitalist economy cannot directly compete with an economy that gets cheap resources/labor by force, so any nation that doesn't have slaves and colonies will find itself at a perpetual disadvantage to one that does. So, that nation either has to embrace slavery/colonialism or go to war to get the other side to abandon those practices.
I am pretty sure the above statement is false. The Northern economy was more fluid and adaptable than the South and by the end of the war was superior in well, everything.
The Confederate army was pretty terrible on basically every level.
The pre-war South had the highest per capita income in the world, and the Southern economy was much stronger than the North. The South had begun experimenting with slave-based factories by the 1840s, with mixed success.
Turns out, though, that slave economies are kind of shit when it comes to mustering a modern army. That's literally an ancient problem with slave armies.
But that's not what I was talking about in the post above. Probably should have added economic in there.
World War II is, in some respects, a world-wide replay of the American Civil War. A capitalist economy cannot directly compete with an economy that gets cheap resources/labor by force, so any nation that doesn't have slaves and colonies will find itself at a perpetual disadvantage to one that does. So, that nation either has to embrace slavery/colonialism or go to war to get the other side to abandon those practices.
I am pretty sure the above statement is false. The Northern economy was more fluid and adaptable than the South and by the end of the war was superior in well, everything.
The rest of the post is a fairly... strange reading of both WWI and WWII.
WWII Germany went to war for the pretty obvious reason that they wanted to wipe the defeat of WWI of the face of the earth and reclaim all the territory that was "german" before WWI. Its reason for going to war against the USSR was because the USSR was inhabited by untermensch and communist. They invade to eliminate both. The entire "lets turn Russia into a colony" was just a followup from that, since what where they going to do with vast now empty land? New German colonies of course!
WWI Germany went to war because they knew that the French where going to want revenge for 1870 soon or later and because they where lead by a leader even more incompetent then Hitler. All that talk about Germany's place in the sun, along with phrases as Blood and Iron and then screaming encirclement when people start building arms to protect themselves from the vast army/navy germany was building, didn't make them friends.
Kaiser Wilhelm II is the poster child for why hereditary monarchies are a bad idea.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
World War II is, in some respects, a world-wide replay of the American Civil War. A capitalist economy cannot directly compete with an economy that gets cheap resources/labor by force, so any nation that doesn't have slaves and colonies will find itself at a perpetual disadvantage to one that does. So, that nation either has to embrace slavery/colonialism or go to war to get the other side to abandon those practices.
I am pretty sure the above statement is false. The Northern economy was more fluid and adaptable than the South and by the end of the war was superior in well, everything.
The rest of the post is a fairly... strange reading of both WWI and WWII.
WWII Germany went to war for the pretty obvious reason that they wanted to wipe the defeat of WWI of the face of the earth and reclaim all the territory that was "german" before WWI. Its reason for going to war against the USSR was because the USSR was inhabited by untermensch and communist. They invade to eliminate both. The entire "lets turn Russia into a colony" was just a followup from that, since what where they going to do with vast now empty land? New German colonies of course!
WWI Germany went to war because they knew that the French where going to want revenge for 1870 soon or later and because they where lead by a leader even more incompetent then Hitler. All that talk about Germany's place in the sun, along with phrases as Blood and Iron and then screaming encirclement when people start building arms to protect themselves from the vast army/navy germany was building, didn't make them friends.
Kaiser Wilhelm II is the poster child for why hereditary monarchies are a bad idea.
The above post is the modern academic understanding of WWII. If you read the three volume history of the Nazi Germany by Richard Evans, he makes many of the same points.
To wrap back to the OP's first post, it's issues like these that divide academic historians from the History Channel equipment fetishists. The issues that propelled the war and decided its outcome were much more complex than whi had the best tanks. Also, public school history really sucks for anything except mild political indoctrination and an overall sense of the dates stuff happened.
Gotta read those big books. And just one doesn't help, since there are multiple valid interpretations.
Germans made alot of impressive inventions in WW2 but many of them were horribly impractical or too small a scale to make much of a difference
Like the Tiger tanks had massive firepower but were also very prone to mechanical failures and were huge gas guzzlers at a time where Germany was running out of oil
V2 were essentially a terror weapon that served little practical military purpose. More focus on conventional aircraft would've bene a better use of resources.
A lot of those weapons wound up becoming prototypes for American and Soviet weapons. For example, they had a rudimentary remote operated anti-tank missile using a wire - recovered samples led to the development of the TOW missile that's a mainstay of the US Army since the 70s.
As Wotan 's use went on, the aircrew accused the ground station of sending bad signals and the ground station alleged the aircraft had loose connections. The whole scheme appealed to Jones as he was a natural practical joker, and remarked that he was able to play one of the largest practical jokes with virtually any national resource that he required. The gradually increasing power conditioned the Germans such they did not realise that anyone was interfering with the system, but believed that it suffered several inherent defects.[30] Eventually, as the power was increased enough, the whole Wotan system started to ring with all the feedback.
The Luftwaffe, finally realising that the British had been deploying countermeasures from the very first day that the system was used operationally, completely lost faith in electronic navigation aids (as the British had predicted) and did not deploy any further system against Great Britain,[31] although by this time Hitler's attention was turning toward Eastern Europe.
While this was going on, UK was hard at work developing their radar system that would make beam-riding obsolete.
This illustrates one the most important rules when it comes to project codenames - the name should mean absolutely nothing. Yes, I would imagine that the planners thought that naming the system after the Allfather was highly symbolic, but it ultimately gave the Brits a key piece of information (namely, that the system was built around a single primary beam.)
German command was very much a boy's club of people jockeying for the Fuhrer's attention. Hence all the impressive sounding but impractical weaponry. Basic troop stuff that actually wins wars isn't as cool.
see also the modern American military
History would have been a lot different if Germany had focused its initial war efforts on effective gear to fight in heavy winter, instead of super cool tanks and planes.
honestly just giving them the coats would've been enough probably.
of course they were going to have to push further into the country to actually get Stalin to concede. All the industry was basically told to move further inland around the start of the war.
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Der Waffle MousBlame this on the misfortune of your birth.New Yark, New Yark.Registered Userregular
-that a Tiger tank could easily go toe to toe with an Abrams or Challenger, and that Shermans and T34s were stupid garbage that could barely go a mile without catching fire and killing their crews?
Oddly enough this is pretty much what I've heard about Panther tanks. Of particular note was an incident during the battle of Kursk where, I think (I'll look for the passage later) a good number of Panthers caught fire just getting off the train.
Late war german tanks were a goddamned mess in terms of reliability.
I don't know the veracity of this, but one claim about the flaws of German WW2 manufacturing that I've seen put forward was the diversification and specialization of parts. Panzers and Tigers and Mammoth guns may be individually impressive, but their designs were so specialised they each needed their own parts for maintenance, so if you didn't have them your options were limited. Contrast with the relative simplicity of a T-34 where you could cannibalise different engine parts to get it working.
One of the things about WWII that I think makes it especially facinating as one learns more about is the extent to which it was like science fiction come to life.
It was a war where people fought on horseback and where horses often did the majority of hauling, where bolt action rifles were still heavily used in certain places, and in some ways was not too dissimilar from 19th century conflicts. But it was also future warfare. Jet engines. Rockets. Radar. Aircraft carriers. Immensely improved firearms and guns. The cold, grim calculus of the Battle of the Atlantic and submarines growing more and more powerful and deadly. Battleships bigger and more heavily armed than anyone had ever imagined that were obsolete the day they were launched. The Willow Run aircraft factory and Liberty ships. Antibiotics. Enigma, Collosus, and Ultra. Nuclear weapons.
It's like a war broke out today, and by the time it ends in six years we have AIs doing strategic planning, city-factories crawling across the ocean floor for resources, while genetically enhanced marines do drops wearing power armor and carry pulse rifles.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
The Confederate army was pretty terrible on basically every level.
The pre-war South had the highest per capita income in the world, and the Southern economy was much stronger than the North. The South had begun experimenting with slave-based factories by the 1840s, with mixed success.
Turns out, though, that slave economies are kind of shit when it comes to mustering a modern army. That's literally an ancient problem with slave armies.
But that's not what I was talking about in the post above. Probably should have added economic in there.
The Confederate economy was built around the export of cash crops like cotton and tobacco, not manufacturing. The northern economy was built around manufacturing. When the War of the Southern Fear That The North Would Take Away Their Slaves began, the Confederates were basically making uniforms in cottages while the Union was making them in factories. The southern economy wilted quickly, since they couldn't export their goods. The self reliant northerners were able to make the guns, trains, and ships they needed.
Slave labour made the South rich, but there really wasn't much industry. It was an agrarian economy.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
I don't know the veracity of this, but one claim about the flaws of German WW2 manufacturing that I've seen put forward was the diversification and specialization of parts. Panzers and Tigers and Mammoth guns may be individually impressive, but their designs were so specialised they each needed their own parts for maintenance, so if you didn't have them your options were limited. Contrast with the relative simplicity of a T-34 where you could cannibalise different engine parts to get it working.
Would that be a fair assessment?
It's also important to bear in mind that the Germans were increasingly reliant on real slave labor & what amounted to slave labor as the war progressed. The machinery may (or may not) have been well designed as far as the engineer's drafting room goes, but then it went on to be built by people who sometimes intentionally sabotaged the equipment & sometimes just weren't skilled at the trade they were press ganged into.
Like, imagine if tomorrow your boss said that you need to pitch in for The Cause and now you'll be building Maybach engine components. Maybe the designs are good, maybe they're not; starting tomorrow, do you think you could start building them to spec regardless?
Silent Hunter becomes kind of boring after you get those (...and on that same token, fuck those stupid electromagnetic or whatever torpedoes. May as well just surface and start throwing rocks).
Hedy Lamarr came up with frequency hopping technologies to avoid jamming that were literally twenty years ahead of their time - the U.S. Navy didn't put her invention to use until the 60s.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
Hedy Lamarr came up with frequency hopping technologies to avoid jamming that were literally twenty years ahead of their time - the U.S. Navy didn't put her invention to use until the 60s.
And today, it's pretty much the reason your cell phone works.
The Confederate army was pretty terrible on basically every level.
The pre-war South had the highest per capita income in the world, and the Southern economy was much stronger than the North. The South had begun experimenting with slave-based factories by the 1840s, with mixed success.
Turns out, though, that slave economies are kind of shit when it comes to mustering a modern army. That's literally an ancient problem with slave armies.
But that's not what I was talking about in the post above. Probably should have added economic in there.
The south might have had the highest per capita income but only if you excluded the slaves in your population measure. At the start of the civil war some 40% of the population were slaves (so your GDP/Person figures are inflated by about 66% when excluding them).
In war, what matters is not per-capita GDP, but raw GDP. And even if the North was less productive than the South per person the North had about 3 times the total population and so would have outproduced the South even if the south had twice the GPD per capita. Which it didn't; the North was more productive per person*.
Additionally the north was self sufficient in terms of material goods. They had the miners, the steel smelters, and the machinery to create what they wanted out of it. The South did not, having basically no durable good production besides cotton. Cotton will not win you a war. So overall the Northern economy was stronger in about every way.
So why did the South think they could win the war? Well i mean, besides the "divine right" craziness? Well, the South did have an advantage at the start. Much of the military apparatus were located there. And a good percentage of the officer core lived or owed allegiance to the South. This gave them a good initial officer core and a large stockpile of weapons. But once they didn't win immediately there was no winning. Those weapons they had were manufactured in the North. Those officers were trained at West Point New York. The North had more people, had more production per person, and had more relevant production and could replace officers. So long as the North didn't outright lose the war it was always on the path to winning.
*GDP/person for the entire US appears to be about $140 in 1860. GDP per capita for the highest producing State in the Rebellion was $253(Mississippi).... not counting slaves. Counting slaves it was $113. Alabama $66. South Carolina $68. Florida $80. Georgia $76. Louisiana $121. Texas $93. North Carolina $72. Tennessee $69. Arkansas $89. Virginia $82. All numbers rounded down because I am both lazy and because it doesn't matter. Not one Southern State at the start of the Civil War had true GDP/Capita numbers above the national average. The North, by way of mathematical necessity had to be higher.
edited for real population adjusted GDP numbers and comparison to US GDP at the time.
Traditional education about the Civil War tries to put the sides at parity, but really the North not only won, but it did so with one hand tied behind its back
The actual non slave population of the south was tiny, and there was no hope of winning. Even if they convinced the North to let them secede, look what happened in the ensuing century. The South hoped to break the will of the North to fight a real war, and they actually came reasonably close to succeeding, but there was no winning in the end for them
After all, even if the North let them secede after their early losses, there's no way the increasingly powerful north would have ever let that stand in the ensuing decades as the entire world grew more distasteful of slavery. After the ink was dry on the peace treaty, the north would spend the next few years or decades turning itself into a military powerhouse the South couldn't hope to fight.
Germans made alot of impressive inventions in WW2 but many of them were horribly impractical or too small a scale to make much of a difference
Like the Tiger tanks had massive firepower but were also very prone to mechanical failures and were huge gas guzzlers at a time where Germany was running out of oil
V2 were essentially a terror weapon that served little practical military purpose. More focus on conventional aircraft would've bene a better use of resources.
A lot of those weapons wound up becoming prototypes for American and Soviet weapons. For example, they had a rudimentary remote operated anti-tank missile using a wire - recovered samples led to the development of the TOW missile that's a mainstay of the US Army since the 70s.
Yeah, the problem is that all the crazy tech was half baked
It would be like the US replacing all the missiles on its destroyers with railguns right now, this year
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Captain Marcusnow arrives the hour of actionRegistered Userregular
Funny thing...Germany did have some areas where they were ahead of the Allies, but for the most part, both sides were developing similar technologies, often not too far off each other in terms of progress.
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.
I had read an interesting essay* that basically argued that because America started so late to produce any kind of armored tank force, it had the advantage of seeing how modern tanks were used in the European theater. And something they realized was that tank vs tank fights didn't actually happen that often, the outcome of those fights rarely had an overwhelming effect on the larger battles, and that more tanks tended to be more helpful than having powerful tanks.
So while Germany pioneered a bunch of tank tactics, they designed their tank strategies very much to win a tank vs tank arms race. America on the other hand went for lighter, cheaper, more reliable tanks, and then usually scattered their deployment to support infantry. When a particularly nasty german tank came rolling up, American tanks could either simply overwhelm it with numbers or the infantry could call in air support, against which the German tanks weren't really prepared.
It's kind of an interesting case of not being in the arms race you thought you were.
*trying to find it still
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.
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
Move to begin using the term "Leeaboo" for people who are really really into the Confederacy.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I had read an interesting essay* that basically argued that because America started so late to produce any kind of armored tank force, it had the advantage of seeing how modern tanks were used in the European theater. And something they realized was that tank vs tank fights didn't actually happen that often, the outcome of those fights rarely had an overwhelming effect on the larger battles, and that more tanks tended to be more helpful than having powerful tanks.
So while Germany pioneered a bunch of tank tactics, they designed their tank strategies very much to win a tank vs tank arms race. America on the other hand went for lighter, cheaper, more reliable tanks, and then usually scattered their deployment to support infantry. When a particularly nasty german tank came rolling up, American tanks could either simply overwhelm it with numbers or the infantry could call in air support, against which the German tanks weren't really prepared.
It's kind of an interesting case of not being in the arms race you thought you were.
*trying to find it still
When the Sherman went into production, it was heavier than and actually outclassed the existing Nazi panzers (the III and IV). The Tiger didn't enter production until the following year, and the Panther the year after that. Even when they did enter service, the heavier panzers were primarily deployed to the Eastern Front to counter Soviet heavy tanks. Fewer than 1,500 Tiger Is were produced, only a couple hundred were deployed in the West. Another factor was the Atlantic Ocean. Germany and the Soviet Union could both roll heavy tanks from the factory to the front line, but we had to ship everything across the water. Heavier tanks would have meant fewer gun platforms per convoy. The Sherman was better than most of the German armor and good enough to take out the rest if it got the first shot. It couldn't engage at quite the same range as a Panther or Tiger, but we managed to land enough of them that that didn't really matter.
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.
I had read an interesting essay* that basically argued that because America started so late to produce any kind of armored tank force, it had the advantage of seeing how modern tanks were used in the European theater. And something they realized was that tank vs tank fights didn't actually happen that often, the outcome of those fights rarely had an overwhelming effect on the larger battles, and that more tanks tended to be more helpful than having powerful tanks.
So while Germany pioneered a bunch of tank tactics, they designed their tank strategies very much to win a tank vs tank arms race. America on the other hand went for lighter, cheaper, more reliable tanks, and then usually scattered their deployment to support infantry. When a particularly nasty german tank came rolling up, American tanks could either simply overwhelm it with numbers or the infantry could call in air support, against which the German tanks weren't really prepared.
It's kind of an interesting case of not being in the arms race you thought you were.
*trying to find it still
Sherman had a mixed reception. It was an ergonomic & easy to drive vehicle, it was a clear step above earlier American experiments like the Lee / Grant, the front was nicely sloped which gave it more effective protection per mm of armor and it wasn't hard to repair in the field if a tread blew out or the engine took a beating.
But crews did not like the power of the 75mm gun. The essay you read was spot on: American planners felt that the Sherman would fill an infantry support role, while dedicated tank destroyers accompanying the tanks punched through any heavy armor that a mechanized allied force came up against. in practice, this wasn't really feasible: battle lines were not as neat & uniform as allied command initially thought they would be, vehicles and troops had to be detached & re-attached from company to company and a lot of the terrain couldn't safely accomodate a spread of open-topped tank destroyers.
If you've seen Fury, that's a pretty accurate depiction of Sherman operation in a nutshell. Everything's great until you bump into one of the heavies that command just kind of hoped you wouldn't bump into.
Of course, then a couple of British guys who were fans of the Sherman chassis - George Brighty and George Witheridge - decided to take it upon themselves to up-gun the vehicle. They stole a Sherman, drove it into a chop shop and replaced the 75mm cannon with a 17-pounder anti-tank gun. Not too many of these 'Firefly' Shermans were produced after George & George proved the concept, but it was nevertheless one of the best overall vehicles to see action in WWII.
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TurksonNear the mountains of ColoradoRegistered Userregular
edited August 2015
I really liked this video. It explains the Battle of Kursk (y'know, the largest tank battle in history) and why the Germans got rolled over hard by the Soviets even though this was the battle where several of these wunderweapons made their debut. The second half is about tank production as a subset of total war production and shows how the Germans shot themselves in the foot and were pretty much screwed starting in 1943. The lecturer for the second half is also the author of Shattered Sword. It's an account of the Battle of Midway and is insanely detailed. I highly recommend it.
i'm starting to think that maybe where a lot of the wehraboo shit comes from is that a bunch of the weapons that the Germans designed just straight up Look Cool, irrespective of how good the designs are or how well the things actually performed in reality
any German tank you care to name looks way cooler than a Sherman (though personally i'd argue that the T-34 is the coolest looking of the bunch)
the V-2 was a huge fuckoff flared black-and-white checkered rocket with big ol' fins, it doesn't get any more badass than that
the MG-42 looked and sounded just completely nasty (and actually was a legitimately excellent design; it's still used in heavily modified form more than seventy years later)
so you start from the aesthetics, then work your way back to the designs themselves and if you're not paying close enough attention you start treating Nazi propaganda about Nazi weapons like they're the actual specs for the stuff, and then from there you start making moral judgments in favor of the guys making all this cool stuff. i mean the V-2 is awesome, its construction can't possibly have resulted in the deaths of many thousands of slave laborers, or ended up not actually being useful basically at all as weapon
Funny thing...Germany did have some areas where they were ahead of the Allies, but for the most part, both sides were developing similar technologies, often not too far off each other in terms of progress.
Yeah, the Germans did have cutting edge technology, but they didn't have the Nazi super science that various conspiracy theories believe they had. The fact is that the Allies had a lot more resources and man power, and thanks to Germany's racism they also had a lot of Germany's brightest minds. So while the Germans did have some technology areas where they were more advanced, on the whole the Allies were more advanced in both the theory and the implementation of advanced weapons and tech.
I really liked this video. It explains the Battle of Kursk (y'know, the largest tank battle in history) and why the Germans got rolled over hard by the Soviets even though this was the battle where several of these wunderweapons made their debut. The second half is about tank production as a subset of total war production and shows how the Germans shot themselves in the foot and were pretty much screwed starting in 1943. The lecturer for the second half is also the author of Shatter Sword. It's an account of the Battle of Midway and is insanely detailed. I highly recommend it.
edit: You'll have to rewind, I have no idea why it wants to start at the 50 minute mark.
jesus, the US could put out thirty sherman tanks in the time it took to put out one tiger (given equal production, which of course wasn't the case, the US had vastly superior production)
jesus, the US could put out thirty sherman tanks in the time it took to put out one tiger (given equal production, which of course wasn't the case, the US had vastly superior production)
I knew there was a disparity but holy crap
Quite possibly apocryphal story: Germans overrun an Army camp, find the remains of a birthday celebration in the mess, complete with a cake that was baked stateside, not locally. The German commander stands there, looking at this humble little demonstration of the Allies' transport and production capacity, turns to an aide, and declares, "We have lost the war."
So the comparisons between the US Civil War and WWII are actually pretty apt. Not because of any slave/free economy comparisons; that doesn't matter. But because the state of production meant that the aggressors could never win, if they didn't win immediately.
The Civil was the first real industrial war, and WWII the last*. Prior to the American Civil War war was about two things, how big your army was; how big your enemies was and which one was closer to the relevant capitol. While the armies are relatively close in size and neither one is between the enemy army and its capitol the war continues. Army mobilization does not have to correlate to your GDP necessarily because you can burn through stockpiles ans can secure a lot of the food you need to keep marching from the land you're marching over. You would repair your equipment but not be producing more.
The Civil War was protracted relative to resupply times. This meant that producing goods was much more relevant to the war. This is similar to feeding your army but on a massive and important scale. And you can't just take bullets from the orchards you marched across, any factories you come across will be stripped bare and destroyed.
So your personal production is what matters. And in the ACW and WWII this is what happened. All(ok, almost all) durable good production went to the war. You produced two things generally; food and bullets.
If you want to win this kind of war, just like if you want to win in Starcraft. You have to either win fast, or you have to have better macro. Germany got lucky in WWII because most of Europe didn't really fight. The Confederacy got lucky that they had stores of equipment located in the south and only Fort Sumter didn't surrender them.
But in the end the North and "the rest of the World" had more people and more GDP and so they won, as bloody as it had to be they were always going to win, it was just a matter of lives and lost production(IE time and effort we could have used to make useful shit)
To put this in perspective for today, where industrial war can no longer really happen (due to willpower and nukes). The U.S. has about 9000 main battle tanks and they cost about 8.5 million dollars to make. That is about 70 billion in tanks. U.S. GDP is around 15 trillion dollars. If we entered an industrial war we could probably spend 50% or more of GDP on military expenditures. We could triple the size of our tank batallions without batting an eye. We have the largest army in the world and we could double the entire thing in size in a year, if not more. If you wanted to win you would have to destory our current strength every year for 5 years(or more)
Fortunately (or hopefully) we won't ever see another industrial war because that sort of thing is amazingly tragic. But these numbers ilusteate what kind of war was picked when the South picked a war with the North and when Germany picked a war with the rest of the world.
*you could argue Korea of Veitnam but the US was not truely mobilized for those, they were like side shows despite the casualties on all sides.
jesus, the US could put out thirty sherman tanks in the time it took to put out one tiger (given equal production, which of course wasn't the case, the US had vastly superior production)
I knew there was a disparity but holy crap
Quite possibly apocryphal story: Germans overrun an Army camp, find the remains of a birthday celebration in the mess, complete with a cake that was baked stateside, not locally. The German commander stands there, looking at this humble little demonstration of the Allies' transport and production capacity, turns to an aide, and declares, "We have lost the war."
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I am pretty sure the above statement is false. The Northern economy was more fluid and adaptable than the South and by the end of the war was superior in well, everything.
The Confederate army was pretty terrible on basically every level.
The pre-war South had the highest per capita income in the world, and the Southern economy was much stronger than the North. The South had begun experimenting with slave-based factories by the 1840s, with mixed success.
Turns out, though, that slave economies are kind of shit when it comes to mustering a modern army. That's literally an ancient problem with slave armies.
But that's not what I was talking about in the post above. Probably should have added economic in there.
Was talking about the pre-war situation. Confederate Army didn't exist then
The rest of the post is a fairly... strange reading of both WWI and WWII.
WWII Germany went to war for the pretty obvious reason that they wanted to wipe the defeat of WWI of the face of the earth and reclaim all the territory that was "german" before WWI. Its reason for going to war against the USSR was because the USSR was inhabited by untermensch and communist. They invade to eliminate both. The entire "lets turn Russia into a colony" was just a followup from that, since what where they going to do with vast now empty land? New German colonies of course!
WWI Germany went to war because they knew that the French where going to want revenge for 1870 soon or later and because they where lead by a leader even more incompetent then Hitler. All that talk about Germany's place in the sun, along with phrases as Blood and Iron and then screaming encirclement when people start building arms to protect themselves from the vast army/navy germany was building, didn't make them friends.
Kaiser Wilhelm II is the poster child for why hereditary monarchies are a bad idea.
The above post is the modern academic understanding of WWII. If you read the three volume history of the Nazi Germany by Richard Evans, he makes many of the same points.
To wrap back to the OP's first post, it's issues like these that divide academic historians from the History Channel equipment fetishists. The issues that propelled the war and decided its outcome were much more complex than whi had the best tanks. Also, public school history really sucks for anything except mild political indoctrination and an overall sense of the dates stuff happened.
Gotta read those big books. And just one doesn't help, since there are multiple valid interpretations.
A lot of those weapons wound up becoming prototypes for American and Soviet weapons. For example, they had a rudimentary remote operated anti-tank missile using a wire - recovered samples led to the development of the TOW missile that's a mainstay of the US Army since the 70s.
This illustrates one the most important rules when it comes to project codenames - the name should mean absolutely nothing. Yes, I would imagine that the planners thought that naming the system after the Allfather was highly symbolic, but it ultimately gave the Brits a key piece of information (namely, that the system was built around a single primary beam.)
honestly just giving them the coats would've been enough probably.
of course they were going to have to push further into the country to actually get Stalin to concede. All the industry was basically told to move further inland around the start of the war.
Oddly enough this is pretty much what I've heard about Panther tanks. Of particular note was an incident during the battle of Kursk where, I think (I'll look for the passage later) a good number of Panthers caught fire just getting off the train.
Late war german tanks were a goddamned mess in terms of reliability.
Would that be a fair assessment?
One of the things about WWII that I think makes it especially facinating as one learns more about is the extent to which it was like science fiction come to life.
It was a war where people fought on horseback and where horses often did the majority of hauling, where bolt action rifles were still heavily used in certain places, and in some ways was not too dissimilar from 19th century conflicts. But it was also future warfare. Jet engines. Rockets. Radar. Aircraft carriers. Immensely improved firearms and guns. The cold, grim calculus of the Battle of the Atlantic and submarines growing more and more powerful and deadly. Battleships bigger and more heavily armed than anyone had ever imagined that were obsolete the day they were launched. The Willow Run aircraft factory and Liberty ships. Antibiotics. Enigma, Collosus, and Ultra. Nuclear weapons.
It's like a war broke out today, and by the time it ends in six years we have AIs doing strategic planning, city-factories crawling across the ocean floor for resources, while genetically enhanced marines do drops wearing power armor and carry pulse rifles.
The Confederate economy was built around the export of cash crops like cotton and tobacco, not manufacturing. The northern economy was built around manufacturing. When the War of the Southern Fear That The North Would Take Away Their Slaves began, the Confederates were basically making uniforms in cottages while the Union was making them in factories. The southern economy wilted quickly, since they couldn't export their goods. The self reliant northerners were able to make the guns, trains, and ships they needed.
Slave labour made the South rich, but there really wasn't much industry. It was an agrarian economy.
It's also important to bear in mind that the Germans were increasingly reliant on real slave labor & what amounted to slave labor as the war progressed. The machinery may (or may not) have been well designed as far as the engineer's drafting room goes, but then it went on to be built by people who sometimes intentionally sabotaged the equipment & sometimes just weren't skilled at the trade they were press ganged into.
Like, imagine if tomorrow your boss said that you need to pitch in for The Cause and now you'll be building Maybach engine components. Maybe the designs are good, maybe they're not; starting tomorrow, do you think you could start building them to spec regardless?
Silent Hunter becomes kind of boring after you get those (...and on that same token, fuck those stupid electromagnetic or whatever torpedoes. May as well just surface and start throwing rocks).
Hedy Lamarr came up with frequency hopping technologies to avoid jamming that were literally twenty years ahead of their time - the U.S. Navy didn't put her invention to use until the 60s.
And today, it's pretty much the reason your cell phone works.
The south might have had the highest per capita income but only if you excluded the slaves in your population measure. At the start of the civil war some 40% of the population were slaves (so your GDP/Person figures are inflated by about 66% when excluding them).
In war, what matters is not per-capita GDP, but raw GDP. And even if the North was less productive than the South per person the North had about 3 times the total population and so would have outproduced the South even if the south had twice the GPD per capita. Which it didn't; the North was more productive per person*.
Additionally the north was self sufficient in terms of material goods. They had the miners, the steel smelters, and the machinery to create what they wanted out of it. The South did not, having basically no durable good production besides cotton. Cotton will not win you a war. So overall the Northern economy was stronger in about every way.
So why did the South think they could win the war? Well i mean, besides the "divine right" craziness? Well, the South did have an advantage at the start. Much of the military apparatus were located there. And a good percentage of the officer core lived or owed allegiance to the South. This gave them a good initial officer core and a large stockpile of weapons. But once they didn't win immediately there was no winning. Those weapons they had were manufactured in the North. Those officers were trained at West Point New York. The North had more people, had more production per person, and had more relevant production and could replace officers. So long as the North didn't outright lose the war it was always on the path to winning.
*GDP/person for the entire US appears to be about $140 in 1860. GDP per capita for the highest producing State in the Rebellion was $253(Mississippi).... not counting slaves. Counting slaves it was $113. Alabama $66. South Carolina $68. Florida $80. Georgia $76. Louisiana $121. Texas $93. North Carolina $72. Tennessee $69. Arkansas $89. Virginia $82. All numbers rounded down because I am both lazy and because it doesn't matter. Not one Southern State at the start of the Civil War had true GDP/Capita numbers above the national average. The North, by way of mathematical necessity had to be higher.
edited for real population adjusted GDP numbers and comparison to US GDP at the time.
I'll see your homing torpedoes in 1943 and raise you radar guided bombs in 1944.
Freeaboo! Freeaboo!
- John Stuart Mill
The actual non slave population of the south was tiny, and there was no hope of winning. Even if they convinced the North to let them secede, look what happened in the ensuing century. The South hoped to break the will of the North to fight a real war, and they actually came reasonably close to succeeding, but there was no winning in the end for them
After all, even if the North let them secede after their early losses, there's no way the increasingly powerful north would have ever let that stand in the ensuing decades as the entire world grew more distasteful of slavery. After the ink was dry on the peace treaty, the north would spend the next few years or decades turning itself into a military powerhouse the South couldn't hope to fight.
Why do you hate Freedom!™, Seal?
- John Stuart Mill
hitting hot metal with hammers
Yeah, the problem is that all the crazy tech was half baked
It would be like the US replacing all the missiles on its destroyers with railguns right now, this year
I'll call with infared scopes fitted to assault rifles in 1945
Indeed
Funny thing...Germany did have some areas where they were ahead of the Allies, but for the most part, both sides were developing similar technologies, often not too far off each other in terms of progress.
- John Stuart Mill
So while Germany pioneered a bunch of tank tactics, they designed their tank strategies very much to win a tank vs tank arms race. America on the other hand went for lighter, cheaper, more reliable tanks, and then usually scattered their deployment to support infantry. When a particularly nasty german tank came rolling up, American tanks could either simply overwhelm it with numbers or the infantry could call in air support, against which the German tanks weren't really prepared.
It's kind of an interesting case of not being in the arms race you thought you were.
*trying to find it still
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
When the Sherman went into production, it was heavier than and actually outclassed the existing Nazi panzers (the III and IV). The Tiger didn't enter production until the following year, and the Panther the year after that. Even when they did enter service, the heavier panzers were primarily deployed to the Eastern Front to counter Soviet heavy tanks. Fewer than 1,500 Tiger Is were produced, only a couple hundred were deployed in the West. Another factor was the Atlantic Ocean. Germany and the Soviet Union could both roll heavy tanks from the factory to the front line, but we had to ship everything across the water. Heavier tanks would have meant fewer gun platforms per convoy. The Sherman was better than most of the German armor and good enough to take out the rest if it got the first shot. It couldn't engage at quite the same range as a Panther or Tiger, but we managed to land enough of them that that didn't really matter.
- John Stuart Mill
On reddit there are subs for r/ShitLeeaboosSay and r/ShitWehraboosSay. They are simultaneously glorious and likely to induce liver failure.
- John Stuart Mill
Sherman had a mixed reception. It was an ergonomic & easy to drive vehicle, it was a clear step above earlier American experiments like the Lee / Grant, the front was nicely sloped which gave it more effective protection per mm of armor and it wasn't hard to repair in the field if a tread blew out or the engine took a beating.
But crews did not like the power of the 75mm gun. The essay you read was spot on: American planners felt that the Sherman would fill an infantry support role, while dedicated tank destroyers accompanying the tanks punched through any heavy armor that a mechanized allied force came up against. in practice, this wasn't really feasible: battle lines were not as neat & uniform as allied command initially thought they would be, vehicles and troops had to be detached & re-attached from company to company and a lot of the terrain couldn't safely accomodate a spread of open-topped tank destroyers.
If you've seen Fury, that's a pretty accurate depiction of Sherman operation in a nutshell. Everything's great until you bump into one of the heavies that command just kind of hoped you wouldn't bump into.
Of course, then a couple of British guys who were fans of the Sherman chassis - George Brighty and George Witheridge - decided to take it upon themselves to up-gun the vehicle. They stole a Sherman, drove it into a chop shop and replaced the 75mm cannon with a 17-pounder anti-tank gun. Not too many of these 'Firefly' Shermans were produced after George & George proved the concept, but it was nevertheless one of the best overall vehicles to see action in WWII.
edit: You'll have to rewind, I have no idea why it wants to start at the 50 minute mark.
any German tank you care to name looks way cooler than a Sherman (though personally i'd argue that the T-34 is the coolest looking of the bunch)
the V-2 was a huge fuckoff flared black-and-white checkered rocket with big ol' fins, it doesn't get any more badass than that
the MG-42 looked and sounded just completely nasty (and actually was a legitimately excellent design; it's still used in heavily modified form more than seventy years later)
so you start from the aesthetics, then work your way back to the designs themselves and if you're not paying close enough attention you start treating Nazi propaganda about Nazi weapons like they're the actual specs for the stuff, and then from there you start making moral judgments in favor of the guys making all this cool stuff. i mean the V-2 is awesome, its construction can't possibly have resulted in the deaths of many thousands of slave laborers, or ended up not actually being useful basically at all as weapon
hitting hot metal with hammers
jesus, the US could put out thirty sherman tanks in the time it took to put out one tiger (given equal production, which of course wasn't the case, the US had vastly superior production)
I knew there was a disparity but holy crap
Quite possibly apocryphal story: Germans overrun an Army camp, find the remains of a birthday celebration in the mess, complete with a cake that was baked stateside, not locally. The German commander stands there, looking at this humble little demonstration of the Allies' transport and production capacity, turns to an aide, and declares, "We have lost the war."
The Civil was the first real industrial war, and WWII the last*. Prior to the American Civil War war was about two things, how big your army was; how big your enemies was and which one was closer to the relevant capitol. While the armies are relatively close in size and neither one is between the enemy army and its capitol the war continues. Army mobilization does not have to correlate to your GDP necessarily because you can burn through stockpiles ans can secure a lot of the food you need to keep marching from the land you're marching over. You would repair your equipment but not be producing more.
The Civil War was protracted relative to resupply times. This meant that producing goods was much more relevant to the war. This is similar to feeding your army but on a massive and important scale. And you can't just take bullets from the orchards you marched across, any factories you come across will be stripped bare and destroyed.
So your personal production is what matters. And in the ACW and WWII this is what happened. All(ok, almost all) durable good production went to the war. You produced two things generally; food and bullets.
If you want to win this kind of war, just like if you want to win in Starcraft. You have to either win fast, or you have to have better macro. Germany got lucky in WWII because most of Europe didn't really fight. The Confederacy got lucky that they had stores of equipment located in the south and only Fort Sumter didn't surrender them.
But in the end the North and "the rest of the World" had more people and more GDP and so they won, as bloody as it had to be they were always going to win, it was just a matter of lives and lost production(IE time and effort we could have used to make useful shit)
To put this in perspective for today, where industrial war can no longer really happen (due to willpower and nukes). The U.S. has about 9000 main battle tanks and they cost about 8.5 million dollars to make. That is about 70 billion in tanks. U.S. GDP is around 15 trillion dollars. If we entered an industrial war we could probably spend 50% or more of GDP on military expenditures. We could triple the size of our tank batallions without batting an eye. We have the largest army in the world and we could double the entire thing in size in a year, if not more. If you wanted to win you would have to destory our current strength every year for 5 years(or more)
Fortunately (or hopefully) we won't ever see another industrial war because that sort of thing is amazingly tragic. But these numbers ilusteate what kind of war was picked when the South picked a war with the North and when Germany picked a war with the rest of the world.
*you could argue Korea of Veitnam but the US was not truely mobilized for those, they were like side shows despite the casualties on all sides.
I'd be very surprised if that wasn't apocryphal.