Thread: Dreadnoughts thread on military history

Originally Posted by King87

Dread, speak to me of Tunisia.

The Tunisia campaign of WW2 is a pretty interesting one, and a classic case of throwing good money after bad. The Axis could barely resupply North Africa as it was, and the British had been sinking a huge percentage of Axis shipments from their air and naval base on Malta since early 1941. The Axis should have seen the writing on the wall after El Alamein, and withdrawn from North Africa completely to the extent they could. Instead, they shipped even more men and equipment to Tunisia, only to eventually have the entire bundle end up in POW camps, 230,000 men in all. Really stupid. They could have cost us a lot of blood and trouble later in the War, as these were really good and well trained troops, including almost the entire Afrika Korps.

Tunisia was also the first time U.S. forces came into contact with the Germans in the European theater, and we didn't exactly cover ourselves with glory, enough so that the Germans underestimated our Army going forward. Teething pains and inexperience, mostly. At this stage (Early 1943) the British still had to do most of the heavy lifting.

Tunisia for the Axis is a perfect example of the old saying that stubbornness is a weak and stupid man's imitation of resolve.

This is a cool thread when Dread speaks.

I don't know about the rest of you guys . . .
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Here is an excerpt from a sermon I gave a while back, titled "Unconditional Surrender." Thought it might be interesting:


It was July 1945. The nation of Japan and its cities were decimated from months of endless fire-bombing. Cities across the island nation looked like wastelands, with barely a structure standing here and there, mostly a partial wall from an otherwise destroyed building. Because of the mostly straw-and-wood-type residential homes, entire cities had gone up like tinder boxes.

Even in her beaten and battered state, Japan was not ready to surrender. Surrender was a foreign concept the Japanese. They did not know what it was to surrender. Their way was victory or death. Nothing in the middle. That was part of their culture, their faith, inculcated into each of them, not only throughout their respective lifetimes, but throughout many generations.

Only when the first Atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 did Japan’s resolution begin to crack. Still, they had their own terms for “surrender” (and in my notes I put that term in quotes). They had one stipulation: The Emperor Hirohito and his family would remain on the throne.

In response, the Allies met to discuss the terms of surrender. In what we know today as the Potsdam Proclamation, Japan’s stipulation was categorically denied. The terms were . . . well, there was one term, actually: total, unconditional surrender. As William Manchester put it in his biography of General Douglas MacArthur, “The Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally or face ‘prompt and utter destruction.’ ”

So the Allies wanted total surrender . . . that is, absolute, total, unconditional surrender and submission to the will of the Allies. Nothing less. The Japanese offered "surrender," (once again, in quotes) but with conditions. That was not satisfactory. Anything less would have amounted to an armistice, and they had tried that at the conclusion of World War I, and those of us who know anything about history know how that worked out . . . and so did they.

In truth, the Allies, mostly Americans, had learned to a tragic degree at Iwo Jima and in Okinawa that the Japanese would never offer unconditional surrender. The Allies had to fight for every square inch of both islands, in bloody affairs that claimed tens of thousands of American lives, and the lives of the Japanese at a ratio of 20:1 to the Americans. Once they were vanquished and could no longer fight, the Japanese committed suicide in droves, rather than to give up. The prisoners the Allies took in those conflicts were minuscule, compared to the numbers who died fighting the Allies . . . or at their own hands.

In fact, before the Americans hoisted our flag on Okinawa, a foreign flag had never flown on Japanese soil . . . not as the dominant flag, anyway. The Japanese never believed a foreign flag would fly over the mainland, their home. And they were prepared, from the armed forces down to every man, woman, and child, to die, just as hundreds of kamikaze pilots had done.

We have to understand it was nothing to a Japanese pilot to die in such a mission. It was an honor to them to die for their Emperor.

To that end 5,000 more kamikaze pilots were ready to do just that. That’s how many airplanes the Japanese still had, ready to go on kamikaze missions upon the invasion of their homeland. The Japanese Air Force had been decimated, and most of these planes were obsolete, but they would work just fine for suicide missions. But that was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Many more kamikaze weapons were at their disposal in such an attack, and they had every intention of using them.

There was the Ohka Suicide Rocket, actually 750 of them, ready to go. It was actually a flying torpedo, capable of flying about 220 MPH, until honing onto a target, at which its rocket engines were ignited, and it would hurdle into the target at 600 miles per hour, detonating a 256 pound bomb. They had already begun to use them to crash into our B-29 bombers.

There was the SHINYO, a fast motorboat driven by one man and loaded with explosives. The Japanese had built about 9,000 of these. They were the size of a speedboat and were very difficult to hit as they hurdled toward their target.

The Japanese had built or were developing many more suicide weapons besides those, such as the KAITEN, a human guided torpedo that carried a 3,400 pound TNT warhead. The FUKURYU was another: Japanese swimmers became human mines with explosives were strapped to them: They could swim to the target ship to destroy themselves and the ship.

The NIKAKU was particularly alarming. The suicide soldier had explosives strapped to his body. He would then crawl under a tank or other vehicle and blow it up. What was alarming about it is that the Japanese were enlisting children–I mean grade school-aged children–to carry out those missions.

In fact, once the Allies got past the army of about two million waiting for them on the Japanese homeland, they would encounter a 28 million civilian army of men, women, and children, all ready to honor the descendent of their gods, the Emperor with their own deaths.

Virtually every living soul on that island nation was borne of the kamikaze spirit.

So, once again, it was not in the Japanese to surrender. What they wanted was a form of armistice. And it was estimated that to force that surrender through invading and conquering Japan, the death toll for the Allies might reach as high as one million, and as high as 20 million for the Japanese. So the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia were all in agreement that the bomb had to be dropped. They dropped the first, and that didn’t do it, so they dropped another one.

That is when the Emperor Hirohito himself got on the radio and announced unconditional surrender. He was ready to step down and end his family’s reign of many generations to save his people and, as he explained in his speech, the world.

Now here is the shocker: After Japan’s surrender, after the papers were signed and General MacArthur was established as the interim de facto ruler of Japan, MacArthur placed Hirohito back on his throne as Emperor of Japan (if only as a figurehead now). And there the Emperor remained until his death in 1989.

Why?

What was the purpose for all this? The only stipulation Japan had originally made in its offer to surrender in July 1945 was to leave the Emperor on his throne, which was promptly rejected, and now, after the unconditional surrender, MacArthur puts him back there, anyway!

The difference is, MacArthur didn’t have to do that. It was by his good graces that the Emperor was again able to ascend to his throne. (Actually, MacArthur had other reasons, such as more docile Japanese subjects since they did not lose their Emperor.)

The point is, however, that the Japanese had to figuratively walk out with nothing that belonged to them, not even the clothes on their backs, had our side not wished to grant them to them. Which would not have been the case, had the Japanese been allowed any terms at all to the event.

This is what is meant by unconditional surrender!
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Hey dread, my friend and I were discussing the Prussian Potsdam Giants today. Seemed like a strategy move ahead of its time to draft based on size... But I don't think they were ever battle tested. Do you know anything about them?

Maj. Gen. George Crittenden, Zollicoffer’s superior, had arrived at Mill Springs and taken command of the Confederate troops. He knew that Thomas was in the vicinity and decided that his best defense was to attack the Yankees. The Rebels attacked Thomas at Logan’s Crossroads at dawn on January 19. Unbeknownst to the Confederates, some of Schoepf’s troops had arrived and reinforced the Union force. Initially, the Rebel attack forced the first unit it hit to retire, but stiff resistance followed and Zollicoffer was killed. The Rebels made another attack but were repulsed. Union counterattacks on the Confederate right and left were successful, forcing them from the field in a retreat that ended in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Mill Springs, along with Middle Creek, broke whatever Confederate strength there was in eastern Kentucky.

http://www.civilwar.org/battlefields...html?tab=facts


This was a battle that happened where I live. It seemed to be a pretty big battle early on, being a victory for the Union in the "battleground" state of Kentucky. I visited the battlefield and the official Mill Springs Museum. They told the story about how General Zollicoffer was killed. Instead of screwing it up, I'll look it up and post it.

Few aspects of the battle of Mill Springs are as surrounded by controversy as the death of Gen. Felix Kirk Zollicoffer, CSA. Ignoring the embellishments and the whys-and-wherefores, what seems clear is that Zollicoffer mistook Union troops for his own units (quite understandable in the confusion of that dark misty morning), and he approached the Union lines by mistake. He wished to order them to cease firing on their own men, since he thought they were all Confederates. Whatever the cause, it is evident that Zollicoffer did not recognize the Union officer to whom he spoke as an enemy; neither did this officer recognize Zollicoffer as a Confederate. Or possibly, Zollicoffer did recognize the enemy and realized his mistake, and attempted to bluff his way out. Only as they parted, and one of Zollicoffer’s staff rode out of the woods to warn his commander (meanwhile firing at the Federals), did both parties realize the truth. In the ensuing exchange of fire, Zollicoffer was shot dead from his horse.

http://millsprings.net/history/48-de...llicoffer.html

Originally Posted by Buff

Hey dread, my friend and I were discussing the Prussian Potsdam Giants today. Seemed like a strategy move ahead of its time to draft based on size... But I don't think they were ever battle tested. Do you know anything about them?

Did he forget about this thread?

Originally Posted by Buff

Hey dread, my friend and I were discussing the Prussian Potsdam Giants today. Seemed like a strategy move ahead of its time to draft based on size... But I don't think they were ever battle tested. Do you know anything about them?

Not too much, really. I think they were more a novelty than an advanced weapon of war. Peter the Great had a unit of midgets, probably of little use as well. The British used units of small men "Bantams" in WW1 for tunneling operations under the trenches, at one point beginning an offensive at Messines Ridge in Flanders by detonating something like 17 enormous dynamite charges under the ridge, erasing both the ridge and the Germans on top of it. Supposedly you could hear the boom in London.

Speaking of WW1, my favorite War in that it is so uniquely awful, in December 1916 on "White Friday" avalanches on the Italian Front buried 10,000 or so Austrian and Italian soldiers alive. By way of comparison, this was more than all U.S. War losses in all wars combined since Vietnam. Most of the bodies were never recovered

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...ld-war-i-rages

100 Years ago this past Saturday, a 19 year old Serbian Anarchist nutjob named Gavrilo Princep shot Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophia to death in Sarajevo. And then a lot of other sub-mediocrities (the Kaiser, von Bethmann-Hollweg, KuK Franz Josef, von Berchtoldt, the Tsar) let things spiral utterly out of control. One thing led to another, and we got the Great War, IMO the most dramatic and calamitous event in mankind's History...even WW2 is just a sequel to this one. All started because one doofus, backed by the elements in the Serbian secret service, killed a fairly mediocre Austrian member of the Hapsburg clan. The shooting started July 28th, and I'll post more then

dread, tell us a sacking story. . .

Originally Posted by dogfish

dread, tell us a sacking story. . .

"Sacking" as in firing?

Originally Posted by Dreadnought

"Sacking" as in firing?

oh hell no. . . as in the sack of a city. . .

Originally Posted by Dreadnought

100 Years ago this past Saturday, a 19 year old Serbian Anarchist nutjob named Gavrilo Princep shot Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophia to death in Sarajevo. And then a lot of other sub-mediocrities (the Kaiser, von Bethmann-Hollweg, KuK Franz Josef, von Berchtoldt, the Tsar) let things spiral utterly out of control. One thing led to another, and we got the Great War, IMO the most dramatic and calamitous event in mankind's History...even WW2 is just a sequel to this one. All started because one doofus, backed by the elements in the Serbian secret service, killed a fairly mediocre Austrian member of the Hapsburg clan. The shooting started July 28th, and I'll post more then

I heard an interview with a historian about this on NPR the other day... Sounds like it was a real cluster**** of epic proportions!

I've always thought WWI would make a good allegory in the form of a sitcom because of how frenetic it is. All those damn allegiances.