Infantry Discussion Thread, Mk. 8 Mod. 0 [No Kaiju]

[Fordorsia]

How horrid.

Just tell me what it would do to a people

[Puzikas]

No

[Fordorsia]

ok :c

[Gallia-]

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/65329749/Nationstates/Tabes-of-Organization-and-Equipment/SVG/IRL/Composite-Battalion-1982.png

the bn with its revised/leaner platoons

What's the difference between company maintenance and battalion maintenance?

i dont know he doesnt say presumably the bn service coy is just more trucks than the coy service plt

stuff that would presumably live in the company transport sections of a Bn HQ i guess lives in the coy now

[Fordorsia]

The question is should it be single or double barreled

[Puzikas]

It just shouldnt be.

[Dostanuot Loj]

I'm caught in a pickle.

I can't decide between HK33, FAMAS, and Type 97-1.

[Fordorsia]

Hey now

Actually how thick should the barrel wall be? Right now it's 6.2mm at the chamber and 4.3 at the muzzle. The fatness of the barrel really bothers me, even though it's a 25mm bullet.

[Sevvania]

The question is should it be single or double barreled

Triple. Make it a combination gun.

[Schwere Panzer Abteilung 502]

In terms of WWI combat, if soldiers from one side managed to capture some trenches from the other side, what sort of risk would they be at in terms of a quick counterattack?

[Fordorsia]

The question is should it be single or double barreled

Triple. Make it a combination gun.

That sort of thing belongs in MGV

In terms of WWI combat, if soldiers from one side managed to capture some trenches from the other side, what sort of risk would they be at in terms of a quick counterattack?

Depends on the losses of the defenders and what they had in reserve I'd imagine.

And did you spell your name correctly this time?

[Schwere Panzer Abteilung 502]

In terms of WWI combat, if soldiers from one side managed to capture some trenches from the other side, what sort of risk would they be at in terms of a quick counterattack?

Depends on the losses of the defenders and what they had in reserve I'd imagine.

And did you spell your name correctly this time?

I think my old nation got deleted or something over the Christmas break - I couldn't log in. So whatever, the old name always annoyed me.

And WWI combat is a mystery to me. I'm sure the popular idea of "500 men charging into a hail of machine gun fire, 10 of them make it to the enemy trenches only to be bayoneted" has some truth to it, but I can't help but think that that's a very dumbed down version.

[Allanea]

In terms of WWI combat, if soldiers from one side managed to capture some trenches from the other side, what sort of risk would they be at in terms of a quick counterattack?

And basically this is part of why WW1 was terrible.

[Fordorsia]

Depends on the losses of the defenders and what they had in reserve I'd imagine.

And did you spell your name correctly this time?

I think my old nation got deleted or something over the Christmas break - I couldn't log in. So whatever, the old name always annoyed me.

And WWI combat is a mystery to me. I'm sure the popular idea of "500 men charging into a hail of machine gun fire, 10 of them make it to the enemy trenches only to be bayoneted" has some truth to it, but I can't help but think that that's a very dumbed down version.

In the early months/ years I do think that was the case. But commanders weren't stupid, they stopped that because regardless of their rank/nobility/poshness, anyone can see how bad large exposed formations now were. I think the main problem for most is getting around the fact that the majority of WWI wasn't trench warfare. Most of it was pretty much WWII firefights in towns and countrysides just without the planes and tanks. At least for me, that throws of visualizing what it would actually be like in either trenches or open battlefield.

Then again I did see a combat montage which included what I think were French soldiers retreating with a flamethrower on their heels, so I guess I do have an idea of what it was like...

[Gallia-]

Depends on the losses of the defenders and what they had in reserve I'd imagine.

And did you spell your name correctly this time?

I think my old nation got deleted or something over the Christmas break - I couldn't log in. So whatever, the old name always annoyed me.

And WWI combat is a mystery to me. I'm sure the popular idea of "500 men charging into a hail of machine gun fire, 10 of them make it to the enemy trenches only to be bayoneted" has some truth to it, but I can't help but think that that's a very dumbed down version.

If only that were the truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Loos

When the battle resumed the following day, the Germans had recovered and improved their defensive positions. British attempts to continue the advance with the reserves were repulsed.[8] Twelve attacking battalions suffered 8,000 casualties out of 10,000 men in four hours.

As late as September 26, 1915, two new British divisions were committed to attack under such circumstances [bayonet charge against machine guns] in the area of Loos. Twenty minutes of bombardment, which appears to have caused the Germans no casualties, was followed by a pause of about half an hour. Then 10,000 men in 12 battalions advanced up a gentle slope toward enemy trenches still protected by unbroken barbed wire. At 1,500 yards range, the British advance met with a storm of machine-gun fire, which, in rough three and one half hours, killed 385 officers and 7,861 men. As remnants of the British staggered away from "Liechenfeld von Loos," the Germans stopped firing in compassion. Their casualties in the same time had been nil.

Also, B.H. Liddell-Hart's battalion was annihilated in an almost similar manner in the Battle of the Somme.

The Allies took many years of charging machine guns with elan et esprit before they realized bullets trumped martial courage.

In truth, it would be more like "2,000 men charge into machine gun fire, 200 return in disgrace" though.

[Taihei Tengoku]

I'm caught in a pickle.

I can't decide between HK33, FAMAS, and Type 97-1.

HK33

In terms of WWI combat, if soldiers from one side managed to capture some trenches from the other side, what sort of risk would they be at in terms of a quick counterattack?

"Quick" is a relative term in WWI but after capturing a few lines of trenches the infantry is usually exhausted and heavily attrited. Reinforcements would obviously have to cross no man's land while the enemy would have ready-made routes of advance out of their redoubts. More importantly, enemy artillery would probably have pre-planned coordinates for just that contingency while the friendly troops are operating closer to the edge of their artillery support.

[Fordorsia]

I think my old nation got deleted or something over the Christmas break - I couldn't log in. So whatever, the old name always annoyed me.

And WWI combat is a mystery to me. I'm sure the popular idea of "500 men charging into a hail of machine gun fire, 10 of them make it to the enemy trenches only to be bayoneted" has some truth to it, but I can't help but think that that's a very dumbed down version.

If only that were the truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Loos

When the battle resumed the following day, the Germans had recovered and improved their defensive positions. British attempts to continue the advance with the reserves were repulsed.[8] Twelve attacking battalions suffered 8,000 casualties out of 10,000 men in four hours.

As late as September 26, 1915, two new British divisions were committed to attack under such circumstances [bayonet charge against machine guns] in the area of Loos. Twenty minutes of bombardment, which appears to have caused the Germans no casualties, was followed by a pause of about half an hour. Then 10,000 men in 12 battalions advanced up a gentle slope toward enemy trenches still protected by unbroken barbed wire. At 1,500 yards range, the British advance met with a storm of machine-gun fire, which, in rough three and one half hours, killed 385 officers and 7,861 men. As remnants of the British staggered away from "Liechenfeld von Loos," the Germans stopped firing in compassion. Their casualties in the same time had been nil.

Also, B.H. Liddell-Hart's battalion was annihilated in an almost similar manner in the Battle of the Somme.

The Allies took many years of charging machine guns with elan et esprit before they realized bullets trumped martial courage.

Compassion, or just saving ammo :/

[Schwere Panzer Abteilung 502]

That's absurd. I can't even begin to imagine what that was like. I don't want to imagine it.

Was it much the same for battles like Verdun, Somme, Ypes, etc.?

[Fordorsia]

I found the video with the soldiers getting chased with a flamethrower. I think the pursuers are German but I don't know about the ones they're chasing.

Happens at 1:20 for a few seconds, but I recommend watching the whole video. NSFW for gore (iirc) (yep gore/death) and plenty of unsettling footage of neurosis. Also the music, if I can even call it that, is terrifying.

Now I just feel like shit.

[Dostanuot Loj]

I'll just say this. I can add more later (WW1 my favorite war).

Bloody Verdun was the German campaign to "bleed the french white".

There's not a family in France from the time period who's blood did not soak that ground.

[Taihei Tengoku]

That's absurd. I can't even begin to imagine what that was like. I don't want to imagine it.

Was it much the same for battles like Verdun, Somme, Ypes, etc.?

Verdun and Somme are meatgrinders but are part of a "transitional" period for the Entente. By the time of Third Ypres (Passchendaele) the Entente was fairly tactically proficient, and at Messines took a lot of ground with relatively few casualties.

[Schwere Panzer Abteilung 502]

I'll just say this. I can add more later (WW1 my favorite war).

Bloody Verdun was the German campaign to "bleed the french white".

There's not a family in France from the time period who's blood did not soak that ground.

Why is it your favorite? I'd think WWII is what really defined what a big war would really be like to this day. (of course, in the interwar period, everybody thought the next war would be like WWI)

I found the video with the soldiers getting chased with a flamethrower. I think the pursuers are German but I don't know about the ones they're chasing.

Happens at 1:20 for a few seconds, but I recommend watching the whole video. NSFW for gore (iirc) (yep gore/death) and plenty of unsettling footage of neurosis. Also the music, if I can even call it that, is terrifying.

Now I just feel like shit.

Some of that footage is from WWII. The first video is the Barham exploding in 41.

[Fordorsia]

I'll just say this. I can add more later (WW1 my favorite war).

Bloody Verdun was the German campaign to "bleed the french white".

There's not a family in France from the time period who's blood did not soak that ground.

Why is it your favorite? I'd think WWII is what really defined what a big war would really be like to this day. (of course, in the interwar period, everybody thought the next war would be like WWI)

WWI was the transition into modern combat and a literal meatgrinder to boot. Personally I'm not that interested in researching it, but I know all I need to know to understand why it's the war that people are most interested in. It's the closest we'll ever come to real 40k. That isn't even me trying to be light hearted either.

Some of that footage is from WWII. The first video is the Barham exploding in 41.

Yeah I caught that. Still, the video gets the message across.

[Kazarogkai]

That's absurd. I can't even begin to imagine what that was like. I don't want to imagine it.

Was it much the same for battles like Verdun, Somme, Ypes, etc.?

That was mostly the western front, go on to the eastern front and you find a different picture. Sure there were trenches but overall the front stretched over a far more massive area and in turn the battles did to with the front itself rather than remaining static in constant flux with each side gaining and loosing mass areas of land. In Africa, it looked little like the other aforementioned two resembling something like a guerrilla conflict rather than a classic conventional war.

[Gallia-]

If only that were the truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Loos





Also, B.H. Liddell-Hart's battalion was annihilated in an almost similar manner in the Battle of the Somme.

The Allies took many years of charging machine guns with elan et esprit before they realized bullets trumped martial courage.

Compassion, or just saving ammo :/

Little of column A, little of column B. You don't want to kill another person after all, unless you're a legitimate psychopath who needs to be locked up I guess, and that applies as much in 1915 as it does in 2015.

This was the era of the Christmas Truce, and honor among and towards [white skinned] warriors.

That's absurd. I can't even begin to imagine what that was like. I don't want to imagine it.

Was it much the same for battles like Verdun, Somme, Ypes, etc.?

It got better.

The Allies tried short and brief bombardments to "shock" the enemy and avoid the creation of artificial obstacles, and then they tried moving barrages and nuclear level bombardments to shatter defences and stop the Germans from reinforcing their trenches, with varying degrees of success.

After the Marne, the Allied troops were almost continually on the offensive until 1918, and pre-war doctrine demanded maneuver and flanking attacks. Unfortunately, they didn't have the room to maneuver and no flanks to flank, so the only way they could feasibly attack was by massing as much manpower against Germans as possible. In some battles, it was 5-to-1 in favour of the Allies, and they never really broke the German defences. Firepower trumped the old ways of maneuver and the Allies constantly launched massive frontal assaults to break the German lines and force some kind of penetration they could exploit/flank.

The running theme is that basically prior to Mort Homme, British attacks were characterized by Boer War-style battalion waves, and eventually progressed to a semi-modern platoon-based fire-maneuver system after 1916. The French mastered the moving barrage earlier than the British, and small unit (platoon-section) level fire/maneuver. By the Somme, the British too had working creeping barrages, but stuck to their battalion-company "human sea" attacks for a variety of political and class reasons, and very few practical ones. The creeping barrage itself was problematic in that it didn't kill the enemy. German riflemen and machine gunners often lived through the barrages, waited for it to pass, and then shot up the British battalions and companies as they wallowed through the mud floundering helplessly.

The British eventually learned the value of the small unit and its fire/maneuver tactics, the last of the Allied armies to do so (besides maybe the Americans), the tank helped a bit (not understatement), and they refined the creeping barrage into a sort of ridiculously methodical/slow method of advance that involved battalions passing through each other so the barrage didn't "run away" and multiple transitions from standing to moving barrages, combined with massive amounts of counter-battery fire.

The Germans learned too, and had better infantrymen and small unit capability to compensate for their lack of mechanical troops like tanks, and generally performed better per man due to a combination of well-led small units and innovative tactics. Naturally, they also faced opponents with larger gross economic output and higher birth rates, but they were practically destined to lose once the Allies marshaled their economic and maritime power against the Reich.

Post-Verdun the Allies came into their element and got better.

By the end of the war it was still a bit of a mess, but WW1 was the culmination of several centuries' worth of increasing force dispersion and firepower that ended with indirect fire, mathematical warfare, and machine war. It was mostly dramatic because it was a shock to the system of the old ways of formation fighting, where troops lined up in company sized squares, volley fired their rifles from 2,000 meters, and got owned by shrapnel shells and machine guns.

The essence of WW1 can be found as early as Crimea, or if we want to be more pedantic the American Civil War, where trench fighting and machine guns (in the latter) were all present. The European armies had just failed to take into account the changes of these wars since basically Crimea, because they mostly ignored the US Civil War as an aberration, and were hyper focused on Imperial police actions where tactical finesse was trumped by sheer muscle. The Boer War was the most modern war the British had fought before the Great War, and while they had all the elements of the Great War (trenches, shrapnel, machine guns) none of it was present in sufficient number to matter to the generals who had studied Jomini, Dragomirov, etc. and who studied tactical analysis of Waterloo as the epitome of Great Power fighting.

Really what caused it was pretty simple: It'd been a century since the last Great World War of the age, so naturally there was no data to draw new conclusions or hypotheses upon (and even worse, historical analysis was itself an infant science), military theory was as much philosophy as science, and the great generals of the era (Foch, Haig, etc.) had no significant military experiences outside the parade grounds. Their historical allegories were based on as much mythology (and often national mythos) as primitive mathematical tactics/differential equations like Lanchester's square law, both probably epitomized by Foch.

Of course, the Allied and German generals also weren't stupid idiots, so they naturally adapted as parts of their theories were proven wrong, encouraged development of technology and tactics to bring a return to open maneuver warfare, and tended to apply some universal laws (albeit very primitive, the generals of the era were the titanic pioneers of an essentially new form of warfare) from Clausewitzian or Jominian theory.

The unfortunate fact of history is that when the cascading effects of multiple, minor changes (you might call it a "change chain" but that's dumb) in war catch up to the present without significant and rigorous scrutiny, a lot of people die.