The Old Hack

It was the strategy of Air Marshal Dowding who was the man who devised the entire air defence system of Britain. He was the one who pushed through the construction of the heavily defended RADAR stations that allowed the RAF to detect incoming air raids ahead of time and intercept them. The idea was to let the Luftwaffe penetrate into Britain, then attack them when they were turning back and short of fuel. While this allowed the Luftwaffe the opportunity to drop their bombs it also made them far more vulnerable to RAF interceptors in dog fights. The entire system Dowding created was extremely complex and required minute coordination by ground personnel heavily trained to map out Luftwaffe incursions, keep track of them, keep track of all RAF planes available and choose which to commit against which incursion. So yes, there was a great deal of strategy involved. Now you are just being ridiculous. 'Taking a bus' was a metaphor for any number of methods used to return to base and the local population would be highly motivated to help foreign pilots get back to their units. Besides, it also included wounded pilots who required hospital stays before they could return to combat. Even if he required months of hospitalisation in order to be combat ready again, a surviving trained pilot remained a valuable asset. If they had had M. C. Escher on their design team, maybe he could have come up with something!

I have a niggling itch. On a scale of Impending Doom going from 1 to 100, I'm only at about fifteen or so. (With thanks to Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier.)

That is a good point, but at least this will be more like a slow double take than a huge floodwave of new spell users, which would have been the most likely outcome of a hard reset if Magic had chosen that.

Hm. Possibly, yes, but with the existing system of magic surviving with only minor modifications, maybe the situation will be more like this: that Magic allows matters to proceed from where they are now and does not inform the rest of the world's seers. That way instead of a huge revelation following on the Internet it would simply continue at the present pace. Which is to say, dribbles and drabbles slowly spreading and probably accelerating, but happening on a slower scale and leaving the various magic bureaus with intimidating acronyms for names more time to adjust and prepare themselves.

It was mostly this I had in mind, yes, though I certainly agree about the potential benefits. It is just that when the objective is so self-contradictory that it strikes me as a dubious idea. They were essentially told to design a heavy airframe that could on demand perform tasks best suited for a light airframe. This does not seem like a fertile field to plow.

Ah, I see. I am not really sure it would have improved the weapon that much if they had used ten yards long poles instead, or even if ten yards would have been enough of a minimum safe distance. That was the Devil's Dilemma the air powers faced. Their green pilots had to learn so many things the hard way and the loss rate was horrific. This was actually a key part of the defence strategy of the Battle of Britain: lure the Luftwaffe into fighting all its battles above hostile soil where every plane shot down meant that pilot and crew would be lost/captured whereas surviving British pilots only had to take the bus back to their base and climb into a new airframe. The Luftwaffe never did completely recover from the losses it suffered then. Part of the problem was that Germany's aircraft research was rather schizophrenic. It had two men directing research. One was a genius who helped create all the deadliest airplanes of the Luftwaffe and also led its research into jet planes. The other was a complete imbecile who wasted massive amounts of effort on ideas such as a heavy bombing plane that could also be used for tactical/dive bombing. This was roughly equivalent to the idea of devising a Flying Fortress that could also be used as a Stuka. (The amazing part of this is that the hapless engineers handed this self-contradictory and all but hopeless task almost succeeded. By 1944 they had a working design and in early 1945 they had a test model built. Of course by then they had sunk five years of hard work into this chimaera of a project. And I personally do not see what would have been wrong with instead designing one heavy bomber and one new kind of dive bomber and just build both.) Then, of course, it also did not help that in late 1941 the genius designer died -- of all things, in a plane crash. All his work came to a halt as they had no-one to replace him. It took a year and a half to recover from his loss and get his work resumed. I for one am not sorry about this as if he had survived, we would likely have seen the first Me 262s in mid-42 instead of late 43. At least they came up with the Panzerfaust in '43. It was a single-shot disposable rocket launcher and worked much better. The Japanese never came up with any infantry-portable antitank weapon much more effective than spit wads and rude gestures. Oops, ninjaed. According to Walter Lord's book Incredible Victory, Yamamoto's idea was that if his carrier force and its escorts had to retreat, he might be able to lure the American Navy into pursuit and have it sail into the waiting embrace of his battleships. As it turned out, Nimitz and his fellow admirals proved too canny to make that mistake. My bad. Thank you.

Now that I think about it, it is possible that it had to do with trying to reach the enemy tank through a hail of fire from its machinegun and its supporting infantry, and the fact that once you set off the charge you stood so close to it that you would be guaranteed to be ripped to shreds by the detonation.

The Germans had serious problems with resource allocation. They spread what they spent about too much. The carrier was a complete waste of resources. If they had thrown more resources at the submarines, that might have worked better for them. As for their High Seas Fleet, its true power did not lie in the damage it could actually do but in the threat it represented. As long as it remained a fleet in being, it compelled the British to constantly keep a superior fleet in the North Sea or close by to protect their coasts and trade vessels. Once the Germans actually committed their fleet and it was destroyed, it had not done enough damage to the British to seriously weaken their fleet. Worse yet, without the threat of a fleet in being, the British were now free to commit their North Sea fleet to any theatre they desired, a huge relief and a vast advantage. I hadn't heard that, but it sounds entirely believable. Ah well, I have had many a myth sunk beneath my feet before. For all his flaws, Patton was a brilliant general and in the right sort of theatre he shone. He was certainly neither a Haig nor a Prince Eugen. I do not think Yamato would have helped much at Midway. Midway ultimately proved a battle of aircraft carriers. As to the air war, the Japanese squandered the huge advantage they had in the Mitsubishi Zero by deciding that since they had the world's best fighting plane, it was a waste of resources to try to build better. And so their air power stagnated while the US caught up, and worse yet, by the time they realised this they had also lost their momentum. They had to practically recreate their research program from scratch while the Americans drew steadily further ahead and they never caught up again after that. Skilled pilots are an invaluable resource and often irreplaceable. Through Göring's antigenius, the Luftwaffe was bled white in the skies above Britain. It lost many skilled pilots and aircrew that they never did manage to replace afterwards. The Japanese had similar problems and they lacked a huge safe airspace to train new pilots in, especially in the latter years of the war. It is rather demoralising for trainee pilots to attempt to take off only to be engaged by enemy fighters using live ammo wishing to cut their education short.

Certainly. Even Haffner himself was uncertain about this. He set it forth as a hypothesis more than anything else, basing it on Hitler's essential nihilism and self-centeredness. You have to remember that the twenties in many ways were not good years for Germany. Where a lot of other nations spent this time modernising their industry and farms, Germany struggled with war debt, unstable government and years of deliberate hyperinflation. Then 1929 and the Wall Street disaster struck, leading to several more years of depression. Germany did catch up in the artificial boom Hitler created in the 30s but also spent immense effort on infrastructure, their new air force and general rearmament. They simply did not have the resources or the time to motorise everything. Incidentally, Hitler found a way to create compromises between labour and employers that helped create his boom. "I have found a solution to the current deadlock. All who are against it will be shot. Show of hands, please. Who here are in favour?" *a brief count later* "All in favour, I see. How gratifying. Solution adopted by acclamation." In general this is correct. Some few officers and experts knew exactly how ill-advised it was to poke the sleeping giant but they were overruled. For example, the famous Admiral Yamamoto spent years in the US and had a very high opinion of her energy, people and productivity. When asked his opinion of what would happen if Japan declared war on the US, he unhesitatingly declared, "We will be able to expand freely for six months, then we will be halted, and will never achieve new gains after that. And then we will lose all our gains one by one until we have nothing left." Yamamoto gave his very unpopular opinion and was then ordered to attack Pearl Harbour. He carried out his orders, convinced that they would destroy Japan's dreams of empire but determined to do everything he could to do buy as much time as possible. He died in 1944 when a plane he was riding in was shot down, having seen basically his entire prediction come true. Göring was like a stopped clock. At most right twice a day and entirely useless for anything except looking fancy. I personally feel that he should have been presented with the Victoria Cross for his efforts during the Blitz; he richly earned it. The Sherman was not a bad tank for the year it was made in but the US clung to it for too long. In 1942 it was rather decent. In 1943 it was more or less outdated against anything German. In 1944 it was a rolling death trap that basically only beat the Germans by drowning them in numbers and taking horrible casualties in the process. If the US had created and deployed the Pershing one year earlier it could have saved the lives of so many heroic US tankers by giving them decent tanks to fight in. Mind you, it did quite well against the Japanese who had spent next to no resources on developing tanks at all. With few exceptions all Japanese armour consisted of light tanks and the Shermans slaughtered them as effortlessly as the Panthers and the Tigers chewed up Shermans. It did not help the Japanese that they did not possess any real man portable antitank weaponry at all. The one such weapon they did have was basically a big explosive charge on a stick. It was operated by having a soldier run up to the tank with the stick, insert the charge at the end of the stick in some vulnerable spot and then set it off by pulling a string. For some reason I am not completely sure of, it was not a very popular weapon among Japanese infantrymen.

This is a question that has made more than one noted WW2 historian scratch their head. Why did Hitler declare war on the US then? There is no really clear explanation. Sebastian Haffner proposed one that at least matched Hitler's personality: he was so furious at the failure of the Russia offensive that he declared war on the US to punish Germany for failing to live up to the demands he had asked of it. It was at the same time he started to go from mere incarceration and persecution of Jews and other 'inferior races' to active extermination of them. He no longer thought he could win the war so he wanted to hurt his enemies as badly as he could before it ended. Still along the same lines, he ordered the destruction of Germany's heavy industry as the Allies started to cross the borders. He wanted Germany utterly ruined as punishment for its failure. It was at that point that the hitherto loyal Albert Speer defied Hitler by only destroying ten percent of Germany's factories, then showing him the pictures of the ruins and telling him he had had it done to all of the factories in Germany.

...badly timed. I had not read the news. I am sorry.

HERE COMETH THE DRAMATIC EXPOSITION! http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=2460

Really? What sort of ammunition are they loaded with? And what caliber are we talking about?

Like this?

It is an old trick when summing up a debate. List pros and cons separately, then weigh them up against another. Often the person doing the listing will choose to list the points on the side they are against first. That way the points on the side they agree with will be fresher in mind for the people doing the deciding. Note that this may be done subconsciously rather than out of calculation and also that it self-evidently cannot be relied on to work this way with the Will of Magic as it is not human and its mind might function radically different from that of a human being. (For one thing, it might have a very good memory. The aforementioned technique relies on short term memory glitching at least a little.) Also please note that the above example relies specifically on this being near the end of a debate. Given that to humans at least first impressions are important, it may not be a good idea to introduce a subject by listing all the opposing points first -- at least not for someone with a vested interest in a specific outcome who consciously or subconsciously wishes to shape the opinion of their audience.

HOLD IT!

Yeah, the execution of General Tukachevsky and all the most competent staff officers of the Red Army just a year before WWII erupted might not have been Stalin's smartest move ever. Particularly not since they had trained together with the Germans for a decade until Hitler broke off relations after coming to power. They were the ones who best understood the Wehrmacht and had the keenest grasp of how modern warfare was likely to work. Their loss meant that the Red Army had to relearn all these lessons in the costliest possible way once Operation Barbarossa began in May 1941.

Czarist Russia did not learn in time. It fell and was replaced twice, first by a burgeois revolution, then by the Leninists. The Empire of Austria and Hungary likewise collapsed and split into two. All that remained of what was once the mightiest power in central Europe was a rump around Vienna. Some lessons are so expensive that they do not leave much behind to benefit from what they taught.

Everybody were scared of the Canadians in every war. Canadians are just not known for going into war with the intent of serving the enemy tea and scones, for some reason.

I have noticed that the longer I live, the more the world seems full of young people.

I believe that Haig was one of the principal reasons the Germans referred to the British soldiers as 'lions led by donkeys.'

That explains what happened to the journalists sent to interview the favourites at the last Being-Eaten-By-A-Crocodile event. They didn't even place in the contest. They were disqualified for not being part of the scheduled events.

In the two first, possibly. In the third, I doubt it. Crocodiles are conservative creatures and not best pleased with sudden and unexplained changes in their diet and feeding times.

One of their generals was a true marvel. He had read about some of the historical exploits of the Austrian Army about a century before and decided that this was the way to wage war. Only there happened to be a small difference between the Austrian Army he read about and the one of 1914. The historical Austrian Army contained highly motivated and trained troops with an excellent supply network, allowing it to cross impressive distances and still remain combat ready upon arrival to the field of battle. The one of 1914 contained demoralised and poorly led and trained troops and there was a notable absence of excellent supply network. In fact, the only thing it had in common with the historical Austrian Army was its weaponry.1 So when the general marched his troops to meet the advancing Russians, they did manage to get two thirds of the way to the place he wanted to go at very nearly the speed he demanded of them. At that point they fell apart due to exhaustion, lack of supplies and a general state of near mutiny. This general literally marched his army into uselessness. Austria might have been knocked out of the war in 1914 if the Russians facing them had been decently led, trained, supplied and armed. Unhappily for Russia, their troops were in nearly as poor a state as the Austrians and their Minister of Logistics was an utterly corrupt imbecile who spent more than a third of his budget on bribes, favours for friends, magnificent feasts and his own bank account. He was noted for saying that all a good cavalryman needed to win was his trusty saber and that artillery was expensive, useless toys. 1This was not actually a good thing.

The Gods of Curling are pleased.