Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "TIKhistory"
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@ImperialSenpai The Holy Roman Empire was a relic by then. It didn't really function at all the way it did in the Middle Ages after 1648. There was a thing called the Thirty Years' War, perhaps you should read about it.
I just recently read a book about the Napoleonic Wars which concentrated on the political arena and argued that the Napoleonic Wars were less like the revolutionary wars and more like 18th century wars in terms of great power goals, ambitions, and tradeoffs. The carving up of the former HRE, as with the Ottoman Empire, took several centuries not because the petty states being carved up had any meaningful say in the process, but because each great power very carefully balanced the costs and benefits of any territorial change against the costs and benefits to its rivals.
Also, Napoleon never called himself the HRE, he was styled Emperor of the French, which was a novel institution that claimed no continuity with the Roman Empire.
Austria still exists because the Allies won WW2 and didn't want Germany getting any territory it hadn't had in 1918. Czechia was never German. Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, all the other old German states do not exist as sovereign states as they were in 1700, they are constituent parts of Germany the same way New York and Virginia are merely constituent parts of the US. In both cases its a federal union but supreme power resides at the federal level.
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That's something I think TIK, whose analysis is otherwise excellent, consistently fails to recognize. For Britain, for France, even for Stalin, war and foreign policy were inextricably tied to rational, if not always ethical, political goals. For the German generals and many other Germans, that was true as well. But Nazism was a romantic movement, one that placed itself in diametric opposition to Enlightenment rationalism - that's the reason for all those torchlit rallies and book-burnings and blood banners and all the SS occult weirdness. For them, while rational goals still mattered, ultimately war was a spiritual exercise, a way to both attain and demonstrate the dominance of the Aryan race, to purify the blood and purge the nation of weakness. You cannot understand Hitler by analyzing him solely as a rational actor, because the heart of his ideology was a rejection of pure rationality.
And Hitler had another motive as well: like many Germans but even more so, he was extremely bitter about the defeat in WW1 which he could never accept as a legitimate loss of the war by Germany. Hitler had to have a rematch against Britain and France in order to prove that Germany would have won the first time but for the "stab in the back" by Jews and communists. No matter how well off Germany might be materially after the new conflict, if it didn't accomplish that - humiliate the Western Allies and show the spiritual and military superiority of Germany beyond all doubt - it would not satisfy him personally.
Many of his generals understood that in 1938 and that was why they saw him as a dangerous madman who would bring ruin on Germany. And Churchill understood it as well.
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@misarthim6538 " In terms of air combat, that means that it could pretty much choose when to fight and thus only fight under favorable conditions." Only if the fight started low and slow. If not, F4Fs and P40s could always dive away from the fight while Zeros, which would become uncontrollable and even shed wings at speeds the American planes could easily tolerate, could not. It also had insufficient armament - the 20mms had atrocious ballistics and very little ammo, and the 7.7mms might as well have been peashooters against the tough American planes - and could take far less damage. And in a head-on, which was relatively easy to achieve with the right wingman tactics, the American plane had a huge advantage because of the advantages in toughness and firepower.
Climb rate is nice to have, particularly for bomber interception, but climbing into a fight would get you killed even in a better plane, and climbing couldn't save you from an opponent who started with a big advantage in energy and position. Climb rate mostly helped in an even engagement between similar small numbers of planes starting at a similar speed and altitude, and while often that's the expectation in games, in the real war the Americans quickly learned not to even think about fighting like that.
The Japanese pilots, even more so in the AAF, placed way too much stock on maneuverability, particularly tight turns at low speed, seeing air to air combat as a dogfight with victory going to the first plane to get guns on target. The planes they ended up in reflected that. The Americans, like the Germans, quickly learned to treat fighters as ambush hunters, not knife fighters, scoring kills when they had an initial advantage and refusing combat when they didn't, and the planes they flew reflected that.
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@misarthim6538 "Zero's could choose whether they'll initiate fight or not because they were faster in level flight and climbed better."
Again, only if they start on an equal or better E basis. If the Wildcats or Warhawks started with a significant altitude advantage, the Zeros were trapped because the American planes were faster diving than the Zeros were either diving or in level flight. If the Zeros started with a significant altitude advantage, the American planes could still dive away unless they were already on the deck. And...
"Zeros could fly circles around Wildcats without Wildcats being able to do anything about it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thach_Weave Zero pilots never learned any way to counter this tactic. Part of its effectiveness was because a Wildcat could always turn into an attack by a Zero, while a Zero didn't dare turn into an attack by a Wildcat because the much sturdier Wildcat would win the resulting head-on nine times out of ten.
Anyway the numbers just don't bear your assertions out. Zeros racked up impressive scores for the first six months or so because the inexperienced American (and British, Commonwealth, and Dutch) pilots didn't know how to fight them properly. Once the gap in pilot skill and experience closed, Wildcats and P-40s could and did engage Zeros on at least an even basis. And of course once P-38s, P-47s, F6Fs, and F4Us, all significantly faster than Zeros, started appearing int he second year of the war the Zero was obsolete and doomed.
"Yes they could run away, but that's not really an option if you protect say squadron of SBDs."
Which is why American fighter pilots learned to cover the bombers from above so they could dive down and break up incoming attacks rather than flying close escort where they'd get bounced by intercepting enemy fighters.
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@bakters The US wasn't getting large numbers of replacement pilots either in autumn, 1942. But they understood that fewer pilots who were not half-dead from exhaustion, stress, and tropical diseases was better than more pilots who were at that point of collapse. Sick, exhausted, demoralized pilots were more of a liability than an asset. The Japanese simply expected their pilots to buck up and take it, and that was a terrible idea no matter how good the pilots were or how urgently they were needed.
Winning at Midway wouldn't have changed much except the temporary balance of carrier decks. Relatively few Japanese pilots went down with the carriers at Midway, most of their aircrew losses (a bit over 100 men) were to US AA fire and would have happened even if they'd won. Their pilot losses in the Santa Cruz battle, which was a tactical victory for the Japanese, were actually more severe than at Midway, despite fewer carriers being involved and none lost. Santa Cruz is a typical story: the Japanese inflicted more damage on the US fleet, but lost 99 aircraft to the US' 81,and, much more important, 148 pilots and other aircrew to 26 for the US. American aircrew were highly likely to survive the loss of their planes while Japanese aircrew were not.
The really bad human loss at Midway was the hundreds of highly skilled mechanics, armorers, and other technicians who were in the carrier hangars when they were turned into infernos. Even the engineering spaces of the doomed carriers had a better survival rate than the hangar decks.
But what killed the pilot corps of the IJNAF was the long, relentless slog of the Solomons campaign as a whole.
A major factor was the difference in recovery rates for downed aircrew, which was the result of several factors but had the united theme that the Japanese simply didn't prioritize this while the US did. This is where having a feudal death cult mentality in a modern technological war gets you. The US didn't need to throw hordes of untrained rookies at the Japanese, not because they were getting large numbers of replacement pilots, but because their veteran pilots were surviving to fight another day regardless of the outcome of individual battles while the Japanese veterans were dying gloriously for the Emperor.
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@bakters Armor was "fragmentary" because it is heavy, weight is a huge consideration for aircraft, and a lot of thought was put into where it was most needed and where it could be dispensed with.
The TBD wasn't a deathtrap because of any particular design feature or philosophy, it was a deathtrap because it was terribly obsolete by 1942. Both pilots and planners were aware of that and a much better replacement was in the pipeline, it just hadn't been built in sufficient numbers to replace the TBDs at Midway. You go to war with the weapons you have. By contrast, the Zero (and the Betty it was designed to escort) was a deathtrap because of a design philosophy: putting all priority into speed, range, and maneuverability at the expense of survivability. It was not obsolete and waiting replacement in 1942, it was the newest and best design the Japanese had for a naval fighter until 1944.
Many planes, including the F4U-1A and the Merlin-powered P-51s, had some self-sealing tanks and some that weren't. The idea was to use the fuel in the non-self-sealing tanks before reaching the combat area (and in the case of the F4U, jettison any remaining fuel in them and purge them with CO2 before commencing combat, I'm not sure if the Seafire had this feature or not). The Japanese did eventually realize the folly of trying to fight with non-self-sealing tanks full of fuel and added self-sealing tanks (as well as pilot armor) to many planes including the later Zero variants. But again, the early Zeros lacking any self-sealing tanks was not a matter of their not being available, it was a deliberate design choice, and, as it turned out, a very bad one. They felt range was more important, and their pilots paid the price.
(Also, I'm in this discussion with several people and I don't remember whether it was you or one of them who pointed out that many of these defects were inevitable due to the limitations of Japanese engine technology, which may deflect some blame from the designers, but saying the Zero suffered from being underpowered for a 1942 fighter, which it was, kind of negates the idea that it was technologically superior. it just means its technological inferiority had a different cause. Having 30% more engine power, as the F4F-3 and P-40E both did, was a form of technological superiority.)
You asked for sources, I gave some to you. I can't read them for you. Let's put the shoe on the other foot: cite me a source to support your claim that Japanese aircrew losses were not much worse than American from mid-1942 to the end of 1943.
As for feudal death cults, if you have any account of any Allied pilot declining to wear a parachute because bailing out and possibly being captured was dishonorable, I'd love to hear it. Japanese pilots having that attitude has been documented in too many sources to even begin to list them. It's been ages since I read Suburo Sakai's book, and I don't have it with me, but I'm pretty sure he mentions it.
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