Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Military History Visualized" channel.

  1. Have you tried panzer corps, and panzer general?
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  2. 1939 - Crushing Poland so fast that France stop them. 1940 - Secure Swedish Iron shipments by capturing the Ice free harbour at Narvik where the Iron gets shipped to Germany. - May 1940, capture the Benelux countries and push into France without crossing the Maginot line. 1941 -Put Balkans under Axis control, and then securing Crete in order to deny allied bombers the ability to bomb Romanian oil fields. Troops are sent to North Africa to save the Italian Army there from collapsing. -June 1941, The largest military operation in history begin, when Hitler attack Soviet Russia. The objective is to destroy the Russian army as fast as possible, and no army in history have suffered so heavy losses as the Russians did in 1941. But the losses for the Germans were also enormous, even if they were nowhere near as bad as the Russians. -October 1941, Since Germany now controls huge areas of land and inflicted heavy losses on their enemy, it is decided to end the war in Russia with the capture of Moscow, and the Germans push forward under heavy losses but fail to capture their goals. 1942 Russia have gathered large numbers of men from all over Russia, and decides to throw in everything they got in a winteroffensive all along the Russian front. And the German army was exhausted by the losses from the previous year, many had also frozen to death by the winter, and much of their tanks, guns and planes couldn't be used in the cold... so when the Russians attacked, the German army wasn't strong enough to hold them back so they were pushed back 100km before the Russians could be stopped. The Russian troops had moved forward so hastenly that they didn't know where to go, and the units where spread out and couldn't support each other and couldn't get enough fuel, ammo and food forward to them when they had moved so deep into enemy lands so fast. So the Germans simply encircled and destroyed each russian unit one by one. And Stalins winteroffensive ended up as a worse disaster for the Russians than for the Germans. But the German retreat during the winter had also meant that troops had to abandon much of their heavy equipment so they could retreat fast enough without getting caugt by the Russians. So Germany had lost huge number of guns, tanks, trucks and transport planes. -may 1942, Hitler changes his plans. Moscow is no longer a target.. its too well defended and can't guarantee an end to the war. Hitler understands that this war will probably last for years and to win he needs recources. So he decides to take Southern Russia instead. And if he succedes he could solve Germanys problems of consuming more food and oil than they produce. And losing Southern Russia would also mean a heavy blow to Russia, even losing those resources in the shortrun would be devestating. So Hitler starts Operation Blue, with the best Divisions of his army and support them with his best air units. The heavy losses Germany had simply didn't allow for any attack into Russia on all fronts like in 1941. And Hitler captures Kiev, he takes Crimea, Kharkov and Rostov.. and he almost takes Stalingrad.......................... But then Russia makes a huge counterattack on the entire eastern front like in 1941. Outside Moscow a huge German army is under threat of getting encircled and crushed, and is fighting for their lives in the battle of Rzhev. And at the same time is an equally epic battle going on in Stalingrad, where the Russians succesfully have encirled the German 6th Army.. which is now fighting for their lives to get out of the ring the Russians have formed around them. But the Russian forces is too strong, and the German troops is starving, and lacking medicines, ammunition and fuel to fight effectivly. And finally gets forced to surrender. Which is a disaster for Germany, who needed that 6th Army more than ever to fight a war that has grown even larger when USA joined it. And the loss of it, created a big open hole in the German frontline at the south. And 1942 was not a good year for the navy either. And the war went to shit for japan as well after unrepairable losses at Midway and Guadacanal. The battle in Europe and North Africa in 1942 was supposed to be the year when the Axis powers should have used the time to deal a big punch to the Allies so they couldn't recover until the war in Russia was over. It was important to punch hard in 1942, because America wasn't still ready for war. Their industry hadn't geared up yet, and millions of new troops had to be equiped, trained and then sent to Europe.... and that would take a year before they could get strong enough to become a real threat to Germany. So what did Germany do on the western front in 1942? Nothing. They thought about capturing Malta with paratroopers, to stop allied planes and ships from harassing supply ships. But the operation was canceled at the last moment, because it was wrongly considered that the operation was unnessary when Rommels Afrika Korps had inflicted a devestating defeat on the allies with the capture of Tobruk.
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  3. I would also mention logistics, since thats a factor that is totally left out in games such as Age of Empires, Cossacks and the Total war series.
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  4. The lend-lease help was unimportantly small until 1943. It would play an important role in the late war, but in 1941 it wasn't important.
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  5. Panzer = tank kampf = combat wagen = wagon Its a bit the same in Swedish for those who play WOT ;) Stridsvagn = kampfwagen = combat wagon I have to say "wagon" is a strange word to call a tank even for me as a Swede, since I normally think of a wagon sitting behind a horse when I hear the word "wagon". I guess one could roughly say that the Germans use the word "wagen" to rougly mean "vehicle".
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  6. Conscription.
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  7. I use my google translate skills :P ober = over schturm = Storm bahn = train gruppen = group fuhrer = leader
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  8. Originally it was against USSR, but when America boycoted Germany in 1936 and started to give lend-lease to Hitlers enemies he tought that America could go to hell. But Hitler himself lacked a large Navy to take on the Americans, so he was happy to get Japan on his side. And some historians say that the push against Moscow in 1941 was a desperate attempt to make it seem like the war in Russia would be over soon, so Japan would feel comfy to start a war with America. From a Japanease perspective was the Attack on America only foolish and totally lacking rationality since Japan had 0% chance of winning a war against the American gigiant. The reasons were only feelings. Japan had free trade forced upon them in 1853 by western powers. They felt inferior back then to the westerners with superior weapns innovations and industry, and firstly bought into the racist rethoric that only the white man could have a modern state, and that made the Japanease depressed. But they were determined to try to get a modern army, so imported technologies and tried to finance all expenditures by industrialization. So they became one industrial power, not the greatest one in the global league, but the greatest one in the Asian league. So then they started to imitate western powers in other ways and started to colonize their neighbours such as Korea and they got involved in a conflict with China. But despite all great achievements and western admiration of Japans progress, the Asian race was still looked down upon, and America had restricted their immigration, and western countries refused to treat them like an equal as with western countries. So all this frustration, in combination with shinto warrior ideals and crazy imperalistic nationalism, plus militarism and Americas trade boycot of Japan triggered a Japanease reaction that became the attack on Pearl Harbour. The hope was to destroy the American navy completly, and then go south and take Indoneasia and grab some of the most resource rich areas in the world. And instead currency reserves for buying raw material imports being the limiting factor for the industrial production, the only limiting factor would become the amount of plundered resources the transport ships could carry.
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  9. "What can be further done diplomatically to end this conflict?" Diplomacy have been tried and Russia answered by poisoning peace negotiators, nuclear threats to the west and sending missiles away to kill the UN chief. So the best diplomatic solution is therefore to use heavier arguments when talking with the Russians. And with heavier arguments I mean tanks, heavy artillery, armored vehicles and such. That is the only kind of language that Kremlin seems to understand.
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  10. Panzer III was a shitty tank in 1939, with only a 37mm gun. When Panzer III entered service in 1935 it was intended to be the main tank of the German army, and it was planned that this machine - which was considered as powerful tank back then - should one day replace all weak pz1 and pzII tanks in service with the army. But the World War began before that dream could come true. And in 1939 only a few of these tanks had been produced. So the German army had to use old PzI and PzII tanks to crush the Poles instead. And in 1940 in the Battle of France, the same story was still true, since German tank production was still unimpressive. And the few panzer III tanks that fought, showed the German army that this tank was shit compared to French tanks, it had crappier firepower, armour and horsepower per tonne ratio. So the German army decided to give the tank a better 50mm gun and give it some extra armour so it would be able to better against a future enemy than what it had done against French tanks. And in Russia in 1941, the Panzer III was finally deployed in large numbers. But because of the lazyness of the German industry, which had choosen to not listen to Hitlers orders, most of the panzer III tanks still carried the old 37mm gun. And that gun was okay when fighting most Russian tanks such as T-26 and BT7. But against the best Russian tanks (KV-1 and T-34) with thick armour it was completly useless. And some historians even claim this to be the reason why Hitler lost the battle of Moscow in 1941. Panzer III got upgraded and did an okayish performance in 1942. But by 1943 it started to getting a bit outdated, and not being able to fight against allied tanks (ie M4 sherman and T34/76) on equal terms. But it wasn't enough panzer IV and Panther tanks available to the German army to take this old crappy machine out of service. So it had to continue it service within the German army, but now as a reconnaissance tank. And since the gun was useless against armour, it was instead given a 75mm gun to fire High-Explosives on soft targets. And this PanzerIIIN variant was also given some extra thick armour and was used for infantry support. So by 1943 the roles had changed. Panzer III had earlier been intentended to fight tanks, while Panzer IV should be attacking the infantry and bunkers with its short fat gun. But now the roles was the opposite. Panzer III had to fight the enemy foot solidiers while Panzer IV dealt with the enemy tanks. And in 1943 production of Panzer III had stopped, since the tank was outdated. Instead Germany used all panzer III chassis to build the Sturmgeshütze III. Because Stug had both better armour and firepower than panzer III (since it didn't have a turret), and it also had some of the best optics of any German tank. And it was also much cheaper to produce and days needed for production was also cut down, since Stug didn't need a turret like other tanks. All in all, Panzer III looks impressive on paper with its big gun and high numbers of tanks produced. But it was only after 1942 that the tank really got some substantial improvements. And it was not until 1941 that the tank was availale in large numbers. So I would call this tank a little bit of a failure. But its excellent traverse speed enabled the tank chassi to become the most succesful tank destroyer in history.
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  11. Interesting question that one can dig deeper into than what I can do now. I think that one thing should be kept in mind, and that is that things are different than what they are now. USA and Germany had mass unemployment and factories were closed down and unused. So there was not much problem to find men to work for the arments industry and dress up in uniforms. And empety factories could be converted into building tanks and guns. And the long period of poverty had made people used to a low standard of living, so people didn't complain much when the standard of living was low and the government took much of peoples salaries to pay for the military expansion. People simply no longer remembered what is what like to have a wage and living a life in comfort, so they didn't complain much when the civilian sector was drained of resources. But Germanys resources was scare and they didn't have enough steel to build everything they wanted, so their economy was overheating by the 1930s. But America didn't have much such problems. On the contrary, it even had to start cut down orders for war material as the war seemed won by late 1943 and many military units were demobilized even before the war ended. So America could have given much more than what they actully gave during the war. So even some heavy losses by some miraculus German victories could easily have been absorbed.
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  12. The are also good because you can also fast and easy get them to move so they will not get hit by enemy fire, after you have fired your shots and the enemy now know your position and wants to take revenge by firing big guns on the place where the fire came and send some Aircrafts to bomb that place. Moving a heavy gun without a motor can be difficult and you might not have time to get into safety before the enemy starts firing.
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  13. Merry christmas God Jul
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  14. Russia have lost nearly all its wars the last 150 years... The Crimean war, the russo-japanese war, World war 1, the Polish-Bolshevik war, it got humiliated in the winter war, it then got humiliated again in the continuation war, it suffered enormous humiliating defeats against nazi Germany was kept on life support from lend lease aid from USA and Britain. It then when on to lose the war in Afghanistan and lost the war in Chechenya. So yea russia sucks at fighting wars. And now russia have started an evil war of aggression again. And thousands of russian families have lost a family member in this stupid war. It might seem a bit cold hearted to say.. but it doesn't make it less true.. when I say that the russian people only got themselves to blame.
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  15. Its "LEND" not "Land" lease.
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  16. There are a few exceptions to this rule. There can be a few weapons that are objectively best. But often do they quickly get copied by other nations so they no longer seem unique. Or history passes.. and their best days are gone.
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  17. Russian optics were bad with much dust in theirs and the inprecision made their guns very unaccurate at long ranges. Having super optics on German tanks was perhaps not super useful. I mean really need a dumb opponent driving open terrain to let him fire at you from long ranges where you cannot fire back. I would try to use hills and buildings to sneak up on my enemy at close range so a fair fight could be had. And if my tank company was ambushed then I would just fire smoke grenades and retreat. And then would the enemy be unable to use his nice optics to destroy allied tanks from long ranges anymore. I would try to sneak up on the flanks on the German tanks and hit their side armor and deny them the chance of a long range fire fight where they can use their superior frontal armor, optics and powerful guns. The Germans in the late war also lacked everything supporting their tanks - they did not have enough recon to know where the enemy were, they did not have enough flak to protect their tanks from air attacks, they lacked artillery support and infantry support to deal with close range threats from enemy infantry, and engineers to deal with mines and make bridges... So even if the Germans for some reason would have been able to assemble lots of panther tanks they would still not be able to use them effectivly because the lack of good support organization - so as an allied tanker I could use this knowledge to my advantage to sneak up on them and outflank them. And if I was lazy, I could just call in air strikes and destroy the German tanks with bombers before they even had the chance to use their nice optics on any allied tank.
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  18. I think one can have a closed bottle filled with chemicals. Outside the bottle you can have some paper or cloth fixated with a tie, rubber band duct tape or whatever. To me this seems like a safer way of doing things than just put a paper directly into the hole of the bottle and then set the paper on fire and then throw it. I mean by not risking the fire coming into direct contact with the fuel one does not take the risk that it ignites. And the effectivness of throwing it on trucks is the same - the bottle gets crushed, its flamable liquid content gets spread out, and the fire outside the bottle sets all the liquid on fire.
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  19. It was good for storming enemy positions like rhinos
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  20. World war 2 was an industrial war done on scale never seen before in history. The mobilization never seen in another war. But the organized murder of civilians also took forms of extreme efficiency and industrial scale. The entire state machinery was brought into this... the railroads, technicians to build ovens, gas chambers, gas vans and ventilation, and electric fences, the secret police tracked up people, the military provided machine guns for the guard towers and land mines outside the camps. And the efficiency was brutal. Gas did cost nearly nothing to produce. The camps did not need much personnel. Millions of people died in just a year. Evidence was hidden by burning the bodies to ashes, and then using the ashes to grow trees. The killers did not have to see their victims, since the dirty work of taking care of dead bodies was done by slaves. And nearly no one successfully able to flee from those horrible places. The chance of survival was literary less than one in 250.000 in one of those. And even less if you were a child, elderly, a mother or disabled and unfit to work - because then you were killed right away. And almost all among those few who were lucky to flee were men who were working outside in the forest as a slave and cutting trees. Otherwise was there nearly no chance at all of surviving, except an armed uprising. To me the lesson of all this is how powerless the individual is against an evil government. If the Germans were able to do this with such a brutal efficiency in 1942, then imagine what a modern government would be able to do today... Back then it was almost impossible to flee from a factory of death. You had to worry about guards with machine guns, electric fences, barbed wire, land mines, And even if you manage to get out of the camp, then you would have to flee out in the woods starved and with a striped pyjamas and no food or cover against the cold. And meanwhile would trucks with guards and barking dogs come out and looking after you. And people would feel sympaties with you and give you food and a blanket if you were lucky. But they would be too afraid to hide you, because then their entire family could be killed if your enemy would found out. And today I imagine that chance of surviving a genocide is not 1 in 250.000.... but rather it is 0%. Today governments can track fleeing prisoners with drones flying around or satellites. Heat seeking sensors can see the heat of a human body hiding in a forest. Microphones, surveillance cameras and sensors can easily track people down. With RFID tags can you track down the movement of cattle on a radar. With coal cameras can you see through walls if someone is hiding on the other side.
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  21. Thankfully its not fighting on a modern battlefield, but against a 3rd world country opponent.
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  22. German extreme pacifism have never been logical. Now it is colliding with reality. And more realistic pragmatism and less hypocrisy is probably the result.
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  23. They got some tanks from Belarus that they probably have lost by now. They also took some tanks from India only to also lose them in the field. And now they use T-55 and T-62 tanks plundered from museums. So I look forward to them buying some North Korean tanks that are older than granpa. And after that they can use their T-34 togheter with their GAZ AA trucks.
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  24. 1. German car manufacturers was not used to producing cars at the same large scale as the Americans. And European economic culture have traditionally been very different from Americas. In the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s did America have much natural resources but little workers, while Europe had the opposite and had much workers but little natural resources. So Europe could waste much workhours to produce a thing but they could not afford to waste natural resources. And the problem was the opposite for the Americans, which were inventing the concept of massproduction by starting to produce homes of wood with standardized parts - which was method that saved much labour but wasted much material resources. So traditionally have wages and the standard of living been higher in America than in Europe until the last hundred years of history. 2. People didn't know that there was much oil there. Another problem with oil is that not all oil fields are equally large (there are over 80.000 oil fields in the world today but 60% of our oil comes from the 500 largest fields. And the Ghwar field in Saudiarabia produces more oil than all oil fields in the North Sea combined). So I wonder if the Libyan oil would be available in the large amounts needed for Hitlers ambitions. And opening a new oil field takes 12 years on average today. And then you also need oil refineries, infrastructure, transportation and such. So if you started gathering oil in 1933, then you would have to wait until 1945 before you could start getting any oil.
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  25. Russia have their terminator tanks
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  26. "Wasn't the whole ISU-152 and SU-152, inspired by the Stugs?" The reason why SU-152, SU100 and SU85 entered service was because they carried the only guns that could effectively fight Tiger tanks. All those tanks were late war designs, so of course could the Russians then use the many things they had learned from tank production such as sloped armor. And a tank without a turret meant a cheap vehicle that could carry a bigger gun. So Russia could thereby quickly get some new vehicles into service that could kill Tigers when all allied tanks were too weak to do that job. New Russian tanks were under development, but it would take many months before those tanks that could kill Tigers would enter service, such as the IS-2 and T-34/85. Russia could not afford to wait so long. They needed something here and now to deal with the Tiger threat. So they built those cheap Tank destroyers with big guns, and used them until the new generation of medium tanks and heavy tanks could take over. You could say that history repeated itself. Germany was in the same situation in late 1941, when all German tanks had no chance against KV-1 and T34 tanks. Germany was saved in 1941 because the enemy thankfully had too few of those "super tanks" to make any difference. But Germany rightfully feared that 1942 would be a horrible year, if Russia would start to produce those tanks in large numbers and get better crews and tactics when they used them. So a fast solution was needed. PzIVH and Tiger 1 was tanks that needed months of further development before they could go into service with the German army. So Germany needed something instantly that could kill Russian monsters. And the solution was to remove the turret from crappy weak tanks. That saved weight. And now you could mount a heavy gun instead. So you got a powerful tank killer with a big gun that was fast and cheap to build. But the problem was that they lacked both armor and a turret. Those vehicle needed to remain hidden for their survival. So their use in offensive warfare was a bit limited. Never the less would I say that Nashorn was probably one of the most successful tanks that Germany built. Stug was a stealthy vehicle with a gun of the size of light artillery. And its armor protection was moderate. ISU-152 was meant for two jobs - killing Tiger tanks and turning office buildings into rubble. And its armor was thick enough that it could do close combat fighting with enemy tanks and did not have to stay hidden like stug. Stug was a long range sniper tank. Only the Panther had better optics among all German tanks. While SU152 with its short fat gun had terrible precision of its gun at longer ranges. The slow speed of its shots and the high air resistance meant that winds easily could pull the projectile a bit of course and make it miss its target. "serve in the role of a Sturmpanzer or Jagdpanzer." I guess that is a fair description. "With both direct and indirect fire capabilities" I do not think they were good as SPGs. Their precision was bad and their reload time was awfully slow. But they were excellent at doing other things - like killing Tigers and blow up buildings in Berlin that was 4 floors tall with just a single shot. Their effect on fighting morale on both sides must also have been large. Even some King Tigers backed up by elite paratroopers would probably pissing their pants if they saw a few of these beasts turning up.
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  27.  @katrinapaton5283  IVF and IVH was surprisingly quick to enter service. It entered service in the summer of 1942. But then had the war on the eastern front already been raging for a year. And meanwhile did the Germans develop Marder tank destroyers as a stop gap measure. And in January in 1942 could the Germans not be sure that their upgraded Panzer IV tanks would work good with a better gun. Researching new tanks doesn't work like in computer games where you can know in before hand what you get by investing money into a project. You can instead get lots of delays and oftentimes do research projects fail completly, and many German projects ended that way - as you can see on all prototype tanks that exist in world of tanks. But the Germans were lucky this time. They could fit a big gun into the old panzer IV. The new tank became so succesful that it became the best tank in the world that summer. And the tank would remain the only tank that would serve throughout the entire war. It was built as a support tank to deal with infantry while Panzer III was supposed to do the job of fighting other tanks and do the main typical tank jobs on the battlefield. But with Panzer IVs succesful upgrade, and Panzer III getting too old and weak to be frontline tank - then the roles got reversed. And panzer IV became the workhorse for the German army throghout the war. But by 1944 it started to become obsolete. T34/85 (which was built on the old T34 chassi) had become more powerful than its old foe with the new upgraded variant. And also IS2 was built on the same hull as its predessesor KV1. And it too was a superior monster on the battlefield. So Panzer IV was good as a temporary solution for the Germans. But the tank begun to ageing at the end of the war.
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  28. It is ironic that he got away while the guy under his command - Alfred Jodl - got executed
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  29. Falkenhayn was good at the beginning of the war, but behaved like an idiot regarding Verdun. Swedish military history got something similiar. Carl Gustav Rehnskiöld was a brilliant Field Marshal scoring victory after victory against superior forces in the Great Northern war.. but at Poltava he acted like a fucking idiot.
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  30. Indeed. Arracourt and Korsun comes to mind.
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  31. Having the engine at the front could make it easier for the enemy to see the heat signature of your tank as you show your warm engine at the front as you move towards him. I also think it would be less fun to repair a tank in the frontline if you had to do it at the front side of the tank and not the back. I also think that adding the engine at the front will make the tank very heavy at the forward parts of the tank. And a front heavy tank could tip forwards and somersault and wreck both the tank and the crew if you make it too unbalanced and only put all weight at the front. And that means that you have to put more weight at the rear of the tank to counter-weight the heavy engine at the front. So you will have to put your turret in the rear for example. But is this an optimal layout? I don't know. There are both advantages and disadvantages of having the turret in the rear of a tank, just as there are pros and cons of putting the turret at the front at the tank or in the middle. Your tank does not have to be that long when you point your gun forward with a tank with the turret at the rear. rotating
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  32.  @Darilon12  I read it in a very old piece of "Arménytt" (the newspaper magazine of the Swedish army). In Sweden we never use feet as a measurement for anything. Here we only use meters instead. The magazine did compare flamethrowers from Nato with Soviet union. And most of the "best" western flamethrowers did not even have half that range.
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  33. Baron von Steubens drilling tactics and training came to have an impact on the American army. And Fredericks troops marching goose step became very popular among other armies and is still used in many parts of the world. For example did the Swedish army start to use the Prussian marching style during the 1760s when Sweden fought against Frederick in Northern Germany. Germanys offensive aggressive warfare would also be formed by the experiences Prussia had during the Seven years war. Frederick Army was strong enough to deal a hard local punch to any enemy, but it lacked the resources for a long war. So Frederick had to beat his enemies at one place, so he could move his men to another front.
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  34. Maybe they could have achieved more with their nice navy. But the army was simply not ready for this war, and their industry was even less so.
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  35. The allies focused their planning on D-day and very little was thought about the breakout. They had access to aerial photographs, to information about the terrain from the french resistance, and probably lots of British tourists, foreign workers and visitors and such could have told the allies about the terrain in forehand if the allies just had cared to ask for that information. I mean the allies had planned the D-day landings for years down to the damn little detail.. and still they missed to deal with this important topic. It would be an interesting topic for alternative history if the allies had failed with their breakout from Normandy. Would a over a million men and thousands of tanks and trucks just be lost to the Germans if the winter arrived and the allies fell short of supplies? I mean no one in the allied camp had planned for this operation to be this long failure, and the allies had not been succesful in capturing any real port except Cherbourg - which had been utterly destroyed by the Germans and would take weeks to bring back into service... and even so it would have been too little too late for the allies. The bad winter weather would have also prevented the allies from using air power. So they would basicly be stuck on a beach for months and having to rely on their mulberry harbours and hoping weather and wind didn't destroy them.
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  36. Diversity is a strength
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  37. ​ @qk-tb2df  "as the worlds oil reserves go down (if they actually do)" First you discover oil. Then you start building oil rigs, and 12-15 years later will the oil field be ready to be used. And then you pump oil. The oil field usally never run out of oil. The problem is rather that when you have pumped out half of the oil of the field, then it will become harder and harder to get oil out from the ground. The oil will be mixed with sand and will be thick and sticky and hard to get out from the ground, and you will need more and more energy to pump the oil from the ground. And then you need more and more energy to clean your impure oil from sand and other stuff before you can turn your oil into petrol, plastics, asphalt, and other petroleum products. So the oil will become too expensive and too energy consuming to pump up from the ground at some point. And then the oil field gets closed down even if there are oil left in the ground. I mean why use 100 barrels of oil to drive a diesel pump if you only pump up 50 barrels of oil from the ground? That would only be idiotic and unsubstainable. The problem is that we do not discover much new oil fields nowadays. And the few oil fields we find are tiny in size. And the quality of the oil we find is also crappy (ie Canadian tar sands) or it is oil which is not easy and cheap to get - like drilling for oil thousands of meters underneath the water outside the Brazilian coast. "the supply/demand of electric and other sources will become more and more appealing to markets" That might be true. But the laws of physics crush the laws of economics. Unless you of course believe in magic. "also keep in mind that the world population will eventually start to flatten out as more education is involved" I guess that is too little too late. We have already depleted much of the freshwater reserves. We have depleted fishstocks. We are using up oil reserves and phosphor mines that provides our agriculture with inputs that allows a highly productive agriculture. And the population are declining in places with smart people (ie Iran), while the population is increasing in places with dumbass retards (ie Pakistan). We are seeing a world with more religious fundamentalists and dumbass analphabets in Africa, while civilized westerners and east asians are getting fewer. The global population is already too large to be substained. And having a few billion more people in the near time will only overstretch the planet even more. Land will turn into deserts as we use up water and cut down trees and use up the top soil with our unsubstainable agriculture. Extinct animals are not coming back. Rainforrests will not come back even if we wait another 1000 years for it to heal. The fresh water reserves under arabia took a thousand years to fill and now most of it has been used up. The aral sea and dead sea will soon be nothing but desert. Global population will stabilize as you say. But it doesn't seem like it will be through the rational way of stupid people abstaining from having kids they cannot take care of. Rather the job has to be done by mass starvation. At this point are countries like India so fucking overpopulated that the next monstous disease, like the bubonic plague 2.0 would not be able to fix the problem even if it manage to kill an astonishing number like 500 million people. Even if that would happen there would still be a billion people left just in India alone. I wish that you were right however. I wish that everyone - even the idiots - would have a great standard of living. But that is never going to happen with a planet with 7 billion people. There are simply not enough resources on this planet to go around for everyone, so that we all can live the life of middle class Americans and have a family with 2 cars, one house, multiple computers, a tv, a fridge, a mixer, a lawn mover, a stereo, a washing machine and so on. And then afford to take a vacation to Spain, Florida, Hawaii or Thailand. "stop listening to retarded doomsayers and use your brain" Many doomsayers are wrong. But some of them make good arguments for not believing in a bright future. All I do is to simply just look at the facts. And if someone presents a convincing argument - then I am prepared to change my opinion. In this case do I really wish that I was wrong, because I don't like the idea that the world is running out of oil, that we are depleting resources and that millions of people will die because of it. And that human civilization has reached its peak, and that every future generation will become poorer than us when energy becomes scarce.
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  38. The Soviets also had a gigantic food shortage in 1942, so they never gave the German POWs the food they were promised so many of them died. But then did lend lease arrive and USSR got all food they needed plus much more, so they could afford the luxury of keeping many troops alive. That is atleast the impression that I have got. But war crimes of the red army happened the entire war. A Swedish soldier in SS Division Wiking spoke in television about the fighting in the Baltics in 1944. He was driving his panzer II and heard a man screaming from a farm, and when he walked inside he found a German SS soldier who had been captured by the Russians. And he was left bloody and tortured and was hanging crucified upside down with all his intestines hanging out of his body. So he took this crying man and put him on top of his tank and drove him to a military hospital. So the Russians could be very cruel. Especially under the influence of vodka. And it was not just German civlians who got murdered and raped. The also raped polish women. They even raped jewish women from liberated camps. And they plundered and stole wherever they went. Homes in FInland were left empty and many Russian soldiers came from such a poor background that they didn't even know what a toilet was, so they carved out a hole in a the floor on finnish homes and used them for taking a shit in instead.
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  39. If Hitler only had listened to his Generals and don't touched the General staff then Germany would have won the war. First world war tactics with frontal assaults was a winning concept. And had only listened to the old guard officers then he wouldn't have wasted time on building panzer divisions. Infantry are the crown of all weapons.
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  40. Superior to the museum piece equipment that the Russian military use
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  41. Brummbär, sturmtiger and such were mostly used for blowing up buildings in city fighting. Their huge short fat gun were excellent at delievering a big heavy explosion, and their armour were super-thick so they could take much fire in the fighting inside cities. And having a short gun barrel might not being a bad thing when you try to move a tank around in the narrow streets in a city. But these machines were bad for everything else. Their heavy armour made then slow. Their big guns made them slow to reload. Their short gun barrel made their shots flying out from the gun barrel at a slow speed which gave their shots bad precision at longer ranges, and it made it more difficult to hit moving targets at longer ranges as they could just evade the shots. And when you fight enemy tanks you also want fast flying shots so you can punch through the enemy armour and make an explosion inside the enemy tank and knock it out. Leaving a firecracker on top of a thick armour plate will not cause much damage, and the same thing goes with a high explosive round hitting a heavily thick armoured tank - it would simply be more effective to fire a fast moving projectile of a hard material that could punch through the armour and then explode inside the tank instead. The Russians would also like to use big tanks for city fighting. ISU152 was a monster with thick frontal armour and its massive gun was able to take down a multiple floor building with just 1 shot. And likewise was IS-2 and its massive gun also useful in city fighting. Bombarding buildings with a 37mm armour piercing round will not be effective to take out a machine gun nest. But if you fire a 105mm high explosive round into the room then you will silence it.
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  42. German politicians are full of sh*t. Germany now says it will soon be independent of Russian energy. It's taken a year, while Merkel had 16 years and said it was impossible! As welcome as all these moves are to finally stand up to Russia, they expose the appeasement of previous admins.
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  43.  @MilitaryHistoryVisualized  T-34/85 was pretty large compared to how I imagined it after hearing people on tv and on the internet saying how crampy it was. Likewise was Hetzer a lot bigger than I imagined after seeing Chieftains video about it. I imagine 4 persons could actually fit very well into that tank now - altough I haven't seen the inside of any of those tanks. Sherman firefly is tall like a tower - and with a tank commander looking out from the turret you would probably have your head head like 3.5 meters above the ground. Leopard1 was just about the same size as I imagined it to be, but the gun still looks large and menacing despite its old age.
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  44. Building 50 and 70 tonnes tanks demand more specialist vehicles and strain the logistical system to an unnecessarily large degree. It would take 3 Famo-trucks just to be able to pull a single Tiger to a repairshop after it had broken down - and all this timestaking work had to be done in wartime condions where the Wehrmacht didn't have many transport trucks to spare to begin with, and even if some would be available it would still not be an easy job to slowly pull away a heavy tank while the enemy is firing in your direction. Furthermore will you need new military bridges, since neighter the standard 20 tonnes or 40 tonnes bridges would be able to carry those machines. Those heavy tanks will furthermore be more tactically inflexible since they cannot cross normal bridges or most military bridges... and they are also too slow to keep up with the fast changes of the frontline due to their slow speed. And when you produce something in larger numbers, then it makes more sense to start using specialized tools that makes massproduction easier. And massproduction in turn makes unit-cost to fall, so that a tank would take less and less manhours to build. A Tiger took 200.000 manhours to build while a new Sherman came out of Detroit every 45 minutes. Producing things in small numbers simply makes it uneconomical and not very practical to switch over to more division of labour and more effiecent production methods. Building heavy tanks also demands heavy cranes to carry all extra heavy machinery so I guess a car plant would need much modifications before production could be switched towards wartime production of tanks. The Germans overengineered their tanks, and this is a lesson we can learn from the Russians. The Russians never overengineered their tanks. If the average lifespan of a tank was just 6 months, then it would pointless to build it with components that last much more longer than that. So the Russians could save both expensive and rare building material as well as manhours by not wasting any extra efforts in building a tank that probably just would be destroyed within a certain point of time. But the Germans never did that. They built their tanks with quality that could make them last for decades in peacetime, despite they would likely be destroyed within some month or year. So the Germans simply wasted time and resources, and also got less tanks produced. And when it comes to the fighting I say that quantatity has a quality of its own. Germany could have relied more upon the StuGIII and a light weight version of the Panther and probably been doing better than what they did with their over-engineered tanks that either killed themselves in engine fires or got blown up by their own crews because they were too heavy to drag to a repairshop. And those special scenarios with super tigers rarely happen. Firstly because only 1.300 were built compared to 100.000 Shermans and T-34's.. and secondly because only a few of them was in service, and half of the German tankforce was undergoing maintance because they were over-engineered. And thirdly, the allies were not stupid enough to try to make long distance fire duel at 2000 metres most of the time, but rather tried to let air power and battleship guns kill the German tanks, or make close range flanking attacks where they could make masskillings of the German cats - as they did at Arracourt and Korsun. And here we come to the final point. The German cats was too expensable to afford to lose one of them. But a Sherman, a T-34, or a StuG could be lost and it wouldn't be much of a big deal. A weapon system that is "too-big-to-fail" is not every useful when it comes to war, if a carrier just sits in the harbour all the time that a war lasts because it would be too disastrous to risk losing it, then what use does it have? And if a Tiger tank is too dear to being risked of losing, then how useful is it? To me it seems like Germany should have tried building a good 30 tonnes medium tank instead. It wouldn't have won the war, but it would perhaps allowed the evil empire to last a few more months. And the German heavy tanks would have been outclassed by new allied medium tanks pretty soon anways, as the Centurion and T-44 was entering into production. And then the Tiger and Panther would have been as outdated as the old panzerIV was. So new tanks would be needed to be developed anyways if Germany should have kept its upper hand in the technological race.
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  45. Other countries preserves their traditions despite their anti-democratic roots. "Royal" airforce does not really sound democraticly and nice as the name "people's liberation army" of the democratic people's republic of China. But I guess that superficial attributes are more important than what things really are. Sweden continues the tradition of parading regiments in front of the Royal palace - a tradition with roots from 1523, when the Swedish King wanted protection from his life guard regiments of his life and to protect his undemocratic royalistic rule. Personally, I think that a country should honour its past. Atleast when it comes to the symbols of the state - such as coins, military traditions and such. And I also think it is more honest to name a government department "the ministroy of war" instead of naming into som lying Orwellian bullshit like warmongering neoliberal politicians do today when they call it the "ministry of defence" while they go to war against country after country... Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria... I don't care about superficial garbage like politically correct idiots. I only care if things are opressive in the real world - which Iron crosses, palace guards, royal names on regiments, old royalist military flags are not. And things that sound nice, doesn't have to be nice things - as DPRK and DDR shows.
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  46. So they lost the war was because they replaced panzer II ?
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  47. The makers of this operation are indeed "special". Seems like this operation was planned inside an "special education" military school.
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  48. The orc black sea fleet is hiding on the eastern coast of the black sea. Nazi russia is importing ammunition from North Korea. So pathethic putler is getting nowhere. With this speed of advance will it take over 100 years before all of Ukraine has been taken by him. But it will not be taken by him. He will be dead by then.
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  49. Stole them from Belgium?
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  50.  @historyandhorseplaying7374  Well all tanks have their drawbacks. If this tank is so heavy, fuel consuming, difficult to maintain, cannot drive over bridges etc etc... then do USA use this tank today if it is so worthless? It does not make any sense.
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