Star Wars Quirks

It my favorite series on youtube so far. I really hope they do a WW2 series.

@frimmel:

@Jermofoot:

Maybe if Lee and the Confederates had AK-47s…

That one was good. I hear the rest got really off the rails.

:|

We’ve had that discussion here haven’t we?

We have.  I couldn’t search it at first, but tried again and found this thread:

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=14501.0

I never read past the first one, but I did take a stab at the Aliens in WW2 one.

@seththenewb:

Very interesting stuff there Mark. Although Dyer’s credentials lend his thoughts a lot more weight that mine do, I have to disagree with his analysis of what the threshold for a war to be dubbed a ‘world war’. I guess my thinking is that his criteria (based on this short narrative) seems to pretty Euro-Centric in account the 30 year’s war and the Spanish Succession to be a world war. I could be wrong, but I thought both of those wars were pretty much just fought between European powers and confined, for the most part, to Europe itself. 
I know I’m pretty guilty of knowing a LOT more about Western civilization and history than I do about Eastern history/civilization. I’m not trying to dig on him or his work, I just figure that you could apply the label of ‘major power’ to at least the Incan, Aztec, and Chinese empires. I guess it depends on how you define major power though.
[…]
I do however agree that the last four on his list qualify as world wars and I like his theory on treaties reflecting the true balance of power. I never really thought of the time periods between wars in that light before and on the surface it seems to make a lot of sense and in my mind goes a long way towards explaining the cycle of war and peace in Europe.

You make a good point about Dyer’s list being Eurocentric, which is something that hadn’t occurred to me (since I don’t have much familiarity with wars outside the western world).  And I don’t know enough about the first three wars on the list to make an informed judgment about how well they fit the all-the-major-powers-of-the-time criterion.

In his discussion of the fifty-year cycle, Dyer speculates that this amount of time is about how long it takes for the difference between the fixed world power structure defined by major peace treaties and the constantly-evolving actual power structure on the ground to become sufficiently large that it reaches the breaking point.  Dyer’s book (based on a TV series of the same name) was published two years before Paul Kennedy’s 1987 book “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000,” but the argument Dyer makes has some similarity to Kennedy’s.

Kennedy argues that, even when a particular country retains the same level of absolute strength, it may still find itself in a position of decline relative to other countries whose strength happens to be growing.  He identifies the source of that strength as the relationship between economic and military power in any given country, saying that they reinforce each other: economic power (gross national product and foreign trade ) enables you to boost your military power (by buying weapons and enlarging your military forces), and military power returns the favour by helping to protect your economic interests from foreign threats.  A classic example is the synergistic relationship that existed between the Royal Navy and the British merchant marine in the 19th century.  An example closer to home (here on this discussion board) is the fact that, in A&A, income buys units, units fight battles, battles win territories, and territories generate income.

Kennedy states, however, that economic and military strength must be kept properly balanced for the equation to work.  He points to the way in which history’s great powers have tended to get caught in the following trap: when their power declines in either relative or absolute terms, they try to maintain their standing by devoting more and more of their economic resources to the expansion of their military strength, thus upsetting the balance of the equation.  His book came out before the USSR imploded, but as I recall one of the factors which contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union was that it bankrupted itself through excessive military spending, along the lines of Kennedy’s theory.

@Gargantua:

I’m seeing no Geneva convention applying on either side, and perhaps the release of chemical/biological weapons.

It really wouldn’t surprise me.

I’d wager on ‘bitter’ as well. A killing prisoners and not even marginal attempts to limit collateral damage to civilians, scorched earth, Soviets-Nazis kind of ‘bitter.’

Yes its on my top 5 movie list post!

This was broadcast on Soviet television in the late 70’s and the effort spared no expense for extras because they used actual Soviet soldiers and the budget was basically unlimited. The portrayal all the Germans and Soviets is extremely good. The sets are very realistic and the battles consist of perhaps 10,000 or more soldiers, plus hundreds of tanks ( the germans are mostly tiger 1’s and some decent mockups of elephant and panther).

all the battlefield combat scenes are panoramic which is IMO the only way to film a war movie. You can literally see the 10,000 soldiers.

5 movies were presented

Stalingrad ( 2 parts)
Kursk
Operation Bagration
Assault of Berlin

however no english subtitles of this exist. My girlfriend has to translate for me ( shes from Odessa). You wont find any copies of this with english either. I have tried for many years to do this but to no avail. I own all these movies and they are amoung my favorite of all time.

It will cost you at least 100 bucks for the set of movies, unless you rent them from a russian video store and make copies.

Yes i did a long search as well when i was debating that point and could not find anything about the second war-just 1991. He may not have much of an air force to move anyway at that time.

@cystic:

Hey!! i’m biased!!
especially to those offering me candy . . . .

A spark of wisdom!
Will he put it to use?

I dare anyone to guess where the next “hit” is going to be. Mostly because if you turn out to be right, there will be several armor-clad people knocking down your door a few minutes later asking you (with the aid of a large rubber hose) how you knew where the attack would come. Call me crazy, but THAT would make me laugh.