Unless you’re under arms, that is.
Of course, there is the saluting trap (as practiced by Spike Milligan and his fellow conscripts).
Once my Warrant Officer must have gone to a different place to eat lunch than he usually did. After lunch, he griped about having to salute his arm off on his way back (we were at a training center and there were very many enlisted students). I found the whole base sort of amusing when Warrant and Commissioned officers would cross the street to the other sidewalk to avoid being saluted.
We totally did that! 
This simply isn’t true. The greatest numerical advantage the Russians had on the front was 1.6:1. Almost everything you know about the eastern front is a myth.
In the Army there are a few specific times you salute indoors. One is when reporting to the commanding officer. That is not the same as when someone says, “Hey the CO wants to ask you something.” Its usually preceeded by the First Sergeant coming up to up with flames coming out of his eye sockets and thunder clouds over his head saying, “Report to the CO. Now.” (or when new to a unit and meeting the commander for the first time) Its a formal event. You approach the door, knock three times while standing at attention then enter when told. Two steps in front of the desk you stop, render a salute, and state “Private Loach reporting as ordered sir.” As you hold the salute the CO will shuffle his papers and ignore you for a while then return the salute.
I’ve been both active duty (Aviation) and National Guard (Armor, Engineer). Sometimes we would hold formations inside the hanger or on the drill floor and basically pretend its outside. Covers and saluting at the appropriate times.
The only other time I know of when you would salute indoors was when reporting for pay. In the olden days there would be a pay officer on pay day. He would have a lock box full of cash and an armed guard. The troops would line up, step up to the pay officer, render a salute and say, “Private Loach reporting for pay.” The pay officer being busy with the cash and paperwork was not obligated to return the salute. The pay officer would hand over the pay and the private would move out to go piss away his money. I’m old enough to have gone through this ritual. Direct deposit was already manditory but this relic remained. You could still get cash from the pay officer instead of going to the bank.
Was there a brief period in the 1970s when hair length was relaxed a little? My dad was in the Army in the 1970s, and in some of his old photos he and his buddies have rather shaggy hair over the ears. It is certainly not extremely long, but its certainly a huge difference from the very short hair that prevails in the military today.
It is very silly to see MASH and other films and shows where characters have longer 70s hair in the 1950s. That also happens with Laverne and Shirley and Happy Days at times.
Caveat: not a military person, just an armchair reader.
One of my favorite lines in movies occurs when the bad guy discovers one of his henchmen dead in the galley, impaled by a cooking knife to a cutting board.
“No cook did that,” he proclaims.
Waves of fires arrows arcing like tracers??? It’s a neat visual, but you don’t shoot fire arrows at people to hurt them – real arrows work great. Fire arrows are for specific kinds of attacks on structures.
That’s what jumps out at you? How about the way the SEALs keep turning their backs to doors and windows, through which a bad guy rushes, so that they have to spin and shoot him, then they go into the next room and stand facing each other – their backs to the entrances again – and it happens AGAIN? Don’t they have any ability to learn, let alone training?
Also, as each mission starts, long before reaching their objective, often as soon as they hit the beach, someone notes that they’re “out of time!!!” We just watched them PLAN these missions. If your mission planning repeatedly results in you running out of time before even reaching your objective, you’re Doing It Wrong™.
Concur. There were several reasons for the German defeat. In many cases, even the much-maligned Soviet equipment was superior to the German equivalent. While the Germans did fight at a numerical disadvantage, the “we were overrun by endless numbers” claim exaggerates that, and reeks of a loser’s excuse.
And the bar-none dumbest military film of all time, Terence Malick’s epic attempt to thumb his nose at the way humans interact with the physical world: The Thin Red Line.
Notably, the sonar screens showed what looked (to me, anyway) like a real passive waterfall display instead of Crimson Tide’s color-coded WW2 radar.
I think the scene that took me the most out of the movie though was when a helo drops a torpedo on the October to let the Russians believe it got sunk, then James Earl Jones pushes the torp’s self-destruct button from aboard the Perry. Yeaaaah, it don’t really work that way, skipper :).
As for my own example: Enemy At The Gates. The opening scenes with the poor dumb freezing Russian conscripts being handed half a rifle each, launching a frontal human wave attack into a meat grinder then getting gleefully machine gunned by their own commissars… Jesus, but that was propaganda written mighty large.
Crew cuts, flat tops, and high & tights (unless you were a Marine) were out of style in the 70’s, but hair covering one’s ears never was permitted. When Personnel Inspections were by a posted schedule, one could press their luck until the day before the PI when the line waiting to get a chair at the base barbershop went out the door. They always wanted to see some skin around where your ears joined your head.
After Stalingrad, the Soviet numerical advantage got bigger and bigger.
It was about 2:1 at Kursk, almost 3:1 during Operation Bagration, 4:1 in the Vistula-Oder offensive, 2:1 in the East Prussia Offensive, and roughly 3:1 in the Battle for Berlin.
This is from the Wikipedia articles on each of those battles- something tells me they’re not really propagating too much myth.
I was talking about numerical advantage along the entire front. If the Soviets were able to achieve local superiority for specific battles, then that’s just good fighting. It makes no sense to criticize the Soviets for creating an advantage for an offensive they were on, and in fact they were quite well at hiding their forces and keeping the Germans spread out and not sure where to concentrate their defenses.
Russia’s prewar population was less than twice that of Germany, and they lost most of their regular army in the opening months of Barbarossa. If the Germans racked up the mythical 15:1 kill ratios against Russian attacks, how does the math possibly work?
People fetishize the German military in WW2 and there was a cold war desire to play down the Russians, to dehumanize them and imply that they aren’t really an effective military or a threat. So you get the idea that the Germans were supermen mowing down dozens of times their numbers of Russians over and over again and yet still succumbing to the horde. Where are all these soldiers coming from?
The reality is that German warfighting capability - both in terms of quality of men, quality of equipment, logistics, leadership, and tactics - the whole deal - declined significantly during the war, whereas Russia’s started very poorly and became quite dramatically better. Early 1943 is roughly where those capabilities met and from there onwards the Russians were simply the better fighting force, not just the most numerous.
Plus, the Soviets had Georgy Zhukov.
Where else were they fighting? Even at the Battle of Budapest, it was roughly 2:1 in the Soviets’ favor, so at roughly the same time, they had huge numerical advantages in both the north and south.
I’m not saying the Soviets didn’t get better at fighting- they obviously did. But that, combined with huge overwhelming numbers is what spelled the end for Germany.
It’s the same thing on the Western Front- early on, man-for-man, the Germans were better soldiers and were better led. As the war went on, the US forces in particular got a lot better, just like the Soviets did.
It wasn’t the brilliance of the Allied leadership that won the war, it was the fact that we could put 3-4 guys in the field for every one of theirs and feed him, equip him and keep him in bullets. Same thing goes for tanks and airplanes, except on an even larger scale.
Gentlemen please, no fighting in the war room.
Exactly where is a 15:1 kill ratio claimed?
Germany’s 1939 population within 1937 borders was 59.7 million. With Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia added, it was 69.5 million. The USSR’s 1940 population was 191.7 million.
Total Axis dead on the Eastern Front were 5.178 million plus. Total Red Army dead were 10.651 million. KIA/MIA for each side were 4.428 million and 6.927204 million, respectively. The figures for the USSR do not include partisan KIA/MIA.
Numbers of POWs were 5.45 million for the Axis, 5.28 million for the Soviets.
German troop strength on the Eastern Front was highest at the start of Operation Barbarossa at 2.976 million (out of 4.3068 million Axis personnel). Red Army strength peaked at 6.724 million in July 1943 with a potential reserve of ~700,000 troops in the Far East. By April 1945, the ratio was 6.41 million to 1.96 million in favor of the USSR.
Continually fielding an army of over 6 million soldiers for four years while suffering casualties in the neighborhood of 15 million speaks of a huge numerical advantage. At the same time, the Germans were struggling desperately to keep their forces at the 2 to 3 million mark.
Siberia.
Due to exhaustion, attrition, abbreviated training regimes, the Allied strategic bombing campaign, shortages of fuel, misguided production priorities, Hitler’s increased micromanagement and personal interference, and other factors.
Debatable on both counts.
And yes, so-called Punishment Batallions composed of malingerers, political unreliables, ODCs, and other low-lifes were often used to clear minefields and spearhead attacks. Army noncoms and NKVD troops were required to shoot anyone trying to retreat, and were known to resort to decimation to ensure discipline.
Incompetent does not imply innocuous. If you have an inexhaustible pool of manpower and are not answerable for high casualty counts, you can of course use a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel to attain your objectives. Subtlety is not required.
And the numbers of POWs who died in captivity were 374,000 and at least 3.6 million, respectively.
Entschuldigung, bitte. Ich vergaß Memelland. :rolleyes:
…including mistakes, bad strategy, infighting, errors in weapon design, and good performance by their foes.
No one is denying that the Germans fielded a formidable military, but far too much is made of how they were swamped by endless enemy resources.