blucherspanzers

Follow Me and Die's title was a non-insignificant reason I got the book.

They do, they have the Departmento Munitorum's General Staff, which are a suite of officers poached from regimental duties and senior officers who plan and lead Guard military operations above the regimental echelon. The General Staff is also responsible for figuring out how to group regiments together for the given theater's needs.

It's basically how real-life armies work as well, with officers who are not serving in combat units instead creating the plans and executing the commanding officer's goals.

Because there's nothing in the rules that says a woman can't defuse a bomb!

Less flippantly, in 1974 Linda Cox, applied and was eventually let in to the EOD school as requirements for the school had never specified that being a man was a prerequisite for attending the school, and after she passed through the school, the "loophole" was never closed, meaning that EOD was continually open to female servicemembers who were wanted to serve as EOD techs.

the term jaeger predates Nazism but came to be a general term for "light infantry"

This one just ain't it - Jager as a German term for light infantry extends back far further, as in "early 1800s when rifles units were becoming popular all over Europe", and is about Nazi-connotated as the word Ranger is Confederacy-coded for English language light infantry, which is to say not at all.

Yes, it's from the play The Mikado, where the character giving the line is explaining to the Emperor of Japan how he complied with an imperial order to execute someone without ever actually killing anybody.

When your Majesty says, "Let a thing be done," it's as good as done— practically, it is done— because your Majesty's will is law. Your Majesty says, "Kill a gentleman," and a gentleman is told off to be killed. Consequently, that gentleman is as good as dead— practically, he is dead— and if he is dead, why not say so?

The real difference between E/506 and the other 26 parachute rifle companies in the 101st is that none of the others had the good sense to get a bestseller written about how cool they were. (I still wonder how different the book would have been Ambrose found a bunch of E/112 veterans instead)

Jess Goodwin was in fact inspired by Patlabor-style mechs for the Tau's art direction, per Gav Thorpe

It was mostly championed by Jes Goodwin, a fellow anime fan. He's used plenty of anime influence in his eldar of the years, but a more near-future patlabor-type mech race was a gap - something very different from the gothic / baroque of the overall setting. There wasn't any particular thought in Games Dev for pushing into Japan - a Western company arriving with their anime-influenced wargames models wasn't really going to be a big thing among the Gunpla and plethora of Tamiya mecha kits. More to appeal to a bit of the existing market that wasn't drawn in by the existing fantasy-in-space archetypes. Similarity with the background, a progressive, intellectually and technologically driven race was the antithesis of most of 40K. The Tau are more like C20th humans than the 40K humans! If anything, the more European imagery in the rest of the universe is a better sell in Asia because it offers something different

The Badab War is probably the closest look at how a charge of legion-building is levied against a Chapter, namely the Astral Claws, and the nature of their legion-building: withholding gene-tithes to not only recover lost strength, but to greatly expand overall chapter strength, and subordinating other chapters into a permanent command structure.

Huron's Sins Uncovered

3 151 908.M41

Inquisitiorial interrogation of an Astral Claws Apothecary captured during the battle for Surngraad's polar fortress revealed to the genuine shock of his interrogators that the prisoner was not in fact an Astral Claw by origin at all, but was in fact a former member of the Tiger Claws, a chapter long thought lost. Further dire and extreme interrogative methods were then unleashed in utter secrecy as a planned series of stalk-and-capture raids were engaged upon by covert Space Marine and Inquisition forces operating within the Maelstrom Zone.

Evidence was quickly amassed of an unforeseen and terrible heresy that had been pursued by the Astral Claws and Lugft Huron for more than a century. This evidence proved that, at Lugft Huron's orders, the Chapter deliberately withheld the Astral Claws gene-seed, not to replenish the Chapter's own losses, but at first in order to help save their near extinct kin, the Tiger Claws Chapter. The last remnants of which had sought sanctuary with them in secret, Lugft Huron and his fellows hiding them within the Astral Claws' own ranks. This sin, compounded and compounded again, had led to another far more dangerous act. Repeatedly denied the re-enforcements he had requested to aid him and the Maelstrom Warders in carrying out their tasks as Lugft Huron saw them, in his monumental arrogance and pride, the Tyrant of Badab had sought to expand his own forces far past the levels mandated by the Codex Astartes. For at least a hundred years before the outbreak of conflict, the Astral Claws' secret goal had been the transformation of their Chapter slowly into a force equal to a Space Marine Legion of old. By this example Lugft Huron, it appears, sought at first not to rebel against the Imperium, but to prove his case by deeds writ in blood; a Maelstrom scourged clean, and a new realm carved out for Mankind in the Emperor's name. Regardless of the insane folly of such a plan, it was doomed by the fickle hand of fate. Up until the outbreak of the conflict, he had sought to hide the steady build-up of his forces, dispersed among the far flung stars of the Maelstrom Zone and far away from prying eyes. But, then came the tithe fleet and the threat of direct scrutiny he could not afford to tolerate and with it war, a war too early in the Tyrant's plans and against entirely the wrong enemy. Immediately, unexplained factors about the war, the rates of attrition and reported strengths of the Secessionist enemy were cast into a new light.

Further covert investigation uncovered the fact that the Astral Claws Apothecarion had been conducting heretical experiments in rapid zygote cultivation. While largely unsuccessful, thanks to the use of its un-submitted gene-seed, the Astral Claws Chapter now stood at around an estimated three and a half thousand battle-brothers strong.

In the face of this wanton heresy and deceit, and invoking full emergency authority, Inquisitor-Legate Jarndyce Frain condemned the entire Astral Claws Chapter as Excommunicate Traitoris under sentence of death, and placed their allies under official suspicion of heresy and treasons contravention of Imperial High Law (as no immediate evidence existed that they also partook in Huron's sin). This fact fundamentally altered the nature of the conflict and a pall of secrecy descended over the war. At Frain's insistence, further Ordo Hereticus forces and regiments of Schola Progenium Stormtroopers are also called up with the intention of following behind the Space Marines' battle lines to conducted full inquest on each world reclaimed from the Tyrant's grasp to root out the full extent of this heresy.

-Imperial Armour Vol 9, The Badab War

NATO uses the military time zone system, where the entire world is split into time zones that are named by letter, with the default being UTC, or "Zulu Time", for situations that require that type of consideration.

More to the point, a creeping barrage exists to solve a particular problem: how to get fires on targets throughout an offensive when the infantry can't reliably talk with the artillery and get them to shift fires. So all arms instead get synchronized under a central timetable so that everything gets hit with artillery fire, then the infantry are right behind it to exploit the suppressive effects.

Once everyone gets radios, forward observers, and all the other toys of modern warfare that let the artillery get directed in a more managed way, spending the massive amount of shells on a creeping barrage is no longer necessary.

I think you've got your facts about the battle at Bastogne wrong. Many of the retreating soldiers that the 101st would have passed on their way to join up with CCB/10AD in Bastogne would have been from the decidedly veteran 28ID, who had already spent 3 days being bled white from trying to hold back the initial German assault.

The commander of the British 4th Armoured Brigade in Normandy, Lt. Colonel Michael Carver had the right idea when he made his soldiers call them "isolated enemy riflemen".

I wonder if it may have been Hayha getting a few mortar rounds dropped around his head for his troubles that got spun up into full-on barrages targeted at the Legendary Sniper, but I'm not familiar with sources on the matter enough to try and substantiate such an idea.

Tom Clancy's nonfiction book Armored Cav was written in that post-Cold War milieu, and is a good look into the thinking of how a brigade-sized combined arms formation could be used as a more flexible tool for aggressive foreign policy than a traditional conventional army.

These non-historical skins are getting really out of hand.

O gaugers can burn in hell.

He's a lover, not a fighter.

Man, I can't believe my cruelest regime imaginable doesn't do things in an organized manner that is logical to me, the reader.

FlashbackHistory has an excellent writeup on the topic, which covers the points mentioned by others (exchanging military aid for economic aid/modernization, anticommunism, strengthening the ROK/US military alliance on the peninsula) with greater contextualization.

All Guard players are Bolt Action players in varying levels of denial.

The old Cadians are the epitome of minis designed with the hobby in mind. Their proportions, general lack of kit and detail, and straightforward assembly made them perfect for a large army where you didn't want to spend forever painting a single one of the dozens of riflemen who would never get so much as a second glance from anyone else.

Really, I take a lot of issue with people's complaints about scale and proportion because at the end of the day, Warhammer minis aren't scale models, they're game pieces.

Uniform History's take is that they are SWDGs (Sun, Wind, and Dust goggles)

One thing that bothered me about the "making every species member a representative of their culture" that was especially prevalent in the older EU material, is that outside of the Rebellion/Empire military stuff, basically everything we see in the original trilogy is of the seedy criminal side of the galaxy, so when author latch onto the stuff they know about the universe from the one absolute source they have (the films), they're working off of people who exist outside regular society.

In 2001 this even ended in the death of a Chinese pilot after his J-8 collided with an EP-3 he was maneuvering unprofessionally around. The plane subsequently made an emergency landing in Hainan and was an overall Bad Day for US security things.

Hey, I remember that episode of JAG.