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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 9, 2019 9:53:17 GMT -8
Quite often, the degrading things front-line soldiers say about their generals should not be taken very seriously. A common refrain soldiers made about Patton was that he was "Old Blood and Guts. Our blood and his guts." If taken literally, one might think Patton was unpopular with his men. Apparently, this was not necessarily the case. Some may recall I had an old friend who served in the Eighth Air Force during WWII. Among the stories he told me was the one when he ran into an army officer while visiting a bar in London. Apparently, the guy's uniform was very loose as if he had recently lost a lot of weight. The man was a tanker in the Third Army. When my friend saw this, my friend said "Old Blood and Guts, ha, ha." To which, as expected, the army man said, "Yeah, our blood and his guts." My friend then asked something like "why don't you ask for a transfer?" The army officer shot back, "Not a chance. Patton is a fighting man's general and let's us fight. He takes care of his troops. I wouldn't want to be under any other commander."
The conversation went on and the somehow landed on the subject of the practical use of the 1911 .45 pistol. My friend opined that one couldn't hit anything with it, to which the solder responded, "The hell you can't. If you practice enough with it it is a very deadly weapon. And, I don't know how he does it, but Patton gets us all the ammo we need for practicing."
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Post by timothylane on Jul 9, 2019 10:40:09 GMT -8
Patton's nickname, or its interpretation, may have come early on. His insistence on strict discipline grated on many. Bill Mauldin did a cartoon on that once. But he also respected Patton's ability to get results, and once that started, so did Patton's troops. Winning overcomes many sins.
Incidentally, after the road junction of Houffalize was bombed during the Battle of the Bulge, Patton did a one-stanza parody of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" about it. I don't have a copy available, but it was more or less this:
O little town of Houffalize, How still we see thee lie. Above they steep and shattered streets The aeroplanes fly by. But in thy dark streets shineth Not any goddamn light. The hopes and fears of all thy years Were blown to Hell last night.
Patton was a warrior, but he also had his sympathy for the victims of war. After all, Houffalize was (and is) a Belgian town (and probably Walloon in population).*
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 11, 2019 10:22:20 GMT -8
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Post by timothylane on Jul 11, 2019 12:02:30 GMT -8
Farming can be a very difficult occupation. But it could be worse than leftover ammunition exploding. After all, most of the field survived and there was probably no one killed. Look up Paricutin sometime.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 11, 2019 12:33:57 GMT -8
What a cool little volcano. Or not so little. It looks like it got fairly large.
Having an old bomb blow up in a field in Germany after all these years is amazing. It apparently caused quite the stir. People thought it was an earthquake. But there had to have been a time when regular explosions of not just one but hundreds of these bombs was and became routine.
When you think how Germany had twice thrown the world into war, I have little pity for the German people. But it had to be a horrendous experience living with those huge bombs raining down.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 11, 2019 12:57:08 GMT -8
Well, the German people of today aren't the adult German people of the 1940s, with very rare exceptions. We don't want to take the collective guilt route of that the left favors. Admittedly, this was a lot more recent than American chattel slavery, but they also have paid a lot of reparations to make up for it.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 11, 2019 13:20:39 GMT -8
If you've done what Germany has done over the last century, there ought to be some collective guilt. That is certainly the way they are operating in many respects. Oh, I think Jews are still hated in Germany. But they can sort of engage that impulse by taking their newfound "compassion" out on Muslims. You can make life difficult for Jews by proxy.
If I had read this storyline in a novel I would have thrown it away as the bland fiction of the unimaginative. But it fits into the "fact is stranger than fiction" category.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 11, 2019 14:50:05 GMT -8
Just think how lucky that farmer was not to be plowing at the time the bomb went off!
They found and removed a 500kg bomb in Frankfurt last week. These things keep popping up and it is not surprising considering the tonnage the Allies dropped on Germany in WWII. It makes me wonder how much of this stuff is waiting to explode in Vietnam, on which we dropped more tonnage than we did on all the Axis powers in WWII.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 12, 2019 12:13:03 GMT -8
I just finished the first episode of Warriors of the Night which is currently being presented on Amazon Prime Video. From that link you can either start a 30-day trial of Prime or purchase the entire 4-episode season ($2.99) or a single episode ($0.99). Going by what I saw in the first episode, this is quite a deal. This is a series from 1998. The video quality is definitely SD (not HD) and is a little rough. This is not widescreen either. But this is exactly how to make a documentary (except for the opening credits which I think are needlessly drawn out). I’ve seen much about the German air defense that I had never seen before (or remember seeing), even despite reading a pretty good book on the subject a year or two ago. The basic facts of the situation are presented well with direct commentary given from participants where appropriate (and is by no means over-done as so many documentaries are wont to do). I doubt this first episode (or this series) contains overall facts that you haven’t heard before (although certainly some of the details I had not). But it presents the story in a coherent way without a lot of fluff but without skipping over so much that you don’t get a feel for the situation. Episode 1 ends with some info on the first British Halifax bomber. This was one of several new bombers that certainly outlines how relatively quickly the British got their act together to engage in more effective night bombing and intercept (if an average of 50% losses of aircrew can be called effective). This bomber was a big leap from what they had been using (including the capable Stirling) and there were more greats to come, including updated versions of the Halifax as well as the Lancaster. Two photos of the Halifax: See also: Halifax at War: The Story of a Bomber
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Post by timothylane on Jul 12, 2019 13:48:09 GMT -8
Was that top turret in the first photo equipped with 4 machine guns? What caliber were they? (American heavy bombers during the war had Browning .50s, usually 2 in any turret. The fighters mostly used them, too, though some had heavier guns as well. The P-38 had a 20mm gun, and the P-39 had a 37mm that was very useful for ground support.)
I've read a good bit about German (and for that matter British) defense, having read extensively on the air war from several perspectives. One interesting annoyance was the De Haviland Mosquito, mostly made of wood and thus reflecting only weakly on radar screens. It was a fast, high-altitude light bomber (also useful in different configurations as an escort fighter) and in infernal nuisance that was almost impossible to knock down. (I believe the He-219 was one of the few fighters to succeed.)
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 12, 2019 17:07:23 GMT -8
In the first episode, they explicitly noted that the first version had two machine guns in the top turret and then later went to four. I think the back turret always had four. The program noted that although the caliber of the machine guns was only .303 (Brownings), it had four of these pumping out something like 1600 rounds a minute each. Here’s a nice graphic. [ original] The tail on the above is a little different from those other photos of the Halifax. Perhaps this one is a slightly newer version. Perhaps this info page explains that difference in the tail: Although the purpose of these planes was obviously not to hand out popsicles to the kiddies, I find in them a staunch, rugged, English stoic beauty. Propeller aircraft, in particular, are musically poetic. Piston engines are the sound of strength. Jet engines are just whiny, bitchy things. Yes, they're more powerful but far less elegant. Halifax 360VR Tours (I couldn't find any VR links or videos to click on but this image is apparently part of what you see. And this.)
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Post by timothylane on Jul 12, 2019 18:08:25 GMT -8
The first photo obviously was one of those with 4 guns, then. I couldn't see the top turret on the second. Incidentally, both the Spitfire and Hurricane started out with 8 .303 machine guns, 4 of them on each wing. (I don't know about the Hurricane, but on the Spitfire they fired outside the propeller arc so there was no need for interrupter gear, which reduced the rate of fire. They were also placed so that they would all hit at the same spot a certain distance away -- I don't recall how far -- and sighted to aim for that point. I got this from a book on the plane I read about 50 years ago, part of the Ballantine Illustrated History of World War II series.)
The British heavy bombers tended to have a higher bomb load and longer range than American ones, but less firepower. The Lancaster was the prime example, but I think this was also true of the Stirling and Halifax.
Adolf Galland, when he first tested the Me-262, found it much quieter than the Me-109. This may sound surprising after you've been in a jetliner. But when I was on a piston-powered plan on a commuter airline, it was MUCH noisier.
As for beauty, I think I would tend to prefer the modern aerodynamic designs. I have the same reaction at looking at tanks. Warships tend to look much the same all over tough there are differences in detail.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 13, 2019 14:19:38 GMT -8
Episode 2 of Warriors of the Night did mention the Mosquito. I’ve read a bit about that marvelous airplane in the past. Episodes 1 and 2 of this 4-part series are tightly scripted and focussed on the advances in night fighting with aircraft. You follow, in sufficient detail, the problems they were up against. It was no picnic even in daytime to simply find your target, especially if your target was a moving aircraft. At night, it was obviously much more difficult. Each side would make advances that the other had to counter. What Bomber Command eventually relied on mostly was mass formations of 500 planes and more. It would overwhelm German defense systems. But there was much more to the evolving strategies than that, of course. Episodes 3 and 4 lose the focus of the series. Episode 3 had plenty of interesting factoids but focusses mainly on a mission to Berlin. This would have been fine had it actually fleshed it out more, start to finished. But much of the drama of there-and-back is unrealized. Also, the series begins repeating itself, including actually re-using parts of interviews from earlier episodes. Episode 4 — again, still full of interesting factoids — runs off the rails completely in terms of focusing on the advance of night bombing, intercepting, and various defensive measure. You get sort of a scattershot with most of the episode devoted to talking about efforts to preserve the planes. And, again, a repetition of some material that was used earlier. It seems apparent that they just ran out of money or material to continue what had been a very interesting exposition on the subject of advancing aircraft technology and tactics for night fighting. By all means, watch the first two episodes and then decide from there.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 13, 2019 14:42:19 GMT -8
As for locating targets, both sides used electronic means. The Germans used double radio beams -- the planes would follow one until they detected the other, at which point they were over the target. This worked fine until the Allies figured out how to deflect the beams.
The Allies, due to the accidental discovery in 1940 of the cavity magnetron, relied on centimetric radar, which allowed them to see the ground pattern. (This continued to be used for decades; you may recall the end of Failsafe, in which the bomber sights Manhattan on its ground radar screen.) The Germans finally learned about this from a functional set on a downed bomber in 1943, and eventually developed a device to detect centimetric radar (this was also useful for U-boats). But they never developed a centimetric radar set of their own.
Spotting planes involved air-to-air radar, although after the Allied use of Window at Hamburg, the Germans used a tactice (Wilde Sau) based on attacking planes in the well-lit skies over the target cities until they came up with radar using the Doppler effect to differentiate between planes and chaff. This wasn't a problem for bombers, who just shot back at fighters that attacked them.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 14, 2019 17:23:15 GMT -8
I did watch Halifax at War: The Story of a Bomber on Amazon Prime. It’s from the same people who did Warriors of the Night. Now that I know, if you go back through those Halifax photos, the oldest version is the one with the kidney-shaped tails. This proved to be a disastrous aerodynamic design. Over 20 Halifaxes corkscrewed (the maneuver to evade a fighter) right into the ground, unable to pull out after a steep bank and dive. This was Bomber Harris’ favorite plane until it was not. The Lancaster, which came later, could cruise at a much higher altitude, carry a heavier bomb load, and was harder to find. The ceiling of the early Halifaxes was about 18,000 feet which was relatively low. Plus, there was an easy-to-spot glow from the exhaust vents that made it easier for German fighters to find. The Rolls Royce Merlin engines of the earlier Halifaxes were replaced in 1943 (the Mk III) with the more powerful Bristol Hercules XVI radial engine. It then lost most of the disadvantages it had compared to the Lancaster. For a time, the loss rate of the Merlin-powered Halifaxes had been frightening, even by Bomber Command standards. But with the Mk III, the loss rate became comparable to the Lancasters. Even before the introduction of the Mk III, the Halifax found use in other areas (prompted, in large part, by its increasing deadliness — to its own crew — as a bomber). It was a great cargo ship compared to the Lancaster because it has a much larger fuselage. It also took damage very well. It played a major role in launching gliders and covert operations in France. One of the ex-pilots noted that it had the same relationship to the Lancaster that the Hurricane did to the Spitfire: The Spitfire got all the glory but the Hurricane did the bulk of the work. I don’t think that analogy quite holds. But the Halifax was a good bomber for its time. And one’s “time” in WWII where innovation was happening at a remarkable pace often wasn’t that long. There are only two flying Lancasters at the moment and I’m not sure how many Halifaxes. This documentary does include a lot of information on the restoration of a couple Halifaxes that were found in Norwegian waters. And the restorers are dedicated men. One of them made the most eloquent statement in regards to the work they do. To paraphrase: People living the life they are living now need to know the people and the equipment at this point in time (WWII) that made all this possible. Beautiful. This is one of the groups shown in this show: Halifax 57 Rescue (Canada). The is a “Donate” button that you can click on to support them.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 14, 2019 17:32:43 GMT -8
Changing engines can make a big difference. The P-51 became a great fighter when it started using the Rolls Royce Merlin. One can thing of many things -- power, fuel consumption, engine size and shape -- than can affect the plan carrying the engine.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 15, 2019 8:12:50 GMT -8
From my reading, it's unclear if the Lancaster used mainly the Rolls Royce Merlin engine. It seems to have been the mainstay although it was later outfitted with Bristol Hercules engines. According to Wiki, "this had been produced as a stopgap modification as a result of a shortage of Merlin engines due to fighter production having higher priority for the engines at that time."
Were the Merlins powerful enough for the Lancaster but the Halifax needed more power for its great and less aerodynamic bulk? I don't know.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 15, 2019 8:20:00 GMT -8
There's an interesting segment in "Warriors of the Night." One of the pilots of one of the existing flyable Lancasters is (at the time the documentary was made) a 747 pilot. He gave a pretty good description of just how physical it was to fly one of these planes which he noted have zero powered controls. It's all done by moving things with muscle power. And he said you could get quite a workout flying one of these planes. Moving around the Lancaster was no piece of cake either. It was way more cramped than the Halifax. And the older gentlemen noted the cross-bracing and other obstacles in the Lancaster that had to be navigated moving from one end of the craft to the other. For young men it was task enough to do so. For the older gentlemen, it took much effort to get around.
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