@ABWorsham4
Hi AB nice to see you :)

Yea read a good one on stalingrad years ago. Posted on the old site. Can’t remember the name. I’ll try and look it up.

The daughter of Captain Hans Langsdorff will travel to her father’s grave in Buenos Aires next month, marking the 80th anniversary of his death and the scuttling of the Graf Spee. She’ll be accompanied by the descendants of some of the 1,000 German sailors who served on the ship.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/daughter-scuttled-german-ww2-battleship-graf-spee

@barnee said in Wrecks of WWII Carriers Kaga and Akagi Located:

@CWO-Marc
yea Spruance steaming away at night was a smart move. I wonder if Halsey was in the same situation if he would have. I kinda doubt it

Agreed. Ray Spruance was an excellent combat officer – he and Halsey spent the last few years of WWII alternating command of the 5th Fleet / 3rd Fleet, which was actually the same force whose name got switched every time the two admirals rotated, much to the confusion of Japanese naval intelligence – but he was very different from Bill Halsey in terms of style and personality. Spruance was precise and analytical; he certainly didn’t lack aggressiveness (when he made a decision to attack, he sent in “everything that wasn’t bolted to the flight deck”), but before making his decision to attack he would carefully weigh all the factors of the situation, which sometimes translated into over-cautiousness. Halsey was a hell-for-leather type – sort of the naval counterpart of George Patton – whose fighting spirit greatly inspired his men (the enlisted sailors loved him, not least for the fact that he could drink and swear as well as any of them), but this sometimes translated into recklessness. After the war, someone – I think it was Spruance himself – said that it would have been better if Halsey has been in command at the Battle of the Philippine Sea (where the IJN lost hundred of planes and pilots, but managed to save the bulk of its fleet) and if Spruance had been in command at the Battle of Leyte Gulf (where Halsey fell for a Japanese decoy operation, and compounded his error by leaving no covering force to guard the San Bernardino Straight).

Here’s an interesting news story from yesterday. For technology buffs, note that Mr. Smoyer posed in front of a Sherman tank for the occasion (which was a nice touch), but that the tank in which he served as a gunner, and with which he destroyed a Panther, was a Pershing, a late-war 90mm-gunned well-armoured US tank which could take on the Panther on better terms than the thinly-armoured 75mm-gunned Sherman.

Published Wednesday, September 18, 201
World War II veteran Clarence Smoyer, 96, receives the Bronze Star from U.S. Army Maj. Peter Semanoff at the World War II Memorial, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2019, in Washington. Smoyer fought with the U.S. Army’s 3rd Armored Division, nicknamed the Spearhead Division. In 1945, he defeated a German Panther tank near the cathedral in Cologne, Germany — a dramatic duel filmed by an Army cameraman that was seen all over the world.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/the-u-s-hero-of-cologne-receives-his-bronze-star-75-years-late-1.4599606

If you recognize someone as looking like Albert Kesselring in a drive thru, you might be a WW2 junkie.

@barnee said in Churchill-Bradley Hypothetical Incident:

@captainwalker thanks for this. I’ve heard of the KV but never actually saw a picture of one this close up, that I recognized anyway. I know it was a heavier tank than the T-34 but thought it would’ve had a longer barrel. Maybe the picture is is a bit deceptive in that regard. Idk. I’ve read where they were quite the terrors on the battlefield

The picture isn’t deceptive. The KV-1 may have looked impressive in terms of sheer size and weight, and it was very tough in terms of armour protection, but it lacked firepower. To put things in perspective: the original version of the Panzer IV, which was intended to be a heavy infantry-support tank, was similarly armed with a short-barreled 75mm gun, with a barrel length of 48 calibers. The KV-1 gun had an almost identical caliber (76.2mm), but it was appreciably shorter, at 42.5 calibers, which meant a lower muzzle velocity. At the opposite extreme, the future Panzer V Panther’s high-velocity 75mm gun was an impressive 70 calibers in length.

@CWO-Marc The vast majority of vintage “combat” photographs and videos are staged or reenacted. The ones that aren’t are often blurry and ill-composed because the photographer was being shot at.

I wouldn’t really expect them to show battle with actual bullets flying until the gopro era

As a follow-up to the original post, by the way, it’s not surprising that the bomb went off spontaneously (which is what the news story seems to indicate). Explosives can become unstable over time, which is one reason why certain types of souvenirs sometimes kept by veterans are potentially dangerous. I read a news story a few years ago about a woman who was going through the personal possessions of her father (a WWII vet) after he passed away, and who found an unexploded hand grenade in one of his desk drawers. She very sensibly called the police.

@CWO-Marc

yea is real surprising King didn’t convoy from the get go. USA did the same thing in WWI, not learning from their allies. A bunch of guys got slaughtered because of it.

A news story about some of the secret behind-the-scenes work (signals intelligence and radio navigation) done by the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service (the Wrens) during WWII.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/d-day-code-breakers-women-1.5159789

I started by checking my own Global 1940 map analysis document…

https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/26161/global-1940-2nd-edition-map-analysis/33?page=2&lang=en-GB

…and the entry for Chile says “Chile, a country with close trading ties with Germany, initially chose to remain neutral (in contrast with many South American countries which, although technically neutral, tilted slightly towards the Allied side early in the war). Chile only started to distance itself from the Axis powers in 1943, when it broke diplomatic relations with them.”

According to this page…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allies_of_World_War_II

the “Declaration by United Nations”, originally signed by 26 nations in January 1942, was signed by Chile in early 1945. Chile was also one of the original 51 signatories of the 1945 Charter of the United Nations, and Chile also apparently declared war on Japan in April 1945. This page…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarations_of_war_during_World_War_II

…similarly notes the same declaration of war against Japan and similarly mentions none against Germany.

All in all, it sounds as if Chile was one of the countries (there were several, notably in Latin America) which spent much of WWII playing their cards close to their vest, and which only committeed themselves to the Allied bandwagon once it was clear that a) the war was nearly over and b) the Allies were going to win. Based on the other entries in my map analysis document, it looks as if, basically, the Latin American countries whose real inclination was to be pro-Axis spent the war pretending they were neutral; the Latin American countries whose real inclination was to be neutral spent the war pretending they were pro-Allied; and the Latin American / Caribbean countries whose inclination was to be pro-Allied jumped onto the Allied bandwagon right after Pearl Harbor. The reason for all of these positions (nuanced or overt) isn’t hard to guess: they were all in the western hemisphere, i.e. in the backyard of the United States, so they had to be careful about the public stance they took, even in those countries with right-wing governements and/or significantly large numbers of residents of German ancestry.

@barnee said in WWII Mohawk Code-Talkers:

@CWO-Marc

On a side note, the Tlingit’s were/are badasses. They kicked ass on the russians and were hired to pack 200lb packs up the chilkoot trail. They all seem to be naturally strong. Probably weeded out the weak genes long ago : )

I saw something similar in a 1950s US Army film about the Korean War, part of which showed UN troops employing locals as porters to haul impressively large loads of supplies and equipment up steep trails to hilltop positions.

Another example of a simple-yet-sophisticated solution which the Americans used to address a WWII problem was the Marston Mat, which was conceptually similar to those Meccano construction sets for kids. It required heavy industry to manufacture it in the required huge quantities, but the device itself was mechanically straightforward: standardized sheets of steel mesh which could be laid down in an interlocking pattern, at whatever length and width was desired, to construct runways for aircraft in places where they were needed in a hurry, or in remote locations like Alaska and the Pacific Islands. The Marston Mat, combined with the use of heavy equipment like backhoes and bulldozers – which were commonplace in the US civilian construction industry – and chainsaws, allowed the Navy’s SeaBees (in the Pacific) and the Army’s Corps of Engineers (in Alaska) to turn an area of wilderness into an operational runway in just a few days.

As a footnote: I once read a book on the Doolittle Raid in which the author commented that James Doolittle’s family name was somewhat ironic because, on the contrary to “doing little,” the man was actually a powerhouse with a long list of accomplishments in various aviation-related fields, both theoretical and applied. He was, among other things, a test pilot and an aeronautical engineer, a record-setter and a prize winner, with many of these accomplishments pre-dating the outbreak of WWII in 1939 (at which time he was a reserve officer in the Air Corps, having resigned his regular commission in 1930; he returned to active duty in the Air Corps in 1940). WWII added more items to his C.V., the Doolittle Raid being the most famous example but by no means the only one.

Here’s a great project that a filmmaker has been working on. And I think it’s especially nice that he’s a young man, not someone from a generation closer to WWII.

Thursday, February 28, 2019 6:38AM EST

A young American filmmaker is on a mission to interview every last Second World War veteran to share the stories of as many combat veterans as possible – before it is too late.

Rishi Sharma has spent the past three years documenting the lives of living Second World War veterans in the U.S., U.K. and Canada for his non-profit organization Heroes of the Second World War.

The average age of Second World War vet is now 93 years old, and the number of survivors is slowly diminishing with the passing of time.

After three years of visiting seniors’ homes to record veterans’ stories, Sharma says has filmed more than a thousand interviews.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/american-filmmaker-on-a-mission-to-interview-every-last-second-world-war-veteran-1.4316271

@CWO-Marc

I probably won’t be able to, since I believe the movie is going to be a summer release and my jacket is on the heavier side, but if the weather is cold enough I will. It currently has the patches for Enterprise and Yorktown shown above. Only reason I haven’t put on the Hornet one is that it is rather large and I have limited real estate to work with. I may just try to find a smaller one. As you can imagine, there are few online retailers selling replica ship patches from World War II.

Here are a few more; the WWII-era US military videos are fun to watch, and the orchestration / performance of the service songs in question is quite lively and enthusiastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E3QIHivAqA
SERVICE SONGS - Soundies , The Caissons Go Rolling Along , The Marines Hymn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pagjJ3DAabk
SEMPER PARATUS - The United States Coast Guard Song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2YlbiyiuMc
Red Army Choir: Polyushka Polye (“Oh Fields, Our Fields”; music composed by Lev Knipper; lyrics by Viktor Gusev, 1933)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRvhEZuTeBE
Soviet Army March “Moscow in May” (music: Dmitry and Daniil Pokrass; lyrics: Vasily Lebedev-Kumach, 1937)

HERE

Notice the machine gun on top and the men posted

Zeppelins

Do any of you have any recommendations for a book on Orde Charles Wingate?

Very cool, reminds me of the efforts to catalog and examine all the fortifications and pillboxes of the Invasion Scare era.