Best WW2 Videogame you have played!

As I recall, when the Norwegains protested to the British that Britain had violated Norwegian neutrality by entering Norwegian waters and boarding the Altmark, the British retorted that the Altmark had violated Norwegian neutrality by anchoring in Norwegian waters while retaining a cargo hold full of prisoners of war.  The British also apparently implied that the Norwegians had been either openly complicit in this action or, at the very least, negligent in not discovering the German ruse.  My understanding of international law is that belligerent ships entering neutral waters are required to release any prisoners of war they are carrying – a good example being, ironically enough, the British prisonners who were released in neutral Uruguay by Captain Langsdorff when the Graf Spee (the ship supplied by the Altmark) anchored in Montevideo harbour.  At any rate, the British position vis a vis Norway was basically, “You drop your protest and we’ll drop ours.”  Which they did.

@RJL518:

Do you guys think that Germany DID change their attack plans after the plane had crashed?Â

I haven’t looked at the linked article, but one thing to remember is that the German plans for invading western Europe changed substantially (and many times) between the fall of Poland and the invasion of the Low Countries – so it would be hard to say whether this incident was (if at all) exclusively responsible for any particular changes a plan that was already evolving.

@The:

@CWO:

@ABWorsham:

Did I forget a category or person?

I don’t know how his numbers stack up against the others, but Adolf Galland shot down over a hundred Allied aircraft.

Galland ranked right up there, if not surpassed, most of the airmen in the Luftwaffe.

He could also light a cigar and smoke while wearing his oxygen mask. Great fighter pilot! Had he not been promoted to General he may have added another hundred kills to his score.

@CWO:

I have no idea if this is a joke or not, but according to this web page (which claims to be quoting a book called “Psychological Operations American Style”), during WWII the U.S. considered and even tested (in Central Park, of all places) the idea of painting large numbers of foxes with luminescent paint and unleashing them against the civilian population of Japan, in a bid to create mass superstitious terror among them.

http://theglyptodon.wordpress.com/2011/06/24/glow-in-the-dark-foxes-and-wwii-project-fantasia/

Good article. And funny. :)

Project Pigeon was another American attempt to use animals for war.

The idea was to create a large, gliding bomb. One - three lenses would be mounted on the outside of this bomb. They would be used to project an image onto a screen placed inside the gliding bomb. Pigeons–specially trained to recognize the bomb’s intended target–would peck at the screen. The screen was attached to a steering mechanism. Pecks at the center of the screen would cause the bomb to continue its current course. Off-center pecks would steer the bomb in a different direction. The project was canceled in late '44; perhaps because humans didn’t trust birds to steer large, expensive weapons.

America’s bat bomb project solved that trust problem. Instead of allowing birds or bats to steer one big bomb–as in Project Pigeon–each individual bat was attached to a small quantity of explosive. The plan was to release large numbers of bats at night over Japanese cities. The bats would fly around for a while. Then at dawn they would hide in man-made structures. The bats’ bombs were timed to go off shortly after dawn. Japanese buildings tended to be made of wood, bamboo, or other flammable materials. A homeowner would not initially realize his home had been penetrated by a bomb-laden bat; or that the bat’s bomb had started a small fire. Only after the fire had really taken hold would the homeowner become aware of the problem.

It was a promising project–at least if the goal was to burn Japan to the ground. But it was eventually abandoned, after the atomic bomb had made it redundant.

This is a pretty interesting read debunking the secret Antarctica Nazi base.

http://www.histarmar.com.ar/Antartida/Base-Hitler/LaBaseAntarticadeHitler.pdf

If you’re looking at physically discernible traits in posterity (i.e., the baby boom generation), I’d say they would require considerable epigenetic or even genetic alterations in the parents (i.e., the people living there at the time). That’s not a very likely effect from such levels of pollution. If anyone was affected in any way, it seems more probable that their overall health would suffer to some degree, but it would probably be difficult to attribute that to any specific factor. An extensive epidemiological study may be able to demonstrate some effects, but I don’t know whether anybody has done one.

Also, it’s uncertain how much of the oil even reached the beaches or the fishing grounds. It seems obvious that the marine ecosystem could handle less oil, over a much longer period of time, and at various locations, much better than the massive BP spill. So a lot of that WWII tanker oil may have evaporated, or sunk to the bottom, or gone down with the ship and slowly dissipated.

I don’t think that the war itself would have played a major role in deciding to either clean up or ignore any oil that may have landed on the beaches. If the oil would have arrived in a town like, say, Biloxi, then people would have probably cleaned it up because it posed a direct threat to the livelihood of the local fishermen. On the other hand, if it would have landed in a remote location, it would likely have been ignored, simply because environmental awareness was not exactly a major concern in the 1940’s, war or no war.

In each case, I’m only speculating - we’d need to look for contemporary reports to know the truth.

And of course, the petroleum flavor does little for the shrimps, so I don’t think too many were eaten.  :-)

@Fishmoto37:

My favorite–They Were Expendable with Robert Montgomery and John Wayne. Has been since I was a kid and when I was a kid the Dead Sea was only sick.

Great Movie!

Korea was indeed the first war to use helicopters on a significant scale.  They were most experimental in WWII.