Favorite Bantam WWII Book?

Good to know. Thank you. And I did mean Palermo Italy.

Hi all,

My Great Uncle Reginald Bethuy fought in the 101st Airborne Division, 401st Infantry Regiment and was KIA in October 1944. He’s buried in the Netherlands American Cemetery and on behalf of my grandmother (his sister - now 89 years old with failing health), I’m flying from Michigan to Margraten for Memorial Day to pay respects to him and those he fought with. Also to the woman who has tended to his grave since 1944. To this day, my grandma laments that “he should have never went.” With her dementia setting in, she still remembers him. It will be a one of a kind experience for all of us.

I am setting up a fundraiser for this trip and to fund a beautiful wooden memorial case for his burial flag (still in the original box mailed to my grandma’s house with a note accompanying it). If you could pass it on, even not willing to give anything, that would mean the world to us. Just to get this story out there - that the wounds of WWII NEVER go away - even 80+ years later.

Thank you!
Stephanie B.

gofundme.com/journey-to-reginalds-grave

Germany had essentially two options here. 1) Capture the city quickly, before the defenses could be built up. 2) Capture it via siege.

I don’t think that creating an urban combat situation, in which Germany attempted to capture the city street by street, would have been viable. In typical combat situations German soldiers had a 3:1 or 4:1 advantage in combat effectiveness over their Soviet counterparts. But in urban, street-to-street fighting the ratio was about 1:1. Germany could not afford anything even remotely approaching that 1:1 ratio, which is why something other than street-to-street fighting was necessary.

Von Manstein wrote that during the Barbarossa operation of '41 there had been a perfectly good opportunity to take Leningrad. But that this was wasted, allowing the Soviets to fortify it.

The other option would have been to do a better job of putting it under siege. This would have entailed tightening the cordon around the city, preventing just about anything from making it through. I think there was a case when Germany attempted exactly that. However, at the same time the Soviets were attempting to break the siege, so each side’s offensive encountered the other’s. From a tactical view there may have been more Germany could have done. But I think the real problem was strategic: the Soviet Union had too much military strength. A discussion on how to address that problem is probably outside the scope of this thread.

The Shetland Bus was the nickname of a clandestine special operations group that made a permanent link between Shetland, Scotland, and German-occupied Norway from 1941 until the German occupation ended on 8 May 1945. From mid-1942 the official name of the group was “Norwegian Naval Independent Unit” (NNIU). In October 1943 it became an official part of the Royal Norwegian Navy, and was renamed the “Royal Norwegian Naval Special Unit” (RNNSU).

The unit was operated initially by a large number of small fishing boats, and later augmented by three fast and well-armed submarine chasers – Vigra, Hessa and Hitra.

Crossings were mostly made during the winter under the cover of darkness. This meant that the crews and passengers had to endure very heavy North Sea conditions, with no lights, and constant risk of discovery by German aircraft or patrol boats. There was also the possibility of being captured whilst carrying out the mission on the Norwegian coast. However, early on it was decided that camouflage was the best defence and the boats were disguised as working fishing boats, with the crew as fishermen. The fishing boats were armed with light machine guns concealed inside oil drums placed on deck. The operation was under constant threat from German forces, and several missions went awry, of which the Telavåg tragedy is a prime example. Several fishing boats were lost during the initial operations, but after receiving the three submarine chasers there were no more losses.

Leif Andreas Larsen (popularly known as Shetland Larsen) was perhaps the most famous of the Shetland Bus men. In all he made 52 trips to Norway, and became the most highly decorated Allied naval officer of the Second World War.

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

The Shetland Bus is a little known story of WWII.  What do you guys think?

To be a traitor he would need to have betrayed his country. Nothing in the summary posted suggests this to be true.

Instead prior to US involvement in the war he espoused views that are open to quite a negative perception. His thoughts on race and Semitism do him no credit - to quote from his diary: “We must limit to a reasonable amount the Jewish influence … Whenever the Jewish percentage of total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to invariably occur. It is too bad because a few Jews of the right type are, I believe, an asset to any country.” He was also very slow to condemn the Nazis for acts such as the invasion of Czechoslovakia. More debateable is whether he was a fascist sympathiser, as Roosevelt thought.

He was certainly an isolationist - but in itself that is not a “crime”. Once the US was involved in the war he tried to “do his bit”.

So I think he was both a patriot and misled. Only being able to vote for one option, I chose the latter.

I voted advantage Axis. As others have explained, the Allies didn’t have very good methods of detecting u-boats–at least not after the first year of the war. However, that changed as the war progressed. The Germans did not anticipate the Allies miniaturizing radar to the point where it could be equipped on board an aircraft. (Even though they later duplicated that feat.) When the British began using such aircraft against u-boats, it fundamentally altered the equation in the Atlantic.

During the last year of the war, the Germans were taking steps to reclaim the edge in the war of the Atlantic.

One of those steps involved torpedoes. A standard-issue WWII era torpedo involved a diesel engine, as well as fuel and compressed air so that the engine could work. The compressed air took up plenty of space. Early in the war, Germany’s torpedoes were based on this model. But there are problems with diesel-powered torpedoes. They are noisy, and can be detected by enemy ships. As they burn diesel fuel, they leave a telltale trail of bubbles in the water. If this trail is observed from the air, it alerts the target ship a torpedo is coming, and guides planes back to the sub which launched the torpedo in the first place. Something better was needed–or at least desired.

The Japanese dealt with these problems by providing their torpedoes with compressed oxygen, not compressed air. Separating the oxygen out from the rest of the air was very difficult, and the Japanese closely guarded their secret of how to do it. A diesel engine requires only 1/5 as much compressed oxygen to burn a given quantity of diesel fuel as it would compressed air. Due to the enormous space savings gained by using compressed oxygen, Japanese “Long Lance” torpedoes had about triple the range of anyone else’s. Also, the air bubble trail they left was much less pronounced than typical for a WWII-era torpedo. This was particularly important for the South Pacific at night, because the presence of luminescent algae meant that those bubble trails glowed in the dark!

The Germans dealt with the torpedo problem in a different way. As the war progressed, they began making use of battery-powered electric torpedoes. At first these torpedoes represented a very serious trade-off. Their range was much shorter than a standard-issue diesel torpedo’s. On the other hand, the electric torpedoes left no bubble trail, and were very, very quiet. They were therefore a mixed blessing–at least until the Germans began to improve their range. Later in the war, Germany’s electric torpedoes had about the same range as standard-issue diesel torpedoes. (Japan’s torpedoes, of course, had a much longer range than anyone else’s.)

Good torpedoes were useful, but not alone enough to swing the Battle of the Atlantic back in Germany’s favor. What it needed was a submarine much harder for the British to detect than the submarines it had. In addition, the submarine in question needed a long range, and it needed to be mass produceable in large quantities. The Type XXI u-boat was all these things and more.

The Type XXI was fast. Its hydrodynamic shape allowed it to actually travel faster underwater than it could on the surface. It had a very advanced (for the time) electronics suite and sonar system. Its electric torpedoes had a range comparable to most diesel-powered torpedoes of the era. Its hull was coated in a layer of rubber, making it very difficult to detect via radar or sonar. It had a very large complement of batteries–batteries which allowed it to remain submersed for 2 - 3 days at a time. When it did finally have to emerge, it didn’t need to come all the way to the surface. Instead, it would go most of the way to the surface, then raise its snorkel. With the snorkel above the surface it could run its diesel engines. (Necessary to recharge its batteries.) This submarine was much, much quieter than almost any other sub of WWII. The Type XXI u-boat and associated models were by far the most advanced submarines of the war. In many ways they had more in common with nuclear submarines of the postwar era than with their WWII contemporaries.

Albert Speer began producing this type of submarine in large quantities in 1944. These subs were built in sections to make them easier to mass produce. However, there were some initial glitches in the production process, slowing things down. Also, a submarine this sophisticated required a relatively long working up period. No Type XXIs saw action before the war ended. Had the war lasted another six months, the story would have been very different. :o

A sister ship–the Type XXIII–was put into service, in limited numbers, before the war ended. The Type XXIII was very similar to the Type XXI in most ways, except much smaller and with a shorter range. The Type XXIII could hold only two torpedoes (compared to twelve for the XXI). The Type XXIII was intended for use in coastal waters. Type XXIIIs sank or damaged five Allied ships; and the Allies did not sink or damage any Type XXIIIs. The rather one-sided track record of the Type XXIII reinforces the suspicion that it would have been very, very difficult for the Allies to detect or destroy the Type XXIs.

From the OP: please explain what you do at this time if you are the Axis or Allies?

Am I allowed to use 20/20 hindsight? If I am, my choice would be to accelerate the development and production of the Type XXI as quickly as possible. Had the Type XXI appeared in the Atlantic in large numbers in 1943, it could have decisively tipped the Battle of the Atlantic in Germany’s favor.

You had lots of Hitler puzzles. That explains alot to us in these forums.

Then there is the other side of the war, the Pacific theater.  I don’t think any events in Europe regarding Hitler (or even Churchill) would have affected the decision by Japan to annex Manchuria in 1931, China proper (at least as much as they could get) in 1937, and then to attempt the quick strike at Pearl along with the dash to the oil-rich Dutch East Indies in 1941.

WWII, at least in the Pacific, was pretty much going to happen regardless of events in Europe.  Considering the culture of the Japanese (essentially controlled by the military leaders) at the time, I don’t think the change of any single person in Japan (even the emperor considering the Japanese military could and did replace emperors when convenient for them) could have altered this course.