Favourite WW2 Tank

@General:

29 July 1942 the SS Seatrain Texas set sail from New York with a cargo of 250-300 Sherman tanks. Arrived Cape Town 18 days later and arrived Port Taufiq southern end of Suez Canal 2 Sept. 1942                          Â

Thank you.

Mussolini (and many others) thought the war all but won by Germany - hence the quote you post. From that starting point, with his political views and territorial aspirations, declaring war was an easy decision.

When you say “at this day and age” I think you mean with the largely pro-facist Italian mindset of 1940? So ignoring hindsight and my own morality?

Please clarify RJL.

Thanks
PP

Escaping Montevideo Harbour – possibly.  Getting all the way back to Germany – extremely doubtful.

In terms of getting out of the harbour, Langsdorff would have had two options: heading across the river Plate to Argentina, or making a break for the open sea.  If he’d headed for Argentina, there was no guarantee that he’d be any better off than in Uruguay.  Argentina had some Axis sympathies, I think, but it was still nominally neutral, and the British and French would have put the same diplomatic pressures on it as they had put on Uruguay to respect the Geneva Convention and either intern the ship or force it to leave.  Making a break for the open sea was problematic too.  The British had made sure that the Graf Spee’s departure from Montevideo was in a carefully defined time window by making use of an article in the Geneva Convention that prohibited a warship from sailing from a neutral harbor less than (I think) 24 hours after an enemy merchantman had left the same harbour.  There were British merchant ships in Montevideo at the time of the Spee incident, and the British arranged for one of them to leave the harbour at the right moment to put Langsdorff in a bind between the Geneva Convention and the expiration of the Uruguayan government’s deadline for the Spee to leave.  Harwood’s cruisers were lying in wait nearby, and it’s doubtful that the Spee could have given them the slip.  Moreover, the shallow waters of the Rio de la Plata area were unsuited for combat from Langsdorff’s perspective because his water intakes might have gotten clogged with mud.  Additionally, having the ship sink in combat in shallow water carried the risk that secret equipment and papers would have fallen into Allied hands (this being less of a concern if, as eventually happened, the ship was scuttled under controlled conditions).

Assuming for the sake of argument, however, that Langsdorff had managed to elude Harwood, getting back to Germany would have been very challenging.  Although the Spee was technically still able to sail and fight, the damage she had suffered in the original battle with Harwood had left her in very poor condition to make a long sea voyage.  Harwood, even if he’d initially been eluded, would still have been close by and would have sent his ships (and his scout plane) to look for the Spee; additionally, some British and French naval groups were already converging on the general area following Harwood’s initial battle a few days earlier, so Langsdorff would have had an awful lot of sea power focused on finding him.

Yes Marc, but in that case UK and France could just as well accepted the proposal from the Sovjet Foreign minister Litvinov and marched into Germany in 1933 to arrest Hitler. After all, Hitler did threat to attack USSR in his book Mein Kampf, so nobody could say they didn’t know. It looks like the capitalist Brits hated the commies so much, they wanted Germany to grow strong and kill the commies. So no, I don’t think the Brits or the French would have done anything to prevent the war from starting. It had to be prevented by someone else, like the Terminator coming to 1936 by accident, and mistaking Hitler for John Connor

ME 262

I actually collect bolt-actions as a hobby. I have in my collection a Canadian made Enfield (Mk III type 4 I think) from 1944, I have a French MAS-36 both of which are in amazing condition (which is suprising and not suprising when you think about it  :lol: ). I own 3 Mosin-Nagant rifles, two are full sized rifles from 1942 and 1936 (the 36 has a hex shaped reciever intrestingly) and one is an M38 Nagant carbine (my pride and joy the first gun I ever bought). I have 2 K98’s from 1941 and 1943 respectively. I also have a Chinese made Mauser copy from 1937(ish) that looks like an intresting hybrid of the Gewher88 of WW1 and the K98, bit of an oddity but a fun gun to have all the same.

He 219.
I like his strange configuration.

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