Odd WW2 factoids.

If the course of events had been different by just three hours, the last battleship-versus-battleship fight in history would have been an engagement between vessels of the two biggest battleship classes ever completed: the Japanese superbattleship Yamato and the American Iowa-class battleships Iowa and New Jersey.  That’s the margin of time by which Admiral Kurita’s Center Force and Admiral Halsey’s Task Group 34.5 missed each other in the closing stages of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, in the early hours of October 26, 1944.  The Japanese Center Force – consisting of Yamato and three other battleships, plus several cruisers and destroyers – was sailing north towards San Bernardino Strait following the Battle of Samar.  The American TG 34.5 – consisting of Iowa and New Jersey, and escorted by a few cruisers and destroyers – had been detached by Halsey from Task Force 34 (which was engaged in the Battle of Cape Engaño) and was sailing south towards San Bernardino Strait.  The Americans got there just three hours after Kurita had escaped through the Straight.  So instead of an epic clash between the Yamato and the Iowa / New Jersey pair, the last dreadnought-versus-dreadnought engagement in history actually ended up being the Battle of Surigao Strait, which was fought a few hours before the start of the Battle of Samar.

By adding a couple of extra might-have-beens to this scenario, we get an even more interesting situation.  The brand-new Iowa-class battleship Wisconsin arrived at Ulithi (in the Caroline Islands) on December 9, 1944, and on that date joined Halsey’s 3rd Fleet.  Her equally new sister ship Missouri arrived at Ulithi on January 13, 1945.  Had both vessels reached the western Pacific just a few weeks earlier, they could very well have been operating alongside Iowa and Jew Jersey during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.  On the Japanese side, Kurita’s Center Force had originally included both of the Yamato-class battleships: Yamato and Musashi.  The latter ship, however, had been sunk by US carrier planes at the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea, one day before the Battle of Samar.  So: if Musashi hadn’t been sunk on the 24th, if Wisconsin and Missouri had joined Halsey a couple of months ahead of schedule, and if TG 34.5 had intercepted Kurita’s Center Force instead of missing it by three hours, the result would have been a slugfest between two Yamato-class battleships and four Iowa-class battleships.

Spectacular Marc. Great research and inferesting read of a “what if”.

The innocent-sounding name “the Twenty Committee” which was given to a British wartime management group was a kind of cryptic joke-within-a-joke, even though its purpose was deadly serious.  The “twenty” part was a misleading reference to “XX”, which is the number 20 expressed in Roman numerals.  The “XX”, however, wasn’t actually a Roman numeral; it was a sly allusion to the phrase “double cross,” which means to betray someone.  The Twenty Committee’s job was to oversee the Double-Cross System (or XX System), an MI5 counterespionage scheme which took control of German agents operating in Britain during WWII and turned them into double agents.  Captured German spies tended to find the prospect of working for MI5 preferable to the alternative of being stood up in front of a brick wall at dawn and summarily executed for espionnage.

You can thank the Greatest generation for Folgers and SPAM, although originally ration for the troops, both continued after the war due in part to returning GI’s conscious or sub-conscious fondness and consumption of both.

Similarly, WWI GIs learned to appreciate doughnuts while consuming them in England thanks to Red Cross workers serving them.

So the next time you have coffee and doughnuts remember to thank two world wars.

I found out something neat at Pearl Harbor.
When Adm. Nimitz took over at Pearl Harbor he was surprised to see that the runway’s and Petrol storage facilities were untouched. He was puzzled .
Later to find out after going threw Japanese documents when the war was over, that Yamamoto’s plans were to capture the Naval and Airbase and to use the fuel that was there.
If the Carriers were in port along with the BB’s  and the landing force was there with them at that time I think they would be speaking Japanese there today.
The Japanese High Command changed Yamamoto’s original attack plan to exclude the landing forces and send them to the Philippines to capture the oil fields there…Hawai’i wasn’t a state until 1959.
Another what if that could have changed the war

During WWII, Germany printed massive quantities of counterfeit British £5, £10, £20, and £50 banknotes as part of a secret plan (Operation Bernhard) to create economic chaos in Britain by flooding it with fake currency so perfectly forged that it was almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

The Canadian WWII corvette HMCS Wetaskiwin (named after a town in Alberta whose own name comes from a Cree word meaning “the hills where peace was made”) had an unofficial badge painted on the gunshield of her 4-inch gun, in the same way that bomber crews were fond of painting nose art on their planes.  Wetaskiwin’s badge was a large queen-of-hearts playing card showing a cartoon picture of a crowned lady falling on her posterior into a puddle of water – a joking reference to the ship’s nickname “Wet-A$$ Queen”.

Radio frequency-hopping, the basis of modern spread-spectrum communications technology (exemplified by Bluetooth), was co-invented during WWII by the famous Austro-American actress Hedy Lamarr, who some years earlier had scandalized movie audiences by appearing in one of the first mainstream films to depict complete female nudity.  She and her co-inventor, composer George Antheil, pitched their 1942 patent to the U.S. Navy as a secret communication method, but the U.S. military didn’t start using the technology until the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, after the patent had expired.

I believe you can read this in the Longest Day, and that’s where I remember it.

Koreans served the Germans and were captured in Normandy when the Allies landed.  In total, they served 3 countries:

Conscripted by Japan
Captured by the Russians and pressed into service.
Captured by the Germans from the Russians and forced to defend the Atlantic Seawall.

http://thomo.coldie.net/wargaming/korean-soldiers-in-ww2-german-army

I think Stephen Ambrose referenced it as well. Although a great author, Ambrose has been known to plagiarize other author’s work from time to time and was factually incorrect on other stuff. So whether he researched this tidbit himself or just saw it in the Longest Day and stuck it in one of his books can be debated.

@seththenewb:

I think Stephen Ambrose referenced it as well. Although a great author, Ambrose has been known to plagiarize other author’s work from time to time and was factually incorrect on other stuff. So whether he researched this tidbit himself or just saw it in the Longest Day and stuck it in one of his books can be debated.

True enough, I just thought that was the book I first read it in.  Maybe in whatever Ambrose’s was as well, I read both books.

Either way, I don’t think he needs to “research” every fact, no matter how odd or obscure.

@Jermofoot:

I believe you can read this in the Longest Day, and that’s where I remember it.

Koreans served the Germans and were captured in Normandy when the Allies landed.  In total, they served 3 countries:

Conscripted by Japan
Captured by the Russians and pressed into service.
Captured by the Germans from the Russians and forced to defend the Atlantic Seawall.

http://thomo.coldie.net/wargaming/korean-soldiers-in-ww2-german-army

That is about 9.080 Kilometer away from Home!!..And that is only estimated from Caen to Seoul…Rough!!!

@Jermofoot:

@seththenewb:

I think Stephen Ambrose referenced it as well. Although a great author, Ambrose has been known to plagiarize other author’s work from time to time and was factually incorrect on other stuff. So whether he researched this tidbit himself or just saw it in the Longest Day and stuck it in one of his books can be debated.

True enough, I just thought that was the book I first read it in.  Maybe in whatever Ambrose’s was as well, I read both books.

Either way, I don’t think he needs to “research” every fact, no matter how odd or obscure.

Oh don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of Ambrose’s books. I think he’s a pretty good author and I still read his books as I usually find them pretty engaging and he has a knack for making the stories come out of the page. I just figured I’d caveat it as it caught me off guard when I realized some of the issues others have brought up.

And Longest Day came out quiet a bit earlier than Ambrose’s books.  :-D

The original objective of Fall Gelb was to take the belgian coastline and northern france, so germany could fight a more effective air and sea campaign against britain.

Hitler was scared that france would preemptively occupy belgium, so he wanted to take it first.

I give you the most inept ship of WWII, USS William D. Porter (DD-579) or Willie Dee.

During her ill-fated career she:

• Dragged her anchor across a friendly ship as she attempted to leave port
• Accidently dropped a live depth charge drop into the ocean that could’ve sunk her and coincidently placed FDR at some small risk
• Fired a live torpedo at the USS Iowa while FDR was on his way to the Tehran Conference
• Subsequently became the first USN ship to have it’s ENTIRE crew arrested
• Was exiled to the Aleutians for a year
• Fired on the base commander’s garden while exiled
• Riddled USS Luce with gunfire during the battle for Okinawa
• Was often greeted with the phrase ‘Don’t Shoot We’re Republicans’
• Was sunk by a kamikaze plane that was shot down, entered the water, and went under the destroyer before blowing up.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19637_the-5-craziest-war-stories-all-happened-same-ship.html

@seththenewb:

@Jermofoot:

@seththenewb:

I think Stephen Ambrose referenced it as well. Although a great author, Ambrose has been known to plagiarize other author’s work from time to time and was factually incorrect on other stuff. So whether he researched this tidbit himself or just saw it in the Longest Day and stuck it in one of his books can be debated.

True enough, I just thought that was the book I first read it in.  Maybe in whatever Ambrose’s was as well, I read both books.

Either way, I don’t think he needs to “research” every fact, no matter how odd or obscure.

Oh don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of Ambrose’s books. I think he’s a pretty good author and I still read his books as I usually find them pretty engaging and he has a knack for making the stories come out of the page. I just figured I’d caveat it as it caught me off guard when I realized some of the issues others have brought up.

And Longest Day came out quiet a bit earlier than Ambrose’s books.  :-D

I prefer Cornelius Ryan to Ambrose, but enjoy both just the same.  I’ve come across the criticism of Ambrose, but not sure the veracity of the claims.

And as entertaining as the Longest Day was, I think I enjoyed The Last Battle the most followed closely behind with A Bridge Too Far (which I enjoy that movie more than the Longest Day as well).

@seththenewb:

I give you the most inept ship of WWII, USS William D. Porter (DD-579) or Willie Dee.

During her ill-fated career she:

• Dragged her anchor across a friendly ship as she attempted to leave port
• Accidently dropped a live depth charge drop into the ocean that could’ve sunk her and coincidently placed FDR at some small risk
• Fired a live torpedo at the USS Iowa while FDR was on his way to the Tehran Conference
• Subsequently became the first USN ship to have it’s ENTIRE crew arrested
• Was exiled to the Aleutians for a year
• Fired on the base commander’s garden while exiled
• Riddled USS Luce with gunfire during the battle for Okinawa
• Was often greeted with the phrase ‘Don’t Shoot We’re Republicans’
• Was sunk by a kamikaze plane that was shot down, entered the water, and went under the destroyer before blowing up.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19637_the-5-craziest-war-stories-all-happened-same-ship.html

It’s like the Animal House version of a WW2 navy ship.

Germany’s WWII V-2 rockets were the first human-built objects to cross the Kármán line, the altitude commonly used to define the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.  The Kármán line, which lies at an altitude of 100 kilometres (62 miles) above the Earth’s sea level, is the point at which the atmosphere becomes so thin that a winged aircraft would have to travel at orbital velocity to obtain enough aerodynamic lift to stay airborne, thus marking the point at which aeronautical flight ends for practical purposes and spaceflight begins.

Here’s a odd WWII-related story I’ve just come across on Wikipedia:

Clark Eldridge (1896–1990) was one of the engineers who designed the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge. […] Federal officials decided that Eldridge’s design was too expensive, so they required the Washington State Toll Bridge Authority to hire noted suspension bridge engineer Leon Moisseiff of New York as a consultant. Moisseiff proposed shallower supports; his approach meant a slimmer, more elegant design, and also reduced the construction costs.  Moisseiff’s design won out. When the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (known as Galloping Gertie) collapsed in 1940, Eldridge accepted some of the blame. In late 1941 Eldridge worked for the U.S. Navy on Guam when World War II began. He was captured by the Japanese and spent the remainder of the war, three years and nine months, as a POW in a prisoner of war camp in Japan. There he was recognized by a Japanese officer who had studied in America; he came up to Eldrige and said bluntly, ‘Tacoma Bridge!’"

Germany had been developing the Landkreuzer P.1500 Monster tank. As the name indicates, this tank weighed 1500 tons. That’s 50 times the weight of a Sherman! The P.1500 Monster fired 800mm shells; with each shell weighing about 25% as much as a Sherman. It would have also featured two 150mm secondary guns. These secondary guns were larger than the primary guns of almost any other WWII era tank.

The P.1500 was intended to be powered with four diesel engines–the same kind of diesels used to power U-boats. Because this tank would have been too heavy to cross bridges, it would have driven along the riverbed bottom; while using a snorkel to provide air to its engine. The Monster would have had a crew of over 100.

Albert Speer cancelled this tank in 1943. He also canceled the slightly smaller P1000 Ratt.

@KurtGodel7:

Germany had been developing the Landkreuzer P.1500 Monster tank. As the name indicates, this tank weighed 1500 tons. That’s 50 times the weight of a Sherman! The P.1500 Monster fired 800mm shells; with each shell weighing about 25% as much as a Sherman. It would have also featured two 150mm secondary guns. These secondary guns were larger than the primary guns of almost any other WWII era tank.

The P.1500 was intended to be powered with four diesel engines–the same kind of diesels used to power U-boats. Because this tank would have been too heavy to cross bridges, it would have driven along the riverbed bottom; while using a snorkel to provide air to its engine. The Monster would have had a crew of over 100.

The P.1500 concept essentially involved arming a tank with an 800mm gun similar to the Schwerer Gustav and Dora 800mm railway guns, which I believe were the largest-caliber artillery pieces ever used in combat.  Hitler also once proposed building battleships armed with 800mm guns.  He allowed himself to be dissuaded from that project when his admirals pointed out that a ship large enough to carry such monstrous guns would be too big to fit in any existing German harbour.

It should also be noted that an 800mm gun would be completely useless for salvo firing at sea by a moving ship against a moving target.  In order to hit an enemy ship, a gun-armed vessel has to be able to shoot, observe where the shells land relative to the target, quickly correct its aim, and shoot again before the movement of the two ships invalidates the computed firing solution.  The 16-inch guns of the Iowa class battleships could, with a well-drilled turret crew, be fired every 30 seconds, and the 18.1-inch guns of the Yamato class battleships could be fired every 45 seconds, which is adequate for naval combat.  The Gustav/Dora 800mm (31-inch) guns – which had a rate of fire of 1 round every 30 to 45 minutes – were sixty times slower, and thus at best would only have had practical use (if 14 rounds per day can be called “practical”) as shore-bombardment vessels.