WWII–-75th ANNIVERSARY DISCUSSION--#29---DECEMBER 1941 #3

@DiegoMaxwell

Congratulations to Mr. Prewitt. It should be noted, however, that France’s highest order of merit is called the Legion of Honour (Légion d’honneur), not the Legion of Armour, and also that France doesn’t actually have knighthoods in the same sense as Britain does. “Chevalier” (knight) is indeed one of the Legion of Honour’s five levels, and the name is a holdover from the days when France still had an aristocracy, but the French nobility system went out the window with the French Revolution. I once saw a series of amusing cartoons depicting what life in France would be like today if the Bourbon monarchy hadn’t fallen, and one of them showed an irate air traveler standing at the ticket counter of “Royal Air France” and telling the ticket agent “But I’m a baron and I have a confirmed reservation!” The agent replies, “I’m sorry, sir, but the Duke of So-and-so has precedence over you, so we gave him your seat.” In fairness, the same sort of thing actually happens in real-life republican France. A few years ago, there was scandal involving one of the major D-Day anniversaries (I think it was the 50th one), when the French government contacted various hotels in Normany and appropriated some of their existing reservations so that various French officials could have rooms for the event. Some of those rooms, however, had been reserved by foreign veterans of the D-Day invasion. When the story broke on the front page of French newspapers (under such headlines as “Our Liberators Insulted!”), public opinion was outraged and the French government beat a hasty retreat. The prevailing editorial opinion over this affair was: Do this to our own citizens if you want, but don’t do this to the heroes who ended the occupation of France.

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

The Second Battle of Kharkov was an Axis counter-offensive in the region around Kharkov (now Kharkiv)[8] against the Red Army Izium bridgehead offensive conducted 12–28 May 1942, on the Eastern Front during World War II. Its objective was to eliminate the Izium bridgehead over Seversky Donets or the “Barvenkovo bulge” (Russian: Барвенковский выступ) which was one of the Soviet offensive’s staging areas. After a winter counter-offensive that drove German troops away from Moscow and also depleted the Red Army’s reserves, the Kharkov offensive was a new Soviet attempt to expand upon their strategic initiative, although it failed to secure a significant element of surprise.

On 12 May 1942, Soviet forces under the command of Marshal Semyon Timoshenko launched an offensive against the German 6th Army from a salient established during the winter counter-offensive. After initial promising signs, the offensive was stopped by German counterattacks. Critical errors by several staff officers and by Joseph Stalin, who failed to accurately estimate the 6th Army’s potential and overestimated their own newly trained forces, led to a German pincer attack which cut off advancing Soviet troops from the rest of the front. The operation caused almost 300,000 Soviet casualties compared to just 20,000 for the Germans and their allies.

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

Was Stalin right to order this operation against oncoming German forces on the Eastern front?

It looked like a PT-6. They must be pretty similar.

@MrMalachiCrunch:

I saw this movie u-571 where the US navy captured a german submarine.  The movie made a great deal of money.  Obviously, in the movie the US navy was very heroic and therefore it all must be true, cause it was in a movie see……

From wiki on that incident…

U-571 is a 2000 film directed by Jonathan Mostow, and starring Matthew McConaughey, Bill Paxton, Harvey Keitel, Thomas Kretschmann, Jon Bon Jovi, Jack Noseworthy, Will Estes, and Tom Guiry. In the film, a World War II German submarine is boarded in 1942 by disguised United States Navy submariners seeking to capture her Enigma cipher machine.
The film was financially successful and generally well-received by critics in the USA[1] and won an Academy Award for sound editing.[2] The fictitious plot attracted substantial criticism since, in reality, it was British personnel from HMS Bulldog who first captured a naval Enigma machine (from U-110 in the North Atlantic in May 1941), long before the United States entered the war. A German U-boat crew is portrayed in a negative light (See the U-852 story below.) The anger over the inaccuracies even reached the British Parliament, where Prime Minister Tony Blair stated that the film was an “affront” to British sailors.[3]
The real U-571 was never involved in any such events, was not captured, and was in fact sunk in January 1944, off Ireland, by a Short Sunderland flying boat from No. 461 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force.

The movie was not enjoyable for me, thought it was a decent action movie, poor war movie.

Here’s a weapon which could more properly be described as “low-profile” rather than underrated: the proximity-fused anti-aircraft artillery shell.  Proximity fuses were essentially miniature radar sets, built small enough to fit in a shell and tough enough to withstand the tremendous kick of being fired from a gun.  They were quite a technical achievement and they increased the chance that a shell would bring down an airplane even if it didn’t hit it directly.  The Americans kept the proximity fuse very hush-hush; if I recall correctly, it was restricted to being used at sea, where unexploded shells couldn’t be recovered by the enemy and studied for their secrets.

Another effective weapon whose details were kept secret from the American public was the shaped-charge warhead.  I own a laminated WWII magazine advertisement page which tells Americans about a revolutionary new anti-armour weapon called the bazooka; it makes the point that GIs are finding it very effective against German tanks, but it adds that the exact details of how it works and what it looks like can’t be revealed.  As it happens, the Germans knew all about the Munroe Effect (discovered as far back as the 19th century) and had their own shaped-charge anti-tank weapon: the Panzerfaust.  An amusing example of the public on your side being kept in the dark more than the military people on the enemy side.

@ABWorsham:

Great post Black Fox.

Reading about the air war in the Pacific, if an aircraft was off a few degrees could lead to a watery grave hundreds of miles out in the vast Ocean.

Thanks

Thinking of the Pacific.  I knew a guy who was a B-25 waist gunner in the Pacific during WWII.  He told me a story where his squadron was sharing the air field with Richard I Bong when he was flying the P-38.  At the time their version had the eight .50 cal in the nose.  He said those guns we just vicious.  However, the high humidity was causing problems with the electrical circuits that controlled the guns.  When it got bad enough the moisture would connect the firing circuits and the guns would sometimes start firing by themselves.  One day they were getting ready for a mission.  Just as they were walking out to the planes, one of the P-38s guns went off.  The airplane starting bouncing and spreading lead all over the field.  It hit a few other planes and their guns went off too.  At this point they now had 5 fully load P-38 with guns just blazing away and planes just started exploding all over the place.  He said by the time it was all over, they had 45 planes destroyed on the ground!  I’m sure this is just one of many such incidents that added to those mind blowing statistics.

I played WaW once. Didn’t like it much. But I’ll give it another try if you think it is worth it.
  What do you like about it?
  Crazy Ivan