New WWII Movie on the Way

@barnee said in WWII Mohawk Code-Talkers:

@CWO-Marc

On a side note, the Tlingit’s were/are badasses. They kicked ass on the russians and were hired to pack 200lb packs up the chilkoot trail. They all seem to be naturally strong. Probably weeded out the weak genes long ago : )

I saw something similar in a 1950s US Army film about the Korean War, part of which showed UN troops employing locals as porters to haul impressively large loads of supplies and equipment up steep trails to hilltop positions.

Another example of a simple-yet-sophisticated solution which the Americans used to address a WWII problem was the Marston Mat, which was conceptually similar to those Meccano construction sets for kids. It required heavy industry to manufacture it in the required huge quantities, but the device itself was mechanically straightforward: standardized sheets of steel mesh which could be laid down in an interlocking pattern, at whatever length and width was desired, to construct runways for aircraft in places where they were needed in a hurry, or in remote locations like Alaska and the Pacific Islands. The Marston Mat, combined with the use of heavy equipment like backhoes and bulldozers – which were commonplace in the US civilian construction industry – and chainsaws, allowed the Navy’s SeaBees (in the Pacific) and the Army’s Corps of Engineers (in Alaska) to turn an area of wilderness into an operational runway in just a few days.

Here’s a great project that a filmmaker has been working on. And I think it’s especially nice that he’s a young man, not someone from a generation closer to WWII.

Thursday, February 28, 2019 6:38AM EST

A young American filmmaker is on a mission to interview every last Second World War veteran to share the stories of as many combat veterans as possible – before it is too late.

Rishi Sharma has spent the past three years documenting the lives of living Second World War veterans in the U.S., U.K. and Canada for his non-profit organization Heroes of the Second World War.

The average age of Second World War vet is now 93 years old, and the number of survivors is slowly diminishing with the passing of time.

After three years of visiting seniors’ homes to record veterans’ stories, Sharma says has filmed more than a thousand interviews.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/american-filmmaker-on-a-mission-to-interview-every-last-second-world-war-veteran-1.4316271

Part of the problem that the US Navy ran into when it went to war was that – like many military forces before or since – it had to learn some things for itself before it believed them.  The British had over two years of experience fighting the Battle of the Atlantic at that point, but the Americans didn’t feel that they needed any advice from them on the matter.  It didn’t help that Admiral Ernest J. King was an Anglophobe, in addition to having a generally abrasive personality.  (His wife reputedly once said: “Ernie is the most even-tempered man I’ve ever met.  He’s always in a foul mood.”)  As a result, the Americans made mistakes in their early ASW methods of operations which could have been avoided.  In fairness, the US Army had similar learning-curve problems in North Africa, notably at Kasserine Pass if I remember correctly.

The Barbarossa aspect of this could be argued two ways. Would a six week head start been to Germany’s benefit? The attack caught the Soviet Union completely off guard, and resulted in the rapid encirclement and surrender of millions of Soviet soldiers. Germany achieved a 10:1 exchange rate during Barbarossa.

The problem with starting all that six weeks earlier was that spring rains were worse than usual that year, and persisted later into the spring than expected. The effect of surprise would, at least initially, have been largely counteracted by muddy roads. That would have given the Red Army the chance to get the worst of the surprise over with, and at least begin the process of getting its legs back underneath itself, at a time when Germany could not take maximum advantage of the situation. It’s possible that they could have accelerated the beginning of Barbarossa by a week or two without running into the muddy roads problem. But not six weeks.

A second point to bear in mind is the value of not having the British military on the European mainland. Italy might have eventually been able to defeat the Greek army. But as Britain sent more and more reinforcements to Greece, the combined Anglo-Greek force would have quickly become too tough a nut for Italy to crack. Britain could draw troops not just from its home islands, but also from its enormous colonial empire. The last thing the Axis needed was for Egyptian or Indian soldiers to gain a stronghold in the Balkans. If that force grew strong enough Germany might eventually have been forced into a two front land war, even without American involvement. There was also–as I mentioned earlier–an absolute necessity to keep British bombers from bombing Romanian oilfields. Without that oil the German war machine could not function.

I don’t think that the invasion of Greece was responsible for the full six week delay in Barbarossa. If Hitler had gone for Greece only, maybe it would only have been a three to four week delay. That’s acceptable due to the late spring rains. Unfortunately for the Axis, the government of Yugoslavia was overthrown in a military coup. As Hoover pointed out in his book, FDR encouraged that coup by falsely promising members of the Yugoslav military that, if they overthrew their own government, the United States would provide military aid against German retaliation. With perfect foresight, the Germans would have allowed Yugoslavia to remain neutral, instead of pressuring it to join the Axis.

But let’s say their foresight wasn’t quite as good as that decision would have implied. The next-best decision would have been to launch Barbarossa even while mopping up opposition in Yugoslavia and/or Greece.

My answer is NO!
It was not neccessary, but the people want it!
All the problems could have been solved, but the people stirred it up so that another war was uninevitable.
The Germans never had a need for more Lebensraum, that was A.H’s dream.
The russians never had a need of spreading communism, but Stalin felt the need for it.
The americans never wanted a war but Rosewelt thought it would be better for America to expand the outerim territorys.
Everybody else was just soaked in in this filthy war and joined a side as nation they thought would win.
Are you really hot for war?
Do you think a war today like ww2 would solve all the issues?
Is a war neccessary?

No…

If you recognize someone as looking like Albert Kesselring in a drive thru, you might be a WW2 junkie.

@Gargantua:

I would take chesty 1 on 1.

So long as I get a bayonet on my flamethrower!

Garg,

––While I’m usually on your side,…I don’t think you’d stand a chance against “Chesty” Puller even if you had a
16" naval gun strapped to you back!  :-o

“Tall Paul”

@strategic:

I may would have been a proponent of continuing the war to Moscow to obliterate Stalin after 1945, so communism would be nothing but a fad and dead.

If I remember correctly, the USSR had something like 300 divisions in Eastern Europe at the time of the Potsdam Conference – a rather large figure compared to what the Anglo-Americans had in Western Europe.  I doubt the Americans and the British could have beaten those kinds of numbers.  I also don’t imagine that a radical move like expending one of America’s rare and priceless A-bombs on Moscow would have done anything other than get those 300 veteran Soviet divisions (who had just helped whip the Wehrmacht) really, really angry at them.  The US and the UK being democracies, they would have also found it a trifle hard to convince their war-weary voters and servicemen to start a whole new war against the country which had just helped them defeat Nazi Germany, and which was getting ready to help them finish off militarist Japan.

At any rate, if you exclude Cuba and China and North Korea, Communism today is in fact pretty much a dying fad…espcially when you consider the amount of free-market capitalism with which China has been flirting for the past decade or so.