Favorite WW2 Fighter Plane

For me, it would depend on if I was the pilot, or the air marshall…

Pilot - BF109. The later spits outperformed the later bf’s, but 1940, in a straight dogfight, the 109.

BUT…
If I was looking at it and commanding at the high level, the hurricane. Easy to fix, easy to produce, fast turn around for reload/refuel, easier to train on, fighting over your own territory with a full tank. Yep - the hurricane.

Besides anyone with knowledge knows that Kam. Pilots were all volunteers and only existed out of desperation.

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.

Here’s what I want:

A Japanese battleship that can launch German V2 rockets loaded with American A-bombs.  After annihilating the enemy cities with my atomic rockets I will sail in and land my British soldiers equipped with Russian T34-85s to finish the extermination.

@abworsham4

Any of the Panzer aces-they truly destroyed a lot of tanks.

Seriously though, I would choose the Sturmtiger-I just find it interesting how it launches rocket propelled mortars rather than normal shells, even if the vehicle was never used as intended.

May 18- German withdrawal from Monte Cassino.

If you’re looking at physically discernible traits in posterity (i.e., the baby boom generation), I’d say they would require considerable epigenetic or even genetic alterations in the parents (i.e., the people living there at the time). That’s not a very likely effect from such levels of pollution. If anyone was affected in any way, it seems more probable that their overall health would suffer to some degree, but it would probably be difficult to attribute that to any specific factor. An extensive epidemiological study may be able to demonstrate some effects, but I don’t know whether anybody has done one.

Also, it’s uncertain how much of the oil even reached the beaches or the fishing grounds. It seems obvious that the marine ecosystem could handle less oil, over a much longer period of time, and at various locations, much better than the massive BP spill. So a lot of that WWII tanker oil may have evaporated, or sunk to the bottom, or gone down with the ship and slowly dissipated.

I don’t think that the war itself would have played a major role in deciding to either clean up or ignore any oil that may have landed on the beaches. If the oil would have arrived in a town like, say, Biloxi, then people would have probably cleaned it up because it posed a direct threat to the livelihood of the local fishermen. On the other hand, if it would have landed in a remote location, it would likely have been ignored, simply because environmental awareness was not exactly a major concern in the 1940’s, war or no war.

In each case, I’m only speculating - we’d need to look for contemporary reports to know the truth.

And of course, the petroleum flavor does little for the shrimps, so I don’t think too many were eaten.  :-)

@Fishmoto37:

All of the above made important contributions to the war effort. Which one do you think contibuted the most. Do you think that there is one fighter that the U.S. could not have done without?

The voting is now closed and the P51 is the winner by 3 votes. Although there was very little commentary as to why.