Favorite WWII Ship

I don’t think so much was a French duping as it was the unrestricted sub warfare in the Atlantic shipping lanes, involving a lot of US ships.  But hey, wars have been fought over less, and I would not be in the least bit surprised by propaganda usage.

@CWO:

Italy didn’t hold on to British Somalia for very long.  Britain recaptured it in early 1941, and likewise liberated Ethiopia and conquered Italian Somaliland.  Germany didn’t save Italy’s rear end in that part of Africa, nor did it even intervene as far as I know;

I believe the Suez Canal was closed  :wink:

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

@Der:

Mine was probably one of the books in the Time-life series published about WWII.

Same, my Great-Grandfather had a bunch of those Time-life books that he gave to me.

I found a hypothetical scenario that pitted the Richelieu & Jean Bart against the 11" KM battlecruisers…suprisingly it was ugly for the French.  The scenario claimed to be using the Dunkerque and Strasbourg with 13" guns, but looking “under the hood” they were actually using the Jean Bart/Richelieu and their 15" guns.  Since the editor doesn’t work for me I did text edits to put in the actual French BC’s with their appropriate arms, ammunition quantities, and hull/flotation hit points.

The French get mauled!  It isn’t even close after playing it from both sides several times.  (No wonder the designer fudged in French BB’s with BC names…it was an attempt to balance the scenario.)  The heavier armour belt/turrets of the German boats seem to handle the 13" French guns, while the fast firing 11" German guns soon take out the turrets and/or magazine of the French ships.  In about 1/4 of the engagements one of my French boats pulled a “Hood” early in the exchange from about 13,000 yards (where the Kriegsmarine ships couldn’t even identify her yet but were reliably hitting.)  Boom! went the entire magazine.

I don’t know if there is some sort of artificial difference in the 3D model, if it is a reflection of the gunnery bonus for the Germans in the game, a particular range band, or even the 5.9" secondary guns of the KM scoring (vs. 5.1" for the French), but those quad turrets and thinner belt are proving a very brittle instrument of war.

And after you knock out the French guns, the stern chase is a breeze for the Germans!

One of my favorites is the E-75 Standardpanzer. Germany’s Entwicklung series was intended to have been a replacement for its existing tank designs. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entwicklung_series . The Entwicklung series tanks were intended to be simpler, easier-to-produce, more mechanically reliable versions of the tanks they replaced. The series ranged from the E-5 (5 - 10 ton light tanks and armored reconnaissance vehicles) to the E-100 (a 100 ton successor to the Maus).

The E-75 was the intended successor to the Tiger 2 (a.k.a. the King Tiger). The E-75 was significantly better armed and better armored than the Soviets’ IS-2. However, the E-series tanks were still in the prototype phase when the war ended.

@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.

My bad of course '43!!

here are two more of my favorites…

Hetzer  / agitator          and        Marder

180px-Jagdpanzer_38_Hetzer_1.jpg
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