Topics created by CWO Marc

Good to see you back. Thanks for reply. I do have what your talking about on old map and my new map. Axis control Belgian Congo receive 4 icps. Other 3 is from USA.
We don’t have the atom bomb but allies get to start game with these 4 icps but axis can get it too. Just a small house rule anyway.
97605C85-9FA0-46E4-A372-E0EC9899C0C6.jpeg C9D9ED4D-6642-42EB-BDC7-93A951074384.jpeg

@CWO-Marc

heh heh good one : ) I could just imagine if it landed in the yard and somebody saw it. A stuff bunny falling out of the sky ?! LOL !

@barnee said in Wrecks of WWII Carriers Kaga and Akagi Located:

@CWO-Marc
yea Spruance steaming away at night was a smart move. I wonder if Halsey was in the same situation if he would have. I kinda doubt it

Agreed. Ray Spruance was an excellent combat officer – he and Halsey spent the last few years of WWII alternating command of the 5th Fleet / 3rd Fleet, which was actually the same force whose name got switched every time the two admirals rotated, much to the confusion of Japanese naval intelligence – but he was very different from Bill Halsey in terms of style and personality. Spruance was precise and analytical; he certainly didn’t lack aggressiveness (when he made a decision to attack, he sent in “everything that wasn’t bolted to the flight deck”), but before making his decision to attack he would carefully weigh all the factors of the situation, which sometimes translated into over-cautiousness. Halsey was a hell-for-leather type – sort of the naval counterpart of George Patton – whose fighting spirit greatly inspired his men (the enlisted sailors loved him, not least for the fact that he could drink and swear as well as any of them), but this sometimes translated into recklessness. After the war, someone – I think it was Spruance himself – said that it would have been better if Halsey has been in command at the Battle of the Philippine Sea (where the IJN lost hundred of planes and pilots, but managed to save the bulk of its fleet) and if Spruance had been in command at the Battle of Leyte Gulf (where Halsey fell for a Japanese decoy operation, and compounded his error by leaving no covering force to guard the San Bernardino Straight).

@CWO-Marc said in UK World War Two Bombing Site Map:

German bombers attacked the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh on 16 October 1939. The last raid was a V2 rocket attack near Iwade in Kent on 29 March 1945.

Thanks for the interesting link!

The map seems to be offline right now ‘due to high demand’, but the data can still be accessed. And indicate that the first ‘attack’ actually consisted of two unexploded shells on 6 September 1939. Also, the last raid was actually a V1 according to: https://www.flickr.com/photos/22124479@N03/5001363807
The Wikipedia article on the V1 has Datchworth as its final British target, however. And the dataset lists 7 attacks on that day, apparently listing Datchworth as ‘Batchworth’.

Here’s an interesting news story from yesterday. For technology buffs, note that Mr. Smoyer posed in front of a Sherman tank for the occasion (which was a nice touch), but that the tank in which he served as a gunner, and with which he destroyed a Panther, was a Pershing, a late-war 90mm-gunned well-armoured US tank which could take on the Panther on better terms than the thinly-armoured 75mm-gunned Sherman.

Published Wednesday, September 18, 201
World War II veteran Clarence Smoyer, 96, receives the Bronze Star from U.S. Army Maj. Peter Semanoff at the World War II Memorial, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2019, in Washington. Smoyer fought with the U.S. Army’s 3rd Armored Division, nicknamed the Spearhead Division. In 1945, he defeated a German Panther tank near the cathedral in Cologne, Germany — a dramatic duel filmed by an Army cameraman that was seen all over the world.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/the-u-s-hero-of-cologne-receives-his-bronze-star-75-years-late-1.4599606

@barnee said in Churchill-Bradley Hypothetical Incident:

@captainwalker thanks for this. I’ve heard of the KV but never actually saw a picture of one this close up, that I recognized anyway. I know it was a heavier tank than the T-34 but thought it would’ve had a longer barrel. Maybe the picture is is a bit deceptive in that regard. Idk. I’ve read where they were quite the terrors on the battlefield

The picture isn’t deceptive. The KV-1 may have looked impressive in terms of sheer size and weight, and it was very tough in terms of armour protection, but it lacked firepower. To put things in perspective: the original version of the Panzer IV, which was intended to be a heavy infantry-support tank, was similarly armed with a short-barreled 75mm gun, with a barrel length of 48 calibers. The KV-1 gun had an almost identical caliber (76.2mm), but it was appreciably shorter, at 42.5 calibers, which meant a lower muzzle velocity. At the opposite extreme, the future Panzer V Panther’s high-velocity 75mm gun was an impressive 70 calibers in length.

@SS-GEN yes they are my victory city markers, a nail, in a 1/2 wood plug (available at any hardware store) with a flag printed in colour. I use the same 1/2 plugs as flight stands, by adding a dress making pin, 1 inch for fighters, 1.25 inches for bombers, 1.5 inches for tactical fighters. If you cut the heads of the pins after hammering them into the plugs, you can heat them with a candle to lance the planes… works great.

As a follow-up to the original post, by the way, it’s not surprising that the bomb went off spontaneously (which is what the news story seems to indicate). Explosives can become unstable over time, which is one reason why certain types of souvenirs sometimes kept by veterans are potentially dangerous. I read a news story a few years ago about a woman who was going through the personal possessions of her father (a WWII vet) after he passed away, and who found an unexploded hand grenade in one of his desk drawers. She very sensibly called the police.

One hundred years ago today, the German High Seas Fleet, which was interned at Scapa Flow, scuttled itself, sending 52 of the 74 ships to the bottom. Peace talks to formally end WWI (which technically was still in progress, since the armistice of November 11, 1918, was a cease-fire rather than a surrender) were dragging on, and the interned German sailors were worried that their ships were going to be seized outright, so it was ultimately decided to sink them in a final gesture of defiance to keep them out of enemy hands.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-48717820?intlink_from_url=&link_location=live-reporting-story

@CWO-Marc

yea is real surprising King didn’t convoy from the get go. USA did the same thing in WWI, not learning from their allies. A bunch of guys got slaughtered because of it.

A news story about some of the secret behind-the-scenes work (signals intelligence and radio navigation) done by the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service (the Wrens) during WWII.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/d-day-code-breakers-women-1.5159789

@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.

As a footnote: I once read a book on the Doolittle Raid in which the author commented that James Doolittle’s family name was somewhat ironic because, on the contrary to “doing little,” the man was actually a powerhouse with a long list of accomplishments in various aviation-related fields, both theoretical and applied. He was, among other things, a test pilot and an aeronautical engineer, a record-setter and a prize winner, with many of these accomplishments pre-dating the outbreak of WWII in 1939 (at which time he was a reserve officer in the Air Corps, having resigned his regular commission in 1930; he returned to active duty in the Air Corps in 1940). WWII added more items to his C.V., the Doolittle Raid being the most famous example but by no means the only one.

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

@CWO-Marc

I probably won’t be able to, since I believe the movie is going to be a summer release and my jacket is on the heavier side, but if the weather is cold enough I will. It currently has the patches for Enterprise and Yorktown shown above. Only reason I haven’t put on the Hornet one is that it is rather large and I have limited real estate to work with. I may just try to find a smaller one. As you can imagine, there are few online retailers selling replica ship patches from World War II.

Very cool, reminds me of the efforts to catalog and examine all the fortifications and pillboxes of the Invasion Scare era.

After logging in this morning it works here, too. So it’s indeed a matter of reloading.

| @crockett36:

that was kind of random.  sorry, a momentary lapse of reason.  Niagara Falls, slowly I turned . . . .

Step by Step, Inch by Inch . . . .

Blood ! Rivers of Blood !!! |

I’m beginning to think Nazis and Zombies go together like Peanut Butter and Jelly.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the launch of the British battlecruiser HMS Hood, the Royal Navy’s largest warship during the interwar period, sunk by the Bismarck in 1941, and (much later) the inspiration for the A&A 1941 Allied battleship sculpt.  The BBC story…

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-45270946

…mentions that Hood’s round-the-world cruise in 1923-1924 included a stopover in Canada; I’ve attached below a photo of Hood anchored off Quebec City, with the easily-recognized Chateau Frontenac Hotel (site of the 1943 Quebec Conference involving Churchill, Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister King) in the background.
HMS Hood Quebec City 19 August-2 September 1924.jpg