Posts made by Raunchy The Pirate

Approaching the anniversary, Feb 26th

What are the VC (Victory Conditions)? If you need a navy to reach the 9th VC for victory, then the first turn German AC is the best time to buy it. You need to set up for the future and the other moves of the players are predictiable on turn 1 as they are set in funds and locations, then you know what you are facing round 2.

This also provides flexability for your future advances and defenses. If you aren’t playing for 9+ VC conditions, then I say to heck with a German navy.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/08/14/buchenwald.liberator/index.html

By Wayne Drash
CNN.com senior producer

(CNN) – James Hoyt delivered mail in rural Iowa for more than 30 years. Yet Hoyt had long kept a secret from most of those who knew him best: He was one of the four U.S. soldiers to first see Germany’s Buchenwald concentration camp.

James Hoyt Sr. was one of the four U.S. soldiers to first find the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Hoyt died Monday at his home in Oxford, Iowa, a town of about 700 people where he had lived his entire life. He was 83.

His funeral was Thursday at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Oxford, with about 100 people in attendance. The Rev. Edmond Dunn officiated and recalled time he spent with Hoyt and his wife.

"I used to go over to have lunch with Doris and Jim, and I would sit across from Jim at the kitchen table and think, ‘Before me is a true American hero,’ " he said.

Hoyt had rarely spoken about that day in 1945, but he recently opened up to a journalist.

“There were thousands of bodies piled high. I saw hearts that had been taken from live people in medical experiments,” Hoyt told author Stephen Bloom in a soon-to-be-published book called “The Oxford Project.”

“They said a wife of one of the SS officers – they called her the Bitch of Buchenwald – saw a tattoo she liked on the arm of a prisoner, and had the skin made into a lampshade. I saw that.”  See the horrors of Buchenwald »

Pete Geren, the secretary of the U.S. Army, said the sacrifice Hoyt made for his country so many years ago should never be forgotten.

“It’s important that we don’t allow ourselves to lose him,” Geren told CNN by phone. "It’s the memory of heroes like James Hoyt and the memories of what they’ve done that we must ensure that we keep alive and share with the current generation and future generations.

"Mr. Hoyt, as a young man, saw unspeakable horrors when he was one of the soldiers to discover the Buchenwald concentration camp, and those are experiences as a country and a world we can never forget.

“You think back on a young man 19 years old and to have the experience that he had,” Geren said, his voice dissolving before ever finishing his thought.

The discovery of Buchenwald, on April 11, 1945, began the liberation of more than 21,000 prisoners from one of the largest Nazi concentration camps of World War II.

The official U.S. military account of the liberation called the camp “a symbol of the chill-blooded cruelty of the German Nazi state,” where thousands of political prisoners were starved and “others were burned, beaten, hung and shot to death.”

“There is reason to believe that the prompt arrival of the 6th Armored Division … on the scene saved many hundreds and perhaps thousands of lives,” it said.

As a private first class in the U.S. Army, Hoyt was just 19 when he and his three comrades – Capt. Frederic Keffer, Tech. Sgt. Herbert Gottschalk and Sgt. Harry Ward – found Buchenwald in a well-hidden wooded area of eastern Germany.  See U.S. military documents detailing the liberation »

Hoyt was driving their M8 armored vehicle.

According to military records, Keffer was the officer in command of the six-wheeled armored vehicle that day. The soldiers were part of the Army’s 6th Armored Division near the camp when about 15 SS troopers were captured. It was mid-afternoon.

“At the same time, a group of Russians just escaped from the concentration camp, burst out of the woods attempting to attack the SS men. The Russians were restrained and interrogated,” Maj. Gen. R.W. Grow, the American commander of the 6th Armored Division, wrote in a 1975 letter about the Buchenwald liberation.

Keffer was ordered to take his three comrades and two of the Russian prisoners “as guides to investigate, report and rejoin as rapidly as possible.”

“I took this side journey of about 3 km away from our main force because we kept encountering SS guards and prison inmates, and the latter told us of the large camp to the south,” Keffer wrote in a letter around the 30th anniversary of the liberation.

“We had been told by our intelligence that we might overrun a large prison camp, but we – or at least I – had no idea of either the gigantic size of the camp or of the full extent of the incredible brutality.”

Keffer and Gottschalk, who spoke German, entered the camp through a hole in an electric barbed wire fence. Hoyt and Ward initially stayed at the vehicle.

“We were tumultuously greeted by what I was told were 21,000 men, and what an incredible greeting that was,” Keffer wrote. "I was picked up by arms and legs, thrown into the air, caught, thrown again, caught, thrown, etc., until I had to stop it. I was getting dizzy.

“How the men found such a surge of strength in their emaciated condition was one of those bodily wonders in which the spirit sometimes overcomes all weaknesses of the flesh. My, but it was a great day!”

Keffer said the prisoners, through an underground system, had already taken control of the camp. The four soldiers notified division command to get medical help and food to the prisoners as soon as possible.

The 6th Armored Division newspaper “Armored Attacker” ran a headline on May 5, 1945: “Four 9th AIB Doughs Find Buchenwald.” The article described the discovery as “the worst concentration camp yet to be uncovered by west wall troops.”

Hoyt, a Bronze Star recipient and veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, was the last of the four original liberators to die.

Born May 16, 1925, to a railroad worker and a schoolteacher, James Francis Hoyt Sr. returned to his Iowa hometown after the war and largely kept quiet about the atrocities he saw. He and Doris married in 1949 and had six children. “She’s the love of my life,” he said.

He met Bloom, a journalism professor at the University of Iowa, in recent years and began telling him his story.

Even 63 years after the liberation, Hoyt suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and attended a weekly group therapy session at a Veterans Affairs facility.

“Seeing these things, it changes you. I was a kid,” he said. “Des Moines had been the furthest I’d ever been from home. I still have horrific dreams. Usually someone needs help and I can’t help them. I’m in a situation where I’m trapped and I can’t get out.”

Hoyt was invited to attend the 50th anniversary of the liberation, but he declined. “I didn’t want to bring back those memories.”

“Thinking back, I would have pushed to be a psychologist – if for no other reason than to understand myself better.”

The military documents detailing Hoyt’s involvement in the Buchenwald liberation were discovered in a box in an archive at the The Center for Military History this week after a CNN query.

It was fitting for the humble Iowan. Hoyt listed his greatest achievement not as a Buchenwald liberator, but as spelling bee champ of Johnson County in 1939, when he was in eighth grade. "I still remember the word I spelled correctly: ‘archive,’ " he said.

The story of James Hoyt – mail carrier, spelling bee champ and American hero – has now been archived for history. Sacrifices like his were something his commander once said future generations should never forget.

“Memories of evil get erased, for life must go on, and new generations cannot be locked in the past. But they would do well to remember the past,” Keffer wrote.

At Hoyt’s graveside Thursday, a 12-veteran color guard gave him a traditional 21-gun salute. Hoyt’s casket was draped with the American flag, and that flag was folded, as is tradition, 12 times.

Retired Gen. Robert Sentman gave the flag to Doris Hoyt. Sentman had earlier told mourners about the Buchenwald liberation.

“When the prisoners saw Jim, they picked him up and threw him in the air, that’s how happy they were after seeing such horrors. Prisoners had been hung from hooks to die. He saw a lampshade made from a prisoner’s tattoo. Jim carried those horrors with him forever. He never got what he had seen out of his mind. If you ever wondered about Jim, think about what he saw.”

“When you were discharged, no one really gave a hoot about you. It was difficult for a compassionate person like Jim to forget what he saw. He was a hero.”

Ahhhhhhhh, it’s been awhile since I have replied to a specific option.
The most important question……WHAT ARE THE VICTORY CONDITIONS?
If you don’t have to reach a foreign shore to win, then navy be damned!
If you need a navy to reach the victory city, then axis better start early and protect.
Allies respond to what the axis need to do, and where they are focused, and be prepared to respond to either the Baltic or Barents sea.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/02/dayintech_0226

Feb. 26, 1935: Radar, the Invention That Saved Britain
By Tony Long  02.26.08 | 12:00 AM

Robert Alexander Watson-Watt convinced the Air Ministry that his radar set had merit. Good thing for Old Blighty.
Courtesy Archives of Ontario
1935: The feasibility of radar is demonstrated for the British Air Ministry. It would prove to be a just-in-the-nick-of-time apparatus that helped save Great Britain from defeat in World War II.

Radar (for RAdio Detection And Ranging) was developed over the years with input from many sources, but it was Robert Watson-Watt, a Scottish physicist looking for a reliable method to help airmen locate and avoid approaching thunderstorms, who designed the first set put into practical use. Watson-Watt realized, as he perfected his device, that radio waves could be used to detect more than storms.

A Royal Air Force Heyforth bomber was used for the War Ministry demonstration at Daventry. Three times the plane passed overhead and three times the main beam of a BBC short-wave radio transmitter picked up reflected signals.

Impressed, the air ministers embraced the new technology and by September 1939, when war broke out in Europe, the British had a network of radar installations covering the English Channel and North Sea coasts.

It was radar, even more than the pluck of the dashing RAF pilots, that tipped the scales in England’s favor in the Battle of Britain.

Hitler’s strategic aerial onslaught, meant to clear the skies over the Channel and southeastern England preparatory to an invasion of the British Isles, might have succeeded if not for radar. The RAF was outnumbered by the Luftwaffe, and radar saved already-stretched Fighter Command from having to maintain constant air surveillance.

With radar providing an early-warning system, well-rested RAF pilots could be scrambled and rising to meet the incoming enemy formations in a matter of minutes. As the German fighters ran low on fuel and were forced to turn back, the Spitfires and Hurricanes could pick off the German bombers as they moved deeper into England.

The battle peaked during September and October 1940. The Germans, discouraged by their tactical errors and high losses, gradually tapered off their attacks, then abandoned them altogether when Hitler turned his attention to Russia.

An interesting historical footnote: Although radar was introduced to warfare by the British, the Germans developed their own version and used it effectively during the Allied air raids over occupied Europe and the Reich.

(Source: Various)

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/monumental-mission.html

Great story, to long to post all 5 pages.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/03/whitler103.xml

Adolf Hitler’s ‘lost fleet’ found in Black Sea
By Jasper Copping
Last Updated: 1:52am GMT 04/02/2008

The final resting place of three German U-boats, nicknamed “Hitler’s lost fleet”, has been found at the bottom of the Black Sea.

In pictures: Hitler’s lost U-boats
The submarines had been carried 2,000 miles overland from Germany to attack Russian shipping during the Second World War, but were scuttled as the war neared its end. Now, more than 60 years on, explorers have located the flotilla of three submarines off the coast of Turkey.

On the road: One of the U-boats being taken to Ingolstadt

The vessels, including one once commanded by Germany’s most successful U-boat ace, formed part of the 30th Flotilla of six submarines, taken by road and river across Nazi-occupied Europe, from Germany’s Baltic port at Kiel to Constanta, the Romanian Black Sea port.

In two years, the fleet sank dozens of ships and lost three of their number to enemy action. But in August 1944, Romania switched sides and declared war on Germany, leaving the three remaining vessels stranded.

With no base and unable to sail home - the Bosporus and Dardanelles were closed to them because of Turkish neutrality - their captains were ordered to scuttle the boats before rowing ashore and trying to make their way back to Germany. However, all three crews were caught and interned by the Turks.

Now the submarines’ hulls have been discovered by a team led by Selçuk Kolay, a Turkish marine engineer, who will present his findings to a shipwreck conference in Plymouth this week.

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Mr Kolay established the boats’ positions through research in German archives, interviews with surviving sailors and by sonar studies of the seabed.

He has already completed successful dives to the wreckage of one vessel, U-20, two miles offshore in about 80ft of water. He believes he has discovered another, U-23, at twice that depth, three miles from the town of Agva, but bad weather forced him to suspend diving until the spring.

He thinks he is also close to pinpointing the third boat, U-19, thought to lie more than 1,000ft down, three miles from the Turkish city of Zonguldak.

“It’s one of the least well known stories of the war but one of the most interesting,” said Mr Kolay.

“It is a quite incredible story. To get to the Black Sea these boats had to be taken across the land, and once they got there they had no way out.”

All three U-boats had been operating against British shipping in the North Sea. U-23 gained notoriety for scoring one of Germany’s earliest successes, sinking a British ship off the Shetland Islands days after war began. It was later commanded by Otto Kretschmer, known as “Silent Otto”, the most successful U-boat ace.

In 1941, Germany invaded Russia and decided it needed a presence in the Black Sea to harass Soviet shipping there. Unable to use the Bosporus, the only shipping route into the Black Sea, the boats were dismantled at Kiel and taken by canal to the River Elbe, and upstream to Dresden.

Here, they were partly dismantled and taken by lorry to Ingolstadt, on the Danube, and then ferried downstream to the Black Sea and Constanta, where they were re-assembled.

When Romania switched sides the crews were ordered to scuttle out of sight of the Turks so the submarines’ locations would remain a mystery. Mr Kolay was helped by a map drawn by Rudolf Arendt, 85, the former captain of the U-23, showing where his crew came ashore.

Mike Williams, secretary of the Nautical Archaeology Society, said: “This is a significant find because these U-boats were all scuttled, so they should be intact, like a sealed tube. They are unique survivors of the war.”

I’m pulling for the Sens. They better start pushing the puck more on the attack. The Ducks kept it moving and never let up, you saw the results.

IMO, the ducks best weapon is 2003 Con/Smyth (sp?) winner JS Giguere. I’m afraid he will win again, this time on the winning side.

Everyone at work has it Ducks in 6. I still want Sens in 7.

“Munch on me mutton, ya sultry wench!”
“Lass, bend over so I can bury me treasure.”

“Raunchy” is my old Army nickname.

The above pick up lines actually worked.

“The Pirate” refers to my nefarious ways, I think you get the message.

Think of my personality as resembling ALF, turned up several notches.

Taurus? Astrology?

This is the Year of the Dog!

Dragons Rule!

Our New Years Eve party to usher in 1988.
By the way,
I am President of the local procrastinators union #869.

Our group plays with Total Victory Conditions (12 Cities), in a match play format, so:

I usually go for either 2 task forces with 2 BB, AC, Destroyer, Sub and 4 transports per task force, or;

a task force of 3 BB, 2 AC, 2 Destroyers, Sub and 5 transports.

I try and add a naval piece every turn so I can make the push later in the game.

The very first game we played, I drew Germany and won taking out London and the USA.

I still have won more games/matches than lost, when playing Germany.

Gauntlet

Together:

Rush- Limelight
Led Zeppelin- Over the hills and far away, live version
CCR (Credence Clearwater Revival)- Born on the Bayou
The Doors- Road House Blues
The Who- Entire rock opera, Tommy.

Top 3 Actors:

Ed O’Neill- Married with Children (Al Bundy)
Raymond Burr- Perry Mason
James Garner- Maverick, Jim Rockford

Top 3 Actresses:

Katey Sagal- Married with Children (Peg Bundy)
Gillian Anderson- The X-files (Dana Scully)
Christine McIntyre- The Three Stooges

Quotes:

1- “…and now for something completely different.” (Monty Pythons flying circus)
2- “…who are your attorneys? Hagen and Daaz?” (Al Bundy, Married with Children)
3- “…you have just entered the Twilight Zone.” (Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone)
4- “oh, wiseguy” (Moe Howard, the Three Stooges) followed by the classic eye finger poke.
5- " you knuckleheads!" (Moe Howard, the Three Stooges) followed by the classic double face slap.
6- “Della, get me Paul Drake.” (Perry Mason)
7- “Trust no one.” (The X-Files)
8- “Hi, you’ve reached Jim Rockford….” (The Rockford Files)
9- “Gilligan!” (Gilligan’s Island)
10- “HA HA!” (Nelson Muntz, the Simpson’s)

I always thought “shiver me timber” was good one.

It went like this, “Shiver me timber with ye pearly whites ya sultry wench!”

“Arrr wench, munch on me mutton!”

“Eh lassie, walk me plank.”

'I’m lookin to bury me treasure in your blarney deep!!!"

My old Army nickname was “Raunchy” and apply that to the ole pirate pick up lines, and the traditional response would be, “Man you’re one raunchy pirate!”

Depending on the response, I could take anything to “another level”.

A suggestion for you, so you will have the chance to play USA and Russia.

Go with match play.  Set the victory conditions for the 5 game match. You will play each of the countries once. Draw for pairings for each game, thus changing the partner structure.

Who ever collects the most victories, wins the match. Break any tie by head-to-head.

Affluent beggars’
Couple supports family through panhandling; Ashland merchants fear negative impact on customers
By JENNIFER MARGULIS
for the Mail Tribune
The first time 30-year-old Elizabeth Johnson stopped a stranger on the street to ask for money, she was really nervous. She was six months pregnant and desperate, having just spent seven days in jail for shoplifting books.

“How are people going to perceive me?” Johnson remembers wondering. “They’re going to think I’m crazy.”

That was six years ago in Madison, Wis. The Ashland mother says in hindsight, she believes she was socially conditioned to think that if you ask people for money something is wrong with you.

Since then she has changed her mind.

“I don’t believe that at all anymore,” Johnson says.

Now Johnson and her 34-year-old partner, Jason Pancoast, who have been together for 14 years, support themselves and their three children, 6-year-old Seth, 3-year-old Adrianne and 3-month-old Synclair, by panhandling.

Pancoast refers to himself and his family as “affluent beggars.”

“If you’re an affluent beggar you stay in a hotel and eat a continental breakfast,” he says. “It makes it a lot easier to be philosophical about it.”

Carrying her smiling baby in a navy blue front pack and pushing Adrianne in a green jogging stroller, Johnson stops people on the street and asks them for money to find shelter for her children.

“I ask the question and I move on,” says Johnson, who adds that she is careful to be non-aggressive when she begs.

The family has stayed in Ashland since the summer in order for Seth to attend the Waldorf-inspired experimental classes at Willow Wind, part of the Ashland public school system.

“They are a lovely family,” says Seth’s teacher, Trisha Mullinnix, who has been working with children for 25 years. “They fill all the needs of the classroom teacher — they are attentive, they come to school on time, they are available to me to talk to them. Seth is loving and happy and well fed and clean. He comes prepared to learn.”

The family is staying at the Cedarwood Inn in a room with a kitchenette. It costs $243 a week. Johnson and Pancoast are hoping to find something more permanent.

According to Pancoast, begging can be lucrative. He claims the family sometimes makes $300 a day asking for money and has made as much as $800. The family also receives $500 a month in food stamps.

But the presence of a well-fed, well-dressed family begging from strangers on the streets does not sit well with some Ashland locals, though none who spoke with the Mail Tribune would allow themselves to be identified.

“I always felt bad for her because she had a baby in the hot summer sun,” says Debbie, an Ashland resident who asked that her last name not be used. Debbie remembers Johnson, Pancoast and their children from their first visit to Ashland in 1999 and has given Johnson money on several occasions. “That kind of thing tugs on anyone’s heartstrings,” she says.

But then Debbie saw Pancoast drop Johnson off at the Ashland Plaza in a nice car and kiss her and the baby goodbye. “Then I became a little bitter,” Debbie says. “I was working my tail off at three jobs — waitressing and babysitting — and I see her eating at restaurants that are so expensive I can’t afford to eat there.”

Ashland police officer Teri DeSilva says that in the summer, she receives on average one call of complaint a week about Johnson’s begging.

In response to community concern, DeSilva called the local child-welfare office for the state Department of Human Services to evaluate the family.

“They came out and interviewed her, and said those babies are just fine,” DeSilva says. “They’re well-cared for, they’re well-dressed, there are no signs of abuse. If you look at those children they are plump and happy.”

But according to DeSilva, the shopkeepers downtown continue to complain. “A lot of the store owners are upset about it,” she says. “I’ve talked to her on several occasions and asked her to move along.”

Merchants are afraid that Johnson’s presence begging with her children has a negative impact on their customers. “The people visiting here are not happy seeing that type of behavior,” says a downtown clothing merchant who asked not to be identified. "We have so many complaints from our customers who shop here. They come in talking about her and being upset by her … they don’t want to be harassed like that.

“If we end up with a lot of people like this it is going to deter people from coming to visit,” she says.

Ashland police Chief Mike Bianca points out that begging is not illegal. “Can you be a beggar in America? Yes, you can,” says Bianca. “…The state is not going to step in and take those kids away unless there is some recognizable or identifiable abuse or neglect.”

Johnson says she doesn’t want to get a job because it would keep her away from her children.

Pancoast says he would like to get a job, but finding suitable employment has been difficult. His lack of experience and difficulty with jobs in the past make it even more challenging.

“What do I say? ‘I’ve been traveling for seven years, I haven’t had a job?’” he says. “People don’t know what to say to me.”

Both are originally from the East Coast. Johnson was born in New York and Pancoast in Philadelphia. They met when Johnson was 16 years old and in high school.

At the time, her parents were divorced and Johnson was living with her mother and stepfather. Johnson says her mother abused drugs, was promiscuous and periodically took psychotropic medications; her stepfather, she says, has an extensive criminal record and abused her both psychologically and physically.

Johnson says her stepfather’s idea of a good joke was to put a stocking over his head, climb into her window in the middle of the night and wake her up by shining a flashlight in her eyes.

To escape her chaotic family life, Johnson spent her time at parties and in bars, she says. She met Pancoast at a party in Florida and asked him out.

Pancoast’s mother dropped out of high school and gave birth to him when she was 17, he says. He describes her as a “kleptomaniac” who showed little interest in her family. His father is a Vietnam vet. His parents divorced when Pancoast was 16, and he began living on the streets, he says.

“What was striking is that Elizabeth was the one asking me out and I was the older gentleman,” remembers Pancoast, who was 21 at the time. He adds that at that point Elizabeth was “malingering within milieus that were probably not appropriate for a young lady to be spending her time in.” Pancoast quickly fell in love.

Their difficult childhoods and interest in drug culture quickly solidified their bond, the couple say. One of their first experiences together was canoeing on the Withlacoochee River and taking LSD. “Both of us coming from broken homes,” says Johnson, “and needing to develop ourselves.”

“Well, I think we had no love,” Pancoast quickly adds, “we had no clarity … we were both so disassociated for different reasons.…”

But the more serious they got, the more their families disapproved of their relationship and tried to separate them, the couple say. A fear of being separated continues to haunt their lives.

In addition to the three children who live with them now, Pancoast and Johnson say they have two older sons who both have been adopted into an upper-middle-class family in Alameda, Calif.

Johnson got pregnant when she was not yet 18 and they were living in Gainesville, Fla., shoplifting, doing drugs, and heavily into what Pancoast describes as “death culture.”

At a friend’s house they read a classified advertisement in Spin Magazine of a couple looking to adopt a newborn. Johnson and Pancoast talked to that couple and three others, they say.

“From my perspective I was pressured into giving Erik away,” Johnson says. “It seemed like a way out of the desperation I was in as a byproduct of not having a family … I actually went to go have an abortion and I found out I was too far along, which I was happy about. I didn’t want to do that.”

The couple who adopted Erik flew Johnson and Pancoast out to the Bay Area and helped them find a place to live and jobs. Pancoast worked at a record store, Rasputin’s, until he was fired, and then at the Monterey Fish Market, until he lost that job as well. Johnson worked in retail. After the first son was born, the adoptive couple asked Johnson and Pancoast to have a second child for them. Ian was born in 1997.

Neither can talk about their two older sons without crying. “I wish we were all together,” says Johnson.

Johnson and Pancoast say they are very different from most of the people living on the street. Neither has attended college but when Johnson dares to dream of the future, she talks of becoming a midwife.

“We’re good people and we love each other,” Johnson says. “To shellac us with anything other than that hurts us and hurts our children.”

Jennifer Margulis is a freelance writer living in Ashland. E-mail her at properzioprose@jeffnet.org.

88 knows that I agree with him;

“#1 The most fun you’ll have is by trial and error. There is no perfect strategy.”

The one tidbit that I will add in any thread or discussion in any of the posts,

“What are the victory conditions you have set for the game?”

If you are after a minor victory (8 cities) then Germany can focus on a land war, navy be damned.
However, a major victory (10 cities) or total victory (12 cities) is going to require an Axis navy to reach the 10th/12th city.

IMO, I have a German Navy at the start of the game that is easier to add to and maintain in order to play a role in the 10/12 city VC (Victory Condition).