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Southside Judge Smails
a day ago
I didn't know any of that...any specific books recommended?
anon-y2mh Southside
a day ago edited
Probably the biggest one I can think of off the top of my head was "At Dawn We Slept" by Gordon Prange.
However, something to think about - the USN actually wargamed an attack where the US had 24 hours warning. Pacific Fleet was able to sortie, and they met Kido Butai some four or five hundred miles north of Pearl Harbor.
Where they proceeded to get their asses kicked (it hurts to say, but I say that as a veteran myself - call Pearl Harbor what it was) as badly as they did in real life. There were only 2 carriers available in PacFlt at that point. One was off delivering aircraft to someplace (Midway, I believe). Don't remember where the other was, but they were not in any shape at all to contribute to a battle with 6 Japanese carriers.
The gotcha was where they were. In the real world, Pearl Harbor was only something like 60 - 100 ft. deep. The Navy was able to salvage and patch many of the ships initially sunk or mangled. Had they met the Japanese navy 500 miles northwest of Pearl, they would have been in multi-thousand foot deep water. Any ship lost there would have been lost permanently.
The point is that Pearl Harbor has on several occasions been called the most "successful defeat" in USN history. Had they been warned, the death toll would have been higher and the permanent destruction of PacFlt (minus the two carriers) would most likely been almost total.
anon-y2mh Mrs. deWinter
2 hours ago edited
Hat tip!
First, I owe Mrs. deWinter and mopani an apology. When I wrote my original post, I had a false memory and used an incorrect number. There were 3 carriers (not 2) in PacFlt's order of battle. The carriers were Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga. Enterprise was returning from a mission to send a Marine fighter squadron to Wake Island. On the morning of 7 December, the task force was about 215 miles west of Oahu. Lexington and her task force was returning from a similar mission to Midway, and was, on the morning of 7 December, 500 miles southeast of Midway. She alone, of the 3 carries, was in a position to do something about Kido Butai. However, the smart money would have been a direct order to her commander telling him to run for it. There was no way on the face of this planet that Lexington was in a fit state to go up, effectively by herself, against any two of the 6 Japanese carriers present. Had she attempted to do so, she would almost definitely been sunk, losing a significant number of her sailors.
The third carrier (the one I'd forgotten about because she wasn't present in theater that morning) was Saratoga who was just pulling into San Diego when the attack started in Hawaii.
One other thing I touched on but didn't really go into depth on was the death/injury toll. Of the 8 battleships present in Pearl Harbor that morning, 5 were either sunk outright or damaged badly enough that they would be expected to sink had that damage occurred in deeper waters.
Of those 5 battleships, only two (Arizona and Oklahoma) were completely written off. The remaining three (Nevada, California, and West Virginia) were ultimately moved to Puget Sound, WA for repairs and refit.
Being the only ship to successfully get underway, Nevada was hit by at least one torpedo and 6 bombs, forcing her crew to turn out of the channel and beach her near the mouth of the harbor (had she sunk in the mouth of Pearl Harbor, the harbor would have been utterly useless until she was cleared out of the way). After repairs, Nevada, was used for convoy duty in the Atlantic and provided fire support for 5 landings (Attu, Normandy, Southern France, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa).
California was hit by two torpedoes and a bomb. However one of the hits started a fire which disabled part of the electrical system that powered the pumps. So she slowly sank over the next 3 days. After she was refloated and repaired, she took part in the Battle of Suriago Straight, she was hit by a kamikaze during the invasion of Lyangen Gulf. Following repairs, she was again present and providing fire support during the invasion of Okinawa.
West Virginia sank after multiple torpedo hits. After being refloated and repaired, she was sent to support the invasion of the Phillipines (Gen. MacArthur and his "I Have Returned" moment), taking part in the Battle of Suriago Straight, as well as the battles of Lyangen Gulf, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.
So I think it's safe to say that those three ships materially contributed to the success of the war effort, and none would have been available had they been sunk 400 miles northwest of Oahu.
Now the men are something different. There were 2,008 sailors killed and 710 wounded during the attack, with roughly half of the fatalities coming from the explosion on board Arizona. We can probably deduct the Army/Army Air Corps casualties (218 killed, 364 wounded) from the totals, as the Army Air Corps couldn't have been present due to range from Pearl Harbor. The Marines would still have suffered some fatalities, but it would come down to whether or not they were deployed on the ships or if they were shore Marines at the time.
Let's start with keeping the Marines out of it, and deducting the Army/AAC totals from the Navy. That would leave us with a floor of 1790 killed and 646 wounded.
This is where it gets really sketchy to determine what a reasonable total should be. If we determine that California, Nevada, and West Virginia were total losses (with only California sinking slowly enough to get more than a tithe of her men off), we'd be looking at 778 casualties from Nevada and 1157 casualties from from West Virginia, assuming that they sank in a similar way in this universe as they did in ours. In our world, West Virginia lost 106 killed and Nevada lost 60 killed and 109 wounded. So, if you take the C-A-T =DOG numbers that we came up with above, my back-of-the-napkin arithmetic raises the casualties from 2043 killed and 1178 wounded to something on the close order of 3450 killed and 646 wounded (the numbers I have access to don't easily differentiate between wounded and killed, so I've been kind of lumping everything into the killed basket).
And this is, frankly, almost more important than saving 3 ships for battle later. Our back of the envelope estimate says we'd lose 1400 or so more trained sailors. And from a human perspective, we'd lose another 1400 or so brothers, sons, and fathers. In Pearl Harbor, these men were able to frequently self-rescue by crawling to other ships via mooring lines. They were close enough to shore that, assuming that they could dodge the burning oil slicks, they stood a passable chance of getting to dry ground. In the middle of the Pacific, they'd have to take their chances that someone would be around to rescue them, as they would be in no position to rescue themselves.
So, yeah. I'll freely admit that the above was a bunch of back-of-the-napkin arithmetic held together by more wild guesses that I should have used, but it kind of puts things in perspective.
Where would our nation be without men like this? When the attack came, they performed. It was a deadly dangerous business. So many of these men saw friends maimed and killed. Even the survivors bore scars, some within, some without. But they recovered from the attack and went on to flood in increasing numbers across the Pacific, and they won. It's hard to imagine what may have happened if they hadn't, but they did. Vaughn P. Drake Jr., from what we read of his life, made no great deal of his service. Many of his peers did likewise. There was a job to do, they did it, and then they went home and got their lives back. They are heroes nonetheless, and now there is one fewer hero in our world. //
Mr. Drake will be laid to rest in Winchester Cemetary in Winchester, Kentucky, with full military honors, as he deserves. There are now only 15 confirmed survivors of the December 7th, 1941 attack.
To Vaughn P. Drake Jr.'s family, I can only say this: All of America is proud of Mr. Drake; we, as a nation, are richer for the existence of men such as he. Indeed, without men like him, we might very well not have a nation at all. //
7againstthebes
21 hours ago
Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness. GB Shaw
The above characterizes that entire generation of people. Men that were willing to absorb punishment in order to close with their enemy and dish out punishment of their own. Men and women that did the job and came home and made their life happen. Made society happen. Made new industry happen. People that brought about a new era of prosperity to this country.
They never whined about the hardships. They just worked to make everything better.
Judge Smails
19 hours ago
Read a book sometime ago about this subject. It would appear to me that adequate intelligence was not being passed from DC to Pearl regarding Japan. Still, that radar system that was operational did what it was suppose to do and painted the massive amount of aircraft in formation (over 300), far larger than those three unarmed B-17s. The soldier watching it phoned the duty officer and was told "not to worry about it." Outrageous. We knew an attack was coming, but not where. Could have been the Philippines, Singapore or Thailand. No one thought Pearl was in jeopardy for some reason. Astonishing.
Air patrols should have been up looking west through north. It would have been easy to spot over 300 aircraft in formation as they closed on the north coast of Hawaii. Two days before, Japan told all its embassies to destroy their sensitive material. DC knew this. Tragic, horrible day.
anon-y2mh Southside
16 hours ago edited
Probably the biggest one I can think of off the top of my head was "At Dawn We Slept" by Gordon Prange.
However, something to think about - the USN actually wargamed an attack where the US had 24 hours warning. Pacific Fleet was able to sortie, and they met Kido Butai some four or five hundred miles north of Pearl Harbor.
Where they proceeded to get their asses kicked (it hurts to say, but I say that as a veteran myself - call Pearl Harbor what it was) as badly as they did in real life. There were only 2 carriers available in PacFlt at that point. One was off delivering aircraft to someplace (Midway, I believe). Don't remember where the other was, but they were not in any shape at all to contribute to a battle with 6 Japanese carriers.
The gotcha was where they were. In the real world, Pearl Harbor was only something like 60 - 100 ft. deep. The Navy was able to salvage and patch many of the ships initially sunk or mangled. Had they met the Japanese navy 500 miles northwest of Pearl, they would have been in multi-thousand foot deep water. Any ship lost there would have been lost permanently.
The point is that Pearl Harbor has on several occasions been called the most "successful defeat" in USN history. Had they been warned, the death toll would have been higher and the permanent destruction of PacFlt (minus the two carriers) would most likely been almost total.
In Winston Churchill: The Roaming Lion, a six-hour course, Dr. Larry Arnn examines Winston Churchill's life, philosophy, and political legacy through a comprehensive analysis of his military experiences, leadership principles, and views on governance. The lectures explore Churchill's evolution from a soldier-writer to a statesman, highlighting his perspectives on warfare, democracy, and individual liberty, while examining how Britain's geography and history shaped his strategic thinking. The course delves into Churchill's complex political philosophy, including his approach to just war, constitutional government, and the balance between social welfare and individual freedom.
It has been about a year since we reported on the major revelation that many thousand original North American Aviation manufacturing drawings survived destruction during the 1980s because one of their employees, Ken Jungeberg, saved them from incineration. Furthermore, as we also discussed last year, AirCorps Aviation worked out a deal with Jungeberg in 2019 to secure these historic artifacts for their longterm preservation. Ever since their arrival at AirCorps last winter, Ester Aube, the company’s manager for their technical documentation division, AirCorps Library, has been working diligently to preserve and catalogue this massive archive. With so many drawings to review, this would be a daunting task for anyone to undertake successfully, but Ester has applied her keen intellect, professional training and substantial skillset to systematically document and collate these drawings into a practical and valuable resource for aircraft restorers, historians, and the aviation-minded public at large. Additionally, Aube has delved deeper into the process, tracing personal details for several NAA technicians who originally drafted these drawings, because their stories are no less important to the narrative than the documents themselves; this aspect of aviation history has received little prior attention from the wider world …until now.
AirCorps Aviation of Bemidji, Minnesota has just announced that they have acquired a massive trove of original manufacturing drawings for North American Aviation (NAA) covering types such as the P-51, T-6, B-25 and P-82. This is a remarkable development, and all due to a lone engineer at NAA named Ken Jungeberg who had the foresight to save these drawings when they were days away from destruction at North American’s plant in Columbus, Ohio during the late 1980s. But before we discuss this find, it is perhaps first worth reflecting upon what it represents…
Just a few of the thousands of WWII-era North American Aviation aircraft manufacturing drawings which Ken Jungeberg saved. (image via AirCorps Aviation)
The American aircraft industry produced just under 300,000 aircraft between 1940 and 1945, a staggering feat by any measure, especially considering that just 3,600 rolled off U.S. assembly lines during the entirety of 1940. While aviation companies such as Boeing, Douglas, Curtiss and their like would design the aircraft, and put them together at their factories, it was simply impossible for them to both make all of the components and subassemblies on site and keep up with production demand. They had to subcontract out the bulk of this work once a design received an order for full-scale production. Indeed, much of America’s entire manufacturing base was involved in this effort – from small ma and pa furniture shops to industrial giants like Ford and Chrysler – whether they were making map cases or wing panels. Some companies, such as Ford, even had their own aircraft assembly lines, like the one in Willow Run, Michigan which built B-24 Liberators.
But have you ever wondered how it was possible to have such a prolific output of high quality aerial machinery when each aircraft assembly line received component parts from so many different independent subcontractors? How was it possible for all of those many thousands of parts to fit together properly in such a repeatable fashion?
The answer is pretty simple; it all came down to the quality of the manufacturing drawings which the aircraft company engineers created during their design process. If you had a coherent set of accurate drawings showing how to make each part, and how to put each assembly together, then you could rely upon skilled workers at disparate factory locations to produce components whose dimensions complied with design tolerances. Of course, there were times when problems arose, but when they did, the engineers usually found solutions. But a coherent set of manufacturing drawings was key to this effort.
However, every single component, from the tiniest rivet to the entire aircraft, required drawings to properly describe them. Obviously, the more complex parts and sub-assemblies required multiple drawings, sometimes hundreds. Highly skilled draftsmen and women created all of these drawings by hand by – usually using pencil on vellum drafting paper. Drawings could sometimes be massive too, extending ten feet or more. The finished product was designed to be practical, fully describing the part and how it fit into an assembly. Drawings were often exquisitely beautiful too – more works of art than simply functional. //
But then along came AirCorps Aviation with their AirCorps Library project. For a small annual subscription of just $50, you have access to serious engineering details, including manuals, for several dozen American WWII-era aircraft designs. They have also digitized the engineering drawings for a number of these aircraft too, such as the P-51 Mustang, F4U Corsair and B-17 Flying Fortress. While they haven’t digitized everything available yet for each aircraft design – it’s a massive process – it is a fascinating resource for anyone with even a passing interest in WWII aviation. //
This is why the news about the preservation of more than 15,000 original drawings produced by North American Aviation that relate to such iconic designs as the T-6 Texan, P-51 Mustang and B-25 Mitchell is such a revelation. AirCorps Aviation has gained access to these drawings, and is presently cataloguing and copying them for their subscription library. However, the fact that these drawing still exist at all is down to the dedicated efforts of just one man, Ken Jungeberg. His name will resonate in aviation lore for generations to come due to his foresight in saving such historically important documents. For further details on this remarkable news, we will let AirCorps Aviation’s Ester Aube continue the story…
Thousands of original North American Aviation technical drawings undergo preservation and cataloguing, highlighted in museum exhibit. //
In April of 2023, Ester Aube finalized and installed an exhibit at the EAA museum using the drawings and telling the story of the draftsmen from North American and highlighting their contribution to the war efforts. When the collection was initially received from Ken Jungeberg, they had promised to do something to help get the story of the draftsmen out to the general public and get some of the drawings in public view so that people could enjoy and learn. The exhibit will be in the museum until September of 2025. “I chose some, cherry-picked some really amazing drawings to highlight in that exhibit,” says Aube. //
With so many drawings and aircraft to sort through, Aube started the project working on a specific aircraft, the P-51, because both AirCorps Aviation and the many aircraft in the warbird community would get a lot of benefit from such extensive original engineering drawings. At this point she estimates she has catalogued a little over 15,000 drawings just for the Mustang, and has also ventured into the smaller size drawings for the early B-25 models, which will be her next branch to catalogue. “The cataloging process is very labor intensive,” she says. “So I’m cataloging part number and the description, which under normal circumstances isn’t as important. But because this collection contains so many experimental and pre-production drawings, you have to catalog the description because that part number isn’t listed anywhere in a parts catalog or it’s not referenced.” North American did have a part numbering system, but all the pieces of data are needed or else the searchability is difficult. So part number, description, the date it was drawn, name of the draftsman, the material the drawing was done on, and the factory it was made in all are recorded during the cataloguing process. There are drawings from factories in Inglewood, Kansas City, Dallas, and even some from the Canadian Car Foundry in Ontario, Canada’s largest aircraft manufacturer during World War II.
Ken Jungeberg’s efforts saved a vast collection of North American Aviation’s WWII engineering drawings from being lost. In this interview, Ester Aube of AirCorps Aviation shares his story and her role in their preservation. //
During World War II, long before the advent of computer-aided design, thousands of skilled draftsmen meticulously created tens of thousands of engineering drawings for every aspect of each aircraft model produced. These drawings were not only precise and detailed—ensuring different factories could manufacture components to exact specifications—but also works of art in their own right. Without the dedication of preservationists and archivists, many of these irreplaceable documents might have been lost forever. Thanks to the vision of a select few, however, these drawings are being safeguarded—not just as historical artifacts but as invaluable resources for the warbird restoration community. In 1988, Ken Jungeberg, head of the Master Dimensions Department at North American-Rockwell’s Columbus plant, was granted permission to save a large collection of non-current engineering drawings from the company archive. //
In this video interview, Ester Aube, Manager at AirCorps Aviation, shares Ken’s story and her role in preserving these invaluable engineering drawings.
https://youtu.be/eK--vNanN_U
Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh
·
🚨 Trump just posted this video that pushes for the U.S. to take foothold in Greenland
It goes all the way back to WORLD WAR 2 when the Arctic was targeted by Germany.
"Now is the time to stand together again - for the future. America stands with Greenland."
1:30 / 1:30
2:46 PM · Mar 28, 2025
Francos said the order to release the files came directly from the president, and it would be part of a larger Milei project to declassify and release information about the 1970s military crackdown on government opponents, many of whom disappeared.
The government announcement came on March 24, which in Argentina is a public holiday to commemorate the victims of the political strife during the so-called Dirty War. The Dirty War ran roughly between the 1974 death of President Juan Peron and the subsequent 1976 military coup, through to the junta’s fall in 1983.
Peron, who was sent on a 1939 mission to learn about Italian fascism, is an essential figure in the Nazi migration to Argentina. He was a senior member of the fascist government coup that took over the country in 1943. That government declared war on Germany in February 1945, which could be seen as a fig leaf for its true leanings.
In a 1969 interview with historian Felix Luna, quoted by Tomas Eloy Martinez in his Wilson Center paper, “Peron and the Nazi War Criminals,” Peron said he reached out to influential members of the German community to explain that the war was over and Argentina needed to act. “Please understand, we have no choice but to go to war, for if we do not, we will go to Nuremberg.”
Eloy Martinez said Peron told him in 1970 that he orchestrated the effort to collect as many worthy Germans as possible—just as the United States, Russia, England, and France were doing—and because they were technically on the winning side, they would have a free hand.
Peron, who began his first of three presidential terms in 1946, also said he coordinated with Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who had remained formally neutral throughout the war.
On this site you will find all the German U-boats of both World Wars, their commanding officers and operations including all Allied ships attacked, technological information and much more. You can also browse our large photo gallery and thousands of U-boat books and movies. While hundreds of U-boats were lost some of the boats are preserved as museums today.
We also have a huge section covering the Allied forces and their struggle with the U-boat threat - not to mention the Pacific war. Included there are all the Allied Warships and thousands of Allied Commanding officers from all the major navies (US Navy, Royal Navy, ...) plus technical pages and information on the air forces.
On January 17, 1961, in this farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the establishment of a "military-industrial complex."
In a speech of less than 10 minutes, on January 17, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his political farewell to the American people on national television from the Oval Office of the White House. Those who expected the military leader and hero of World War II to depart his Presidency with a nostalgic, "old soldier" speech like Gen. Douglas MacArthur's, were surprised at his strong warnings about the dangers of the "military-industrial complex."
As President of the United States for two terms, Eisenhower had slowed the push for increased defense spending despite pressure to build more military equipment during the Cold War’s arms race. Nonetheless, the American military services and the defense industry had expanded a great deal in the 1950s. Eisenhower thought this growth was needed to counter the Soviet Union, but it confounded him. Though he did not say so explicitly, his standing as a military leader helped give him the credibility to stand up to the pressures of this new, powerful interest group. He eventually described it as a necessary evil.
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. . . . American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . . This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Less than a year before the end of World War II, then-U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau drew up a nightmarish plan to punish postwar Germany.
After the serial 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II—along with the failed Versailles peace treaty of 1919—the Allies in World War II wanted to ensure there would never again be an aggressive Germany powerful enough to invade its neighbors.
When the so-called Morgenthau Plan was leaked to the press in September 1944, at first it was widely praised. After all, it would supposedly render Germany incapable of ever starting another world war in Europe.
Morgenthau certainly envisioned a Carthaginian peace, designed to ensure a permanently deindustrialized, unarmed, and pastoral Germany. //
When the dying Nazi Party got wind of the plan, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had a field day. He screamed to Germans that they were all doomed to oblivion if they lost the war, even growing opponents of the Nazi Party.
Even many Americans were aghast at the plan.
Gen. George Marshall, the Army chief of staff, warned that its mere mention had galvanized German troops to fight to the end, increasing American casualties as they closed in on the German homeland.
Ex-President Herbert Hoover blasted the plan as inhumane. He feared mass starvation of the German people if they were reduced to a premodern, rural peasantry.
But once the victorious allies occupied a devastated Germany, witnessed its moonscape ruined by massive bombing and house-to-house fighting, and discovered that their “ally” Russia’s Josef Stalin was ruthless and hellbent on turning all of Europe communist, the Harry Truman administration backed off the plan.
There is a tragic footnote to the aborted horrors of the Morgenthau Plan. Currently, Germany is doing to itself almost everything Morgenthau once dreamed of.
Its green delusions have shut down far too many of its nuclear, coal, and gas electrical generation plants.
Erratic solar and wind “sustainable energy” means that power costs are four times higher than on average in the United States.
Once-dominant European giants Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes are now bleeding customers and profits. Their own government’s green and electric vehicle mandates ensure they will become globally uncompetitive.
The German economy actually shrank in 2023. And the diminished Ruhr can no longer save the German economy from its own utopian politicians.
The German military is all but disarmed and short thousands of recruits.
German industries do not produce enough ammunition, tanks, ships, and aircraft to equip even its diminished army, navy, and air force. //
After World War II, the Truman administration rejected the notion of a pastoral, deindustrialized, and insecure Germany as a cruel prescription for poverty, hunger, and depopulation.
But now the German people themselves voted for their own updated version of Morgenthau’s plan—as they willingly reduced factory hours, curtailed power and fuel supplies, and struggled with millions of illegal aliens and porous borders.
Germans accept that they have no military to speak of that could protect their insecure borders—without a United States-led NATO.
Eighty years ago, Germany’s former conquerors rejected wrecking the defeated nation as too harsh. But now Germany is willfully pastoralizing, disarming, deindustrializing—and destroying—itself.
“This is a strange Christmas Eve. Almost the whole world is locked in deadly struggle…. [B]efore we turn again to the stern task and the formidable year that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.” //
OwenKellogg-Engineer | December 25, 2024 at 6:09 am
I just finished reading “The Splendid and the Vile” by Erik Larson, about Churchills first year as PM (May 1940-May 1941). What an incredible insight into one of the 20th Century’s most prominent figure. He truly understood that the freedom of western civilization was at stake.
My, how we have slipped away in such a short period of time…..
The 51 Factory has been established with the goals of supporting the legendary P51 Mustang, British Spitfire, and other Rolls Royce or Packard Merlin powered aircraft of the WWII era.
These superb aircraft powered by 1650 cubic inch, over 1500 hp, liquid cooled V-12 engines, represented some of the most advanced technologies of the day, and most certainly greatly contributed to the allied victory, both in the Pacific, and in Europe.
The fighters developed in WWII are the pinnacle of piston engine, propeller driven aircraft performance. Even today, the fastest piston engine aircraft in the world are modified WWII fighters with Rolls Royce/Packard Merlin V-12’s, as seen at the annual Reno Air Races.
The bomb caused runway damage and cancelled 80 flights. Thankfully it did not hurt anyone. //
Blackwing1 | October 2, 2024 at 2:36 pm
I so much want to insert a clip from “Falling Hare” where Bugs Bunny meets the Gremlin, who is pounding the nose of a bomb with a giant sledgehammer, and tells him, “To make these block-buster bombs go off, you have to hit them JUUUUUST right.” //
Hodge in reply to scooterjay. | October 2, 2024 at 3:06 pm
Nice math but you are way under-estimating just how many bombs were dropped during the War.
“World War II ended more than 79 years ago. But remnants of the intense airstrikes across Japan keep surfacing occasionally. The Self-Defense Forces reported that during the fiscal year 2023 alone, they disposed of 2,348 bombs, weighing a total of 41 tons.”
TargaGTS in reply to Joe-dallas. | October 2, 2024 at 1:38 pm
The wife and I went sailing around Denmark & Germany (through the Kiel Canal) in 2019. We tied up next to a weird looking Danish navy ship. So, I introduced myself to one of the sailors and asked what kind of ship it was. It was a bomb disposal ship. It’s outfitted with MADs (like what we use to detect subs underwater) and specialty sonar and it spends the year looking for unexploded WWII ordnance…and finds a LOT of it every year. They’ve even found WWI mustard gas shells. They apparently have similar land-based units that do the same thing. The ground is so soft in that part of Europe (probably not unlike where that airport sits), that these 500-lb would simply bury themselves meters-deep into the soil and sit there until some unsuspecting farmer or developer hit it with machinery. //
Hodge in reply to Joe-dallas. | October 2, 2024 at 2:52 pm
“Quite a few” is quite an understatement –
The zone rouge (English: red zone) is a chain of non-contiguous areas throughout northeastern France that the French government isolated after the First World War.
The zone rouge was defined just after the war as “Completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to Agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life impossible”.
Each year, numerous unexploded shells are recovered from former WWI battlefields in what is known as the iron harvest. According to the Sécurité Civile, the French agency in charge of the land management of Zone Rouge, 300 to 700 more years at this current rate will be needed to clean the area completely. Some experiments conducted in 2005–06 discovered up to 300 shells per hectare (120 per acre) in the top 15 centimeters (5.9 inches) of soil in the worst areas.
At the start of WWII, the US armed forces used various means for enciphering their confidential traffic. At the lowest level were hand ciphers. Above that were the M-94 and M-138 strip ciphers and at the top level a small number of highly advanced SIGABA cipher machines.
The Americans used the strip ciphers extensively however these were not only vulnerable to cryptanalysis but also difficult to use. Obviously a more modern and efficient means of enciphering was needed.
At that time Swedish inventor Boris Hagelin was trying to sell his cipher machines to foreign governments. He had already sold versions of his C-36, C-38 and B-211 cipher machines to European countries. He had also visited the United States in 1937 and 1939 in order to promote his C-36 machine and the electric C-38 with a keyboard called BC-38 but he was not successful (1). The Hagelin C-36 had 5 pin-wheels and the lugs on the drum were fixed in place. Hagelin modified the device by adding another pin-wheel and making the lugs moveable. This new machine was called Hagelin C-38 and it was much more secure compared to its predecessor.
In 1940 he brought to the US two copies of the hand operated C-38 and the Americans ordered 50 machines for evaluation. Once the devices were delivered, they underwent testing by the cryptologists of the Army’s Signal Intelligence Service and after approval it was adopted by the US armed forces for their midlevel traffic. Overall, more than 140.000 M-209’s were built for the US forces by the L.C. Smith and Corona Typewriters Company. (2) //
‘Report of interview with S/Sgt, Communications Section 79 Inf Div, 7th Army’. (dated March 1945) (51):
"The US Army code machine #209 was found to be something that hampered operations. It would take at least half hour to get a message through from the message center by use of this code machine and as a result the codes of particular importance or speed, for instance mortar messages, were sent in the clear."
Also, from the ‘Immediate report No. 126 (Combat Observations)’ - dated 6 May 1945 (52): ‘Information on the tactical situation is radioed or telephoned from the regiments to corps at hourly or more frequent intervals. Each officer observer averages about 30 messages per day.………………The M-209 converter proved too slow, cumbersome and inaccurate for transmission of those reports and was replaced by a simple prearranged message code with excellent results’.
Buchanan documents, as have others before him, that both the First and Second World Wars are primarily the product of wretchedly incompetent management of international relations on the part of Britain, France, Germany, and others. //
Most readers, myself included, will not buy all of Buchanan's arguments. Regarding the fecklessness of European diplomacy, and the causes of the First World War, I think that Buchanan is on solid ground. Other researchers before Buchanan have found the First World War to have been an avoidable tragedy that the European states should have been able to avoid. Buchanan's Second World War arguments are somewhat more problematic. //
Buchanan makes a pretty good case that Hitler was an opportunist, and that he was not without justification in seeking return of the Sudetenland and of Bohemia. Had he stopped there, and negotiated return of Danzig without war (which Buchanan says would have happened absent the British guaranty) we might be living in a very different world. Who can say?
Personally, I still think that Hitler was determined to fight a bloody war against Russia and persecute the Jews and other nationalities and ethnicities that he hated. Ultimately, it seems that Hitler was bound to fight such a war, but Buchanan makes some case that the world might have been better had Germany and Russia fought their war without the Western Allies being involved. Each reader must decide for him or her self. I don't accept this thesis. //
Mr. Buchanan's most insightful analysis is at the very end of this piece. He argues, as discussed above, that inept European diplomacy in which Great Powers went to war for non-vital reasons, was the cause of the World Wars. He then contrasts this with US diplomacy from World War I to the end of the Cold War. During this time American leaders refused to be easily drawn into conflicts and joined the World Wars only in their latter stages (particularly the First) thereby avoiding in significant degree, the horrendous casualties that many others suffered. Even more significantly, once America became the leading world power, American diplomacy repeatedly avoided war-starting confrontations by refusing, not without anguish, to fight wars for non-vital interests to America. Hence America's refusal to fight wars over Soviet interventions in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, or even the Cuban Missile Crisis. The contrast between the success of America in winning the Cold War without a World War (albeit with some sizable errors such as Vietnam) and European fecklessness in managing to start two world wars in 25 years, is stark. This is a truly fascinating insight which in my opinion is the major contribution of this book.
Christos T. • June 27, 2024 12:44 AM
@sqall:
In 1947 the US occupation authorities retrieved the files of the German Army’s codebreaking agency, called Inspectorate 7/VI. These had been buried at the end of the war in a camp in Austria.
The list of the documents that were retrieved is available from NARA as TICOM report IF-272 Tab ‘D’:
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/2811501
In page 12 of that report, it says: ‘Technische Erlaeuterung zur maschinellen Bearbeitung von AM 1 Kompromisstextloesungen auf der Texttiefe’.
The translation of that report is TICOM DF-114 ‘GERMAN CRYPTANALYTIC DEVICE FOR SOLUTION OF M-209 TRAFFIC’ and was released by the NSA to NARA in 2011 and copied and uploaded by me to Scribd and Google drive in 2012.
You can find it at NARA: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/23889821
Alternative historical fiction is a popular genre in America, where readers explore possibilities such as Napoleon deciding not to invade Russia or a Confederate victory in the Civil War, pondering the hypothetical impact on world history. In honor of Maritime Day 2024, let's consider what would have happened if the United States had fought the Second World War without a strong Merchant Marine and the tens of thousands of courageous mariners who delivered crucial supplies, troops, and weapons across dangerous waters.
It's clear: we would have lost the war or failed to achieve a decisive victory.
During WWII, an estimated 250,000 mariners served, and nearly 10,000 gave their lives, resulting in a higher per capita casualty rate than any of the armed services. Over 700 Merchant Marine ships were sunk by enemy attacks, and hundreds of mariners were held as prisoners of war.
FDR recognized the indispensable role of the Merchant Marine, which he considered the "fourth arm of defense" on par with the navy, army, and air force.
As we observe current global instability and brutal Eurasian conflicts, who will be the visionary leader and advocate who ensures the readiness of our Merchant Marine for the challenges ahead? Its current state is far from adequate. //
The distinction between admirals, generals, and media commentators who freely opine on strategy and theory neglects or casually assumes away the hard reality of logistics. Lately, the strategists have not fared well in deterring conflicts, and the logistic shortcomings in Ukraine and the Middle East are glaring. While those deficiencies are apparent, they pale in comparison to a potential war in the Pacific.
Policymakers properly acknowledge China as the pacing threat, but so few seriously consider the critical importance of logistics and the availability of highly trained and militarily obligated maritime personnel. Decades of war in the Middle East have conditioned us to the luxury of uncontested sea and airspace. We enjoyed large support bases close to combat operations. Our fleet had uninterrupted access to intact and secure port facilities. //
The People's Liberation Army knows that sealift is key to our success. While many debate the vulnerability of our aircraft carriers, they gloss over that our combat power will be short-lived without robust sealift and persistent combat logistics in a war at sea.
Regrettably, we are no longer a true maritime nation; we are now a naval nation.
China, now a bona fide maritime nation, has made significant investments in its merchant fleet and can call on over 5,000 merchant vessels during war. The US has around 80. We must expand our commercial fleet to align with our strategic interests. That means acquiring more ships and enhancing our ability to build, maintain, and quickly repair them. Above all, we cannot prevail without a significant number of merchant marine officers who are ready and obligated to serve the nation when called upon.