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Fangz posted:Well, by WW2 they were using cruise ships as troop ships. That pontoon doesn't compare to RMS Queen Mary carrying over 15,000 passengers... I'd bet that Queen Mary is a bit swifter than that likely lumbering while.
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Apr 28, 2021 18:56
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Libluini posted:Yeah, my first reaction to that was "But what if a German U-Boat manages to torpedo it when it's loaded up real good with all the troops?" It's probably too shallow-draft for a torpedo, really - the forward end has to come right up to the beach. The monitors were highly survivable against torpedoes. They had massive anti-torpedo bulges, which could prevent torpedo hits doing serious damage. In October 1917, Terror survived three torpedo hits, more than a couple of battleships did.
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Apr 28, 2021 19:20
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The twentieth century Monitors are so loving goofy I love them so much
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Apr 28, 2021 21:51
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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I imagine for something that size and carrying that many things they'd either drop the stuff off somewhere safe or have a huge screen of boats to prevent any kind of attacking thing going on.
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Apr 28, 2021 21:55
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Man Queen Mary fuckin drove right through a light cruiser, HMS Curacoa (sic), and just kept on trucking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Curacoa_(D41)#Collision
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Apr 28, 2021 22:40
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Fangz posted:Well, by WW2 they were using cruise ships as troop ships. That pontoon doesn't compare to RMS Queen Mary carrying over 15,000 passengers... Take a lot longer to get them all off of there and to shore, though.
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Apr 28, 2021 23:07
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aphid_licker posted:Man Queen Mary fuckin drove right through a light cruiser, HMS Curacoa (sic), and just kept on trucking quote:At 13:32, during the zig-zag, it became apparent that Queen Mary would come too close to the cruiser and the liner's officer of the watch interrupted the turn to avoid Curacoa. Upon hearing this command, Illingworth told his officer to: "Carry on with the zig-zag. These chaps are used to escorting; they will keep out of your way and won't interfere with you." Narrator: they did not keep out of the way
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Apr 29, 2021 00:48
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Fangz posted:Well, by WW2 they were using cruise ships as troop ships. That pontoon doesn't compare to RMS Queen Mary carrying over 15,000 passengers... Different kind of transport. The big liners were used to ferry troops between the US and Britain/Europe, not for actual amphibious landings.
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Apr 29, 2021 01:12
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feedmegin posted:Take a lot longer to get them all off of there and to shore, though. Vincent Van Goatse posted:Different kind of transport. The big liners were used to ferry troops between the US and Britain/Europe, not for actual amphibious landings. Y'all, Fangz is not implying that the QM is a landing ship of any sort. They're responding to a post Libluini posted:Yeah, my first reaction to that was "But what if a German U-Boat manages to torpedo it when it's loaded up real good with all the troops?" about the risk of a whole bunch of soldiers going down at once to a torpedo attack and pointing out that that risk is hardly unique to the pontoon—it applies equally if not more so to any large troopship, of which the QM happens to be an exceptionally large example.
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Apr 29, 2021 04:13
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Libluini posted:Yeah, my first reaction to that was "But what if a German U-Boat manages to torpedo it when it's loaded up real good with all the troops?" Amphibious Assault Barge would be a pretty soft target but during the landing it would be surrounded by dozens of warships there to protect it and bombard the beach. The U-Boat would have to get through a wall of destroyers first.
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Apr 29, 2021 05:31
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:Y'all, Fangz is not implying that the QM is a landing ship of any sort. They're responding to a post Generally, convoys containing troopships like that were well-escorted and fast, and the Allies were more willing to abuse their cryptographic knowledge of U-boat patrol zones to dodge them to avoid that. IIRC the Torch invasion fleet, going from the US had a fairly absurd escort.
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Apr 29, 2021 08:29
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Different kind of transport. The big liners were used to ferry troops between the US and Britain/Europe, not for actual amphibious landings. Didn't some kind of modified cargo ship/liner get used as an assault transport at Gallipoli?
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Apr 29, 2021 09:12
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MikeCrotch posted:Didn't some kind of modified cargo ship/liner get used as an assault transport at Gallipoli? Yeah, that was a collier, the River Clyde.
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Apr 29, 2021 09:17
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:Y'all, Fangz is not implying that the QM is a landing ship of any sort. They're responding to a post  MikeCrotch posted:Didn't some kind of modified cargo ship/liner get used as an assault transport at Gallipoli? Yes, the River Clyde. And while she was very much a proof of concept for later landing ships, she was nowhere near the size of an oceanic passenger liner.
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Apr 29, 2021 09:22
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:about the risk of a whole bunch of soldiers going down at once to a torpedo attack and pointing out that that risk is hardly unique to the pontoon—it applies equally if not more so to any large troopship, of which the QM happens to be an exceptionally large example. one of the major risk mitigation factors for the big liners is that they were very fast, which would not be the case for the big pontoon
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Apr 29, 2021 14:42
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In addition to the pontoon being covered by warships, might its presumably shallow draft also render it de facto immune to the torpedoes of the time?
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Apr 29, 2021 15:03
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:that risk is hardly unique to the pontoon—it applies equally if not more so to any large troopship, of which the QM happens to be an exceptionally large example. And even to ships carrying POWs torpedoed by submarines from the nation the POWs are from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jun%27y%C5%8D_Maru
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Apr 29, 2021 15:27
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Phanatic posted:And even to ships carrying POWs torpedoed by submarines from the nation the POWs are from: At least that guy didn't machine-gun the POWs in the water afterwards thinking they were Japanese, like another US sub captain did 
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Apr 29, 2021 15:54
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FuturePastNow posted:Amphibious Assault Barge would be a pretty soft target but during the landing it would be surrounded by dozens of warships there to protect it and bombard the beach. The U-Boat would have to get through a wall of destroyers first. WWI-destroyers? So the assault barges are basically dead as soon as the fighting starts. Edit: Thinking about this some more, this WWI assault barge would probably go down when German artillery starts bombing them. As Gallipoli showed, WWI-ships have a hard time hitting targets on land, and I'm not really sure a major operation like this could be a surprise, anyway. An actual attempt would have, in all probability, ended with all barges sunk, some other British ships included. And if they try landing far enough from the frontlines, the troops would attempt landing in good range to get surrounded by German reserves on their way to the front*, even if for some reason the German Empire completely misses a fleet operation of that size *I'm assuming here an ongoing offensive to try to keep attention from the landing operation so the attackers have at least a chance to land before getting massacred, but then again this would mean German reserves mobilizing and heading to the front, which means the landing operation ends up spilling brigades into an ocean of enemy soldiers. Somewhat of a Catch-22
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Apr 29, 2021 16:21
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Panzeh posted:Generally, convoys containing troopships like that were well-escorted and fast, and the Allies were more willing to abuse their cryptographic knowledge of U-boat patrol zones to dodge them to avoid that. IIRC the Torch invasion fleet, going from the US had a fairly absurd escort. Large liners like the Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, Normandie, etc were so fast that they mostly operated outside the convoy structure. And by “fast,” I don’t mean that they could do 33kts when pressed, but cruised around at 15. QE as an example, cruised at well over 25kts, and could do better than 30kts when needed. Queen Mary averaged over 31kts all the way across the Atlantic when she won the Blue Riband in 1938. Even a surface warship would have a hard time catching/intercepting a liner like that, let alone a WWII diesel/electric submarine.
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Apr 29, 2021 16:37
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:one of the major risk mitigation factors for the big liners is that they were very fast, which would not be the case for the big pontoon Agreed, which is why I did not respond to the earlier posts raising that comparison.
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Apr 29, 2021 16:44
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Phanatic posted:And even to ships carrying POWs torpedoed by submarines from the nation the POWs are from: I know I've mentioned this, but I was a curator on USS Pampanito, a museum ship. In September 1944 Pampanito was part of a wolfpack with two other subs (Growler and Sealion) that sank Japanese shipping. One of the Japanese ships turned out to be a "hellship" (Rakuyo Maru) transporting British and Australian POWs who had previously worked on the Burma Railway (the infamous Bridge on the River Kwai) to Japan. When the ship was sunk the Japanese escorts saved Japanese sailors but left the POWs in the water to die. Pampanito returned to the area the next day and, to their surprise, heard the men in the water. They saved all that they could find, 73 of them, and radioed for other subs in the area (Sealion, Queenfish, and Barb) to help look for survivors. All but one that they found survived and were returned to an allied base. Up until the early 2000s every three years the museum would host a reunion for the crew and the POWs. It was an emotional event. I distinctly remember one Australian POW speaking and saying, "thank you for giving me my life back." One of the other museum staffers, a historian, wrote a book based on the incident and interviews with the veterans called Lucky 73.
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Apr 29, 2021 17:00
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Libluini posted:WWI-destroyers? So the assault barges are basically dead as soon as the fighting starts. After August 1914 where do you think the German army's reserves are exactly
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Apr 29, 2021 18:17
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Libluini posted:WWI-destroyers? So the assault barges are basically dead as soon as the fighting starts. The plan was to land on beaches to the west of Ostend. These were covered by a few German batteries, with the main one being a battery of 6in guns at Raversyde. These were to be engaged by the RN's three 15in monitors, while its force of 12in monitors pushed the pontoons to the beaches. The monitors displayed fair accuracy along the Belgian coast in 1916-17, especially in combination with air spotting. The problem with Gallipoli was that the Ottomans were able to position Army field guns and howitzers in dead ground, where they couldn't be spotted from the ships. These could do little to a battleship, but effectively prevented minesweeping, which in turn made it hard for the battleships to move into position to engage the fixed forts. Against the forts at the mouths of the straits, the battleships managed to do some quite serious damage. There's no reason to think that the fixed German batteries here would have come through it any better. The landing might well have been able to achieve surprise. It was a relatively small operation, using only the ships of the Dover Patrol, and landing ~three miles from the Allied front line. The British had kept strict security around the assault troops, the lighters and the monitors, to ensure that there were no leaks. It would have been a night landing, further reducing the effectiveness of the German batteries, and a smoke screen would have been used to keep the assault force hidden from the shore until the last minute. The German corps tasked with defending the area believed that a landing was likely to come east of Ostend; the beaches to the west were backed by a tall seawall, which would make an assault much more difficult. The beaches to the east were also better positioned to threaten key bases such as Bruges. However, the British found that the Mark IV tank could, with minor modifications, climb the seawall with little issue. The land behind the beaches was mainly marshy. This would make it hard for the Allies to advance out of the beachhead, but also made it hard for the Germans to counterattack. As far as the possibility of encountering German reserves go, this was unlikely. The operation was planned to coincide with the Third Battle of Ypres, going on further inland. There were few German reserves based around Ostend, and they wouldn't be advancing along the coast to get to Ypres. At the same time, it was acknowledged that the British were taking a risk, but since the likely maximum losses were a single division and a few monitors, the risk was thought to be relatively minor; even an absolute calamity would see fewer losses than Gallipoli.
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Apr 29, 2021 18:35
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6.2 Countermeasures (Ripped from A Radar History of World War 2 by Louis Brown) Part 5/? Window was the perfect countermeasure for the Wurzburg wavelength. To be effective, Window must fall through the radar beam to insure that the operator's indicator is overwhelmed. If the radar beam is narrow, as is the case for microwaves, the chance of a sufficient number of dipoles lying in it will be correspondingly small. The Wurzburg 50 cm dipoles beam was large enough to pick up thousands of the little dipoles as they drifted through the sky, whereas a 10 cm beam would intercept only about 1/25 as many. The Wurzburg used a rotating dipole at the feed, which provided a continuous sweep of all polarizations, so the random orientations of the falling strips were well scanned. Telefunken tested the idea at the Luftwaffe research station at Rechlin in early 1940 with results so shocking to the top levels of the Luftwaffe that the tightest secrecy was imposed on the knowledge; a ban was even imposes on further experimentation, effectively cutting off the development of protective measures. In accordance with Telefunken's use of geographical locations as code names, Leo Brandt called the metal foil technique Duppel after a Flak battery stationed on an estate by that name near Berlin-Zehlendorf, an exceptional way of being secretive - the German word for dipole is similar to the English. When Terman returned from his stay with Cockburn, he brought knowledge of Window with him. He instituted research in what the Americans chose to call Chaff and assigned Dr. L J Chu, a noted antenna expert, to study the matter theoretically. Theory was important because the ratio of the width of the foil to its length determined the bandwidth of its resonance. A very sharp resonance could miss the wavelength of the incident radar and generate only a small echo. To extract the practical aspects, Terman turned the theory over to Fred Whipple, an astronomer. Practical manufacture set constraints on a design for the huge quantities that would be needed, and Whipple soon worked out formulae that gave radar cross sections for a given bandwidth per kilogram. His results were confirmed in experiments at TRE, and large quantities were stockpiled against the day of use. By the end of the war, three quarters of all American aluminum foil production went for Window. The introduction of Window caught the Wurzburg-equipped gunners and Lichtenstein-equipped night fighters completely by surprise. Ever since the Bruneval raid, jamming had been expected for Wurzburg, and a modification, Wismar, that allowed relatively rapid changes of wavelength was ready, but an air filled with dipoles had been officially banished from thought and plan. What might have been accomplished in calm now had to be done in extreme haste. The night fighters were already in the process of changing their 50 cm equipment for 3.5 m sets (for unrelated reasons) and thereby became immune to the new clouds obscuring their prey, but a substantial change of wavelength was not an immediate option open to the AA radar. The basis for working through Window came from the very first reflection experiments of the early 1930s - the Doppler effect. The Wavelength of the reflected signal was altered by motion of the target, and bombers moved fast whereas the drifting dipoles moved with the wind. The Wurzburg used special high-frequency triodes in its transmitter, which were stable enough in frequency to allow filters in the receiver to distinguish shifted from unshifted echoes. This was the first use of the technique that has come to be called "pulsed Doppler". Unfortunately, echoes from aircraft were not just shifted, they were shifted to either side of the transmitter wavelength depending on whether the targets were approaching or departing and by an amount dependent on the velocity. A suitable device, called Wurzlaus, invented at the Max-Wien-Institut within two weeks after the alarm, suppressed the unshifted signal that came from the cloud of dipoles, which made it easier for the operator to see the unsuppressed echoes from the target. It allowed some degree of success in distinguishing bombers from aluminum foil, and in skilled hands under the right conditions, this restored much of Flak's accuracy. It worked on the approach, where there was a Doppler shift to shorter wavelengths, but failed, of course, in the important mid-course region when the bombers flew at right angles to the radar line-of-sight and where the Doppler shift was too small for discrimination. But Wurzlaus had the unfortunate characteristic of requiring a fixed wavelength, which made it incompatible with Wismar's frequency agility. This meant that formations throwing out packages of Window and operating their Carpet jammers, something that became common in Fall 1944, made radar-directed gunfire sometimes impossible. When overcome in this manner, the Wurzburg made use of Stendal A and became a passive device that at least determined the direction to the Carpet transmitter. Another expedient made us of an audible signal produced on the reflected pulses by the propellers and general vibration of airframes, an effect noted by Lorenz investigators when observing a windmill in experiments just before the war. The radar receiver output was passed through an audio-frequency filter that suppressed the pulse-repetition frequency before transmitting it to a pair of headphones; the operator then attempted to "hear" the airplane. The device, called Nurnberg, was manufactured between September and December 1943. In Early 1944, Dr. H Pohlmann of the Reichs-Luftfahrt-Ministerium removed the frequency rigidity and other deficiencies of Wurzlaus with an improvement called Tastlaus, which worked with Wismar and thereby greatly improved the ability of radar control to work through Window and Carpet. Despite all Allied precautions, Flak took ever greater numbers of the attacking formations. During the last seven months of the war, the US Army Strategic Air Forces in Europe lost 1566 aircraft to AA fire. What would the total have been without Carpet and Window? The unsatisfactory nature of the methods to counter Window was reflected in a competition offered by Goring for the best technical solution with tax-free prizes up to 300,000 Rm depending on the value of the invention. Entries were to have been delivered to the Air Ministry Technical Office GL/C-F4 by 1 April 1944. Staatsrat Professor Abraham Esau, who would shortly replace Plendl as Plenipotentiary of High-Frequency Research, was to head the judges. There is no record of an award.
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Apr 29, 2021 21:11
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Jobbo_Fett posted:[Incomprehensible yet fascinating stuff] "Abraham Esau" strikes me as a dangerous name to have in nazi Germany.
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Apr 30, 2021 08:22
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Can anyone recommend a book about female soldiers in the American Civil War?
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May 2, 2021 05:23
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Thank you for your Radar posting Mr. Fett. Dumb question for the thread in general: how much of the electronic devices discussed do you know what they are? Because aside from maybe vacuum tubes, it's all Greek to me.
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May 2, 2021 14:31
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Randomcheese3 posted:The plan was to land on beaches to the west of Ostend. These were covered by a few German batteries, with the main one being a battery of 6in guns at Raversyde. These were to be engaged by the RN's three 15in monitors, while its force of 12in monitors pushed the pontoons to the beaches. The monitors displayed fair accuracy along the Belgian coast in 1916-17, especially in combination with air spotting. The problem with Gallipoli was that the Ottomans were able to position Army field guns and howitzers in dead ground, where they couldn't be spotted from the ships. These could do little to a battleship, but effectively prevented minesweeping, which in turn made it hard for the battleships to move into position to engage the fixed forts. Against the forts at the mouths of the straits, the battleships managed to do some quite serious damage. There's no reason to think that the fixed German batteries here would have come through it any better. Hey, that's an interestingly in-depth description of the plan, thank you! Though my mind zeroed in on two possible failure points: It would really suck if it turns out the Mark IV's couldn't deal with the real seawalls and if the secret gets out before the landing, boy those poor bastards
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May 2, 2021 16:18
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6.2 Countermeasures (Ripped from A Radar History of World War 2 by Louis Brown) Part 6/6 The Pacific War was almost a separate war, and this held particularly for radar; thus the introduction of Window by the Japanese during a night raid on Guadalcanal in May 1943 went unreported to Europe and did not enter into the discussion that led to its introduction in the July attack on Hamburg. The Japanese dropped 75 cm strips of "deceiving paper" (Giman-shi) to disrupt the SCR-268 that was proving to be a problem. They considered the use successful in reducing losses. Observing enemy radar and radio navigation equipment in order to discern its characteristics was the earliest function of countermeasures people. The Royal Navy entered quickly into these transactions, setting up an electronic countermeasures station at Dover during summer 1941. Such services quickly became airborne, and their missions, thought inherently passive, were by no means safe. The direct observation of a Lichtenstein during the night of 3 December 1942 proved to be a very near thing for an air crew that had deliberately positioned themselves as bait. Much more tangible information about the Lichtenstein came the following May in the form of a Ju-88 equipped with 50 cm B/C model, thanks to the carefully planned defection of a night-fighter pilot and radioman who secured the acquiescence of the mechanic with the aid of a pistol. This gave Britain not only the details of the radar and radio altimeter but allowed the machine to be used in simulated fights with British aircraft, which helped them locate weaknesses to exploit. The vast expanse of the Pacific resulted in a number intercept-receiver-equipped long-range aircraft, called Ferrets, probing the Japanese-held islands, but the first solid data came by way of a submarine, not an airplane. USS Drum went on patrol in September 1942 with an ARC-1 receiver on board. The radio operator was told how to use it when the boat was on the surface near Japan, but only if its employment did not interfere with other operations. The strip chart records brought back were the first interceptions of Japanese radar. A newly equipped Ferret in the South Pacific at about the same time failed to be first, presumably because of a poor receiver. The Ferrets soon improved their technique and successfully mapped the radiation from the Japanese Mark I Model I set on Kiska, Alaska in March 1943. These kinds of flight became a normal part of fleet reconnaissance. When radar sets pointed their beams according to the will of the operator, intercept receivers could be tuned by hand, as the interrogating beam could be expected to remain long enough to be recorded. When the PPI technique became widespread, the receiver could expect to be in the sweeping beam only a small fraction of the time, and this required automatic scanning receivers. The ultimate of such receivers was the TRE frequency-indicating receiver that presented received signals on a cathode-ray tube with their amplitudes shown as straight lines radiating from the origin and the frequencies given by the angles of trace orientation. Signals that might be missed during most receiver scans stood out and were easily identified by the operator. Such were the principal means by which the adversaries came to grips over Germany during the night and, after the arrival of the Americans, during the day. There was variation that will occupy us yet, and deception was not restricted to radio waves. German radar engineers found themselves devoting ever more time and resources to devising the means of countering Allied countermeasures, but they understood the peril of the time and gave a full measure of ingenuity to protect their homes while the regime that controlled their country seemed to the end incapable of comprehending the need for an extensive development of defensive weapons.
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May 2, 2021 17:58
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Are the losses of attacking B-52s in Vietnam still disputed? If so, how? You'd think one thing that would be extremely easy to establish is the production/fate of Stratofortresses.
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May 2, 2021 21:04
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Also which one of you nerds is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZdbpfcxfSk Trigger warning: enthusiasm about castles
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May 3, 2021 01:18
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Randomcheese3 posted:The problem with Gallipoli was that the Ottomans were able to position Army field guns and howitzers in dead ground, where they couldn't be spotted from the ships. These could do little to a battleship, but effectively prevented minesweeping, which in turn made it hard for the battleships to move into position to engage the fixed forts. Against the forts at the mouths of the straits, the battleships managed to do some quite serious damage. (forward observer nerdery follows) This also has to do with naval guns having a flat trajectory compared to land artillery. A ship (or the forts) essentially represents a vertical target you're shooting at with a very big rifle, and the probable error range matters a whole lot less than with a horizontal target dug into the dead ground (or preferably slightly into the back of the slope). Probable error range is up to a hundred metres / yards currently (https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA331645.pdf) so I'm sure way more than that in WW1. 50% of rounds will fall +/- 1 PER but the expected dispersion is 4x PER overall.
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May 3, 2021 08:32
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Hey, can anybody recommend any WW2 memoirs from people serving on carrier aircraft maintenance crews? Also in general memoirs from the odd sides of war - was reading "Naples '44 - An intelligence officer in the Italian labyrinth" by Norman Lewis and it feels like there's a lot to look into in terms of daily life in an army outside of the front lines and command tents.
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May 3, 2021 10:58
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IS-6 And as a bonus, one of my original articles: British study of the Panther tank Queue: SU-101/SU-102/Uralmash-1, Centurion Mk.I, SU-100 front line impressions, IS-2 front line impressions, Myths of Soviet tank building: early Great Patriotic War, Influence of the T-34 on German tank building, Medium Tank T25, Heavy Tank T26/T26E1/T26E3, Career of Harry Knox, GMC M36, Geschützwagen Tiger für 17cm K72 (Sf), Early Early Soviet tank development (MS-1, AN Teplokhod), Career of Semyon Aleksandrovich Ginzburg, AT-1, Object 140, SU-76 frontline impressions, Creation of the IS-3, IS-6, SU-5, Myths of Soviet tank building: 1943-44, IS-2 post-war modifications, Myths of Soviet tank building: end of the Great Patriotic War, Medium Tank T6, RPG-1, Lahti L-39, American tank building plans post-war, German tanks for 1946, HMC M7 Priest, GMC M12, GMC M40/M43, ISU-152, AMR 35 ZT, Soviet post-war tank building plans, T-100Y and SU-14-1, Object 430, Pz.Kpfw.35(t), T-60 tanks in combat, SU-76M modernizations, Panhard 178, 15 cm sFH 13/1 (Sf), 43M Zrínyi, Medium Tank M46, Modernization of the M48 to the M60 standard, German tank building trends at the end of WW2, Pz.Kpfw.III/IV, E-50 and E-75 development, Pre-war and early war British tank building, BT-7M/A-8 trials, Jagdtiger suspension, Light Tank T37, Light Tank T41, T-26-6 (SU-26), Voroshilovets tractor trials. Available for request (others' articles):  Shashmurin's career T-55 underwater driving equipment T-64's composite armour  Oerlikon and Solothurn anti-tank rifles Evolution of German tank observation devices Ensign Expendable fucked around with this message at 16:28 on May 3, 2021 |
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May 3, 2021 14:16
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Nebakenezzer posted:Are the losses of attacking B-52s in Vietnam still disputed? If so, how? You'd think one thing that would be extremely easy to establish is the production/fate of Stratofortresses. The Vietnamese claim more were shot down than USAF records support (17 is the most reported number v. 34 claimed by North Vietnam) but it's hard to blame them, such things are notoriously hard to document.
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May 3, 2021 15:26
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I recently listened to The Dollop's episode on the USS William D Porter. Dear Lord, what a story. When FDR heard that a torpedo was launched at his ship and asked to have his wheelchair parked at the railing to watch it approach, I knew I was in for a good time.
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May 4, 2021 00:36
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Cessna posted:The Vietnamese claim more were shot down than USAF records support (17 is the most reported number v. 34 claimed by North Vietnam) but it's hard to blame them, such things are notoriously hard to document. If they claim they shot down only double what they actually did, that's probably a pretty modest overestimate.
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May 4, 2021 04:01
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Tomn posted:Hey, can anybody recommend any WW2 memoirs from people serving on carrier aircraft maintenance crews? Also in general memoirs from the odd sides of war - was reading "Naples '44 - An intelligence officer in the Italian labyrinth" by Norman Lewis and it feels like there's a lot to look into in terms of daily life in an army outside of the front lines and command tents. Maybe not quite what you're thinking of, but you could try Exploding Star by Fritz Molden. Molden was a member of the Austrian resistance, and went from being assigned to a penal battalion to working for Allied intelligence undercover, traveling between Italy, Austria and Switzerland. He became a major newspaper publisher after the war, and was married to Allan Dulles' daughter for a time.
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May 4, 2021 10:30
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Tomn posted:Hey, can anybody recommend any WW2 memoirs from people serving on carrier aircraft maintenance crews? Also in general memoirs from the odd sides of war - was reading "Naples '44 - An intelligence officer in the Italian labyrinth" by Norman Lewis and it feels like there's a lot to look into in terms of daily life in an army outside of the front lines and command tents. http://70yearsago.com/ Chick Bruns served in the Army during WWII, was a Sergeant in the 3rd Division, 10th Combat Engineers and participated in 5 invasions; Africa, Sicily, Italy, Anzio and France. He was awarded the Purple Heart, French Croix De Guerre with Palm and 2 Presidential Unit Citations. This one is probably more what you are looking for, even though it is being posted in a frustrating manner: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/i-found-my-91-year-old-fathers-us-navy-aircraft-carrier-diary-world-war-ii-100777 SerthVarnee fucked around with this message at 12:58 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 12:51
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