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The Old Hack

Story Wednesday January 31, 2018

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8 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

If the Pearl harbor attack was stupid, Germany's war declaration on the US was brain-dead.  So much so that one wonders if it were the actions of a time-traveler trying to keep history on track.

This is a question that has made more than one noted WW2 historian scratch their head. Why did Hitler declare war on the US then? There is no really clear explanation. Sebastian Haffner proposed one that at least matched Hitler's personality: he was so furious at the failure of the Russia offensive that he declared war on the US to punish Germany for failing to live up to the demands he had asked of it. It was at the same time he started to go from mere incarceration and persecution of Jews and other 'inferior races' to active extermination of them. He no longer thought he could win the war so he wanted to hurt his enemies as badly as he could before it ended.

Still along the same lines, he ordered the destruction of Germany's heavy industry as the Allies started to cross the borders. He wanted Germany utterly ruined as punishment for its failure. It was at that point that the hitherto loyal Albert Speer defied Hitler by only destroying ten percent of Germany's factories, then showing him the pictures of the ruins and telling him he had had it done to all of the factories in Germany.

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31 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

This is a question that has made more than one noted WW2 historian scratch their head. Why did Hitler declare war on the US then? There is no really clear explanation. Sebastian Haffner proposed one that at least matched Hitler's personality: he was so furious at the failure of the Russia offensive that he declared war on the US to punish Germany for failing to live up to the demands he had asked of it. It was at the same time he started to go from mere incarceration and persecution of Jews and other 'inferior races' to active extermination of them. He no longer thought he could win the war so he wanted to hurt his enemies as badly as he could before it ended.

Still along the same lines, he ordered the destruction of Germany's heavy industry as the Allies started to cross the borders. He wanted Germany utterly ruined as punishment for its failure. It was at that point that the hitherto loyal Albert Speer defied Hitler by only destroying ten percent of Germany's factories, then showing him the pictures of the ruins and telling him he had had it done to all of the factories in Germany.

I'm not sure punishment would be apropos to declaring war on the US.  Not in 1941.  It does sound like Hitler made the decision past the tipping point to madness.  It could have been sheer accumulated frustration that had Hitler declare war.

Hitler had to know we were supplying both the British and the Russians with equipment despite calling ourselves "neutral".  Germany failed at the Battle of Britain which meant Germany couldn't invade and US help to Russia undoubtedly made the job of taking Russia down harder.  (One of the big things we sent Soviet Russia were trucks.  It still boggles me a little how much technologically-focused Germany relied on horse-powered supply and support). 

I think the Germans also looked down on the US.  Goering was once quoted as saying words to the effect that the US made decent enough cars and razor blades, but combat stuff?  yeah,  right.  Sources I've read suggest that none of the axis powers really grasped the US ability to crank out sheer amounts of stuff and way over-estimated the importance of their own tactics, training, ferocity and general racial superiority. 

There's even some truth to what Georing said.  The legendary P-51 just wasn't that great with it's US-made Pratt and Whitney engine.  But the Rolls Royce Merlin made it sing.  I think it was the Sherman tank whose poor performance was greatly increased by giving it a British gun as well.

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11 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

I'm not sure punishment would be apropos to declaring war on the US.  Not in 1941.  It does sound like Hitler made the decision past the tipping point to madness.  It could have been sheer accumulated frustration that had Hitler declare war.

Certainly. Even Haffner himself was uncertain about this. He set it forth as a hypothesis more than anything else, basing it on Hitler's essential nihilism and self-centeredness.

12 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

It still boggles me a little how much technologically-focused Germany relied on horse-powered supply and support

You have to remember that the twenties in many ways were not good years for Germany. Where a lot of other nations spent this time modernising their industry and farms, Germany struggled with war debt, unstable government and years of deliberate hyperinflation. Then 1929 and the Wall Street disaster struck, leading to several more years of depression. Germany did catch up in the artificial boom Hitler created in the 30s but also spent immense effort on infrastructure, their new air force and general rearmament. They simply did not have the resources or the time to motorise everything.

Incidentally, Hitler found a way to create compromises between labour and employers that helped create his boom. "I have found a solution to the current deadlock. All who are against it will be shot. Show of hands, please. Who here are in favour?" *a brief count later* "All in favour, I see. How gratifying. Solution adopted by acclamation."

20 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

I think the Germans also looked down on the US.  Goering was once quoted as saying words to the effect that the US made decent enough cars and razor blades, but combat stuff?  yeah,  right.  Sources I've read suggest that none of the axis powers really grasped the US ability to crank out sheer amounts of stuff and way over-estimated the importance of their own tactics, training, ferocity and general racial superiority. 

In general this is correct. Some few officers and experts knew exactly how ill-advised it was to poke the sleeping giant but they were overruled. For example, the famous Admiral Yamamoto spent years in the US and had a very high opinion of her energy, people and productivity. When asked his opinion of what would happen if Japan declared war on the US, he unhesitatingly declared, "We will be able to expand freely for six months, then we will be halted, and will never achieve new gains after that. And then we will lose all our gains one by one until we have nothing left."

Yamamoto gave his very unpopular opinion and was then ordered to attack Pearl Harbour. He carried out his orders, convinced that they would destroy Japan's dreams of empire but determined to do everything he could to do buy as much time as possible. He died in 1944 when a plane he was riding in was shot down, having seen basically his entire prediction come true.

27 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

There's even some truth to what Georing said.  The legendary P-51 just wasn't that great with it's US-made Pratt and Whitney engine.  But the Rolls Royce Merlin made it sing.  I think it was the Sherman tank whose poor performance was greatly increased by giving it a British gun as well.

Göring was like a stopped clock. At most right twice a day and entirely useless for anything except looking fancy. I personally feel that he should have been presented with the Victoria Cross for his efforts during the Blitz; he richly earned it.

The Sherman was not a bad tank for the year it was made in but the US clung to it for too long. In 1942 it was rather decent. In 1943 it was more or less outdated against anything German. In 1944 it was a rolling death trap that basically only beat the Germans by drowning them in numbers and taking horrible casualties in the process. If the US had created and deployed the Pershing one year earlier it could have saved the lives of so many heroic US tankers by giving them decent tanks to fight in.

Mind you, it did quite well against the Japanese who had spent next to no resources on developing tanks at all. With few exceptions all Japanese armour consisted of light tanks and the Shermans slaughtered them as effortlessly as the Panthers and the Tigers chewed up Shermans. It did not help the Japanese that they did not possess any real man portable antitank weaponry at all. The one such weapon they did have was basically a big explosive charge on a stick. It was operated by having a soldier run up to the tank with the stick, insert the charge at the end of the stick in some vulnerable spot and then set it off by pulling a string. For some reason I am not completely sure of, it was not a very popular weapon among Japanese infantrymen.

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1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

Certainly. Even Haffner himself was uncertain about this. He set it forth as a hypothesis more than anything else, basing it on Hitler's essential nihilism and self-centeredness.

That's why I say "not in 1941".  There was still plenty of room for self-delusion in 1941.

1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

You have to remember that the twenties in many ways were not good years for Germany. Where a lot of other nations spent this time modernising their industry and farms, Germany struggled with war debt, unstable government and years of deliberate hyperinflation. Then 1929 and the Wall Street disaster struck, leading to several more years of depression. Germany did catch up in the artificial boom Hitler created in the 30s but also spent immense effort on infrastructure, their new air force and general rearmament. They simply did not have the resources or the time to motorise everything.

Incidentally, Hitler found a way to create compromises between labour and employers that helped create his boom. "I have found a solution to the current deadlock. All who are against it will be shot. Show of hands, please. Who here are in favour?" *a brief count later* "All in favour, I see. How gratifying. Solution adopted by acclamation."

This makes sense.  Germany was really still recovering from the depredations of Versailles and the Great Depression.  There was only so much industrial output available, so they got done the minimum needed to go on a land offensive.   They always seemed to have some to spare production for projects like jet aircraft, ballistic missiles and a thousand-ton tank, of which only the turret was ever built.  Thinking about horse-drawn supply, I had in mind limits to German industry, especially the sorry state of the Kriegsmarine.  The few ships they had were good but not nearly enough to contest with the Royal Navy.  Production simply wasn't there to put a serious navy into the water so the Germans built both surface ships and submarines designed to reduce or with luck interrupt the flow of resources from the US.  They mostly built one aircraft carrier, the Hindenburg, and puttered around with it over the entire war without ever finishing itto the point of going to sea with it.

1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

In general this is correct. Some few officers and experts knew exactly how ill-advised it was to poke the sleeping giant but they were overruled. For example, the famous Admiral Yamamoto spent years in the US and had a very high opinion of her energy, people and productivity. When asked his opinion of what would happen if Japan declared war on the US, he unhesitatingly declared, "We will be able to expand freely for six months, then we will be halted, and will never achieve new gains after that. And then we will lose all our gains one by one until we have nothing left."

Agreed.  That was the Japanese plan.  Quick, vicious war and hope the isolationist Americans would not want to dig in and fight.
 

1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

Yamamoto gave his very unpopular opinion and was then ordered to attack Pearl Harbour. He carried out his orders, convinced that they would destroy Japan's dreams of empire but determined to do everything he could to do buy as much time as possible. He died in 1944 when a plane he was riding in was shot down, having seen basically his entire prediction come true.

Newer sources say that Yamamoto was actually very contemptuous of the US.  I grew up hearing that Yamamoto esteemed the US highly as well.  What I hear now He may have had had an accurate grasp of what we could do if we wanted, but he considered us to be shallow and decadent, which I guess is why he thought the "quick war" plan would work.

1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

Göring was like a stopped clock. At most right twice a day and entirely useless for anything except looking fancy. I personally feel that he should have been presented with the Victoria Cross for his efforts during the Blitz; he richly earned it.

The "floating fat man" of Hitler's inner circle but with less intelligence and guile.  Goring's qualification for his job was loyalty not expertise and it showed.

1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

The Sherman was not a bad tank for the year it was made in but the US clung to it for too long. In 1942 it was rather decent. In 1943 it was more or less outdated against anything German. In 1944 it was a rolling death trap that basically only beat the Germans by drowning them in numbers and taking horrible casualties in the process. If the US had created and deployed the Pershing one year earlier it could have saved the lives of so many heroic US tankers by giving them decent tanks to fight in.

...which speaks that much better for Patton's military ability.

1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

Mind you, it did quite well against the Japanese who had spent next to no resources on developing tanks at all. With few exceptions all Japanese armour consisted of light tanks and the Shermans slaughtered them as effortlessly as the Panthers and the Tigers chewed up Shermans. It did not help the Japanese that they did not possess any real man portable antitank weaponry at all. The one such weapon they did have was basically a big explosive charge on a stick. It was operated by having a soldier run up to the tank with the stick, insert the charge at the end of the stick in some vulnerable spot and then set it off by pulling a string. For some reason I am not completely sure of, it was not a very popular weapon among Japanese infantrymen.

IIRC, the Japanese had worse resource problems than the Germans.  One historian I read suggested that the Japanese could have built 50 of their innovative destroyers with the resources they sunk into the Yamato.  But the Japanese admirals believed in the "decisive battle" theory of sea warfare where there would come one perfect battle that would decide it all.  They mostly kept the Yamato and its sister ship the Musashi in reserve for that expected battle, which never came (or occurred without them at Midway).  Japan just got whittled down.  They needed carriers and experienced pilots and sheer US production, as well as fast-evolving US carrier planes, chewed both those resources up far faster than the Japanese could replace them.

 

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3 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:
9 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

This was the successful Japanese strategy for war with Russia earlier in the 20th Century.
You make an overwhelming attack on the enemy fleet and then sue for peace on your terms.

You also have to be sure that's the fleet you want to actually knock out.  The fleet docked at Pearl were mostly older ships.  The US was busily putting together an updated navy, but like the Doomsday machine of Dr. Strangelove, we just hadn't told anybody so it had zero deterrence value.  Of course we were mostly building a surface fleet, but very quickly into WW2, The US started asking the same question of cruiser-size ships planned or being built, "can we turn this into a carrier?"

War with Japan took so heavy toll on US fleet they ended the war with four times more ships they had on start, didn't they?

Japan seriously underestimated the capacity of US industry to build more ships.

2 hours ago, The Old Hack said:
2 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

I think the Germans also looked down on the US.  Goering was once quoted as saying words to the effect that the US made decent enough cars and razor blades, but combat stuff?  yeah,  right.  Sources I've read suggest that none of the axis powers really grasped the US ability to crank out sheer amounts of stuff and way over-estimated the importance of their own tactics, training, ferocity and general racial superiority. 

In general this is correct. Some few officers and experts knew exactly how ill-advised it was to poke the sleeping giant but they were overruled. For example, the famous Admiral Yamamoto spent years in the US and had a very high opinion of her energy, people and productivity. When asked his opinion of what would happen if Japan declared war on the US, he unhesitatingly declared, "We will be able to expand freely for six months, then we will be halted, and will never achieve new gains after that. And then we will lose all our gains one by one until we have nothing left."

Yamamoto gave his very unpopular opinion and was then ordered to attack Pearl Harbour. He carried out his orders, convinced that they would destroy Japan's dreams of empire but determined to do everything he could to do buy as much time as possible. He died in 1944 when a plane he was riding in was shot down, having seen basically his entire prediction come true.

Sometimes loyalty is a flaw.

2 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

The one such weapon they did have was basically a big explosive charge on a stick. It was operated by having a soldier run up to the tank with the stick, insert the charge at the end of the stick in some vulnerable spot and then set it off by pulling a string. For some reason I am not completely sure of, it was not a very popular weapon among Japanese infantrymen.

Presumably due to the string being too short?

 

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On 2/13/2018 at 8:24 PM, Tom Sewell said:

The Germans might have won the war in 1915 with their first gas attack--except they faced a Canadian division. The Moroccan troops next to them ran away.

One should always keep in mind that the national sport of Canada is hockey.

I've recently been reading a bunch of stories set in a universe where the invading aliens decided to begin their invasion of Earth by showing how incredibly powerful they were by attacking a well-televised event and wiping out everyone there.

Due to the time of year and so forth, the event they chose was an NHL game in Vancouver BC. They began by crashing through the roof into the middle of the rink and shooting the players.

None of the invaders survived.

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11 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

War with Japan took so heavy toll on US fleet they ended the war with four times more ships they had on start, didn't they?

Only because we cranked out 5 or 6 times the ships...

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1 hour ago, Vorlonagent said:

Thinking about horse-drawn supply, I had in mind limits to German industry, especially the sorry state of the Kriegsmarine.  The few ships they had were good but not nearly enough to contest with the Royal Navy.  Production simply wasn't there to put a serious navy into the water so the Germans built both surface ships and submarines designed to reduce or with luck interrupt the flow of resources from the US.  They mostly built one aircraft carrier, the Hindenburg, and puttered around with it over the entire war without ever finishing itto the point of going to sea with it.

The Germans had serious problems with resource allocation. They spread what they spent about too much. The carrier was a complete waste of resources. If they had thrown more resources at the submarines, that might have worked better for them. As for their High Seas Fleet, its true power did not lie in the damage it could actually do but in the threat it represented. As long as it remained a fleet in being, it compelled the British to constantly keep a superior fleet in the North Sea or close by to protect their coasts and trade vessels. Once the Germans actually committed their fleet and it was destroyed, it had not done enough damage to the British to seriously weaken their fleet. Worse yet, without the threat of a fleet in being, the British were now free to commit their North Sea fleet to any theatre they desired, a huge relief and a vast advantage.

1 hour ago, Vorlonagent said:

I grew up hearing that Yamamoto esteemed the US highly as well.  What I hear now He may have had had an accurate grasp of what we could do if we wanted, but he considered us to be shallow and decadent, which I guess is why he thought the "quick war" plan would work.

I hadn't heard that, but it sounds entirely believable. Ah well, I have had many a myth sunk beneath my feet before.

1 hour ago, Vorlonagent said:

...which speaks that much better for Patton's military ability.

For all his flaws, Patton was a brilliant general and in the right sort of theatre he shone. He was certainly neither a Haig nor a Prince Eugen.

1 hour ago, Vorlonagent said:

IIRC, the Japanese had worse resource problems than the Germans.  One historian I read suggested that the Japanese could have built 50 of their innovative destroyers with the resources they sunk into the Yamato.  But the Japanese admirals believed in the "decisive battle" theory of sea warfare where there would come one perfect battle that would decide it all.  They mostly kept the Yamato and its sister ship the Musashi in reserve for that expected battle, which never came (or occurred without them at Midway).  Japan just got whittled down.  They needed carriers and experienced pilots and sheer US production, as well as fast-evolving US carrier planes, chewed both those resources up far faster than the Japanese could replace them.

I do not think Yamato would have helped much at Midway. Midway ultimately proved a battle of aircraft carriers.

As to the air war, the Japanese squandered the huge advantage they had in the Mitsubishi Zero by deciding that since they had the world's best fighting plane, it was a waste of resources to try to build better. And so their air power stagnated while the US caught up, and worse yet, by the time they realised this they had also lost their momentum. They had to practically recreate their research program from scratch while the Americans drew steadily further ahead and they never caught up again after that.

Skilled pilots are an invaluable resource and often irreplaceable. Through Göring's antigenius, the Luftwaffe was bled white in the skies above Britain. It lost many skilled pilots and aircrew that they never did manage to replace afterwards. The Japanese had similar problems and they lacked a huge safe airspace to train new pilots in, especially in the latter years of the war. It is rather demoralising for trainee pilots to attempt to take off only to be engaged by enemy fighters using live ammo wishing to cut their education short.

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29 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Presumably due to the string being too short?

Now that I think about it, it is possible that it had to do with trying to reach the enemy tank through a hail of fire from its machinegun and its supporting infantry, and the fact that once you set off the charge you stood so close to it that you would be guaranteed to be ripped to shreds by the detonation.

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10 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

and the fact that once you set off the charge you stood so close to it that you would be guaranteed to be ripped to shreds by the detonation.

That's what I mean by the string being too short.

11 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

Now that I think about it, it is possible that it had to do with trying to reach the enemy tank through a hail of fire from its machinegun and its supporting infantry,

... but it might be due to this as well, yes.

14 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

Skilled pilots are an invaluable resource and often irreplaceable. Through Göring's antigenius, the Luftwaffe was bled white in the skies above Britain. It lost many skilled pilots and aircrew that they never did manage to replace afterwards. The Japanese had similar problems and they lacked a huge safe airspace to train new pilots in, especially in the latter years of the war. It is rather demoralising for trainee pilots to attempt to take off only to be engaged by enemy fighters using live ammo wishing to cut their education short.

I don't think the war was long enough to train skilled new pilot from scratch even if started right on beginning. Anyone who only started flying in war was trainee at best. Like, here they boast they can make someone civilian pilot in "only" three to four years. You need more experience to be fighter pilot.

(Of course, that doesn't stop any side of war to putting people into airplanes with much less training.)

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5 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

The Germans had serious problems with resource allocation. They spread what they spent about too much. The carrier was a complete waste of resources. If they had thrown more resources at the submarines, that might have worked better for them. As for their High Seas Fleet, its true power did not lie in the damage it could actually do but in the threat it represented. As long as it remained a fleet in being, it compelled the British to constantly keep a superior fleet in the North Sea or close by to protect their coasts and trade vessels. Once the Germans actually committed their fleet and it was destroyed, it had not done enough damage to the British to seriously weaken their fleet. Worse yet, without the threat of a fleet in being, the British were now free to commit their North Sea fleet to any theatre they desired, a huge relief and a vast advantage.

I have heard this strategy called "la gueirre de course" and it was a preoccupation of world navies since the US Civil War.  While the US Confederacy lost the war their commerce raiders proved the effectiveness of the strategy.  It led to huge increases in warship speed or combat power.  You either wanted a ship that could outrace the enemy's best raider in order to both run that ship down and do your own raiding and it also needed to be bigger than the enemy's raider in order to win the fight.  Alternately you wanted a big block of seagoing iron or steel to hide behind which was big enough to stare down the enemy blocks of iron or steel.  Hence the Washington Naval Treaty.
 

13 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

I do not think Yamato would have helped much at Midway. Midway ultimately proved a battle of aircraft carriers.

IIRC, the Japanese had no shortage of surface ships, including battleships, at Midway. 

15 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

As to the air war, the Japanese squandered the huge advantage they had in the Mitsubishi Zero by deciding that since they had the world's best fighting plane, it was a waste of resources to try to build better. And so their air power stagnated while the US caught up, and worse yet, by the time they realised this they had also lost their momentum. They had to practically recreate their research program from scratch while the Americans drew steadily further ahead and they never caught up again after that.

How similar to Germany scrapping its advanced aircraft programs because "the war would be over before they would be ready"...

17 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

Skilled pilots are an invaluable resource and often irreplaceable. Through Göring's antigenius, the Luftwaffe was bled white in the skies above Britain. It lost many skilled pilots and aircrew that they never did manage to replace afterwards. The Japanese had similar problems and they lacked a huge safe airspace to train new pilots in, especially in the latter years of the war. It is rather demoralising for trainee pilots to attempt to take off only to be engaged by enemy fighters using live ammo wishing to cut their education short.

..making the shift to kamikaze tactics close to inevitable.

16 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

Now that I think about it, it is possible that it had to do with trying to reach the enemy tank through a hail of fire from its machinegun and its supporting infantry, and the fact that once you set off the charge you stood so close to it that you would be guaranteed to be ripped to shreds by the detonation.

IIRC the Germans had something similar.  A bomb with a sticky coating that a soldier ran at a tank with.  They didn't work very well either.

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1 minute ago, Vorlonagent said:
22 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

I do not think Yamato would have helped much at Midway. Midway ultimately proved a battle of aircraft carriers.

IIRC, the Japanese had no shortage of surface ships, including battleships, at Midway. 

Hmmmm ... they seem to had five battleships there which DIDNT ENTERED THE BATTLE. And two which did. None of those were sunk. They must've been furious big battle is happening around and everyone ignores them ...

Wait. Yamato WAS there. Not from start but arrived later ...

 

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8 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

IIRC the Germans had something similar.  A bomb with a sticky coating that a soldier ran at a tank with.  They didn't work very well either.

Actually the British are the ones who came up with the sticky bomb. The German equvalent was attached with a magnet. But the Germans went on to develop the first really effective one-man antitank weapon, the Panzerfaust.

 

4 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Hmmmm ... they seem to had five battleships there which DIDNT ENTERED THE BATTLE. And two which did. None of those were sunk. They must've been furious big battle is happening around and everyone ignores them ...

Wait. Yamato WAS there. Not from start but arrived later ...

There were two fast battleships escorting the Japanese carrier groups. Yamamoto was aboard Yamato with other battleships far behind, but these were all old and slow, basically similar to the old battleships which had been so useless at Pearl Harbor. It's unclear what he expected to do with this enormous force; it burned an lots of scarce fuel and would have been able to do little more to turn around and return to Japan if it actually reached Midway. Maybe Yamamoto thought America wouldn't really risk any more of its navy after this battle and this would be his last chance to be in another gunfight (he'd lost two fingers at Tsushima fighting the Russian navy in 1905). Halsey did something quite similar two years later at Leyte Gulf.

A slight correction: Yamamoto was killed in April 1943, not 1944, by P-38s flown from Guadalcanal.

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34 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Wait. Yamato WAS there. Not from start but arrived later ...

Definitely my error.  before this conversation I thought Yamato was built during the war but come to find out it was completed about a week before the Pearl Harbor attack.

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1 hour ago, Tom Sewell said:

It's unclear what he expected to do with this enormous force; it burned an lots of scarce fuel and would have been able to do little more to turn around and return to Japan if it actually reached Midway.

Well, they would be able to destroy that important base US had there? Oh wait, it would already be destroyed by their aircraft at that point, if they wouldn't lost the battle.

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7 hours ago, hkmaly said:

That's what I mean by the string being too short.

Ah, I see. I am not really sure it would have improved the weapon that much if they had used ten yards long poles instead, or even if ten yards would have been enough of a minimum safe distance.

7 hours ago, hkmaly said:

I don't think the war was long enough to train skilled new pilot from scratch even if started right on beginning. Anyone who only started flying in war was trainee at best. Like, here they boast they can make someone civilian pilot in "only" three to four years. You need more experience to be fighter pilot.

(Of course, that doesn't stop any side of war to putting people into airplanes with much less training.)

That was the Devil's Dilemma the air powers faced. Their green pilots had to learn so many things the hard way and the loss rate was horrific. This was actually a key part of the defence strategy of the Battle of Britain: lure the Luftwaffe into fighting all its battles above hostile soil where every plane shot down meant that pilot and crew would be lost/captured whereas surviving British pilots only had to take the bus back to their base and climb into a new airframe. The Luftwaffe never did completely recover from the losses it suffered then.

7 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

How similar to Germany scrapping its advanced aircraft programs because "the war would be over before they would be ready"...

Part of the problem was that Germany's aircraft research was rather schizophrenic. It had two men directing research. One was a genius who helped create all the deadliest airplanes of the Luftwaffe and also led its research into jet planes. The other was a complete imbecile who wasted massive amounts of effort on ideas such as a heavy bombing plane that could also be used for tactical/dive bombing. This was roughly equivalent to the idea of devising a Flying Fortress that could also be used as a Stuka. (The amazing part of this is that the hapless engineers handed this self-contradictory and all but hopeless task almost succeeded. By 1944 they had a working design and in early 1945 they had a test model built. Of course by then they had sunk five years of hard work into this chimaera of a project. And I personally do not see what would have been wrong with instead designing one heavy bomber and one new kind of dive bomber and just build both.)

Then, of course, it also did not help that in late 1941 the genius designer died -- of all things, in a plane crash. All his work came to a halt as they had no-one to replace him. It took a year and a half to recover from his loss and get his work resumed. I for one am not sorry about this as if he had survived, we would likely have seen the first Me 262s in mid-42 instead of late 43.

7 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

IIRC the Germans had something similar.  A bomb with a sticky coating that a soldier ran at a tank with.  They didn't work very well either.

At least they came up with the Panzerfaust in '43. It was a single-shot disposable rocket launcher and worked much better. The Japanese never came up with any infantry-portable antitank weapon much more effective than spit wads and rude gestures.

7 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

Actually the British are the ones who came up with the sticky bomb. The German equvalent was attached with a magnet. But the Germans went on to develop the first really effective one-man antitank weapon, the Panzerfaust.

Oops, ninjaed. :icon_eek:

7 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

There were two fast battleships escorting the Japanese carrier groups. Yamamoto was aboard Yamato with other battleships far behind, but these were all old and slow, basically similar to the old battleships which had been so useless at Pearl Harbor. It's unclear what he expected to do with this enormous force; it burned an lots of scarce fuel and would have been able to do little more to turn around and return to Japan if it actually reached Midway.

According to Walter Lord's book Incredible Victory, Yamamoto's idea was that if his carrier force and its escorts had to retreat, he might be able to lure the American Navy into pursuit and have it sail into the waiting embrace of his battleships. As it turned out, Nimitz and his fellow admirals proved too canny to make that mistake.

7 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

A slight correction: Yamamoto was killed in April 1943, not 1944, by P-38s flown from Guadalcanal.

My bad. Thank you.

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5 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

And I personally do not see what would have been wrong with instead designing one heavy bomber and one new kind of dive bomber and just build both.)

Building two separate planes would potentially require more production capacity then building a single plane that could do both. The separate planes would require at least two production lines, while the single plane could make do with a single line, which could be a boon if there aren't enough factories to go around. Though I'm not sure if that boon would have been worth the massively increased design and development time needed.

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1 hour ago, Drasvin said:

Though I'm not sure if that boon would have been worth the massively increased design and development time needed.

It was mostly this I had in mind, yes, though I certainly agree about the potential benefits. It is just that when the objective is so self-contradictory that it strikes me as a dubious idea. They were essentially told to design a heavy airframe that could on demand perform tasks best suited for a light airframe. This does not seem like a fertile field to plow.

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5 hours ago, Drasvin said:

Building two separate planes would potentially require more production capacity then building a single plane that could do both. The separate planes would require at least two production lines, while the single plane could make do with a single line, which could be a boon if there aren't enough factories to go around. Though I'm not sure if that boon would have been worth the massively increased design and development time needed.

...but it's hard to avoid ending up with a result that isn't great in any role

*cough*F-35*cough*

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14 hours ago, The Old Hack said:
22 hours ago, hkmaly said:

I don't think the war was long enough to train skilled new pilot from scratch even if started right on beginning. Anyone who only started flying in war was trainee at best. Like, here they boast they can make someone civilian pilot in "only" three to four years. You need more experience to be fighter pilot.

(Of course, that doesn't stop any side of war to putting people into airplanes with much less training.)

That was the Devil's Dilemma the air powers faced. Their green pilots had to learn so many things the hard way and the loss rate was horrific. This was actually a key part of the defence strategy of the Battle of Britain: lure the Luftwaffe into fighting all its battles above hostile soil where every plane shot down meant that pilot and crew would be lost/captured whereas surviving British pilots only had to take the bus back to their base and climb into a new airframe. The Luftwaffe never did completely recover from the losses it suffered then.

Was that really "strategy" and "luring"? I though the Luftwaffe was flying there on it's own, based on Hilter being optimists.

BTW, You forgot about surviving pilots of other nationalities, like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, South Africa, France ... who might actually have some problems taking that bus.

14 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Then, of course, it also did not help that in late 1941 the genius designer died -- of all things, in a plane crash. All his work came to a halt as they had no-one to replace him. It took a year and a half to recover from his loss and get his work resumed. I for one am not sorry about this as if he had survived, we would likely have seen the first Me 262s in mid-42 instead of late 43.

On the other hand, maybe if he survived USA would get to Moon sooner. Maybe even Mars.

He should've been injured instead.

 

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7 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

It was mostly this I had in mind, yes, though I certainly agree about the potential benefits. It is just that when the objective is so self-contradictory that it strikes me as a dubious idea. They were essentially told to design a heavy airframe that could on demand perform tasks best suited for a light airframe. This does not seem like a fertile field to plow.

They just needed to build a heavy light plane of medium weight, with a broad wingspan able to fit through narrow spaces...

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20 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:
7 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

It was mostly this I had in mind, yes, though I certainly agree about the potential benefits. It is just that when the objective is so self-contradictory that it strikes me as a dubious idea. They were essentially told to design a heavy airframe that could on demand perform tasks best suited for a light airframe. This does not seem like a fertile field to plow.

They just needed to build a heavy light plane of medium weight, with a broad wingspan able to fit through narrow spaces...

This reminds me my pending request for 1.5"x4" phone with 7" display.

...

Except display CAN be rolled. That heavy light plane would require exotic matter.

 

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16 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Was that really "strategy" and "luring"? I though the Luftwaffe was flying there on it's own, based on Hilter being optimists.

It was the strategy of Air Marshal Dowding who was the man who devised the entire air defence system of Britain. He was the one who pushed through the construction of the heavily defended RADAR stations that allowed the RAF to detect incoming air raids ahead of time and intercept them. The idea was to let the Luftwaffe penetrate into Britain, then attack them when they were turning back and short of fuel. While this allowed the Luftwaffe the opportunity to drop their bombs it also made them far more vulnerable to RAF interceptors in dog fights. The entire system Dowding created was extremely complex and required minute coordination by ground personnel heavily trained to map out Luftwaffe incursions, keep track of them, keep track of all RAF planes available and choose which to commit against which incursion. So yes, there was a great deal of strategy involved.

23 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

BTW, You forgot about surviving pilots of other nationalities, like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, South Africa, France ... who might actually have some problems taking that bus.

Now you are just being ridiculous. 'Taking a bus' was a metaphor for any number of methods used to return to base and the local population would be highly motivated to help foreign pilots get back to their units. Besides, it also included wounded pilots who required hospital stays before they could return to combat. Even if he required months of hospitalisation in order to be combat ready again, a surviving trained pilot remained a valuable asset.

23 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

They just needed to build a heavy light plane of medium weight, with a broad wingspan able to fit through narrow spaces...

If they had had M. C. Escher on their design team, maybe he could have come up with something! :icon_eek:

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38 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:
1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Was that really "strategy" and "luring"? I though the Luftwaffe was flying there on it's own, based on Hilter being optimists.

It was the strategy of Air Marshal Dowding who was the man who devised the entire air defence system of Britain. He was the one who pushed through the construction of the heavily defended RADAR stations that allowed the RAF to detect incoming air raids ahead of time and intercept them. The idea was to let the Luftwaffe penetrate into Britain, then attack them when they were turning back and short of fuel. While this allowed the Luftwaffe the opportunity to drop their bombs it also made them far more vulnerable to RAF interceptors in dog fights. The entire system Dowding created was extremely complex and required minute coordination by ground personnel heavily trained to map out Luftwaffe incursions, keep track of them, keep track of all RAF planes available and choose which to commit against which incursion. So yes, there was a great deal of strategy involved.

I'm not saying there was no strategy used in battle for Britain.

I just suspect that Luftwaffe flying above hostile soil was not result of that strategy. Them not leaving that hostile soil, THAT certainly required some effort.

38 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

and the local population would be highly motivated to help foreign pilots get back to their units.

... I was referring to some movie about the battle for Britain where those foreign RAF pilots were mistaken for Germans.

38 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:
1 hour ago, Don Edwards said:

They just needed to build a heavy light plane of medium weight, with a broad wingspan able to fit through narrow spaces...

If they had had M. C. Escher on their design team, maybe he could have come up with something! :icon_eek:

Well they would at least have the plans. Not sure how good was M.C. Escher with realization.

devilsfork.gif

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45 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

I just suspect that Luftwaffe flying above hostile soil was not result of that strategy. Them not leaving that hostile soil, THAT certainly required some effort.

I agree that it's hard to see the Luftwaffe being "lured" in the sense of getting German planes to go anywhere they weren't planning on going.  It's really more a ""roach motel" strategy, but that doesn't read as nice in history books.  :)

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