Book by General Sir Miles Dempsey is found.

@CWO-Marc said in WW2 Generals’ November birthdays:

Along similar lines: General Joseph E. Johnston, who had surrendered his forces to General William Tecumseh Sherman in the last days of the Civil War, died just a few weeks after Sherman. He had attended Sherman’s funeral and had kept his hat off during the proceedings (despite the cold and rainy weather) as a sign of respect to his former adversary; he caught a cold as a result, and it developed into pneumonia.
True Marc. I also remembered that they, too, were born in the same month. Was February, actually, but 13 years apart. Funny.

@seancb:

My grandfather wasn’t on the Lexington but he was a Sea Bee.

In case you’ve never seen it, you might enjoy watching the 1944 John Wayne movie “The Fighting Seabees”.  It’s a highly romanticized version of the origin of the US Navy’s Construction Battalions; not accurate historically, but fun nonetheless. One of my favourite parts is the one in which the staff captain played by Addison Richards (who often portrays businesslike, non-nonsense military officers, and thus can serve as his own straight man when the occasion demands it) is on the phone with his superior, who asks him what the new construction battalions will be called.  Richards, puzzled by the question, answers a bit blankly, “What’s wrong with ‘construction battalions’?  What?  No ‘oompf’?”  As he says this, he’s doodling on a notepad and he happens to write “C.B.” – at which point he brightens up and tells his superior that he’s just thought of a good name.

There are modern-day echoes, by the way, of the SeaBee name in the fictional Star Trek universe.  Various designs have been used for the emblem of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, and many of them feature a stylized bee (sometimes carrying six tools, one per arm), and some of the small spaceships that serve as work pods in orbital shipyards have been referred to as Work Bees.

Thank you for sharing.

I vaguely recall seeing an old Popular Mechanics cover which showed an alternate solution to the problem of widening the Panama Canal to accommodate warships broader than the 110-foot width of the locks: building a railway that would allow the US to move battleships overland from the Atlantic to the Pacific and vice-versa.

Indeed.  Im checking out this forum daily now to see what interesting stories you have found.

Thanks alot!

It seems mines in general are usually overlooked in WW2 History.  Not only were mines a danger to U-boats, much of the Allied shipping losses in the first 3 years of the war were attributed to mines.

Thanks for the great post!

and you Razor prob. meant Heinrich Himmler who was responsibil for a lot of killed Jews…Heinz Guderian was to busy Fighting in Poland, France,Russia and for respect from Gen. Kleist… 8-) :lol:

@frimmel:

Agreed. It is sometimes like he can’t remember what it is he wants to tell us. Or he has so much to tell he forgets not to say it all at once. I like that it is taken a lot from the common soldier’s experience but Ambrose does get off track frequently and a little too mired in the details.

Although that can be good too. In D-Day when he talked about all the stuff the guys carried I felt weighted down with equipment.

He’s still quite readable.  I just feel like Cornelius Ryan beat him to the punch and did a much better job.  Ambrose certainly goes for the empathy angle.

@frimmel:

@tcnance:

the war of the rats is a good book, made a movie out of it  cant remember the name but it is based on the german-russian front. it centers on 2 dueling snipers in stalingrad

Enemy at The Gates?

Exactly what I was thinking.