WW2 TIMELINE ON VIDEO

Should the US continued to remain neutral, what ships would have been completed by early 1943? Thank you!

The peace terms that France accepted caused an unavoidable perception that Vichy was a puppet regime. Events proved this right, despite the no doubt honourable intentions of some.

I don’t see how the British could have taken the huge risk of leaving the French fleet in the Med.

Escaping Montevideo Harbour – possibly.  Getting all the way back to Germany – extremely doubtful.

In terms of getting out of the harbour, Langsdorff would have had two options: heading across the river Plate to Argentina, or making a break for the open sea.  If he’d headed for Argentina, there was no guarantee that he’d be any better off than in Uruguay.  Argentina had some Axis sympathies, I think, but it was still nominally neutral, and the British and French would have put the same diplomatic pressures on it as they had put on Uruguay to respect the Geneva Convention and either intern the ship or force it to leave.  Making a break for the open sea was problematic too.  The British had made sure that the Graf Spee’s departure from Montevideo was in a carefully defined time window by making use of an article in the Geneva Convention that prohibited a warship from sailing from a neutral harbor less than (I think) 24 hours after an enemy merchantman had left the same harbour.  There were British merchant ships in Montevideo at the time of the Spee incident, and the British arranged for one of them to leave the harbour at the right moment to put Langsdorff in a bind between the Geneva Convention and the expiration of the Uruguayan government’s deadline for the Spee to leave.  Harwood’s cruisers were lying in wait nearby, and it’s doubtful that the Spee could have given them the slip.  Moreover, the shallow waters of the Rio de la Plata area were unsuited for combat from Langsdorff’s perspective because his water intakes might have gotten clogged with mud.  Additionally, having the ship sink in combat in shallow water carried the risk that secret equipment and papers would have fallen into Allied hands (this being less of a concern if, as eventually happened, the ship was scuttled under controlled conditions).

Assuming for the sake of argument, however, that Langsdorff had managed to elude Harwood, getting back to Germany would have been very challenging.  Although the Spee was technically still able to sail and fight, the damage she had suffered in the original battle with Harwood had left her in very poor condition to make a long sea voyage.  Harwood, even if he’d initially been eluded, would still have been close by and would have sent his ships (and his scout plane) to look for the Spee; additionally, some British and French naval groups were already converging on the general area following Harwood’s initial battle a few days earlier, so Langsdorff would have had an awful lot of sea power focused on finding him.

I looked up Chistopher Lee bio, as my wife and I saw he was in a low budget werewolf movie we started watching. I found his WW2 service, which I did not know before.

Service in World War IILee volunteered to fight for the Finnish forces during the Winter War against the Soviet Union in 1939; however, he along with other British volunteers were kept away from actual fighting, although he was issued winter gear and was posted on guard duty a safe distance from the frontlines. He went on to serve in the Royal Air Force and intelligence services during World War II, including serving as an Intelligence officer with the Long Range Desert Group. He trained in South Africa as a pilot, but eyesight problems forced him to drop out. He eventually ended up in North Africa as Cipher Officer for No. 260 Squadron RAF and was with it through Sicily and Italy. Additionally, he has mentioned (including in his audio commentary on the Lord of the Rings DVD) serving in Special Operations Executive. Lee retired from the RAF after the end of the war with the rank of Flight Lieutenant

If you’re looking at physically discernible traits in posterity (i.e., the baby boom generation), I’d say they would require considerable epigenetic or even genetic alterations in the parents (i.e., the people living there at the time). That’s not a very likely effect from such levels of pollution. If anyone was affected in any way, it seems more probable that their overall health would suffer to some degree, but it would probably be difficult to attribute that to any specific factor. An extensive epidemiological study may be able to demonstrate some effects, but I don’t know whether anybody has done one.

Also, it’s uncertain how much of the oil even reached the beaches or the fishing grounds. It seems obvious that the marine ecosystem could handle less oil, over a much longer period of time, and at various locations, much better than the massive BP spill. So a lot of that WWII tanker oil may have evaporated, or sunk to the bottom, or gone down with the ship and slowly dissipated.

I don’t think that the war itself would have played a major role in deciding to either clean up or ignore any oil that may have landed on the beaches. If the oil would have arrived in a town like, say, Biloxi, then people would have probably cleaned it up because it posed a direct threat to the livelihood of the local fishermen. On the other hand, if it would have landed in a remote location, it would likely have been ignored, simply because environmental awareness was not exactly a major concern in the 1940’s, war or no war.

In each case, I’m only speculating - we’d need to look for contemporary reports to know the truth.

And of course, the petroleum flavor does little for the shrimps, so I don’t think too many were eaten.  :-)

@ABWorsham:

Here is a picture of a group of youthful German men.

I think they are of the R.A.D. wich was the Reichsarbeitsdienst…they all got that spat and similar looking insignias on their clothings…probably arround 1943

@calvinhobbesliker:

How did Poland provoke the Germans into attacking?

they didn’t, they just were in between…

@Col:

With the ME 262 seemingly winning the poll, eyebrows should be raised at the fact that the ME 262’s closest rival in it’s own catagory, the Gloster Meteor was unfairly banned from the poll.

I’m surprised that a jet is the winner. I came close to not including the Me 262.  I may just be old school.

Col Cool, i have named you the Poll Cop- always fighting poll injustice.