Random COOL photo! WW2 armies issued Paper Models

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQFbgmayQ-E

I just got the HTC vive and picked up this game, and I must say it really is amazing (esp. for us WW2 geeks).  You are in a U-boat during WW2.  It can be single or multiplayer up to 4 people (some ship features like loading torps. can be put on auto if you don’t have a full crew).  I must say the realism is amazing.  The game does not assign you a role, but to be efficient the people playing need to split up resp. to complete the mission.  You are talking to these people, and running all over the ship to get the job done.  It is so realistic the other day when I was playing I had a bit of flatulence and my first thought was “can’t do that here, will stink up the ship”, just to remember a couple seconds later “uh, I am in my living room!”.

It is not just the underwater stuff.  You can go above deck and fire the 88 to take down merchant shipping, or fire the AA to knock down enemy aircraft.  When the boat is getting depth charged you have to seal the leaks and pump out the excess water.

I am not big into gaming systems.  XBOX and the playstation were not a big deal, and although I owned an xbox I almost never played it.  VR is different.  20 years from now people are going to look at the present gaming systems the same we look at 1970s ‘Pong’.

@EricTheGreat12:

Although no one in my family fought in the Second World War, my great grandfather was in the Canadian Army during the First World War.

He was a messanger, and unfortunately he got gassed up pretty badly. I don’t remember how long he was in the war, but I do remember records saying that he fought in the battle of Passendale. He later got brought back to Canada after he got shot in the leg   :-(

My grandmother tells me that he never talked about the war; he never even kept any part of his uniform. But at least my grandmother kept his medals and she still has a photo of him in his military uniform :-D

I wished I had asked more questions to my relatives.
I believe one serviced Halifaxs in India though on reflection
I was unaware whether they were based there, others served
in the Merchant navy or in the Fire service etc.

One account I recently read about the gassing in WW1 was
a doctor treating two patients, the Chlorine gas was so strong
on them that he left the room to be sick.

As I recall, when the Norwegains protested to the British that Britain had violated Norwegian neutrality by entering Norwegian waters and boarding the Altmark, the British retorted that the Altmark had violated Norwegian neutrality by anchoring in Norwegian waters while retaining a cargo hold full of prisoners of war.  The British also apparently implied that the Norwegians had been either openly complicit in this action or, at the very least, negligent in not discovering the German ruse.  My understanding of international law is that belligerent ships entering neutral waters are required to release any prisoners of war they are carrying – a good example being, ironically enough, the British prisonners who were released in neutral Uruguay by Captain Langsdorff when the Graf Spee (the ship supplied by the Altmark) anchored in Montevideo harbour.  At any rate, the British position vis a vis Norway was basically, “You drop your protest and we’ll drop ours.”  Which they did.

@Herr:

The Soviet Union indeed intended to spread communism all around the world, but whether that would necessarily have implied a military invasion of central Europe in the 1940’s, is not certain. Their approach varied quite a bit, from inciting revolutions of the “working class” in other countries, to promoting wars between “bourgeois” powers, to actual war.

Also, if I remember correctly, Lenin’s death was followed by a power struggle in the USSR between the Trotsky faction, which wanted to pursue an agenda of internationalist communism, and the Stalin faction, which wanted to focus on communism at home (or whatever the phrase was).  The Trotsky faction lost, with Trotsky himself eventually going into exile and ultimately being assassinated.

An american in europe because i dont want to get tortured raped and killed by Japanese soldiers in POW camps

How aerial photographs tracked down Hitler’s flying bombs:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23270332

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.  :-)

KurtGodel7, very good post, thank you.

I’m still not convinced however, I’ll reply to a few of your points below further:

Germany desperately needed the Russian oil by 1943 (as well as Russian grain which I will discuss further below).  That they failed to take the Caucasus during this time was their last realistic chance at victory, IMO.  However, had they taken the oil wells, but with the Russians destroying them in the process as was quite likely, would the Germans be able to restore the flow of oil in sufficient time? It might take months, even years to rebuild the necessary infrastructure in the best of circumstances, let alone during a brutal war.  The German industry was already hard pressed to supply the necessary armaments and did not have a great deal of experience with oil industry in the first place.  I think they would not have been able to do this.

The same idea goes for the chromium, vanadium, etc., though this would be less difficult for the Germans to accomplish (or mitigate as you also suggest) than the oil problem.

While Germany might have been able to supply an equivalent amount of money, material and engineers to work on their atomic program, there simply were much fewer top nuclear physicists in all Europe than existed in the US.  Consequently, it would have probably cost more and taken longer than the US program for this reason alone.  I have no doubt they could have eventually done it, but I don’t see how they develop nuclear weapons before the allies developed a delivery system that could get through their defenses.

The German V-2 was a technological marvel, but other than size, no more advanced than the rockets being built by Dr. Goddard.  After the war, when Dr. Goddard was able to examine a captured V-2, he was convinced the Germans had stolen his work.  And the Germans might have because most of his designs were on file in the US patent office, available for public viewing (which the Germans did prior to the war).  I think had the Americans wanted to (and Dr. Goddard certainly did) they could have built a superior rocket in a couple months and have it mass-produced in six.  As the A-bombs designs at that time were quite heavy, it might have taken longer than that to build a nuclear capable rocket…but how much longer?

Alternatively, the Allies could have either copied the German jets to enable a delivery system, or devise other means (boats/submarines? special ops?) to deliver these weapons.

In addition, I consider the German attack on Russia to be about food as well as oil  The Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe, and helped the Germans tremendously in 1943.  But food was scarce in 1944 and onward.  Partly this was due to Russian recovery of territory.  But it was also because the Ukraine was normally not sufficient by itself to feed Germany (the year of the capture of Ukraine by the Germans was one of the best years for Ukrainian agriculture as the weather was nearly perfect).  Of course, the poor treatment of the Ukrainians by the Germans did not lend itself to helping this problem either. In order to assure itself of adequate food, I think the Caucasus (the next logical food source) was needed.