Favorite WWII Ship

at the start of the battle, the german OKH had two options. Both where considered. They had a very limited capacity to transport vital supplies to the front. They had enough to send the ammunition and fuel for a drive on Moscow without winter equipment. Or, they could send the  winter equipment, fuel and ammunition that was needed for defensive operations. They chose to send ammunition and fuel, but no winter coats. This resulted in the disaster in front of Moscow, and the loss of a lot of the elite leadership of the german army. I believe the only reasonable choice would be to realize that the campaign could not be won in 41 and plan for a 42 campaign. Instead they decided to launch a battle with the potential to lose to war.

The Shetland Bus was the nickname of a clandestine special operations group that made a permanent link between Shetland, Scotland, and German-occupied Norway from 1941 until the German occupation ended on 8 May 1945. From mid-1942 the official name of the group was “Norwegian Naval Independent Unit” (NNIU). In October 1943 it became an official part of the Royal Norwegian Navy, and was renamed the “Royal Norwegian Naval Special Unit” (RNNSU).

The unit was operated initially by a large number of small fishing boats, and later augmented by three fast and well-armed submarine chasers – Vigra, Hessa and Hitra.

Crossings were mostly made during the winter under the cover of darkness. This meant that the crews and passengers had to endure very heavy North Sea conditions, with no lights, and constant risk of discovery by German aircraft or patrol boats. There was also the possibility of being captured whilst carrying out the mission on the Norwegian coast. However, early on it was decided that camouflage was the best defence and the boats were disguised as working fishing boats, with the crew as fishermen. The fishing boats were armed with light machine guns concealed inside oil drums placed on deck. The operation was under constant threat from German forces, and several missions went awry, of which the Telavåg tragedy is a prime example. Several fishing boats were lost during the initial operations, but after receiving the three submarine chasers there were no more losses.

Leif Andreas Larsen (popularly known as Shetland Larsen) was perhaps the most famous of the Shetland Bus men. In all he made 52 trips to Norway, and became the most highly decorated Allied naval officer of the Second World War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shetland_bus

The Shetland Bus is a little known story of WWII.  What do you guys think?

@WraithZer0:

Wow, man.  You really did want the Nazis to win.  You wanted us to help them conquer Stalin, and, in turn, probably cede to letting them take over most of Europe.  Until this long-storied analogy, I believed you were just defending a well-read argument for the hindsight of the goings on of WWII.  I was really intrigued by taking a neutral look in to things, but I knowingly can’t ever choose any side other than my own country in this venture.  I am sure you say patriotism be damned, but out of your “3 evils” of the western allies, Russia, and Nazi Germany, I will always choose the allies.  Sorry, Kurt.   :-(

I appreciate the sincerity and candor of your post. I also respect your patriotism.

When a soldier turns traitor, you shoot the soldier. When a general turns traitor, you hang the general if you possibly can. But what happens when a nation’s leader betrays the nation he’s charged with ruling? What happens when, as a result of that cynical treason, he leads his own nation down the road to its own destruction?

When FDR died, Truman inherited his administration. A number of the members of that administration owed their loyalty to Joseph Stalin and to communism–not to the United States. According to Herbert Hoover’s book Freedom Betrayed, members of Truman’s state department talked about their desire for South Korea to fall to the communists. But they wanted to avoid the appearance of having pushed it over.

In 1946 the U.S. government embargoed weapons deliveries to the Chinese nationalists, because members of Truman’s administration thought those weapons shouldn’t be used in a civil war against the communists. Also, the nationalists were pressured to cede more and more to the communists–to meet them halfway. But the United States government never pressured the communists to be more reasonable to the nationalists. After WWII ended, Stalin had plenty of American Lend Lease weapons lying around. He gave a large portion of those weapons to the Chinese communists. The communists also received Japanese weapons caches which the Red Army captured during its invasion of Manchuria. Chinese communists had access to more and better weapons than did the nationalists–which proved an important factor in the ultimate communist victory in China.

That same cynical, deliberate treason against the United States was also seen toward the end of WWII. Harry Dexter White was a known Soviet agent within the FDR administration. (One of many.) He was also the original author of the Morgenthau Plan. The central objective of the Moregenthau Plan was to create hunger (and outright starvation) in the democratic portion of postwar Germany. Partly, that was intended as revenge against Germany for having gone to war against the Soviet Union. But the main (communist) reason for formulating the Morgenthau Plan was so that West Germany would go communist.

It took two years (1945 to 1947) of death and disease, and fears that starving Germans might “go Communist” before U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes made his Stuttgart speech.

Given the Soviets’ stated long-term goal of world conquest, starving West Germany into the acceptance of communism represented deliberate treason in the face of an avowed (and very powerful) enemy. The Morgenthau Plan was formulated under the FDR administration, and FDR himself was a strong supporter of the plan. It was implemented under the Truman administration, in the form of JCS 1067. Not only was JCS a crime against humanity, the apparent motive for that crime was the advancement of a treasonous objective.

At what point did the “contain Germany, appease the USSR” crowd knowingly commit treason? When did they first decide to cynically betray the nations they were tasked to lead? For the most part, I do not think that the “contain Germany, appease the USSR” politicians of the Versailles Treaty era were guilty of treason. Many or most of those politicians were fairly despicable human beings, granted. But they were not (so far as I can tell) traitors.

At least in the United States, the transition from non-treason to treason probably occurred in the election of 1932. FDR (deliberately?) allowed his administration to become a rats’ nest of Soviet agents, fellow travelers, and sympathizers. Whenever there was an internal disagreement within FDR’s administration, FDR typically sided with the Soviet agents. The Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin were therefore able to exert considerable control over the FDR administration, especially when the most important decisions were being made.

Stalin wanted a one front war, in Europe. It was therefore important that Japan be distracted. Fairly early in the Chinese civil war, Mao captured Chiang Kai-shek. Mao’s instinct was to shoot him. But before doing so, he radioed Moscow for instructions. The instructions came back: “Do not shoot him. Force him to fight the Japanese.”

But the war between the Chinese nationalists and the Japanese was not alone enough to distract the latter from a possible attack on the Soviet Union. Stalin used his (considerable) influence in the United States, and his influence in Japan, to encourage war between the United States and Japan. The United States government embraced eight separate provocations against Japan; the most serious of which was the oil embargo. (Some of the provocations included moving the U.S. Pacific Fleet from California to Hawaii, basing American strategic bombers in the Philippines, and deliberate violations of Japanese territorial waters by American destroyers and cruisers.) These provocations ultimately resulted in the Pearl Harbor attack. Once the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Stalin knew that the Japanese could no longer afford to launch a serious invasion of the U.S.S.R. He transferred 100 divisions from his eastern front to his western front. Given that the Germans had used only 100 divisions in their initial invasion of the Soviet Union, the appearance of 100 additional Soviet divisions proved devastating.

After the end of WWII in Europe, General Patton began speaking out against the Soviet-influenced war crimes then being committed by the American government. He strongly disagreed with the decision to ship many or most American-held German POWs to France or the Soviet Union. He pointed out that in French or Soviet custody, many of these men would die of starvation.

Patton died a few months after having first pointed out the Truman administration’s war crimes. Evidence strongly indicates, but does not prove, that he was assassinated. Patton was the patriot, the men who ordered his assassination were traitors. Traitors who deserved to be hanged not just for the war crimes they had committed, but for having betrayed the nation they’d sworn to protect.

The Soviet Union was stronger than Nazi Germany in terms of population size, industrial capacity, and access to raw materials. Perhaps even more importantly, it was also much stronger than Nazi Germany in terms of its ability to influence the behavior of Western democratic governments.

When a man contracts rabies, the rabies virus overrides some of his brain’s programming. Specifically, the virus causes the man to want to bite the people and animals around him. Biting allows the virus to spread. Eventually the rabies virus will kill the man’s brain; and therefore the man. But unless the man has been physically restrained, odds are that before he dies he will have bitten a significant number of victims. His infected saliva will seep into his victims’ wounds.

The governments of Western democracies had been infected with the communist virus. Due to that infection, they experienced a strong desire to “bite” any nation which stood up to communism. That desire to bite was motivated not by patriotism, but by a treasonous illness.

@CWO:

Italy didn’t hold on to British Somalia for very long.  Britain recaptured it in early 1941, and likewise liberated Ethiopia and conquered Italian Somaliland.  Germany didn’t save Italy’s rear end in that part of Africa, nor did it even intervene as far as I know;

I believe the Suez Canal was closed  :wink:

“A remarkable film showing life inside an Austrian prisoner of war camp - and a daring escape from it - has been obtained by BBC News.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23512979

Here’s a weapon which could more properly be described as “low-profile” rather than underrated: the proximity-fused anti-aircraft artillery shell.  Proximity fuses were essentially miniature radar sets, built small enough to fit in a shell and tough enough to withstand the tremendous kick of being fired from a gun.  They were quite a technical achievement and they increased the chance that a shell would bring down an airplane even if it didn’t hit it directly.  The Americans kept the proximity fuse very hush-hush; if I recall correctly, it was restricted to being used at sea, where unexploded shells couldn’t be recovered by the enemy and studied for their secrets.

Another effective weapon whose details were kept secret from the American public was the shaped-charge warhead.  I own a laminated WWII magazine advertisement page which tells Americans about a revolutionary new anti-armour weapon called the bazooka; it makes the point that GIs are finding it very effective against German tanks, but it adds that the exact details of how it works and what it looks like can’t be revealed.  As it happens, the Germans knew all about the Munroe Effect (discovered as far back as the 19th century) and had their own shaped-charge anti-tank weapon: the Panzerfaust.  An amusing example of the public on your side being kept in the dark more than the military people on the enemy side.

Wow, miss a few days drinking and dancing…well watching others dance anyways…but I digress.  We no longer have an expert on the WWII food thingee/justification whatchermacallit?

I bet, many of you are like me, I grew up reading the Bantam WWII series of books. I starting looking at the number of books produced and realized how many i have not read.

What is your favorite? I love Iron Coffins, Samurai & Company Commander.