Slide show of WWII

@barnee said in Wrecks of WWII Carriers Kaga and Akagi Located:

@CWO-Marc
yea Spruance steaming away at night was a smart move. I wonder if Halsey was in the same situation if he would have. I kinda doubt it

Agreed. Ray Spruance was an excellent combat officer – he and Halsey spent the last few years of WWII alternating command of the 5th Fleet / 3rd Fleet, which was actually the same force whose name got switched every time the two admirals rotated, much to the confusion of Japanese naval intelligence – but he was very different from Bill Halsey in terms of style and personality. Spruance was precise and analytical; he certainly didn’t lack aggressiveness (when he made a decision to attack, he sent in “everything that wasn’t bolted to the flight deck”), but before making his decision to attack he would carefully weigh all the factors of the situation, which sometimes translated into over-cautiousness. Halsey was a hell-for-leather type – sort of the naval counterpart of George Patton – whose fighting spirit greatly inspired his men (the enlisted sailors loved him, not least for the fact that he could drink and swear as well as any of them), but this sometimes translated into recklessness. After the war, someone – I think it was Spruance himself – said that it would have been better if Halsey has been in command at the Battle of the Philippine Sea (where the IJN lost hundred of planes and pilots, but managed to save the bulk of its fleet) and if Spruance had been in command at the Battle of Leyte Gulf (where Halsey fell for a Japanese decoy operation, and compounded his error by leaving no covering force to guard the San Bernardino Straight).

Hey Kurt have you ever been to Auschwitz, Dachau or Wewelsburg?

In 1939 the Soviet Union seized the eastern half of Poland. In 1940 it followed that up by annexing Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and part of Romania. In addition it launched a war of aggression against Finland, seizing about 10% of Finland’s total land area. Inhabitants in conquered territories were treated brutally. For example in the east half of Poland 10% of the population was lost due to deportation or outright liquidation.

FDR did not meaningfully pressure the Soviets to renounce their strategy of territorial aggression. Moreover, he did not put serious pressure on Japan to abandon its policy of expansion in China–at least not in 1937 when the wave of expansion in question had been released. FDR’s hard line stance against Japanese expansion did not manifest itself until 1941.

FDR’s warlike opposition to Japanese aggression in China was not the result of a universalist policy of opposing aggressive territorial expansion in general. If it had been, he would have been equally assertive in opposing Soviet expansion. Nor was his opposition driven by a particularist concern for the Chinese: he waited four years between the start of the Japanese offensive in China before initiating his efforts to provoke war with Japan. Those efforts started in 1941, shortly after Germany had invaded the Soviet Union.

Prior to Barbarossa, German military planners had anticipated having to deal with 200 Soviet divisions. By the mid to late fall of '41 they had already encountered nearly double that number. During the winter of '41 - '42, the Soviets shipped an additional 100 divisions west across the Trans-Siberian railway. Prior to Pearl Harbor, Stalin had held those divisions in reserve on his eastern front, to defend against possible Japanese aggression. With Japan going to war against the United States, Stalin knew that Japan would be too preoccupied elsewhere to launch much of an attack against the U.S.S.R. The hundred divisions in question could therefore be used on the German front.

None of the above could have been accomplished, had the U.S. and Japan signed a mutually acceptable peace agreement. That is why FDR’s administration ignored Japan’s various peace proposals, while pursuing a policy of deliberately provoking Japan into doing what it ultimately did.

If you recognize someone as looking like Albert Kesselring in a drive thru, you might be a WW2 junkie.

I’m going to go with a guy not on the list, Col. Aaron Bank. This type of mission sounds right up his alley…

Hehe - good point Miami
No one had mentioned the Italians in this thread yet

@ABWorsham:

Great post Black Fox.

Reading about the air war in the Pacific, if an aircraft was off a few degrees could lead to a watery grave hundreds of miles out in the vast Ocean.

Thanks

Thinking of the Pacific.  I knew a guy who was a B-25 waist gunner in the Pacific during WWII.  He told me a story where his squadron was sharing the air field with Richard I Bong when he was flying the P-38.  At the time their version had the eight .50 cal in the nose.  He said those guns we just vicious.  However, the high humidity was causing problems with the electrical circuits that controlled the guns.  When it got bad enough the moisture would connect the firing circuits and the guns would sometimes start firing by themselves.  One day they were getting ready for a mission.  Just as they were walking out to the planes, one of the P-38s guns went off.  The airplane starting bouncing and spreading lead all over the field.  It hit a few other planes and their guns went off too.  At this point they now had 5 fully load P-38 with guns just blazing away and planes just started exploding all over the place.  He said by the time it was all over, they had 45 planes destroyed on the ground!  I’m sure this is just one of many such incidents that added to those mind blowing statistics.

A more realistic distance is over 800 statute miles.

Zero had a range of 1,600 miles, so yes thats consistent with Sakai’s account over Java.

Also, they had over 400 Zeros in active service by July 1940.