Musings of a Small Mind: September 2008

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World War Two

November 30, 1939: the Soviet Union invaded Finland and promptly got their asses handed to them. Let me run that by you again: the Soviet Union, the largest military power in the world, invaded Finland, who had gone through a civil war just 20 years earlier, and suffered what this editor consider to be the most spectacular military defeat in modern history. The fact that the USSR had just executed a large amount of high-ranking officers didn't help. You can check That Other Wiki for details.
- Probably one of the most unbelievable details of this war was that when Finnish soldiers saw tanks coming over their defenses, one of them would run out with an anti-tank mine and set it where the tank would land on top of it.
- What's even more unbelievable is that Finland lost. They ended up ceding say 10% of their population and much of their industrial capacity in the peace treaty that followed. They could inflict 6-1 losses on the USSR but that just shows that even the greatest victory can be a pyrrhic victory. The USSR could have kept it up and Finland knew it.
- Finland managed two stunning victories in World War II. Having made a separate peace with the Soviets having mostly given up, Germany declared war. The Finns, outnumbered 200,000 to 60,000, against what was still considered man-for-man the best army in the world, having just beaten off the Soviets in the Continuation War and while demobilising their armies, threw the Nazis out. Let's just repeat the demobilising bit again: by the end, the Finnish armies had been dismantled until there were something like 600 soldiers active left, mostly inexperienced recruits, and they still won.
- This is the same war the featured Simo Häyhä, who is generally considered the greatest sniper in the history of warfare, with a grand total of 542 confirmed sniper kills (!) (in some cases racking up more than twenty-five kills in a single day) and another two hundred kills with a Suomi 9mm submachinegun.
- Even though they were on the side of the Germans for most of the war, hundreds of Finnish and Russian Jews served in the Finnish Army alongside German units. Several were awarded Iron Crosses; they invariably declined.
  - Come to think of it, the Winter War and Lapland War probably come under Crowning Moment Of Awesome...
- In all fairness, the Finns had Christopher Lee, before he went off to spy on the Nazis.
  - Christopher Lee, who admitted in his autobiography to having never shot a bullet during his time in Finland.
  - You say that like it's a bad thing. Put another way, Christopher Lee defeated the Soviets with his bare hands!
  - Christopher Lee, who when filming his death scene in Lord Of The Rings told Peter Jackson "I know the sound a man makes when he's stabbed in the back."
  - Gulp! Somehow I doubt PJ asked for the details.....
The MacLeod clan has a flag known as the An Bratach Sith or Fairy Flag at a castle. When waved, it's supposed to magically summon an army of wish-granting elves to save the world. This was actually considered as a countermeasure if the Nazis invaded the UK.
- "MacLeod" also means "son of ugly people".
As part of the Wizard Wars — the back-and-forth competition of radar, radio and other largely top-secret gadgets, the German air force developed a nighttime navigation system based on crisscrossing radio beams. A pilot would fly along one beam (using sound in his earphones to know he was on course). When he crossed another beam, over his target, the sound would change and he would drop his bombs. The British warped the beams and caused the Germans to heavily bomb empty patches of British countryside.
- Later, the British tried the same method themselves, but started by deliberately leaking it to the Germans. The Germans jammed the beams (which were not being used) for six months, concluded it wasn't working, and gave up. Then the British started using the beams, successfully.
Early in the war there was an "air gap" in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where u-boats could operate without having to worry about land-based aircraft. One scheme to deal with this was to build half-mile long aircraft carriers... made of ice. Codenamed Project Habbakuk.
- Its worth noting that these Carriers were to be made out of Pykrete, a substance which consists of 90% water, 10% woodpulp, and is STRONGER THAN CONCRETE, and due to the thickness of the carrier's walls it would essentially have been immune to everything except nuclear strikes and melting (though it could survive months at the equator with little structural loss.)
  - Reportably, the Admiral pushing this idea brought a sample of Pykrete to a meeting of the Allies naval chiefs, and to show it's strength, pulled out a pistol and shot the block. The bullet rebounded and punched a hole in Admiral King's pant leg, barely missing the leg.
    An aid outside the conference room: And now they are shooting at each other!
Another strange British World War II weapon project: The Panjandrum, a project by the Admiralty to create a device powerful enough to penetrate the Atlantic Wall. How? By placing around two tons of explosives in a drum with two huge wheels on either side that have rockets strapped to them, producing a contraption that wouldn't look out of place in a Wile E. Coyote short. Suitably, when it was finally demonstrated in front of Royal Navy officials, it failed in a spectacularly cartoonish fashion, inspiring a Dad's Army episode decades later.
- Though it's generally believed to have been part of the part of the Allied effort to convince the Nazis that the D-day landings would take place around Calais since it would have been spectacularly and obviously unsuited to the beaches of Normandy.
The Blitzkrieg tactics employed by Germany in 1939/1940. The idea of a single nation (one which little over a decade previously had been in complete economic ruin) conquering and actually holding most nations in Europe in a matter of months is stunning by today's standards. Just imagine how it must have seemed for those for whom the trench warfare of World War One was still fresh in their memories.
- This was probably the main reason the blitzkrieg worked as well as it did. Outside of Germany, military tactics hadn't really moved on from 1918.
  - Oh they had. The polish, facing a larger and more powerful german army, developed a number of highly successful tactics to stop the Germans. General Stanisław Maczek, a general who had never lost a battle against the Nazis despite the country losing the war, submitted a report to the french on how to counteract the blitzkreig. They took it, and filed it away. The nazis found it unopened. Plus the counter strategy was pretty simple. Hit the undefended supplies from the side.
  - Or not. In fact the first successful use of what was later termed "blitzkrieg", consisting of heavy all-armoured attacking forces followed up by infantry and watched by close air support took place in 1938 and 1939...in Mongolia. The Red Army utterly trashed the Japanese, putting such a fear of the USSR in Japan that they never tried to attack even when it looked like the Germans had them on the ropes a few years later. The two campaigns have been called the most important battles of the Second World War that no one has ever heard of.
- Not to mention the fact that France had built the Maginot Line, which had been designed to repulse large, slow troop movements. The fact that the Germans could move their soldiers and equipment around the areas where the artillery cannons would land their shells is the "intelligent" part of the reason for their success. The "dumbass" part is that the French simply assumed that no one would dare attack the line and left most of the fortresses on it unmanned or manned by troops who couldn't take their duties seriously... and ran for Paris as soon as the Germans actually showed up. Napoleon must have been spinning in his grave.
  - And the even stupider part of this is that France didn't bother to extend the Maginot Line past the French-German border... even though Germany went through Belgium in World War One and didn't hesitate to go through Belgium again in World War Two.
  - "Annals of a Fortress" a history of siege warfare by Viollet-Le-Duc discusses fortifying France's entire border with Germany, dismisses it as impractical and stresses the importance of mobility instead. It was written in 1874.
On a more optimistic note: the Dunkirk evacuation. The rather shocking success of evacuating over three hundred thousand soldiers in nine days-and the fact that any and all boats that could possibly make the trip were called into action to help with the evacuation, among them fishing boats and all kinds of civilian crafts-served as a much needed morale boost after losing the Battle of France.
- The "miraculous" part is emphasized by the fact that the experts who planned the operation didn't expect to rescue a tenth of that number of troops.
- An additional bizarre irony is that 1940 the majority of Americans were bitterly isolationist, feeling that Europeans has betrayed the sacrifices made by American soldiers in World War I by starting another bloody squabble only twenty years later. The melodrama of the heroic defeat at Dunkirk convinced many in the United States that there was something in Europe worth defending. This allowed the American government to offer aid to Britain and start a serious rearmament program, actions that might not have been possible if the invasion of Belgium and France had ended in an allied victory or a stalemate.
- This troper remembers being taught that by all rights, the Dunkirk evacuees should have been massacred- except that Hitler decided to halt his troops, for no discernible reason.
  - The 'discernible reason' was that Hermann Göring, Hitler's Air Force commander, wanted to show off by bombing the city into submission, since a land attack would have resulted in weeks of heavy street fighting, and high casualties on both sides. Göring steadfastly refused to allow the Panzers surrounding the city to move in and steal his glory, despite his planes' complete ineffectiveness in stopping the evacuation. Finally, after almost everyone had been evacuated, Hitler allowed the tanks to roll into a nearly empty Dunkirk.
  - Another factor was Hitler's desire to make a separate peace with Britain so he could concentrate all his energy on conquering Europe and the Soviet Union. It didn't work, obviously.
In that vein, 1991's Operation Solomon, El Al's Crowning Moment Of Awesome. Talk about standing room only...
The Spanish government during the WWII, lead by Generalissimo Francisco Franco that accused a Jewish-Freemason conspirancy against him led efugees from occupied nations to use them as a transit country to flee. The unbelievable?they where refugees from Axis Countries!, mostly Jewish
Among the weapons considered to be used against Japan were bat-bombs: cages filled with live bats to which small incendiary bombs were to be strapped. The idea was that the 'bombs' would be deployed during nighttime bombing missions, with the cages set to break apart in midair and release the bats. When morning came, the bats would come to roost inside the wooden buildings around the major cities of Japan, after which the timed incendiaries would go off and set the buildings ablaze. They were tested once, extremely successfully, but never deployed.
- This was the inspiration for a large portion of the plot of Sunwing, the sequel to Silverwing.
- The plan was cancelled after a series of comical disasters — during the first test, several hundred bats were released in midair, but they had been kept cold to stop them moving and failed to thaw out before they hit the ground. In the last straw for the army, two bats were accidentally released with live bombs at an airfield, which burned down.
Another animal-powered weapon developed against Japan in WWII was a bird-powered smart bomb developed by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner. It consisted of a window on the front of a bomb that had three pigeons behind it. The pigeons were trained to work buttons or other simple, peckable controls connected to the bomb's guide fins so that their target stayed in the window.
- Actually the device worked by training the pigeons to peck at an aerial photograph of the target (say a battleship or carrier) in order to receive grain and the window itself was then wired up to the weapons fins; If the weapon drifted to the right, the pigeons would see the target was off centre, peck to the right of the glass and so steer it in that direction and so on. They had no clue they were trained to operate anything, they were just pigeons who knew they got food for pecking at a certain image. The most tragically funny bit was that the pigeons were conditioned to expect more grain the closer the picture got, so if the weapon had ever been used the last thing to go thought the poor birds minds before they slammed into a boat and exploded would have been "Whoa, I'm eating really well tonigh-"
Similarly, the Soviets used dogs in WWII to attack tanks. They were trained to expect food to be found underneath the bellies of tanks (where they have less armour) and then released onto the battlefield with mines strapped to their backs which were triggered when they went under a low space. The problem: they were trained using Soviet tanks. When released onto the battlefield, they would ignore the German tanks they had been aimed to destroy, and run straight for the Russian ones... Despite this, they were successful in destroying around 300 German tanks.
The Japanese Navy actually managed to stage a single air raid against the continental United States in 1942. A lone seaplane launched from a submarine flew over western Oregon and dropped a stick of bombs, setting off a forest fire. The results were so negligible that the US was unaware of the attack until after the war.
Marginally more effective were the 'Fuji' fire balloon bombs, large paper balloons carrying incendiary bombs released into the jetstream in the hope that the would land in the US and go off. Over 9000 such bombs were released. Several large forest fires were started this way, and a handful of American civilians were killed by one bomb which they found and accidentally triggered. While the material impact was negligible, the US government was so concerned about the morale impact that they took strong measures to prevent the public from learning about them.
- More disturbing were the plans to change out the payload from an incendiary one...to a biological one.
The "baseball grenade", designed to be easier to throw for American soldiers (who would presumably be used to throwing baseballs). Once the pin was pulled and the device thrown, it would explode on impact. The reason it was never used: when its inventor demonstrated it, he did so by pulling the pin, throwing it straight up in the air... and catching it.
- In one incident, a former professional baseball player in the Marines caught and threw back five live grenades in a row — until the Japanese caught on and waited several seconds before pitching to him.
- The British "Sticky Bomb" was almost as daft, with the added bonus that it got used. An anti-tank device the charge was nitroglycerine and as such unstable. The "grenade" was not meant for throwing, you broke the fuse's seal, removed the casing and slapped the glue covered head of the bomb on the target whilst holding the glue free handle. You then ran. Problems included: leaking nitro, the fact that the fuse's seal was glass, the fact that the handles often came loose, the fact that some soldiers thought you were meant to throw them, the fact that the bomb often got glued to their clothes, and the fact that if you placed it the way you would place it naturally and ran away in a straight line, there was about a 40% chance that the handle would get blown out of the bomb and fly straight at the back of your head.
Three words: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If the Western Front made people both soldiers and commanders painfully aware of the magnified horrors of modern warfare, this is what drove the point home, with two instances of a single bomb flattening an entire city, killing tens of thousands of people and leaving fallout radiation that still kills people to this very day. It also had a powerful effect on works of fiction, but that's for another trope.
- More chilling than that: we'll never know the complete death toll from the bombs, but the worst-case estimate is still less than the calculated death toll from Operation Downfall, the planned land invasion of Japan. Yes - removing two cities from existence with nuclear weapons was the less destructive option.
  - The calculated death toll was as convincing and accurate as Iraq having nuclear weapons. The nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were Not Compensating For Anything. (Do I win bonus points for a pun?)
- Oh, and Nagasaki? Had everything go wrong that went right at Hiroshima. Nagasaki wasn't even the originally intended target. It was the secondary target to Kokura, the primary target and the original secondary target to Hiroshima.
- At least nine people are known to have survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. One of these was a man from Nagasaki who was in Hiroshima on business when the bomb fell. Escaping the devastation, he made his way home over the next three days. He had just arrived and was in the middle of describing the bombing to his skeptical wife, when - you guessed it!
- On a related note, initial evaluations of the bomb severely underestimated the duration and spread of the radiation it would release. As such, early reports of radiation burns and radiation-related illness among survivors of the bombings were dismissed as Japanese propaganda... and it took three years for the US government to get around to checking and confirming that the stories actually were true after all.
  - Yet despite all the destruction and after-effects of the two bombs, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are currently thriving cities with almost no trace of radiation. Apparently, after the US confirmed those stories, they took steps to undo the damage.
- And it has had one positive result. How many times since have nuclear weapons been used in a warfare capacity?
It is perfectly possible for (for example) a Japanese girl to have grown up in feudal structures with samurai as a high rank, living through the Meiji restoration and die by the Nagasaki or Hiroshima atomic bomb. All these things happening within one single lifespan.
- Just to emphasize this, this would be the equivalent of growing up in Europe with knights, castles, and feudal lords, and dying alongside television and Coca-Cola.
Two Words: Pavlov's House. A Soviet force made up of twenty-five men managed to defend an apartment building for two months against vastly superior Nazi forces.
- According to The Other Wiki, Pavlov's initial defense was four men. It took a while for the reinforcements to come with supplies.
The Holocaust. The very idea of extermination camps where millions of Jews were sent to their deaths seems so ridiculous.
- Holocaust denial. The soldiers who liberated the camps testify to it. The survivors testify to it. The guards testify to it. There are piles of photographic, video, and documented evidence that General Dwight Eisenhower personally ordered collected to its existence. The camps are still there. And yet there are still people who claim it never happened, or not to the extent commonly believed. There is no better testimony to the human capacity for disbelief and hatred.
- The only thing weirder than the Holocaust is that people knew about it and didn't care. Yes, the anti-Semitism of the time was strong enough that Hitler had several admirers in the US before - and probably during - the war.
- One might say the the lack of action is evidence of just how unbelievable it was. This troper have heard of groups trying to help the Jews who thought it was too far fetched!
  - During World War I, the Allies distributed propaganda in their homelands describing a similar persecution of Jews which didn't happen at that time. When news of the Holocaust got out, many reasonable people did think they were Making It Up. It wasn't until the Allied armies liberated the camps that the evidence became overwhelming.
- Four words: Voyage of the Damned.
D-Day and the coverup. The Allies conducted Operation Fortitude to deceive the Germans - and succeeded so well that the Germans didn't believe in the real invasion until it was too late!
- Even more impressive was a British agent code named Garbo, who was awarded an Iron Cross by Germany for his efforts in Operation Fortitude. He also convinced the Germans to pay a pension to the widow of one of his dead agents, both of whom were fictional.
- In another win for British intelligence, they managed to identify and turn every single German spy in Britain during the course of the war. The Germans never figured out their agents had been compromised and turned against them.
Related to D-Day, the Germans had some massive, powerful Panzer tanks at their disposal on D-Day that never got used, because Hitler had decreed that they could only be deployed on his personal command. Unfortunately, since the Fuhrer hated being woken up from sleep, his cronies were too scared to disturb him so he could give the order when the attack came, and the tanks never got used.
Jasper Maskelyne, the 'War Illusionist', was a stage magician who worked for British Intelligence during WWII and who together with his team, the 'Magic Gang', applied the techniques of his trade to massive-scale deceptions and camouflage including disguising tanks as trucks and trucks as tanks and building fake bases, battleships and railways, even whole fake armies and navies.
When this troper first heard about the Japanese war crimes in Korean and Manchuria, disbelief first popped up. But yes, there were camps to test chemical weapons on Korean POW's, mass rape of Chinese women and head-chopping competitions.
- One particular death camp was called Unit 731, one of several secret installations of the Japanese guandong Army in Manschuria that Japanese officials still do not like to talk about today. It employed physicians whose medical experiments on Chinese civilians (either captured or living in cities in the surrounding area) and prisoners of war from several countries have earned them the name of Japanese Mengeles. Chemical and bacterial warfare (typhus, anthrax, pestilence pathogens, delivered either through grenades or infected animals), the effects of hypothermia and pressure variations on live subjects, vivisections, weapon tests, you name it.
- You know what the worse part is? The Japanese government has yet to apologize for any of this. Unlike Germany who apologized for everything!
Navajo Code Talkers. The world was saved by a secret code based on an obscure Native American language that to this day has yet to be broken.
- Three details; one, the Navajo language is almost untranslatable on its own anyway, and is one of the hardest-to-learn modern languages on the planet. Two, almost no one anywhere had translators for Navajo; in fact, the missionary schools active in the interwar period on the reservation actually tried to wipe out the language. Three, the code was based on a key letter replacement of the Navajo language that required the speaker to be fluent in both English and Navajo, so even if someone knew the Navajo language (and a few American citizens who were in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded did), the code remained gibberish. The Navajo-speakers in the Philippines were subsequently tortured for information, which they couldn't provide.
- The Red Army (you know, the little guys who actually were saving the world, while Yanks were doing nothing, being so safe behind the ocean) sometimes also used obscure languages as codes. This troper remembers an old WWII story about a Russian soldier and his Kazakh friend. The Russian learned the Kazakh language from his friend and used it as a code.
Jimmy Stewart rose, by merit, from private to colonel in 4 years (and afterwards, to brigadier general). Yes, that Jimmy Stewart. And he was humble enough that he refused to allow his military record to be used in advertising for the movies he starred in afterwards.
The wreck of the RMS Lancastria. Two weeks after Dunkirk, the ship was evacuating British troops from France when it was destroyed by a German airstrike. More than 4000 people died (more deaths than on the Lusitania and the Titanic combined, and one third of all British losses during the evacuation of France), but the Ministry of Defence hushed it all up for the sake of morale. It was the single worst loss of life in British maritime history, and the bloodiest single engagement for UK forces in the whole of World War II. Nearly 70 years later, the Ministry of Defence still refuses to make the site a war grave and has shot down pretty much any proposal that would allow the disaster to be commemorated. It remains a more or less forgotten tragedy.
Some planes (Such as the American B-17 and P-47) were so heavily overbuilt that large numbers of them came home with so much damage as to stray far into I Am Not Making This Up territory: Some B-17s had huge gaping holes blown into them that one could drive a car through; Some P-47s flew so low above the ground that they came home with branches and sections of telephone poles embedded in the fuselage or wings; one P-47 even accidentally collided with a grove of trees...and made it back home with only a damaged engine cowling!
- One B-17 was rammed (from behind) by a German fighter. It staggered home, and only after it landed and had to bear its own weight did it break in two. A similar incident happened to a P-38 that collided with an opposing plane. The pilot radioed that he was bailing out, but arrived home several hours late.
- Regarding the P-47, the story of Robert S. Johnson is one of particular note- a German aircraft (flown by a guy who only died after 102 kills) attacking him basically riddled Johnson's plane with bullets, but the P-47 kept flying. The Allied pilot only survived because the German ran out of ammo and gave up.
- Additionally when Johnson did come to land the P-47, he attempted to count the bullet holes in the plane. He gave up when he reached 200 which included twenty-one 20mm cannon shell impacts without even moving around the plane.
In February 1942, a man in Oregon claimed to have seen a Japanese plane in the sky. It's still unknown just what, if anything, he actually did see, but the result was that people all over the west coast, already paranoid from the attack on Pearl Harbor, got all their guns together and kept shooting into the air at nothing. By the time the truth became known a few hours later, they had expended thousands of rounds of ammunition.
Although the numbers are by far not as mind-boggling as those in some of the other examples above, this troper thinks that the rescue of the Danish Jews still falls into this. Basically, a tiny country says NO U to one of the biggest, cruellest war machines in their day.
While many people know about the battleship Bismarck, fewer know about its bigger sister Tirpitz, a ship whose mere existence paralyzed Allied shipping in the North Sea out of fear of what would happen if it ever left the fjords of Norway. You see, after the Bismarck sank, the Nazis realized a huge, expensive battleship on the open seas might as well have a bull’s-eye and “Drop bombs here” painted on it and sent it to what was considered permanent shore leave. Tirpitz made only three sorties and never managed to attack anything, but that didn’t stop the British from spending three years and executing numerous operations to sink the damn ship. Midget submarines attaching explosive charges to the underside of the hull? Check. Numerous airstrikes? Check. The Nazis eventually gave up on the ship after it was hit by a five ton bomb and moved it to a location where it could defend Norway if the Allies ever invaded. Two more air strikes and the ship finally sank.
- Part of reducing the Tirpitz threat? The St. Nazaire Raid. Sailing an explosive-packed ship up a channel into a port in Western France, with the intention of ramming, then blowing up the gate of a dry-dock that could take it. Through a massive bunch of German artillery. With a commando assault for distraction purpose. It actually worked, resulted in the awarding of five Victoria Crosses and was dubbed "The Greatest Raid Of All" by Winston Churchill.
- To top it off, the bomb (the fuses were dodgy) went off late, just as a German officer was wondering why anyone would ram a dock gate with a destroyer. Bits of people were found 400 yards away.
Speaking of big ships, Japan had three really big ones. The Yamato and Musashi battleships had 18 inch guns and weighed over 72 thousand tons, larger than everything existing today bar US super-carriers. The third ship, Shinano, was going to be another battleship, but was converted into a super-carrier during construction. It was moving to another shipyard for finishing when a lone US submarine, the USS Archer-fish, sank it. A submarine with no previous kills. The Shinano might have survived, except: 1. it had a crew with no knowledge of damage control, 2. the captain recalled his escorts from attacking the Archer-fish, thinking the sub was a decoy with more subs out there and 3. at one point, he took a zig-zag route to shake the imagined fleet, only to turn right back into the path of the Archerfish.
- Also, Shinano was kept so secret, US naval command had no idea it even existed until after the war, believing Archerfish took down a carrier 40% the weight of the Shinano.
- 4. That finshing work the previous troper mentioned? It was the ship's water-tight doors that needed to be added.
  - Heh. That's nothing : the Japanese Navy also had 3 ''Submarine Aircraft Carriers''. That could go anywhere in the world and back without ever making port to take on fuel - since of course they were diesel subs, too.
American mutilation of Japanese war dead. Several American officers who wore Japanese body parts on their uniforms were shot by their own disgusted troops, many of whom had participated in earlier and lesser atrocities.
The Home Guard. Britain's anti-paratrooper force, founded after Dunkirk, made up entirely of men too young, too old or otherwise disqualified from military service. What this ended up amounting to was a force of mostly pensioners armed with army hand-me-downs and some of the most terrifying makeshift weapons you will ever see.
During the invasion of the Netherlands, the German army aimed to take over its major military airfields by landing troops directly on their respective runways. Most were well-enough defended that the piled-up wreckage of German aircraft made it impossible for the rest to land. In the three days it took to conquer the Netherlands, 125 transport aircraft were destroyed and 47 damaged, representing 50% of the German transport fleet.
Come to think of it, all of World War II can be considered an I Am Not Making This Up. Just look at the numbers.
I read somewhere about a submarine sinking a transport carrying trucks. When it then went up to the surface to check, it was hit by a flying truck and was destroyed.
Probably one of the fastest ever genocides was the Ukraine Genocide. Ukraine wanted to be an independent nation, so what did Stalin do? He just closed all the borders and shipped out all of the food, creating a forced famine, and killed 1 million people in 9 months! (If not more; check T'Other Wiki.) Soon after that ended, Nazi Germany came in, and killed some more of them, just for good measure.
- Because of the former, the Ukrainians initially welcomed the Nazis.
Nimitz and Mac Arthur: During the war, the Pacific Theater was divided between Admiral Nimitz and General Mac Arthur, with each having complete command of all forces in their area (no matter the service).
- Marines and Sailors hate each other? Well, during the mid years of the war, William Randolf Hearst penned (under a pseudonym) an editorial saying that Nimitz should be sacked and his command put under Mac Arthur, because ‘Mac Arthur gets things done.’ The result? At least one California newpaper office flooded by marines protesting the treatement of their commander.
- When Nimitz was promoted to five star rank (officially one day after Mac Arthur), the members of a machine shop in Pearl presented him with the never made before five-star rank insignia. A while later, they met face to face, only to have the meeting delayed as Mac Arthur scrambled to have his own insignia manufactured.
- Things got bad enough that late in the war, basic communications between commands became strained. At one point, an order to not transmit routine arrivals of naval vessels was interpreted as to also not permit the communication of the non-arrival of naval vessels. The result, neither command even realized that the USS Indianapolis was missing for nearly five days.
- These inter-service rivalries outlasted the war by decades. A story is told of Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay hearing a subordinate's reference to "the Soviet enemy" and correcting him: "The Soviet Union is our adversary. Our enemy is the Navy."
To further note how bizarre some things were in pre-WWII America, and continue a point from earlier about Hitler's fanboys in America, there were actual Nazi camps in America before the nation entered the second world war. That's right, camps where people could go and live as the Nazis did, complete with celebrating under the swastika and even American branches of the Hitler Youth groups. Of course, once America entered the war and things started becoming public, these camps and organizations vanished nearly overnight.

The Cold War

The Davy Crockett nuclear recoilless rifle, a man-portable nuclear weapon with a dialable yield between 20 and 400 tons. The launching mechanism was designed to be either pack-carried or mounted on a light vehicle such as a Jeep. Intended as a last-ditch weapon for delaying a Soviet armored attack, it was essentially a suicide weapon: at the highest yield, the blast radius exceeded the firing range. Over two thousand were actually put into service from 1961 to 1971.
- No, no it wasn't a suicide weapon. T'Other Wiki has its range as 1.25 to 2.5 miles, depending on the launcher used, and its lethal radius as roughly .25 miles. Yes, you'd have a significantly increased risk of cancer down the road, but you'd get that from eating a banana. Its power was roughly equivalent to 10-20 tons of TNT.
- Regardless, the fact that the US Army built a man-portable nuke, that only weighed 70lbs, qualifies for I Am Not Making This Up.
  - This Troper simply assumed that they made that weapon up for Metal Gear Solid 3.
During the development of the Blue Peacock nuclear land mine, the developers considered placing a live chicken inside the mine casing; the chicken's body heat was supposed to keep the warhead from freezing and becoming unusable.
The 20 incidents that nearly started World War Three by accident. Includes nine separate incidents over a period of five days during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Clearly, we are very, very lucky to be alive today.
- And one of them happened in 1995.
The 1983 incident involving Stanislov Petrov. Petrov was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Soviet early warning system watching for a nuclear attack from the US. In September of 83, a new computer system showed a single missile incoming from the US. Petrov identified it as a computer failure, because an attack from the US would include hundreds of missiles, in order to cause as much damage and cripple the Soviet ability to respond. The system then showed four additional missiles incoming. Still, Petrov identified it as a glitch and did not verify it. Fortunately for us all, he was correct.
Acoustic Kitty was a project by the CIA to utilize cats as bugging devices against the Soviets, by surgically implanting a battery and a microphone inside a cat, with an antenna in its tail. After spending five years and over twenty million dollars in researching and building the technology, they sent it out on its first test run... whereupon it was quickly hit and killed by a taxi. The project was promptly abandoned.
Charlie Wilson. Not only single-handedly responsible for Afghanistan getting the weapons to turn back the Soviets, but convinces the Egyptian Defense Minister to sell him weapons with a belly dance by a Texan girl. And The Movie left out many of the juicy bits!
In the 1970s, concerned that the Soviets might be ahead of the US in "psychic science", the government convened Project Stargate. Two decades and millions of dollars were wasted reaching the conclusion that psychic powers don't work, which, frankly, they could have discovered much more cheaply. And people in the current government want to start it up again.
The Great Politics Mess Up. Seriously, two nations with their hands on the Doomsday Device button for nearly half a century and then one of them collapses without any nasty accidents/disgruntled generals/etc taking us down with them? This editor still has a hard time believing it.
- The fall of the Berlin Wall is a case in point. The final cause of its collapse- an East German Politburo member casually announces the border opening at a press conference and in his confusion (he'd only an hour and half earlier been handed the order) states it occurs immediately.
- It gets better. No-one saw it coming. Everyone had assumed the Soviet bloc would collapse far more violently than it did.
The Cambridge Five. The KGB ends up with a mole (Kim Philby) heading SIS's counter-Soviet-espionage division- and he could have headed the entire service.
- And the CIA's own Aldrich Ames, who was also responsible for ferreting out Soviet agents...other than himself, of course.
The Vietnam War, which is considered a Cold War Conflict due to the Truman Policy of Containment, took so long to come to a cease fire after it was announced because it took months to choose the SIZE OF THE TABLE!
An Israeli F-15 fighter landed safely after losing most of an entire wing during a midair collision. The American manufacturers denied it was possible until the Israelis provided photographs.
Joseph Stalin. He is a straight shot for the craziest person ever to walk the face of this earth. When Lenin died, he actually named Trotsky his sucessor and ruler of Russia, but Stalin got the info first, and basically lied his way into office. He proceeded to kill, maim, torture, and exile millions of people deemed "traitors".(i.e. anyone who talked ill of Stalin.) He was also paranoid, and tended to kill his own officers if they told him any "preposterous plans", claiming they were spies for the enemy (the sheer rate of this left the Soviet armed forces in poor shape in 1941). He had enough spies to populate about a third of the entire population of the USSR, and had them everywhere, meaning everyone soon became just as paranoid as Stalin.
- The fact that when Khrushchev came into office he immediately repudated everything Stalin did should tell you enough about him.
The Avro Vulcan and Handley Page Victor. Ever see a bomber do an Immelmann turn? They could.
During one of Soviet Russia's frequent attempts to copy U.S. technology, they reverse-engineered the Tu-4 "Bull" bomber from a B-29 that landed in Soviet airspace near the end of WW 2. In fact, they reverse-engineered it so perfectly, that there is only one perceivable difference between the U.S. version and the Soviet version; a small round hole bored through the right wing. None of the soviet designers had any idea what it was for, but they were told to copy the plane and copy it they did. On further investigation, it was found that the bomber had been shot at over Japanese airspace, and what they had replicated was, in fact, a single bullethole from a Japanese AA gun, to a degree of accuracy that they could identify the calibre of the round.

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Musings of a Small Mind

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Of Mount and Blade

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Of Stuff I Am Not Making Up

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Of Gringo

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