Unofficial Military (and other cool) Stuff Thread

pigfarmer

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
I was cruising a podcast archive and found this. Belton Cooper. A little hard to understand but possible, after a fashion. He's obviously very elderly and gets a little repetitive. It's a follow on to his book which gets very graphic in detail about the shortcomings of the M4 Sherman tank. He wasn't a tank commander, he was retrieval and maintenance and saw plenty.


View: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/armored-warfare-in-world-war-two/id1350499924?i=1000402984120


It's a follow on to his 1998 book. There has been controversy over what he had to say but it's hard to argue with.

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Dejan Corovic

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
Yeah, it was well known that Sherman tanks were death traps. Gen. Paton deliberately wanted cheap & plenty mass produced tank to overwhelm Germans. Maybe strategy worked for him, but definitely didn't work for the crews.

Anyhow, I've just listened this video narration from a diary of a German soldier who was captured by Americans and taken to US to a "labour" camp. Lots of interesting stuff, but on the negative side he talked how captured Nazis amongst them actually held a sway over ordinary German soldiers even after capture. Nazis even hanged one of captured Germans after he criticized Hitler.


View: https://youtu.be/YL4JIB4CzBw


That whole channel is very interesting, because it reads from diaries of German soldiers, so one get direct insight, without propaganda, into how Germans actually thought about the war.
 
pigfarmer

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
Dejan Corovic said:
Maybe strategy worked for him, but definitely didn't work for the crews
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Indeed. Cooper says in that podcast that Patton wanted Shermans in quantity that were already in production because he felt tanks weren't there to fight other tanks. He had a friendship with and influenced Eisenhower over those advocating the Pershings.
 
Dejan Corovic

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
pigfarmer said:
Indeed. Cooper says in that podcast that Patton wanted Shermans in quantity that were already in production because he felt tanks weren't there to fight other tanks. He had a friendship with and influenced Eisenhower over those advocating the Pershings.
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Well, one can see Patton's point. As he imagined it, tanks were just mobile bunkers with artillery piece attached. They were meant to help infantry during street fighting inside towns and cities. Kursk style, open field battle, indeed never happened on the Western front.

But, do you possibly have casualty figures for Sherman crews? Was the losing crews to Tigers really their main problem or was it just overblown by media?
 
pigfarmer

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
Dejan Corovic said:
do you possibly have casualty figures for Sherman crews?
Click to expand...
That's what makes Cooper so controversial - there are those who felt the M4 was adequate, and certainly in many places other than Europe it was. The Japanese had no real answer for them and I don't know how a Pershing would've fared in the terrain of the Pacific theater. Cooper claims their wider tracks would've been an asset, who knows.

Cooper says that by comparison to the Kriegsmarine's 70% casualty rate in U-Boats the Shermans had a 580% loss rate. I haven't verified any of those numbers but in that podcast and his book he makes his point graphically. He had to retrieve them, clean them out and fix them so I imagine he had a very good look at all that.

Sending young men to war with defective or inadequate weapons is nothing new. In the previous war men got saddled with Cahuchets for lack of anything else and defective US torpedoes plagued the first couple of years of the war thanks to institutional stupidity. They used what they had at the time I suppose and from Ike's p.o.v maybe the bird he had in his hand already in mass production was better than the one in the bush that the Pershing promised. He did have maybe one or two other things on his mind at the time. I don't doubt what Cooper has said really, but as bad as it was I can't help but think his perspective is limited.

I have Death Traps somewhere in the room I'm sitting in, probably within ten feet of me but in this pile of books and **** I just can't find it.
 
pigfarmer

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
nivek said:

View: https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1706004500169847161


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That image stuck in my head. What else that's familiar is of that size - 46000 tons - to compare it to?
Similar displacement to the German battleship Bismarck
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or the Titanic ......
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......or roughly twice the size of the USS Intrepid floating in New York Harbor right now. I've been aboard that a couple of times and man, you really need to recalibrate your Big-O-Meter to consider the size of that Typhoon.
1695726013170.png

It''s still 10K tons larger than bigger the USS North Carolina which, when I was there many years ago, was still in it's unrestored kit.
1695726221352.png
 
pigfarmer

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
index.php


Like I said in the other thread, good story. Can't write fiction any better. What spurred this was the commentary from Trudeau about the Nazi. I was wondering who the man was so I looked up his unit:
14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) - Wikipedia

Some surprising info in that wiki - I never heard of the Deschênes Commission but they diced that unit up carefully. As I suspected, there are shades of grey here that are not tolerated in today's hypersensitive environment. I know it wasn't Canada that did this, but we used actual card carry real criminal Nazis whenever the hell we wanted to. At the time it was a means to an end.

But back to young Hunka. I have no idea. I recently read Stuka Pilot by Hans Rudel. Autobiographical accounts tend to be self serving and often prove to be less than fully accurate but are valuable as contemporary sources. Rudel sure didn't invent that. Rudel was a real goose stepping Nazi - met with and was lavishly awarded praise by Hitler and Goering. His accounts of meeting with them are damned interesting - wish I could've been a German speaking fly on the wall. This man was a veteran of intese combat for many years under great physical hardship. He sounds like he was an arrogant ***hole and his postwar conduct confirmed it. But did he participate in war crimes as we understand them - no not really. So where would he fit into the current picture? Well, he didn't fit into he old one that well, but there's more shades of grey. If you want to vilify the man as a Nazi what treatment would be reserved for Adolf Galland or Saburō Sakai ? See my wandering point in there?

My family is from southeast Wisconsin, very rural. Sturtevant (small town) and my aunt's old house are straight out of Norman Rockwell, I remember many trips there as a kid. There are still tiny Quonset huts being used a block from that house that were used to house Axis POWs during the war. I think there were more of them at the time than citizens - they were brought here and were made to do agricultural work. Well treated. I seem to remember her and my uncle speaking very favorably about them overall, some stayed and made their lives here. Not all of them, but the majority of them. They had direct experience dealing with them as human beings not arbitrary labels.

Unfortunately in 2023 arbitrary labels make great media bytes in our easily offended instant communication society. Not defending Nazis, simply saying we need to look more carefully at some things. When they locate a 90-somethng camp guard or the like, I say hang the bastard. Just make sure first.
 
Dejan Corovic

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
pigfarmer said:
index.php


Like I said in the other thread, good story. Can't write fiction any better. What spurred this was the commentary from Trudeau about the Nazi. I was wondering who the man was so I looked up his unit:
14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) - Wikipedia

Some surprising info in that wiki - I never heard of the Deschênes Commission but they diced that unit up carefully. As I suspected, there are shades of grey here that are not tolerated in today's hypersensitive environment. I know it wasn't Canada that did this, but we used actual card carry real criminal Nazis whenever the hell we wanted to. At the time it was a means to an end.

But back to young Hunka. I have no idea. I recently read Stuka Pilot by Hans Rudel. Autobiographical accounts tend to be self serving and often prove to be less than fully accurate but are valuable as contemporary sources. Rudel sure didn't invent that. Rudel was a real goose stepping Nazi - met with and was lavishly awarded praise by Hitler and Goering. His accounts of meeting with them are damned interesting - wish I could've been a German speaking fly on the wall. This man was a veteran of intese combat for many years under great physical hardship. He sounds like he was an arrogant ***hole and his postwar conduct confirmed it. But did he participate in war crimes as we understand them - no not really. So where would he fit into the current picture? Well, he didn't fit into he old one that well, but there's more shades of grey. If you want to vilify the man as a Nazi what treatment would be reserved for Adolf Galland or Saburō Sakai ? See my wandering point in there?

My family is from southeast Wisconsin, very rural. Sturtevant (small town) and my aunt's old house are straight out of Norman Rockwell, I remember many trips there as a kid. There are still tiny Quonset huts being used a block from that house that were used to house Axis POWs during the war. I think there were more of them at the time than citizens - they were brought here and were made to do agricultural work. Well treated. I seem to remember her and my uncle speaking very favorably about them overall, some stayed and made their lives here. Not all of them, but the majority of them. They had direct experience dealing with them as human beings not arbitrary labels.

Unfortunately in 2023 arbitrary labels make great media bytes in our easily offended instant communication society. Not defending Nazis, simply saying we need to look more carefully at some things. When they locate a 90-somethng camp guard or the like, I say hang the bastard. Just make sure first.
Click to expand...

As guy from the above video wrote in his diary, Nazi's were better fed in US then in their own country. Life was treating them much better then on the Russian front, that's for sure.

One thing that you are forgetting is that many of them committed abominable crimes while in Europe and obviously they kept quiet about it. You name it, torture, rape, mass-murder, Germans Übermensch and their allies did it on industrial scale. Wehrmacht had a deliberate policy of starving Ukrainians and other civilians in Eastern part of CCCP because there was no enough food for Germans soldiers and locals. I can post countless photos of these crimes, taken by overconfident Wehrmacht soldiers themselves, that nowadays are posted on Quora.com.

I think that Jewish officer who started treating Germans the way they treaded Jews in concentration camp ( and was immediately replaced ), was the only one who treated them as they deserved.

Buy the way, poor Ukrainians, lost few millions to starvation by Bolsheviks, then few short years later, who knows how many by Wehrmacht.
 
Dejan Corovic

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
I don't want to flood this thread with German WW2 crimes, but just for illustration what Wehrmacht, not SS or Gestapo, did in Yugoslav county town of Kragujevac. Patisans killed few dozen Germans in an attack and Wehrmacht had rule for each one dead of theirs they'll kill 50 civilians ( or something like that ). So Germans went and collected 2,000 men and women around the town, but that was not enough for their quota, so they went into primary school, right in a middle of the day, and took x2,000 school children. Then they killed all 4,000 of them. Just like that.

And later I found that they did that same retributions thing in France, Holland and Czechoslovakia. There was a village in France where they summoned all the civilians they can get hold of, showed them into a church, then set the church on fire while shooting at it with machine guns.

One's blood curls when one listens about the dark side of WW2.
 
pigfarmer

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
Dejan Corovic said:
dark side of WW2
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There was no lack of inhumanity on both sides, although admittedly there were extreme examples. True in all wars. My point is simply that we need to be careful not to tar everyone with the same brush. It would be hard to find anyone more thoroughly Nazi than Rudel for example, but did he commit war crimes directly? I have some doubt, but who really knows. His post war conduct was nothing to write home to mom about, that's for sure and that's what history seems to judge him by. Contrast him to something current. What to do in the case of Ben Roberts-Smith and the Brereton Report? Regardless of the actual outcome the implications are ominous and consistent with the point I'm trying to make.

You're right, I didn't intend to turn this into a war crimes thread, just came up.

Along this line, more really about the effects of war on the human psyche, ever read With the Old Breed? If not I'd recommend it. I didn't really care for the HBO miniseries The Pacific and if you go looking for this book more recent reprints will mention that on the cover. This book's been around a lot longer and even HBO would have a hard time relating some of the things in it that'll set your teeth on edge. It gets past the usual historical propaganda and gives you a real peek.

I can geek out with the best of them over equipment and so forth, but interest has always been on an individual level. What was it like to really be there? That's why I have been to Gettysburg several times - it's within reach. There are many historical colonial sites right where I live but none of them preserved enough to get the image I want in my head. A field's just a field - the field Pickett went across, or the one leading to the Evergreen Cemetery haven't changed much.


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pigfarmer

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable

P365 Pistol-Armed Aerial Drone Put On Display By Sig Sauer​


Not sure where exactly to put this. I'm not sure I'd call it 'cool stuff' rather 'seed for bad ideas'. Had to look up what a Sig P365 even was. It's solving problems I'm not having. Skynet stuff. I know the Russians experimented with small remote controlled tread-type vehicles with heavy machine guns in Syria - don't think they were very effective.

Having some trouble posting this - it's usually the images and video. Have a look at the link.

P365 Pistol-Armed Aerial Drone Put On Display By Sig Sauer

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​

 
nivek

nivek

As Above So Below

Why Edward VIII visited Hitler: Author says book will shed new light on maligned monarch's dalliance with Nazi Germany and overturn his popular image as lazy and unintelligent​

Jane Marguerite Tippett spoke to The Telegraph about her upcoming book which will cast a 'very different light' on Edward and look into his trip to Nazi Germany. Edward gave up the throne in 1936, a year before his trip to see Hitler, to marry the divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson. Edward and Wallis visited Germany and met the Fuhrer in 1937 - despite British officials strongly advising them not to go because of tensions between the two countries at the time. Two years later, World War II began.

Why Edward VIII visited Hitler: Author says book will shed new light on maligned monarch's

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pigfarmer

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
FPP will sometimes give a taste of other podcasts and that's what this one is. Not complete but meh, complete enough. I thought it was interesting because along with Ford they are deploying the Mighty Ike to the Med. This podcast speaks to the differences between the Ford and Nimitz classes. It sorts of drops off in the middle but gives an interesting taste. Steam out, electric in.

I was never in the military but about 30 years ago was in a wedding in Norfolk, VA and one of the other groomsmen was an officer aboard USS Eisenhower. He gave us the real tour. All aircraft had been flown off as it was in port but there were still plenty of half naked young men running around and I don't think my girlfriend at the time minded. The thing is beyond huge, the arresting cables on deck are as big around as a small tree. I don't remember the man's name but he worked in the CIC and we got to see it. He casually mentioned something about 'shutting down all air traffic control on the Eastern seaboard from here' and I remember the consoles looking exactly like the old arcade Missile Command with the heavy track ball.

He brought his toddler daughter along with us. She kept telling her Dad she had to pee and he was too busy talking to me to pay atention. Eventually the kid just went right there on the floor. He never missed a beat - he just grabbed a mop and bucket that was obviously handy and cleaned it up instantly. Prepared obviously. Made me wonder how often swabbies pee on the floor .... :)



View: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fighter-pilot-podcast/id1330534712?i=1000627872288
 
nivek

nivek

As Above So Below

The White Death, the deadliest sniper who ever lived, 1939-1940​

Simo Hayha was a Finnish sniper who gained notoriety during the Winter War of 1939-1940 between Finland and the Soviet Union. Known as the “White Death,” Hayha is credited with 505 confirmed kills during the conflict, making him one of the most lethal snipers in history. In this article, we will explore the life and legacy of Simo Hayha, and examine how he became such a legendary figure in the annals of military history.

Hayha was born in the small Finnish town of Rautjärvi in 1905. He grew up in a farming family and was an avid hunter from an early age. When he was conscripted into the Finnish Army in 1925, he was a skilled marksman, and he quickly rose through the ranks to become a sergeant in the army’s 6th Infantry Regiment.

During the Winter War, Hayha served as a sniper for the Finnish Army. He was given a Mosin-Nagant rifle, and he quickly became one of the most deadly snipers on the battlefield. Simo Hayha had a number of tactics that made him particularly effective. He would use the snow to his advantage, wearing all white clothing and packing snow around his position to blend in with his surroundings. He would also remove the snow from the area around his rifle, so that the muzzle blast wouldn’t kick up a telltale cloud of snow.

Hayha was so successful as a sniper that the Soviet Army sent their own snipers to hunt him down. They were unsuccessful, however, and Simo Hayha continued to rack up kills. In March of 1940, he was shot in the jaw by a Soviet soldier, and he was evacuated to a military hospital. He survived his injuries, but his face was permanently disfigured, and he was never able to return to combat.

After the Winter War, Hayha returned to civilian life in Finland. He lived a quiet life, working as a farmer and a hunter. He didn’t talk about his experiences in the war, and he avoided publicity. It wasn’t until the 1990s, long after his death in 2002, that Häyhä’s story began to receive widespread attention.

Today, Hayha is remembered as a hero in Finland. His exploits during the Winter War are celebrated, and he is considered a symbol of Finnish resistance against Soviet aggression. Simo Hayha’s tactics as a sniper have been studied by military historians around the world, and his name is mentioned alongside other legendary snipers such as Vasily Zaytsev and Carlos Hathcock.

In conclusion, Simo Hayha was a remarkable figure in military history. His skill as a sniper during the Winter War made him one of the deadliest soldiers in history, and his tactics and techniques have been studied and emulated by snipers ever since. Hayha’s legacy as a hero of Finnish resistance is secure, and his story continues to inspire people around the world.

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pigfarmer

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
Russian Mosin Nagant 91/30s are (or well used to be) a dime a dozen - $100 for a brand new rifle still in grease. Finnish capture 91/30s though, boy do they get some $$. The Finns know what they are doing and are not to be ****ed with.
 
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