Quite untrue. The Americans had many submarines. They were used primarily against the Japanese to great effect. Strangling the supply line from Southeast Asia. Especially oil from Brunei.
It was so effective that Admiral Halsey testified on behalf of Admiral Doenitz at Nuremberg. Saying what Doenitz was trying in the Atlantic, the US was successful at in the Pacific. Doenitz still got ten years in prison for ordering U boat crews to kill floating survivors of attacks.
That sure sounds like Mel Blanc in the second (B17 training) film…
Those Messerschmitts were such beautiful planes. (as were the Mustangs, obvs.)
Strange how so many of our species’ most beautiful objects do such horrible things.
Germany had far more than expected. I learned about that while doing ground crew duty at our glider club. This old German dude starts with “Back when I learned to fly gliders in the Hitler Youth.” Yeah, that was a surreal moment. Seems they would get 5 boys together and give them a glider. They’d haul it to the top of a hill, one would get in, the other 4 would give it a running start. The pilot would fly it down the hill and as far as they could. It was sold as good German exercise for boys.
Turns out the boys were also learning piloting skills, coordinated flight, and energy control. The later two are critical for maximizing speed and distance, especially in dog fights, but not as easy to learn in powered planes.
So at the outbreak of war, Germany reveals all the planes they had secretly built and all the pilots they had publicly trained. In shockingly large numbers. But attrition changed that.
Um, actually, those ships were coming out as fast as one per day, per shipyard, and some were even made of concrete. Yes, really:
Wow. TIL.
I already knew about ferrocement boats, but only among the under-40-foot sailboat variety. I’d never seen one larger than that, and just assumed they weren’t made any larger. But apparently they were made very much larger.
Off topic, but 'tis a shame that we’re just now getting gasoline to the East coast after almost a week’s outage and I (in Texas) had to be without electricity for four days in February. And here we are decades on from when those Liberty ships were built.
That’s it in a nutshell. I always show this picture when this point comes up:
Germany, Japan and Italy didn’t have a prayer when faced with this industrial capacity, and it was frickin’ obvious from the frickin’ start. But then, nobody ever said that fascists are smart, or even sentient.
Interestingly, single individuals did see the disaster coming, like admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in Japan. He did murmur, “guys… not a good idea” but was overruled (and died as a consequence, years later). Italy did try to stay out of it, and without that idiot Jerkolini might have managed it: most fascist big shots were there for the grift, and they had no taste for self-immolation, or hard work in general.
But history is what it is.
Exactly! I live in South Germany (Baden-Württemberg) and there are still a lot of gliding clubs, and a lively glider plane industry. On good days you can see those white birds silently criss-crossing the sky all over the place.
Before the war, glider training provided a lot more trained pilots than expected, and put them inside all those planes built for “light transport”, “postal service” and so on.
The war is long over, but the taste for flight is still there.
My uncle flew gliders with his school’s cadet corps in the UK in the 1960s. Apparently they were launched using a very large elastic band with several fellow cadets pulling on each end.
Here’s an article about one of the few gliding clubs still using the ‘‘bungee launch’’.
It is ugly, but in a fascinating, brutal fashion. I would not want to see something like that coming at me.
From what I understand, the consensus in Japan at the time was that America had absolutely no interest in going to war (and there was indeed strong domestic resistance to getting involved in foreign wars in America at the time). Japan was also counting on knocking out the Pacific Fleet, and assumed that America would cut its losses and stay out of what was happening in Asia rather than rebuilding its fleet to retaliate. The Japanese never expected to fight and win against America head-to-head.
Soviets - “Hold my vodka…”
Getting all those US trucks certainly helped the Soviet Army become a mobile force. The German army was still largely horse drawn for much of the war.
Don’t forget the production lines for one of the war materials the Soviet Union threw in mass at the Germans.
I never cease to be amazed at how the Germans of WW II, while getting the living shit bombed out of them day (by the US Army Air Corps) and night (by the RAF) still managed to design, build and deploy incredibly advanced technologies such as jet fighters and ballistic missiles.
One proffered explanation for their persistence in the face almost inevitable defeat was the Morgenthau Plan.
Little Dieter needs to fly.
