Drunk history!
(Couldn’t find on youtube)
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I read somewhere that this “Whistling Death” quote of the Japanese was a total myth, made up after WWII in the late 40’s as the Corsair was deployed to other nations post war, and it was near the end of it’s military run. One of the last great Warbirds, as the Jet and Rocket age began for the USA and Russia, since we both recovered Germany’s advanced secrets, their technology, and their scientists.
Doesn’t that whistling sound come from the gun barrels? Personally, I think the sound of that double wasp is far more exciting, and would be far more unnerving if I were a dirty Nazi bastard, or a poor Japanese kid willing to die at a moments notice in the war because I was raised to believe that I must love my Emperor as if he were a God. That Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp engine was a thing of beauty. I have a 1500mm electric RC version of the Vought F4U-4 Corsair plane that I’ve been refusing to fly the last two years out of fear of crashing it, it’s such a beautiful thing. I don’t really crash RC planes, but I can’t bring myself to fly it. It’s more enjoyable as a ready to fky model for my RC room.
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That’s basically what they did with the Sherman tank, pitting it against a much more heavily armored machine with an 88mm gun in the German Tiger tank.
Our superior manufacturing capability allowed us to overwhelm the Germans with lesser machines in greater numbers.
There is zero evidence that anyone ever called the Corsair “whistling death”. The Japanese referred to it as the Sikorsky, after Igor Sikorsky, who was influential in its design.
Soldiers never give cool names like “whistling death” to enemy equipment. If they give enemy equipment nicknames at all, they’re usually disparaging (for example, the Japanese Ohka suicide rocket was called a “baka bomb”, baka being a Japanese insult, by American sailors, and American airmen in Europe called the German Me-262 jet fighters “blow jobs” [presumably because of the jet propulsion, but the Me-262 was called the Schwalbe by the Germans, which means “swallow” - the bird - in English, so it could have been something of a play on words as well]).
The “whistling death” myth almost certainly came from someone working for the US Navy/Marine Corps putting out propaganda films. “Our fighter is so good and the enemy are so scared of it that they gave it this really cool name, ‘whistling death’. Whoa, so scary!”. The Corsair was an amazing aircraft for its time - it was even used to shoot down a MiG-15 in Korea, and last shot down an enemy aircraft during the Soccer War in 1969 - and I have a special affinity for it as a Marine myself. But cmon, let’s all use some common sense here. Soldiers either call enemy equipment by technical names or disparaging nicknames, they don’t name it “whistling death”.
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As an 0311, I’m guessing you often carried an M60 and called it a pig?
You’d also need 200 highly skilled pilots, and those are way more expensive than an F35. Also, I know that the F35 is a favourite target, but it’s really a pretty cheap plane for its role.
Fairchild is out-of-business, and has been for a while, though I didn’t realize they stopped producing the A-10 as long ago as 1984. (I was at Hagerstown Airport (in MD) a few years ago and the “Fairchild” logo was still barely visible on at least one of their old buildings.)
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I keep thinking that, one of these days, we’ll embroil ourselves in a country where everyone is poorer than we are. </s>
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When I lived near the (old) AUS, I could tell when a DC-8* was approaching based on its distinctive sound. I always wondered if it was them nostrils. (* Still used for freight at that time)
The Shermans weren’t as heavy as some of the late-war German follies, but they weren’t actually bad tanks.
Shermans had two important good features:
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Crew survivability. Although plenty of Shermans got blown up, relatively few crewman got killed in the process (due to its exceptionally good hatches). Often, they could just walk back to base and collect a new tank.
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Reliability. Shermans just worked, everywhere from the Pacific to the Mediterranean to Northern Europe. In contrast, a very large proportion of those flashy German super-heavies never saw action due to breaking down on the way to the battlefield.
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Another possibly apocryphal example is the Short Sunderland flying boat of WW2.
“The Germans are reputed to have nicknamed the Sunderland the Fliegendes Stachelschwein (“Flying Porcupine”) due to its defensive firepower.”
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Were Britain not sharing?
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Although tiger tanks were uncommon, especially on the Western Front. Panther tanks were much more common and were still significantly better than the Shermans.
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The M60 was gone by like the 90s. We had the M240G by the time I joined in 2003. And it’s the 31s who usually have the 240s. I’ve shot them, but I never carried one around, or had one assigned to me or anything.
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Thanks. That was a good read.
But even though Churchill may have had a hand in creating modern Iraq, we didn’t really have any good reason to go bomb the shit out of them.
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That’s one of the pratfalls of German engineering. They crafted some wonderful machines and gadgets that had higher benchmarks than their competitors. But their instance on doing it this way vs making stuff cheap, simple, and robust means that their production speed was slower, and like you said, maintenance higher.
I heard that is why Hitler and some of the upper brass weren’t as impressed with the Sturmgewehr 44 because it was mostly stamped metal parts, vs the milled parts of the Kar 98. Meanwhile the allies were pumping out sub-machine guns that were basically a tube with a handle.
This may interest you - Ian goes through 3 models of the Kar 98, from pre-war to late war, and you can see all the parts they had to simplify and cheapen to make them more reliable and faster production.
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We were still using the M60 when I joined the Army in '95. But my the time I got to my first Armor unit they had switched to the 240B, and the grunts were just getting their 240Gs. I dont recall any nicknames for the M240. “Pig” suited the M60 well though.
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The early Sherman’s had terrible hatches. But they changed, thankfully. Jump to 7:30.
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Fair point, and I know it’s a little bit of an open question about whether some of the Sherman’s downsides were a bit exaggerated or not. I think for me it’s more an issue of a lost opportunity–there just was no reason why with the manufacturing base and logistic mastery we had we couldn’t field a superior tank in those kinds of numbers rather than one that could hold its own as long as it had numbers on its side.
