JimBowie1958
Old Fogey
- Sep 25, 2011
- 63,590
- 16,753
- 2,220
When I was growing up, there were all kinds of amateur history "buffs" in what today people would call a community, lol, and they had wide ranging discussions on all manner of factoids about their favorite wars to read about and memorize reams of trivial data on. Discussions on the Civil War, The Napoleonic Wars and World Wars One and Two were common, especially the Second World War. Some participated in historical re-enactments of battles here in the USA, and some recreated the battles they best that they could on sand tables in the garage that used lead miniature troops to represent the participants of the battles with complex rules for determining the outcome of each unit's attack.
I participated in a few of those battle recreations and mostly listened to the banter on various topics, and many things amazed me and spurred me to read up on the topics, like how recently we have come to map the entire planet, for one thing. I have an old original map printed during the Second World War and there are still unexplored areas on it that are deliniated with a thin small dotted line that meant "We really dont know what the fuck is out past this line" which always left me with a feeling of wonder. How was it that in an age of aircraft we still had no clue as to the northern coastline of some arctic islands?
I think that the end of World War Two was the end of an era of humility for mankind as since then we have the entire planet well mapped and there are no more "Here there be Dragons". Today we think the government knows everything well enough to tell people the most outlandish lies and most people believe those lies like "We are the government; you can trust us." Every military history buff that is acquainted with the long history of governmental abuse and lies during war time knows that the LAST group anyone should ever trust is the government. If you doubt me, just ask the Apaches.
Anyway, there were some mysteries about the Second World War that have long held my interest, and so I thought I would post them here with some links if I could find them and see if anyone can contribute to my lack of Google Fu skills.
The lack of German raids along the British coast is a complete mystery to me. The Germans had the capability of doing it as they demonstrated in France and Scandinavia, so why not raid the British Isles as well? I know of a parachutist raid the Germans used in I think 1940 that was not uniformed and the British had them executed within a couple of days of capture for being brigands. There are the rumors of the Shingle Street landings in which a few hundred German military were caught and all killed, with those who surrendered supposedly burned alive, according to some of the stories that the government denies ever happened.
Surely the Germans saw the value in tying down British forces in guarding homeland coastal areas; could it be that there were raids and the Brits thought it might hurt their war morale and so covered them up? I dont know,but I have never heard a satisfying explanation of why the Germans did not raid the British coast and if they did what the hell is so important about keeping it all secret for nearly eighty freaking years.
Whatever happened to the father of the V-1 program, General Kammler? Some say he committed suicide via cyanide capsule, but others differ, some suggesting he was captured by American forces to help work on our rocket program but he was not cooperative enough or had some connections too ugly to stomach and we put him in solitary confinement until he finally committed suicide by hanging himself. I find it hard to believe that any background of this SS general could be so unsavory that it justified his coerced suicide as his technical knowledge had to have been immense in an area we were a bit behind with.
Could it be that other German rocket scientists we caught just refused to work with the man and so he was a handicap? I find it unlikely that a group of expats from Germany that lives thousands of miles from their beloved fatherland in captivity could be so unforgiving. Could it be that the Brits had dibs on him once a minimal technical transfer of data was carried out then they tormented the poor guy till he killed himself as punishment for his V1 rockets h tting London? It is intriguing to me to say the least just how vindictive the Western world can really be.
What caused the RAF Fauld base ammo explosion? That was a catastrophe, as about 4,000 tones of explosives stored there all blew up. Some say the storage was improper, but I wonder if the Italian POWs there might have done it themselves as a last act of defiance. Italian POWs were used in a lot of places as slave labor during the war, something we dont like to talk about. Was this a case of it biting us in the ass?
How did the band leader Glenn Miller actually die? He was engaged in moral boosting activities in the UK and about to transfer his band to France after D-Day, but his plane disappeared. What happened to him? How could the Allied command fuck up a major morale boosting performer by letting him get killed like that? Could it be that as he palled around with top Allied commanders he learned of things only a few were meant to know and so was targeted for an Arkacide?
Was Wilhelm Canaris a spy for the Brits? The guy had ties to the German resistance, and had been involved in some huge German losses in the war, particularly the Battle of Kursk and the U-Boat campaign. Was he feeding the West information? He had access to information from the Brits that no one bothered to explain and his hatred of Hitler was hardly a secret. He several times met with MI6 and exchanged unknown information as he did with Franco. He was tasked with convincing Franco to enter the war on Germany's side, but instead the Spanish declared that they would not enter any with as allies of Germany until England was out of the war. It was another catastrophic failure for Canaris, and the grateful Spanish government paid his widow a pension until she died. Canaris also put together the U-Boat launched team of saboteurs who failed utterly upon landing, as two of their comrades promptly surrendered and gave the rest of their team up to the FBI. Did Canaris deliberately load that team with a couple of losers to get the desired result?
Did any Germans hold out in New Swabia? Not all Germans troops surrendered at the end of WW2, and some took months to carry through. Operation Tabarin by the Brits had military objectives in Antarctica, so the region had value that the previous German expeditions indicate that the Germans also recognized. We also built facilities there in Operation Windmill and High Jump. Was there ever any effort taken to inspect New Swabia to see if the Germans had ever actually abandoned all their facilities in Antarctica? The Little America bases are on the opposite side of the continent, but one would think that surely Admiral Byrd may have sent at least a handful of men to check it out. But did we?
What would have casualties been like had we had to invade the Japanese home islands? This has long puzzled me, and if the battle of Okinawa was any indicator it would have been a bloody freaking mess.
Okinawa ended with over 142,000 civilian casualties out of a population of around 300k. Over 110k Japanese military were killed and we had 82k casualties with 12k killed. And this was just a set of tiny islands, one 200th the size of Japans home islands.
If we used Okinawa as a gauge to estimate the invasion of the home islands results, Japan had a population of around 77 million on their home islands with 110 million across the Japanese Empire, so using that number, a proportional result using Okinawa as the guide would have been over 35 million civilians killed, over 5 million Japanese military dead and about 4 million US military casualties with about 400,000 dead. How accurate that is however is anyone's guess. Japanese morale may have collapsed much earlier after the southern islands were take and Honshu reduced to cinders, but then again they might have found their morale reinforced instead.
All I do know is that millions of lives were saved on both sides by dropping our two atom bombs.
Did the US military continue development of Earthquake class bombs? These kinds of bombs are meant to destroy military and industrial targets by penetrating deep into the Earths crust and exploding with such force that the shock waves would cause the greatest damage to the physical targets and spare most of the population. In a nuclear age such weapons are not made obsolete because they are considered rational to use. For example, in WW2, the Germans, Brits, the USA and the Soviet Union were all thought to have enough stock piles of nerve gas that it would have caused massive civilian casualties mounting into the millions had we used them. But all sides seemed to have come to an implicit agreement to not use them so that no one would have to suffer through a cataclysmic war in which persistent nerve agent was spread all over the respective home lands, meanwhile we conventionally bombed the living shit out of each other. Many believe that in any future war, all sides will agree to not be the first users of nuclear weapons, but no one is entirely certain given the presence of the irrational actors in such conflicts from the leaders in North Korea to the worst ISIS suicide bomb organizers. But no one will restrain themselves from use of conventional weapons, so are we prepped for that capability?
Having an array of these bombs available would be a sufficient response that could allow us to win a war with the Russians and Chicoms that does not require first use of nukes. We did have such bombs made in the Gulf War and invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, but I have the impression these were newly designed and made bombs which would be consistent with both possibilities, an abandonment of such bomb development after WW2 and also with the theory that we have been covertly developing some very nice Earthquake bombs and only used down scaled bunker busters int he Mid East to avoid tipping our hands on our truly massive weaponry.
But who really knows? The ones that do know are all probably dead, so I will just have to wait till I cross that river and can pick Jackson, Lee, Ney, Patton and Guderians brains.
I participated in a few of those battle recreations and mostly listened to the banter on various topics, and many things amazed me and spurred me to read up on the topics, like how recently we have come to map the entire planet, for one thing. I have an old original map printed during the Second World War and there are still unexplored areas on it that are deliniated with a thin small dotted line that meant "We really dont know what the fuck is out past this line" which always left me with a feeling of wonder. How was it that in an age of aircraft we still had no clue as to the northern coastline of some arctic islands?
I think that the end of World War Two was the end of an era of humility for mankind as since then we have the entire planet well mapped and there are no more "Here there be Dragons". Today we think the government knows everything well enough to tell people the most outlandish lies and most people believe those lies like "We are the government; you can trust us." Every military history buff that is acquainted with the long history of governmental abuse and lies during war time knows that the LAST group anyone should ever trust is the government. If you doubt me, just ask the Apaches.
Anyway, there were some mysteries about the Second World War that have long held my interest, and so I thought I would post them here with some links if I could find them and see if anyone can contribute to my lack of Google Fu skills.
The lack of German raids along the British coast is a complete mystery to me. The Germans had the capability of doing it as they demonstrated in France and Scandinavia, so why not raid the British Isles as well? I know of a parachutist raid the Germans used in I think 1940 that was not uniformed and the British had them executed within a couple of days of capture for being brigands. There are the rumors of the Shingle Street landings in which a few hundred German military were caught and all killed, with those who surrendered supposedly burned alive, according to some of the stories that the government denies ever happened.
Surely the Germans saw the value in tying down British forces in guarding homeland coastal areas; could it be that there were raids and the Brits thought it might hurt their war morale and so covered them up? I dont know,but I have never heard a satisfying explanation of why the Germans did not raid the British coast and if they did what the hell is so important about keeping it all secret for nearly eighty freaking years.
Whatever happened to the father of the V-1 program, General Kammler? Some say he committed suicide via cyanide capsule, but others differ, some suggesting he was captured by American forces to help work on our rocket program but he was not cooperative enough or had some connections too ugly to stomach and we put him in solitary confinement until he finally committed suicide by hanging himself. I find it hard to believe that any background of this SS general could be so unsavory that it justified his coerced suicide as his technical knowledge had to have been immense in an area we were a bit behind with.
Could it be that other German rocket scientists we caught just refused to work with the man and so he was a handicap? I find it unlikely that a group of expats from Germany that lives thousands of miles from their beloved fatherland in captivity could be so unforgiving. Could it be that the Brits had dibs on him once a minimal technical transfer of data was carried out then they tormented the poor guy till he killed himself as punishment for his V1 rockets h tting London? It is intriguing to me to say the least just how vindictive the Western world can really be.
What caused the RAF Fauld base ammo explosion? That was a catastrophe, as about 4,000 tones of explosives stored there all blew up. Some say the storage was improper, but I wonder if the Italian POWs there might have done it themselves as a last act of defiance. Italian POWs were used in a lot of places as slave labor during the war, something we dont like to talk about. Was this a case of it biting us in the ass?
How did the band leader Glenn Miller actually die? He was engaged in moral boosting activities in the UK and about to transfer his band to France after D-Day, but his plane disappeared. What happened to him? How could the Allied command fuck up a major morale boosting performer by letting him get killed like that? Could it be that as he palled around with top Allied commanders he learned of things only a few were meant to know and so was targeted for an Arkacide?
Was Wilhelm Canaris a spy for the Brits? The guy had ties to the German resistance, and had been involved in some huge German losses in the war, particularly the Battle of Kursk and the U-Boat campaign. Was he feeding the West information? He had access to information from the Brits that no one bothered to explain and his hatred of Hitler was hardly a secret. He several times met with MI6 and exchanged unknown information as he did with Franco. He was tasked with convincing Franco to enter the war on Germany's side, but instead the Spanish declared that they would not enter any with as allies of Germany until England was out of the war. It was another catastrophic failure for Canaris, and the grateful Spanish government paid his widow a pension until she died. Canaris also put together the U-Boat launched team of saboteurs who failed utterly upon landing, as two of their comrades promptly surrendered and gave the rest of their team up to the FBI. Did Canaris deliberately load that team with a couple of losers to get the desired result?
Did any Germans hold out in New Swabia? Not all Germans troops surrendered at the end of WW2, and some took months to carry through. Operation Tabarin by the Brits had military objectives in Antarctica, so the region had value that the previous German expeditions indicate that the Germans also recognized. We also built facilities there in Operation Windmill and High Jump. Was there ever any effort taken to inspect New Swabia to see if the Germans had ever actually abandoned all their facilities in Antarctica? The Little America bases are on the opposite side of the continent, but one would think that surely Admiral Byrd may have sent at least a handful of men to check it out. But did we?
What would have casualties been like had we had to invade the Japanese home islands? This has long puzzled me, and if the battle of Okinawa was any indicator it would have been a bloody freaking mess.
Okinawa ended with over 142,000 civilian casualties out of a population of around 300k. Over 110k Japanese military were killed and we had 82k casualties with 12k killed. And this was just a set of tiny islands, one 200th the size of Japans home islands.
If we used Okinawa as a gauge to estimate the invasion of the home islands results, Japan had a population of around 77 million on their home islands with 110 million across the Japanese Empire, so using that number, a proportional result using Okinawa as the guide would have been over 35 million civilians killed, over 5 million Japanese military dead and about 4 million US military casualties with about 400,000 dead. How accurate that is however is anyone's guess. Japanese morale may have collapsed much earlier after the southern islands were take and Honshu reduced to cinders, but then again they might have found their morale reinforced instead.
All I do know is that millions of lives were saved on both sides by dropping our two atom bombs.
Did the US military continue development of Earthquake class bombs? These kinds of bombs are meant to destroy military and industrial targets by penetrating deep into the Earths crust and exploding with such force that the shock waves would cause the greatest damage to the physical targets and spare most of the population. In a nuclear age such weapons are not made obsolete because they are considered rational to use. For example, in WW2, the Germans, Brits, the USA and the Soviet Union were all thought to have enough stock piles of nerve gas that it would have caused massive civilian casualties mounting into the millions had we used them. But all sides seemed to have come to an implicit agreement to not use them so that no one would have to suffer through a cataclysmic war in which persistent nerve agent was spread all over the respective home lands, meanwhile we conventionally bombed the living shit out of each other. Many believe that in any future war, all sides will agree to not be the first users of nuclear weapons, but no one is entirely certain given the presence of the irrational actors in such conflicts from the leaders in North Korea to the worst ISIS suicide bomb organizers. But no one will restrain themselves from use of conventional weapons, so are we prepped for that capability?
Having an array of these bombs available would be a sufficient response that could allow us to win a war with the Russians and Chicoms that does not require first use of nukes. We did have such bombs made in the Gulf War and invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, but I have the impression these were newly designed and made bombs which would be consistent with both possibilities, an abandonment of such bomb development after WW2 and also with the theory that we have been covertly developing some very nice Earthquake bombs and only used down scaled bunker busters int he Mid East to avoid tipping our hands on our truly massive weaponry.
But who really knows? The ones that do know are all probably dead, so I will just have to wait till I cross that river and can pick Jackson, Lee, Ney, Patton and Guderians brains.
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