Education: Schools for Sabotage

American Thinker ^ | July 23, 2014 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

It is a common scene in World War II movies: a captain maneuvers in close to a big ship and fires a spread of torpedoes. None of them detonate. Some submarine officers lost the will to fight and had nervous breakdowns.

In fact, German engineering was not always at fault. Sabotage (sporadic, opportunistic, often a personal enterprise) was almost a second army arrayed against the Third Reich.

Here are some revealing war stories:

'U-505s fifth patrol, in July 1943, lasted less than two weeks--she was attacked by Allied airplanes and had to return to France for repair. The next four patrols also ended in failure, as conscripted French workers at the submarine base in Lorient, many of whom were members of the Resistance, systematically sabotaged the subs equipment and instruments.'

'[M]y grandmother…was a 17-year-old Polish girl taken by German soldiers in Poland and sent as slave labor to work in the Reich at a armaments factory. She told me they routinely tinkered with everything possible so it wouldn't function properly.'

'There were some tricks like dropping a precision part so it would deform a tiny bit and malfunction down the line....'

Any time you have a precisely made machine, it does not take much to keep it from working optimally. This is also true of a childs mind.

'Drop a precision part so it would deform a tiny bit and malfunction down the line.' That is practically an epitaph for the destructive results achieved by our elite educators throughout the 20th century.

Great cunning was displayed in educational sabotage. Typically, there is an optimal sequence in learning something, no matter if it is tennis, driving a car, typing, speaking French, or American history. Disrupt that sequence, teach things in a confusing way, and you will have poor results....

[dp0622]

One of the few articles a day that I will actually link to :)

Interesting so far.

[RitaOK]

My tagline is years old. It is much shorter.

Thanks, very much, for this fine post. It needs to be repeated once a month. :)

[tanknetter]

Speaking of the U-505 and officer nervous breakdowns, on one of the patrols and under depth charging the CO whigged out, pulled his sidearm and splattered his brains all over the control room.

The U-505 survived the war, was captured by a CVE group on the high seas and is now magnificently displayed at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago

[moose07]

Great post, Bruce.
Didn’t know some of this nonsense was so old.

[sparklite2]

Another WWII commonality you may not have heard of was the complete ineffectiveness of American torpedoes going into the War. Patrols would routinely return to base with tales of torpedoes fired to no effect. For many months, the pencil pushers in Washington denied anything was wrong except for incompetent sub drivers. When someone looked into it, it was found that our torpedoes were set to travel too far down beneath the enemy ship’s hull.

If you get the chance read up on the Battle of Midway to see the fustercluck of B-17 bombs dropped from 20.000 ft onto the Jap fleet, from a altitude so high that they never delivered a scratch to the enemy. Of dive bombers whose windshields fogged up near the end of their dive, blinding the pilots.

Thanks to our industrial base, it’s no surprise we won the war. It’s just damned humiliating to see some of the idiocy that the military was handicapped with.