One of the few articles a day that I will actually link to :)
Interesting so far.
My tagline is years old. It is much shorter.
Thanks, very much, for this fine post. It needs to be repeated once a month. :)
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
Great post, Bruce.
Didn’t know some of this nonsense was so old.
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.