Amen-Moses

Originally posted by theyeti
The V1 was guided. It wouldn't have been able to hit London otherwise. In fact, a common way of stopping it was simply to smack it hard enough to screw up its gyroscopes.

It was guided in the sense that it flew in a straight line until the fuel ran out.

The V1 could be launched from anywhere;

Yes, anywhere you first built a 150ft ramp!

you're confusing it with the V2.

Which was an ICBM (where the C stands for country rather than continent ), it was vertically fired from a mobile platform, was guided to within a mile or so of target and there was no warning of it coming.

It's true that it was just a terror weapon, but it did put a significant strain on Allied resources. Unlike the V2, the V1 was probably a worthwhile weapon.

The V1 was pretty pathetic, only half the 30,000 built actually made it into allied airspace (25% failed on launch or shortly after, and 25% went missing over the sea somewhere), of those only a tiny fraction actually made it to London and did any damage.

The V2 otoh was extremely successful and had it been produced a year earlier could have done serious damage, unfortunately for the Germans (and the dutch) the only place within range by the time it was produced in any numbers was Holland. Several thousand were fired on Holland and it was a very feared weapon.

Why do you think that post-war rocket development in the West was carried out almost exclusively by German scientists?

In the US yes, the British development was virtually all home grown with testing done in Australia. There was originally a British space project but it was scrapped due to costs.

And the first American jet flew in 1942. Nothing produced by either America or Britain was combat worthy; only the Germans pushed the technology that far.

The first Brit jet flew in 1941 and the worlds first operational Jet fighter came in mid 1944, and yes it was British.

Strangely enough every modern Jet is based on Whittle's design of engine and not the German design, I wonder why that is?

http://inventors.about.com/library/i...ljetengine.htm

The Komet was worthless. It killed almost as many German pilots as it did Allied pilots. The ME 262 was the real masterpiece of German aviation technology. None of the allies had anything close to it.

Except the Meteor which although not as pretty or as manouverable was much easier to fly and more reliable.

The Komet was very dangerous to fly, mainly because they were extremely difficult to land safely on runways crater by allied bombing, the fuel used was extremely volatile and quality of build by that stage of the war was poor. The bomber crews hated the damn things though as there was little chance of either evading or shooting the things down and for a while losses due to the Komet and the peoples jet were alarmingly high.

Amen-Moses

Amen-Moses

I do hope you are including the 30% Canadian and other commonwealth forces amongst "Tommies" there.

btw only about 25% of the Normandy forces were US and we gave you the more lightly defended beaches.

Amen-Moses

sullster

Back to normal I see.

The percentage of US forces was higher than 25%. Utah was lightly defended but Omaha certainly wasn't.

Whether through design or luck, the nastiest beaches were the ones the Canadians and Americans landed on. You Brits had the easist beaches, and you know it. Casuality statistics tell all.

By the way, when you say "we", you are including Eisenhower, are you not?

The British have been famous for always having their "commonwealth" forces get shot down, so their blue-blood Brits can come in and make the victory. Look at the idiotic Dieppe raid, mostly all Canadians. You always praise the Canadians at the expense of the hated Americans. England always loved to let their colonial forces die for the Empire. Gallipoli come to mind.

Australians were fighting in North Africa to save Egypt for the King while the Japanese were moving towards OZ. England was just angry because the USA wasn't a colony anymore, or they would landed nothing but Americans, Canadians, Indians and Aussies at Normandy.

lpetrich

The V-1 was the world's first cruise missile. It was called the "Buzz Bomb" on account of its pulse-jet engine.

It had an on-board autopilot whose flight direction could be set, and also a timer to set when to go into a dive and end the plane's flight.

Also late in WWII, Japan got into the cruise-missile business, though its cruise missiles all had human pilots, and most of those missiles were already-existing warplanes -- fighters and light bombers.

However, they had some "Oka" rocket-propelled flying bombs, which were the world's first air-launched cruise missiles. But their launch platforms, some "Betty" heavy bombers, were slow and vulnerable.

The other "V" weapon was the V-2, which was the world's first long-range ballistic missile. The "Scuds" of recent decades are not much different from the old V-2's.

Amen-Moses

Well I hate to differ but seeing as how I've actually taken one apart I do feel a might more qualified!

The ramps were the aiming method and the giros just kept the thing flying in a straight line. It also had a small amount of elevator control by way of a barometer set to a specific height.

The "timer" was the fuel load, once they ran out of fuel they just fell out of the sky (rather gracefully for a hunk of tin).

They were dirt cheap to produce and contained nothing in the way of advanced technology (about 500 dollars us equivelent a pop apparently) which is why so many were produced.

Amen-Moses

Amen-Moses

Originally posted by sullster
The percentage of US forces was higher than 25%. Utah was lightly defended but Omaha certainly wasn't.

Nope, 25% is about right. Both beaches were supposed to be lightly defended as they had not completed the fixed defences on the western most beaches. Unluckily there was a German armoured division close by that was sent to Omaha to counter the ivasion.

The main difference between the landings was that the US forces chose to use small lightly armoured landing craft that couldn't carry armoured units to be followed up after the beaches were taken by larger units carrying the armoured divisions. On the Brit beaches we landed using huge specially designed landing ships which could dispanse armour from the front and troops from the sides.

Whether through design or luck, the nastiest beaches were the ones the Canadians and Americans landed on.

Absolute twaddle, the Brits landed against the most fortifed positions with huge naval barrages to try and soften up the defences.

You Brits had the easist beaches, and you know it. Casuality statistics tell all.

They do indeed, the Canadians followed the US lead and went in without armoured support, they got badly mauled. The massed coordinated landings on the Brit beaches were far more successful although it took longer to get off the beaches because of the fixed defences.

By the way, when you say "we", you are including Eisenhower, are you not?

We call him dick head over here although we did at least erect a statue in his honour.

The British have been famous for always having their "commonwealth" forces get shot down, so their blue-blood Brits can come in and make the victory. Look at the idiotic Dieppe raid, mostly all Canadians. You always praise the Canadians at the expense of the hated Americans. England always loved to let their colonial forces die for the Empire. Gallipoli come to mind.

True sometimes the commonwealth forces got the shitty jobs but mostly their failure was partly down to lack of battle experience.

Australians were fighting in North Africa to save Egypt for the King while the Japanese were moving towards OZ. England was just angry because the USA wasn't a colony anymore, or they would landed nothing but Americans, Canadians, Indians and Aussies at Normandy.

Everyone was fighting in North Africa not just Aussies and maybe you should talk to some of the Brits fighting in Borneo before you suggest it was all one sided.

Amen-Moses

Amen-Moses

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Amen-Moses
[B]Originally posted by sullster
The percentage of US forces was higher than 25%. Utah was lightly defended but Omaha certainly wasn't.

Nope, 25% is about right. Both beaches were supposed to be lightly defended as they had not completed the fixed defences on the western most beaches. Unluckily there was a German armoured division close by that was sent to Omaha to counter the invasion.

The main difference between the landings was that the US forces chose to use small lightly armoured landing craft that couldn't carry armoured units to be followed up after the beaches were taken by larger units carrying the armoured divisions. On the Brit beaches we landed using huge specially designed landing ships which could dispense armour from the front and troops from the sides.

Whether through design or luck, the nastiest beaches were the ones the Canadians and Americans landed on.

Absolute twaddle, the Brits landed against the most fortifed positions with huge naval barrages to try and soften up the defences.

You Brits had the easist beaches, and you know it. Casuality statistics tell all.

They do indeed, the Canadians followed the US lead and went in without armoured support, they got badly mauled. The massed coordinated landings on the Brit beaches were far more successful although it took longer to get off the beaches because of the fixed defences.

By the way, when you say "we", you are including Eisenhower, are you not?

We call him dick head over here although we did at least erect a statue in his honour. Poor old Monty never really got the recognition he deserved for saving US generals (especially Patton) on several occasions. His military genius was on par with the best of the enemy even if his diplomatic abilities could have used a little refining.

The British have been famous for always having their "commonwealth" forces get shot down, so their blue-blood Brits can come in and make the victory. Look at the idiotic Dieppe raid, mostly all Canadians. You always praise the Canadians at the expense of the hated Americans. England always loved to let their colonial forces die for the Empire. Gallipoli come to mind.

True sometimes the commonwealth forces got the shitty jobs but mostly their failure was partly down to lack of battle experience.

Australians were fighting in North Africa to save Egypt for the King while the Japanese were moving towards OZ. England was just angry because the USA wasn't a colony anymore, or they would landed nothing but Americans, Canadians, Indians and Aussies at Normandy.

Everyone was fighting in North Africa not just Aussies and maybe you should talk to some of the Brits fighting in Borneo before you suggest it was all one sided.

Amen-Moses

Vorkosigan

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Amen-Moses
Keeping chickens and bantams also became a national obsession even in the cities and at a push pidgeons could also be bred for food. We were hungry but we weren't starving.

Nobody said you were starving. Merely that the data shows that the average German was better off than the average Brit until 1944.

In Germany otoh the initial flush of victory and the efforts by the government to put about victory propaganda meant that it wasn't until late in the war that the same sort of efforts were made.

Nonsense.

One of the interesting things I discovered in the diaries was that farmers in Germany intentionally downplayed their crops to officials in order to hoard some for their own use and to sell on the black market, the effect of this was that if you lived in rural areas you didn't even need a ration card because local produce was abundent but in the cities even bread and potatoes were in short supply. In the later diaries he describes how the incoming Russian authorities had to force the farmers to hand over hoarded produce to alleviate the starvation in the cities and were astounded that the farmers would do such a thing.

LOL. British farmers did the same thing. So did Italian, French, etc. Cheating officialdom is as old as farming.


In the UK noone needed to starve as having a raton card was a guarantee of food even if you had to do without other things or wait for the next delivery, it was in a way a rather civilised affair.

This is part of the postwar myth of everyone cheerful and happily dealing with the deprivation of war. Fussell has a wonderful chapter on this Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. In there he points out that hardly anyone in the West can comprehend that the Blitz led to the development of a whole new class of thieves and looters who specialized in bombed out areas and their corpses. We just don't think of our civilization like that, especially since we won the war.

Go read Fussell. As Wordsworth said of our Civil War: "The real war will never get into the books."

Vorkosigan

John Hancock

I've been ignoring this thread don't know what the hell you guys are talking about. The reason I felt inclined to post in this thread is that I've hope some 18th Century History buff reminds all these weak mind French bashers that if not for France we'd still be a British colony-remmber dummies they had toops over here training us and fighting for us as well as supplying This young nation with arms.

Further if you believe that we won by hiding behind rocks and trees while the redcoats lined up, ya gotta cherry tree stuck up your silly ass.

Martin Buber

theyeti

Wrong as usual. If the V1 kept going until it ran out of fuel, it would overfly its target. Instead it used a timer which directed it to plunge into the ground. From this page:

I wonder how you managed to miss that. You were probably taking apart a child's fire engine instead.

That's what made them a worthwhile weapon. Despite their poor success rate, their inexpensiveness made it possible to produce them in massive numbers, which kept allied air defense on its toes; the allies suffered many damaged planes -- and even several destroyed -- while trying to knock out the V1. The V2 on the other hand was very expensive, and used fuel and other materials which could have been better spent elsewhere. And ironically, the fact that it couldn't be shot down meant that it wasn't even taxing allied military resources, with the exception of the bombers sent to destroy the launch sites. It just killed civilians, that's all.


theyeti