Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Imperial War Museums" channel.

@Dave5843-d9m They had planned the Mk 8 but it wasn't going to be ready as soon as it needed so the Mk 9 was kind of a stopgap hybrid between the 5 and the 8 that could be rushed into service very quickly - the first ones were essentially Mk 5 airframes with minimal modifications to take the Merlin 61 engine intended for the Mk 8.
21
I think you may mean Berchtold. And his allies were urging him to go to war. Germany, or at least its generals, wanted a war with Russia (which inevitably meant a war with France as well) before Russian modernization and recovery from its 1905 woes made the France-Russia Entente too strong for Germany to handle.
10
@michellebrown4903 The British generals probably had a better appreciation of the power of modern rifles than anyone else. The generals were not fools and they realized that the key to breaking defenses was largely artillery (which also had as much as machine guns do do with stopping attacks). However in 1916 the British artillery and the British infantry were not yet up to the task. As the video notes, Haig knew this and told his superiors, but he was ordered to attack anyway. The Germans were not on the defensive in 1916, they were on the offensive at Verdun. In 1917 they went on the defensive in the west so they could concentrate on knocking Russia out of the war in the east. This done, they went back on the offensive in the west in 1918. They understood that whatever the powers of the defense, the war was not going to be won by skulking in their own trenches behind barbed wire.
8
The Austrians only wanted a war with Serbia, though. It was the Germans, specifically the German military leadership, who wanted to turn that local war into a general European war.
7
A combination. The Allies borrowed huge sums of money from the US as well as buying massive amounts of munitions on credit. This is a major reason why the US became increasingly pro-Allied as the war went on: an Allied loss would mean those debts would likely never be repaid, and that would have been catastrophic for the American economy.
4
A Mr. Schlieffen is here and would like to speak to you about German plans regarding France.
4
@pilotjonas8 Italy never entered the war on the side of the Central Powers. It declared itself neutral in 1914, and then in 1915 when both sides were looking for an advantage to break the stalemate Italy essentially solicited secret bids for it to join each side and took the Allied offer. Turkey was not bound to either side by treaties but joined the Central Powers shortly after the war broke out mostly because of its territorial ambitions in the Caucasus and its fear of Russia and of British imperialism. Russia had always coveted Constantinople and free access to the Mediterranean from the Black Sea. Churchill (who was First Lord of the Admiralty) didn't help matters when he confiscated a top-of-the-line battlecruiser being built for the Turkish Navy in Britain which had already been paid for by the Turks. The Germans responded by offering to give the Turks a German battlecruiser (which was already at sea when the war broke out) in compensation if they'd join the Central Powers.
3
The war started because of the vile Hun and his villainous empire-building.
3
This video is completely mistaken. It falls for the old Barbara Tuchman line of a Europe that had tensions but no real reason for war blundering its way into a war because of a mishandled crisis. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was not just tension between France and Germany, each was not only just prepared for war with the other, they were both determined to fight such a war and were only waiting for the time to seem right. And the German general staff deemed that when the 1914 crisis happened, the time was right. They were looking at demographic trends in France and Germany and even more so at the recovery of Russia from its 1905 aborted revolution and at its rapid industrialization and modernization, and they figured that conditions would only get less favorable for Germany to win the inevitable war as time went on. This is why this crisis turned into a war when all previous ones had been resolved through diplomacy. The German general staff, and to a lesser extent its civilian government, did everything it could to ensure that diplomacy would fail. They not only gave the Austro-Hungarians the famous "blank check" promising support in the event of war, they pushed them very hard to be as harsh as possible in their response to Serbia and to send an ultimatum that Serbia couldn't possibly accept, thus ensuring a war between Austria and Serbia. They worked to sabotage every effort by third parties to mediate the crisis between Austria and Serbia. They then pushed Austria-Hungary to mobilize its army against both Russia and Serbia instead of just mobilizing against Serbia as the Austrians wanted, saying this would deter the Russians from declaring war while knowing that it would inevitably do the opposite. When Russia responded by mobilizing its own army (which was tantamount to a mutual declaration of war) the Kaiser wanted to mobilize against Russia only and try to keep France from joining the war through diplomacy, but the generals convinced him that this was impossible and that Germany had no choice but to invade France as well. And this is where this false narrative really goes off the rails. It's always claimed that when Germany went to war with Russia, France joined in to honor its treaty obligation. Now, France very well may have done that if given the choice, but in actual fact it never came to that because Germany effectively initiated a war with France. It did that by sending an ultimatum to France demanding that France disarm its frontier and allow the German army to occupy fortifications on the French side of the border, which was an absolutely insane demand that no one imagined France could ever possibly accept - it would have been national suicide. The alternative was that Germany would attack. It was in response to this ultimatum and its open threat of invasion that France mobilized its army. In any case the Germans were going to invade France whether France mobilized its army or declared war or not - the only question was whether France would resist the invasion. This was because the German mobilization plan, which the generals absolutely insisted on following to the letter, required German troops to cross into France, Belgium, and Luxembourg as a specific point in the process. This is not to say that Germany bears sole responsibility for the war - the other powers were all spoiling for a fight as well (Austria to crush the Serbs, Russia to check Austrian ambitions in the Balkans, France to avenge its loss in 1870 and recover the provinces lost in that war, and Britain to eliminate the German naval threat and check German economic expansion into the Middle East). And the German generals were probably correct that France was eventually going to attack Germany if Germany didn't attack France first. But the reason the war broke out when it did and the way it did was that the German general staff saw 1914 as the best chance for them to win a war against Russia and France and therefore did everything they could to ensure that the diplomatic crisis caused by the Archduke's assassination turned into a general European war. Also, the main reason the British cabinet went to war (as opposed to the reason they told the public) which less a principled outrage over the violation of Belgian neutrality than a realization that Germany invading Belgium meant they would gain control of the Channel ports of both Belgium and France, and that controlling those ports would raise the German naval threat from unsettling to absolutely intolerable. This is why the BEF was initially deployed into Belgium when everyone still expected the main thrust of the German advance to come through Alsace-Lorraine - initially the BEF wasn't there to win the land war against Germany (that was the French Army's job), it was there to protect vital British interests on the Channel coast. As it turned out the German plans were something very different and the BEF happened to find itself in the right place to play a decisive role in keeping the Germans from taking Paris by a very, very narrow margin.
3
Ever since the Tudors Britain had followed a policy of opposing the strongest power in Europe so that no one country would gain dominance of the whole continent. In Napoleon's day the strongest rival power in Europe was France; in 1914 it was Germany.
3
@vlaythsh7880 Why are you spamming blank comments?
2
Verdun wasn't meant to fall. The Germans actually avoided taking it when they might have. Verdun was meant to lure the French Army to its destruction. However, I think it is fair to say that without the Somme the French Army may have broken from the strain and the Allies potentially lose the war.
2
Most of those soldiers hadn't been in the war two months, let alone two years. The British Army had recently expanded to many times its prewar size and most of the officers and men were novices - and even the most senior commanders had never commanded a force that size, because such a force had never existed in British history. And there is certainly precedent for this in previous wars. The learning curve for both armies in the American Civil War was just as steep. Likewise for French armies in the Revolution - by the time Napoleon became First Consul the clueless novices of 1793 had had many years of warfare to learn the art of soldiering.
2
If Princess Victoria had been the heir to the throne, she almost certainly would have been made to give up that claim when she married the heir to the German throne. Personal unions of monarchies of first-rate powers had always been seen as a major threat to stability in Europe.
2
Small came at a steep price, though - the takeoff and landing characteristics were atrocious due to the narrow undercarriage and many planes and pilots were lost that way, and the cockpit was one of the most cramped and uncomfortable fighter cockpits in all history - many pilots complained about how it increased fatigue and made turning to look to the rear much more difficult.
2
The casualty numbers for this war are just staggering. 250,000 men. Half a million men. A million men. All in just one or two campaigns. I can't even picture what a million men would look like assembled in one place. The men who fell on the first day of the Somme alone would fill all but the largest sport arenas. Just the British casualties from the whole offensive would fill the largest arena in the world twice over. All considerations of military or political competence aside, it's astonishing that human beings would think to do this to each other and to themselves.
2
The carrier version of the 109 would have been a nightmare, and I can't imagine it would have worked very well in actual wartime service. The Seafire had serious problems as a carrier aircraft for the same reasons. There have been very few really successful carrier-based combat planes that were not designed for that role from the very start.
1
@MeBallerman One small correction: in a modern car with an engine designed to use high-octane fuel, you will get better performance using high-octane fuel without having to do anything yourself to the engine, because if you use lower-octane fuel the car's computer will sense the lower octane and restrain the engine's power to avoid damaging the engine (down to a point, too low and the computer won't be able to compensate and the engine will be damaged), whereas if you use high octane fuel the computer will sense that and allow the engine to run at full power. But this is ONLY if the engine is designed to benefit from high-octane fuel. My car, for example, according to the owner's manual, gets full performance using 93 octane, lessened a bit using 92 and 91 because the computer is limiting the power, and is only supposed to run on 89 for short periods and below highway speeds and not at all on 87. In WW2 you had to mechanically alter the engine to restrict the compression ratio if you were going to run lower octane fuel. If you don't, you don't get more power, you get pre-ignition, which does not increase power because the piston is still in the compression stroke when the fuel ignites which means the expanding gases work against the momentum of the turning crankshaft. And, of course, causes severe damage to the engine because of the pressure spike. The Germans didn't run high octane because they weren't producing it - AFAIK only the US and UK were, and some was supplied to the Soviets through Lend-Lease. High-octane was (and is) more expensive to produce and, more important for the Germans, you get less of it from a given volume of crude than you get if you're producing lower-octane gas.
1
@Ghreinos Von Moltke and Falkenhayn both did. Source for that is David Frompkin, Europe's Last Summer. I don't recall offhand what original source he had for that but he did cite them. They also deliberately interfered with the kaiser's attempts to stop the war, most notably by secretly cabling Conrad von Hotzendorf and telling him to ignore the German civilian government and declare war on Seebua ASAP. Theoretically the generals were under the kaiser but he was an ineffective and weak-willed sovereign and as a practical matter the general staff obeyed no authority but its own.
1
At Duxford I was able to climb up on the wing of an airworthy 109 with the canopy open and get a closer look inside the cockpit than I'd ever had before. Sadly, they would not let me climb inside.
1
Better? I think it's too close to call. But what isn't close at all is that the Spitfire is the most beautiful machine ever devised by the hand of man, and the 109 is not.
1
@chippyjohn1 The 109K-4 was not better than the Mustang. They had different strengths. But the Mustang could fly from England to Berlin, engage enemy fighters, and have plenty of fuel to get back home. No 109 had anything remotely approaching that capability.
1
@garyseeseverything8615 The Merlin didn't "need" high American octanes. Both engines had improved performance with higher compression ratios made possible with high-octane avgas. You might as well say the 109Ks were inferior because they needed MW-50 injection. In both cases it was a strength, not a weakness. Also, they developed a carburetor that was less prone to choking, and then moved the fuel outlet on it to eliminate the negative g problem altogether. The 109's biggest weaknesses were very short range, which the Spitfire and Hurricane shared but of course that was much less a problem for the British in 1940, and that it was extremely difficult for novice pilots to fly, in particular because of its atrocious behavior on takeoffs and landings. A lot of planes and pilots were lost that way. That wasn't so much of a problem in 1940, when the Luftwaffe had had years of peacetime growth to train pilots, but it was a serious drawback later in the water when replacement pilots had very little training. The Spit was not great for novices but not as bad as the 109. The later F4U had similar issues, but the US was able to afford the luxury of more extensive training for new pilots before putting them in frontline fighters. Also the pilot in the video notes, the 109 also suffered from an excessively tiny cockpit, which made for a nice slender fuselage and the tiny airframe you're crowing about but at the cost of greatly increasing pilot fatigue and the ability to turn to look to the side or rear. I've heard or read dozens of former 109 pilots complaining about it, as well as modern pilots who've flown the 109 and other aircraft from the war. I honestly don't know how a 6 foot pilot could even jam himself into that tiny space, let alone fight effectively in it. (The Spitfire had a small cockpit as well, but by all reports it was not as cramped as the 109 and had slightly better ergonomics. I've seen both up close and the 109 definitely looks more cramped. But for real comfort on long flights, give me an F4U or better yet a P-47! Or for German iron, a 190. Messerschmidt may have been a genius at designing the fastest possible plane, but Tank had a better understanding of the all the intangibles that made an effective combat plane.) That's not to say it wasn't a great fighter, one of the greatest of all time, but I think you're overlooking its weaknesses.
1
@larryhats4320 How exactly do you imagine the so-called Milner Group (which was likely a fantasy created by one pseudo-historian who never provided any sources or other evidence) controlled diplomatic intrigues between the governments in Berlin, Moscow, and Vienna?
1
@jandron94 I'm not trying to imply that the British shouldered the larger burden of the fighting in 1916, the French certainly did. But neither of them was capable of going it alone against the Germans, even with the Germans split between eastern and western fronts.
1
@jandron94 You could put it the other way round : "without the french support at the battle of the Somme we the Brits would have been annihilated by the Germans". Without French support and French demands for support there wouldn't have been a battle of the Somme, and the UK never would have been at war with Germany to begin with if the Germans hadn't invaded France and Belgium, so that's not remotely realistic as a hypothetical. I certainly never came anywhere near suggesting that the British could have beaten Germany alone. It's not a matter of the British being better or more important or any such thing, but the fact remains, it was France that Germany chose to go to war with in 1914, and it was France Falkenhayn chose to try to knock out of the war with the Verdun offensive in 1916, because he realized that France was the strongest opponent and the linchpin of the Allied war effort, and without British support Falkenhayn probably would have succeeded in this aim. Yes, the French were heavily engaged in the Battle of the Somme, but they couldn't have launched the offensive at all without very substantial support from the British, which is precisely the reason the French demanded that the UK government order Haig to begin the offensive before he wanted. That's not cheerleading or chest-thumping, it's simple historical fact. If the facts offend you I'm not sure how to suggest you remedy that.
1
@garyseeseverything8615 That math is VERY far from simple.
1
@starsailor49 More like the other way around. Zhukov and Khrushchev both said in their memoirs that the USSR couldn't have won the war without the massive Lend-Lease supplies they received from the US and UK. The Red Army may have driven to Berlin in T-34 tanks but its fuel and supplies, much of which came from the US, were carried in American trucks and its soldiers subsisted on American Spam.
1
@jacktattis "Just in food you owed close to 1 billion USD and never paid a cent." How much is keeping the IJN off your doorstep when the UK couldn't be bothered worth? (I will never say that Australian and NZ contributions to the Pacific war were not vital. But the US Navy was the only navy in the world capable of stopping the Japanese in the Coral Sea.) And yes, assuming that's what you're asking, I am American. And had several relatives in that war, including an uncle in New Zealand and another in Burma.
1
@johnrohde5510 Yes, they both had plans to invade each other, that's the point.
1
@antonioherrera2476 Germans who based their work on an American who invented the first liquid-fueled rocket.
1
Found the Nazi!
1
@jonwinfield9193 If they had to use it at 40 below zero, they'd become PPSh fans pretty quick.
1
It's more that they talk about the first day and then assume the rest of it was just more of the same.
1
Pshaw. You want a roomy cockpit, fly a P-47. On long flights the pilot could hop out of his seat and run laps around the fuselage to stretch his muscles. 😉
1
@DevSolar It's not an urban legend, it's something commented on by many former 109 pilots as well as postwar pilots who have flown several different WW2 fighters. The pilot in this video mentions it. The undercarriage was also relatively weak for a WW2 fighter. If you look at the F4F you'll see a much better design where the landing gear is also contained entirely in the fuselage when raised but has diagonal supporting braces for the struts so the angled struts didn't collapse on a hard landing the way the 109's often did. But the 109 designers were obsessed with minimizing size and weight whatever the cost, and the result was a plane that had an unusually high record of operational losses of both planes and pilots. And the cockpit is the tiniest I've ever seen, I can't imagine how anyone of even slightly larger than average build could stand being crammed into it for hours, let alone fight at 100% efficiency under such cramped conditions. For me is is literally nightmarishly small.
1