Comments by "David Elliott" (@davidelliott5843) on "Timeline - World History Documentaries" channel.

  1. Allowing the insides to freeze was as suicidal as opening the sea valves.
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  2. The climate between 900 AD and 1300 AD was relatively warm. It then turned cold for 500 years. Tambora caused a pulse of even colder weather with famines and major rivers freezing over.
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  3. Sounds a lot like a recently lost carbon fibre submersible. Just swap the fundamentally flawed hull with a fundamentally flawed ice drill that’s supposed to allow engines to run under the ice.
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  4. 3:30 to 4:40 illustrates just how many holes had to be drilled and riveted. That panel carried across at 4:35 is a real eye-opener. The work involved to make just one one airframe is amazing. At Dunkirk, the RAF were hardly credited at the time, but dd a much work behind the lines to keep the German army and Luftwaffe at bay.
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  5. Drachfinel makes a compelling argument that Hood was hit below her armour belt where the wake dips exposing the hull below the static waterline. We know what happened next.
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  6. YouTube contributor Lindybeige has some choice things to say about the Imitation Game film. It completely misses the point of what they did and the huge effort involved.
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  7. It’s a film from 1999. The Polish input was ignored back then.
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  8. When Bismarck and Tirpitz were built, no nation could compete with the Royal Navy on its own terms. This made them little more than vanity projects. Had the effort which went into Bismarck and Tirpitz gone into U boats, the outcome of WW2 would have been very different.
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  9. The RN quickly dealt with Graf Spee, sank Italians battleships at Taranto and kept Sharnhorst & Gneisenau pretty much boxed up. They also had numerous radio listening stations so radio signals could be accurately plotted. Added to that, Ark Royal’s Swordfish were effectively all weather heavy lift STOL aircraft. They could fly and deliver ordnance when everyone else was locked down against storm conditions. Germany never had an operational carrier and Bismarck & Prinz Eugen were on their own. RN was weak against U-boats. Yet again Hitler’s megalomania played into Allied hands. A bigger U-boat fleet could have won the first Atlantic war.
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  10. It’s not mentioned but while Germany began the BoB with vastly more aircraft, British factories came on stream just in time to seriously out-produce Germany. The Luftwaffe was being eaten away while fighter command was growing stronger.
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  11. The P51 Mustang (B or D) was a next generation plane which looks like another natural design. It just works from any angle. The later Hawker Sea Fury is the last high power piston engine plane. The design just works so well. You can even see echoes of the late model Spitfire wings.
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  12. The best medical schools say that years 1 and 2 should always be taught by the top professors. Mary is doing that for Roman history.
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  13. British gunnery accurate but shells were not exploding. They also had weak protection of magazines and some safety interlocks were defeated.
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  14. The Stuka was ideal for bombing ships (as shown at Dunkirk) but the type was dead meat against contemporary fighters. The Luftwaffe did not have endless supplies of aircraft.
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  15. In late 1944, there was a blue flash explosion over north Poland. It killed hundreds of Russian prisoners and had all the signs of a nuclear bomb that did not quite go critical. It's highly likely this was a real nuke and explains why USA poured so much money and effort into the Manhattan Project. There are numerous smaller questions that all point towards a German Manhattan Project.
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  16. Station X had the first programmable electronic computer in the world. It was kept so secret that UK never had its own electronic computer industry.
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  17. Wikipedia says Krakatoa erupted 535, 850, 950, 1050, 1150, 1320, 1530 1680 and 1883. The next one could be any time.
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  18. Top Gear did it in a pick up truck
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  19. Stalin with his brutal purges had all but destroyed Russia. Germany as a liberator could have taken control. Instead they were even more brutal than Stalin. The people kept with what they knew. Moscow was strategically irrelevant but Hitler’s generals could not resist the open door. The wasted resources led directly to the failure at Stalingrad.
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  20.  @KHH595  We are perfectly capable of recreating the pyramids today. We don't do it simply because the costs would be huge - a problem no pharaoh ever had to worry about.
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  21. Check out the film of Canada’s Lancaster flying to U.K. That cockpit is about the same size as a small car cabin.
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  22. The man who rescued the love poems absolutely had his priorities right. He probably had no idea about the captain’s code book.
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  23. The aircraft had faulty torpedoes so no harm done. But the action (and at Anzio) proved that heavy lift STOL were the perfect weapons for operating on heaving Atlantic seas and for hitting ships in harbour.
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  24. My uncle while an apprentice with Rolls Royce was sent to Prestwick to build the Merlin engine factory (hopefully) out of the way of Luftwaffe bombs. Funnily enough, Derby was never hit by German bombs though they did try and hit various woodland around the town.
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  25. The Mediterranean Sea dried out during the last Ice Age as world sea levels were dropped by the ice sheets. Back then the English Channel was the course of the Rhine with Thames as a tributary. Sea levels rose as the ice sheets melted. The Gibraltar Straights were still closed but they eventually collapsed and the Med filled rapidly. What's to say the Dardanelles were not washed out in a similar way.
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  26. The German invasion corridor across the channel protected by mines would have become a trap when Britain unleashed its petrol weapons burning the sea The Royal Navy would have stood off by 10 miles or more and pounded them with its big guns.
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  27. Reagan significantly increased pressure on the Soviets. After which, their whole system collapsed. A deliberate plan to crush them economically, calculated risk of WW3 or accidental outcome(?) we may never know.
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  28. Kessler the German leader of war infrastructure almost certainly developed an atom bomb. The Japanese also came close using German technology.
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  29. Thor Heyerdahl sailed a balsa-wood raft across the pacific to prove how people in pre history could have colonised the remote islands. He then sailed a papyrus boat from Africa to the West Indies via the Canary Islands. He wrongly believed the Tenerife pyramids of Güímar were contemporary with ancient Egypt but no matter, Heyerdahl proved that trans-Atlantic voyages were possible in prehistoric boats.
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  30. Is this why my school history books called it The Dark Ages?
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  31. Tambora (also Indonesia) was/is another huge explosive eruption.
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  32. Tambora caused the Maunder Minimum (1645 to 1715) which dropped neatly into the already chilly Little Ice Age AD1300 to AD1850. The LIA temperature fell quickly enough to trigger the the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and Black Death 1346-1353.
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  33. Flying a multi engine jet sir liner or multi engine Halifax of Lancaster bomber there no real difference. You know shatter needs to be done you have the skills to do it all that’s missing is exactly where the various switches are located. The ladies could have taken control of the flight to Alicante if asked.
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