Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "PeriscopeFilm" channel.

  1. "Distortion free" they said, about 100 times. Then, a few years later, RCA invented the Dynagroove pre-correction to get rid of some of the distortion. Then the Japanese devised elliptical styli to get rid of some more. Then the Brits devised linear tracking tone-arms to get rid of the distortion still remaining. The presenter forgot to mention that the plastic used in 45's was a lot more susceptible to warping than the old shellac 78's. I had to laugh when the 45 he demonstrated was already warped. Big holes and separate players didn't last long - ideas that must have seemed daft even during development.
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  2. Don't you just love the narrator's speaking style? Talking very slowly with lots of pauses so that the dimmest grunt can keep up with it and has time to absorb the points made.
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  3. Ham radio was once an interesting and very rewarding hobby. But not now - being able to call anyone in the word on a cellphone, or send an email, makes it look stupid. But the reasons for its demise as a popular hobby predate cellphones and the internet and are evident in this old 70's film: Store-bought equipment and obsolete technology. While it talks about making your own equipment, almost all the gear shown is store-bought. There's not much fun, and no real gain in knowledge, in being an appliance buyer. When I was in junior high school (early 60's) I decided that ham radio was just the thing - I had been reading electronics magazines and had successfully designed and built a solid state stereo system. In electronics generally, tubes were going out and transistors were coming in. So I built a receiver for a ham band (all solid state) and set about building a 10 watt transmitter, also all solid state. As the licensing authority here in Australia essentially limited novice hams to the VHF bands, this was quite a challenge, but I mastered it. Up to that point, I had not met or spoken to any other hams. But once on the air, the universal response was "You built in yourself? With transistors? Are you nuts? You should have just bought an old tube-type taxi transceiver and changed the crystals." (Lots of these old tube transceivers had been scrapped because the Govt had decided to halve the channel spacing). I was disgusted. I was under a misapprehension - I thought ham radio was about designing and building it yourself, so you could learn the technology, learn some radio engineering, and help advance the state of the art. Silly me - it's not that at all - its about old men having a gossip. After a few weeks I forgot all about ham radio and never went back to it. You'd think they would want to see photos and the circuit. No, they were not interested - they thought it was stupid. Since then, the odd ham has said to me something along the lines of "oh, but we are researching propagation, advancing that field." Well, sorry mate, no way. In the 1950's and 60's the US military did and sponsored a heck of a lot of research into propagation. It's all available in professional journal papers and textbooks - far beyond what any ham would know.
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  4. The answer is pretty much yes. I owned a 1950's D4 and the local dealer had all the parts I needed in stock. Have a look at Squatch's YouTube videos on old Cats. If you local dealer doesn't have whatever you need, another dealer will. Things like engine blocks are difficult, but only a badly abused engine will render a block unusable.
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  5. Dave, you are spot on. What the US politicians never understood was that it wasn't just the North that wanted to unify, the people of the South wanted it too. Both just wanted foreigners out of their country, If that meant going communist in order to get help, that was in their eyes a better option than having the foreigners in control.
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  6.  @ohio  : Communism need never have started in Vietnam. And it had nothing to do with the USA and Australia anyway. What happened is this: At the end of World War 2, Mountbatten decided to divide Vietnam into two - North and South, just as he did with Korea. And the Allies decided, without consulting the Vietnamese, to give it back to the pre-war colonial power - France. There's 2 things wrong with this:- a) Mountbatten thought that the North would come under the protection of Ally Chiang Ki Check, and the French would look after the South. b) He didn't take into account the wishes of the Vietnamese. The first thing that happened was that Chiang Kai Sheck was driven out of China mainland by communist Mao Tse Tung. This was inevitable given Chiang's corruption and general incompetence, and Mao being smart and backed by the USSR. The second thing that happened was that Vietnamese leaders asked Western leaders for help in getting the French out, as they had had it up to here with foreign domination, but nobody wanted to know. So they asked China for help. China said yes, we'll help, but you must adopt communism. That incensed American politicians, so they decided to go to war. Realise this, and you should then realise that Vietnam wanting unification and independence via communism was a consequence of Western stupidity. War in Vietnamn was a consequence of Western stupidity. Yes, hindsight can be 20/20, but sometimes foresight is completely lacking. Changing a country's borders against the wishes of the people never works well.
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  7. All that talk about fire-proofing and not allowing wood - but they built it of aluminium - the one structural metal that burns really good and hot! Building it for the trans-Atlantic run at the beginning of the jumbo airliner era was much like building steam locomotives at the beginning of the diesel electric era. Somebody had more money than brains.
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  8. Either the cost of diesel fuel was really cheap then, or grid electricity companies were gouging. Which was it? After all, the power companies could have installed diesel engines too.
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  9. A fair bit of nonsense is given in this film. Strowger did NOT devise a practical switch. He merely thought up the stepping/rotating contact basic concept and explained it to a family member, who decided to set up a company and comercialise the idea. They employed a competent electrical engineer to devise the switch, something the unskilled Strowger could never do. The idea that Strowger was worried that the phone company was connecting potential customers to the opposition undertaker is an old urban myth. At the time, Kansas was a large city with dozens of undertakers, but very few people had a telephone. Business communication was conducted by messenger boys/runners - an early form of courier service. Or if you wanted something, you hailed a horse-drawn cab or walked to the business premises. The narrator claimed multiple times that electronics works at the speed of light. The sort of silicon chips available when this film was made worked at best at a small fraction of the speed of light, and cables carried signals at only a fraction, sometimes a very small fraction, of the speed of light.
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  10. Two things made Japan a great technical manufacturer:_ 1) Cooperation between companies in a way that was considered anti-competitive in the USA; 2) An outcome of World War 2 was that Japan was not to spend tax money on creating & maintaining a military offensive capability.
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  11. Newer stuff would indeed by in a film like this, since this is a training film for radar operators - it is not a documentary for your entertainment. The 1949 year given is obviously a mistake. At 0:17 the year is given as 1942.
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  12.  @perrybarton  : Yes, like Lear 8-track tapes, S-100/CP/M computers, and non-metric measurements - only in the USA. Actually, didn't they eventually come up with a design for 45's that had a three-pointed knock-out section, so that you could play on a regular 9/32" spindle turntable, or knock it out and play it on a large spindle turntable?
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  13.  @WestCoastDP  : Certainly 45 RPM singles were very successful - from introduction, up until the introduction of CD's in the 1980's. I bought 45's myself when In was a teenager in the early 60's. But I've only ever seen them with the small hole the same as 33-1/3 LP's. I'm in Australia - perhaps we never bothered with the large hole version and just went straight from 78 RPM singles to 45 RPM singles with small holes. Incidentally, when you bought a 45, you usually got 2 good songs. When I was a teenager 45's cost $1 - 50 cents a song. An LP cost about $5 and you got 8 or 9 songs. You might think 45's were not good value, but many of the songs on most LP's were third rate, or covers of other artiste's songs, so you only really got about $2 worth. Juke boxes had very good sound, but were expensive - as I recall, 10 cents each song play. If you took a girlfriend to a JD's (hamburger place) or to a milk bar, and there weren't many other customers free with their coins, you could go broke pretty quickly - about 30 cents for the milkshakes, another 40 cents or so for food, and up to $2 for the jukebox. A lot of money for a teenager back then - would take me days of part time work to earn it. Just to get a shine in your girl's eyes for an hour.
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  14. I've never used a Dictaphone. But I remember the days before email. In the company I worked for, we had a typing pool. I would ask for a girl and she would take down my letter, and a short time later a beautifully typed and set out letter with perfect spelling and grammar would land on my desk for my signature. I thought those girls were great. But, for business, email was a vast improvement. So much faster than a letter through the post. Things can be organised in a day that used to take a couple of weeks.
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  15.  @lizzyfan1986  : My comment above is a very old comment now. It says all that needs to be said. As only a single response has been made - yours - I guess I hit the nail on the head. If any hams can come forward and refute it, well and good. It would be great if there is still a place for ham radio. But none have.
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  16.  @bill-2018  : That makes you a "proper" ham, and not a mere appliance buyer. Great - but you are in a minority group. I like building things too - but my own designs, not someone else's. That is usually just enough challenge to give me a buzz when it's finished and works. Designing electronic products was my day job for many years. I let my VK license lapse when it came up for renewal at the end of the first year. No point in it when one's right-up-to-date solid state design is viewed with sneering disdain by other hams, who think it a stupid thing to do. Nothing wrong with enjoying valves of course - in fact one of my hobbies is restoring vintage (valve) test equipment - but that sneering disdain made a ham license pretty pointless.
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  17.  @psinclairjr  : No EPA back in the 1930's. There was a tax on electricity?!!! That would be anti-industry.
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  18. They didn't know it then, but carbon pile reactors are inherently dangerous, due to the Wigner effect - as the British learn the hard way at Windscale - major disaster. Wigner effect prevents a shutdown.
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  19. Dig that crazy B-grade cartoon at the start. Apparently General Stewart had a TV set that warmed up about 10 times faster than any other cold-war era TV set in existence.
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  20. The link you provided is to Flight Dojo's video. Don't take any notice of it. He's confused technical accuracy with operational accuracy and made many other serious errors. Technical accuracy is what an aiming system can do under specified conditions. Operation accuracy is what people actually achieve under operational conditions. The technical accuracy of the Norden was excellent. But, doing all that's needed on an actual run when the enemy is shooting at you, the target is obscured by smoke, and/or the enemy has erected decoy target is something else. It's a bit like trying to make a precise measurement with a vernier caliper. The technical accuracy is 0.01 mm. But could you always get that accuracy while on a lurching truck while I am yelling right in your ear?
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  21. Willard, you could not be more wrong, although he became deeply flawed later in life. During World War 2, after the Japanese started the War in the Pacific by attacking Pearl Harbour, it became apparent that Japan was intending to attack and invade Australia. Since Britain refused to help, failed to use our troops effectively in the War in Europe and North Africa, and essentially pretended the War in the Pacific was of no consequence in order to serve Britain's own ends, and available senior military officers in Australia were not up to the task, our Prime Minister asked the USA to help by send us an experienced capable general to take charge. The USA sent Gen Douglas MacArthur, available as he had been ordered out of the Philippines and was then 62 years old and had retired 4 years previously. He performed brilliantly, preventing by his leadership and strategy the Japanese for getting any closer than they already were, half way across New Guinea. He took command of the US and Australian occupation forces in Japan, sent there to get the country back on its feet after all their cities had been carpet bombed, keep the communists out, and make reforms so that Japan could be an effective modern democracy. Again, he performed brilliantly, and Japan quickly became an economic powerhouse directly because of the reforms MacArthur drove them to make. However, he took charge of US forces in Korea in the Korean War. This didn't go well due to huge assistance given to the North by China. MacArthur wanted to use nukes, and when the US President refused to authorise any nuclear bombs, MacArthur proposed to render the North and part of China uninhabitable by spreading nuclear waste around. In this way, MacArthur, now 71, showed that he had lost the plot, was now a dangerous menace, and the US President had to sack him.
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  22. This film presents a very American view of China and surrounding countries. What it conveniently omits is why there was North Korea and South Korea in the first place, because if Korea had not been divided, there would have been no Korean War. And if the US had left the Vietnamese to their own devices, there would have been no protracted Vietnam War. Korea was arbitrarily divided in two by the evil stupid Mountbatten, who thought that the West would look after and control South Korea, and the West's ally Chiang Kai-shek would look after and control the North. Mountbatten didn't foresee the obvious - the communist but willy Mao, backed by the Russians, would rapidly prevail over the much less competent and much more corrupt Chiang Kai-shek. Which inevitably led to the North Koreans trying to take over the South, the US coming in to aid the South, and the Chinese then coming in to aid the North - Mao felt obliged to lend a hand.
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  23.  @erickrobertson7089  : You are pretty right on Vietnam - the US did indeed had no understanding of the situation. Essentially, the Vietnamese were by then pretty fed up with foreigners trying to run their country, and just wanted them all gone. They were prepared to to go to any lengths to get the foreigners out. What I find hard to understand was why the US put Gen Westmoreland in charge - who promptly lived up to his reputation within the US military as an incompetent "rock painter". Was it just some sort of game in which the US WANTED to loose? One can assign various practical aspects as to why the US lost the Vietnam War (lack of political understanding, no attempt to properly encript comms, McNamara's Morons, corruption, etc) but the prime cause was Westmoreland's incompetence. The US in acting as a sort of international policeman often made things worse, due to their culture preventing them from understanding what actually goes on. My motivation in posting was in part to show that Vietnam was an example of this. My main motivation was to remind people of something that this American film does not mention: The Korean War resulted from decisions imposed on them by the West, and Mountbatten in particular. As an expedient, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman divided the world involved in the WW2 into 2 - a part to be controlled by the US (and Britain) and a part to be controlled by the USSR. That was not ideal, but would not necessarily have led to any subsequent war. However, they left it to Mountbatten to divide Indochina. The idiot decided to divide countries up. He split Vietnam along line somewhat naturally along North/hill tribe and South/urban lines. He also split Korea into 2. If he had not done that, there would have been no Korean War. He spilt Korea into 2 because he thought that North Korea could be looked after by Chiang Kai Shev, reducing the burden on the West. Korea was never intended by the West or Mountbatten to be communist, but that should have been an issue for the Koreans. Naturally the USSR and China - especially China were keen so see it go communist, and took political and practical advantage of the split created by Mountbatten.
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  24.  @CableWrestler  No, they most certainly DO NOT, as any competent electronics engineer or technician knows.. In a vacuum, electrons can be accelerated by an electric field. Since they have mass, Einstein's E = MC^2 applies - the closer you get them to the speed of light, the greater their effective mass becomes. An electron velocity of the speed of light cannot be attained as then their effective mass would be infinite, requiring an infinite force to achieve. The highest practical speeds are obtained in vacuum devices such as X-ray tubes, where extraordinary voltages are required, hundreds of kilovolts, resulting in speeds a small fraction of the speed of light. In ordinary metallic conductors, where the voltages are small (a few millivolts/inch at most), electron speeds are tiny - a tiny fraction of an inch per second. In semiconductors such as silicon, electron velocity is typically about 1000 times faster, this is still a very tiny tiny fraction of the speed of light. The advent of radio electron tubes (what the British call valves), where electrons are accelerated in a vacuum, and strike a metallic plate called the anode is how electron mass was measured for the first time. Due to their mass, they have kinetic energy, and this energy is converted to heat in the anode, which can be accurately measured. The quantity of electrons is precisely known from the current, and their acceleration known from the anode voltage.
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  25.  @bradjohnston8193  : Snipe is actually correct, except for a minor error in floppy size. 1. IBM's German subsidiary DEHOMAG (Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen company) leased punched card equipment and supplied cards to the Nazi government, for the purpose of processing census data, identify jews & others considered undesirable, and track them through deportation and into the concentration camps. DEHOMAG had a monopoly on punch cards and punch card equipment in Germany at the time. 2. Most IBM System 1's used the standard 8 inch floppy disk, however they could also be had for a short time with the Model 341 drive which used 4 inch floppies. These 4 inch floppies were unique to IBM and were a commercial failure and so are not well known.
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  26. "Worker safety is paramount." And they encouraged smoking. They had tea ladies delivering food/drink to the workers at their machines - that's a big non-no. At places I worked, any machinist caught eating or drinking was called out, because the oil etc on their hands can be injested, as can bits of metal. And the food/drink can get on the job.
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  27. So, special tools were required in the field. That doesn't seem real smart. At 6:30 it tells you to hit a nut, not the bolt. Good advice. But that's not what the actor actually did. He left a couple of mm of bolt protruding.
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  28. I wonder what the North Vietnamese made of any US films they got hold of, or the repeated assurances by General Westmorland (the incompetent fool in command of US forces in Vietnam) that the US was winning and the communists were running out of people to deploy in the fight - they must have thought it hilarious - Abbot & Costello.
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  29.  @ohio  : Why? Vietnam has been communist for 47 years now. They're doing ok. Certainly better than when the French were in charge. USSR/Russia - communism failed. Has it got better since? It doesn't seem so. In Germany, Hitler was democratically elected - how well did that work? The point is, capitalism works well for some, and not for others. Same with communism. Neither is anywhere near perfect. China is communist and is ascendent. The USA is capitalist and is in decline. In any case, what has it got to do with the USA what system Vietnam chose? What right had the USA got, to intervene by starting a war? That's the key question you haven't answered.
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  30.  @stevek8829  : You need to read more widely and with more care. The post-World War 2 history of Vietnam is very complex, but here is an overview, somewhat more detailed than I posted before:- Following WW2. Vietnam was divided into 2 by the silly & ignorant Mountbatten. This naturally led to 3 things: the North going communist in order to get help from China, both the South and the North wanting to unite, and both wanting to fight and get the French out of the South. The South came to be run by the non-communist Diem government, which took over by force and was not legitimate. If free elections had been held, the communist party would have won, leading immediately to unification. The USA decided to send a small number of forces to prop up the Diem government. This didn't work, so they escalated and sent very large forces. They also installed a puppet government - the Thieu government, which had almost no support from the Vietnamese people. Any request to the US from the Thieu government was thus a sham. Both US and Australian forces sent to Vietnam were called "advisors", as were Australian forces sent to Afghanistan. They were called advisors for legal and propaganda reasons - in the case of Australian soldiers, they cannot legally be sent to fight in an overseas war zone unless the government declares war on the opposing participating countries - this involves constitutional difficulties. A declaration of war would obviously have been inadvisable anyway as China was assisting Vietnam. Nobody with any sense believes that the "advisors" were advising and not fighting. Certainly not the Vietnam veterans I know, who all served as privates and got shot at and fired their own guns, seriously risking their lives. Not a single one gave any sort of advice to any Vietnamese - not during the Diem era nor the Thieu era. If you believe they were only advising, at any time, I suggest you watch the available films of them fighting. Nobody with any sense believes that individual Australian and US men went to Vietnam with evil intent - they were forced to go, most as conscripts. That's partly why the Vietnamese are happy to have us visit today. But it WAS evil of the US Government to send their forces and coerce the Australian government to also send conscripted troops. One of the legal fictions/shams that our government in Australia instituted due to not having declared war was that nobody was legally forced to go to Vietnam at all. They were all volunteers. In theory. How it worked was this: Teenagers were conscripted for basic military training as grunts, which was legal under the constitution. Upon completion of training, each was asked to volunteer for service in Vietnam. Anybody that refused was then ear-bashed and shamed by progressively higher officers until he weakened. If that didn't work, he could be referred to an army psychiatrist. Few failed to weaken at that stage, but those that did didn't go to Vietnam.
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  31. The film gives the year at 0:17 as 1942. The SCR-270 radar shown was in use in 1940.
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  32.  @ypaulbrown : You should read some books yourself - including official war-time reports that have now been declassified. Britain made a maximum effort in terms of commitment of forces, putting factories to work on military equipment etc. But its war effort was ill-conceived and achieved very little. WW2 was won by the efforts of the USA and the USSR - both deployed far more troops and equipment, and both directed their efforts to what actually mattered.
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  33.  @Cartoonman154  The British Government could have forbidden the sale if it wished, but it was a commercial transaction between a Russian aircraft company and Rolls Royce. Britain was bankrupt and the government was borrowing huge amounts of money from the World Bank. If the government had forbidden the sale there probably would have been questions from the World Bank - "What do you think you are doing, son? You told us you would make every effort to trade out of your mess and repay the loans."
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  34.  @swlmiami6605  : Ha! SWL! Short Wave Listener! Another strange breed I didn't think existed anymore. For the information of those who have never been a ham, ham radio clubs used to issue certificates entitled "Registered Short Wave Listener" supposedly to encourage schoolboys to study and pass the government exam to qualify for a transmitting licence. You kept a list of stations heard for a few weeks and paid a fee - ah that's it - paying money for no good reason to a bunch of old men so their clubhouse tea got paid for. Do clubs still issue SWL certificates? I could never see the point in such a thing. Before the internet, shortwave receivers were very common, and lots of people that had no interest in ham radio at all used them to get news reports and music from the country they or their parents came from, in their own language. Basically, any twit can use a receiver. The internet has rendered shortwave radios obsolete.
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  35.  @stargazer7644  : Yeah, there's other things like attending club meetings to gossip, talking gossip over the air, talking about things you know almost nothing about, gossiping ......
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  36.  @stargazer7644  On paper that is true. But authorities such as the ARRL estimate that only 10 to 20% are actively engaged technically, as distinct for just on-air chit chat. In previous decades the percentage was much higher. in 1935 the percentage was over 80%. In 1955 it was still 50%. Thus between 1955 and today, the real number of technically active hams in the USA has declined from ~160,000 to ~80,000, while the general population has more than doubled. In the USA a license is granted for 10 years. In most other countries it has to be renewed (fee paid) each year. This means that Americans suffer virtually no penalty for retaining a license they are not using, and people who dip their toe in and quickly leave are on the books for 10 years regardless.
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  37.  @stargazer7644  The thing is, if what you do is buy equipment and use it to talk on air (whether voice or packet data or whatever), the novelty is likely to wear off, since you are not doing anything your neighbour can't do with his mobile phone. But if you design, engineer, and build your own gear, you can do something the neighbour can't, and you are much more likely to stick with it and keep up with the technology. Sure it can cost more to build your own than to buy, but just about any hobby costs you money. That just means there is not so much fun in building someone else's design or a design published in a magazine. You get a LOT more out of it if you design and engineer your own. I figured out how to design circuits when I was in primary school and germanium transistors were the latest thing. 70 years later I'm still designing and engineering circuits - its still fun. Not ham radio circuits though. My experience described in the head of this thread is why. Those guys who spend $6,000 on an IC-905 or whatever and be on 10 GHz the same day - are they real hams? No, they are just appliance users. The entry hurdles to get a license are not significant. I did it when I was a 13 year old schoolboy. The requirements are a lot less stringent now. I didn't do a club course - I just bought the ARRL manual and read it. It was more than sufficient to pass the exam (which required candidates to draw circuits and write words explaining how they worked, no silly multiple choice tick the right box jokes.) I own a couple of high performance general coverage receivers - they are quite useful in various ways in a home-based electronics lab, especially since I designed and built them and calibrated the AGC for accurate dB readings. Ham bands are pretty quiet these days. There is more "hash" these days due to the proliferation of computers and switch mode power supplies in consumer equipment, etc, so a signal has to be a few dB stronger than in the 1960's and low cross modulation in receivers is critical. But even allowing for that, the ham bands are pretty quiet compared to what they used to be. Maybe you live in a much larger city than I do, so more transmitters within line of sight for the VHF and higher bands for you. Just as a check for this post I checked the HF ham bands using one of my old general coverage receivers - found only 3 or 4 weak voice signals and some kind of piccolo code - probably an embassy somewhere on a channel they shouldn't be on. I checked with a WinRadio card in one of my PC's for activity up to 2 GHz - no hams on the air this evening. Admittedly the WinRadio noise floor is a bit high. I have no idea how the ARRL has estimated how technically active hams are. I freely admit - how long is a piece of string? Only about 20% of American hams are members of the ARRL (because of the cost??) - did they just estimate for members or hams in general? I do not know. some years ago I trialed a subscription to QEX but the quality of articles was not very good.
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  38. Love the ham acting in this old TV show. E.g., at 1:55 the actor lurches about to simulate the sub being shook by a depth charge. He bangs his head on the periscope. In real life if the sub moved that violently, he would be knocked out, seriously injured. "Give it all you've got" says the commander. Well, it sounds suitably dramatic, but he's already ordered All ahead Flank - that's all there is.
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  39. Very old fashioned looking cars with mechanical brakes. The competition had modern styling and hydraulic brakes. But at least RR had come to its senses on the engine, dropped the old F-head six and switched to making a clone of the Cadillac Big Block V8 and to using a GM Hydramatic gearbox. I have worked with large industrial diesel engines. RR engines were just as unreliable as other British engines, and not a patch on American engines from Cat or Cummins or Detroit.
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  40.  @c.c.hiliner1065  It seems you are the one who does not understand. Go look us what happened to USS Belknap. It collided with an Aircraft carrier with negilble damage to the steel hull. However a fire broke out and the Belknap's aluminium superstructure and interior, being built of aluminium, melted and collapsed, caught fire too, resulting in the USN banning aluminium. You should look up the thermite reaction, where burning aluminium in the presence of rusted iron causes heat hot enough to reach 2,500 C. It is well known that jumbo airliners made air travel so cheap the ship travel could not compete and disappeared.
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  41. Don't add stupid music. We don't need it.
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  42. No crumpets. Britain rationed its food.
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  43.  @Look_What_I_Did  : Welcome to the asylum. Watch out for Nurse Ratchet.
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  44. At 2 minutes in, the Domino Theory is presented - communist progressive takeover in expanding areas in South East Asia. This was used to justify conscription for the Vietnam War. It was a load of nonsense. Mao had enough troubles just getting China under control. The Vietnamese just wanted the foreigners out of their country.
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  45. And also as "peck and hunt".
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  46. @Evan Hodge : I'm Australian. The Australian Army sent large numbers of soldiers to Vietnam to assist the US Army - the Australian government responded to a request to do so from the US government. In order to get the agreed numbers, the Australian government instituted conscription and everybody in Australia knows people who served as conscripts in Vietnam. Like many, if not most, Australians, whether they served or not, I was opposed to the Vietnam War at the time, considered it a stupid mistake and quite unnecessary, and still think that. Vietnam had a detrimental effect on veterans and ruined some. It wouldn't have been so bad if there was any justification for the War and if the US forces conducted themselves in a competent manner, but there wasn't and they didn't. Our government had films shown on TV, shown to conscripts on induction, and shown to high school boys, attempting to justify the war - basically purveying the domino theory - an idea obviously false at the time. The incompetence of Gen Westmoreland has been documented by quite a few authors. He was what is called in the US Military a "rock-painter." (A rock painter is an officer who wants everything neat and tidy, everyone wearing the correct uniform neat and clean, but does not know what is really happening.) But he was obsessed with statistics and standard rules, which would have sat well with MacNamara.
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  47. @Evan Hodge : See post by "Dave" 9 days ago, beginning "I wonder if .... ". He's exactly right.
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  48. This 1951 film is surprisingly accurate. It's much better than the ridiculous "Just Say No" campaign run by our State Governments about 30 years ago. In my country, they send policemen to schools to tell the kids to stay clear of drugs. For some reason these cops think it's a good idea to show kids photographs of a pretty girl aged 14 allegedly caught with pot, and the same girl allegedly caught with heroin 6 months later and looking like 40 and very sick. And tell the kids that one dose and you're hooked. Of course the kids know much better than that. They know perfectly well it's usually not a bad as that, because they know of someone who has been doing drugs. They know it's a risk but think "it won't happen to me, I'll stop before it does." It would be better to give kids accurate information, but every time that's proposed, the do-gooders make a fuss and stop it.
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  49.  @PeterNgola  : There are indeed American operated facilities here in Australia. There are also Australian bases at which US forces train and contribute towards operations. I don't like it. It makes us a nuclear target in a possible future war that some country may start with the USA. However, World War 2 led to Australia signing the ANZUS mutual defence treaty with the USA and New Zealand. Also, in World War 2 Britain basically abandoned Australia to Japanese attack, whereas the USA came to our assistance. So, Australians, including me, feel we owe something to the USA, but we owe nothing to the treacherous British. There are no British bases in Australia, and never have been since Australia became a country. If I were the leader of the government, I would pass a law preventing foreign military personnel (whether US or not) from operating facilities or training here, noting that the USA does not permit foreign bases on its soil. Exchange assignments (both ways) of trained personnel has to be allowed, as must joint exercises. However, I am not in the government, so I just have to put up with it like everybody else.
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  50.  @stevek8829  : Which specific errors did I make? Unless you can identify specific errors, your ambit claim means nothing. If the USA had let Japan take Australia, world history since then could have been somewhat different. At least the war in the Pacific could well have lasted longer. Given that Japan's war effort was severely restricted by not having any oil resources, and minimal iron and coal resources, Australia's geographical position at the end of a chain of islands, very large land mass, and Australia having immense resources of all kinds, plus considerable industry, taking Australia would have helped Japan immensely. That's why Japan wanted to take Australia. And one reason why the USA was keen to see that they didn't. The War in the Pacific ended when the USA dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. Much has been written about the horror and destructiveness of nuclear bombs, but don't overlook that for Japan it was much of a straw that broke their back - they had already had practically all their cities carpet bombed by the USAAF, and that was possible because the Japanese navy had insufficient fuel, as well as incompetent senior officers. And Australian industry supplied US forces with quite a lot of electronic equipment and food.
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  51.  @stevek8829  : I was born well before the Vietnam War - as you may see if you google my name or check my other posts in YouTube. I'm 75. I remember listening to Radio Peking during the Vietnam War - it was very entertaining. At one point they claimed North Vietnam had sunk an Australian Navy aircraft carrier. We had only one - a worn out World War 2 surplus British carrier (HMAS Melbourne), and it was tied up at its base at the time, and hardly ever went anywhere (until it was sold to China). It later was revealed that Radio Peking had nobody that spoke English other than the foreign-born English programme announcer, and he was deliberately undermining them by making ridiculous claims. When they found out he was in very deep poo. I was called up for service in Vietnam, but got a deferment to complete my 5-year trade training. Thanks for shooting your own argument. If a guy is not non-combatant, then he is combatant, and if he is combatant then his mission is to kill and destroy and be shot at himself. Australians sent to Vietnam were also called "advisors" as this was a legal loophole that meant the government didn't have to declare war on Vietnam and China, but nobody involved thought they were anything but fighting combatants. Any other point you think I got wrong? We Australians actually very much appreciated US help in WW2. The US came because our government realised Britain couldn't care less, and their generals were pretty hopeless anyway - so our government requested the loan of an American general to take charge of Australian forces. The US sent a retired Gen MacArthur, who was a very considerable improvement over the average British general, and Australian generals too, as they were all British trained and selected by written examination, not ability. But we had much to offer the US too - it was win-win for both.
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  52.  @stevek8829  : Grunts, NCO's, officers - it makes no difference. Many "advisors" were grunts that were trained and employed as specialists - eg communications, mechanics, supply clerks. Makes no difference, as they were providing their specialities to troops of their own country, not providing or training Vietnamese personnel without regard for which side they were on. The government that "invited" the US in was not legitimate because it had not won power through free elections, as I pointed out before. A third country, such as USA, cannot under such a situation morally decide to accept such an "invitation" just because it means fighting communists. It's on record that China was not interested in imperialistic expansion to the south. Mao and his leadership had enough on their hands getting China organised, and securing places they had some claim to, eg Tibet. The domino theory advanced by both the US and Australian governments as justification was a load of nonsense. However, North Vietnam asked China for help getting the Americans out, and Mao decided to make some sacrifice of resources and help out. The help from China was not entirely right either, but at least as legit as the USA sending forces. Other governments in the region were also not entirely legitimate but that does not alter things. Just because Bill killed Fred, it does not make John any less guilty of killing or wounding Martin. Putin invading Ukraine is an interesting situation - he has some justification arising from old agreements between Stalin, Churchill, and Truman. On balance I consider he is very much in the wrong, because Ukrainians never had any say in these agreements, and were held down by USSR might, while it lasted. So, it is wrong, but again a wrong here does not make a wrong in Vietnam right. There is indeed a long history of nations sending armed forces as advisors or combatants to other countries. So what? How does that make the USA starting a war in Vietnam a right thing to do? History shows that humans are pretty warlike - they have been conducting wars ever since there were tribes. Countries or primitive tribes - there has always been strong groups forcing their way over weaker groups - or thinking they are strong and trying to. It doesn't make it right.
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  53.  @LanNguyen-gz6ov  : It seems an awful lot did. If NO Vietnamese wanted reunification, how come they've been happily remaining unified ever since? Vietnam is pretty fiercely independent though. If NO Vietnamese in the south wanted reunification, how come the Tet Offensive was on such a large country-wide scale, occurred within cities including Saigon, to the surprise of American forces? One of the remarkable things about Vietnam, in contrast to other communist forced takeovers was there was no purge of senior administrators and leaders - they remained in their jobs. Australians who served as soldiers in Vietnam have revisited since peace occurred, looked up Vietnamese they knew, and discovered they were during the war agents of the north. Many Vietnamese after the war ended emigrated to Australia - I know quite a few. They are quite a shopkeeper and bread & cake factory force here. The reason why they left Vietnam was that they are committed Catholics - communism has a problem with that. Also, many are the illigitimate children of US soldiers.
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  54.  @stevek8829  : The ones that didn't like it, or were likely to be downgraded because they were Catholic etc, left. Lots came here to Australia, some went to the USA. The bulk stayed in their own country. A friend of mine is Vietnamese and has been back several times to see her parents. They have been here too - I've met them. There certainly doesn't seem to be any problem. Her story is pretty typical. You remind me of an old but very well known joke. Like all good jokes, it's funny because it is based on reality:- A chap asked a home owner "how many people does it take to change a light globe? He was answered "Just one." A chap asked a government employee "how many people does it take to change a light globe?" He was answered "Four - one to write the procedure, one to supervise, you need a safety officer, and oh, someone to change the globe." A chap asked a unionist "how many people does it take to change a light globe?" He was answered "I don't know - it's not my job to change globes." A chap asked a Vietnam veteran "How many people does it take to change a light globe?" He was answered "YOU WOULDN"T KNOW, WOULD YOU? YOU WEREN'T THERE!" Steve K, khi bạn ở Việt Nam, nếu bạn thực sự ở đó, bạn có dành thời gian để học bất kỳ ngôn ngữ địa phương nào và làm quen với người dân không? Hay bạn chỉ đi đến các quán bar nữ tính?
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  55.  @stevek8829  : The point behind the joke is that a) Vietnam vets are often emotional - understandable because they were conscripted into an unnecessary and pointless war, witnessed and/or sufferred horror, and when they returned home, they were not welcomed as heroes like World War 2 vets were; and b) Vietnam vets often have very little understanding of the big picture of the Vietnam war, unless they researched it well after they got home. Is abuse the best you can do? It confirms you cannot put forward any detail or logic behind your claim I got everything wrong.
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  56. ​ @stevek8829  : Greece has nothing to do with Vietnam. Separate part of the world, separate issues. The USA had a lot more justification to be in Korea, but the Korean War too was a war that didn't need to happen. Same as Vietnam, it came about because the fool Mountbatten, when supreme commander of the whole area, decided to split Korea in two, without consulting the locals and without bothering to look into what would happen. Mountbatten seemed not to understand what communism was or why it was a force to be reckoned with. He expected Chiang Kai-shek to run China and have influence and political control over North Korea and North Vietnam, and of course Chiang didn't - Mao drove him out and limitted Chiang to Taiwan Island. Mountbatten thought Chiang Kai-shek, Churchill, Truman, and Stalin were all good, benign, capable, and legitimate leaders, and of course Chiang wasn't - he wasn't anywhere near the same league. (Stalin was hardly benign, and legitimacy was doubtful, but at least he was capable). Mountbatten was fully aware that Stalin, Churchill, and Truman agreed to carve the world up into three political influence spheres - he was there at the conference. If Mountbattern had not split Korea, it's probable that the communists, not having re-unification as an excuse/justification, would not have got anywhere, just as MacArthur was able to easily deal with them in Japan. In Vietnam, 're-education' was applied to those who sided with the American forces. You can hardly blame them - the USA was the invading enemy. In Western countries, traitors were traditionally executed. Korea was somewhat different. But terror has never been confined to communists. Look at the area bombing of residential areas of German cities in WW2 by Britain. Whenever people trained to make war and kill get control, there tends to be some that go beyond what's reasonable and terrorise civilians/non-combatants. It happened in WW2 Europe (all sides), it happened in Afghanistan (Australian war crimes very much in the news), and it's happening in Ukraine - probably by both sides, but certainly be the non-communist Russians.
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  57.  @stevek8829  : I see you have not grasped a very simple and fundamental reason why Greece was different. The principle is this:- Both Vietnam and Korea were arbitarily split in two by a decision of a British supreme commander without any regard for what the Vietnamese and Koreans wanted, and without any regard to regional affairs. Greece was not so split. In the case of Vietnam, the south was given back to France, a pre-World War 2 colonial power there. The Vietnamese, north and south, wanted 2 things: 1) the French driven out, and 2) unification. They sought and obtained assistance of China to achieve that, as the USA refused to help. This resulted in a war between North Korea and the USA with the South just wishing the Americans would just go and let them re-unify. The USA installed a puppet government (Thieu government) to do their bidding. Hence it wasn't a pure civil war - it was a war between Vietnam and USA (with foolish Australia coming in on the American side). Korea was a bit different - both North and South wanted to re-unify (they both still do - it is official with both governments) but the South wanted to be in charge and run Korea under their system, and the North wanted to be in charge and run it with their system. The result was a civil war and the USA blundered in to help the South. Greek history is very complicated, but the Third Civil War, that occurred just after WW2, was essentially a pure civil war - Greeks fighting Greeks, albeit one side supported politically principally by Britain, and the other side politically supported by the USSR. The USA kept its military nose out of it. But subsequent to the Greeks sorting themselves out and aligning with NATO, the USA gave economic aid under the Marshal Plan, which was a much better idea. It's a pity the USA has not treated other countries the same way - that is, let them sort themselves out, and when they've done that, give economic help. The USA itself had a civil war with much killing and horror. The country sorted itself out and became an industrial powerhouse. How do you think it would have gone, if say there was another powerful country that had decided to come in and fight on one side or the other? I suggest it would have just caused more trouble and strife, for a longer period. It would not have helped solve the problem.
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  58.  @stevek8829  : No, Pol Pot is NOT a hero to me. Why on earth would he be? But, I don't know much about Pol Pot and Cambodia - just the general awareness that most people here have. On Vietnam, I have over the years read quite a bit about it, because:- 1. I was a young adult during the Vietnam War (aged 15 went the first Australian troops went to Vietnam - those "advisors" that fought, and aged 28 when the War ended.) 2. The USA asked Australia to send troops and the Australian government immediately agreed. This was EXTREMELY controversial at the time and led to very large protests around the country. 3. I witnessed some of those mass protests. 4. To make up the numbers the USA asked for, the Australian Government implemented conscription. I was called up. About 50,000 Australian men served in Vietnam, far beyond the capability of our normal peacetime military strength. 50,000 is pretty tiny compared to the US commitment of 2.7 million men, but we were certainly there - shooting and getting shot at. 5. I have several Vietnam Vets as friends and sometimes discuss the Vietnam War with them. 6. I have many Vietnamese as friends and work colleagues, as many Vietnamese have emigrated here. 7. The US forces lost the War. This was unexpected at the time, as US forces were highly effective in World War 2. However even a cursory read of the available literature shows that the US military effort in Vietnam was shambolic - which led me to try and find out why. I have now a fairly good idea on that, but I won't go into it now as this post is long enough. Basically, as I said, after WW2 was over, the French tried to control Vietnam again. The Vietnamese had had enough of foreigners controlling their country by force - in the modern age, the French, then the Japanese, then the French again. They asked the US for help expelling the French, didn't get it, so they turned to China. Mao said. yep, we'll help, but you must go communist. Ho Chi Min was happy with that deal. Vietnamese generally were not so happy, but considered communism an acceptable price to get unified and independent. The USA didn't like Vietnam going communist and intervened. You said the US intervention was not of evil intent. No it wasn't - the US Government thought it was doing a fair thing. But intent and reality are two different things. The result was evil. The US action was immoral - because what style of government any country adopts is none of the USA's business. It is perhaps understandable that the US would not help in getting the French out, which likely would have resulted in no war and no communist government, as the US was having enough trouble trying to have good relations with de Gaule at the time. There is a subtlety behind all this. As I also said in this thread, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman met together and carved up the world between them, allocating spheres of influence. Sort of negotiating world peace in return for allowing limited Soviet expansion. Some people believe that the US government thought that Vietnam was a communist expansion beyond what was agreed, and thus they needed to show the Russian/Chinese block they were not going to stand for breaking the agreed limits, The root of the trouble was the incompetence of Mountbatten in doing these North/South divisions. Incidentally he stuffed up in partitioning India as well - caused unnecessary death of millions, and leaving us with another possible cause of a nuclear war. I take it, since you claim to have done some reading, that you were aware of Mountbatten and his stuff-up?
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  59.  @stargazer5784  It was definitely an AC-style hum they added in. MIG welding with DC is a pulsating process and therefore makes a buzzing or humming sound, but it is a quite different sound, more erratic, lower in frequency. MIG welding is a pulsating process because the machine continually pushes out a thin wire (about 1 square mm cross section per 100 amps) - when the wire end contacts the job the current melts a tiny bit off the end, which cuts the current until more wire emerges and contacts the job again. But it is difficult to imagine how this would arise in a submarine battery room. There's nothing to steadily push out more wire. Stick welding with DC just makes a hissing sound as it is a continuous process.
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  60.  @Spookieham  : Presumably you are referring to the fact that the USA was not involved militarily until December 1941. The fact is, until then the War was not a World War and had nothing to do with the USA, no more than for any other neutral on non-involved country. Britain had declared war on Germany in 1939, which was a bit like an arrogant kid in the schoolyard giving cheek to the school bully, who of course said "Want to have a go, do you? Right ho then." The other kids in the yard did not get involved, which is as it should be. Due to the pre-existing Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy, and Japan, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour in December 1941, that made the USA at war with all three by default. To clear the air and provide their soldier with a legal basis, the USA and Germany promptly declared war on each other simultaneously.
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  61.  @willarddevoe5893  : You remain very wrong. Ford was in Australia long before WW2 and MacArthur, beginning assembly of cars and trucks in 1925. Philco has never had a presence nor marketed in Australia. Boeing airplanes became common in Australia after WW2 and MacArthur gone - and they have been very good airplanes. Martin pretty much unknown in Australia. GM commenced manufacturing cars and trucks in Australia in 1948, after MacArthur long gone, and at the invitation and enticement by the Australian government, and quickly became the most popular brand due to their comfort, reliability, and low cost. As I and others has posted, MacArthur was not perfect, especially in Korea when he was quite old. But he was in fact a very very good commander. He had a sense of his own destiny (or as might be put, a swelled head), but his strategy for fighting the Japanese (leap frogging), and the post war reconstruction of Japan and reform of its government and recasting of the emperor was brilliant. And, by the way, done against the opinions of senior generals in the US and Australian forces, and politicians in US and Australia. He proved them all wrong. He suppressed the communists in Japan and kept the Russians out. Yes, America's might would have prevailed in WW2 without MacArthur - after all he was in command of only an area allocated to him - a fraction of the Pacific region. But he ran that area very well.
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  62.  @willarddevoe5893  : Will do. I was not aware of this book. I've just done a bit of googling on it and it has excellent reviews.
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  63. or the rapid advance of technology.
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