Comments by "Helium Road" (@RCAvhstape) on "The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered" channel.

  1. Another thing most people don't know is that all those cool films of the launch vehicle separating in flight shot from inside the stages were taken from Apollo 6, which was packed with instrumentation and movie cameras. The film cartridges were separated, dropped in the ocean and picked up by sailors for later analysis. There were no compact HD digital cameras back then like there are today on almost every launch. People get confused because whenever you see some video or documentary about Apollo 11 they always edit in footage from Apollo 6, because that's the only in-flight footage of a Saturn V staging that exists.
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  2. Between THG and Drachinifel we aren't wanting for naval history these days.
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  3. "If." Spartans, inventors of the action movie hero one-liners.
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  4. The guy won a river boat in a card game and cheated gangsters, he's like a real life Han Solo.
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  5. This doesn't do much for France's military history joke problem.
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  6. I personally think that the Huey is the quintessential helicopter: totally iconic and, to me anyway, a beautiful design. The US Marines are still using the latest member of the Huey family, the UH-1Y Venom, which has 2 engines and a four-bladed rotor. Cool that the Huey is still around, but it doesn't sound the same without that big 2-bladed thump.
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  7. Never heard of a coal torpedo before, learn something new in every one of these videos!
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  8. USAAF: We will use nuclear weapons to sink you. Nevada: Come at me bro.
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  9. Airships are perhaps the greatest failure of the romantic era of early air travel. Even today they fascinate us and many of us wish there were a way to make them practical, if only so we could treat ourselves to the spectacle of those great vessels gliding over skyscrapers. If only the mooring mast on top of the Empire State Building hadn't proved equally as dangerous to use, we'd be able to take an airship and travel between the tops of buildings in cities. Sometimes reality fails us.
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  10. I once replied by asking, "Well, if the kids in China are starving, why not send them my food, I don't want it." That did not end well for me.
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  11. Attacking a US VP when Marines are just off the shore nearby is not good for one's health.
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  12. I was playing Missile Command on my Atari 2600 in those days...
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  13. Great story. The boxer guy had the drop on the clown and should've pounded his head into hamburger after that first punch. If you're going to bring fists to a gunfight, you have to be prepared to go full savage.
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  14. Hipster Stalin
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  15. "Times can be tough, but good times will come again." Unless you are killed, that is.
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  16.  DR Dan  Almost every ship gets a "not for public consumption" nickname. Ships tend to be dirty nasty things to live in, especially when packed in with a full crew. They require constant maintenance and cleaning to stay fit for humans. The toilets tend to clog, and the unclogging process is hilarious and disgusting, involving a firehose and high pressure followed by a lot of cleaning. The entire ship smells like machine oil and paint and cleaning chemicals and sweat and salt and vomit from seasick, and personal space is more of a theory than an actual thing. It's noisy 24/7, with air handler fans and machinery and the goddamned 1MC speaker right next to your fucking rack waking you up all the time and some asshole who won't shut the fuck up or turn off the TV in the berthing area. Sailors and Marines can love a ship while sometimes hating it at the same time, plus they have a warped sense of humor, thus the funny foul language nicknames they give the ships. And if they're in aviation maintenance, the aircraft often get equally irreverent nicknames too.
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  17. Nearly a hundred thousand deaths in the Battle of the Atlantic, wow, that's more than most whole wars. And this battle was brutal, amazing I've never heard of it before. An old school battle from the days of Nelson.
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  18. "How about a nice game of chess?"
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  19. German sniper: "Check out my nifty sniper rifle!" Texas: "That's real cute."
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  20. But then along came the chainsaw, basically a full auto axe.
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  21. Yeah, we've heard that before, it's called the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. Everywhere communism has been tried it's been a disaster, and evil that results in, at best, a stagnant economy and an oppressive regime, and at worst, megadeaths (and an even more repressive regime). There is absolutely no reason to believe that guys like you will finally "get it right" if we just give you another chance, give up all our liberties and property, and hope for the best. Ill take my freedom with all its flaws and imperfections, thank you very much.
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  22. I love the terrifying idea of being 5 miles away from your spacecraft, out of sight behind the hills, on an alien world with nothing but a spacesuit and an off-road vehicle to keep you alive. Sounds like the ultimate wilderness adventure.
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  23. Awesome. Best I'd be able to do is, "There once was a History Guy from Nantucket..." aaaand I'd better just stop there.
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  24. This reminds me: time to go give James Burke's Connections a rewatch!
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  25.  @jtgd  That's no joke, for those who don't know, Wilson threw people in prison for speaking out against the war to make the world safe for "democracy".
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  26.  @Saitaina  "Ready to jump into" while waiting on "tarmac" implies that the man was a paratrooper with the 101st AB Division. He himself may not have been told why he was being readied for deployment, and even if he did know, not to run his mouth about it, and forbidden from using a phone. Just a guess here.
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  27. The weird thing is that we rarely bother memorizing phone numbers anymore because we store them all on our phones. If you are ever in an emergency where you've lost your phone, it's good to remember at least one friend or family member's phone number so you can dial them up from a desk phone quickly.
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  28. In the Onion book "Our Dumb Century" there was a headline from the early 60s that said, "Soviets ahead of US in dog-killing race" and a story that went on to say how alarming it was that the US was falling behind in the technology of killing dogs in space and had to catch up. I love the Onion.
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  29. I'd rather spend 80 hours at battle stations aboard that ship than 80 seconds on foot disembarking from a landing craft with German machine guns shooting point blank at my face, though.
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  30. Hypergolic fuels in land-based missiles are scary dangerous enough (look up the Titan II silo explosion in Arkansas); putting them in submarines is beyond stupid.
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  31. Unfortunately in all likelihood it would be woke and full of CGI and totally suck. Michael Bay would direct it and every thrown knife would result in a huge explosion.
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  32. "I'm your sonar system. I don't feel like keeping track of that American aircraft carrier you've been stalking for days. Oops, look out {BANG}! [Mayhem laughing hysterically] Better get Allstate, so you can better protect your submarine against Mayhem."
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  33.  @bearcatben4762  "Now I finally have time to read!"
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  34. Look up Agent 355. She was a spy who gave her life for her country and to this day we haven't found what her real name was. So sad we can't even honor her properly.
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  35. YouTube/google is run by assholes who half the time don't know what they're doing and the other half are deliberately trying to sabotage your privacy and steer discussion and speech. Hard to tell which is which sometimes.
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  36. paved with communism
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  37. So Bee Mail complains about the music and now is here to rag on the Brits. Troll.
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  38. I read somewhere that Ho was an admirer of Thomas Jefferson and the idea of the Declaration of Independence before he threw in hard with the communists. Methinks we screwed the pooch on that one. But at the time, it would've meant letting the French down. They'd have gotten over it eventually but nothing is free.
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  39. I remember it also. I really couldn't care less if some Italian or Egyptian politician gets bent out of shape over it; those bastards murdered an American citizen and I'm fine with the Navy and other services hunting them down and bending the rules to do it. We must never forget, and they must have no safe haven.
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  40. As an aside, I spent some time near Lake George a while back and I learned that people from upstate New York tend to hate NY City, which doesn't surprise me.
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  41. Slow clapper.
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  42. He WON the Battle of Saratoga for Gates, while Gates hunkered down in a tent far to the rear, unaware of what was going on at the front. In an era where generals on horseback frequently took bullets next to privates, Gates was a terrible officer and leader, who conspired to replace Washington as leader of the Army before disgracing himself at Camden. Despite his later treachery, Arnold could not be accused of cowardice in combat.
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  43. According to Wikipedia the tailguns were removed from B-52s some time ago, but in Vietnam there were two or three enemy fighters shot down by B-52 tail gunners, depending on whose records you go by (US and NV records differ, as is common in all aerial wars), supposedly the last planes shot down by a bomber. It must be immensely cool to fly around in a strategic bomber that has a MiG kill painted on its side.
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  44. Keep the bowtie. And keep growing "professor hair"!
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  45.  @onlyrick  Yeah, jet fuel and jet exhaust, and the anti-skid coating on the flight deck blasting you in your face if you're in the wrong spot when the jet engines spin up. And, if you're too close to shore to dump trash, you get to smell the rotting garbage near the mess deck for a few days. And then the chow, which is good when you first leave port but after a few days you're drinking powdered milk and eating powdered eggs and so on lol. And when you're in heavy seas and the ship is pitching and rolling, you get to find out which gear wasn't properly secured, while your muscles get fatigued from just trying to sit still for a few minutes, and you have to strap yourself into your rack so you don't fall out. No matter how big the ship is, somewhere out there is a storm that will make it feel like a rowboat.
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  46. Marty, quit copying and pasting your racist nonsense.
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  47. The Fairey Swordfish keeps popping up in history as the best obsolete attack plane ever, always punching way above its weight class.
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  48. WWII ships had pretty sophisticated mechanical fire control computers, machines with gears and cams and so forth. The ones in the Iowa class were still functional during the Gulf War of 1991. Do a search, somewhere on YouTube there is a cool Navy training film from the 1950s showing how these computers worked, maybe on Jeff Quitney's channel. By the middle of the war the US Navy had superior radar and fire control systems, as well as very consistently made gun shells, which made them scary accurate for a moving platform.
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  49. I was thinking the same thing. Something shady went on behind the scenes here, even if the guy probably did murder his wife.
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  50. Beware anyone who wants to ban things. Alcohol, tobacco, firearms, drugs, etc. Free with risk is better than unfree.
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