Comments by "John Burns" (@johnburns4017) on "Curious Droid" channel.

  1. Mocsk On D-Day, with the western allies now also half way up Italy, the Germans were still way inside the USSR. The Germans took units from the east to France after D-Day, making it easier for the Soviets. Still the Soviets found the Germans hard going and even the Finns started to give them a hiding ...again. Yet the western allies when fighting the Germans did not have the massive losses the Soviets suffered.
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  2. http://www.historynet.com/did-russia-really-go-it-alone-how-lend-lease-helped-the-soviets-defeat-the-germans.htm Germany was totally dependent on imports of cereals (animal and human), ores, oil, and just about everything. In May 1941 they were considering demotorising as they had little rubber. Read Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze. Strategic bombing was highly effective. By early 1945 the Rhine was so clean fish were in it, as no toxic industrial waste was being dumped into the river. El Alemein stopped the Axis getting the vital Middle East and linking up with the Japanese with also the oil as a massive prize. They also would have circled the Med, the aim of the Germans. Turkey most probably would have joined in with the Germans at that point. If that happened the USSR could/would have been defeated. The Japanese link up was enacted - with over 30 U-Boats operating at a Japanese submarine base in Penang. The British put enough men and resources in the desert to defeat the Axis. No one puts in an army twice the size needed consuming needed men and resources. The Soviets could not match the Germans on equal terms, they had to massively outnumber them to win. So playing the numbers game does not stack up. The Soviet army was not the best in the world, that was the British. It never suffered a reverse from mid-1942 onwards anywhere in the world, unlike the Red Army. Against quality opposition the Red Army took amazing losses needing to outnumber the Germans by amazing numbers to defeat them. The ease of victories by the Germans against the Soviets was never like that against the British. When the Soviets only stopped the Germans at Moscow the British were pushing them and their allies back 1000 km in the desert.
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  3.  Coldern Ice  The Yanks have too high opinion of themselves and too low opinion of others. Facts prove the US technically and scientifically were way behind.
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  4. The modular meant it was easy to repair.
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  5. @Ryan Chao The British saved the US's ass. They were very amateurish with massive egos. The Liberty ship was a British design, made in Sunderland.
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  6.  @TroubleShooter1337  Supercharging is as old as the internal combustion engine. The British took supercharging to another level. After Stanley Hooker, a pilot just took his plane anywhere in the sky, with all flaps, supercharging speeds, etc, all done automatically. Before, a pilot had to open air flaps at various heights, etc. A massive difference. Hooker put another 15,000 feet and 70mph on the Merlin 61. The first time FW-190s met the Spitfire Mk 9, with the Hooker supercharging, they were salaughtered.
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  7.  @TroubleShooter1337  You really need to read and understand what Stanley Hooker did. Repeating over and over make no impact.
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  8. David Barlow "Nigel Farage said it best when he said instead of capitalism we have corporatism." Corporatism is fascism.
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  9.  @kin4967  The USA provided approx 10% of British needs while 5% to the USSR. Hardly earth shattering. Britain has imported wheat and timber from the US since the 1850s. War breaks out then the Yanks say they are supplying the British war effort. Laughable. While all scientific and technical advances were given to the USA free of charge - the British MAUD Committee figured out how to make the A-Bomb. Next to nothing came from the USA. What price was this technology?
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  10.  @kin4967  You must stop making things up.
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  11.  @seanjoseph8637  The Battle of Britain was a one sided battle. Operation Sealion would never have landed. The RN would have blown it out of the water.
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  12.  @larryg7109  The UK can defend its own country. You gear the military to the current and potential threat. If threats increased, the military would increase. The USA has a massive military as they need it to support their economy - the military-industrial complex. The military is far larger than needed to defend the USA.
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  13. The video was clear that Oppenheimer was not the inventor. It is common knowledge for those familiar with the history that the British team invented it.
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  14. reggiep75 "the Tories who've managed to nearly double UK national debt in lest than 8 years" National debt was up £651bn in 5 years with Tories. Up £405bn in 13 Labour years. Tory finance minister Osborne borrowed more than a quarter of trillion pounds more than he said he would in 2010. In just 4 years he created more new debt than every Labour government in history combined.
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  15. Michael Hartman To catch up, the USA drained the UK of its scientists. It caused a crisis in the UK reaching parliament's concerns, called the Brain Drain.
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  16. athodyd Towards the end of WW2 the Soviets made some excellent planes. They were experimenting with motor-jets, booster rockets, turbojets, swept wings, etc. But unfortunately pinched the Rolls-Royce Nene engine and put it in the MIG 15 - the airframe was advanced and not a copy of anything at all despite sneers from the west.
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  17.  @wilburfinnigan2142  Hey nutjob, the Brits did it. British engineers at Bendix-Stromberg engineers overcame the problems found with float-type carburetors by moving the fuel discharge nozzle to the carburetor adapter or in some cases at the "eye" of the supercharger, both below the throttle plates and by eliminating the float from the fuel metering system. The new "pressure carburetor" design replaced the float-operated fuel inlet valve with a servo-operated poppet-style fuel metering valve. There are however, either one or two small floats in the fuel regulator air bleed system. These floats have nothing to do with the air-fuel ratio, as their only purpose is to allow any entrained air that may have become trapped in the fuel regulator to return to the fuel tank where it will be vented to the atmosphere.
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  18.  @wilburfinnigan2142  Nope. Developement for Merlin carb was by the Brits.
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  19.  @gyozakeynsianism  But mainly sewer systems, rather than hot and cold running water.
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  20. RealityIsTheNow When you declared war on the British you declared war on all of its empire. This one is so thick. The Spanish and Turks never got involved as the Turkish ambassador said, the British have a pool of men to raise an army of 45 million.
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  21. Vémundr The Soviets did get into main islands Japan. They took Sakhalin which was part of Japan proper - a prefecture. The Soviets were about to jump onto the next island south then they surrendered. BTW, the nuke dropping was before the Soviets invaded Manchuria. The USA was trying to end the war before the USSR took territory and possibly all of Japan. US forces were 330 miles away in Okinawa and making heavy going wherever they went. The US insisted on the British Pacific Fleet which protected the east coast of Okinawa attacking Japanese ships and position on land, while Churchill did not want to send it.
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  22. dogsbd Pre 1939 the British did extensive trade with the USA with the British owning a significant level of US industry. When war broke out this normal trade was now the USA supplying the British war machine. The USA supplying quite a number of Sherman tanks to the British - the Brutish wanted to dip into idle US industry (in depression) and use it, so requested US companies make the Crusader tank (as they did with the Mustang planes), then the idea of the Sherman came about as the Americans did not want to make a British tank. This meant the British could divert its industries to other lines, like shipbuilding. The Sherman was outdated on introduction and came to bite the British on the bum taking so many of these Tommy Cookers rather than make more of their own superior tanks. British tank production was less in 1943 than in 1942. You are over emphasising western supply to the USSR. The Soviets had better tanks than the Germans. The Soviets lacked trained officers to control the tanks. The Germans found it difficult to knock out the KV1. But the Soviets would send them out with poorly trained crews, no radios, or control of the tanks and tell the crews to just roll aimlessly across the battlefield trying to find targets. The Germans brought up big guns and would pick them off at will. The USSR lost a lot of equipment. The British aid assisted them at the vital time. The Soviets took extensive volumes trucks, boots, cable, raw materials, they like the British then concentrated on other war lines. They were perfectly capable of making these. Again...the Soviets suppled 96% of their own needs. US materials only advanced the end of the war not decide it. Even the US concluded the USA was not necessary to win WW2. Go to 1hr 14 mins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79KU997m9o4&t=4448s
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  23.  @lenroddis5933  Not how Hollywood told it, is it?
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  24. The first 100% electronic computer was Colossus in WW2. It decoded the German Lorenz machines.
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  25. DeathTDOW, true, telling an American conditioned by Hollywood that their role is greatly overstated will make little impact.
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  26. ivanlagrossemoule British industry was the same size as Germany's. The British alone produced more, and better, planes than Germany. Also far, far more ships. The British supplied 40% of the tanks used in the vital Battle of Moscow, which counter attacked with a battering ram. From then onwards Germany were not going to win the war. The gamble had failed.
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  27. US aid was mainly raw materials. The British largely made their own equipment.
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  28. The most forgotten and important operation of WW2 was the Royal Navy blockade of Germany.
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  29. Juuso Peltoniemi, Total bollocks. BTW, The US Navy was so good it had to borrow HMS Victorious for Pacific duty, as they ran out of carriers. She was renamed USS Robin while there. The Yanks with the Aussies took care of the Pacific while the RN took care of the Atlantic, Med and Indian Ocean. Oh and also the war for the Brits ended in 1946, as they continued to fight in Viet Nam defeating the Viet Minh. It is not worth responding any further to such tripe inspired by Hollywood. Sorry to rain on your parade, but the Yanks never won the war. They were mediocre at best.
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  30. Elddir, A loss to the German war machine whether military or a skilled industrial worker is just the same. The skilled civilian is rarely accounted for. The bombing campaign accounted for many losses in hardware and vital personnel.
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  31. Because the UK made money on it. The money was there to pay off. The loan was at such a low interest rate they reloaned it and made money. The USA made a profit from WW2.
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  32. dzonikg Germany's debts were wiped out after WW2. Germany's industry was near zero so they had to start from zero and build the latest buildings, plant and machinery. The UK's industry was intact but old, unable to compete with the high mechanisation of Germany. The USA printed dollars like crazy after WW2, lending it to US corporations for next to nothing who bought up for a song dilapidated European and Japanese industries.
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  33. Britain's defense has always been the natural English Channel, it was no luck it is there. Britain was fighting away from its borders which requires a large navy and merchant navy. The logistics train from the UK, the sea and onwards in fighting all over the world are massive and complex compared to fighting on your own borders. The Soviets could not have have fought where the British did, neither could the Germans whose surface fleet was near nil being mainly destroyed by the Royal Navy in Norway. In June 1941 the Germans committed all their available forces to invading the USSR as they foolishly thought they would win in a matter months. Once committed they could not pull them out especially after Moscow in Dec 1941, when it was clear there was to be no quick victory.
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  34. Mocsk Just about everything you wrote displays total ignorance and indoctrination. Read what I wrote on this thread again. The biggest agent in the defeat of Nazi Germany was the British. They fought in all parts of the world including Madagascar. The Soviets could only stick to one front being supplied directly behind it. We called it World War Two The Soviets the Great Patriotic War. That says it all. The Soviets launched an attack into Manchuria with one million men after the A-Bomb was dropped. The British managed 2.6 million men against the Japanese. More than the USSR and the USA. Your knowledge of the economic aspect is about zero. Read: Wage of Destruction - The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy.
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  35. Mocsk, Look up David Glantz about the horrific losses the incompetent Soviets suffered under the Germans. Only for British aid at the vital Battle of Moscow, even to giving Hurricane planes which were vastly superior to the antiquated junk the Soviets were flying, the USSR would have been a part of the German empire. The British even gave the Soviets the German strengths in the Battle of Kursk as they broke the German codes. Even so, more Soviet tanks were destroyed than German.
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  36. Mocsk War Production: • Germany was third behind the USA, then the UK in GDP, in 1939. • Germany = UK in capital goods production in 1939. • UK economy grows 60% during WW2. • Hitler says to Guderian, re: USSR, "had I known they had so many tanks as that, I would have thought twice before invading" - World War Two, chapter War Production by Keegan. "Combined GDP of the UK and France exceeded Germany & Italy by 60%." - Wages of Destruction by Prof Adam Tooze, Preface, xxiii: "It was poor because of the incomplete industrial and economic development of Germany". - Wages of Destruction by Prof Adam Tooze, page 454. "Soviet exceeded German GDP in 1940" "The Allies won the war because their economies supported a greater volume of war production and military personnel in larger numbers. This was true of the war as a whole, and it was also true on the eastern front where the Soviet economy, of a similar size to Germany's but less developed and also seriously weakened by invasion, supplied more soldiers and weapons." "the technological key to Soviet superiority in the output of weapons was mass production. At the outbreak of war Soviet industry as a whole was not larger and not more productive than German industry. The non-industrial resources on which Soviet industry could draw were larger than Germany's in the sense of territory and population, but of considerably lower quality, more far-flung, and less well integrated. Both countries had given considerable thought to industrial mobilisation preparations, but the results were of questionable efficacy. In both countries war production was poorly organised at first and productivity in the military-industrial sector had been falling for several years. The most important difference was that Soviet industry had made real strides towards mass production, while German industry was still locked into an artisan mode of production that placed a premium on quality and assortment rather than quantity. Soviet industry produced fewer models of each type of weapon, and subjected them to less modification, but produced them in far larger quantities. Thus the Soviet Union was able to make considerably more effective use of its limited industrial resources than Germany. "Before the war Soviet defence industry was in a state of permanent technological reorganisation as new models of aircraft, tanks, and other weapons were introduced and old ones phased out at dizzying rate." http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/workingpapers/publications/twerp603.pdf The USSR had access to oil, more natural resources, and far more men. Giving them the ability to produce far greater than Germany, which actually happened.
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  37. They key was that Bell had a telephone monopoly in the USA. They used the profits to fund the labs - to make more money. Large monopolies can do this, as the British GPO Telephones did. Bell was a private monopoly and GPO a public one. GPO built the world's first electronic computer (Tommy Flowers), and optic fibre system in 1977, cell phones, amongst others. Bell's private monopoly was split up. The GPO was privatized.
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  38. badlandskid What made high rise buildings possible was the invention of the elevator.
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  39. Most Americans actually do believe without them Germany would have won the war. The US propaganda machine says so, so you can't blame the average US citizen for believing that. FDR and his advisors believed that Germany would be defeated without US intervention. I recall many old British WW2 vets saying 'the Yanks came in at the last minute'. That was largely true. The Germans had been stopped in the west by the British at the Battle of Britain, with the RN wiping out most of their surface navy. In the east they were stopped at Moscow in Dec 1941, the month the USA came into the war. Germany were now going nowhere. By the time the USA first had boots on the ground in North Africa, the Germans (well the Axis) had been defeated at two key battles of Stalingrad and El Alemein. These two defeats meant Germany was on the run for sure. The RN, the largest navy in the world, stopped any foolish German invasion attempt.
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  40. What depressed me was people living in sub standard homes, not sky rockets.
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  41. ...Continued... Rolls Royce. Rolls engineers under Ron Harker went to North American to advise on how to install a Merlin engine in the Mustang. They also gave advice from their work with the RR Mustang X. Rolls-Royce made the first proposal to North American regarding a Merlin 45 engine Mustang in 1940, after Stanley Hooker improved the power by 30%. This was before the plane was operational an still in the R&D stage. The RR Merlin was superior to the Alison engine, also to what it was in February 1940 when North American were first approached by the Air Ministry. The later Merlin 61 had the two-stage auto controlled superchanging developed by again by Stanley Hooker. This gave an extra 70 mph and 15,000 feet of operation to the Merlin. A quantum leap. The pilot just went where he liked without degradation in performance. RR sent three engineers led by James Ellor to supervise the adaption and manufacture of a Merlin 61, built under licence by Packard, the same type that was already being considered for the Rolls Royce Mustang X experimental series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Mustang_Mk.X On 9 June 1942, the first memos from W/C I.R. Campell-Orde of the RAF Air Fighting Development Unit at Duxford, revealed that an effort was being made to convince North American to adopt a Merlin-powered Mustang. Work in the US was setback due to an initial lack of interest and also to mechanical failures of the first Merlin engines built under licence by Packard. Both projects commenced at nearly the same time with the first Mustang X in the air about a month earlier than the North American XP-51B. The RR Mustang-X programme was 5 or 6 airframes each with different experimentation. RR attempted to have North American accept British Merlin 61s (the two-stage superchargers) in American airframes, it is clear that the prime contractor (NAA) wanted to control the project as control was looking like it was to move over to the UK. NAA was essentially building production-standard aircraft rather than the experimental series that saw each of the RR Mustang Xs trying out new variations of design. An offshoot was the mid-engine RR Griffon engined Mustang that actually made it to the mock-up stage, albeit with a Merlin installed amidships. On the success of the RR Mustang-X built in Nottingham, the Air Ministry ordered hundreds from RR, who declined wanting to remain specialising in engines. NAA remained the prime contractor. Rolls Royce mass produced Merlins in Crewe, Manchester and Glasgow, also licensing Packard in the USA, using idle US industry. The US made Merlins were to supply the Canadian aircraft factories - to avoid a two-way trans-Atlantic trip and give extra manufacturing when the engine proved very popular with many airframe makers. An agreement was reached in September 1940, with the first Packard built Merlin engine running in August 1941. Early in 1944 the P-38, P-51B Mustang and P-47C, were dived by the British for compressibility testing at the RAE Farnborough, England at the request of the USAAF. They had trouble when these planes dived onto attacking German fighters when providing top cover for the bombers. The results were that the Mach numbers, the manoeuvring limits, were Mach 0.68 for the P-38, Mach 0.71 for the P-47, and Mach 0.78 for the Mustang. The corresponding figures for the FW-190 and Me109 was Mach 0.75. The tests resulted in the Mustang being chosen for all escort duties. - Page 70, Wings On My Sleeve by Eric Brown, who did the test.
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  42.  @TroubleShooter1337  The USA was way behind the British. Advanced supercharging was an item in the Tizard mission. Stanley Hooker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by4lH2whhjk
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  43.  @TroubleShooter1337  As a part of the agreement to approach US industry direct, the British had to give the US military two planes for assessment. The two planes stood in the corner of a hangar, ignored, for a long time.
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  44.  @TroubleShooter1337  Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles, also perpetrates myths. He bigs up some so-so US planes as being better than what they were.
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  45.  @TroubleShooter1337  You are going around in circles. Read what I wrote. Read up on Hooker. The Allison engine only had a successful Stanley Hooker type of system after WW2. They tried and failed during WW2.
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  46.  @TroubleShooter1337  Again...get to understand what Stanley Hooker did. It was not just the engine. Stop repeating nonsense.
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  47.  @TroubleShooter1337  You are some sort of obsessed conditioned nut.
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  48.  @TroubleShooter1337  FFS! Hooker took two stage, two speed supercharging to a different level. Some mothers.....
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  49.  @TroubleShooter1337  Again you nutball... "Hooker took two stage, two speed supercharging to a different level."
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  50.  @TroubleShooter1337  Not this conditioned nut! incapable of learning with poor comprehension.
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