Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered"
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There have been many more pilotless private aircraft that have presented problems to civilian authorities. I was involved with chasing one Piper Cub that actually took off without a pilot, climbed to about 2500 feet, leveled off, still with no pilot, and flew west. It crossed over six counties before it became our problem. My department had a helicopter, so we were detailed to get in the air and try to find the plane and follow it.
It took a while to find it because we only had weather radar, and the FAA was only able to give us partial radar tracks since a Cub without a transponder is actually a great stealth aircraft, being mostly canvas over a collection of steel alloy tubes. There was only about an hour of daylight left when we spotted it, still flying straight and level. Our first issue was it was headed directly toward a range of mountains with 3,000 foot peaks. While we thought the Cub would not make it over the mountains, it somehow flew through one of the few passes that was less than 2,000 feet and continued on its merry way.
Now we really had problems, since the plane was headed toward an urban area of the county. Norad was still trying to find a fighter to scramble, and the FAA wanted to know if we were able to shoot the plane down. Sure. Between myself and the other observer, our armament consisted of two Glock .40 caliber pistols, and it was quickly decided that our air to air combat training wasn't adequate to attempt that stunt. As the Cub flew over various cities, we now had police cars and fire departments from I don't know how many jurisdictions that had joined in the ground chase. The pilot of the Cub, which had landed at a small private airport to answer the call of nature and had left the engine running while he did , was finally able to update the FAA with the amount of fuel he "thought" he had onboard, and they calculated that the plane should have about 25 minutes of fuel left. It was only flying at 65 mph, and our Long Ranger was able to easily fly at 120 mph, so we were able to get out ahead of the plane to alert the now considerable number of ground units where the Cub was likely to be in the next five minutes, and then zip back behind it. We had a great pilot that flew Hueys in Vietnam, and I think he was actually enjoying this.
The Cub eventually flew over 11 cities in our county before heading toward the sparsely populated coast. It was now nearing sunset as the Cub flew directly into the setting sun. The Cub had its newly installed anti-collision strobe light on, and that allowed us to follow it at that point. Now this ghost plane started to descend, and the Coast Range of mountains presented our next problem. There are 1,500 to 1,900 foot peaks there, and the Cub had reached about 1,000 feet before approaching the mountains. We put some distance between our aircraft and the Cub, and waited for the inevitable crash. To our surprise, the next thing we saw was the Cub flying through a 600 foot pass, missing those rocks in the sky again. We were able to follow the Cub with our FLIR now, and almost at the second the plane was over the coast, the prop stopped spinning, and the poor old Cub was finally out of fuel. It went into a steeper but still level decent, making contact with the water about four miles offshore. The Cub was a beautifully restored 1940 model J3 that we had seen at various airshows, and it was a sad thing to watch her sink. Still, we were glad that ordeal was over with. In my 27 years with the department, that was one of my more exciting days. :-)
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The Nevada's 14" rifles had a tested range 19.89 miles. Luckily for the troops ashore on D-Day, Nevada had been refitted at the start of 1944 with the most modern fire control radars. She was able to provide danger close gunfire support better than an any other battleship that day. As she moved closer to shore she was able to bring her ten 5" guns to bear as well. So many 5: shells were fired that some sailors from the gun crews from the 5" turrets on the non-beach side of the ship had to be used to toss enough empty brass overboard so sailors could actually walk on the decks. She then stayed offshore shelling other German positions until the end of June before proceeding to New York for a reline of her worn out gun barrels.
After her refit and adding even more modern gun direction radars she proceeded to the Pacific and continued her gunfire support role off Iwo Jima, shelling Japanese positions within 100 yards of advancing Marines. After Iwo, she then proceeded ot Okinawa and again shelled Japanese positions. She was struck by a Kamikaze on March 27, 1945 and was hit by five armor piercing shells from a Japanese shore battery on April 5. She was able shrug off the damage to continue on the gunline until April 19 before proceeding to Pearl Harbor for a quick repair and barrel relining again. She was back at Okinawa by early June and was then assigned to shell high value targets in coastal Japan. She was able to destroy everything from steel plants to shipyards in preparation for the invasion of Japan.
It's possible Nevada may have been the last battleship to fire her main battery guns in anger for WWII. She was offshore from Japan firing at a Japanese airfield. Word of the surrender came just as full broadside was on its way. As far as I can find out, no other battleship had a gunfire assignment that day. She fought from the very first to the very last day of the war. She survived sinking at Pearl Harbor, being hit by German and Japanese shore batteries, and shot down at least 17 Japanese planes before and after being hit by a Kamikaze. She fired 5,028 14" rounds, 18,297 5" rounds, 23,333 40mm rounds, 13,311 20mm rounds.over the course of the war. She was then used as the ground zero target for the air dropped during the first Bikini atomic bomb test, as second bomb that was exploded underwater about 300 yards from Nevada. Not only did Nevada survive both bombs but, if she wasn't so intensely radioactive, her boilers could have been fired up and she could have proceeded under own power. She was then towed and anchored offshore Pearl harbor until late July when she was towed about 200 miles offshore to be sunk as an ordnance target. On July 31 she was subjected to almost six hours of naval gunfire from 3" to 16" guns and being hit by at least five aerial torpedoes. Only after this battering did the old but reliable Nevada slip below the waves to her final resting place about 1900 feet deep in the Pacific Ocean.
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The Stephen Hopkins was also armed with two .50 caliber and two .30 caliber machine guns. It was these guns, plus the two 37mm guns at the bow, and the sailors who manned them that allowed the single 4" gun on the Stephen Hopkins to cause such damage to the Steir. The machine guns kept up a heavy and accurate fire on the ship, killing crew members trying to get to the 5.9" guns that were concealed on the Steir. The steel plates concealing those guns had to be dropped before the main battery could fire. Every time gunners saw a head pop up to do so, they were shot.
Eventually, one German 5.9" gun got in action, and the first round hit and destroyed the bridge of the Stephen Hopkins, the location of the all four machine guns. The machine guns were destroyed and the gunners were killed. The next round hit the 37mm gun tub at the bow, killing their gunners as well. Their combined fire stopped return fire from the Steir long enough for the 4" gun to fire off 20 rounds and fatally damage the Steir. Lt. (jg) Kenneth Willett USNR, had exercised his gun crews mercilessly, knowing the 4" gun was their only hope for a real defense. He practiced for exactly what happened when his ship met the enemy, using the 37mm guns at bow and the machine guns on the bridge to keep the enemy away from their guns while his crew could fire the 4" gun as fast as they could load the shells. With a well trained crew, the gun could fire 6-8 rounds a minute. In about a minute and a half, the gun crew fired off those first 20 rounds before the Stier could answer, a rate of fire that was probably the fastest ever attained with a 4" gun. Even though this single gun couldn't save his ship, the constant training done by Lt. Willett did assure the destruction of a German raider that had already sunk four other merchant ship and was just at the beginning of her voyage.
Not only was the SS. Stephen Hopkins the only American ship to sink a German surface ship in combat, she was the first US ship to sink a German surface ship in WWII.
[Edited to replace "Hoskins" with "Hopkins" and "Steven" with "Stephen". I was apparently having a bad day. ]
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@shaggybreeks I was living in the Bay Area then and it became the most drawn out police action in history.It started out with the Red Power movement, a mostly native American group of Berkeley students with communist leanings as a way to start seizing property that they thought they could claim belonged to them, even though there was no evidence native Americans ever occupied the island for the same reason the occupation finally wound down -there was no water on the island. As the occupation dragged out hippies, street people, and assorted criminals and drug addicts were getting ferried over every weekend by sympathetic boat owners. The numbers grew from 89 to over 400. Women were getting raped, people were being robbed, and a general sense of lawlessness prevailed. It was a good example of why anarchy won't work.
One of the leaders, Richard Oakes, had his 13 year old daughter fall to her death from a wall in early 1970. This was the beginning of many of the original occupiers. Many of the Red Power students, showed their commitment by leaving with the excuse they didn't want to flunk out of Berkeley. The vast majority of occupiers were then just street people and drug addicts. The few native Americans left got into intertribal battles that sometimes ended in bloodshed It still took another year and a half before the Feds finally decided to end it in June, 1971 after an arson fire destroyed a large number structures. By then, only 15 people remained to be removed by a force of 300 federal officers. It was sad thing and should never have been allowed to go on as long as it did, but it was a poster child of how the country was descending into anarchy at the time.
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My understanding of the history of Andaman Islands is that Arab slave traders used the islands for fresh water and wood supplies as they plied the trade routes from Somalia to India and even on to China. The trade may have been going on since the tenth century, and certainly from the twelve century. Slave traders apparently took what they could from the islands, including the native peoples for slave trade. The Arabs looked upon them as black Africans that had somehow escaped to the islands. This went on for at least five centuries before there were any shipwrecked sailors from Europe on the Islands. The treatment of the various tribes by these slave traders seems to have predisposed the Andaman peoples to judge all outsiders as dangerous and needing to be killed before they could kill them. The British added their own layer of hostility to the mix while building convict colonies in the Andamans.
One last colonial irony affected one of the VC winners from Arracan. William Griffiths was still a private in the British army in 1879, itself quite a feat for a solder 13 years after getting the VC. I haven't found much about him except for the fact he was apparently an alcoholic, and it was only the VC that stopped him from being drummed out of the Army. He was still with the 24th Regiment of Foot on January 12, 1879 at Battle of Isandlwana, the first major battle between an organized army of Africans, now know as the Zulus, and the British army. Griffiths, along with the rest of the 2nd/24th Regiment of Foot battalion, fought to the literal last bullet, and they ran out of bullets before the Zulus ran out of men. Everyone in the battalion was killed that day as their position was overrun by Zulus.
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Michael, the Carson City Mint dollars came from the Treasury Department. They were being held in reserve for those exchanging silver certificates for silver dollars. That's how I got started collecting them back in the late 50's. Hard to imagine now, but a common date silver dollar was worth exactly one dollar.
Convertibility of silver certificates to silver dollars ended in 1964 as the price of silver was rising above the value of .77 ounces of silver in the dollar. Treasury still had almost 3,000 $1,000 face value bags of silver dollars in 1964, and this supply was shipped to the West Point (NY) Bullion Depository until a decision was made on how to dispose of the coins.
The process started in 1970 when GSA employees, with the guidance of a committee of professional numismatists started separating the coins into grades from uncirculated to circulated. It was decided to offer these in mail bid sale in 1972 with a minimum bid of $30. Almost all were CC coins, and the date and quantity lists sent shockwave through the collecting community. Some of the most expensive date like the 1879 and 1882-1884 were considered rare because so few were available, and the assumption was most had been melted in great silver melts of the 1920's. In fact, they were rare because Treasury was holding enough of them to make it seem like so few were left. CC dollar prices collapsed almost overnight once the lists were released. Without knowing how many more of each date were left in the hoard, many collectors left the CC dollar collecting hobby in disgust. Bidding was much less than had been anticipated. Only 700,000 of the 1.7 million offered were sold. It took the rising price of silver, six more sales, and renewed collector interest before all the silver dollars were finally sold in 1980.
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He may not have been a test pilot before he took off but he surely was when he finally managed to land. Holden had flow more than the Tiger Moth. He qualified on the Harvard, or T-6, a much more powerful airplane, although still a tail dragger. He was qualified on the twin engine Airspeed Oxford, yet another tail dragger, and had flown as the co-pilot on the P-2 Neptune, a much larger twin engine aircraft, and one which finally had tricycle landing gear. He had flown as a second seater in the Javelin, a subsonic British fighter, and the Canberra bomber, but only assisting other qualified pilots. The whole concept of safely taking off and landing an aircraft like the Lightning is like a ten year old being able to successfully drive a Formula One car.
One bit of correction. Holden didn't spend two years in the hospital. He spent two periods of a couple weeks each in the hospital over a period of a couple years getting psychiatric help for the extreme anxiety of that 12 minutes of flight. [Edited to correct my usual typos]
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There really isn't a need for precision beyond 15 cm, 150 mm, or 5.9", all of which were used to describe the deck guns on the U-156. Only those companies manufacturing the ammunition needed more precision than that.
The HMS Swift only carried a single 6" (15.24 cm) gun for a short time, and then as replacement for her two weak 4" guns. The RN hoped the 6" gun would be able to lob shells into German destroyers armed with 105 mm guns at ranges safe from German hits. The Germans has been shelling the Dover coast and the RN needed a large destroyer that could stop the smaller German vessels. Unfortunately, the additional strengthening need to resist the recoil of the 6" gun took a knot off the top speed of the Swift, making her 1.5 knots slower than the German destroyers. Even more unfortunate, the six inch gun wasn't provided with a good fire control mechanism or a crew experienced with the large gun. In her one battle with German destroyers in the Dover Strait, the Swift fired off 50 6" rounds without a single hit while sustaining several hits for the handier and more accurate German 105 mm guns. The Germans were able to outrun the Swift and made it safely back to German ports. The 6" experiment was deemed a failure and the Swift was rearmed with her original weak 4 " guns. She was the only large destroyer leader type ship of the RN in the war, was judged an all around failure, and was "swiftly" scrapped immediately after the war. Sorry, couldn't resist the pun. :-)
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@brucesmith54 You really have no idea about the US besides whatever left wing sources you seem to use. Most Americans don't have a gun at arms reach. Even CBS, not usually known as a right leaning outlet, reported the actual numbers (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/despite-mass-shootings-number-of-households-owning-guns-is-on-the-decline/) that show less than 30% of US households have even a single gun, and over 65% don't have even one, and thee number of gun owning households has been on a constant decline sine . About .02% of people own an automatic weapon of any kind, and almost all of them are collectors of obsolete weaponry. I'm sure you meant semiautomatic, but your unfamiliarity with firearms means both have that same word in them, so close enough. Kind of like a Kia and Ferrari being the same thing since they both have an engine and four wheels.
US males don't commit suicide with guns more often than Australian males hang themselves. Ironically, given your penchant for making things up, the number of hangings has increased as the supply of guns has decreased. Apparently, having to go to the store to buy rope hasn't stopped men from hanging themselves. Maybe you and the other leftists can start a movement to make any rope with more than a 100 pound test illegal too.
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@brucesmith54 Even the "small towns like Chicago", a city with a population almost twice the largest city in Australia, Sydney. Your country is one with only five cities with a population of more than a million. We have fifty-three with more than a million and 361 with more than 100,000. Australia has seventeen. do you think that may be a factor in murder rates?
You keep moving the goalposts while adding in more snarky shit to bolster yourself. Wollongong and Cairns have the third and fourth highest crime rates in Oceana...which proves what? Bodies laying the streets. You can't even get your own country right. Adelaide is not now nor has ever been the murder capital of Australia. A story from the ABC, (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-15/why-cant-adelaide-bury-murderous-capital-reputation/9249142) as left as you can get there, proves this. The place with the highest murder rate in the Northern Territories and it has a murder rate equal to the US. Any kind of similarities between there and Detroit or Chicago? No place in the NT that would be kind of like a war zone?
And then you want to tell me about US cities and school me about how they really are because, you know, I really might not live in one. I've lived in three of the four largest cities in the US, all way larger than Sydney. You, however, being Australian leftist who I doubt has spent as much time in the US as I have in your country, shows me you don't know your ass from your elbow about the US. GTFO.
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Humberto, Thanks. My dad wanted to be a pilot but, like you, he was washed out because of his eyesight. He spent his three years in the Pacific as a motor machinist mate on a PT boat. That's cool that you managed to get all the way up to your commercial transport license and are flying a later model of the plane that my dad helped to engineer. He started working on the 747 gear when it was still a design project for a military transport. When that contract went to Lockheed for what became the C-5 Galaxy, he thought he was done with that project. He would have been if not for Juan Trippe having the vision to see this monster as a viable airliner. I believe the basic structure and hydraulics of the gear is still the same as it was on those original Pan Am 747-100's.
Ironically, the best flight I ever had on a 747 was six days after 9/11 on an Air New Zealand flight from LA to Fiji for a dive trip. We had planned the trip for a year, and we were going as long as they could get the flights restarted. IIRC, there were a grand total of 18 of us on that almost brand new 747-400, all of us in free first class seats and eating free first class food. The number of pax's must have been close to the number of flight attendants on the trip since it seemed like I had my own personal attendant for the flight. Marilyn was her name...but I digress. It's a long ass haul to Fiji but, with the main cabin virtually empty, we all had our own beds, stretched out across that whole center row of seats. Marilyn bought me blankets and extra pillows to make sure I was comfortable. What flight that was!
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@brucesmith54 No, 'only money" isn't the only determinant of what affects a person's life, but it's a pretty huge part. Not having enough disposable income to have some freedom to make your own decisions in life can suck pretty bad. However, if you feel that money isn't all that important, feel free to follow the AOC path of sharing your money with those who'd rather not work.
I don't know what you mean by "American males and females are killing themselves at a higher rate" but if you mean compared to Australians, the standardised rates per 100,000 compared to the US are nearly identical and fluctuate from year to year. There are also significant differences in how suicide is recorded in Australia compared to the US. The ABS tends to underreport suicide because it only classifies it as suicide when the the cause is incontrovertible compared to US more often classifying it as suicide when the evidence is such any other means of death is unlikely. Nevertheless, rates are close enough that they don't tell us much about either country. Suicide rates are higher in Finland, Japan, and Belgium than the US, so does that mean people there are even more unhappy than the US? Hardly any statisticians are willing to use suicide rates as a sign of anything since the reporting rates vary so widely around the world, and a rate of even a couple people per 100,000 higher or lower is just noise.
But sure, go ahead and make up statistics as if they are real and telling us anything.
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I don't know if it's already been covered, but the whole history of LORAN in the Pacific deserves to be remembered. The Coast Guard took over operation of the 72 widely dispersed and lonely atolls in the Pacific from the Aleutians into Canada, down the West Coast into Mexico, and then across the Pacific to Japan, South Korea, and over to Australia. The stations were difficult to keep in phase with the early tube type receivers and transmitters, and the station equipment needed constant testing, maintenance, and repair. Some stations were only visited by a resupply ship once a month, or even once every two months. The Coast Guardsmen had to learn not only the LORAN radio equipment, but normal radio communications gear, the generators that supplied power, and desalinization equipment on some islands. They had to become experts with just about everything a base required, as well as learning enough medical skills to care for each other in case of sickness or accident until they could evacuated. Almost as important was having one guy that was a good cook with the monotonous diet of canned and dried foods. My uncle served at a couple bases as a replacement when waiting for the rest of a new crew to be delivered, and he said it was great duty for a guy who just didn't like a lot of people around, fishermen and divers, or for someone escaping from a wife he didn't want to be around. :-)
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The Bathurst class minesweeper/corvette, of which the HMIS Bengal was a member, were really awful vessels. She was poorly armed, as shown in this battle, and too small to be effective ships operating in the Pacific. They were built to an Admiralty design for ships that, would serve in the Atlantic, not in the tropics. Below decks spaces were cramped and poorly ventilated with ratings often suffering from heat exhaustion. The ratings had to sleep in hammocks slung in what also operated as 10 man mess decks, the ships having more subdivisions than a normal corvette to help them survive a mine hit, a perpetual danger to a minesweeper. Because of all the subdivisions, it was impossible to ventilate any of the subdivisions adequately. There were no showers and only one head, the ratings having to use a buckets and sponge to try to keep clean, and a seat slung on either side of the ship as toilets. There were only two iceboxes That had ice enough for about a week for provisions and no freezers. Men would often take their bedding on deck, as it was nearly impossible to sleep in the stifling heat below, doing the best they could beneath moth eaten canvas awnings as their only protection from frequent nighttime rain showers. Several crew members wrote in their memoirs after the war that men went weeks never getting more than five or six hours sleep.
The six to ten officers had individual or two man cabins at main deck level with things like bunks, electric fans, portholes, and desks. They ate better food than the ratings and had their own steward to serve them in the officer's wardroom. The ratings had their typical two cups a day of watered down rum while the officers enjoyed their own bar. The Bathursts replicated the worst of the British class system, but on a modern warship, and morale and discipline suffered as a result.
Good captains did what they could to improve conditions, bringing onboard better provisions when they could be found and having officers and men eat the same food. Some allowed the engineering staff to modify the deck air intakes to bring more air below decks and having cots built for sleeping instead of hammocks. Other officers were either incompetent or just cruel, this treatment leading to four mutinies aboard the Bathursts, the most of a single class on the allied side. Most were small scale revolts but one, one the Pirie while in port, was serious enough that the captain had the main gun spiked and called on Australian army troops to surround the ship and arrest the men involved in the mutiny. Ten men were later sentenced to prison for their part in the mutiny, the men testifying to incompetent and cruel behavior of the captain at the courts martial. Amazingly, he wasn't relieved of command until six months after the mutiny, when he barely averted another mutiny.
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None of the bombs and other explosives are waterproof. The fuzes are constructed using lead azide, the actual detonating chemical, a copper springs, and a steel trigger. The dangerous part is the lead azide since exposure to humidity or static electricity can cause it to explode. Because of this, it's generally handled and even stored underwater. The only bombs with detonators are apparently the bomb clusters, generally six to twenty 20-lb M41 fragmentation bombs wired together to produce one droppable munition. These are much different than today's cluster bombs. The triggers would have experience the equivalent of a fall from 10 feet for the trigger to work.
Even if all the cluster munitions were detonated at once, a very unlikely scenario, there are somewhat less than 200 tons of these on the ship. The seismic wave would be fairly small, somewhere between two and four feet, depending on what study you believe, and enough to cause some minor flooding in areas right along the banks of the river. The fragments from the bombs would be the greatest danger, but those fragments generally didn't go further than about 700 feet in the air, and the amount of water around the bombs would absorb a lot of the energy. OTOH, attempting remove these explosives would expose the lead azide to high humidity and static electricity, the two things that really will set it off. There's no safe alternative, but leaving all the lead azide underwater is more safe that trying to remove it and expose it to air. The risk of a catastrophic explosion of all 1400 tonnes of the explosives at once seems extremely remote.
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@1pcfred I can see you're a real expert on things naval. Firstly, the 9% rate was for ships sunk, not number of men killed. The number of merchant sailors lost from all causes in WWII was between 8,000 and 12,000 while about 1,500 ships of all types were lost due to all causes. There were about 14,800 ships in the merchant fleet by 1944. As you can see, the average number of sailors lost per lost hull was about 8 at the highest estimate, and that from an average crew of 38 to 50. If we were losing 10% of every crew that left port we would have rapidly lost the war.
The 9% rate was hulls lost from all causes, including submarine and aircraft attacks, not men lost. These were ships that, in first three years of the war, spent a lot of their time either under attack or damaged by enemy action. About 30% of merchant sailors killed due to enemy action were killed without their ships sinking. By comparison, the casualty rate among WWI merchantmen was over 20%, and that was from virtually no aircraft attacks and much less efficient and deadly submarine attacks. Better antisubmarine warfare and convoy techniques in WWII saved a lot of merchantmen that would have been lost in WWI. Merchant sailors face risk every day from things like weather, grounding, and collisions, yet men still go down to the sea in ships. Luckily, you don't have to do that if you don't want to.
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@DavidSmith-ss1cg They were part of the number of Americans who dabbled in Communism because it opposed racism
Yeah, you did argue they weren't really spies, just communist dabblers because the Rosenbergs were anti racists and all, even though there's zero evidence of that. The Rosenbergs, Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, Harry Gold, and Klaus Fuchs were part of spy ring that passed on secrets that allowed the Soviet Union to develop their first atomic bomb at least five years ahead of schedule. They gave away secrets about the performance of the F-86 that made it easier for MiG-15 pilots to shoot them down. The Rosenbergs were the recruiters and organizers of the spy ring.
You are now using the communist story that, while they might have been spies, their execution was just too brutal. That argument, also used by their communist children, was modified from the decades lone "they were totally innocent" when the secrets of Soviet spying were revealed by Soviet documents in 1995. Now the line has switched to Ethel's reputed smoke from the top of her head. Maybe Stalin's favorite form of execution would have been better - a bullet to the back of the head.
I don;t know if you're actually a Soviet communist sympathizer or just a useful idiot. It's one or the other. People like you are really good at playing the reasonable humanitarian when your goal is a new communist state, but this time "doing it right". You are as transparent as cellophane.
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The Dahlonega GA and Charlotte NC mints, operated from 1838 to 1861, only minted gold coins, and generally using gold mined from the SE United States. The first gold in the country was mined in Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina. Both were taken over the Confederate states and operated as mints for the CSA until it became clear there just wasn't enough gold being mined to keep the mints operating. Neither mint was reopened after the war, but Charlotte was operated as an assay office from 1867 to 1913, when the supply of gold from the SE US slowed to a trickle, and the assay office was no longer needed. Both mints, along with Manila, are the least remembered of the many mints that operated at one time.
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You forgot to mention (or maybe ran out of time) the reason why the Russian Pacific Squadron was forced to take their round the world voyage. As the squadron sailed into the North Sea, they had received reports of the Japanese torpedo boats laying in wait for them. These bogus reports may have been placed in Russian hands by Japanese intelligence, but how Japanese torpedo boats could have gotten to the North Sea undetected was never explained. The Russians were on high alert while passing through the area of the Dogger Bank, off the northeast coast of England. Somehow, British fishing trawlers commonly in the Dogger Bank, were misidentified as Japanese torpedo boats, and the Russians opened up with everything they had. They not only sank one fishing boat and damaged at least seven others, they also damaged two of their own cruisers and killed a number of Russian sailors. It took Admiral Rozhestvensky almost 20- minutes to get everyone to cease firing due to the poor communications of the fleet, something that would later haunt them again. The fact that so few trawlers were sunk or damaged and no British fishermen were killed was solely due to the horrible gunnery skills of the Russians, another thing that would later haunt them.
The British were furious, and it was only the intervention of France that stopped the Royal Navy from sinking the the Russian fleet in the English Channel. The Russians had to leave behind several high ranking officers to answer for the outrage and agree to pay reparations for the lost and damaged boats. The whole mess cost the Russians about two weeks time, and alerted the Japanese that the Russians were headed their way. The British, who almost entered the war on the side of Japan, believed something amiss was up with the Russian and forbade them the use of the Suez Canal. That lead to the necessity of sailing all the way around the Cape of Good Hope.
The amazing thing about the battle of Tsushima was not that the Russians lost, it was that the Russians showed up at all. The Russians only had four recently built battleships of the Borodino class, the first built in Russia, although they were fairly close copies of the Tsesarevich. The Tsesarevich was a design with a heavy roll when doing fast turns or in cross running seas. The Borodino class made several changes to the armament that made that worse, and there were several times on the epic voyage where it was feared one or more of the vessels would capsize. The older vessels were even less seaworthy, and the whole squadron never averaged more than seven knots through the stormy seas around the Cape. All the Russian ships consumed prodigious amounts of coal due to their leaky stacks and boilers, and they had to be rebunkered a grand total of 65 times during the voyage. This was all done by the sailors on each ship transferring coal a bag at a time from accompanying colliers, and many ships just loaded the coal on the decks, shoving it down into the bunkers as needed. That's why the Russian ships's decks were covered in coal when they met the Japanese. The Russian sailors had already heard of the Fall of Port Arthur, and that meant an even longer sail to try to get to Vladivostok, the only remaining Russian port in the Far East. The material condition of the ships was poor after sailing for 16,000 miles and almost four months at sea, and the Russian sailors were demoralized and exhausted. The Japanese has been training and refitting their ships for the previous three months, and they were in top form by the time the Russians showed up. The outcome of the battle was never in doubt.
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@julieenslow5915 You're welcome. Smiles are indeed in short supply since the arrival of this virus in...I don't know, some researchers are now saying last November. I read a poll yesterday saying 68% of people are afraid to go into a store, and 78% are afraid to go into a restaurant! I'm 74 with COPD, one of the supposed targets of this virus. I had zero fear because the restaurant was cleaner than most surgical suites, and they were more careful about infection control than most nursing homes. It was more than a little depressing watching people in their twenties all masked up and rushing into the place to get their takeout order and then rushing back out, eyes darting back and forth, looking for any signs the bug might spring in them from hiding. The latest death rate I've seen is that people under 40 have a death rate from the Wu Flu of about two in ten thousand. I mean, for heavens sake, they had a better chance of serious injury or death just driving to the place. We have turned into a much more fragile place than I ever imagined we would. And, yes, it's vessels like Mount Hood and the crews that served aboard them that deserve a lot more recognition, but she wasn't a battleship or aircraft carrier, so not many people are interested. Sad. :-(
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eryeland Information coming from a website where data is transmitted from Zetas (which don't exist) and their "emissary", Nancy Lieder, who had her Zeta cell phone implanted in her brain as a girl, is hardly something any sane person would believe. Lieder is a liar, fraud, and scam artist that has been predicting the pole shift and end of the world as we know it since 2003, most recently in 2017. On her first go round in 2003, she advised pet owners to have their animals euthanized so they wouldn't suffer. She and her ZetaTalk sycophants have predicted the pole shift at least four times since 2003 and, since we're not yet history, she was wrong again...and again. By copying and pasting this garbage here, you must either be one of the most gullible persons ever, or a liar and fraudster like your mistress.
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@allangibson8494 The SABS was generally a more accurate bombsight, but only when the aircraft was flying straight and level. Since it had no connection the aircraft's autopilot, it quickly lost accuracy if the plane had to take any evasive maneuvers or was thrown off course by wind buffeting. The biggest problem was they were all built by hand and required considerable adjustments after they were built. As a result, less than 1,000 were available by the end of the war. In contrast, somewhere around 80,000 Norden units were built.
The right thing to have happen was the British and Americans would both use the same bombsight. The British tried for over three years to get a license for the Norden but the US stupidly wouldn't do it, mostly because of the Navy, which owned the license. As you say, the Norden was only a secret in the minds of the Navy, which had an unreasonable fear that one would be recovered by the Germans from a crashed British bomber. What they didn't know was German espionage agents had already stolen a complete Norden in 1939 and were busily working on a reverse engineered bombsight of their own. They also never were able to figure out how to hook it into the bombers autopilot or initially how to mass produce the sight. Consequently, they were also built by hand until they could go into mass production by late 1944, when it really didn't matter much. There were at least a thousand unused Lotfe 7's in the Carl Zeiss factory by the Russians. They also had very little success trying to reverse engineer the bombsight. If the British and Americans both were using the Norden, it would have been improved more rapidly, and crews from both air forces could have been cross trained. A good example of foolish US isolationism, and something Roosevelt should have stepped in to solve.
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@allangibson8494 Yes, the Navy decided dive bombing was the way to go and rapidly lost interest in level bombing by 1940. That left the Norden to the air force. The Fritz X and Hs 293 were both successful guided weapons, with the 293 sinking far more tonnage, but the Fritz X had the more spectacular successes against warships. After Anzio, the allies, and the British in particular, figured out how to make automatic jamming transmitters. Once that happened, both guided weapons lost effectiveness. The Norden and SABS were about equal in accuracy with a well trained pilot and bombardier. As I said, however, that only held true in straight and level flight. With the Norden being tied into the autopilot, it could follow the movements of the plane automatically, something a British bombardier had to do manually, so the Norden became more accurate under those circumstances. In reality, it was the training and experience of the crew that had more to do with accuracy than either bombsight.
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To her credit, the Willie D had one of the highest aircraft kill totals of any destroyer arriving in the South Pacific after the actual invasion of Leyte. She shot down somewhere between ten and fourteen aircraft, depending on which count is to be believed.
She had one other unlucky incident while serving in the Aleutians before being deployed to the South Pacific. On June 13, 1944, while assigned to shore bombardment duty against Matsuwa Island in the Kuriles, her radar picked up what the operators identified as an enemy PT boat closing at 55 knots. No visual identification was possible in the early morning gloom and fog, but Willie D opened up radar directed fire with every gun on the ship that could be brought to bear. After about five minutes of firing, the target disappeared from radar, and the crew believed they had sunk the enemy ship.
Postwar records show no PT type craft were ever in the Kuriles, and there were no Japanese ships of any kind within 300 miles of the Willie D on June 13. It appears she was a victim of the "Battle of the Pips", something that plagued a whole task force a year earlier in the Aleutians. Radar was still rather primitive, and about all it could do was show reflections from anything on or over the ocean. There's a bird in the Aleutians called the dusky shearwater, a type of albatross, and a large bird at that. They would appear in large flocks when huge schools of anchovy would appear near the surface. Their hunting pattern as they flew a foot or two above the water in unison would show up on radar with the same kind of return as a warship zigzagging to evade incoming fire. When the anchovy school went deeper to escape the birds, the flock would break up and start searching for fish on their own, and the supposed ship would seem to have disappeared from radar, just as if it had been sunk. It looks like the Willie D was shooting at birds, just another unlucky incident in the history of an unlucky ship.
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Halsey was totally responsible for the loss of so many men and ships to Cobra. He knew that the storm was getting bigger and more intense. It could be seen on ship's radar up to 150 miles away, so it didn't just sneak up on them. Halsey was intent on getting his ships refueled to resume air operations. If he had called off the refuelling and ordered his ships to sail on a 90 degree path across the approaching storm. his should could ave escaped with very little damage or loss of life, It was only the intervention of Admiral Nimitz that saved Halsey from being court martialed. Almost unbelievably, Halsey sailed the Third Fleet right into Typhoon Connie in June, 1945, even though he had the command ship USS Ancon as part of his fleet. She had the most advanced radars of any ship off Okinawa, and her radar was able ot see Connie a75 miles away. If he had liaison officer aboard her, the flett could have turned away from the storm in time. Instead, Ancon had to send a coded radio message that took five hours to decode, and the storm was on top of them by then. Luckily, it wasn't as bad a Cobra, so no ships were lost (although many were damaged) and only six men were lost. Once again, Nimitz stepped in to save Halsey from sanction and reassignment, and he kept command of the fleet until December, 1945. Halsey had turned from the best admiral we could have in 1942 into a disaster by 1945.
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The training film "Ditch and Live" was made because so many crews forced down over water were dying only after three or four days on a raft. Realizing this, the Army Air Force had their film unit produce a training film starring Arthur Kennedy as Captain Scott H Reynolds. After a previous ditching where he was the sole survivor when the rest of his crew died at sea, he decided to train his new crew mercilessly in ditching procedures and survival techniques.
As bad luck would have it, Captain Reynolds and his crew were forced down at sea and were able to put their training to good use. There was one scene where the men were rolled out of bed at 3:00 in the moring to practice on a derelict B-17 so the men would be used to having to ditch in the dark. Several of the men, while getting dressed to head out to the plane, remarked that they'd live longer than Reynolds if they ditched just so they could throw him in the dunk tank when they got back to base. This was an obvious play on what Rickenbacker's crew said about him. He later found out about what the men had said. In reality, it was more like they wanted to live so they could kill him. The producers, not being sure of Rickenbacker's reaction, showed him the script with the more sanitized version of what the crew had said. He approved it without comment.
Many of the survival procedures were adapted from Rickenbacker's harrowing experience, and he contributes=d to the script. It became mandatory viewing for bomber crews, and the amount of time men lived at sea more than doubled for crews that had seen the film. Rickenbacker's experiences helped many more men than just the crew he went down with.
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Excellent video as usual. One small correction. The F4U had a maximum bomb load of 4,000 pounds, and that only at the expense of useful range. Most F4U flew off carriers with about 2,500 pounds of bombs, three napalm containers, or eight 5" rockets. The Corsair, originally designed as a fighter, so it didn't have the lifting capacity to carry even two of the three typical underwing loads at once. I see some viewers have already made the correction about the type of gun armament carried. Nevertheless, these are small details in a much larger and more important story of trying to save a friend and fellow pilot.
Lt. (Later Captain) Hudner continued to serve in the Navy until retiring in 1973. He worked with various veterans service organizations until the time of his civilian retirement in 1999. He was one of the few living persons to have a major warship named after him. He passed away quietly at his home in Concord, Massachusetts in 2017, living to the ripe old age of 93, especially for a combat pilot.
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Oh my. My best friend, Rick, just lost his best friend of 15 years, Gizmo. Rick is a big guy, 6'3" and 220 pounds of muscle. Gizmo was a tiny guy, maybe seven pounds soaking wet, but he was as big a guy as Rick in so many ways. I loved Gizmo too, and Rick and I both shared a good cry as Gizmo breathed his last. If there's a heaven, I have no doubt that, before I see God, I'll see Gizmo, barking his friendly greeting, and waiting for his usual treat.
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Myoko was a lucky ship in general. She participated in almost all the major naval engagements of the war. She sank or damaged several Allied warships while escaping any serious damage until the Battle of Leyte Gulf, when she was hit in the stern by a torpedo fired for an American destroyer. She had survived multiple attacks from US subs, none of them managing to hit Myoko . After breaking off from the battle, she was able to make it Singapore for temporary repairs. She was enroute to Cam Ranh Bay in what was then French Indochina for more repairs and fuel, which was in short supply at Singapore.
When a portion of her already weakened stern was blown off by a torpedo from Bergall her stern bulkhead held, as the weakened portion of the stern happened to be after of strongest stern bulkhead. All Japanese heavy cruisers converted from light cruisers were dangerously overloaded, and some cruisers, including Myoko , were refit with stronger stern and bow bulkheads as well as antitorpedo bulges. Myoko was one of the last cruisers to undergo such an extensive refit, completed in April, 1941, as the course of the war interfered with most further refits of that class.
In a postwar examination of the remaining stern of Myoko , it was found that three of her four propeller shafts were blown away or broken by Bergall's torpedo. It was only by the shearest of luck the one shaft held long enough to make it to Singapore for repairs to that shaft. As the video said, there were insufficient materials at Singapore to repair all the ships needing repairs after Leyte Gulf. The IJN had decided first priority for repairs would go to destroyers. Cruisers were no longer needed for the set piece battles the Japanese had assumed would decide the war since submarines and aircraft had sunk most of her major surface units. Even if she could have been repaired, there was insufficient fuel at Singapore for a large vessel like Myoko to make it back to Japan. Myoko was one of the few major surface ships that survived repeated attacks by British midget subs and air attacks at Singapore. She was damaged by still afloat at the time of the Japanese surrender, a testament to the damage control skills of her crew.
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At least one book, "Mrs Sherlock Holmes", was written about her and is available at Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Sherlock-Holmes-Detective-Captivated/dp/1250072247). She really revolutionized the investigation into how immigrants were treated and how the cases of missing persons, especially women and girls, were treated. For example, it turned out Coochi had been paying off the beat officers in his block to leave him alone since he apparently was involved in some underworld crime. It was these payoffs that made sure his shop was never properly searched.
No one is quite sure why she came forward with what are now regarded as some pretty fanciful stories about girls being kidnapped to various WWI Army bases to be sexually abused. She never provided any corroborating evidence to support her claims, and the Army pushed back hard on the accusations, allowing the Department of Justice and state police to search bases where the abuse was supposedly taking place. No evidence was ever found to support her claims, and Grace rapidly fell from public favor. There was a war on, and Grace was suspected of harboring more sentiments for her immigrant clients than the United States Army. Was Grace right and the whole thing had been yet another cover up, or had Grace really gone off the deep end this time? At this late date, it's impossible to tell, but Grace closed the People's Law firm and retired from public life by 1920. We'll never know the true story, but Grace, regardless of the Army accusations, had certainly showed that women attorneys and crime investigators were as good as any men at a time when the concept was rarely even thought of.
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Ken Hudson Ken, Meniere's Disease and Syndrome are just variant names of the same thing. I have had all the symptoms you've had. Surgery is almost never effective. I lost 90% of the hearing in my left ear in the first week after my first symptoms, vertigo and vomiting. I had returned from a diving trip and my doctor thought I had a case of barotrauma of the inner ear. That usually clears up in about ten days, and this didn't. The hearing loss sent me to an ENT doctor who thankfully was also an Meniere's expert. He did a few tests, listen to my symptoms, and declared it to be Meniere's in the space of an hour. I really had all the classic symptoms. My really bad attacks have been controlled with valium, and I take a diuretic every day to get rid of excess fluid. I've been in a burnout phase for the past five years and haven't had a serious attack. Like you, my main hearing loss has been in the human voice ranges, and a hearing aid only amplifies sound in my one more or less good ear. I have constant tinnitus, sometimes so bad I can't use a hearing aid. Still, I'm able to drive, and my work as a consultant before I retired allowed me to catch up with tasks in between attacks. I've been retired for about ten years so I at least no longer have to worry about Meniere's making me unable to work. It's a terrible condition with no known cause or cure, and every few have even heard about it. It's a tough life, but at least it hasn't killed us.
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Correct. The 2011 event was the largest and most deadly outbreak in modern times. While the deadliest tornadoes generally occurred in the Southeast, the storm system set off tornadoes all the way up into New York and Ontario. Although the storm system lasted three days, the most intense part of the storm happned on April 27, when a record 217 tornadoes occurred from midnight to midnight, of which four were rated EF-5. The 317 deaths on April 27 were the most in a single day since the devastating Tri-State tornado outbreak of March, 18, 1925, when 747 people lost their lives. It's hard to compare these super outbreaks since the records, even from 1974, are not as complete as 2011. While the 1925 outbreak killed more people, it appears the 2011 outbreak had more long track intense tornadoes, but there are a lot of guesses in anything before the satellite and radar eras.
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