Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "Mark Felton Productions" channel.

  1. The Mosquito wasn't close in bombload, even on paper. Although the theoretical maximum bomb load was 4,000 pounds, that was for a mission of less than 700 miles round trip. A more typical bombload was 2,500 pounds. The B-17 carried 4,500 pounds over ranges three times as long as the Mosquito, and had an internal bombload of 8,000 pounds over a 1,400 mile radius. A maximum bombload with external racks for a 700 mile mission was over 17,000 pounds. The B-17 was a slow but heavy strategic bomber while the Mosquito was a light but fast bomber, and later one of the first true multirole aircraft.
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  2.  @FLJBeliever1776  In addition, radar equipped and rocket firing Swordfish patrolled the Channel and attacked every submarine detected by their radar. Because they were able to attack from less than 100 feet, the low and slow Stringbags were hard for subs running on the surface to detect while the Stringbags radar was able to see even a periscope at five miles, The combination of rockets and strafing was fatal for a number of U-boats. As long as there were no modern fighters to oppose them, they were very effective in the air to surface role.
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  3. The Japanese had used small scale banzai charges as far back as the Russo-Japanese war in 1905 and during the Sino-Japanese war in 1930's, but most of those were against troops armed with slow firing bolt action rifles and only a few machine guns. The first massed banzai charge against well armed modern forces was on Attu in the Aleutians in 1943. After all night repetitive charges by Japanese soldiers mostly using bayonets and swords, 2,600 of them were wiped out by massed machine gun and artillery fire, with only 29 soldiers too badly wounded to commit suicide captured. The US lost 549 killed and wounded, but the ratio demonstrated the futility of such tactics. Still, this last stand was in line with the Japanese bushido code of warfare, and the defense of Attu was romanticized in Japan as each soldier assuming the role of a samurai, something previously limited to officers and nobility. This set the stage for the tremendous waste of soldiers on Saipan. As the war grew ever closer to the home islands, banzai charges were discouraged, since it was possible to evacuate some surviving troops from doomed islands to others to fight again. There were still some smaller scale banzai charges, particularly on Okinawa, but the Japanese high command came to recognize that Americans weren't going to break and run under massed banzai charges. The bushido code really didn't work in modern warfare.
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  4. It wasn't exactly a fight with a P-51. It was Cavalier TF-51D, the Cavalier conversion of a P-51D single seat fighter to a two seat training version. It was much slower than the F4U and much less maneuverable. The more interesting fight was later the same day, when an FAH F4U shot down two FAS FG1's, the last dogfight between propeller driven fighters of about equal performance.
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  5. Pinpoint bombing had a somewhat different meaning in 1918.
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  6. The Bears make good snoopers and aircraft to test British/Nato radars and countermeasures. The Tu-160 flown at combat ceilings and speeds represent a real threat.
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  7. Little Jimmy, flying in a large formation would have made them more liable to be detected by radar, and detected further out. Given that New York City wasn't on high alert for enemy air attack, the first flight of however many aircraft the Germans could muster may have made it through. That would have been the end, however, as the US had more than enough aircraft, light aircraft carriers, early warning radar, and radar directed high altitude anti aircraft artillery by mid-1944 that it's unlikely any further aircraft would have made it through.
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  8. Great story.
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  9. Fantastic. I never heard of these two tenders before. I sure wish I lived near Belfast so I could see Nomadic in person. That was quite an amazing restoration job.
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  10. Great video. I've never heard of this incident before. I'd sure hate to be the hastily assembled crew of a Cromwell going up against a trained crew in a Centurion.
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  11. The Nazis had collected so much loot, and conditions in immediate postwar Germany and surrounding Axis countries were so chaotic, that it was inevitable that Allied troops would be involved in looting. For accounts I've read from US and British soldiers involved in looting, their view was so much loot was available that a few things stolen here and there would hardly be missed. That would have been true if looting was confined to troops in direct contact with the loot and they just pilfered a few gold coins or some silverware. That wasn't the case, however, as the US and British commanders in the region did little to stop the looting. The supposed reason was this was all Nazi owned loot, and troops deserved a little of it after risking their lives fighting against the Nazia across Europe. No one took into account that a large portion of the loor was stolen from civilians.That evolved into a full scale theft and racketeering operation, with Army assets being used to transport stolen goods from Germany and Austria to more friendly neutrals like Spain, extending across the Channel to England and Ireland, and then transshipments on to the US. Bribes were being paid all the way from top commanders down to black stevedore troops to keep the operation going. The whole operation lasted almost a year before finally being shut down by special investigators from the Inspector General's Office, although even some of them were later arrested for at least aiding the operation. There are persistent rumors the bribery extended all the way to Eisenhower's staff if not to Eisenhower himself. It was and is a shameful organized crime operation within the Army, and one that still needs further investigation.
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  12. It wasn't overreacting. What wasn't mentioned is the USSR issued an ultimatum in November, 1958 to the three western powers to withdraw their troops from West Berlin. The date of ultimatum was pulled back several times but reissued for December 31, 1961 after a tense summit in Vienna in April,1961. The wall was built in August, 1961, and tensions between the west and the USSR had never been higher. We had been increasing tank and troop strength in West Berlin since 1959 and had over 400 tanks available compared to less than 100 in 1960. The Soviets actually sent 33 tanks to the border with Checkpoint Charlie because they knew we could face off with them with many more if we chose to.
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  13. Or maybe even the "Led Zeppelin Raid"?
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  14. You are quite incorrect. General von Choltitz was a Francophile that had spent time in France and Paris between the wars. He had a genuine affection for France and the French people. In addition, he believed Hitler was insane, and his orders were no longer operative. He had 17.000 troops in Paris and could have done great damage to Paris if was in the mind to do so. Instead, he surrendered to prevent more deaths on both sides and save Paris from destruction.
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  15. I'm not aware any airborne operations took place over anything but small towns. However, Operation Market Garden showed that church steeples of even small towns could be a hazard.
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  16. I'd think German infantry must have seen the Pershing and finally realized the jig was up. After watching most Shermans get manhandled by Tigers, the Pershing represented the spearhead of tanks that were at least equal to the Tiger, especially for their ability to shoot at longer ranges than the Tiger and do so on the move. For the remaining few months of the war, German armor attacks were more and more from ambush and less from frontal assaults. In addition, each German tank lost represented an irreplaceable asset, not the least of which was the crew. The Allies were pouring a never ending stream of tanks like the Pershing, M4A3E8 "Easy Eight", and Firefly. While these were not in detail better than late war German tanks, knocking one out just meant more pulled up to get in the fight.
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  17. I wonder how long "Excellent" would have lasted if the Germans had invaded? It seems he had a great heart, so I imagine he would have put up a heck of fight.
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  18. Hess was one of the sad cases of war. He was a great believer in astrologers and seers, and his trip to England may well have been inspired by a dream interpretation by one of them. He was Hitler's closest confidant until early 1941 and was responsible for signing the Nuremberg Laws, the beginning of stripping some Germans of their rights and the blueprint for the rounding up and imprisonment of "undesirables". There's no doubt he deserved his prison sentence. I wonder what would have happened if the British just moved him to another prison or some kind of halfway house? Certainly by 1980, the Soviets had bigger and more pressing problems, and weren't likely to do more than protest.
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  19.  @stevekaczynski3793  No, Slovik committed crimes as a juvenile and as an adult. He wasn't paroled until April, 1942, when he was 22 years old, after his last bout of criminality committed when he was 19 years old. The Army needed men for the invasion and occupation of Germany, and then the much larger invasion and occupation of Japan that was still to come. Slovik was a criminal, but not a violent criminal, and tens of thousands of others with backgrounds similar to Slovik's were drafted and served honorably. Slovik was a coward. He was not the only one, but he deserted multiple times so as not to serve at the front. His execution was meant to serve as a warning that cowardice and desertion wasn't going to tolerated. Seems harsh now, but now isn't 1945.
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  20. What the US found out from that risky mission was, except for the airframe and some basic weapons, the Hind-D/Mi-25 bore almost no relationship to the Soviet Mi-24. As usual, the Soviets were happy to sell the Mi-24 to countries like Libya for a healthy cash payment and some cheap oil, but there was no way they were going to have an unstable third country lose their latest systems and weapons. The Air Force found out the Hind D/Mi-25 had almost everything on board at least one generation behind Soviet systems, and almost all of them were known to the US. Hard to tell if there were any actual secrets found, since the whole operation is still secret, but it seems doubtful that the US learned anything commensurate with the risk.
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  21. Thanaks, Mark. The Battle of Los Angeles is the one I used for my college history/psychology paper. It was to demonstrate how fear, hysteria, and panic can create their own reality, even to the point that we'd say that things actually happened when all the evidence was it didn't, and "deniers" would denounced as unpatriotic. I never expected to see a modern demonstration of the same kind of hysteria, by this time on a global scale. Ironically, we've even chosen the same way to deal with threat, just as they did in 1941 - lock people up until the threat goes away. I never expected Americans to ever again meekly surrender their constitutional rights, but here we are.
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  22.  @derrinpickett9948  Look where the US is today? Yeah, we don't have Stalin in charge. You Soviet apologists really set my back teeth on edge.
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  23. I saw the new unified German Army detail at the Neue Wache in 1996. I was surprised to see the soldiers armed with Kar98k rifles from WWII. There's clearly some kind of symbolism to this. The Wehrmacht used M1 Garand rifles when it was reformed in 1955, and it seems as if using M1s for ceremonial purposes would have made sense if they wanted to make a clean break with the past. The fact they reverted back to Kar98s still makes me a bit nervous. A united Germany, for the past 150 years, has never been good news for the rest of the world.
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  24. A small correction. The ship shown at 2:47 is actually an Admirable class minesweeper, the USS Pivot (AM-276). She served with the USN until 1948. She was then sold to Taiwan (Republic of China) and recommissioned as the Yung Shou (AM 49). She served with the ROCS Navy until she was scrapped in 1970.
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  25. What a great story! The FW-190 was never a good night fighter, and Beaufighters and Mosquitos made short work of them.
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  26. Also luckily for the RN, the Argentines didn't really understand they needed to re-fuse their bombs for zero height contact triggers rather than the usual delayed fusings. Because of this, not one RN ship that was hit by a bomb had the bomb actually explode when dropped. They all went through the decks carried by their own velocity and weight, and the explosions on the ships were caused by fuel and ammunition aboard ship. Many more RN ships would have been more heavily damaged or sunk if the fuses worked.
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  27.  @FLJBeliever1776  The Admiralty credits the Swordfish with 22.5 U-boat sinkings, hardly "tens of dozens". No need to exaggerate the successes of this useful aircraft.
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  28.  William Myers  Thanks. I enjoyed search and rescue for 27 years...well, mostly enjoyed it. :-) Now at least I can go to sleep without having to hear a page out on the radio or the phone ringing.
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  29. Merry Christmas, Mark, and my fellow history buffs. Thanks for this video. This was the topic I chose for one of two of my senior history papers. In addition to the most famous 1914 Western Front Christmas truce, small versions also occured on the Eastern Front. It seems this sprang from truces of several hours that happened regularly so both sides could retrieve their dead and wounded from no man's land. By Christmas, the men were fed up with the war that was going nowhere, and these short truces around Christmas expanded to the men of both side coming out of the trenches and fraternizing in no man's land. This only happened on small portions of the front, and the ones that succeeded did so because most officers above lieutenant were on Christmas leave. When some high officers came rushing back on word of the "mutinies", it was too late. One English colonel reportedly ordered his men to open fire and was instead shot himself. Christmas and Easter truces occured on various portions of the front in 1915 as well. Unfortunately, by 1916, the animosities of war on both sides made a repeat of 1914 impossible.
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  30. It looks like most of the ground scenes came from a movie staged after the event. By 1933 the use of superchargers was well known. The Fairy Fox, for example, had been flying since 1926 with a supercharger and had a service ceiling of 33,000 feet. The real feat of the flight was getting over that part of the Himalayas in good enough weather to get the pictures and not getting lost on the way up or back if the weather closed in.
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  31. They were blackout headlights. Most of the light was covered, with the slot providing just enough light for the driver to see the road 50 feet ahead but not enough for the car to be seen from the air at night. They were used on almost German vehicles during the war.
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  32. It's disgusting that a country that gave the world the Dreadnought never saved even one of them. Thank goodness I can still spend a long vacation touring preserved battleships in the US. Those of you playing World of Warships have no idea what you're doing with a battleship until you can see one in the flesh, so to speak.
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  33. Chris, just like a ship at sea. One member of the party was an expert with a map, compass, sextant, and celestial navigation. As long as you had sun during the day and the stars at night, the usual conditions in the desert, navigation was actually reasonably easy.
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  34. I've often wondered why German forces in the west fought so fiercely when all they were doing was allowing the Soviets to advance further into Germany and establish a 45 year reign of terror in their occupied section of the country. If they just started surrendering enmass to the British and Americans, they could have helped the allies establish a zone of occupation much larger than what was ultimately allowed.
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  35.    Well, no, the war didn't start until nearly three weeks after the deciding match between El Salvador and Honduras, which was won by El Salvador. Angry pilots there may have been, but just like with any other air force, you couldn't just jump in a fighter and fly off. Tensions had been building for over a decade, and the results of the playoffs were just another provocation in the eyes of Honduras. El Salvador believed Honduras was about to attack and launched their own preemptive attack. It succeeded at first, but the poorly trained and equipped Salvadoran military soon lost ground to the larger and better trained Honduran forces. The attack by El Salvador was a tactical mistake, but both countries suffered thousands of casualties in the 100 hour war, mostly among civilians.
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  36. The RN never were able to locate San Luis , even after the torpedo attacks. Her performance highlighted the dangers from these relatively low tech but very quiet Type 209 submarines. It was the start of a renaissance in the construction of new diesel-electric subs. Now, with more and more having air independent propulsion, they have many of the same advantages as a nuclear sub without the noise of the reactor. The Argentine Navy had always planned to use the shallows to deny the RN subs from getting close enough to sink the carrier, and 25 de Mayo just made it before she would have been attacked and sunk by Splendid . I'm pretty sure she would have attacked 25 de Mayo if not for the danger of shoal waters regardless of if she was in Argentine waters.
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  37. Did the Germans publicize the "capture" of the plane? The Hurricane was approaching obsolescence by September, 1941, and there wasn't much about the plane that wasn't already know to the Luftwaffe. A Czech pilot as a turncoat may have had propaganda value in occupied Czechoslovakia but I've never heard of the incident being publicized. There must be more to this story.
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  38. What a great story! I thought i had heard about all the strange stories from WWII but this is a new one on me. Probably a good thing they were going up against the Italians though. I don't think a German pilot would have had a bottle of red wine in his kit.
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  39.  @binaway  Yes, Senator Albert Borah, a strange combination of Republican, FDR supporter, strict isolationist, and progressive, although that term didn't mean the same in 1920 as it does now.
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  40. Republic of China (Taiwan) has well over 600 M-41 tanks of which at least 400 are operational in first line service.
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  41. Lyme Bay was one of those military disasters that, while it cost lives, ultimately saved many lives when the actual landing took place. There is reasonably good evidence that D-Day would have failed if we hadn't learned the lessons of Lyme Bay. RIP to all those who died, including my uncle, to secure freedom for us.
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  42. The destroyers, known as the "1200 ton type" as a whole, of which the Reuben James was a member_ , have been given a bad rap by the Royal Navy. They were not "old" at a mere 20 years, especially considering the average age of British destroyer was around 23 years old. They did need some repairs and refitting because they had been sitting in reserve for about 15 of their 20 years in reserve. Some of the US equipment and armament was removed and replaced with equipment that more nearly matched that of an RN escort vessel. Once they had been refitted, the RN had the equivalent of a newly commissioned vessel in a couple months of refitting compared to the year or more it would have taken to construct a new vessel, not to mention it would have required materials the British just didn't have on hand. The RN, even for all complaining they did about the class, were lucky to have them available, since this came at low point in the Battle of the Atlantic. These admittedly less than perfect ships allowed the British to free up newer and better vessels.
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  43.  @sisyphusvasilias3943  Really? Were you alive during Stalin's reign? How about your mother or father? Grandparents? Did any of them live in the Soviet Union under Stalin? Have you heard about the "Great Purge", where somewhere between 600,000 and a million were killed on Stalin's direct order? Where in heaven's name did you learn history?
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  44. Couldn't click fast enough on this one. As a Falklands War aficionado, I'm looking forward to this one. It would have been a close run thing for the RN if those Skyhawks had been able to sortie on schedule.
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  45. Mark, take a look at the US search and rescue operations in international waters after the downing of KAL flight 007 in 1983. It was another incident that almost caused the cold war to go hot. The straying of flight 007 over the Soviet border also opened up the US GPS system to the world free of charge and made such incidents much less likely.
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  46.  @madisntit6547  The video covered the Battle of Britain use but also every significant use after that and outside Britain by foreign air forces and in places like Greece and Malta. He didn't miss any uses of the Gladiators with the sole exception of not giving much time to their U-boat sinkings, one of the important uses of the Sea Gladiator for nearly the entire war.
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  47. There were quite a few Italians tried for war crimes, but Nuremberg was established only for the purpose of trying Nazi war crimes, not for that of their allies. Italians were tried by separate tribunals by the British, Americans, Greeks, and Yugoslavs. Some were also tried by the Co-Belligerent Italian government shortly after the end of the war. A number were also executed under battlefield "justice" as they were seized by those they committed the crimes against, Mussolini being the most famous example. The Russians were quite infamous for executing Romanian and Hungarian Nazis.
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  48. Helium wasn't a matter of money in WWI. It just wasn't available. The US was the only producer of helium at the time, and even they couldn't produce enough to actually fuel any balloons before the end of the war. After that, the US refused to sell any to potential enemies like Germany. That's why the Hindenburg disaster occured. The zeppelin was filled with flammable hydrogen gas, and even though the Germans took many safety precautions while working with the gas, all it took was a small leak and an ignition source to have the craft go up like a torch.
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  49. The Megaroc and Bristol Barbizon, Britain two postwar attempts at being the first and biggest in the field of aeronautics.
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  50. You're quite welcome. I've just discovered your channel and have been binge watching the videos. First rate work on subjects that aren't general knowledge for most of us. I'm more than a little peeved at Youtube hiding a couple of your Hitler videos when they are simply history with no attempt at advocacy one way or the other. I know there's nothing you can do about it, but this kind of censorship makes it impossible for WWII historians to do their work. I downloaded the book but haven't started reading it yet. I have to get some sleep sometime. :-)
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