Comments by "John Luetjen" (@jehl1963) on "Drachinifel" channel.

  1. Cool to see. I work in a different segment of the laser industry, and it is important that the user and people nearby are wearing the appropriate eye protection for the wavelength of the laser. Rust removal lasers usually have wavelengths of about 1064nm. This is in the infrared part of the spectrum that humans can't see. A 4-watt laser at that wavelength can be dangerous to the unshielded human eye at a few feet distance. And being infrared, you won't see it or know it until the damage is done. As you point out, 150 watts is no toy. Always wear appropriate eye protection and put screens.
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  2. Wow Drach! You have really raised this channel to a new level with this VASA series. Hopefully you'll be able to visit the USS Constitution, The Bremen Cog and others like maybe a Viking ship and do similar series one day. Your level of interest and understanding of the subject allows you to ask insightful questions that most of us wouldn't think of asking. Keep up the excellent work!
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  3. I came across this story a few years ago and found it fascinating. A detail that Drach didn't mention -- across all of the Seeadler's engagements -- only 1 person died. Kapitan Luckner did what duty demanded of him, but apparently he wasn't a huge supporter of the war. More of a gentleman naval officer than gung-ho hero or hard-bitten professional. Another interesting factoid -- there are at least 3 very different accounts of the Seeadler's war. Confusingly, all of which where titled "The Sea Devil". 1) Seeteufel (literally the "Sea Devil") by Graf (Count) Luckner) published in 1921 by K. F. Koeler in Leipzig, Germany. To me the best version since it is the most contemporary. Based on the style and contents, it seems to be heavily based on official after-action reports which the German military commonly published between WW1 and WWII. It contains detailed maps and a large number of pictures which did not make it into the other editions. The downside is that you need to be able to read or translate the German which is printed in a Franken font which was the norm for the period. 2) The Sea Devil by Lowell Thomas and Count Luckner, published in at least 25 printings between 1927 and 1932. A fairly straight forward translation, but many of the pictures from the German edition disappeared, and the maps were reduced in quality. If my memory is correct (it's been a few years since I last read it) it was abridged slightly during the translation. 3) The Sea Devil by Sam Jefferson, published by Osprey Publishing, 2017. This version varies the most from the previous two. The account has been significantly abridged, and extra material has been added by Jefferson. If my memory is correct, he had a relative who was on the auxiliary cruiser HMS Patia which stopped the Seeadler as she was breaking out into the Atlantic. This version of the story is very much a 21st century history narrative. There is relatively little first-hand account left in the book, but there is also considerable backstory and author analysis added. I'm lucky to have all 3 versions, but prefer the 1st two for their 1st-person narratives and details.
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  4. I believe another of Holland's early subs was found recently in Long Island Sound, where it too sank while on route to the scrap yard. There are hopes to also raise that example.
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  5. I remember seeing the Reserve fleet moored near Wilmington when my family was driving to Florida for vacation. They were moored near the Delaware bridge (I think?). If my memory is correct, many of them were supply vessels. Given the advent of container ships and roll-on/roll-off ship, I wonder if they kept them around or what happened to them.
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  6. It would be interesting to find out what the US Navy's technical teams thought of these ships and other Japanese ships that were captured at the end of the war. I'm curious if any captured Japanese technologies were incorporated into the Allies' arsenals.
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  7. Curious - as a layperson, King has none of the name recognition (at least to me) as Nimitz, Halsey, MacArthur, Patton, Eisenhower and even Marshall, but his achievements were no less than theirs. Am I the only person who feels this way?
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  8.  @GearGuardianGaming  Back around the time of Old Iron Sides 200th birthday, she did put to sea under her own sail power. She sailed from outside Boston Harbor up to Salem and back (under reduced sail) as part of her turning around.
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  9. Was there a ribbon or something for the sailors who were involved in the salvage effort?
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  10. I always find it interesting when people argue that attackers are someone exempt from maximum force responses.
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  11. Doing a search to see if that episode was on YouTube, I came across -- "Die Piraten des Kaisers - Felix Graf Luckner Der Seeteufel - Dokumentation .
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  12. Did it have various salvaged weaponry fastooned to it?
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  13. I have always heard and read how the larger ships of the era always seemed to have submerged or at least waterline level torpedo tubes, but I can't remember ever hearing about one which successfully executed an attack using those weapons. Did it ever occur?
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  14. Excellent job as always, but you kind of "buried the lead". I was watching the video wondering what sort of ship this was before you mentioned (about 2 minutes in) that the subject ship was a member of the Cruiser class of ships.
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  15. Walker seems to very much be the RN's version of George Patton. The parallels in their lives are fairly striking. Both were described as "sensitive" as youths, but were inspired by their predecessors to follow the careers that they did, and remade themselves into the "hard men" that they felt that they needed to be. Both developed a reputation for innovation and -- aggressively -- defending their ideas. Being of similar age, both gained some initial experience in their respective services in WWI. The tone and contents of their speeches to subordinates was very similar, as was their speeches to the women on the home front. I'm looking forward to the next installment.
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  16. Interesting chapter of history and not covered much in the histories taught in the US. If my memory is correct, during the US Civil war I was under the impression that the British were giving tacit (and in some cases material support) to the Confederates. I'm curious how that fits into the story. It just seems incongruous with the trend described in the video, so I suspect that there is another chapter in the story to look at.
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  17. The Italian movie referenced -- "Eroi di nostri mari" is available to see on YouTube.
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  18. Excellent discussion of what would normally be a very esoteric subject. It compares favorably with the professionally produced documentary that I saw on TV a decade or two ago. Well done!
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  19. Just a note: The map at 18:19 has locations 17 (Falmouth MA) and 18 (Riverhead NY) reversed.
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  20. @bluelemming5296  All good points. Reflectance is often a function of the wavelength and the material. I'm no PhD, so I don't know all of the derails. Appropritae safety glasses are defined by the wavelengths that they block and generally fit in such a way that light doesn't go past them. Just plain sunglasses won't work because they may be transparent in (this case) infrared, but attenuate visible light. These are all excellent questions for the vendor of the laser system. They will know.
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  21. Interesting how Great Britain was looking at the rise of the US and Germany (both without empires) with concern, while both the US and Germany were both looking at Great Britain's empire with envy. The grass is always greener...
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  22. The USS Massachusetts can still be visited in Fall River MA. I was able to visit it as a kid and still remember it. The references to the attempted invasion of Dakar made me stop and look up that tangent. I had never heard of that operation. That was the first really new thing that I had learned about WWIi in the last 45 years.
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  23. Outstanding! Thank-you for setting that up. The Captain personifies excellence in management, and there is much to be learned from him.
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  24. Another long forgotten class of ships covered. Thank-you.
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  25. Sharing an "attaboy!" with you, the last half of the discussions summarizes a beef that I have with many of the histories being published recently. You can make the same complaint about the histories published about the land battles in WWI, or even the narrative of the whole war. Also WWII (although the base of literature is vastly larger), and almost every other key engagement in the past. Usually they are one-sided in the language of the writer, too chronologically limited, and too focused on the headline engagements. They also inevitably end up being called like a football game rather than an engagement of people who are in the moment. Thank-you all for moving counter to this trend, and keep up the good work.👍👍
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  26. The Brandtaucher definitely deserves and episode! I never heard of it until now and just looked it up on Wikipedia. Verrrrrrry Interrrresting!
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  27. It's often forgotten that before WWI, Germany had the pre-eminent chemical industry in the world, and most likely the largest number Nobel prize winners in the field. This allowed them to develop such things as artificial indigo (which helped to create the famous Feldgrau color), fertilizers (which also led to large scale production of chlorine gas) and other many other chemicals which had important industrial and military uses. I suspect that this also influenced their propellants.
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  28. Excellent job pulling this story all together. I don't know about anyone else, but for a long time I was confused at who was who when looking at the diorama presentation of the battle. Any chance of putting an British flag near the British fleet, and a German flag near the German fleet so that it's easier to understand the dynamics of the placements of the ships? I really like how you pulled together first-person accounts from both sides and presented them in multiple voices, it shows how much of a two-way dance such an engagement is rather than a one-sided exercise as is commonly presented in many histories. I can't wait to see part 2!
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  29. Yes, apparently he was quite the self-promoter!
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  30. In all of these years I never quite figured out how the US PT boats fired their torpedoes. With the German and English craft, it was obvious based on how the tubes were angled or projected over/through the hull that the torpedo was fired out of the tube. As Drach mentioned, there are downsides to this approach, but it seems like the European's never changed. Just taking an air-launched torpedo, and rolling it off of the boat (far less disruptive than it's normal mode of launch) was a supremely elegant solution! I just took it for granted that the torpedoes were lined up along the gunnel, and somehow made it into the water. I never understood it until just now!
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  31. In the past, I've looked at a number of WWI battles and found the same thing that that Lundgren and Sposato described. Often -- when I matched up the competing accounts from both sides, it became apparent that the battle didn't necessarily unfold the way the conventional wisdom describes. Given the number of sacred cows involved, people often bristle at resulting changes in the narrative. This is an approach that is surprisingly lacking in much of contemporary history publishing. Good Work Misters Lundgren and Sposato!
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  32. Cool! Nice to see you working down into some of the less well known, and dusty corners of nautical military crafts. I can't wait to see which obscure corner of design you'll go to next!
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  33. I love his Friesian-Australian accent. Truely unique!
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  34. Really Drach, tell us what you really think about the subject. Please, don't hold back!
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  35. Drach; at 57:00 there is what appears to be a steering wheel in the magazine which you fail to discuss. What is that about?
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  36. Wow! There was a lot going on!
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  37. Excellent! I wonder how the German account of the action goes?
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  38.  @colbeausabre8842  Yes. But were those fired from submerged tubes or were they mounted on the deck like most destroyers had them? I'm pretty sure that by the time the Rodneys were built in the 1920, submerged tubes had gone the way of the Ramming Bow
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  39.  @katrinapaton5283  Interesting. Thank-you
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  40. When it comes to optical character recognition of "Gothic" (more accurately referred to as "Franken") fonts, ABBYY's software does a very serviceable job.
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  41. Amazing story! It reminded me of a early Mel Gibson movie that I saw decades ago. I didn't remember the details, so I looked it up. It was called "Attack Force Z" (1981), which -- it turns out --, was only very loosely based on the real Force Z. I also had the opportunity years ago to travel from Singapore to Batam Island by ferry. Batam is the largest of the Indonesian islands across from Singapore, and the land mass that the two canoe teams travelled around. That was quite voyage getting from there tin Singapore and back, in what Americans would call kayaks!
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  42. A belated welcome to Boston Drach.! A very interesting review and I learned a few things, even though I've visited the USS Constitution a few times. On you're next trip you might want to check out Baltimore harbor, which has the Sloop-of-War USS Constellation, which dates to the often overlooked pre-Civil Wat era, as well as a 1940's Coast Guard Cutter that was at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked.
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  43. Excellent conversation. The last 10-15 minutes hits the nail directly on the head when dealing with historical research -- especially in the English language. I've seen it in regards to entire books on WW1, as well as WWII and many other subjects in the last few hundred years. But in speaking of WWI -- there is a truth and a warning in the old adage "The victors write history". I have found time and again when researching events in WW1 that the conventional wisdom is what was recorded in the English histories. But when you put it side-by-side with the German language accounts of the same events -- things look considerably different. The English history might report "We attached, successfully captured the objective and then returned to our lines after inflecting heavy casualties" while the Germans report "Fritz and Georg were killed, and 2 others were wounded in the counter-attack that repulsed the English". Suddenly the effectiveness of the strategy and tactics is called into question. This myopic view of English language accounts explains the almost total ignorance within the English speaking world of events on the WW1 Eastern Front, which had considerable impact on the war. Somewhat beyond the scope of this channel, but very relevant for the overall subject of historical research.
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  44. Drach, you know your naval history, but your understanding of New York's geography is a bit off. Albany is maybe 2 hours north of New York City on the Hudson River. Buffalo is in far western New York and about as far from NYC as you can be in New York state. The USS Slater is in the Hudson River in Albany.
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  45. I guess it's a good thing that nobody asked you to get as high as possible and as low as possible on the HMS Victory!
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  46. I loved the animation images but found the color choices disorienting. Specifically -- the sea being black, and the land blue left me sometimes baffled at what I was looking at. In the future, maybe making thebland green would resolve this.
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  47. @SwankySpitfire  Wow! Thank-you for the detailed reply. Obviously, there is a lot more going on there than I was aware of. I can't wait to see the next iteration! Thanks for the excellent visualizations, it definitely added to Drach's retelling of the events. I did like the ship models.
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  48. Hopefully a discussion of the sea-borne operations supporting Operation Albion will appear sometime in the future. It's an relatively unknown example of a successful large scale amphibious operation in WWI, and included a number of encounters between the German Navy and the Russian Navy.
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  49. It's a pretty open secret what the non-Prussians thought of them. The largest immigration of Germans into the US occurred in the 2nd half of the 19th century, to the point where they were the largest ethnic group in the US by 1900.
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  50. It doesn't matter. According to the modern internet, if it's painted gray and has a gun on it, it's a Battl3ship. Thus, all of the internet stories about Russian "Battleships" in the Black Sea.
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