very nice exchange of information, but you guys have been forgetting one thing all along - rounds.

Shermans used british sabots and HEAT rounds to great effect, while as far as i know germans still used older HEAP rounds.

Yep. Germans lost the ability to produce tungsten-cored ammo in 1943. What little they had was parceled out in very limited quantities and reserved for heavy tanks like the Stalin. APHE is more damaging after penetration but does not penetrate as well as HVAP or sabot. The British 17 pounder was superior to both the Tiger and the Panther's gun as was the American 76mm when firing HVAP (unforntunately, our guys didn't have it in large numbers due to stupid Army policy).

well that depends on your understanding of damaging.

i think armor liquifaction that happens after a sabot strike and primary, and secondary spalling will do the job of BBq'ing crew and equipment just as well as having a fragmentation or HE blast happen inside the vehicle compartments.

But then again, you don't need to blow vehicle to smitherines to kill it. A tank without ammo and/or crew is just a piece of inert metal that can be taken and melted down for other uses

APHE is more damaging after penetration but you are quite right about HVAP and APDS. The shot can also fragment after penetration adding to the damage.

A lot of factors go into how much damage spalling will do, for example, armor ductility. Soviet tankers mentioned that the poor quality of their T-34's armor meant that penetration very often resulted in death or injury to the crew and damage to internal components. On the other hand, they report that hits on Lend Lease vehicles, which had good quality armor, were less lethal.

yes and no. frontal armor of t-34 had better protection capacity then of sherman due to its angle.

weakness in t-34 was when front glacies joined with 'belly' plate. There, "express" welding, didn't do a very good job at joining and re-inforcing two plates. Thus a round there, would penetrate frontal compartment and expode in ammo storage compartment, right underneath the turret. The resulting explosion would pop off the turret and kill everyone.

T-34 also had a huge shell-trap between frontal glacies and its turret

Yes and no. The glacis of all T-34's was 45-47 mm at a 60 degree angle. Dependent upon the model of Sherman, the glacis was 51 to 64mm thick with an angle ranging from 56 to 47 degrees. The quality and construction of the Sherman's armor was also superior.

MC,

The reality of all smart warfare is that you kill assymetrically. In a 3GW condition of industrial/mechanized campaigning, that means _with a platform that it's victim cannot properly fight back against_.

Which is why, when a P-47 or Typhoon can bounce rounds off a roadway into a Tiger's belly and effectively kill it's running gear if not fuel, without ever going through the frontals, you do it and leave the Shermans behind in exchange for Priests.

Because the fighter (and the tactically employed bomber) can mass, 'by weight', more fires locally than the ground pounder can (all their logistics base being 200nm back at an airfield) and they can /come back/ faster as well.

Something which is incredily punishing when the enemy has been cut off from his own lines of communication and resupply by preemptive interdiction of all bridges and railheads.

Throw in the artillery (105 vs. 88, 105 wins, decisively, over-horizon) for interval-air and night time work and the death of the tank lies in the refusal to fight it head on with 'only when massed = huge target signature' armor at all.

Armed forces have a much harder time predicting and blocking tight, random, thrusts by small forces than they do obvious, AA restrictive, brigade or better attack lanes.

Had we been On-Continent in 1943 as Stalin begged us to be, we would have faced fewer aircraft, vastly less well prepared shoreline defenses (something we knew both from Resistance agents in the Wall building effort and radio intercepts as well as technical intelligence from photos), and an enemy utterly bogged down in the Kursk/Kharkov debacle.

The Luftwaffe had virtually ceased to exist in France by 1943 and with limited heavy flak, 600 B-17s operating in 4-ship cells on a 150nm radius could have bombed with 20-50, 100lb, bombs from 10-12,000ft all day long in finally achieving the pickle barrel accuracy the Norden was famed for.

Something which, again, the Jagdfliegers couldn't match because the Me-109 had a radius of less than 90nm and all the local French rail lines by which the JGs were transfered around could have as easily been downed in 1943 as they were in 1944.

As is, we deliberately chose to let the Soviets bleed while stubbing our toe in a bottom up attack that could only end at a blank wall in Northern Italy (they're called the Alps) and so wasted a year in which the Germans only got stronger.

WWII is thus perhaps the best example we will ever have of one side being too proud, too interested in making money off of war production and too interested in long-term geopolitical outcomes to acknowledge the superiorities of it's opponent's tactics in making Blitzkrieg our own system, sooner.

Yet for all that, I think the ultimate argument here is one of troop quality. Despite all the vae victis hindsight and the hype about 'only if Hitler said so' chain of command rigidity, the fact of the matter is that the Wehrmacht was better than we were.

Had it not been for the presence of airpower (albeit late and indecisively in support of 'great push' type efforts instead of multiple small infiltrations) the Germans had the tanks and the machine guns and the ability to integrate multiple units into scratch teams of hardened experience necessary to stop us decisively as soon as we got away from the beaches and the NGS threat.

IF Airpower was not a part of the equation.

As soon as it (and networked artillery) enter into the picture, the individual quality of the tanks matters only to those forced to use them as improper primary exponents in battles of local attrition.


CJ

While it is true that airpower is vital, it is a bit much to claim that it was the sole deciding factor in victory. Air-to-Ground attack has always been over rated. For example:

At Mortain, the Allied air forces claimed 252 German tanks destroyed or damaged. Yet, the Germans only committed about 177 armored vehicles to the attack. Of these, 46 were confirmed kills of which 9 had been hit by air attack.

British conducted studies as to the destruction of Panther tanks between June 6th 1944 and January 16th 1945. Of the tanks they examined they found that airpower had claimed only 14 out of 199 tanks (another 24 were lost to unknown causes).

In 1952, the US conducted a study of weapons effectiveness for the first year of the Korean War (oops, "police action"). It was found that the US Air Force and Navy/Marine Air Wings combined claimed a total of 3100+ North Korean tanks destroyed. Rather interesting math since Soviet records show that they had sold the NK about 150 T-34-85's prior to the war.

It was GI's (along with our Allies) who beat the German army with the help of airpower and everything else that backed them up. When the inexperienced US Army first went into battle against the much experienced German Army, it is safe to say that the Germans were better. Once the US Army was well blooded, that argument becomes purely subjective.

It should also be pointed out that Typhoons (et al) did not richochet their ordnance into the bellies of Tigers. That would be one heck of a trick. The top decks of Tigers, which air weapons are most likely to hit, are not only thin but the armor is of lesser quality than the front plate (relatively speaking, it is "soft").

I'm not sure where the idea comes from that we prolonged the war in order to line the pockets of the arms industry. That is absurd. Sadly, the Italian campaign was born of stupidity, not greed.

Wicingas,

>>
While it is true that airpower is vital, it is a bit much to claim that it was the sole deciding factor in victory. Air-to-Ground attack has always been over rated. For example:
>>

The only statistical example you need is the number of heavies going over Germany in the same period and the escorts they had committed to them on _utterly useless_ 'strategic interdiction' missions.

>>
At Mortain, the Allied air forces claimed 252 German tanks destroyed or damaged. Yet, the Germans only committed about 177 armored vehicles to the attack. Of these, 46 were confirmed kills of which 9 had been hit by air attack.
>>

Here's the numbers I have, though I admit it is only the Typhoon victories that are listed because 9th TAF TBolts were listed as open kill box commited to support missions in divebombing (bridge busting) and flak suppression rather than direct antiarmor roles:
1,014 Sorties
4,000 60lb SAPs expended
84 tanks claimed killed
55 claimed damaged
112 other vehicles hit or left burning.
Which seems _entirely reasonable and conservative to me_ given WDO teams arriving a week later (after evidence of massive salvage operations by German battlefield recovery teams) found 39 tanks and 58 other vehicles of which 24, 10 and 5 were found to be killed outright, damaged or abandoned. Vs. 32, 23 and 3 softskins in a similar state ratio.
(_Aggressors_, Alex Vanags Baginski & Rikyu Watanabe)

That's a 46 percent and 94 percent claimed:confirmed fractional equivalency compared to the oft-quoted '2 percent' attributed to the /system/ of airpower overall.
Add to this the sheer intimidative power of aircraft in forcing short movements in exposed conditions due to all the losses that occured /before/ Mortain (i.e. denying all out penetrations to depth from a breakthru which could actually scatter and interpetnetrate armored 'fronts' to the extent that small units could be wiped out only if they could be found and victory by rear area havoc and standstill logistics coup becomes possible) and you have what amounts to a panic counterattack as Hitler FINALLY realized that 'It doesn't matter whether it's a decoy effort or the real thing if it works well enough they will support success'.

Yet Mortain's reflex counterthrust did NOT work and indeed the commander of 116th Panzer decided to risk a firing squad rather than commit to the 'are you barking?' game plans of his boss.

Let me tell you here and now, it wasn't Patton's or Hodge's Shermans he was afraid of. Nor at the schwerpunkt itself was it /tanks/ but _artillery_ which kept the Germans in the depressed pocket of the town itself rather than up on the surrounding hilltop roads where they were subject to 'until the last radio quits' continuing bombardment by the 120th.

The German combined force moved up, took half their objectives and were slaughtered for their troubles.

By air and artie. Not tanks.

>>
British conducted studies as to the destruction of Panther tanks between June 6th 1944 and January 16th 1945. Of the tanks they examined they found that airpower had claimed only 14 out of 199 tanks (another 24 were lost to unknown causes).
>>

Unless it was joint service TI force, I don't think any analysis matters because it doesn't deal vehicles later recovered by German forces or the notorious 'let's shiv the competitors while they ain't lookin'!' parochialism of ground vs. airwar doctrinal true believers.
Again, fight the right way and ground power serves only to draw out and fix targets for airpower, enabling the assymetric force kill by a logistically /massive/ force supremacy that doesn't have to haul tons of ordnance over roads when it can simply return directly to a depot=main operating base at 150-250mph for new.
All in near total air supremacy at optimum heights for _level bombing_.
Ground Power Enables Air Power, not the other way around and it _has had_ for a long time. The only exception is in poor weather and then you are better off separating into choke-covering traffic lane coverage with mines and RT and not trying to hold contiguous line geometries.

>>
In 1952, the US conducted a study of weapons effectiveness for the first year of the Korean War (oops, "police action"). It was found that the US Air Force and Navy/Marine Air Wings combined claimed a total of 3100+ North Korean tanks destroyed. Rather interesting math since Soviet records show that they had sold the NK about 150 T-34-85's prior to the war.
>>

Bad weather. Emergency response from limited peninsual airbase system in panic-rout conditions and a much smaller, less experienced, less well equipped, CAS force. Again, you don't take away from the obvious which is _ground enables air not the other way around_.
Only counter it with unrelated force metrics conditions.

>>
It was GI's (along with our Allies) who beat the German army with the help of airpower and everything else that backed them up. When the inexperienced US Army first went into battle against the much experienced German Army, it is safe to say that the Germans were better. Once the US Army was well blooded, that argument becomes purely subjective.
>>

No. The Germans had better force integration and composite group capabilities, even with inferior individual weapons systems and severe shortages. The Red Ball Express couldn't keep up with a two pronged assault (not that the British /half tried/) and with effectively a swing-play logistics system in place, the Germans handily held us to minimal advances despite /overwhelming/ force supremacy until we left the Bocage and even, really, on through Caen and into Paris.
Falaise was an unavoidable consequence of dragging the octupus of multiple armies across an ever narrower frontage of available lines of retreat but _even here_ it was not Patton nor the Brits who closed off the gap but rather AIRPOWER which drove armor through a meatgrinder. Even with /poor/ ground tactics, poorly applied and supported by their own logistics system, airpower attrited the Germans retreating through a traffic choke not of our making but it's own.
Pull the airpower, give the Germans the operational initiative to make it an either/or fight at the surfzone or 'beyond NGS' and they will kick your butts. Not because the Nazis are better but because _the Wehrmacht was_.
THERE IS NO DEGREE OF SEASONING that the Allies ever went through in North Africa or Italy to compare to the Oste Front sir. Nothing comes even close.
Which is fine by me because airpower doesn't just 'go away' and given I know how war should be fought, if the Germans had been so foolish as to put themselves in the way of an /American Blitzkrieg/ they would have steamrolled them up all the way to the Rhine by late August and we would have been at the Czech/Polish borders by Christmas.
At the latest.

>>
It should also be pointed out that Typhoons (et al) did not richochet their ordnance into the bellies of Tigers. That would be one heck of a trick. The top decks of Tigers, which air weapons are most likely to hit, are not only thin but the armor is of lesser quality than the front plate (relatively speaking, it is "soft").
>>

Actually they did it all the time. You shoot a tank in the behind (assuming you can tell the difference at 300mph) you have to hit a target about 10-12ft wide. You shoot it in the side which is where you get maximum 'billboard' displayed hull verticals for acquisition as much as tracking and now you're talking about 22-25ft, nearly double the presented target area. Add to this the certain fact that one of the cardinal sins of Road Recce BAI is flying -along- a traffic lane looking to get shot by the very predictability of them-as-you on spatial positioning and any pilot has to have a genuine case of the stupids to willingly try to attack a road column along it's length. Not least because if you fail to pick up two, shoot one and overfly six more (rather than flash your own flatplated wing area in a speed burning pull off), you _will_ be shot from in front and behind the same velocity vector as fire funnel) Indeed, the German gunners knew if they got the flight lead, 90% of the attacking unit's experience and courage would turn to mush behind him.
Now admittedly, you don't always get the nicest setup on the crossing shot because in the Bocage especiall but really throughout France, the 'treelined lanes' approach to rural roads restricted LOS terribly and complicated generated lead prediction when you dare not correct with the ailerons.
Yet a deft touch on the rudder pedals can steer the impact zone of any strafing geometry if the pilot knows his airframe and his job. Which is AGAIN why you put rounds low to find the range and then tap the stick or the rudder to get the coverage on line with the suspension and tracks to cover _the maximum target area_ with the densest round count you can manage until your firing window closes.
Which is why getting hits on the softest, most exposed, part of the tank came naturally.
Lastly, while the 45` and even 30` dive is nice for putting the maximum number of rounds into a small target area with tight harmonization of the guns for something like a cooler uptake hit, you don't always get that option, thanks to terrain, air defense and threat CCD conditions. The Russians in fact felt that high angles = high approach speeds = too many misses altogether on a 'the first pass is always the cleanest' basis of threat exposure and target silouhetting on a level horizon.
It then becomes a race to choke the roads before they all scatter, after which you can switch to intermittent attacks to let the smoke literally settle before coming back to shoot again that which betrays itself through continued movement. Flak typically would not defend a stalled convoy in road march. Had we had significant bombers able to do level release work on a stick by stick basis, none of the German forces would have left France.
Of course if you end up doing really low angle stuff in hilly or overgrown terrain, you WILL walk your rounds over the target because quite often you acquire late and where that happens you get in maybe one good solid burst with no time for correction at all. Again, SHOOT FOR THE BASE. Because it's better to drop low and and walk up because you've at least marked the target for the element behind you.
Don't believe me? Suffer thru it-
P-47/P-51 Deflection Attacks On Tanks.
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.aviation.military/browse_thread/thread/edc6aa46c77239e2/cc11ec638f0e49c0?hl=en&q=P-47+Tiger+Tank&lnk=ol&
Long story short: what it says is that what the P-47 pilots claimed, modern day revisionists refute. And then a pro F-4 driver jumps in and says that 'Uhm yeah, an ex P-80 pilot authenticated it to me from _Korean experience_'. You shred the treads or the fuel tank (trailer in the case of Tigers) and the tank dies.

>>
I'm not sure where the idea comes from that we prolonged the war in order to line the pockets of the arms industry. That is absurd. Sadly, the Italian campaign was born of stupidity, not greed.
>>

Let's start with the certain fact that RLPs around the Pacific Rim, ships and even a submarine tracked the Japanese task ground all the way across the Pacific, exploiting one of the densest signals environments ever perpetrated by a supposedly 'radio listening silence' force. One of many lies and deceptions about how we entered the war-
http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6315/pearl.html
Since this is not a conspiracy forum I will simply add that every 'defensive' war the U.S. has gotten into has been economically good for us and bad for the insanely overmatched Allies beside us as much as threat who stands against. If you want more, send m a PM.

CJ

Uh, well, nice book. I'll keep this one short. It is a well established fact that the damage from air-to-ground strikes are notoriously exaggerated, even today. American bomber pilots stood zero chance of putting their bombs in a pickle barrel despite the hoopla.

The British conducted their studies not as a branch of service competition but in an effort to determine the effectiveness of their weapon systems. Besides the Panthers, they found one out of 40 Tigers had been KO'd by air and the same for 9 out of 121 Mark IV's. Since British found that planes firing rockets on firing ranges in England could only score a direct hit on a tank about 4% of the time, I fail to see how pilots in combat could do better.

The 12th SS suffered fewer than 100 casualties on their march to Normandy. Their most casualty intensive days were in bad weather when Allied planes were either grounded or hampered in their operations. Despite air attacks, the 2nd Panzer suffered insignificant losses and overed about 240 miles in two days. I could go on for quite a while. Suffice it to say that the lossed of aircraft for the RAF's 2nd TAC and the US 9th Air Force were very high, something like 1700 if I remember correctly. A very poor ratio for such a overwhelming force.

The true effect of airpower in Normandy was in delay. German units also had to travel longer distances due to blown bridges, etc. The real handicap they had was in the lack of fuel. They had failed to stockpile enough to begin with.

The Air Forces have a right to be proud, but they do not dominate land warfare (not then and not now). Pilots and tankers get the praise but it is the infantryman and the artilleryman who bring victory.

You refer to a Japanese task force but do not give the context. I assume this is in reference to Pearl Harbor. Actually, yes we knew a Japanese task force was on the move but no one knew where it was headed. Tracking was pretty primitive in those days (even in recent times, our Navy lost contact with a North Korean freighter they had been shadowing--as I recall they were a bit embarrassed over it). There were warning signs, of course, but as often happens all the pieces of the puzzle did not come together in time. You don't really mention why you brought this up but, again, I assume it is part of the conspiracy "theory" that Roosevelt intentionally let Japan bomb Pearl Harbor, which is hogwash. And, yes, arms manufacturers do make money during war, that is a given. To say that we went to war for profiteering is absurd.

Wicingas,

>>
It is a well established fact that the damage from air-to-ground strikes are notoriously exaggerated, even today. American bomber pilots stood zero chance of putting their bombs in a pickle barrel despite the hoopla.
>>

Everytime U.S. forces faced a possible overmatch or 'hyear kitty kitty' conditioned trap during 2003, U.S. Airpower delivered the decisive blows which drove the enemy away from PRECONTACT positions. Over and over and over again the armor advance would _stop_, the enemy would sit wondering 'what next?' and the power of tactical strikes would obliterate them where they sat so that the armor could move on again.

We don't acknowledge the primacy of airpower so that nobody thinks to contribue major resources to it's defeat but it's preeminence remains a lethal fact. Air Wins what Ground forces the enemy to face without fighting.

Subjective attitudes on accuracy: I have seen a B-25 drop a single 250lb bomb from 2,000ft halfway to center on a 30ft circle. That is good enough for infantry and soft vehicles. Five more in a line on across the CEP datum will kill even a tank outright. From 12,000ft, with their bays stuffed to the roofline with 250# /or smaller/, the B-17s could have saturated entire roads. Destroyed entire villages. Forced the enemy to choose between scattering to form too small an FFTTEA kill chain. Or electing to die in place.

>>
The British conducted their studies not as a branch of service competition but in an effort to determine the effectiveness of their weapon systems.
>>

I trust the WDO like I trust the clap.

>>
Besides the Panthers, they found one out of 40 Tigers had been KO'd by air and the same for 9 out of 121 Mark IV's. Since British found that planes firing rockets on firing ranges in England could only score a direct hit on a tank about 4% of the time, I fail to see how pilots in combat could do better.
>>

I said 20mm and .50 caliber. I did not lie about the number of RPs expended.

I know for a fact that the only way to get decent /groupings/ of RP was from a 60` dive or better which was well nigh impossible with the threat and terrain environment faced and the sighting systems available.

What I said is what I know to be true. The Germans lost to airpower so badly that they dared not move in daylight and when they did, even with 300 Luftwaffe aircraft tasked to provide localized air superiority over the AAs to Mortain, they lost anyway.

Because that is SERIOUS airpower showing the steel gauntlet beneath the silken glove.

>>
The 12th SS suffered fewer than 100 casualties on their march to Normandy. Their most casualty intensive days were in bad weather when Allied planes were either grounded or hampered in their operations. Despite air attacks, the 2nd Panzer suffered insignificant losses and overed about 240 miles in two days. I could go on for quite a while. Suffice it to say that the lossed of aircraft for the RAF's 2nd TAC and the US 9th Air Force were very high, something like 1700 if I remember correctly. A very poor ratio for such a overwhelming force.
>>

And until you refute the numbers I have in a way that I believe it will mean no more than apples to carts.

You bomb from over the threatfloor with weapons that will do the job and /no more/ and you concentrate every asset available to force that condition from one of ordered approach to panic to rout until the enemy is no longer a cohesive force but simply a bunch of running dogs.

>>
The true effect of airpower in Normandy was in delay. German units also had to travel longer distances due to blown bridges, etc. The real handicap they had was in the lack of fuel. They had failed to stockpile enough to begin with.
>>

The true effect of airpower in Normandy died when they did not use it. At all.

There should have been a thousand aircraft on cab rank call to make cratered foxholes where there were none. To engage pillboxes and fighting positions from their easiest-hit landward side. To reduce beach obstacles and cover the guns on and behind the heights. To support the airborne troops holding the inland bridges or to down them if no radio contact was made.

We had the force, we CHOSE not to use them.

And thus therein lies the problem for there is nothing for 'historical DDay' to be compared with but itself as the blood of those who died on Omaha fighting infantry vs. fortified position in 'reverse assymetry' warfare are not present to cast dissent or raise a hand for an alternate solution.

>>
The Air Forces have a right to be proud, but they do not dominate land warfare (not then and not now).
>>

They do, we simply cover it up so that those in the 'lesser services' don't lose their esprit de corps and our enemies continue to fail to realize how little they know of what is vs. is not possible with airpower.

>>
Pilots and tankers get the praise but it is the infantryman and the artilleryman who bring victory.
>>

Only if you screw up. Infantrymen should walk in to welcoming arms not small ones. Not stand atop a pile of their own corpses to feel vindicated by defeat.

Infantry exist to occupy terrain AFTER victory. Thereby forcing the /enemy/ to come into their ubiquity as a terrain-held standpoint of denied infiltration and partisan warfare tactics against logistics and rear are maneuver force.

Just like 'the surge' is proving now, three years late.

Soldiers are our ambassadors in honor only. To kill and to win you use -overwhelming force- until the enemy run or dies in place.

Short of Jedi, there will never be any other way.

>>
You refer to a Japanese task force but do not give the context. I assume this is in reference to Pearl Harbor. Actually, yes we knew a Japanese task force was on the move but no one knew where it was headed. Tracking was pretty primitive in those days (even in recent times, our Navy lost contact with a North Korean freighter they had been shadowing--as I recall they were a bit embarrassed over it). There were warning signs, of course, but as often happens all the pieces of the puzzle did not come together in time. You don't really mention why you brought this up but, again, I assume it is part of the conspiracy "theory" that Roosevelt intentionally let Japan bomb Pearl Harbor, which is hogwash. And, yes, arms manufacturers do make money during war, that is a given. To say that we went to war for profiteering is absurd.
>>

We tracked them all the way across the Pacific. We confiscated radio and ships logs putting men at risk of trial for treason lest they let the world know that WE KNEW when the enemy was less than 200 miles off Hawaii's shores.

We chose 'Liberty' and slaughter for the Merchant Marine rather than _Victory_ and steam turbines to make the percentage fraction built vs. reaching destination /survivable/ vs. a 15-17 knot U-Boat surface cruise intercept speed.

We refused to tackle 5 major German transformation/rectification facilities where the loss of superdynes with 10-20 TONS of brass windings would have been as essentially irreplaceable at any point in the war as they were VISIBLE from their high tension lines.

We fought to 'defend Australia' on New Guinea and Guadalcanal rather than inviting them aboard an unsinkable aircraft carrier of some 2.7 million square miles of open terrain, with subs off every coast to render their carriers worthless. And landbased airpower completely beyond their OCA reach.

We refused to tackle the Japanese oil, rubber, tin and aluminum resources in the East Indies until 1945. WHY?

We bled RIVERS for places like Peleleiu, Iwo and Okinawa, knowing full well that with nukes, the only island we needed was Guam, Saipan or Tinian.

Then, having covered the sea in corpses we /refused to spend more/ when, with 20 billion dollars 'under investigation' in the Atomic programs it was all too easy to fake the casualty estimates for Coronet and Olympic so that we could break every treaty or instinct of decency to which we were signatory and hit civilian targets with WMD, for a profit.

With (defective torpedos and all) 56% of all enemy shipping taken out by submarine attack and CVBGs we _could not replace_ if lost to symmetric battle with superior Japanese force at Midway. With England furthermore as little as six weeks away form defeat at least three times /before/ May 1942.

We refused to commit U.S. Carriers to hunter killer operations in exploiting Huff Duff and early Enigma naval decrypts which we had (again 'in denial of stated history') _from almost the beginning of the war_.

We would not force the Neutrality of a fascist dictator like Franco to make a third front beyond the fears of Dieppe when we could go another 1,500 miles to Africa and sweat with the Scorpions like as Rommel's force sat, crippled with Dysentary and crushed logistics, 150 miles short of Alex.

We KNEW the Germans knew how to build a bomb (they had the density calcs better than we did for eletron orbit cascades) and that they had a secret Uranium refining process set up through the SS slave labor system and the 'never a pound of rubber from the largest Buna plant in the world' complex. We KNEW they knew how to use any of the THREE principle means _they pioneered_ to bring yellow cake to yield sufficient for metallicazation.

WE KNEW that they had a high yield fizzle on the north coast of the Baltic in late 1943 because the entire area was EMPd and the Swedes wrote about.

We KNEW that they had 3,000 tons of their own Sudetan and confiscated uranium materials of which we recovered less than half.

We KNEW they could build a (superior because it was lighter) gun design weapon. Because Oppenheimer himself admitted that the reason our own wasn't tested was because it was 'of German provenance'.

And they already had.

Despite such overwhelming evidence of both easy outs and incredible risks, _we did nothing_ to expedite the war.

Because our upper class rules the government by whom they pay to have popularly elected and they /feared/ as fear itself no less than losing their own position to the beginnings of a working socialism as instigated by FDRs early regime. You know the one which WPA extracted a nation from the angry mob of a depression that the elitist rich had put them in.

And the only way to recapture the American Capitalist demi-aristocratic ethos was to reinvest in an industry that itself could only become as powerful by enslaving the working class to the ultimate consumer customer of a World Wide War which 'everyone could afford' on the ultimate credit/installment plan of Lend Lease.

CONCLUSION:
The above is true in detail. Can I link it together into a causal whole as a collective negative whose density is so enormous as to defy statistical probability?

No.

Is it true anyway? Yes. To the extent that anything is true as a trend what is invisible or withheld as an individual incident.

There are way too many instances of the impossible happening for convenience of victimization in our history sir. Alamo, Maine, Lusitania, Mexico, Pearl, Taejon, Tonkin, Iran/Iraq, 1991 ALL are seen as engineered vulnerabilities as much as threats when looked at collectively.

Nobody attacks a nation four times their mass if there is a choice. Nobody fails to destroy an enemy, /quickly/, that is so insignificant as to be quashable minimum effort.

Except by choice.

When 'The New World Order' or whatever it comes to be called dies of it's own bonfired vanity and history is allowed to look at it's own reflection from beyond the reach of dead soldiers defending the why of 'what they fought for' to instead look at the HOW of why they fought /so badly/, on purpose, then and only then will we begin to see the glimmerings of truth in, if not our memories of events, then at least our understandings of why war can never be fought for the reasons it now is.

Short of a time machine, there is nothing better that we can do to understand as much as change the past but build a better future than that based on the lies of assumption we now live with.


CJ

A B-25 dropped a bomb into a 30' circle from 2000 ft. Yes? And your point? In my M60A1, I could put three rounds into an 18" circle at 1200 meters on the gunnery range. Could I have done that in in the stressful environment of combat? I doubt it. At least not consistently. What weapons and soldiers can do in controlled environments is never the reality. The vast majority of bombs that we dropped did nothing of consequence.

Let's see. How quickly could we have quashed the Axis? Some small European countries had larger and better equipped armies than we did. Our main artillery peice was still the French 75mm from WWI. General Marshall initially refused to authorize the upgrade to the 105mm as it would have cost more than $190 million (1930's dollars) just to replace our ammunition stocks. Our mechanized forces were virtually non-existent. The only way our cavalry obtained any light tanks was by tricking Congress into funding "combat cars". Most of our destroyer fleet hailed from WWI. Our soldiers trained with wooden machineguns and sacks of flour. Germany and Japan already had strong militaries when ours was a joke. We had to raise, train, equip and transport a vast force. That does not come from snapping your fingers. I know people these days think in terms of sound bites but war is no sound bite. Victory takes time and how one achieves that victory requires careful planning--unfortunately, however, it is mostly trial and error. The enemy does not cooperate with your plans, there is inside debate, your allies have their own goals and there is the all powerful "Unknown". For example, the US Navy, up until June 1941, was afraid that they would have to fight the fleets of both Japan and the Soviet Union with a fleet that was, overall, not up to modern standards. There was much discussion on how to deal with the percieved threat and it was unresolved until Germany marched into the USSR.

As for letting Japan invade Australia, I don't believe the Aussies would have appreciated that any more so than if someone had said: "Let's let Japan invade California and we'll bleed 'em to death in the Sierra Nevadas". Letting the Japanese invade Australia would have been utter stupidity.

Also, we did not need to go after those Japanese resources you speak of. We had better targets: Their shipping lanes. It was a strategy that worked rather well, all things considered. Our submarines choked Japans resources by sinking the ships carrying them.

I am curious about where you are getting your info on Pearl Harbor and the prolonging of the war for profit. I have read some conspiracy theories and, to date, I find them most amusing.

As for the infantry, they are not babysitters for captured territory. You cannot achieve victory or maintain it without them. Planes may be able to level villages (not so good for the villagers, by the way), but until the infantry move and root out the enemy, most of whom survived the impressive bombing, you can't win.

You are clearly someone who is overly impressed with airpower and obsessively so. I will leave you to your delusions. Just note that airpower is part of the combined arms concept. It is not
a stand alone power. All efforts to win strictly by airpower have historically failed.

The one Sherman that was capable of taking on the tiger and panther was the Sherman Firefly, the upgunned version the Brits deployed. Only problem was there weren't enough, and the germans quickly learned to hit any firefly first, easily recognizable because of the long barrel on the 17 pdr main gun

True for the most part. A Firefly shooting APDS could even take on a King Tiger frontally at a moderate range. However, a Sherman/76 supplied with hypershot could take on Tigers and Panthers at upwards of 1600+ yards (however, in one engagement, Shermans shooting at Tigers at 3400 yards with hypershot were unable to penetrate their armor). While it could not penetrate the Panther's glacis at these ranges it could penetrate the turret front. Hypershot was also much more accurate than the 17 pounder's APDS. The failure in this matter was not the Sherman, it was army policy. Very few rounds of hypershot were delivered to the troops. Despite the realities and changing attitudes, the Army still did not want their tanks getting bogged down in tank duels.