Little Known Facts of World War II

[flywithastick]

1. The first German serviceman killed in WW2 was killed by the Japanese (China, 1937), the first American serviceman killed was killed by the Russians (Finland 1940), the highest ranking American killed was Lt. Gen. Lesley McNair, killed by the US Army Air Corps. . . . So much for allies.

2. The youngest US serviceman was 12 year old Calvin Graham, USN. He was wounded and given a Dishonorable Discharge for lying about his age. (His benefits were later restored by act of Congress).

3. At the time of Pearl Harbor the top US Navy command was Called CINCUS (pronounced "sink us"), the shoulder patch of the US Army's 45th Infantry division was the Swastika, and Hitler's private train was named "Amerika." All three were soon changed for PR purposes.

4. More US servicemen died in the Air Corps than the Marine Corps. While completing the required 30 missions your chance of being killed was 71%.

5. Generally speaking there was no such thing as an average fighter pilot. You were either an ace or a target. For instance Japanese ace Hiroyoshi Nishizawa shot down over 80 planes. He died while a passenger on a cargo plane.

6. It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th round with a tracer round to aid in aiming. This was a mistake. Tracers had different ballistics so (at long range) if your tracers were hitting the target 80% of your rounds were missing. Worse yet tracers instantly told your enemy he was under fire and from which direction. Worst of all was the practice of loading a string of tracers at the end of the belt to tell you that you were out of ammo. This was definitely not something you wanted to tell the enemy. Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss rate go down.


7. When allied armies reached the Rhine the first thing men did was pee in it. This was pretty universal from the lowest private to Winston Churchill (who made a big show of it) and Gen. Patton (who had himself photographed in the act).

8. German Me-264 bombers were capable of bombing New York City but it wasn't worth the effort. (?)

9. German submarine U-120 was sunk by a malfunctioning toilet.

10. Among the first "Germans" captured at Normandy were several Koreans. They had been forced to fight for the Japanese Army until they were captured by the Russians and forced to fight for the Russian Army until they were captured by the Germans and forced to fight for the German Army until they were captured by the US Army.

11. Following a massive naval bombardment 35,000 US and Canadian troops stormed ashore at Kiska, in the Aleutian Islands. 21 troops were killed in the firefight. It would have been worse if there had been any Japanese on the island.

The info listed above is from Col. D.G. Swinford, USMC, Ret. and history buff.

http://www.merel.us/Joker/Joke Archive/archive/070102.htm

 

[bart]

Why did we continue the war after we took casualties? We had no business fighting in Europe. Hitler was no threat to us. The evidence shows that he did not pursue weapons that could reach US soil and he had only weak ties to the Japanese.

 

[Typhoon1244]

German Me-264 bombers were capable of bombing New York City but it wasn't worth the effort.

Fascinating story behind the Me-264. It was one of several aircraft intended to carry Germany's nuclear bomb...if they ever got it built. By the time the '264 was rolling out of the factory, Germany didn't have the capacity to build them in large numbers. And a flight of two or three long-range conventional bombers wouldn't have been able to do much physical damage to N.Y.C. in that day and age.

If you haven't seen it, the Me-264 looked something like a stubby B-29 with twin vertical stabilizers ala the Beech 18.

 

[Typhoon1244]

The evidence shows that he did not pursue weapons that could reach US soil...

False, of course. The Me-264 wasn't as scary as his ballistic missile program. Given time, Hitler could have controlled the planet.

..and he had only weak ties to the Japanese.

Now that's true. Hitler was never comfortable with the Japanese alliance. (For that matter, most Japanese military leaders weren't comfortable with the Germans, either.)

Contrary to what you might think, Hitler's reaction to the attack on Pearl Harbor was not a favorable one. He didn't want us in his war!

 

[JJG]

Here's more,

The PBY pilot who spotted the German Battleship the Bismarck for the British in 1940 was a U.S. Navy exchange pilot.

The P-38's in Europe could not follow the German fighters into steep dives because of compressibility problems. Lockheed built spoiler kits for all the P-38's in the European theatre of operations. The spoiler kits were all placed on a merchant ship that was sunk by a U-Boat enroute to England. P-38's were soon withdrawn from escort duties in Europe.

 

[Snakum]

Why did we continue the war after we took casualties? We had no business fighting in Europe. Hitler was no threat to us. The evidence shows that he did not pursue weapons that could reach US soil and he had only weak ties to the Japanese.

Because he was actively taking over large chunks of other sovereign nations who were weaker. Just like Saddam in 1990. Saddam was waging an agressive war against another country for no other reason than the envy of it's resources.

But Saddam in 2003 was merely terrorizing his own. If the possibility of a WMD program and it's future use against US interests is the issue ... why ain't we in North Korea? They don't have a 'program' ... they got the real deal and are even bragging about it. Why not go THERE after Afganistan? What ... we were in the neighborhood?

What an unmitigated abortion of a foreign policy this nation has today.

Minh

 

[bart]

We aren't in North Korea because we do not want a war with China, plain and simple. If war with N Korea is the course of action you are in favor of pursuing, then get ready for 1,000s of casualties a week. China may not have a technologically advanced military, but they can commit well over 1 million troops and not blink.

Your view on US policy in the Middle East is both short-sighted and extraordinarily naive. We needed a military presence there to combat terrorism and Iraq was willing to cooperate by being obstinate on inspections. Make no mistake, the real reason we are there is to send a clear message to governments in the Middle East that if you support terrorism against the US, then you have declared war on the US and we will bring our might to bear on your ass.

The next time you go bashing our foreign policy, how many attacks have taken place on US soil in the last 2 years? We are killing those that need it in the worst way at a pretty good clip in Iraq, and all the better to do it there than here. The rules of engagement are a lot looser and the media only reports US casualties and not the enemy's. So much the better, let the Islamic fanatics go to Iraq, our military will hunt them down and stack them like cordwood.

 

[Denizen]

Interesting

the first American serviceman killed was killed by the Russians (Finland 1940)

I wonder if the Author is taking into account the U.S.S Panay...Sunk by the Empire in 1936 or '37

Sure, they blamed it on Chinese Bandits...yeah thats it....bandits.

 

[Typhoon1244]

Re: Interesting

I wonder if the Author is taking into account the U.S.S Panay?

Naw, that was the Japs...er, I mean "Japanese."

(Seen the movie Midway on T.V. lately? They've completely edited the word "Jap" out of the movie for the sake of political correctness. Maybe someday they'll have the technology to take all the Japanese people out of the movie, too!)

 

[Vector4fun]

Soooo, Bart,

When will we know we've killed enough Muslim Radicals to be *SAFE* from terrorism again? When will our mission in Iraq be fulfilled? Wait, was *IS* the mission? It changes every few months. True, no attacks here for two years, yet every couple months a new warning about recent intelligence that an attack may be comming. And after Iraq, there's still Iran and Syria to be invaded. Then there's those pesky radicals in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, Malaysia, etc. Lessee, we're still fighting in Afghanistan......

Maybe we can contract the Russians to kill some more of them radicals in their former republics, the Russians have a proven track record for killing their own.

Just want to know how *I* know when we've won this war???

How will I know it's not going to be like '73 when Nixon claimed "success" in South Vietnam?


http://www.watergate.info/nixon/73-01-23_vietnam.shtml





Ya know, I was naive enough to believe the SOB then..........

 

[Majik]

Vector,
You're gonna have a problem because we're never really gonna know when we "win" the war.
You'll know we're losing the war when more planes explode into buildings, cities are rendered unusable for years because of nuclear contamination, the airline industry becomes almost non-existent as we know it now, the economy really collapses, etc.
Pay a little now or pay the ultimate cost later...

 

[House_X]

[
5. Generally speaking there was no such thing as an average fighter pilot. You were either an ace or a target. For instance Japanese ace Hiroyoshi Nishizawa shot down over 80 planes. He died while a passenger on a cargo plane.

20Archive/archive/070102.htm[/url] [/B]

Nishizawa's knickname was "the devil". He would frequently loose wingman in dogfights because they could not keep up with him, thus his wingman would most likely get shotdown. He was 6'-0" and he could barely fit into the cockpit of the zero. Everyone feared this man...even his own commrades. Ironically he was shy and somewhat anti-social. He was stationed at Lae ( a zero hornet's nest) then to the Phillipenes. He was shot down while trying to return to Japan to defend against the B-29's. Suburo Sakai's own wingman (Honda) was assigned TDY to "the devil" for one mission. Honda was shotdown that day...Sakai never forgave "the devil" for his selfishness.

The most surprising thing about the pilots in the Japan Naval Air Force is that they discarded their radios early in the war in-order to save weight (the radios were very unrealiable as well) they used hand signals to communicate while inflight.

 

[katanabob]

Speaking of Saburo Sakai, his autobiography Samurai is one of the finest pieces you'll ever read on the Pacific air war. (In my humble opinion)

On another note, any interested in the Aleutian conflict should read The Thousand Mile War , which is rather dry and long but does a decent job of documenting what really went on in Alaska. My granddad was a Corpsman on a PBY and a veteran of those engagements.

 

[House_X]

Speaking of Saburo Sakai, his autobiography Samurai is one of the finest pieces you'll ever read on the Pacific air war. (In my humble opinion)

On another note, any interested in the Aleutian conflict should read The Thousand Mile War , which is rather dry and long but does a decent job of documenting what really went on in Alaska. My granddad was a Corpsman on a PBY and a veteran of those engagements.

Yeah, it's a great book...I have some clips of him doing interviews, even in japanese he's very entertaining. I think he died in 2001. He worked with microsoft in creating flightsim combat 2 pacific theater.

The funniest part of Samurai is the story of how the Zero pilots would do airshows over Port Morseby to entice the P40 pilots into dogfighting, and how the B-25 pilots would drop notes on Lae thanking the JNAF pilots for the great airshow. Port Morseby and Lae was one of the greatest rivalries in the Pacific.

 

[DoinTime]

The next time you go bashing our foreign policy, how many attacks have taken place on US soil in the last 2 years?

To qualify your statement why don't you tell us how many attacks against the US have taken place on US soil since Pearl Harbor. Better yet, how about since the civil war? The Revolutionary war? Two years is an insignificant amount of time. We are no safer today than we were pre-9/11, in fact, probably less safe.

 

[vossdr1]

Your first point is wrong. The war did not start until Poland was invaded on September 1, 1939. The German casualty was not a casualty of the Second World War (it is difficult to be a casualty of a war that hasn't started).

The American casualty was likewise, not a war casualty since the U.S. did not declare war until after December 7, 1941. Additionally, the Soviets were not the "good allies" they later became in the war. Their conflict with the Finns was, at the time, seen in the same light as the Nazi aggression toward the German neighbors.

Swastikas were used as a good symbol until the Nazis adopted it. The Nazi swastika is pointed opposite to most illustrated on non-Nazi things made before the war. The swastika was also on the headband of the Indian (Native American) symbol of the Lafayette Escadrille.

If interested, additional good reading is the book The Big Show by Pierre Clostermann.

 

[wildbill]

If the japs bombed Pearl Harbor and we declared war on the japs, why did we go after the germans first? They did not bomb us before they declared war on the U.S.

 

[vossdr1]

The Germans declared war on us soon after we declared war on Japan. Sentiment in the U.S. at the time was to stay out of the "European War." When Hitler declared war on us, we had no choice.

Churchill, Joe Stalin and FDR agreed that the more imminent threat was Germany. The allies wanted to take the heat off of Soviet Russia. In 1941, the Russians were taking quite a beating and were in a life and death struggle with the Nazis.

The U.S. believed that the distance the Japanese would have to cover to invade the U.S. was too great, so they only allocated a fraction of the war effort to the Pacific, Alaskan, and CBI theaters.

 

[JayDub]

Another consideration in going after Germany first was the fact that the Pacific Fleet was seriously damaged and the U.S. needed time to lick their wounds. The merchant marine was a lot more critical to fighting a European war, than a Pacific war. True, they needed to convert some passenger liners (like the Queen Mary in LGB), but that was a lot easier done than chasing Yamamoto around with some weakly defended carriers. They really needed to beef-up their battleships and cruisers again before they took that task on.

The battle of Midway allowed them to use carriers to fight a battle, up until then all navies were centered around the battleship. Midway was the first time carriers from two countries basically fought a battle (which proved the concept). The coming-of-age of the carrier is one of the more significant reasons the U.S. became known as having the world's most powerful navy.

The battle of Leyte Gulf (if my memory serves) is marked as the last real duel between war ships slugging it out shot for shot. It also showed Bull Halsey's a$$.

Respectfully,

JayDub

 

[Typhoon1244]

Midway was the first time carriers from two countries basically fought a battle...

If I remember correctly, the Battle of the Coral Sea actually has that distinction.

Here's a trivia question fer y'all: the attack on Pearl Harbor was the second attack of it's type in the twentieth century, and was in fact inspired by the first.

Where was the first, and between what two countries was the battle fought?