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Cessna posted:And to top it all off the book has some extended diatribes about what a tremendous burden it is to have such an enormous penis. No, really, there's page after page of that. I thought you were trying to say I shouldn't read his works. 
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Apr 13, 2023 01:59
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I started reading Thunder Below! last night 
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Apr 13, 2023 08:49
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Gewehr 43 posted:I thought you were trying to say I shouldn't read his works. Next you should read The Godfather for a heartwarming tale of a man with a huge hog and a woman with a giant pussy finding love
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Apr 13, 2023 10:33
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MikeCrotch posted:Next you should read The Godfather for a heartwarming tale of a man with a huge hog and a woman with a giant pussy finding love If you haven’t read it and only saw the movie you don’t know why the Mafia doesn’t sell drugs to children: they don’t have any money.
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Apr 16, 2023 12:54
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https://twitter.com/RealTimeWWII/status/1648076369291538437 So is there a single person in that room who doesn't think they're completely hosed? I'm presuming this is a relatively famous moment from the closing days of the wat, so do we know how many Nazis took the cyanide? More broadly, what is your committed Nazi thinking in that moment, or whatever moment it becomes clear that Germany is hosed: that they were failed by Hitler, they were failed by the military, they were victims of fifth columnists, what's their dolchstosslegende zoux fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 20:22
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https://www.wtnh.com/news/connecticut/maritime-mystery-submarine-found-in-long-island-sound-nearly-80-years-after-it-sank/ The Defender has been found. It's kind of an oddball little sub. Made in 1907 it was designed for anti-ship work but also salvage work. Like the NR-1 it has bottoming wheels. These were more about keeping the hull from having contact with the sea floor than propulsion. But Simon Lake's design didn't impress the Navy and they never bought it. He did end up forming the Lake Torpedo Boat company which made some of the S-class subs before losing the Navy's confidence and all of his contracts were added to the work Electric Boat was doing. Afterwards the thing was at various docks till it sank in 1946. I know a couple of groups want to raise it and see if a museum will take it. The USS Nautilus and Sub Force Museum isn't far away. It's in Long Island Sound so the depth is anywhere from 60 to 300 ft or so.
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Apr 18, 2023 20:47
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lol @ simon lake john holland 5ever
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Apr 18, 2023 22:16
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Greg12 posted:lol @ simon lake There's a book to be written about the shenanigans his company got up to in order to force the USN to buy his inferior submarines, up to the point that a congressman got in hot water with his colleagues over it.
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Apr 18, 2023 22:36
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zoux posted:https://twitter.com/RealTimeWWII/status/1648076369291538437 I can't speak specifically to the cyanide there and how much they were used, but there's an amazing spectrum for end of the war Nazis. On one end you have your utterly died in the wool true believers. The ones who 110% bought into everything and honestly thought that they had lost an existential war for the survival of their race, that the Russians would murder all the men, castrate all the boys for slave labor, use all the women and girls as slave breeding stock, and every other bad thing you could imagine. A fair number of them do suicidal fanaticism poo poo that looks more like something out of the Pacific. Putting their kids to bed with a hand grenade then going outside to bayonet charge a Soviet tank company kind of poo poo. There is just some harrowing, horrible, tragic stuff when you start looking at the level of the dumbshit little gauleiter who, while he may have been a piece of crap, had a family that didn't deserve what he did to them. There's one I remember pretty vividly where some low level bullshit Nazi is all ready to shoot his family before the Russians get to him when his wife manages to talk him down, convince him to just throw his party poo poo in the lake on the outskirts of town, and then they just blended in to the rest of the population. Then you've got the ones who were just so loving deep in the system - political bigwigs and the like - that they knew they were hosed if the house of cards came down. Some of them basically took the true believer way out, and a fair number of them probably were true believers to boot. I'm thinking Goebbels and his wife poisoning their kids in the Fuhrer bunker before having an SS guy shoot them in the back of the head. Others tried to run, some of them succeeded. Himmler tried to blend in with the mass of surrendering soldiers dressed as a sergeant, got found out, ended up killing himself via cyanide. Mengele made it to S. America and died of a stroke in the 70s, Eichmann made it out too but was famously abducted by Mossad. Others saw the writing on the wall and tried to cut the best deal they could, some more successfully than others. Goering went out of his way to surrender to the Americans rather than the Soviets, but he was too fat a fish and would have hung if he hadn't killed himself first. Then you've got the opportunistic followers and the mid-tier careerists. People who were mostly along for the ride to better their own fortunes. Pretty much all of them tried to make it through as intact as possible and restart life, and a shocking number of them laid some groundwork to try and make themselves look not horrible in the post-war.
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Apr 19, 2023 00:03
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Cyrano4747 posted:I can't speak specifically to the cyanide there and how much they were used, but there's an amazing spectrum for end of the war Nazis. Remarkable what people can propaganda themselves into believing, but I guess Nazis have a predisposition, otherwise they wouldn't be Nazis. What about your average civilian, did they also believe in the devouring Russian hordes propaganda? Did they start killing themselves or fleeing to the schwartzwald? I know of that one incident on Saipan where a bunch of Japanese citizens threw themselves off a cliff rather than face the depredations the IJA told them the US GIs will visit upon them, but I don't know how common that was. Did the Nazi party try and do the same to their citizenry? How did the average German citizen conceptualize what was going happen around them and to them in the waning days of the war? How did the average Japanese citizen? zoux fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 00:20
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zoux posted:Remarkable what people can propaganda themselves into believing, but I guess Nazis have a predisposition, otherwise they wouldn't be Nazis. What about your average civilian, did they also believe in the devouring Russian hordes propaganda? Did they start killing themselves or fleeing to the schwartzwald? I know of that one incident on Saipan where a bunch of Japanese citizens threw themselves off a cliff rather than face the depredations the IJA told them the US GIs will visit upon them, but I don't know how common that was. Did the Nazi party try and do the same to their citizenry? How did the average German citizen conceptualize what was going happen around them and to them in the waning days of the war? How did the average Japanese citizen? First off, I'll just note that how much what the citizens on Saipan did was voluntary is pretty hotly debated. Some people claim it was flat out coerced, others that the IJA (or IJN? forget who was defending there) was very much encouraging them to the point of giving people suicide grenades and the like. I don't know well enough to say, but some people get really heated talking about civilian suicides in the Pacific. But you're going to see the full spectrum in the general population as well. It's not like Nazis were separate. In every little town you'd have the people who totally bought in and the people who thought it was bullshit. My guess is that most of the ones who were really bought into it all went out with the Volkssturm, but that's just a gut check.
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Apr 19, 2023 00:30
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Oh for sure, it's a remarkable story and it would make more sense that the Japanese troops marched them over the cliff, I should've considered that.
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Apr 19, 2023 00:41
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Wouldn't the nazi impulses to commit suicide be powered more by fascist death cult poo poo rather than a logical fear of consequences? Germany and Austria lost a major war before, and their leadership wasn't put through trials for crimes against humanity by the Allies last time around. The Nuremberg Trials were a weird new thing that a whole new legal basis had to be constructed for. Plausibly, Hitler could've escaped to like Switzerland to live his life in exile like Wilhelm II did. Japan had its own death cult aspects, but also the public at large knew less about how how the US would treat conquered peoples, so they had a lot more to fear from what they knew about what Japan did when it was out conquering.
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Apr 19, 2023 02:22
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Greg12 posted:lol @ simon lake Half of my family has worked for Electric Boat at some point or another. So I do have a certain amount of bias.
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Apr 19, 2023 02:33
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zoux posted:https://twitter.com/RealTimeWWII/status/1648076369291538437 I just keep imagining hours later, the third viola or whatever cautiously getting up, looking around, leaving, then coming back in with a sack and methodically looting the bodies.
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Apr 19, 2023 02:34
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SlothfulCobra posted:Wouldn't the nazi impulses to commit suicide be powered more by fascist death cult poo poo rather than a logical fear of consequences? Germany and Austria lost a major war before, and their leadership wasn't put through trials for crimes against humanity by the Allies last time around. The Nuremberg Trials were a weird new thing that a whole new legal basis had to be constructed for. Plausibly, Hitler could've escaped to like Switzerland to live his life in exile like Wilhelm II did. I think it's important to note the difference in the scale of defeat of Nazi Germany towards the end of WW2 vs. Imperial Germany in WW1. Not only had all of the pre-war territorial gains been rolled back, but Germany proper had been invaded from several directions. The Wehrmacht was dissolving into pockets of resistance with no real hope of linking up with other elements or being resupplied. Many major cities were wrecked, much of the national infrastructure was destroyed, basic lines of communication interrupted. gently caress, the capitol was under siege! Many labor and death camp complexes had been captured. poo poo was pretty obviously Going Badly© in every way and in every direction. The only thing the Nazi regime had going for it was the lack of revolution at home, among the military and civilians. In comparison, Imperial Germany was still fielding a fairly capable, experienced military under a unified command. The Fatherland, while not untouched, was not under significant enemy occupation. The chances of anything happening towards Germany in the East were very low. Rail lines and roads, the electric grid, what major roads existed, they were mostly intact and operating. All this while attempting to deal with a revolution within state structures, both civilian and military, which was only resolved after the war had ended.
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Apr 19, 2023 03:02
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Good. If only there was a French projectionist too.
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Apr 19, 2023 03:15
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I looked a documentary called Getting away with murder(s), which is about Nazi war criminals who got away with. It boggels the mind that some hardcore SS-men simply continued their lives and were active right wing extremists to the end.
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Apr 19, 2023 08:37
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SlothfulCobra posted:Wouldn't the nazi impulses to commit suicide be powered more by fascist death cult poo poo rather than a logical fear of consequences? Germany and Austria lost a major war before, and their leadership wasn't put through trials for crimes against humanity by the Allies last time around. Not like they didn't try actually - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leipzig_war_crimes_trials
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Apr 19, 2023 09:50
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SlothfulCobra posted:Wouldn't the nazi impulses to commit suicide be powered more by fascist death cult poo poo rather than a logical fear of consequences? There's a line in a soldier's memoir - I forget which, but can dig it up - where the author overhears another German soldier talking to civilians about the advancing Red Army. "If you knew what we did in Russia you'd put a bullet in your brain."
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Apr 19, 2023 14:52
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A few years ago I posted extracts from the account of OzS Heinz Schaffer, commander of the submarine U-977, who took his submarine (and its crew) to Argentina on hearing of the German surrender in 1945. The quotes-in-quotes don't copy over, so here's a link to the post: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3896814&userid=202609&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post505479941 Allowing for it being one guy with a particular axe to grind, and writing in hindsight; he says that as soon as the Eastern Front collapsed and with the success of the Soviet Vistula–Oder offensive in January 1945 he (and everyone else) knew that the war was lost. He says that the common knowledge/feeling was that Germany and its people had the options of being brutally wiped out by the Soviets or facing mass starvation and humiliation under the Allied Morgenthau Plan. There was an undercurrent of wishing/hoping/expecting that the German leadership and the Allies would reach a last-minute honourable surrender and ally against everyone's true enemy, the Soviets, to keep them out of civilised Europe. He was in Berlin in April 1945 and met a Waffen-SS officer on a train who expressed utter confidence that new and terrible German weapons would turn the tide at the last minute. When the order for unconditional surrender was received on U-977, he refused to believe that Dönitz had agreed to those terms and concluded that it was an Allied trick. This, and his certainty that no good fate awaited any German who stayed in Germany, prompted his decision to take his boat to Argentina.
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Apr 19, 2023 17:49
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BalloonFish posted:A few years ago I posted extracts from the account of OzS Heinz Schaffer, commander of the submarine U-977, who took his submarine (and its crew) to Argentina on hearing of the German surrender in 1945. Thanks, it's very informative and also somewhat funny quote:"I returned to Berlin for a few days to take leave of my mother. The war was fast approaching its end: the defence of Hamburg was already being planned. It seemed that destiny was dragging the German people into the abyss, the crazy demand by our enemies for unconditional surrender to them all. The journey to Berlin lasted twenty-four hours. At regular intervals there would be an air-raid warning and then we would crawl beneath the train and wait for the All Clear. Countless re-routings. I was seated next to a Waffen-SS officer. He spoke constantly about the new weapons, decisive for victory. I replied to his assertions, for I had heard about these innovations in my own area of specialization, I knew that the projects were planned, bu the bombing raids... Was this guy just making poo poo up or were the Germans really working on a death ray quote:"In vain our leaders and latterly Grand Admiral Dönitz have implored the enemy to spare the German people this [the Morgenthau Plan], for the sake of the future of Europe. His plea has been turned down. Their hatred is too bitter - apparently not, as they pretended at the outset, against National Socialism - for National Socialism ended with the death of Hitler - but against the German people as a whole. We are to be thrown defenceless to the wolves..." If only... zoux fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 17:59
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zoux posted:Was this guy just making poo poo up or were the Germans really working on a death ray They were working on a lot of crazy things. Succeeding is a different story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderwaffe One of the things mentioned here may be the "death ray" in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon#German_World_War_II_experimental_weapons
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Apr 19, 2023 18:22
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Silver2195 posted:They were working on a lot of crazy things. Succeeding is a different story. That article also mentions (but doesn't link to), Ernst Schiebold, who proposed X-ray weapons "to combat and destroy the crew of enemy aircraft and earth combat troops". Work in this direction was done at the Luftwaffe Research Centre at Aschaffenburg, which also conducted investigations into the weaponry applications of the new Betatron particle accelerator.
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Apr 19, 2023 18:32
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feedmegin posted:Not like they didn't try actually - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leipzig_war_crimes_trials Different sort of thing, though. The Leipzig trials mostly put on trial people accused of abuse of POWs, and a few captains who sank civilian or hospital ships. The Nuremburg trials after WWII went after decision-makers, generals and financers.
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Apr 19, 2023 19:47
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BalloonFish posted:Allowing for it being one guy with a particular axe to grind, and writing in hindsight; he says that as soon as the Eastern Front collapsed and with the success of the Soviet Vistula–Oder offensive in January 1945 he (and everyone else) knew that the war was lost. He says that the common knowledge/feeling was that Germany and its people had the options of being brutally wiped out by the Soviets or facing mass starvation and humiliation under the Allied Morgenthau Plan. There was an undercurrent of wishing/hoping/expecting that the German leadership and the Allies would reach a last-minute honourable surrender and ally against everyone's true enemy, the Soviets, to keep them out of civilised Europe. He was in Berlin in April 1945 and met a Waffen-SS officer on a train who expressed utter confidence that new and terrible German weapons would turn the tide at the last minute. When the order for unconditional surrender was received on U-977, he refused to believe that Dönitz had agreed to those terms and concluded that it was an Allied trick. This, and his certainty that no good fate awaited any German who stayed in Germany, prompted his decision to take his boat to Argentina. This is a theme I see constantly throughout historical accounts and memoirs from German soldiers, sailors, and airmen. I understand that no one really lovedthe Soviets (speaking hyperbolically, of course) and that the whole premise of the alliance with them was the "an enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle, but where does this undercurrent come from? Was it a rumor propagated from the top down, the bottom up, or just general rumor mongering common in a time of extreme crisis?
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Apr 19, 2023 21:12
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Gewehr 43 posted:This is a theme I see constantly throughout historical accounts and memoirs from German soldiers, sailors, and airmen. I understand that no one really lovedthe Soviets (speaking hyperbolically, of course) and that the whole premise of the alliance with them was the "an enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle, but where does this undercurrent come from? Was it a rumor propagated from the top down, the bottom up, or just general rumor mongering common in a time of extreme crisis? It was a rumour spread by time travellers who worked for future war gaming companies. Who hasn't played some what-if like that? Really though I think it comes from official Nazi propaganda which always emphasized the ideological chasm between the western allies and the Soviets, or Churchill and Stalin. If you believed in the news then the anglosaxons were just waiting to get rid of the godless commies.
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Apr 19, 2023 21:21
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It’s wishcasting that persists to the modern day.
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Apr 19, 2023 21:24
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Nessus posted:It’s wishcasting that persists to the modern day. During Winter War some western paper speculated that Stalin would soon feel the wrath of Turkey and Japan as some contemporary
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Apr 19, 2023 21:58
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Nenonen posted:During Winter War some western paper speculated that Stalin would soon feel the wrath of Turkey and Japan as some contemporary
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Apr 19, 2023 22:28
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Gewehr 43 posted:This is a theme I see constantly throughout historical accounts and memoirs from German soldiers, sailors, and airmen. I understand that no one really lovedthe Soviets (speaking hyperbolically, of course) and that the whole premise of the alliance with them was the "an enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle, but where does this undercurrent come from? Was it a rumor propagated from the top down, the bottom up, or just general rumor mongering common in a time of extreme crisis? I mean, it's not quite totally insane given the politics of the 1920s. It really, REALLY can't be under-stated just how hostile the British and the US were to the USSR existing in the late teens/early 20s, especially the British and double especially Churchill. Churchill making common cause against Stalin isn't utterly far-fetched. The problem is just that the Nazis managed to be so loving abhorrent, and Hitler especially, that even loving Churchill realized there are some things worse than commies. Put it this way: this is one of Churchill's more famous quotes: “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” Dude hated himself some Stalin, but hated Hitler more.
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Apr 19, 2023 22:38
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So my wife is reading some novel or other where German spies are sent to the US in world war 2 to disrupt American industry and she's asked me if there's any nugget of truth to this idea. Is there?
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Apr 19, 2023 23:15
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Ganglor posted:So my wife is reading some novel or other where German spies are sent to the US in world war 2 to disrupt American industry and she's asked me if there's any nugget of truth to this idea. Yeah, there were a few of those. For the most part they were total shitshows. Probably the most famous is the Duquesene Spy Ring, but there was also Operation Pastorius. The former was better run and involved people who had set up lives and cover identities before the war, but got busted because they blackmailed a dude into helping them who went to the FBI. The latter was a landing of people via UBoat that was a total shitshow and just led to a bunch of them getting executed. edit: Duquesene was more about intel gathering, Pastorius was a dedicated sabotage op.
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Apr 19, 2023 23:20
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Ganglor posted:So my wife is reading some novel or other where German spies are sent to the US in world war 2 to disrupt American industry and she's asked me if there's any nugget of truth to this idea. Yes - it was Operation Pastorius Wiki posted:Their mission was to sabotage American economic targets: hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls; the Aluminum Company of America's plants in Illinois, Tennessee, and New York; locks on the Ohio River, near Louisville, Kentucky; Pennsalt Chemicals (then the Pennsylvania Salt Manufacturing Company) in Cornwells Heights (Bensalem), Pennsylvania;[6] the Pennsylvania Railroad's Horseshoe Curve, a crucial railroad pass near Altoona, Pennsylvania, as well as their repair shops at Altoona;[7] the Pennsalt cryolite (a raw material in the production of fluorene and aluminum) plant in Philadelphia; Hell Gate Bridge in New York; and Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey. It was a pretty farcical mission because the commander of the group accidentally left the briefing notes on a train in Germany, and then another one of the gang got drunk in Paris and bragged to everyone in earshot about his super-exciting secret mission to America. One guy got caught by the US Coast Guard immediately after landing. The commander and the leader of the second unit met up in a hotel in Cincinnati and - in a scene that would make a great scene in a comedy film - both simultaneously broached the idea of defecting to the other. Mission Over.
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Apr 19, 2023 23:26
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Cyrano4747 posted:I mean, it's not quite totally insane given the politics of the 1920s. It really, REALLY can't be under-stated just how hostile the British and the US were to the USSR existing in the late teens/early 20s, especially the British and double especially Churchill. Churchill making common cause against Stalin isn't utterly far-fetched. Thanks. My knowledge of inter-war politics isn't super deep and I hadn't heard that Churchill quote, but it makes sense. Perhaps there's a miniscule silver lining to the fact that the Nazis were as awful as they were. As bad as second world war history is, the thought of the west turning weapons on the Soviet Union in 1945 is chilling.
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Apr 19, 2023 23:29
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BalloonFish posted:The commander and the leader of the second unit met up in a hotel in Cincinnati and - in a scene that would make a great scene in a comedy film - both simultaneously broached the idea of defecting to the other. Oh my god that would be perfect for the final scene of a Coen Bros style anti-Inglorious Basterds. A whole movie of the recruitment, training, and the nerve wracking trek to insertion for this group of super special spies and BAM "Hey Hans we should just defect, ja?" "That's what I was going to say!"
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Apr 19, 2023 23:36
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Arrath posted:Oh my god that would be perfect for the final scene of a Coen Bros style anti-Inglorious Basterds. A whole movie of the recruitment, training, and the nerve wracking trek to insertion for this group of super special spies and BAM "Hey Hans we should just defect, ja?" "That's what I was going to say!" The poo poo of it is that the two dudes who wanted to defect were also tried alongside everyone else. They got "lucky" in that they got long prison terms instead of death, eventually commuted by Truman on condition that they get deported back to Germany. What's also notable is that Roosevelt was afraid a civilian court would be lenient and decided to convene a military tribunal, a decision which the Supreme Court upheld. This is the legal basis for modern stuff like Guantanamo.
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Apr 19, 2023 23:44
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Gewehr 43 posted:Thanks. My knowledge of inter-war politics isn't super deep and I hadn't heard that Churchill quote, but it makes sense. Perhaps there's a miniscule silver lining to the fact that the Nazis were as awful as they were. As bad as second world war history is, the thought of the west turning weapons on the Soviet Union in 1945 is chilling. As per Cyrano's point about Churchill hating Stalin but hating Hitler even more, as soon as Hitler was dead and Nazi Germany was defeated, he asked the British Chiefs of Staff Committee to draw up a plan for a war between the UK/USA and the USSR in July 1945 - it became Operation Unthinkable . The goal being to drive Soviet forces out of Germany and to enforce the agreements with regard to Poland from the Yalta Conference. Fortunately the Chiefs of Staff were unanimous in it being a totally unfeasible idea militarily and it gained zero diplomatic traction with the Americans. Churchill then asked for a do-over to look at the prospects for a British defensive war against the USSR if it pushed westward, and the Chiefs of Staff were equally emphatic that the UK could do nothing other than abandon all its occupation zones, retreat across the Channel and resort to strategic bombing in essentially a re-run of 1942-1945.
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Apr 19, 2023 23:44
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BalloonFish posted:Yes - it was Operation Pastorius Between stuff like this, published memoirs, and poo poo like my grandpa's journal it is really funny how basically every dedicated nazi, upon seeing civilian life in a non-national-socialist state, immediately defects and starts snitching
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Apr 20, 2023 00:03
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Was Admiral Canaris possibly the highest ranking decent-to-good Nazi? Dude was pretty devastated by the war crimes and became an active hindrance in many ways.
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Apr 20, 2023 00:33
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