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Well, since we're all sharing grandfather stories: My paternal grandfather was in the Wehrmacht almost start to finish. Naturally he wasn't all that eager to share, but every now and then he'd talk about certain bits and pieces. He participated in some fighting in eastern europe at first, where he was wounded by a shot to the gut. The wound was very severe (its aftereffects troubled him for the rest of his life), and according to him he only survived because a comrade pulled him out of the fight. It took almost a year until he was fit to return to duty, at which point he was posted to occupied Paris. He fell in love with a local woman there and often described the ~year he spent there as one of the happiest of his life (much to the annoyance of my grandmother, who he met after the war  ). Shortly before the allied advance reached Paris he was redeployed to the eastern front again, as part of a fresh formation (I wanna say a regiment?) of more than a thousand soldiers. A few months later he'd basically only had his squad left, they'd lost contact with everybody else.As he tells it, spending Christmas 1944 with only them was his personal turning point where he realised that all was lost. It was basically the idea that it's goddamn Christmas, and he was stuck in the middle of nowhere with thousands of russian soldiers coming towards him and no way to ever stop them. They deserted then, basically just heading back home, and managed to keep ahead of the soviet advance until he reached his home town and the war ended. After the war, he and my grandmother traveled a lot, visiting some of the places he'd been to during the war, including Paris. By comparison, my maternal grandfather's story is pretty short. Ge was drafted towards he end of the war and deserted on his way to the front before getting into combat. Apparently his flight was actually fairly eventful, but unfortunately he never really got around to writing his memoirs like he'd planned to do.
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Jan 4, 2016 23:27
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Cyrano4747 posted:Isn't the fact that they're generating that much newspaper coverage worth mentioning in and of itself? Even if they weren't effective weapons they sure did stir up a lot of home front angst and helped to demonize the enemy even further in the eyes of the public. By the same token the brutality and crimes in Belgium might not have been as extreme and egregious as the British press would have you believe, and they might not have had a major effect on the battlefields, but they certainly played a larger role in shaping attitudes about the war. Sure, but the doings of the gasbags are still peripheral enough to be firmly in the category of "quiet day space-filler to be dropped in as and when"; right now the priority is "get the most important things out the way" so I can come at Verdun off as long a run-up as possible. Home fronts are going to come forward somewhat on the back side of the Somme and Jutland, as both sides really start setting about economic warfare with gusto and the Russians suffer from serious rumblings in the interior; but the trouble with the home fronts is that they often need considerable pummelling to fit into the "on the Xth of Belember, a thing happened" format.
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Jan 4, 2016 23:31
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Trin Tragula posted:At the moment I'm of the opinion that Zeppelins were, with a few exceptions, entirely tangential to whatever else happened to be going on at the time. They're generating a lot of extremely irritating column inches in certain newspapers about how barbarous and beastly they are, but at a hundred years' remove, they just don't seem to either be blowing up much of anything, or affecting the course of any of the fighting, nor is the technology pointing the way forward to anything other than an excitable American radio journalist (which is why the Junkers all-metal prototype efforts are due for a few shout-outs: when I look up, I don't see a Mark 45 Totally-Won't-Explode Gasbag, I'm looking at a 747 or similar. You are not wrong about the rigid airship being something that petered out, or about the British newspapers getting hysterical out of proportion to the actual threat. Still, as far as the WW1 narrative goes, German Zeppelins did a few things. First, while admittedly rigid airships are a technical dead end, they did two things very notable: they were the first strategic bombers, and the first long range naval reconnaissance aircraft - which is obviously still a thing. Because the former had never been done before, they were, on the whole obviously not effective like a swarm of B-17s would have been, but still, very innovative. As for effects, there were a few: first, these raids against Britain were a morale booster for Germany, and especially the German Navy. (The German Army and the Navy initially split Zeppelin deliveries, but the Navy proved much more proficient at operations, and needed more airships for patrolling the North Sea, and were delegated more anyway once somebody figured out that a Zeppelin while something of a fair weather device was much cheaper, not to mention faster to build, than a scouting cruiser.) Conversely, these raids were a public relations embarrassment to Britain, that (here's more innovation) lead to the establishment of the first air-defense network. If talking about significance and effects, it should be pointed out that Britain would eventually have a large number of troops tied up in Zeppelin defense that could have otherwise been used on the front. The Germans actually managed to stage a bombing raid in 1914 on Britain, and in 1915-16 mounted quite a few raids, up until mid 1916 suffering few casualties. The biggest success they had was when L 13 flew to London and managed to set the garment district on fire. That raid caused 1/6th of all damage, in monetary terms that Britain would suffer in all of WW1. Then of course the Brits invented incendiary bullets, and causalities, ah, exploded. 1917 saw the Germans revise their Zeppelin designs in a way that completely negated British defenses - but also negated their effectiveness as bombers that could do anything but scatter bombs on a city; kind of a babby's first wunder-waffen, since it was more about morale of the people at home than actual effectiveness. On Naval issues, the Zeppelins were much more significant. The Royal Navy hated the idea of the German fleet having a Zeppelin advantage, and would often stage operations specifically in bad weather so that advantage would be negated. The Germans, meanwhile would grow to rely on the Zeppelin as a sea scout. The origin of the Battle of Jutland was partially tangled up in Adm. Scheer wanting to use many Zeppelins together, and bad weather denying him his sky-scouts. Towards the end of the war, 1917 on, Zeppelins declined in this role too. The Royal Navy used flying boats to intercept Zeppelins in the North Sea, which caused the Zeppelins to fly high as a defense - once again, doing a lot to negate their military value. Had the war gone into 1919, it is likely the Zeppelins would have been a long range reserve supplementing flying boats. The Royal Navy hatred of Zeppelins was oddly influential, since it started the RN messing about launching aircraft from ships. At first it was comical (except of course the parts were people actually died); later on it'd turn into the first aircraft carrier, and the first attack from an aircraft carrier. Oh, one other thing of interest: in 1917 the Germans tried to resupply General Lettow-Vorbeck via airship. I'm not sure if this is the first major resupply operation by air, but it was certainly the biggest, most ambitious one. The airship was going to fly thousands of kilometers over enemy territory, and once it landed, it was to be broken up and used by Lettow-Vorbeck's forces. Even the Zeppelin's outer cover was going to be dyed cotton, so Lettow-Vorbeck's forces could sew uniforms out of it. Anyway, I know you are telling the story of World War 1 - the whole thing - and it could be all this stuff still doesn't quite rise to notable in the same way, er, the Battle of Verdun is notable, and fair enough. A few years ago I did a series of infodumps for the Aeronautical Insanity thread about German Zeppelins, and I put them all up on my blog, which I linked above if you are interested. (It's not proper scholarly material, but I think it tells the story well enough.) Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 23:55
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Trin Tragula posted:Sure, but the doings of the gasbags are still peripheral enough to be firmly in the category of "quiet day space-filler to be dropped in as and when"; right now the priority is "get the most important things out the way" so I can come at Verdun off as long a run-up as possible. Home fronts are going to come forward somewhat on the back side of the Somme and Jutland, as both sides really start setting about economic warfare with gusto and the Russians suffer from serious rumblings in the interior; but the trouble with the home fronts is that they often need considerable pummelling to fit into the "on the Xth of Belember, a thing happened" format. Is there anything in your sources about the usefulness of observation balloons?
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Jan 4, 2016 23:55
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I had three relatives that I know of who were in the War-my maternal grandfather, a paternal great-grandfather, and a paternal great-great uncle. All of them were in the Navy, funnily enough, and all of them fought in the Pacific. Unfortunately they all died long before I ever really had a chance to talk to them, but I have gotten bits and pieces of information. My grandfather joined in 1942, and was a plankowner and radar operator on the USS Ira Jeffery DE-63. A Destroyer Escort, the Ira Jeffery was the tinniest of tin cans and was assigned to Atlantic Convoy duty from 1943-44. In '44, she was transferred to the Pacific and converted into an APD, or fast transport-the idea being that the ship would be used to transport Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT) ahead of the invasion fleet to clear out mines. Fortunately, by the time the conversion was complete the war was effectively over, and the ship had just set out from Pearl when the war ended. I got to go to one of his ship's reunions a few years back, and while the convoy duty could be hairy on the whole it wasn't the worst assignment in the world. My great-grandfather on the other hand had a hell of a war. When it started he'd already been in the navy for over ten years, and was a Chief Petty Officer serving as a clerk on the USS Whitney AD-4, a destroyer tender stationed in beautiful Hawaii on one December 7th, 1941. The Whitney was undamaged in the attack, and my great-grandfather stayed with the ship for several years until he got transferred to the brand-new USS Wilkes-Barre CL-103, a light cruiser. The Wilkes-Barre was then assigned to TF.38, and spent the last year of the war raiding Formosa, defending the fleet from air attack, bombarding Japan, and ending the war just outside the mouth of Tokyo Bay. What's crazy about all this is no one in my family knew he was at Pearl Harbor, or really anything else he'd done-I only read about it when my grandmother asked if I wanted to see his old log book a year or two back. Unfortunately, I don't know a whole lot about my great-uncle. I met him a few times, but I never asked him about the war-I never even knew he'd been in it until he'd passed. From what I've heard he was in the Navy, served as a gunner on some kind of bomber, and allegedly received a Distinguished Flying Cross, but unfortunately nobody seems to know any more details.
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Jan 5, 2016 00:19
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chitoryu12 posted:Is there anything in your sources about the usefulness of observation balloons? I know that at some point in the next two years there's going to be a really funny story from a balloon observer that's just the perfect excuse to talk about observation balloons in general; now all I need to do is find the drat thing again... Nebakenezzer posted:
The thing about strategic bombing is that the idea at the moment is to talk about its development primarily in the context of the better heavy bombers, when they finally show up; the Caproni CA3, the Gotha series, the Breguet 14, and the Handley-Page O/400 (and then that ties in with things like the move towards fully independent air forces rather than running them as service arms of the Army and the development of All Arms Battle from the air force's prespective). Also, never fear, there is less than no way that I'd let things like the African suicide airship or those wonderfully ridiculous seaplane carriers hanging off the side of the Grand Fleet go by without extensive comment... Shiny blog, by the way. I can tell it's the sort of thing I can't allow myself to start reading while I've still got outlining to do. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Jan 5, 2016 |
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Jan 5, 2016 00:40
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Ithle01 posted:Thanks again for the great Taiping posts. Love to read them. From what I recall from Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom the last four years of the rebellion are pretty intense so this is far from over. Thanks! I'll probably go past the end of the Taiping so I can cover the other rebellions that outlived it and also talk about what Zeng and company did during the Tongzhi Restoration. If I go too far and start talking about the Sino-French war somebody please stop me.
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Jan 5, 2016 01:05
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No, I''d love to hear about the Sino French War.
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Jan 5, 2016 01:06
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Acebuckeye13 posted:What's crazy about all this is no one in my family knew he was at Pearl Harbor, or really anything else he'd done-I only read about it when my grandmother asked if I wanted to see his old log book a year or two back.
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Jan 5, 2016 01:56
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Grandpa WWII chat: Mine served as a mechanic at the Swedish Air Force training school: (why yes, that is a frozen lake) He even saw at least one German!  But mostly it was dealing with this bullshit    
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Jan 5, 2016 01:59
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Actually, incidental question on the topic of zeppelins. Early/WWI era AA (especially on ships, which I know better) had some machine guns but also seems to have a strong refrain of high angle guns in the 3-5" range. They just don't seem to make sense against planes in the sense of being actually likely to shoot many down, because hitting with a manually laid gun is really hard. Do any of you know what amount of the cause for those guns is zeppelins and what amount is a desire to make it at least interesting for planes that won't come down to MG range?
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Jan 5, 2016 02:06
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My father's father was in the China-Burma-India front, sometime after the AVF was formed. I know he was there in late 1945 because that is when my dad was born and we have the telegram they sent him, complete with spelling mistakes. Apparently he had to wake up Marshall once and got a medal from Mao, which he supposedly burned. My mother's father was somewhere in the south Pacific, I've never been clear on what he did, other than operated a radio. Neither of them talked about their experiences much, the only time I know about is to each other, the one time they met. I have a great uncle who was wounded with some shrapnel at Anzio. The one with the most interesting story was another great uncle who was stationed on (I think) the West Virginia during Pearl Harbor, then was on the Enterprise during the Doolittle raid, and spent the rest of the war in the submarine service. Of course, it sounds like the experience really affected him and he spent the rest of his life in a bottle.
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Jan 5, 2016 02:15
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Trin Tragula posted:I know that at some point in the next two years there's going to be a really funny story from a balloon observer that's just the perfect excuse to talk about observation balloons in general; now all I need to do is find the drat thing again... Also, most if not all of the thinkers that went on to write major works on strategic bombing were either utterly disinterested in them (Mitchell) or nursed an active grudge against them (Douhet). They weren't just a technological dead end, they were also a doctrinal dead end. They could never have achieved the mass over the target or the flexibility that the bomb guys wanted.
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Jan 5, 2016 02:24
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xthetenth posted:Actually, incidental question on the topic of zeppelins. Early/WWI era AA (especially on ships, which I know better) had some machine guns but also seems to have a strong refrain of high angle guns in the 3-5" range. They just don't seem to make sense against planes in the sense of being actually likely to shoot many down, because hitting with a manually laid gun is really hard. Do any of you know what amount of the cause for those guns is zeppelins and what amount is a desire to make it at least interesting for planes that won't come down to MG range? The point of big AA guns is less to shoot down planes and more to force them to rise out of your range, making it harder to bomb whatever it is you're protecting.
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Jan 5, 2016 02:38
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xthetenth posted:Actually, incidental question on the topic of zeppelins. Early/WWI era AA (especially on ships, which I know better) had some machine guns but also seems to have a strong refrain of high angle guns in the 3-5" range. They just don't seem to make sense against planes in the sense of being actually likely to shoot many down, because hitting with a manually laid gun is really hard. Do any of you know what amount of the cause for those guns is zeppelins and what amount is a desire to make it at least interesting for planes that won't come down to MG range? Flak shells are timed explosives that throw out shrapnel in a radius around them. They don't actually have to directly hit planes to do damage. http://www.lonesentry.com/articles/ttt07/german-aaa.html Fangz fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Jan 5, 2016 |
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Jan 5, 2016 02:40
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My great grandfather on my mom's side was in the Territorial Army as a bandsman prior to WW1, transferred regiments at some point, but then in 1915 when the army discovered he was a carpenter they put him in the Royal Engineers and posted him to the continent. As far as we know he spent the majority of it building and repairing things not on the front line. During WW2 he eagerly joined the Home Guard, but naturally didn't really have much to do. His daughter (my grandmother) left the civil service to become a nurse during WW2. No major incidents other than treating more horrific injuries than normal, other than the standard Blitz related bombings, and one time a V1 narrowly missed their hospital. On my dad's side both my grandparents were too young to do anything in WW2. I think one of my Ukrainian great-grandfathers fought for the Polish side in the 1920 war, but he apparently didn't like talking about the details.
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Jan 5, 2016 03:05
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Trin Tragula posted:The thing about strategic bombing is that the idea at the moment is to talk about its development primarily in the context of the better heavy bombers, when they finally show up; the Caproni CA3, the Gotha series, the Breguet 14, and the Handley-Page O/400 (and then that ties in with things like the move towards fully independent air forces rather than running them as service arms of the Army and the development of All Arms Battle from the air force's prespective). Also, never fear, there is less than no way that I'd let things like the African suicide airship or those wonderfully ridiculous seaplane carriers hanging off the side of the Grand Fleet go by without extensive comment... Good good. I know it will be awhile, but I look forward to hearing about the bombers - I don't know very much about them. Prop Wash posted:Also, most if not all of the thinkers that went on to write major works on strategic bombing were either utterly disinterested in them (Mitchell) or nursed an active grudge against them (Douhet). They weren't just a technological dead end, they were also a doctrinal dead end. They could never have achieved the mass over the target or the flexibility that the bomb guys wanted. Haha, it's news to me any serious theorists were even thinking about airships as bombers. By the end of WW1, its time as a bomber was clearly past - even the Kaiser felt that way by 1917, and he had been reading almost insanely optimistic assessments of the damage Zeppelin raids did.
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Jan 5, 2016 03:26
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david_a posted:Grandpa WWII chat: Mine served as a mechanic at the Swedish Air Force training school: On one hand I could imagine mechanics like that being grumbly as gently caress about some jackass rookie who pancaked one of their beautiful biplanes, but on the other hand I could imagine them just having the biggest laugh ever at some jackass rookie who pancaked one of their beautiful biplanes because said jackass rookie probably pissed and possibly shat himself when the drat thing flipped.
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Jan 5, 2016 03:52
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I'm all curious now, and don't have late grand-dad to ask, and Internet references tend to be paeans to British and American courage with a note of "...and some Canadians too." at the end. Can anyone recommend a good history book that would cover Canada in WW2 in some depth, or Italy specifically?
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Jan 5, 2016 03:57
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Ensign Expendable posted:The point of big AA guns is less to shoot down planes and more to force them to rise out of your range, making it harder to bomb whatever it is you're protecting. Yeah, so even in WWI with hand laid guns, primitive fuzes and not much in the way of coordination they made things unpleasant enough to keep recon planes uncomfortable? What I'm wondering is somewhat more of a question of what the people were intending, whether it was a beneficial second-order effect of something originally there for zeppelins, whether they thought it would have good chances of a shootdown, and scaring them off was considered good enough, or whether it was intended from the start to be area denial. Fangz posted:Flak shells are timed explosives that throw out shrapnel in a radius around them. They don't actually have to directly hit planes to do damage. Believe me, I know. However even in WWII with mechanical computers, optical directors, tables, automatic fuze setting machines fed the target's range and everything (heck to some degree still even with proximity fuzes), those guns were firing as much at the formation as the individual plane. Especially on ships, the heavy guns were barrage firing to break up the attack so as to throw off aim, throw off formations so the light guns had an easier time of things and so on as much as actually expecting kills. Without the benefit of any of those things, I'm expecting enough shells to fill a zeppelin to score a kill, considering that in its best year of WWII 5" common was getting a kill per 252 shells, which plummeted as the war went on to one per 654, and even 5" VT only got one per 340.
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Jan 5, 2016 04:09
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Arquinsiel posted:You know you have to scan or transcribe this for posterity, right? I'm actually kinda annoyed at myself I hadn't already done this, especially since I was actually at my grandparents' house for the holidays and I'm not sure when I'll be back. Funnily enough, though, earlier today I brought it up with my dad and my mom mentioned that we had a number of my grandfather's old records and letters she and my aunt had scanned after my grandmother passed away a few years ago. In particular, there's a bunch of letters he wrote my grandmother while he was still waiting to be drummed out of the Navy after the war ended. They are incredibly sappy.    There's also this makeshift valentine's card, which proves that my grandfather was neither a poet nor an artist:   And of course his portrait, which my grandmother kept framed in her bedroom until the day she died.  You get 'em, Gal. 
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Jan 5, 2016 04:10
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Nebakenezzer posted:Haha, it's news to me any serious theorists were even thinking about airships as bombers. By the end of WW1, its time as a bomber was clearly past - even the Kaiser felt that way by 1917, and he had been reading almost insanely optimistic assessments of the damage Zeppelin raids did. If you listen to Douhet, he was arguing in 1909 that dirigibles and other lighter-than-air craft were useless in Command of the Air. On page 33 he says that "aviation falls into two major categories, lighter-than-air ships and heavier-than-air ships, or dirigibles and airplanes. I should explain, for the sake of clarity, that from now on I will confine myself to the heavier-than-air category, airplanes, as the only kind suitable for warfare." So, I guess he wasn't seriously thinking about them Still, he takes a few more shots at dirigibles in his book. Douhet is really interesting in that despite his ideas being fairly influential to Billy Mitchell, we haven't really bothered translating much more of his writing. I guess that's not surprising given that he ended up working for the Fascists, and by the time WWII came and went so much of his basic thesis had been discredited (don't bother hitting small targets, bombs will never reach artillery levels of accuracy) that there wasn't much interest. Were there any big Italian dirigible proponents? I wonder if he ran afoul of one of them - he made a whole lot of enemies during his career. edit: hahaha I spoke too soon - William C Sherman, no idea if he's related to William T Sherman, but he was a contemporary of Mitchell's. His major claim to fame is that he's more boring and less aggressive, but here he is in "Air Warfare", 1926: quote:But although these examples of the Zeppelin, and the more recent tragic loss of the Shenandoah furnish valuable food for thought, we are not yet warranted in jumping to the conclusion that the tactical usefulness of the airship is altogether at an end. To be fair he's pretty much done with the dirigible as a platform for strategic bombing (and he's not very interested in strategic bombing in general, he's more of an attack/pursuit/recon/mobility guy, which in hindsight makes him way more forward-thinking than the narrow-mindedness that emerged in Mitchell's wake) but he's way into the idea that you could strap a whole bunch of defenses and a whole squadron of fighters onto a dirigible and make it a sort of recon-in-force thing. Also, he died the year after he published that, and as far as I can tell the mothership dirigible idea died with him, at least in America. Prop Wash fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Jan 5, 2016 |
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Jan 5, 2016 04:14
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That is so personal and touching that I hate to sully it with such a pedestrian question but do you know anything about the red and gold eagly tridenty insignia above his rating badge? e: what I'm getting at is that you said he was on a ship affiliated with the nascent UDT program which was the precursor to the SEALs so I'm wondering if the eagle/trident logo has anything to do with their current insignia or if it was unrelated. hogmartin fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Jan 5, 2016 |
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Jan 5, 2016 04:18
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hogmartin posted:That is so personal and touching that I hate to sully it with such a pedestrian question but do you know anything about the red and gold eagly tridenty insignia above his rating badge?] That patch was for the amphibious forces, and looks more like an eagle carrying a Thompson over an anchor. E: the design is similar to the British one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-Service_Training_and_Development_Centre It wasn't specific to the underwater demo teams but I imagine the design elements have similar thought behind them. FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Jan 5, 2016 |
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Jan 5, 2016 04:26
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hogmartin posted:That is so personal and touching that I hate to sully it with such a pedestrian question but do you know anything about the red and gold eagly tridenty insignia above his rating badge?] I have no idea! I'm not sure when the picture was taken, so it may have been when he was in training, since it's not on the other picture I currently have of him in uniform.
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Jan 5, 2016 04:29
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david_a posted:Grandpa WWII chat: Mine served as a mechanic at the Swedish Air Force training school: What the hell are those things? Sopwith camels?
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Jan 5, 2016 04:38
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Acebuckeye13 posted:I have no idea! I'm not sure when the picture was taken, so it may have been when he was in training, since it's not on the other picture I currently have of him in uniform. The crow and hint of a chevron means he's at least a 3rd Class Petty Officer when that was taken, so equivalent to a Specialist or Corporal in the other services (modern NATO E-4). It might have been awarded after an advanced training school but usually denotes maybe 2-3 years experience. I don't know how exactly the Navy handed out advancement during the war. e: I also can't place that rating badge at all (they change them like every 5 years). e2: also FAUXTON has given me good leads on that patch, thx hogmartin fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Jan 5, 2016 |
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Jan 5, 2016 04:39
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Acebuckeye13 posted:There's also this makeshift valentine's card, which proves that my grandfather was neither a poet nor an artist:  Although that letter is dangerously close to cursive Russian. FAUXTON posted:On one hand I could imagine mechanics like that being grumbly as gently caress about some jackass rookie who pancaked one of their beautiful biplanes, but on the other hand I could imagine them just having the biggest laugh ever at some jackass rookie who pancaked one of their beautiful biplanes because said jackass rookie probably pissed and possibly shat himself when the drat thing flipped.  All I have is a small album of sparsely-documented snapshots that my mom salvaged for me when she was helping to clean out the house after my grandmother died.
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Jan 5, 2016 04:42
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david_a posted:Although that letter is dangerously close to cursive Russian. This is probably the version he learned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method This is the kind I learned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian An experienced paleographer would be able to date that letter and one of my notes by the differences between our handwritings, as well as the kind of paper and the kind of pens.
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Jan 5, 2016 04:49
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If nothing else it's certainly better than my handwriting
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Jan 5, 2016 04:51
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Grand Prize Winner posted:What the hell are those things? Sopwith camels? Second and fourth appear to be either Sk 12s (Focke-Wulf Fw 44) or Sk 10s (Raab-Katzenstein RK-26) Can't tell on the third one, the tail seems too slender to be an Sk 10/12. One of these, at least. (Edit: numbers refer to the crash pics) david_a fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Jan 5, 2016 |
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Jan 5, 2016 04:56
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hogmartin posted:The crow and hint of a chevron means he's at least a 3rd Class Petty Officer when that was taken, so equivalent to a Specialist or Corporal in the other services (modern NATO E-4). It might have been awarded after an advanced training school but usually denotes maybe 2-3 years experience. I don't know how exactly the Navy handed out advancement during the war. No problem. Hope you are able to find out more about whether he was in the Atlantic or the Pacific and whether he was a guy who blew up ships in harbor or what not. UDT did some ballsy, badassed poo poo in WWII.
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Jan 5, 2016 05:04
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HEY GAL posted:How old are you? From the middle of the 19th century until about twenty years ago, that's what American cursive looked like. I bounced around between two different countries during some of my early schooling so I never really learned cursive.
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Jan 5, 2016 05:11
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FAUXTON posted:No problem. Hope you are able to find out more about whether he was in the Atlantic or the Pacific and whether he was a guy who blew up ships in harbor or what not. UDT did some ballsy, badassed poo poo in WWII. Think you might have gotten slightly mistaken-that's my grandfather, not his He was a radarman on a DE that got converted into a UDT transport, which may explain the patch-it appears to be the insignia for "US Naval Landing Forces" or something along those lines.
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Jan 5, 2016 05:16
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david_a posted:Yeah well I guess it's not entirely indecipherable if I actually try to read it...
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Jan 5, 2016 05:22
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HEY GAL posted:It also depends on how old you are--I think I was among the last cohorts to learn it. I think learning cursive is dependent on a district-to-district basis more than anything else. I'm 23 and I learned it, as did my sister who's two and a half years younger than me. I'm not sure if my old school's still teaching it, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was. Acebuckeye13 fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Jan 5, 2016 |
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Jan 5, 2016 05:25
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Acebuckeye13 posted:I think learning cursive is dependent on a district-to-district basis than anything else. I'm 23 and I learned it, as did my sister who's two and a half years younger than me. I'm not sure if my old school's still teaching it, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was. That's funny. I'm 28 and we only had a single semester where they made us do cursive back in the 5th grade. Not a single teacher in my high school would accept handwritten assignments. We learned to type on typewriters, though.
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Jan 5, 2016 05:28
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Prop Wash posted:Also, he died the year after he published that, and as far as I can tell the mothership dirigible idea died with him, at least in America. It did not   This is the USS Macon, one of two helium airships the US Navy built in the '30s. They could launch and recover their own aircraft while flying.  
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Jan 5, 2016 05:31
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Think you might have gotten slightly mistaken-that's my grandfather, not his I think we're all talking about the same picture, the one you just posted of your grandfather. I was just intrigued to see a patch above his rating badge and wanted to learn if the eagle/rifle/trident (or anchor) thing might be a link from the UDTs to the SEALs. None of my grandfathers were in the Navy. a. I've never seen anything worn on the left sleeve above the rating badge b. Maybe if they did get permission to do that they were some special unit? c. I expect dress blues to look like this and when they don't in official pictures I wonder what special circumstances led them to be that way. 
hogmartin fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Jan 5, 2016 |
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Jan 5, 2016 05:31
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hogmartin posted:I think we're all talking about the same picture, the one you just posted of your grandfather. I was just intrigued to see a patch above his rating badge and wanted to learn if the eagle/rifle/trident (or anchor) thing might be a link from the UDTs to the SEALs. None of my grandfathers were in the Navy. I've never seen any insignia on the sleeve above the crow so that was kind of a 'hey, this might be a special forces' thing to me but I didn't know his actual job. OTOH I was not in the Navy during WWII nor in the last 10 years and apparently they all wear blue/gray camo and do not look like this anymore so what do I know about 60 year old patches? Oh yeah, I just think Fauxton got a tad confused. Like I said, a UDT connection certainly did exist, and that patch does appear similar to naval special forces patches worn at the time. With that being said I'm not sure how he ended up with it, but maybe it's just a thing they gave to everyone involved in the operation, transport crew included 
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Jan 5, 2016 05:37
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