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Fangz posted:This is neat, I hadn't seen these documents before. Was not expecting the Doolittle Raid to have any significant effect with the British public: 20 April 1942 Weekly Report posted:The tone of most reports indicates, however, that “the feeling of expectancy”, to which we have referred in our last three reports, continues and is accompanied this week by a slight rise in spirits. This is attributed to:- Although, technically Doolittle is as good for public morale as good weather.
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Mar 11, 2024 20:58
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Urcinius posted:Although, technically Doolittle is as good for public morale as good weather. I don't think you appreciate just how rare that is for them If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest weather."
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Mar 11, 2024 21:03
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Starting to see things developing not necessarily to Japan's advantage
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Mar 11, 2024 21:18
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Urcinius posted:8. Defeat and Division by Douglas Porch is superb for understanding what France was up to after surrendering in 1940 and to the 1944 invasions of France. Particularly, it can provide answers to why France resisted militarily the invasions of its territories by the Allies and yet never by the Axis. I have kind of wondered this, but also didn't really think there was heavy invasion of french colonies by the axis, so the dudes there were just kind of defending their colony from whoever
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Mar 11, 2024 22:28
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The fleet at flood tide. Covers the period where the navy starts rolling out the big carpet and really throws the full powers of the USS We built this thing yesterday to make soft-ice at the Japanese defenses and shattered remains of the Japanese navy. The first team. Covers the carrier and carrier adjacent operations from Pearl Harbor to Midway. The part about Midway itself is better left to Shattered Sword, but the rest is a good overview of the initial clusterfuck the allies had to work with on the eastern side of Australia. Michael Tamelander's Battle of Western Europe is also a great read since it covers the full period from the invasion of Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg, includes the sinking of the French fleet at Mers El Kébir and gives a detailed account of the day to day fighting and casualties in the skies during the Battle of Britain. It also covers the horrendous slaughter of the allied air forces during the battle for France, which is something I haven't seen described in other easily digested books. There is a tiny snag though. I can only find copies of it in Swedish (author is Swedish) and I have a Danish translated version. Not sure if it has been translated to English. SerthVarnee fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Mar 11, 2024 |
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Mar 11, 2024 22:39
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ilmucche posted:I have kind of wondered this, but also didn't really think there was heavy invasion of french colonies by the axis, so the dudes there were just kind of defending their colony from whoever indochina immediately comes to mind
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Mar 11, 2024 22:41
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Syria too. That was a nasty little Free French/British vs Vichy French fight in the wake of the Iraqi coup.
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Mar 11, 2024 22:43
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ilmucche posted:I have kind of wondered this, but also didn't really think there was heavy invasion of french colonies by the axis, so the dudes there were just kind of defending their colony from whoever The Germans invaded French North Africa (modern Tunisia) in response to the Torch landings, basically just flying divisions in unopposed. They invaded the Vichy areas of Southern France at the same time.
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Mar 11, 2024 23:11
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Very tangentially related recommendation: Ignition! is a fantastic book about the history of rocketry development, specifically from the viewpoint of the chemistry involved. It'll give you a good appreciation for just how hard it was to get rockets to do anything useful, let alone militarily useful. That said, it does not touch on their use in actual engagements beyond saying things like "In 195whatever, we were tasked by the Navy to produce a rocket with X characteristics, because they were tired of the last iteration's tendency to eat crewmen while it was being fuelled..." Also, reading Ignition! will make it so that any time oxidizers comes up in an online discussion, you will start antipating the phrase "hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers" the way your dog waits to hear you say "walk".
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Mar 11, 2024 23:13
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PittTheElder posted:The Germans invaded French North Africa (modern Tunisia) in response to the Torch landings, basically just flying divisions in unopposed. They invaded the Vichy areas of Southern France at the same time. The UK invaded Madagascar because they were worried that Vichy would let Japan enter unopposed and use it for a Naval base deep in the Indian Ocean. If they expected Vichy to just be fiercely independent, they would have not scraped together the forces needed for a large amphibious operation.
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Mar 11, 2024 23:24
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https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf You can read it for free! It is so good.
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Mar 12, 2024 03:16
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quote:For all this work had been done, as it were, with the left hand. Hy- You wouldn't think that a book full of phrases like "hypergolic with the storable oxidizers" could be a rollicking and entertaining read, and you'd be wrong.
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Mar 12, 2024 12:36
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ilmucche posted:I have kind of wondered this, but also didn't really think there was heavy invasion of french colonies by the axis, so the dudes there were just kind of defending their colony from whoever The US tried, for the first year or so of the war to make a big show of respecting Vichy independence(which resulted in Cordell Hull making some really embarrassing statements) which i think paid off in Torch when the resistance by the French was very brief and they were fairly quick to turn on the Germans- many of the available allied troops for the march on Tunis were French, though their low level of readiness certainly didn't help them. The race to tunis was an interesting, really close-run campaign that could've gone much, much worse for the Axis though the winter migration of the Luftwaffe west and the forces that were arrayed for the invasion of Malta being available helped.
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Mar 12, 2024 13:39
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as we all know, thanksgiving is the traditional american fight holiday. prolly the most surreal fight i saw in my own thanksgivings is the in-laws (my sister's husband's family) arguing about my sister's husband's dad's lackadaisical hydrazine storage for his rocketry projects
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Mar 12, 2024 15:51
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the sentence "lackadaisical hydrazine storage" makes my butt pucker in a way I did not know it could
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Mar 12, 2024 16:03
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bob dobbs is dead posted:as we all know, thanksgiving is the traditional american fight holiday. prolly the most surreal fight i saw in my own thanksgivings is the in-laws (my sister's husband's family) arguing about my sister's husband's dad's lackadaisical hydrazine storage for his rocketry projects It sounds like you shouldn't be going to this thanksgiving. For safety reasons.
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Mar 12, 2024 16:14
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this was like 5 thanksgivings ago, they quit rocketry a few years back
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Mar 12, 2024 16:21
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Nenonen posted:The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell >If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest weather."
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Mar 12, 2024 16:21
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My dad experimented with homemade rockets, briefly. Mom got him to stop because we lived in California and it was only a matter of time before he started a brush fire. He also played with making his own black powder, which he once "tested" by setting off a charge underneath an upside-down metal mixing bowl. Thank god there wasn't any wind, because that thing went straight up at least a hundred feet and then came back to earth right next to the "launch pad" (a.k.a. a concrete sidewalk in the back yard).
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Mar 12, 2024 16:53
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bob dobbs is dead posted:as we all know, thanksgiving is the traditional american fight holiday. prolly the most surreal fight i saw in my own thanksgivings is the in-laws (my sister's husband's family) arguing about my sister's husband's dad's lackadaisical hydrazine storage for his rocketry projects Please tell me deep-frying a whole turkey was involved somehow.
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Mar 12, 2024 17:01
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i was cooking that year, it was normal, regrettably
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Mar 12, 2024 17:02
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Robert Facepalmer posted:Please tell me deep-frying a whole turkey was involved somehow. If the grill is shakin' and the turkey's green He might be cookin' with hydrazine
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Mar 12, 2024 17:30
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oh sorry, i don't acutally know anything about the french colonies in wwii. that was a post expressing my ignorance and interest in the book
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Mar 12, 2024 19:54
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Speaking of reading recommendations, I somewhat wrote myself into a corner by accepting an offer to write about a certain vehicle at the Battle of Lake Balaton and then, much to my surprise, almost every single vehicle of this type at the battle was used by Hungary and not Germany. Any coverage of the battle from a Hungarian perspective (particularly the Royal Assault Artillery Battalions) would be greatly appreciated.
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Mar 13, 2024 04:03
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selfquoting:Neophyte posted:Explosive range of fuel vapor in air:
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Mar 13, 2024 09:51
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Neophyte posted:selfquoting: Hydrazine is a monopropellant isn't it? You don't strictly need any air at all it's quite happy to explode all by itself.
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Mar 13, 2024 10:49
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The Lone Badger posted:Hydrazine is a monopropellant isn't it? You don't strictly need any air at all it's quite happy to explode all by itself. Yeah - it needs a catalyst for the decomposition reactions though, so it's not truly all by itself (which would obviously be very bad if it was).
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Mar 13, 2024 13:32
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Really liking the thread title considering I just had a conversation with my mom last night about whether my elderly father still has 50lbs+ of gunpowder stored haphazardly in a mystery location in one of the packed to the ceiling storage sheds from when he used to be big into reloading and whether I might blow myself to bits when he dies and I have to clean those sheds out.
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Mar 13, 2024 13:41
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D-Pad posted:Really liking the thread title considering I just had a conversation with my mom last night about whether my elderly father still has 50lbs+ of gunpowder stored haphazardly in a mystery location in one of the packed to the ceiling storage sheds from when he used to be big into reloading and whether I might blow myself to bits when he dies and I have to clean those sheds out. Gunpowder is pretty stable stuff. If you find it and want to dispose of it, just scatter it over your lawn. It's mostly nitrogen and is actually pretty good for plants. It's not even really an explosive, it's what's known as a conflagrant - something that burns like a motherfucker. Without getting into the science of it, the long and the short is that an explosive will create a, well, explosion when you set it off, a conflagrant just burns really fast. For gunpowder that's enough, because it burns so fast that the expanding gasses from the fire do the work to push a bullet out really fast. Now, from a storage perspective this doesn't mean you can just treat it like poo poo, but it's more like having a bunch of gasoline sitting next to a pile of oily rags than it is a bomb. You're not going to explode it by dropping a can or anything like that. The bad version is you decide to play with gunpowder while smoking a cigarette and burn down the shed and/or give yourself some nasty burns. So don't do that. Now, the wrinkle to this is whether it's modern smokeless gunpowder or if it's black powder. Black powder (which isn't used in modern firearms - think muzzle loaders and civil war type poo poo) IS an explosive, albeit a pretty stable one. You're not going to explode a can of black powder by dropping it on the floor, either (it isn't very shock sensitive), but if you're dumb enough to put a cigarette out in it it WILL go boom. This means that if it's sitting inside something (like a wooden crate) and it goes off you'll have flying wooden splinters and other unpleasant explosion poo poo. Storage requirements for black powder are pretty different from smokeless because of this. Disposal is pretty much the same as smokeless - just sprinkle it all over your lawn. Water it after if you're worried. Or just pour it into a bucket of water and dump that into a storm drain etc. Source: I use both smokeless and black powder in my own reloading and handle it fairly often. I've done some reading and given some thought to this, but I'm not a bomb tech or anything like that. Here's a dude lighting a bunch of powders on fire for clicks. The first one he does is a type of black powder. The others are all smokeless. The pertinent bit is just how much faster and energetic sticking a match in black powder is than the others. Frankly that's pretty tame for BP, I'll see if I can find am ore impressive one in a bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqEtUKw0kZc edit: Ok, minute ~1:00 or so in this video might be better. The one that he doe first that burns slow is smokeless, the one that just goes *POOF* is black powder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fNxHeM3OQI
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Mar 13, 2024 14:26
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Yeah I know realistically it won't go boom but if it still exists and he never got rid of it (who knows) it's been sitting in a shed in the Texas heat for almost three decades and definitely wasn't stored correctly. Also there is most likely black powder as my dad has several black powder muzzleloaders. I have a hazy memory from when I was young that he bought it in 25lb cloth/burlap sacks and that he actually got several hundred pounds because "it was a deal" and my dad overbought stupid poo poo he would never use all of his whole life. I'm not entirely sure that memory is accurate and he very well could have gotten rid of it but his memory isn't to be trusted and those sheds are a hoarders paradise so it isn't easy to check.
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Mar 13, 2024 15:04
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D-Pad posted:Yeah I know realistically it won't go boom but if it still exists and he never got rid of it (who knows) it's been sitting in a shed in the Texas heat for almost three decades and definitely wasn't stored correctly. Also there is most likely black powder as my dad has several black powder muzzleloaders. I have a hazy memory from when I was young that he bought it in 25lb cloth/burlap sacks and that he actually got several hundred pounds because "it was a deal" and my dad overbought stupid poo poo he would never use all of his whole life. I'm not entirely sure that memory is accurate and he very well could have gotten rid of it but his memory isn't to be trusted and those sheds are a hoarders paradise so it isn't easy to check. Being stored in a hot texas shed won't harm it. That's not good for loaded ammunition, but it's usually the primers that goes in those kinds of storage conditions. Now, that said, gunpowder doesn't age like fine wine. I'm talking purely about being shelf stable and not getting hosed up by the elements specifically. Gunpowder off-gasses decay products over time. Not so much of a problem if it's stored in a can, more of a problem if it's stored in a cartridge you intend to use. But that has more to do with those decay products weakening the brass or steel of the cartridge case than anything else.
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Mar 13, 2024 15:07
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Cyrano4747 posted:Now, the wrinkle to this is whether it's modern smokeless gunpowder or if it's black powder. Black powder (which isn't used in modern firearms - think muzzle loaders and civil war type poo poo) IS an explosive, albeit a pretty stable one. Just a quibble: The distinction between a low explosive and a high explosive is that with a deflagrant, the chemical reaction is propagated subsonically via conductive heating, and with a high explosive the reaction is propagated supersonically via compressive heating. Both black powder and smokeless powder are low explosives. Black powder is theoretically capable of detonation but this is very difficult to make happen and it's not going to detonate under any conditions you're going to find in your back yard. Basically its burn rate is *weakly* dependent on pressure so if you have enough of it under the right conditions you might get some of it to detonate by putting it under enough pressure that it undergoes a deflagration-to-detonation transition, but we're talking about "ship's magazine" quantities.
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Mar 13, 2024 15:21
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Phanatic posted:Just a quibble: *William Randolph Hearst furiously scribbling down notes*
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Mar 13, 2024 16:01
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Vahakyla posted:They were in their foreign uniform, and accompanied the general or colonel or other high ranking host. They’d generally not carry offensive firearms, nor did they take part in fighting in ACW.
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Mar 13, 2024 18:15
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You may have missed it, but Wikipedia said there is a guy who has been reenacting Fremantle since 1993.
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Mar 13, 2024 19:25
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D-Pad posted:Really liking the thread title considering I just had a conversation with my mom last night about whether my elderly father still has 50lbs+ of gunpowder stored haphazardly in a mystery location in one of the packed to the ceiling storage sheds from when he used to be big into reloading and whether I might blow myself to bits when he dies and I have to clean those sheds out. Just make sure it's only gunpowder and not TNT, since TNT will actually become volatile and touch-sensitive if it hasn't been stored properly and starts to sweat out nitroglycerin. edit: relevant clip from Lost https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgo5c1FgPMk&t=64s bees everywhere fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Mar 13, 2024 |
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Mar 13, 2024 22:59
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Elissimpark posted:You may have missed it, but Wikipedia said there is a guy who has been reenacting Fremantle since 1993. D-Pad posted:I recently turned 40 and the usual thing happened where I got really into ww2 history books. But for real, read David Stahel. He's one of the few academics that writes about WW2 and still retains my interest at this point (since no offense to anybody but I read it to death by the time I was like 16 and it's a pretty tired subject for me now mostly, unless its like some interesting niche like the book i picked up that i still need to read about South America during ww2...or any book about the Eastern front not written by some nazi loving churchill-glorifying white guy "anticommunist" type). Punkin Spunkin fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Mar 13, 2024 |
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Mar 13, 2024 23:08
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It's always funny reading about the vast difference in scale, importance, and brutality the Eastern Front had when compared to what the Wallies were dealing with. Like if the Nazis execute Canadian soldiers it's incredible but in the Eastern front that's just Tuesday. And I think David Stahel has written some great books on the subject. I'd go through all of his works honestly, some more focused on military outcomes and maneuvers and others just on the atrocities of the Nazis in the territories of the Soviet Union.
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Mar 13, 2024 23:17
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Punkin Spunkin posted:or any book about the Eastern front not written by some nazi loving churchill-glorifying white guy "anticommunist" type). Have you read Bartov?
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Mar 13, 2024 23:23
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Punkin Spunkin posted:But for real, read David Stahel. There's a couple good interviews with him on YouTube as well, he seems solid.
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Mar 13, 2024 23:41
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