|
Yep, no fat man without the reactors at Hanford
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 16:04
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 10, 2024 23:30 |
|
|
Why do all of Krengel's lieutenants keep dying? That's like, the 4th or 5th one I think.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 16:42
|
|
|
Crazycryodude posted:Why do all of Krengel's lieutenants keep dying? That's like, the 4th or 5th one I think. After two years of being in a war in a combat role being dead is sort of the expected condition and this dude is the freaky exception.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 16:59
|
|
|
Yeah, in WWI you were 6 times more likely to die in the British Army as a lieutenant as opposed to a private. On Omaha beach the initial landing waves were reinforced 50% or more with junior officers and NCOs, and they still got mostly wiped out. Being a junior infantry officer in a shooting war is one of the most dangerous places you can ever be.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 17:05
|
|
|
Crazycryodude posted:Why do all of Krengel's lieutenants keep dying? That's like, the 4th or 5th one I think. In a garrison, subalterns have a lovely charmed life; you have a bunch of people to order around, you don't have to worry about being volunteered for fatigues or guard duty, the brass's Good Ideas about uniforms and parades have to pass through a few layers of more senior officers before they reach you. Then the shooting starts. If you're trying to be a good officer, you now have to lead by example, show no fear in the face of danger, move around so you can give orders and monitor everyone's performance; and when Good Ideas reach you they usually involve something even more dangerous than what you were already doing. This is not conducive to life expectancy, and subalterns die like flies.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 17:09
|
|
|
I was wondering about that. Is there also an aspect to it that junior officers are also always where interesting stuff's happening, while enlisted might be somewhere at the back keeping an eye open for someone sneaking up on a flank or in a trench staring at windows in case anyone tries to take shots or something?
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 17:13
|
|
|
Ensign Expendable posted:I struggle to think where they hit an M3 15 times with a 75 mm Pak and not knock it out. Only the front, at long range or at a high angle, maybe. He says he fired at the M3 fifteen times, it doesn't mean he hit it fifteen times.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 19:42
|
|
|
Since unconventionally armed armoured cars keep coming up, maybe the guy's unit had a bunch of ersatz poo poo like this.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 19:50
|
|
|
Seems the most likely explanation.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 19:55
|
|
|
spectralent posted:I was wondering about that. The general perception is that good officers lead from the front, and there's a sort of expectation that when the shooting starts and everyone else hits the dirt you stay standing and kick everyone else's rear end into gear. If you try and live up to this expectation without experience of what you actually should be doing and take risks to live up to this perception at some point you are going to do something you shouldn't have and get shot, a lot.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 20:21
|
|
|
Vincent Van Goatse posted:He says he fired at the M3 fifteen times, it doesn't mean he hit it fifteen times. Didn't say he fired the 75mm Pak 15 times either.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 20:22
|
|
|
P-Mack posted:Yeah, but I don't know that they could have afforded that industrial effort, Not a chance. Even the industrial efforts they did engage in were promptly attacked and shut down by the Allies. The notion that they could have defended a massive industrial effort to either enrich uranium or produce plutonium even if they could have supported it economically is fanciful in the extreme. From the Farm Hall transcripts: quote:WEIZSÄCKER: I don't think we ought to make excuses now because we did not succeed, but we must admit that we didn't want to succeed. If we had put the same energy into it as the Americans and had wanted it as they did, it is quite certain that we would not have succeeded as they would have smashed up the factories. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Jan 25, 2017 |
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 20:31
|
|
|
The Allies ran some sort of insane commando mission to destroy a Nazi heavy water plant in Sweden right? Was that specifically intended to hurt German The Bomb efforts or was it more like "hmm this seems important to them, we should gently caress it up"?
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 20:55
|
|
|
zoux posted:The Allies ran some sort of insane commando mission to destroy a Nazi heavy water plant in Sweden right? Was that specifically intended to hurt German The Bomb efforts or was it more like "hmm this seems important to them, we should gently caress it up"? Terrible intel, I guess, as Sweden was neutral. (not that it wouldn't be possible, they were about to invade Norway and Sweden in the winter of 1940, blitzkrieging across snow-filled mountain valleys) Nenonen fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Jan 25, 2017 |
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 20:58
|
|
|
Krengel just keeps meeting all sorts of famous people, Stauffenberg?Nenonen posted:Terrible intel, I guess, as Sweden was neutral. It was a dam in Norway, not Sweden.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 21:06
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:It was a dam in Norway, not Sweden.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 21:33
|
|
|
The important thing was that it was in Norway; I didn't remember the specifics of the facility. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 21:38
|
|
|
Fangz posted:The assumption I'm making is that the German nuclear program starts in 1940 with Heisenberg correctly computing the critical mass of Uranium to be on the order of 50 kilograms - as opposed to several tons. Opinions from German physicists about the impossibility of bomb production were based on this miscalculation. Heisenberg did not calculate the critical mass to be several tons, and did in fact calculate it to be on the order of kilograms. That idea of the miscalculation based on some his off-the-cuff comments at Farm Hall, not his actual work. The Farm Hall transcript you posted is very partial and contains a lot of relevant omissions. From your version: quote:HEISENBERG: One can't say that. One could equally well say "That's the quickest way of ending the war.” That's a *huge* ellipsis. Here what's missing there and relevant: quote:
Heisenberg likely knew all along that the critical mass was on the order of kilograms, not tons. It was reported to Germany Army Ordnance in spring of '42 that the critical mass was estimated between 10 and 100 kilograms, a number that is very unlikely to have come from anyone but Heisenberg. At a meeting in Berlin in June of 1942, Field Marshal Erhard Milch asked the assembly how big a bomb would have to be to destroy London, and Heisenberg told him "about the size of a pineapple." Manfred von Ardenne also said that Heisenberg told him that the critical mass was several kilograms. And probably most tellingly, the "tons" figure comes from private conversation between Hahn and Heisenberg recorded at Farm Hall on August 6th, where he uses a random-walk model to explain to Hahn how the fission process proceeds in a bomb, and based on that model the critical mass is on the order of tons, because the critical radius is 54 centimeters. But a week later on August 14, he gives a real lecture and uses a far more rigorous approach (which takes some shortcuts relative to his 1939 paper and uses the wrong value for diffusion length but is still waaaay better than a simple random-walk model), and calculates for the assembled audience a critical radius of 6.2 centimeters, which is about the size of a pineapple. That 1939 paper contained everything necessary to calculate a critical mass of kilograms for U235, it just didn't explicitly do it because it was a paper about reactors and not bombs, which Heisenberg wasn't interested in developing. It's true Heisenberg didn't try to motivate the German military to develop a-bombs, *certainly* not like Fermi and Einstein did, but he also didn't didn't calculate early on that the critical mass was measured in tons and dissuade them on that basis. It's far more likely that the Germans decided in 1940 after having taken control of most of Europe after France's surrender, that they were doing just fine without them. zoux posted:The Allies ran some sort of insane commando mission to destroy a Nazi heavy water plant in Sweden right? Was that specifically intended to hurt German The Bomb efforts or was it more like "hmm this seems important to them, we should gently caress it up"? The former. Enough weapons research was going on to know that if the Germans wanted heavy water, they'd only have one thing in mind with it. France originally tasked some intelligence agents to just, you know, go to the plant and ask to borrow their existing supplies, and the plant director said "Yeah, I'd rather you have this than the Germans." The water was smuggled out to France and then transported to England in the Dunkirk evacuation. But this didn't prevent the plant from making more water, so the British put on an operation with the SOE, glider units, Norwegian commandoes, etc. to blow the place up. There were two different teams, with one engaged in a failed glider landing attempt on a lake and that one was canceled, but the other team that went in by parachute managed to make it inside and blow up the electrolysis hardware. That shut things down for some months, but the Germans got production up and running again, so the Allies started bombing it. This convinced the Germans to give up on the place, so they put whatever production could be saved back to Germany. One of the Norwegian commandos was still hanging around the area, and got wind that they were putting it on a ferry. He walks onto the boat, sees a guy he knows as one of the crew, bullshits with him for a while, and then goes below and sets a bomb that eventually blows up and sinks the ferry and kills some civilians. Then decades later some of the sunken drums of heavy water and raised and it turns out that the concentration was really lovely, and that the Germans never really made up the losses from the successful raid. Later on there was a concerted operation in the spring of 1945 to try to raid and capture everything related to the German bomb program, which scored some more heavy water and uranium ingots, but obviously by that point it was less about hurting the German bomb efforts than with just getting hold of everything we could. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Jan 25, 2017 |
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 21:41
|
|
|
I keep reading "WEIZSÄCKER" as "Wisecracker" am I the only one?
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 21:49
|
|
|
The Krengel Diary Part 23 Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16 Part 17 Part 18 Part 19 Part 20 Part 21 Part 22 1943 6 March: Looks like my last day in Africa 7 March: At 7 AM I reach the air base and finally I leave African soil at 8:55 AM. I was in North Africa exactly 752 days. At 10:30 AM we land at Palermo, Sicily, then take a plane to Napoli and arrive there at 1:30 PM. It's raining. I go by Wehrmacht bus to the main hospital but I have the evening off so I stroll around Napoly. There are many shops but I don't have enough money to buy things. 8 March: We exchange 300 Francs for Liras to buy things in the Cantina. We hear that we are going to be trasnferred to Germany on 11 March. On the 9th I sell a few tins of meat for Liras. On the 10th at 2 AM we board a hospital train. I'm in compartment 17, bed #44. We travel via Rome and Florence to Upper Italy. We receive many presents from people at station stops. 11 March: We travel through Upper Italy, Verona, Trento, and arrive at Bozen at 6 PM. We're in German territory now, Innsbruck. On the 12th we make it to Feldkirch, arriving at 9 PM. We go through a de-lousing, get new uniforms, have a good bath and get much rest. 13 March: I received my ration card for cigarettes and at 2 PM I phone my parents who say they are all well. I'm still in the hospital in Feldkirch on the 17th. 18 March: My parents arrive in Feldkirch for a visit and I stay with them until 9:30 PM. The next morning they visit again and Dad does a drawing for me. After the evening meal, we stroll around Feldkirch. 21 March: This is the last day of my parents visit and we listened on the radio to our Fuhrer's speech. In the evening my parents depart; I hope for not too long. News comes over the radio that the British started a new attack in southern Tunisia. I stay in the Feldkirch Base Hospital until April 2nd. 2 April: I have been released from the hospital. I get a train permit to Nuremberg and arrive there on the 3rd with a 14-day leave pass and go home to work on my library and go shopping with Mother. I get a high fever on the 6th and go to Dr. Klaver for an examination. It's my malaria with fever and cold chills; must go to bed. On April 12th I am admitted to the Bamberg Wehrmacht Hospital. The doctor says it is indeed malaria and calls an ambulance that takes me to the Barenschanze Hospital in Bamberg. There are 34 other malaria cases here, all in room 6. 14 April: I still have a fever. They are doing blood tests. On my 4th day in the hospital, my parents come for a short visit. 25 April [Easter Sunday]: I'm well enough to walk around Bamberg and see my parents and my brother Karl, who tells me he is getting married. We visit the Old Castle. My parents go back to Nuremberg. I still have not recovered. I have a visit from Sigmund who is taking a training course near here. On the 29th mother comes for a short visit, and, since I have a short leave pass for Nuremberg, I go home with her. I have to be back at the hospital on May 3rd. 9 May: Today is my last day in Bamberg. I still have my 14-day leave pass to use yet. I'm going back to Nuremberg.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 21:53
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:The important thing was that it was in Norway; I didn't remember the specifics of the facility. Oh I knew that the heavy water thing happened in Norway, I was just being cruel to zoux.  which should be justified because he was mixing two distinct Scandinavian kingdoms, Norway and Switzerland
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 21:55
|
|
|
Nenonen posted:Oh I knew that the heavy water thing happened in Norway, I was just being cruel to zoux. Hahaha
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 21:57
|
|
|
 I accept SA gift cards as payment
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 22:04
|
|
|
Jeez, that guy really is sick all the time. I guess that's one way to avoid getting killed.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 22:17
|
|
|
Ensign Expendable posted:Jeez, that guy really is sick all the time. I guess that's one way to avoid getting killed. Krengel is Bugs Bunny.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 22:22
|
|
|
He's also really loving unlucky to have been "lucky" enough to get back to Germany then. A little longer and he could have sat the rest of the war out in a POW camp. JcDent posted:I'm probably gonna be probated a second time for this, but I don't hatr Krengel. Unlike aome Dirlewanger - or unless he's being very mum about warcrimes - I feel like he's "there but for the grace of God go I" case. This is from ways back because I've been catching up with the thread, but this is 100% where I am. He's something like 23 when he arrives in Africa. He's a young, dumb kid who has spent the most formative 10 years of his life getting fed Nazi bullshit by every authority figure in his life. He's prime age to have gotten pulled into Hitler Youth bullshit, to have had his teachers go full Nazi on him, the whole nine yards. This isn't to say that it excuses what he does. Reporting that dude because "gently caress Jews / Arabs/ whatever they're all the same" was a really lovely thing. Still, he's less of a true believer and more a product of his times, at least from what I'm seeing. One of the first things you figure out when diving into this stuff really deeply is just how normal all the people that did this poo poo were. Chances are that the vast majority of people reading this would have gone along with all of it, up to and including doing some really horrible poo poo. The people who bucked the trend were, on the whole, the sort of social outcasts that everyone looks down on in a functioning society. Hell, one of the most sobering realizations I had doing my own research on the Nazification of the professions was that, based on my age and the career pressures I'm under right now, yeah I would have been one of the guys joining the party to get a leg up and get a decent job. Krengel isn't some kind of anti-fascist saint, serving at the front while doing everything in his power to undermine the regime. But he's also not even an extreme example of run of the mill 1930s German attitudes. He's pretty much just a normal dude.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 22:34
|
|
|
CIA informants must have access to Red Alert manuals from the future.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 22:51
|
|
|
Ensign Expendable posted:CIA informants must have access to Red Alert manuals from the future. Is that a real mangling of the Object 279? It's off about nearly everything but the "the tracks keep working without each other" thing sounds like they muddled up the double track set, and the detail about the sloping sounds like the blastwave screen thing.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 23:40
|
|
|
Phanatic posted:Later on there was a concerted operation in the spring of 1945 to try to raid and capture everything related to the German bomb program, which scored some more heavy water and uranium ingots, but obviously by that point it was less about hurting the German bomb efforts than with just getting hold of everything we could. Not just get ahold of everything they could of course, since they clearly had more expertise at that point, but to specifically deny as much of that knowledge as possible to the Soviets. Right at wars end there was a lot of speculation by American higher ups that the Soviets would never be able to figure out how to build a bomb without the help of German physicists (because the Russians were a bunch of dumb communists or something), and that they could further block their efforts by establishing control over the known world Uranium supply (turns out Uranium is pretty common!). Some people thought the Soviets would take 20-30 years to build a bomb, others thought they would never succeed. To have seen those faces when the intelligence came in about the RDS-1 detonation, and just how compromised the Manhattan Project had been. Cyrano4747 posted:He's something like 23 when he arrives in Africa. He's a young, dumb kid who has spent the most formative 10 years of his life getting fed Nazi bullshit by every authority figure in his life. He's prime age to have gotten pulled into Hitler Youth bullshit, to have had his teachers go full Nazi on him, the whole nine yards. This isn't to say that it excuses what he does. Reporting that dude because "gently caress Jews / Arabs/ whatever they're all the same" was a really lovely thing. Still, he's less of a true believer and more a product of his times, at least from what I'm seeing. I mean, I would be 0% surprised to hear a modern Canadian/American make a "gently caress Arabs" comment if they thought they had been cheated by some local merchant while on vacation there or something. If that's the worst we get from him I'll be pretty OK with it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2017 23:55
|
|
Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
|
Ensign Expendable posted:CIA informants must have access to Red Alert manuals from the future. Have you also been diving that CIA archive? Also is this some sort of report on the Maus
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2017 00:08
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:Have you also been diving that CIA archive? Yup, so far it's mostly ridiculous poo poo about what they imagine the Soviets are building and two reports worth a drat, one of which I already had. The craziest poo poo they come up with is allegedly being built in Czechoslovakia, like this thing.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2017 00:27
|
|
|
Ensign Expendable posted:Yup, so far it's mostly ridiculous poo poo about what they imagine the Soviets are building and two reports worth a drat, one of which I already had. I wonder if the CIA guy in Czechoslovakia found some nice place to drink/get laid and just sent in "reports" written while he had a hangover. Basically the equivalent of a student churning out a bullshit essay three hours before it's due. Just doing this over and over to keep his cushy post.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2017 00:34
|
|
|
So, uh, EE, any documents you may have crossed (not from the CIA stuff) which might explain what the point of "Anti-Radar" ammunition was in aircraft guns?quote:As a specimen from 1965 indicates, the PRL anti-radar projectile was very soon improved by introducing a thin-walled projectile body. In consequence, it contains a considerably larger chaff payload. Contrary to the previously described projectile, the improved PRL has the base plate press-fitted into the rear of the projectile; the projectile body is no longer crimped over that base plate. An improved VU-30P time fuze is fitted, which is identical in inner construction to the VU-30, but has an additional plastic gasket at the outer thread. The pusher plate that forces the chaff payload out through the rear is made from steel. 25 seconds after ejection, the chaff dipoles form a cloud of 18 square metres cross section which disguise the aircraft amongst a large number of false targets displayed on the radar screen. Usually two bursts of 10 - 12 rounds are fired with a pause of approximately 10 seconds. It is unclear whether a smoke projectile to indicate the location of the chaff cloud existed in 30x155B calibre as well. The improved PRL anti-radar projectile is identified by the white stencilled marking “Д-15-П” on the side of the projectile body. Like, okay, its supposed to "disguise" an aircraft but how is it used operationally?
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2017 00:39
|
|
|
If you've ever asked the question "So what were the procurement fuckups of the Allies in WW2" this blog post has a few.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2017 01:45
|
|
|
Jobbo_Fett posted:So, uh, EE, any documents you may have crossed (not from the CIA stuff) which might explain what the point of "Anti-Radar" ammunition was in aircraft guns? It's meant to be fired at radars to scramble them with false readings, so I'm guessing it would be fired continuously during a bombing run.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2017 01:53
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:If you've ever asked the question "So what were the procurement fuckups of the Allies in WW2" this blog post has a few.  The Brewster saga is insane.I really feel for Curtiss-Wright, though. "We want a pusher prop" "It doesn't really work, are you sure?" "Yeah make us the pusher prop" *comes back at the end* "This really isn't working out" "Hm? Oh, we want jets now. Sorry about the pusher prop thing" "  "
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2017 02:21
|
|
|
Jobbo_Fett posted:So, uh, EE, any documents you may have crossed (not from the CIA stuff) which might explain what the point of "Anti-Radar" ammunition was in aircraft guns? Post-war and aircraft aren't my areas, sorry.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2017 02:21
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:If you've ever asked the question "So what were the procurement fuckups of the Allies in WW2" this blog post has a few. Huh, that's the first person I've heard praise the SB2C. The XA-32 is the Grover-plane I've always wanted .
Fangz fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Jan 26, 2017 |
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2017 02:32
|
|
|
Ensign Expendable posted:Jeez, that guy really is sick all the time. I guess that's one way to avoid getting killed. If he had malaria that would explain the recurrent fevers and sickness. He clearly caught it early on.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2017 03:16
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 10, 2024 23:30 |
|
|
Ensign Expendable posted:Jeez, that guy really is sick all the time. I guess that's one way to avoid getting killed.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2017 03:17
|
|
