The Real War 1939-1945 (1989) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#141

Post by wantoncl » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 3:53 PM UTC

kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #44

iwillbenice wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My grandfather was a WWII B-29 pilot. For a very long time he didn't talk in much detail about the horrors. It was only in his later years before he passed did he talk openly about some of the real nasty aspects. One time I asked him what the most unpleasant thing he experienced was during his time in the military. His answer was the stench of burning humans. When they started low level firebombing, his initial spot…

I wish more of our politicians and pundits had the enlightenment and empathy that comes from such an experience. So many rude, riled-up chickenhawks these days.

I read something a while ago, a veteran who said something to the effect of: "all war would end immediately if the perpetrators had to smell it."

I think he had liberated a concentration camp. I wish I had remembered it better.

I think that this informed a lot of the fury towards the ordinary German population, that they could allow something like that to happen, or that they would ever just get used to it and go on with their lives. I'm probably conflating that with a scene from Band of Brothers, or some other written work.

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#142

Post by softcactus » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 4:31 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #59

> And they knew that the single greatest weapon of the war, the atomic bomb excepted, was the German 88-mm flat-trajectory gun, which brought down thousands of bombers and tens of thousands of soldiers. I beg to differ. It was radar-guided anti-aircraft guns, and proximity fuzes for artillery shells. This had the effect of doubling the firepower. Another was high-octane gasoline, which enabled much more powerful airc…

> I beg to differ. It was radar-guided anti-aircraft guns

The 8.8cm german flak gun WAS a radar-guided AA gun.

> and proximity fuzes for artillery shells

The axis may not have had proximity fuzes, but the 8.8cm flak was so accurate that during a statistical analysis it was determined that the part of the gun that introduced the most accuracy were the timed fuzes. They switched to shells that detonated on impact and actually ended up scoring more kills than before.

The actual piece of equipment that made this thing so accurate was the fire control computer, the Kommandogerat 40.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1UnrEetRYIuLoUT--ic0i...

Here is a Google Drive link to some scans I made in college of the book written by the designer. It explains all the calculations that the analog computer is doing.

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#143

Post by jacobolus » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 4:32 PM UTC

coryrc wrote: post #140

jacobolus wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US Navy ships in the territory of Hawaii were bombed but the island was not “invaded”. You are right that the Philippines was invaded, and was at the time a US territory. But it was at that point under a government intended to transition it to independence. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare–Hawes–Cutting_Act From what I can tell (this was decades before my birth and I have not extensively studied it, so I probab…

People were literally killed by bombs in Oregon: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1945-japanese-balloon...

Remember, our discussion in this thread is the purported “legitimate and urgent fear of a foreign power invading [America’s] shores”.

(a) This balloon bombing was covered up and essentially nobody about it at the time, so clearly not something people were urgently worried about.

(b) This militarily irrelevant bombing of a handful of random civilians is hardly an “invasion”.

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#144

Post by lisper » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

colinsane wrote: post #133

lisper wrote: post #3

The willingness of societies to sanitize the realities of war is easily understood in evolutionary terms: genes that build brains that are willing to suspend disbelief and engage in violence reproduce better than genes that build brains that are not willing to do so because the former can use a credible threat of violence to exploit the latter as resources. The sad fact of the matter is that the answer to Rodney King…

> we live on a finite planet with finite resources, and at the end of the day it is Darwin who runs the show, not Jesus. natural selection/Darwinism isn’t any sort of genius. from one angle, you outsmart it every time you use a condom. from another angle, if Darwinism leads to such an apparently contradictory behavior — one which popped into being suddenly, after millions of years without — how certain can we really…

> you outsmart it every time you use a condom

Not really. All you're doing is moving the needle a tiny bit so that in the next generation there will be fewer people inclined to use condoms.

> if Darwinism leads to such an apparently contradictory behavior

What contradictory behavior are you referring to? The ability to suspend disbelief is useful to survival in all kinds of situations, especially in our ancestral environment. Where is the contradiction?

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#145

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 5:44 PM UTC

softcactus wrote: post #142

WalterBright wrote: post #59

> And they knew that the single greatest weapon of the war, the atomic bomb excepted, was the German 88-mm flat-trajectory gun, which brought down thousands of bombers and tens of thousands of soldiers. I beg to differ. It was radar-guided anti-aircraft guns, and proximity fuzes for artillery shells. This had the effect of doubling the firepower. Another was high-octane gasoline, which enabled much more powerful airc…

> I beg to differ. It was radar-guided anti-aircraft guns The 8.8cm german flak gun WAS a radar-guided AA gun. > and proximity fuzes for artillery shells The axis may not have had proximity fuzes, but the 8.8cm flak was so accurate that during a statistical analysis it was determined that the part of the gun that introduced the most accuracy were the timed fuzes. They switched to shells that detonated on impact and a…

Thanks for the reference!

It seems that not that many were built:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%BCrzburg_radar

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#146

Post by lispm » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #29

ARandomerDude wrote: post #5

I didn't fight in WW2 obviously, but I did fight in a war. For me, the reticence to describe every detail to people who weren't there boils down to this: I don't want my wife, my children, or my neighbors to be burdened with thinking of something so horrible. I want them to be happy and safe, that's why I went. No need to bring it to their doorstep if I don't have to. I suspect many during and after WW2 felt this way…

> I don't want my wife, my children, or my neighbors to be burdened with thinking of something so horrible. Interesting. Until very recently, as far as I could know, my mother's life began at 16. She refused to talk about anything from her childhood. I don't know if, like you, she didn't want to traumatize us or simply didn't want to think about it at all. But now, in her late 80s, she'll sometimes absent-mindedly re…

> While my personal opinion is that Germany is not doing anywhere near enough to help Ukraine, I think they should be preparing a for a huge postwar assistance

Germany already hosts around one million refugees from Ukraine. The exact numer is difficult to say, since the EU has provided all Ukrainian refugees visa-free entry. Which is unprecedented. Most of them are women and children. The winter is coming.

Providing them psychological help is important, but the sheer number of people from Ukraine (not speaking German) makes this very challenging. The Germans themselves also have the problem of finding psychological help, since the number of people needing it has been rising because of the pandemic, the war, the economic instability, etc.

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#147

Post by softcactus » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 6:02 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #145

softcactus wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I beg to differ. It was radar-guided anti-aircraft guns The 8.8cm german flak gun WAS a radar-guided AA gun. > and proximity fuzes for artillery shells The axis may not have had proximity fuzes, but the 8.8cm flak was so accurate that during a statistical analysis it was determined that the part of the gun that introduced the most accuracy were the timed fuzes. They switched to shells that detonated on impact and a…

Thanks for the reference! It seems that not that many were built: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%BCrzburg_radar

Sorry I worded my previous response poorly.

> The 8.8cm german flak gun WAS a radar-guided AA gun.

The Kommandogerat 40 was a rangefinder/computer, not a radar. It had the capability of being radar-guided, but was not necessarily radar-guided by itself.

For the Kommandogerat 40 you needed a direct line-of-sight (they were still used in overcast conditions though) but it would compensate for the velocity vector of the incoming targets, altitude, wind, and would relay fire controls to all the flak pieces in the battery. Not as nice as a radar, but it was able to be fielded in mass quantities, and I think it deserves its place as 2nd most devastating weapon of WWII. Especially since towards the end of the war, the Germans were the ones playing defense. It made the strategic bombing campaigns of the allies very painful. The RAF bomber crews had a 44% death rate. That's deaths, not casualties.

It also excelled in direct fire roles against ground targets.

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#148

Post by helloworld11 » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 6:17 PM UTC

stereolambda wrote: post #42

Not having fought in a war (yet?) I won't dare to speak about the core message here (it's well worth reading), but I sometimes wonder about dissemination of this knowledge. The fragments about Hitler and Goebbels shielding themselves from gory reality on the ground are interesting in this context. This shows well how the leadership operates on the level of its own fantasies, and moves the "chess pieces" while clueles…

>fragments about Hitler and Goebbels shielding themselves from gory reality on the ground are interesting in this context. This shows well how the leadership operates on the level of its own fantasies, and moves the "chess pieces" while clueless about what they're really doing.

For Goebbels, as a cripple who never fought in any war, maybe so, but not for Hitler, at least as far as combat violence was concerned. The man was a repeatedly wounded veteran of the first world war who had served right in the worst of front line duty, and knew exactly how brutal the carnage could be for every one of the millions of soldiers he later ordered out to battle through his generals. Cluelessness might apply to his ordering of the holocaust, because a thing like that pretty much had no precedent in human history, but not quite so much for his war-making.

Curiously, while, as far as anyone knows, Hitler himself never witnessed one of the mass killings his death camps were performing daily, Himmler did want to see what it was truly like, and nearly fainted at his first sight of all those regular people being gassed at once. Didn't stop him from continuing to approve the whole monstrous thing though...

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#149

Post by pram » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

justshowpost wrote: post #123

pram wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I really regret personally starting the war now, thanks.

Yet you've participated in it and got paid for that. Worth to mention paid very well and still receiving retirement plan benefits.

News to me. I had to look: in 2007 I was paid $1800 a month as an E4. I didn’t retire so I don’t have “retirement plan benefits” jfyi

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#150

Post by guenthert » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 7:16 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #29

ARandomerDude wrote: post #5

I didn't fight in WW2 obviously, but I did fight in a war. For me, the reticence to describe every detail to people who weren't there boils down to this: I don't want my wife, my children, or my neighbors to be burdened with thinking of something so horrible. I want them to be happy and safe, that's why I went. No need to bring it to their doorstep if I don't have to. I suspect many during and after WW2 felt this way…

> I don't want my wife, my children, or my neighbors to be burdened with thinking of something so horrible. Interesting. Until very recently, as far as I could know, my mother's life began at 16. She refused to talk about anything from her childhood. I don't know if, like you, she didn't want to traumatize us or simply didn't want to think about it at all. But now, in her late 80s, she'll sometimes absent-mindedly re…

> While my personal opinion is that Germany is not doing anywhere near enough to help Ukraine, I think they should be preparing a for a huge postwar assistance, not just money for rebuilding, but psychological / therapy based on their experience to try to reduce the effects of wartime trauma on Ukraine.

Well, perhaps they should, but I'm not sure they can. My parents never mentioned any help regarding postwar trauma being available in Germany. Perhaps mental health issues weren't recognized as such then, perhaps they had other priorities. The first few years after the war "were difficult".