Amazing how much the posters on this sight have a grasp of history back then. One of my favorite subjects even as a kid for reasons I cannot explain. Perhaps I was interested in why my pop shot missles at “The enemy” ?
Thanks for the kind words. It’s ironic I saw that here. I am not a mariner nor have I ever been a mariner. I just landed on this website because I am totally interested in what you folks do. I read books on the subject when I come across good ones simply out of personal interest. It’s a fascinating life to me and sometimes I wish I had gone down that road, but I never did. I remember when my wife and I were on our honeymoon 20 years ago - we took a cruise out of New Orleans to Cozumel. The most interesting part of the trip to me was sailing down the MS river and seeing all the shipping activity. I guess it goes back to when I was a kid and we would go to Mobile to visit my grandmother. My dad would take me down to the port area so I could look at all the ships. I was just fascinated by all of it. And still am. Tons of respect for what you people do.
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Just to be clear I’m also here on sufferance as a WAFI – Wind Assisted Fecking Idiot. 
Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors
Fly Boys
Jimmy Stewart: Bomber Pilot
The Were Expendable
I have read many more great books about WWII but they are sitting on the shelf in my old room at my parents house, I cant remember their names.
One book I do want to get is The Sand Pebbles, its fiction but still takes place in that era.
As a teenager, I worked for a german fellow that was the local bookie and babysat his really bitchy tiny dog. His brother was one of the few surviving U-Boat captains during the war. There was a book written about the wolfpacks he had in his library that I can’t remember the name. Guy I worked for was Herman Wolfgang Becker. We called him Mr Beck., Not sure but I think his brothers name was George. I researched a bit, there were a few Beckers in the Uboat force. Wish I could remember the book, I read it at an early age, and wish I could have obtained it when he passed. Read that book in less than 48 hours when I should have been studying other things for high school.
That was a bit further back in history than WW II. Still a great book.
Glad you find it interesting. It is a bit of an aside from secret & exotic weapons, and other such intrigues but most of the history I’ve known since I was a kid was about battles and warfare. Seldom does that stuff address why it was happening. (at least from the point of view of those in the headwaters such that I could better know and understand why the warfare) It is something similar with political elections where the media would focus on the horse race rather than to look deeply into the issues the candidates stand for.
I’ll always remember Grandad saying: “It’s the rich man’s war…but it’s the poor man’s fight”.
This is part of what has motivated me to investigate that history and some of our own recent history (since Eisenhower) here in the USA to find connections or at least similarities European Fascism. Yes, it comes from my own mind and thinking. It is fair to say I have gone thru many books and websites to learn as I wasn’t alive in the 1920’s although I’ve listened for hours to Great Grandad and his friends discuss what they experienced and likewise with younger adult parents who were involved in later confrontations involving the USA. But never was any of the stuff I’ve addressed in this thread spoken of by any of them given that they were soldiers and served in the fight…not to chart strategies or to make policy.
German expansion, or “Lebenraum” was a bit of recapturing lands which may have at one time actually been part of the early German region. Speaking of Poland in that. Certainly in amassing more land what you’d have would be a buffer during a war. And, to Fascist peacetime is basically a time to reorganize and prepare for the next war. I believe “blitzkrieg” is born of this notion. (think Sumo Wrestling, where one opponent may be caught off balance and quickly knocked out of the ring) Blitzkrieg would require strategic thinking to arm efficiently enough with small resources to take on small quick battles and win. (this is the alternation of Blitzkreig & Sitzkreig) Still some of these battles could be fought within. (example: the fire at the “Reichstag” where various elements of Government were not of NAZI ideology. In 1933 Hitler’s Socialist Party had won a political victory and Hindenburg directed Hitler to form a government. Four weeks later the Reichstag burned and the next morning Hitler proclaimed emergency measures such as…no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press…no public gatherings…on privacy for mail, phone or telegrams, the right to search houses, and the right to take people’s personal property…Germany would live under this injunction until Hitler died). German’s had never truly known “civil liberties”, so they easily conformed to it believing in Hitler, the success of his earlier policies and with the new found upsurge in morale they felt they were gaining with him.
Libya, Eirea, (north of Ethiopia) and Ethiopia may had been under Roman domination in the in the early Christian era. As with many countries wars, it was about reclaiming former territory. Mussolini (some see him as a latter day Caesar) wanted to restore Rome to it’s former greatness. (not so much as restoring the Holy Roman Empire)
In High School I worked with a fellow who had been in the North African campaign of WW2. He explained how they went up thru Italy with little resistance enroute to Germany. You may recall a low altitude air raid flown over Italy from Libya by American B-24 bombers to the Polesti Romaina oil fields.(sadly it was a failure due to navigation error) Still the Germans had stationed those little Messerschmitt 163 Komets, to protect the refineries and they would have been of no use) As for Japan activities in the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, or Bay of Bengal I know little. But in the Pacific and regarding the Panama Canal, the Japanese had build a special fighter bomber (Aichi M6A1 Seiran) three of which were carried aboard a super submarine (I-400 double hulled aircraft carrier/submarine) whose mission was to disable the Panama Canal and American west coast harbors. The effort was all in vain as it came too late in the war.
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The comets were too late .As was the ME 262. Glad they were late. Our bombers were suffering badly until the spitfires and mustangs had longer range. 262’s could only stay in the air for a very short time, but kicked ass while they were up.
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Yes, but you have to hand it to Alexander Lippisch’s aero-engineering ability. Those Komet’s were built largely of wood as metal was a priority material. Given that they could fly some 130 feet per second per second in the vertical mode to reach 40,000 ft (altitude those B 17’s were flying at…or 8 miles high) within a 5 minute time frame that’s some real flying.
Some of these were armed with 6 50 mm cannons mounted in the root of the wings aimed upwards. They were triggered by photo cells to fire automatically. So the Komet
pilot would fly under a bomber to shade those photo cells so that they would fire the cannons.
Just imagine.
Agree RC.Joe. Those planes were badass, just glad we snuffed Axis before they made too many of them.
LOL, yes those with a mind for History can be good to have around. Those with good memories can usually gain a lot from the study of history. But…those who are able to think for themselves and connect the dots down thru time and glean the parallels of things happening in different regions at different periods may be the most visionary.
As the saying goes, “Those who don’t study history may find themselves repeating it”.
Many things we see going on around us may not be anything terribly new, but just revivals of old history being used as a template in order to replicate earlier events. Of course that would take a lot of money.
I understand that in the USA today we have over 620 Billionaires.( one Billion = 1000 Million) Of the top 400 wealthiest of them their net worth is 3 Trillion dollars.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon com is the worlds wealthiest with 112 Billion to his credit. Then Bill Gates with 90 Billion followed by Warren Buffet with 84 Billion.
Remember this when you get your $1200 stimulus check. Help some little guys why not.
Wish I did/do get the stimulus check. My bride and I think we don’t qualify. Still love WW2 history. The people that really need and deserve it, good for them.
Read Sledge’s book and Leckie’s book. I really enjoyed Leckies book. I also read his book Strong Men Armed. His book Helmet for my Pillow:
A helmet for my pillow,
A poncho for my bed,
My rifle rests across my chest-
The stars swing overhead.
Also about Guadalcanal was Combat Officer: A Memoir of the War in the South Pacific a national guard officers book about the battle.
Wasnt very impressed with Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. I liked Sea of Thunder though.
A friend of mine’s father was a Marine at Guadalcanal. He returned he and married my mate’s mother. The action saved New Zealand as our entire army were fighting in the Middle East, not that we could have done much any way with such a long length of coastline and a small population.
What surprised me was there were almost five times as many casualties among the seamen in Iron Bottom Sound or the Slot as were Marines even thought the land battle was brutal.
I found this beat up old copy of, “Admiral Doenitz Memoirs Ten Years & Twenty Days” in the Library awhile back. It even has the pocket in the front from back before digital record keeping. It is somewhere around 1959 A Professor of History at the local University here
was cited for his assistance with producing this book. (Probably why the Library keeps it)
The ten years represents the time in which he was known as Mr. Submarine. The twenty day was the time in which he was Fuhrer (successor to Hitler).
Excellent book in so many ways. (no wonder the Library keeps it) As he accounts his personal reflections he backs them up with excerpts from the diaries of many of the U-Boat Captains plus his own personal diary. In the back of the book there are numerous charts and tables. His plan to build up the U-boat fleet, failures with torpedoes, and information going back to WW1 U-Boats as he was at sea as a Captain in them. There is the whole story of the U-Boat battle world wide. Most people see U-Boats as cold blooded killers, but that wasn’t always so. In the event of the sinking of the “Laconia”, German U-Boats came to rescue passengers. But British B 24 aircraft began to fly over the rescue mission and drop bombs on all of them. That’s when rescuing survivors was ended by the U-Boat fleet. (with the caveat “as long as it doesn’t interfere with the war ship task”)
Doenitz points out that, “At Nuremberg the German U-Boat arm and it’s command could not be and were not convicted of improper conduct of submarine warfare which to this very day has been kept hidden from the world”
But what I find most fantastic about this book is the Epilogue which as old as it is foretells
much of what has been happening in the USA in the last decades and more so in the last few. years, (by comparison to the rise of NAZI Germany) Doenitz makes the case for an educated public being necessary to maintain a Democracy, (which Germany did not have at the time the Weimar Republic was attempted. Thus their population could be led to a dictatorship by Hitler as ignorant sheep-like followers) Hiram Rickover of the USN Nuclear submarine program echoed those same sentiments shortly after the time this book was published.
Doenitz Epilogue
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A great find. My father ex. Achilles attended several reunions of veterans of The Battle of the River Plate. The German veterans of the Graf Spee and everyone else got along fine.
Marryat basically invented the naval sea story genre. You can get his entire collection on kindle for ~$3. His books are kind of moralistic and preachy but still good reads. They were written in the 1830’s+ so you need to make allowances for that. Jane Austen he’s not.
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Yes, that’s the book and probably a later printing. The cover of the Library copy I have is a different.
It will become clear to anyone who reads Doenitz book that of all the people Hitler kept around him for counsel, had he listened to Doenitz early on he would have likely won the war. And Doenitz didn’t meet with Hitler very often.
Youtube movie: “The Sinking of the Laconia” part 1 & part 2
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Doenitz was brilliant. Perhaps thats the reason he stayed away from Hitler.
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