The Drydock - Episode 273
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- Опубліковано 30 тра 2024
- 00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:13 - Ibuki class cruiser carrier conversion?
00:05:12 - Was suspending aircraft from a carrier's hangar ceiling a common practice among other navies, and was the idea ever utilised to its full potential?
00:13:34 - Could you explain why turret balancing is important and how it works?
00:21:16 - Why were the Turks allowed to keep the Goeben when the first world war ended?
00:23:26 - Why are turrets 'standalone'?
00:26:32 - What was the reason for the construction of the pre dreadnought HMS Hood?
00:31:04 - What ships could we rebuild with both historically accurate interior and exterior?
00:36:52 - Why did warships have portholes in the hull and why do they disappear in later designs?
00:41:19 - IJN Soya?
00:44:17 - What 5 historical naval figures would you like to see have a roundtable discussion?
00:45:50 - Who are some of your favorite crazy destroyer captains?
00:47:23 - How long did it take to correct the brittle fracture issues with welding?
00:53:09 - What are your thoughts on Admiral Spruance’s decision to lead a surface force (including the Battleships Iowa and New Jersey) during Operation Hailstone?
00:57:46 - What does the end of the five minute guides say?
00:59:54 - Marine B-25 PBJ missions vs Japan?
![[柴犬ASMR]曼玉Manyu&小白Bai 毛发护理Spa asmr](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/0TsXQ7z2Dh4/mqdefault.jpg)
"Destroyer captains lacking in self preservation." Hahaha! I laughed so hard at that! I believe a while back you addressed the respect in the Royal Navy for the Polish destroyer squadrons during WWII.
Regarding PBJs, they were adaptations of in-theater mods to B-25s made in 5th Air Force by Pappy Gunn in late 1942, using large numbers of .50s and nicknamed "commerce destroyers" by Kenney et al. Their shining moment was the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, where along with Aussie A-20s and Beaufighters they almost annihilated a 16-ship Japanese convoy in Mar 1943.
North American then got orders for these mods to be introduced into production, and some were picked up by the Marines who used them for patrol/S&D missions. Some with 12.50s in the plated-over nose, others with 4 .50s and a 75-mm cannon.
5th AF was very innovative in both materiel and tactics.
Dear Drach, it is pronounced like «Tree Svya-téa-te-lya»
Trust me, «HMS indefatigable» is as hard to pronounce for slavs, and usually we say something like «indefatikatebull», so you are not alone
Speaking of Cdr. Ernest Evans.... The secretary of the Navy announced last week the new DDG-141 will be named for him. He was of course posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor; for actions as captain of the USS Johnson during the Battle of Samar.
That new ship's slogan HAS TO BE "Into Harm's Way".
@@johngregory4801 it's rather perplexing there has only been one ship in 80 years named for him prior. There have been some other ships named Evans. But those were named for other men.
Reading up on the Soya, she had a few run-ins with topics that have been brought up lately. She was torpedoed by USS Greenling in January 1943 (and hauled up one of the dud torpedoes to the deck in celebration...probably not wise considering there was genuinely rather a lot of explosive material in there and the firing mechanism was in an unknown state, but ok). She fled Truk during Operation Hailstone, running aground in her haste to escape but surviving the operation. Additionally, she was in a convoy attacked by USS Parche in June 1945, though was not herself targeted, and her flotilla was bombed in August 1945 at anchor, again, not being hit but being in the vicinity of other Japanese vessels being hit, which brings her to a total of 4 encounters with Allied forces which she survived in remarkably good condition. (10 sailors died in the running aground incident, but those appear to be the only casualties, at least caused by the result of enemy action...assuming she would not have run aground had she not been fleeing air raids and battleships.)
She was also the ship that evacuated the Showa research station in 1958 but left the 15 dogs behind. 2 of them survived (Taro and Jiro) and were found when she returned that spring. (This is the incident that inspired the movies Antarctica (originally Nankyoku Monogatari or South Pole Story) and Eight Below; if this is vaguely ringing a bell to you, one of these movies is probably why.)
All in all, not too shabby a career for a simple cargo ship.
She's also considered military enough to show up in Kantai Collection as well. :)
@@BleedingUraniumas a potato face but a good looking potato.
@@ousou78 Shibafu is one of my favourite KC artists, I love their artstyle.
There are numerous sources that indicate that Yavuz (formerly Goeben) was to be returned to the Kaiserliche Marine and then interred in Scapa Flow, first under the Armistice conditions (which the Germans anticipated, leading then to formally transfer her to the Ottomans on 2 November 1918 and second between the British and French diplomacy with the Ottomans directly through the Treaty of Sevres.
Sevres was remarkably similar to Versailles, forcing the Ottomans to reliquish massive territories to the European Allies (the United States had not declared war on the Ottomans and thus were not party to this treaty, which was principally Britain, France, Italy and Japan versus the Ottomans) in such forms as the Mandate of Palestine and the Mandates of Lebanon and Syria. The formal transfer of Yavuz in November was also a strange decision, as it was clear that an Allied occupation of the Ottoman Empire was about to commence, which began with the British and French occupying Constantinople starting in 12 November 1918. With the British dissolving the Ottoman Parliament on 11 April 1920 to force the Ottoman signing of Sevres in August, it was remarkable that the Royal Navy did not seize control of Yavuz while the Ottoman Empire was effectively under the control and administration of London.
The collapse of the German government and partition of the German Empire (German Revolution starting in November 1918), which looked on the surface to be the same as what transpired in Constantinople, was in reality so different that circumstances would result in the collapse of Lloyd George's premiership and the Allied evacuation of Anatolia.
Unlike Versailles, after World War I the Turks still had significant fighting power that responded to the occupation of Constantinople and sparked the Turkish War of Independence, unlike the Germans who were simply tapped out by late 1918. The Turks effectively defeated French and Greek forces by 1922, triggering the Chanak Crisis.
Winston Churchill became the face of Lloyd George's coalition's desire to go fully to war in the face of the Turkish advance against Constantinople, the future Second World War PM publishing a manifesto that warned of a massive Turkish assault into Europe if the advance wasn't stopped prior to the former Ottoman capital. The fallout from this overwrought screed, combined with war weariness and the fact that the British commander on the scene, General Charles Harington refused to present a British ultimatum to the Turks led to Lloyd George's resignation and the Treaty of Lausanne.
Quite understandably, with the Turks negotiating from a position of strength, the question of war reparations from the Ottomans/Turks to the British and French was not on the table. Thus, the Turks retained Yavuz for decades afterwards.
I am pretty sure the Allies had interned the former Ottoman Navy until Lausanne (so you know, seized Goeben/Yavuz alongside other ships)(with the exception of some small gunboats) but of course with Turkey winning the Turkish War of Independence the navy was then handed back to Turkey.
@gokbay3057 Yavuz specifically seems to have been laid up in Constantinople for almost a decade starting in 1918. She had been severely damaged by a British minefield in January that year, limping back into Constantinople on 27 January after running aground and being subject to British air and submarine attack which damaged her further. She was functional enough to sail to German-occupied Sevastopol in June 1918 for repairs, but returned to Constantinople in July where she sat when the British took control of the Ottoman capital in November.
So, would this be considered interred, as she sat in Constantinople's harbor the entire time the Allies occupied Anatolia? Perhaps, but it really calls into question how seaworthy she was after the January 1918 ordeal...
Text to voice:
"Casa-mate" for casemate always made me smile
My man opened up with some hard to pronounce battleship name. Drach really knows the wants of his people.
I think the user with the anime warship name is technically correct in that she was purchased/taken by the Imperial Navy and quite correctly commissioned into their fleet. Yes, she was mustered out and given over to civilian use later on, but the fact she was the last ship of the Imperial Japanese Navy still operating in some form gives her an honour
When my daughter spent a semester in Japan, I agreed to finance a few days' pleasure travel after classes ended if she FaceTimed me from one of several naval museums or museum ships. I let her choose between the Mikasa, the Sōya, or the Kure Maritime Museum. She chose the last and also brought me back some Yamato swag from the museum shop. But still, the Sōya is a really cool ship with a fascinating history, including being damaged during Operation Hailstone and postwar Antarctic exploration as part of Japan's contribution to the International Geophysical Year. Also not Russian built, but built in Japan for the Russians and never delivered to the ordering party.
a bit like Acadia in Canada, this really old boat, that was brought into the Royal Canadian Navy Twice! (one for each World War)
I think we also know full well where he learned about the Soya...
Yes, but the spirit of the honor is more geared toward a last surviving/operating/floating WARSHIP. If my uncle still has one of HMS Iron Duke’s lifeboats floating in a marina somewhere, that’s not exactly the greatest honor of the Royal Navy
@@elliottmcnear8516 She may not be a warship, but equating her to a ship's lifeboat feels far more off the mark to me.
Incidentally the fix for the Liberty ships was a long steel "Band-Aid" riveted along both sides of the ship to reduce the stresses where the ships were breaking.
I live in a city on the Great Lakes that had a significant ship building industry and I was told that men from the west coast and east coast ship yards came here to ‘pick the brains’ of engineers and workman who built ships meant to sail Superior and Michigan at their worst.
@@williamprince1114
Never do anything yourself that you can con an expert into doing for you. --- Miles Vorkosigan
48:23 - "Ah, we have a problem with Liberty ships breaking apart when they shouldn't be"
Is there _ever_ a time when they _should_ be?
Properly designed ships shouldn’t break in half.
Was this ship properly designed?
Well obviously not.
How do you know that?
It broke in half.
The front fell off
I mean...if it's breaking up under large amounts of shellfire, that's not an ideal situation, but less an indicator of a design flaw than of imperfect naval strategy and tactics. If it breaks in unusually inclement weather, that's similarly at least possibly a result of poor seamanship and sailing into weather you should have known to avoid. If the seas are calm and the enemy is not shooting at you, but the ship breaks anyway...then yeah, you have a problem.
When you take for type 95s midship.
The horrifying thing is that S.S. Schenectady, the ship in that infamous photo, was repaired and put into service.
That'll buff out!
The crack requested and received a transfer to SS Pendleton so it could finish its job. And still the crew from the stern survived!
Yep, found that out myself when looking up the T2 tanker (after rewatching The Finest Hours). Absolutely nuts. This sort of engineering feat always leaves me at a loss for words to describe just how impressive it is (especially in a pre-digital/computer era).
@@BleedingUranium An excellent movie, made cooler still by the actual facts behind the story. No Coastie has ever pulled of a rescue like it since.
I knew it was "pinned post", but I always hear it as a "pink post".
Armor steel started by Krupp in 1894 (Plate 420), were extra-clean mild steel mixed with about 2.5% chromium and 4.5% nickel. This was the basis for all later armor steels used well after WWII. It met most minimum test standards, too. Krupp nailed the best mixture almost immediately in 1894 (luck?).
Probably did enough research to figure out exactly what properties were useful based on earlier ironclads and early steel ships, then did a bunch of small scale testing to figure out a good option. Good engineers make their own luck.
(Insert History Channel aliens guy meme here)
Mmm... extra-clean mild steel with chromium-nickel topping... 🤤
(Idk why my "reading-voice" decided to read out your comment like one of those seductive dessert commercials, but it sure sounded delicious.)
13:43 The balance extension of the turret is called a bustle, and is still common place on AFVS, but a main reason for balancing a turret either Naval or tank is the amount of effort to move the lump, so in a ship power traverse (try moving a battleship turret by hand crank) the more out of balance the turret the larger and more power the traverse motor required.
It is said that the huge turret on KV 2 tanks could not traverse if the tank was more than 20° out of level, and similar problems were found on the German Panther -which did have a turret extension but obviously not enough to balance the big shooty thing but on a tank the traverse was limited to either hand cranked or comparitively small under powered electrical or electrical/hydraulic motors, but the size and power availablity to traverse motors was limited in tanks compared to the available power in ships.
Admiral Spruance did not appear to have the same opinion about the advisability of using battleships the way he used them against Truk after Operation Hailstone concluded, where in some accounts Spruance gritted his teeth when it was universally acknowledged that Mitcher's flyers gave timely warning to TG 50.9 for USS Iowa and USS New Jersey to comb the torpedo salvo fired from the Japanese destroyer Maikaze, leading to Spruance's remark: “That would have been embarrassing.”
Spruance developed a deep suspicion of risking his fleet when he had massive air power in attendance after Hailstone. Spruance refused to use fast battleships as his flagship after standing on the bridge of USS New Jersey during the assault on Truk, instead preferring the cruiser USS Indianapolis or the Standard battleship USS New Mexico lest he succumb to the temptation to see combat first-hand again.
Perhaps there was something about USS New Jersey serving as fleet flagship that elicited reckless behavior, as she served as Third Fleet flagship during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. But rather than it being a case where Bill Halsey was simply more aggressive than a by-then cautious Raymond Spruance, the reality rather appears to be that Spruance was severely chasened by the experience of Hailstone...had that not occurred in February 1944, perhaps Spruance would have been liable to make a mad dash at Ozawa in the Philippine Sea or emulate Halsey had he been on command during Leyte Gulf?
But why would Spruance have felt so chasened by Hailstone? The USS New Jersey Museum's UA-cam account seems to have the answer, despite their curator Ryan saying specifically in a video that the two Iowa-class battleships weren't really in danger off Truk. Ryan also has made it exceptionally clear that the torpedo defenses of all US fast battleships were inadequate against American Mark 15 torpedoes, let alone Long Lances with much larger warheads and an oxygen-rich propellant that was a potent explosive in-and-of-itself.
Spruance certainly knew how deadly Japanese torpedoes were by 1944, because he became Nimitz's chief of staff shortly after the Battle of Midway and also was promoted to deputy-CINCPAC in 1943...which ensured Spruance saw firsthand the damage Long Lances inflicted on cruisers and destroyers returning from the Solomons that were repaired in Pearl Harbor's yards or just patched up enough to be sent back the the coast...and a single Type 95 oxygen-propelled torpedo forced USS North Carolina to flood one of the fast battleship's main magazines before retiring to Pearl Harbor for six weeks of repairs. Now incorporate the fact that he personally witnessed his flagship having to comb the torpedo tracks from Maikaze...
...it is hard to come to any conclusion other than Spruance's apparent determination to avoid surface-only engagements after Hailstone was extremely wise. The Long Lance was an equal-opportunity killer, but was no match against the American aviation cloud that would throw Mark 13s from TBFs in 260 knot attack patterns escorted by Dauntlesses, Corsairs, Hellcats and Helldivers.
Lol @ Chicago. Thanks Drach. We all appreciate the effort.
Yes an unbalanced turret would be worse than an unbalanced chief engineer.
Or an unbalanced Captain named Queeg.
Probably not, with an unbalanced turret you know your problems are isolated to turrets wanting to move around. with an unbalanced chief engineer you have to worry about the boilers exploding leaving you an easy target, ball bearings replaced with gum balls... HMS Canopus had an engineer going through a mental breakdown and it cost some rather heavy casualties with how late they were to the battle.
Unless you're Admiral Craddock. One unbalanced chief engineer cost him nearly his entire squadron. And his life. An unbalanced turret might have resulted in the loss of one ship.
Looking at the aircraft storage in the hangar overhead I'm immediately impressed by the fact that it's just an excellent use of dead space.
The deep girder frames providing strength to the flight deck above create an otherwise unusable volume. Hangar clearance to the deck below is measured from the bottom of those frames, so anything that can fit up there is stowed up there. Still true on every carrier I was ever aboard in my service.
On your recent visits to the US you've shown a goodly number of the 'steam and steel' museum ships out there. Would you, during some future US tour, be considering seeing some of the museum/reproduction sailing ships in the States. There's the Godspeed in Jamestown, the Elissa in Galveston, Elizabeth II on Roanoke Island, among others.
The PBJ-1H had a 75mm cannon in the nose.
Thank you, Drachinifel.
40:00 As I understand from youtube channel, the Iowa class was planed with portholes in hull but this was skipped to save time.
Superstructure or officer country still had them :)
Great Drydock Drach. Thanks for all the hard work you do on these.
In terms of plans for Age of sail vessels one of the elements that is often missing on plans however is very important to the people back then, is detailing, so the Firgurehead will not be present and the detailing and soemtimes the shape on the stern gallery will also be missing. Which is very important and is also a very distinctive exterior indicator of the age of the vessel, in terms of shape, type of decoration and the amount of decoration and colour used on thr stern gallery.
Wouldn't another MAJOR problem with building a replica of an older warship be armor?
Can modern steel works create armor of that thickness and properly hardened?
46:17 - I mean... I did also mention Kiyoshi Kikkawa notable for what he did at the Battle of Badoeng Strait while captaining the Ooshio and the 1st Battle of Guadalcanal while captaining the Yuudachi.
"What ships could we rebuild with both historically accurate interior and exterior?"
Floaty Log?
"The battle of denial was fought by The Orient and Japanese ships Chi, Ka, and Go." -AI test to speech
Thanks Drach
Thank you for picking my question.
For the B 25, there are several occasions that would reinforce the hatred of the machine by the Japanese.
Obviously the psychological impact of the Doolittle raid, the Bismark Sea slaughter of an entire troop convoy, and repeated strikes on Rebaul.
The Marines being Marines, adding a level of aggression to an already aggressively operated aircraft likely added to the hatred/fear of the B 25.
@Drachinifel I think you've answered a similar question regards your 'perfect' Treaty Era battleship (post London Treaty) but as you've mentioned that the Nelsons were too much of a rush job, I'm curious to know what kind of 16"-armed vessel you'd build within the confines of the Washington Naval Treaty and why. Cheers!
By far best opening jam on UA-cam. Boogie. Can u talk about the drums from Mary rose and what drums on ships were for and if any extant music exists
How many subs sunk friendly ships by accident during WW2, and which cases were the biggest blunders from all of them (military and civilian targets)?
This week's Wednesday video on the US Submarine campaign in the Pacific in 1943 mentions a US sub in the Sea of Japan that shot up a trawler with its deck gun, only to find that the people they were hearing in the water were Russians. They rescued 12 of them and brought them back to the US, by which time the Russian captain had decided his report would say that an "unknown" submarine had sunk his trawler, after which this nice US submarine had rescued them.
In the answer to the first question , you mentioned the "zero" , as far as I can understand the zero was an ultra long range ( for its time) ship board fighter, soo? How did Japanese zero pilots find the ship after a long range sortie? Extremely fantastic navigation?, homing beacons?😮😮😮 just how?
They had a type of RF (radio frequency) location beacon, at least some planes did, the disadvantage of that was though, that you only got a general bearing (as in home's somewhere THAT way) it didn't really give distance, that was where you had to rely on Goodwood fashioned "dead reckoning" (basically, ok we're HERE, WE need to fly north for say, 15 minutes, then turn due west and fly for 20 minutes, etc)
Iirc those were the common methods back then, hope that helps.
Additionally, almost all their really long range missions were flown in support of multiseat attack aircraft which were better planed to navigate.
@Drachinifel thanks ,drachma,? It always seemed a mystery to me how such a long rangenplane could navigate over water. Thanks for such an easy clear cut answer that does not that questions like this as stoopid. ( unlike some in here)
Thanks Drach.
00:21:16 Also, Turkey was not actually allowed to keep the Goeben. Then Turkey defeated the Entente (mainly Greece, but also some others). So did not really suffer much arms limitation (some areas were demilitarised thought).
And your British voice is very nice!!
It was probably Russian for ‘Scrapped on the Stocks’ anyway
DRach, you mentioned that there are no plans existing for teh Yamato and some other warships? This prompts me to ask, as a scale modeller, are the plastic models of the Yamato were accurate or simply built with artistic interpretation?
Regarding re-constructing warships from their plans; Those plans also don't discuss colors or even materials of fine furnishings.
Spare aircraft were more useful during the interwar period when relatively lightly built aircraft were being lost in landing accidents.
Just noticed you changed the graphic of the sailor man! He's now making a hand gesture?
Could you do a video on the german navy plan to use the iberian ports, as part of Operation Felix and later Operation Gisela?
I wonder if part of Spruance decision at Truk was to get some experience for his crews. It must be hard to maintain a high standard of professional development with a bunch of young draftee sailors if they feel like their only purpose from this point forward is shore bombardment & anti air craft gunnery.
The dark irony of this is the cruiser they sunk, Katori, was a training cruiser.
Speaking of multiple pronunciations of words - I seem to recall a video recently where pronunciation of a ship's bow flip-flopped between 'bau' (the front of a ship) and 'bo' (like bow tie). That's one where you need context to know which homonym is meant, and thus which pronunciation to use. Text to speech often being completely oblivious to context (though even human narrators unfamiliar with the subject matter frequently get homonyms wrong)
What was the last fletcher class destroyer?
Gotta sit on SpaceX this morning then Drach
Robo-voice question: The good old "Pingwing" problem.
Well, now you know something of how the admiralty felt after the incidents with HMS Royal Oak & HMS Barham…
I would love to know if the SMS Schleswig-Holstein has complete plans... I hope they weren't destroyed after WWII.
American hydrophone operators during WW2. Were there any operators who picked up "long lances" at extreme range, and were disbelieved or sacked?
Mind, WW2 hydrophones didn't have an inherent "ranging" function. They are just underwater sound receivers that tell you there is a noise that came from a direction. Ranging is more a matter of the operators using experience and reference points over time, and if you have not heard a specific sound multiple times to develop an "ear" for how the thing sounds at specific known ranges, then you can't really estimate distance specifically.
Modern hydrophones use computers with massive databases of sound information to make comparative analysis so they can actually estimate range of common sounds, but in WW2, your hydrophone operator was mostly only able to say "I hear what is probably a torpedo and it seems like it is moving in this direction or that."
Thus, there would be no "punishing" hydrophone operators for wild claims about torpedo ranges because the operators would only be reporting they heard torpedoes in the water, not how far away they were.
Any "ranges" associated with WW2 hydrophone use are ultimately the product of cross-reference with other data sources AFTER the fact. Prinz Eugen's famous detection of the British ships at Denmark Strait was done by researchers later comparing the time of detection with the known position of the Prinz Eugen and the British ships. Prinz Eugen's operators only were able to warn the Germans that they heard powerful turbine engine noises coming from a direction, but actual range was later established by optical and radar systems, not the hydrophones themselves.
The risk of losing an aircraft+ crew from a lucky AA Gun was probably far greater 56:53 56:55
I would think the number of stored aircraft would be reduced in the second half of the war. In the second half the CVEs were used to ferry replacement planes and pilots to the CVs and CVLs/
I think it sounds like the robot voice say paint post
What?! Nothing more on the Aquila?
And let us not forget the aggressive Destroyer captains from Poland😊😊😊
Oh please! Don't you think that Drach takes sufficient troubles with the names of russian battleships without dragging the surnames of polish destroyer captains into the mix? That's just cruel!
In your round-table of Admirals you forgot Admiral King.
That's fine. Halsey was a somewhat of a protégé of King's.
✌️
10th indeed. Madmen led by a madman.
The brittle-ductile failure was studied by Constance Tippett of Cambridge University.
With the plan's probably existing for HMS Hood 1916, when I get Bezos money - I know what I want as my personal yacht.
Since no body with any sense will let it be armed what are you going to do with the turrets ?
@@philvanderlaan5942 steel dummies would work until I can get it to a country that will forge 15 inch guns for me :)
plans. No apostrophes needed to make a plural.
@@philvanderlaan5942 The barrels would be needed to maintain the visual aesthetics. Hmm, I am not sure if twin 15" turrets are large enough to work as some type of room?.. Perhaps as some sort of depot/storage cabinet.
@@robertmatch6550 I'm sorry my auto correct doesn't understand context
Well much like the TTS doesn't like foreign or weird words I really hate trying to type in another language on a phone or tablet that has autocorrect.
It's probably worse with German than it is at Spanish or Latin, and Vietnamese is so out there it gives up trying to correct it.
Warspite is God....
To embark an air group
you need aircraft
and fuel
More groundbreaking work from the pages of the Naval Journal "DUH."
British - AL-U-minum
American - ALUMIN-UM
AI - All you men I am.
:)
My issue with Spruance’s decision during Hailstone has little to do with the risks to American forces (which was basically nonexistent), and more with the pointlessness and wastefulness of it. Why choose to go in for a surface action when you don’t need to? And if you do need to get into a surface action for some reason, why bring the Iowas when the biggest thing you have to face is a training cruiser? Not to mention that it flies against general common sense to give your enemy more of a chance to escape entirely, even if you were guaranteed to win-after all, you could have won even harder!
And yes, it’s wasteful to build a battleship and not use it to shoot at enemy ships, but then you have to go back to why you built the Iowas in the first place and whether that was a good idea.
Apart from World of Warships, how much time in command have you had? Just asking for a Naval Person.
Regarding the name, я is pronounced as ya and should he romanized as such. It’s not sviatitelia but svyatitelya
Re the B24 in the south west pacific. Good book:" Air Combat at 20 feet" by Garrett Middlebrook.. Good book on the B24 bombing attacks on the Japanese areas in the Pacific. Also covers the Battle of the Bismark Sea..
13th, 19 November 2023
Japan didn't enter WWII. They started it. The scale and intensity of combat in Europe did not reach the level of the second Sino-Japanese war until 1941. The date of 1939 for the start of WWII is eurocentric. The true start of WWII is 1937 when the Japanese attacked Shanghai.
Technically it started before the attack on Shanghai with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident.
I completely agree. Nazi Germany had a (relative) breeze going through Poland, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, then with the British were throwing stones at each other across the channel. Meanwhile Japanese forces in China were absolutely going all in from 1937 (insert reference to Nanking here)