Let's take a minute to appreciate the fact that this man used a *Blue Whale* as a unit of measurement instead of using the metic system. Truly a man of culture.
@I can read THE Bible and as history would show, that cupboard can be filled. August 19th would have been the next scheduled atomic bombing, this would be the bomb that held what we call "the demon core"
@user-zy6mj2hd6m now I want to see a bunker buster with a time delay fuse that is the US national anthem playing for those stuck inside with it before it blows.
I've heard a story that when the weapons loading troops loaded the F-111s, the bombs were still warm from the molten explosive still cooling. That's how quickly they went from "I was wondering..." to warheads on foreheads.
@@bigtony4930 Hi mate, I bet all those tank/vehicle/bunker crew/personnel wished they had been in a "Warhead on forehead free zone" just at the very moment someone said "What's that noise?".
Fun story about the aircraft bunker/revetment FE shows with a big hole in it, other than I have been inside it... The Kuwaitis were assured by the French who built the bunkers that nothing could get through them. Well the USAF and USN took out all the Migs parked in them, punching 20-30 ft holes in the several feet thick reinforced concrete bunkers. Kuwait took issue with this and complained to France, who said something along the lines of 'Yeah, they are bombproof for everyone, except the Americans.' The holes are almost the same diameter as the thickness of the concrete, its impressive to say the least. They still had not been repaired or replaced when I was in Kuwait last back in 2004. The highway from Kuwait City to Basra was something for fueling nightmares in Feb-June of 91.
As a machinist who has worked in a very large plant with full in-house Forging, Machining, and Assembly I can agree that doing that all in a few weeks is pretty impressive. I'm willing to bet they worked 3 shifts round the clock and all had raging patriotism oozing from the crew, heh. Working with Heat Treated or other super hard materials like Stainless Steel, Carbide, Titanium, etc.... is such a PITA but not impossible.
The take away, another item on the list of proof that if you give an engineer a goal, explosives, and the us military budget warheads will meat foreheads.
The thing about Grunts and Crafts is that, somewhere out there, I'm pretty sure someone has already tried the crazy shit I'm thinking of. If they've got those tube-fired glide bombs TFE showed recently, you _know_ some grunt has strapped an explosive charge and remote detonator to a cheap-ass quad drone at some point.
@@Fadaar Kind of the worst combination possible there. Bomber drones get to be reused after delivering their payload, and FPV drones are easier to fly at a moving target, vs trying to fly over a target to shoot down at them with a claymore.
Reminds me of what MasterLock (here in Milwaukee)did at the start of the build-up for the war. I don't remember the exact number, but the Army order a new lock for EVERY soldier going to the Gulf. MasterLock officials said they can do it in two weeks. Then, when workers of the first shift was told to stop everything and work this special order, they put their heads together and said we can do this! They worked straight through the shift, passed to news & the work to the 2nd shift & the 2nd passed to the 3rd shift. At the end of the 3rd shift, the order was completed! 2 weeks became 24 hours. Why? Because 'merica, that's why!
That's how it is, the US is only in the supposedly sad state it's in right now because we just haven't been poked in the right way to make "it" better, whatever "it" you might be thinking of. How do you think we made the Covid vaccine so damn quick compared to how long it USUALLY takes to get a vaccine approved by the FDA? Same way we got that order of locks you were talking about done. Quickly, efficiently, and likely under-budget. Now if we could only get our government to work so well 100% of the time....
As the son of a Mechanical engineer who worked on large pieces of round metal (paper mill rolls and damn parts) I can say from experience, that this was, by far, one of the biggest "Hold my beer" moments for those engineers. "You want what? Oh, penetrate into the ground around 50-60ft? through 10 feet of reinforced concrete and steel rebar? And when's it due? Couple weeks. Jr...hand me my slide rule, we got shit to fuck up."
This mans way of explaining things so hilariously is exactly what I need DAILY, I swear to god I don't even think he is trying to be funny half the time lmao
Lots of things like this were done during Desert Sheild! We moved things that would take a year to get to Saudi Arabia and had them there in three weeks. We found out what weapons he had, acquired the same weapons, tested them, and found how to defeat them. We then had new weapons/tactics/upgrades to the war fighters in time for the start of Desert Storm. Contractors that were cutthroat competitors worked together like long lost brothers to save lives on our side. After the war they went back to hating each other just like normal.
It was also amazing how after we (1st Infantry Div) were alerted that we were deploying there was a literal avalanche of parts and gear to fix or replace equipment we had.
@@jarink1 We were modifying C-130Hs into the MC-130H but since we were not operational yet our planes were stripped for parts to support the C-130Hs in theater. We literally had one set of parts we would remove from one plane to install on the next so we could fly it to our contractor for modifications. We used that set to do acceptance tests then had to send them back to Lockheed so they could get our next plane delivered so we could fly it to E-Systems for mod. We actually started to look at the costs to truck new C-130s from Georgia to Texas if we could not get the minimum equipment to fly the planes. At one time we had 8 brand new MC-130H aircraft in non-flyable storage waiting to get our parts back from the Middle East.
That's right there sure ain't your average insight that everyone gives or gets to read from your basic Boot that deployed . Still Blows my mind with all the war movies and images on the media when I tell people that they have been fighting each other over there since mankind started
One of the things i remember most from Desert Storm was that it was really the country's first exposure to the advances in military tech we'd made in the late 70s and early 80s. There were entire magazine issues devoted to highlighting the tech. M1 tanks, cruise missiles, Humvees, guided bombs, the Apache, the F117, etc. They even slapped a bunch of cruise missile tubes on the Missouri and floated it's big ass over there. It was so awesome to see. Not to mention it was the A10's big debut, which literally blew the socks (and turrets) off the Iraqi tank collumns. Honestly, it was probably our most popular war just because of the sheer spectacle of it.
@@johnlozauskas778 For perspective, $1.41 in 1991 is $3.18 today. Prices are still higher than they should be but not too significantly higher in reality than they were then.
Hey Nick! I just was watching the charity stream and saw you were a fan of General Schwarzkopf. Thought I’d share this little comment. My father was in desert storm and interacted with the General on a couple occasions. He was only a major back then in military intelligence. He told me about how the one meeting he sat in on where Norman was present, thee was a situation where another officer in the field was too cautious and complaining a good amount about needing more support or supplies or whatnot. The officer explaining this situation used the idiom “squeaky wheel gets the oil” and Schwarzkopf, without missing a beat responded. “Yup and it’s the first one to get replaced!” My dad said he had never served under a finer general. And it was a perfect example of his talents and leadership, tough, no nonsense or bullshit.
Man I wish my Pop lived a little longer!! He would have loved your channel 😢 Pop was Army/Korea 🇺🇸💪🏻 Thank you I feel closer to my Pop listening to all these stories!!!
My Dad was also in during Korea, thankfully behind the lines working on the M-51 "Skysweeper" AA gun. Unfortunately it came out just as jet-powered aircraft were being introduced, and could not track fast enough to hit them.
@@SGobuck I remember they surrendered to AH64s. My favorite moment was Baghdad Bob in 2003 claiming the US army had been defeated in the desert and no tanks were in Baghdad.. while on various news channels there were Bradleys and Abrams rolling past their crossed swords in the middle of town. Hard not to compare it to Leslie Nielson waving his arms saying "NOTHING TO SEE HERE.. MOVE ALONG" Then twenty years of WTF are we still here ensued. My last trip was 2004, came back with issues regarding walking and standing.
@@SweatyFatGuy Baghdad Bob / Comical Ali, was a psychological WMD, it's impossible not to nearly die of laughter. I think it was Napoleon who said something like to never ever Interrupt the enemy while he's doing something wrong, and they clearly did something very wrong with him, though in a good way.
@@eldritchmorgasm4018 the only way it could have been funnier is if the tanks were driving by behind him as he said it and some Army guy waved at the camera.
You laugh, but that is basically what happened. Engineers were trying to figure out how to make a bomb casing that would survive punching into the earth that deep. One went out for a smoke, and saw them sitting behind a container in the yard, asked a soldier what they were, soldier basically said, "scrap were fixing to ship back to the foundry" "Yeah, but where did they come from?" "OH! They're spend Howitzer barrels..." Engineer says, "HA! You just saved the war. Dont touch em, ill be right back" and ran off to get the others, presumably walking into the room with the biggest shit eating grin of all time. They came up with the idea to use howitzer barrels.....because the yard on the base where their office was just so happened to be storing spent barrels for scrapping..... Yes, the bunker buster was 100% full MacGyver mode happenstance. There are two things you never want America to get.....Crafty, or cruel. Or we just might decide to drop 30 feet of rock into your bunker with a bomb made out of our trash! ;)
The professor I had in an engineering materials course I had to take, was the metallurgist at the Arsenal supervising the heat treatment regime of the gun tubes. The shop had to heat the tubes up and let them cool down slowly enough so they could be machined to spec. The riffling had to go as it would create weakness in the bomb casing, the pointy end of the casing was shaped in the rotary forge to make it strong enough to support the penetrator tip. Now add in all the heat soaking and cooling cycles the tubes went through and you'll see why producing them took so long. I want to add, the Watervliet Arsenal's landscaping is rather neat as well, who do you know that has a few IOWA Class Battleship GUN Barrels decorating their front yard?
Civilian buddy of mine told me (back in 94-95) that he was involved in the initial testing of the GBU-28. They dropped an inert bomb onto a target, hit exactly where is was supposed to hit. They dig down to 200 feet and stopped digging. They never recovered the test article it went so deep. I've loaded many of them on the B-52 in my time.
As an old civilian woman I know nothing about bombs. But I've lived most of my life in Florida so I know a few things about that. If you drill a 100' deep or a 200' deep hole in Florida, you have gone below the water table level and are into limestone (full of holes) and will need scuba gear to go into that hole to look for anything. Now ask a geologist, I am sure I got part of that wrong as the whole state is not the same and that is more the center of the state up near Ocala. But at the Gulfside beach where Eglin AFB is - it will be worse. The sand was only the top layer and not that deep. How did they get 200 foot deep and be digging to find something and be dry? Whatever they dropped (the bomb they tested) had gone through so many layers it was probably in the deep aquifer under the whole state and the bomb was slowly moving toward the gulf. Or it just stopped at the bottom, found a comfortable position and settled in forever. You won't find it!
@@julieenslow5915 The military does it weapons testing a out in the Mohave. You can dig pretty deep and not hit any water out in the desert. Usually aircraft and bombs get tested out there.
@@julieenslow5915 Wrong test. The test in Florida was a horizontal rocket sled into concrete barriers, the test in Nevada was the one dropped into the ground.
@@stuglife5514 in my home town there is an old military decommissioned bombing range I used to go out there just to see what I could find and i found a few cool dummy rounds and that was out by Edward’s Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert
That bunker buster round is the most Marines Logic round I have seen in months. "We need a deep penetration bunker buster" "How about we use a Howitzer Barrel, those are heavy right? Shove it full of explosives and put a cone on one end."
To put this in perspective too, they were seriously talking about reinstating the draft for this war. I was about to graduate college so I began to consider enlisting before they drafted me. And then it was over and Iraqi units were surrendering to TV journalists.
They were surrendering so much and so fast that at one point we started just tossing MREs to them and pointing them to the back. One of the POW camps actually flew an Opryland flag it was insane. We lost fewer troops in the time we were there for Desert Sheild/Desert Storm than we lost to drunk driving during the same period the year before. We joked that it was safer to be at war with Iraq than at peace in garrison.
@@ninjabearpress2574 Well, they were huge "Northern Exposure" fans. The poor bastards that screwed up and surrendered to ABC were strapped to chairs with their eyelids taped open and were forced to watch "Cop Rock." To this day, you can still hear the screams.
Nah. George Washington would have shoved old stale fruit cakes into the howitzers and then crammed an elephant's f*** ton of powder behind it. Sealed the breach and blasted it straight up Saddam's @$$.
They created that bomb in 2 days, tested it on the third day, and deployed 6 prototypes to the battlefield within 3 weeks of the initial call asking if it was a possibility. This is according to the scientist who led the team.. Told to me on Christmas Eve as I helped him hang the star on the family tree.
other fun fact about machining harderned steel like that. You have to go slow and gentle so you don't heat the metal enough to mess with the heat treating. Some grey beard machinist spent a lot of hours slowly and carefully machining those things.
I was a 17 year old engineering apprentice when the Gulf War was winding up,one part of our workshop was turned into a massive spray booth,a lot of green stuff turned up and got sprayed sandy coloured,and a lot of really light weight alloy turned up and was machined into warhead shaped stuff that was 120mm diameter.
Iraq goes from being the 4th largest army in the world....to being the 5th largest army in Iraq. Let that rattle around in your brain box for a minute or two.
A fellow 462X0 (USAF Weapons loading) who was working the F-111F's from RAF Lakenheath told me that when they got the weapons they were still very warm from casting the Tritonal explosive filler. That's how fast they moved those bombs from filling them.
As amazing as this is, I still believe the most amazing display of American hard work and getting the job done is the USS Yorktown between the battles of Coral Sea and Midway. Yorktown was damaged and managed to limp home to Pearl. The dockyard estimated it would take weeks to repair her and get her back in the fight. The dockyard workers understood how vital carriers were and repaired her to battle ready in two days. I also love how stubborn the Yorktown class (the first pure carrier class in the USN) were when they got damaged. Yorktown got severely damaged at two different battles and was gonna shrug it off until I-168 got lucky. Hornet took a beating Santa Cruz and even denied the US Navy’s own attempt to sink her. Enterprise would be hit multiple times throughout the war and survive officially giving the finger to the Japanese. Mr. Fat Electrician I believe you should cover this mighty class of ship that truly displayed American stubbornness, hardiness, and will to keep fighting.
Probably my favorite naval story is of the destroyer USS Johnston. It would, alongside three other destroyers, fight against a Japanese fleet of nearly two dozen ships total including battleships and heavy cruisers, ships out-massing the Johnston many times over. While the Johnston would eventually be sunk in this battle, it first sunk a Japanese heavy cruiser, got into a gunfight with the battleship Kongo, another gunfight with yet another heavy cruiser, and finally engage an entire Japanese destroyer squadron on its own (7 destroyers and light cruisers vs. the heavily damaged Johnston). It won that fight by the way, the entire squadron retreated after the two lead ships sustained heavy damage.
Dude! Dude. As just drop jaw amazing as that is. It...isn't even close. For sheer jaw dropping power. Look at the ship BUILDING competition that happened in WW2. The Liberty ship construction efforts? They built a 440foot ship in less than 4.5 days from keel to champagne bottle on the keel. Including wiring and everything. 250,000 parts in 111 hours. That was a stunt run for sure...But uh. UHH. Not just 440 feet of hull. But an entire ship. Oh you want even scarier? Yeah, that was a stunt run ship. So what was the regular construction speed? Well, eventually, averaged across the country it was 42 days. SO much SLOWER But what about the faster shipyards? what was THEIR average? What could a GOOD shipyard doing average work do? Try a slow sloth like 2 weeks. Yeah. 2 weeks to build a ship. Yeah. Honestly FAR more needs to be said about this entire production. How do you re-arrange an entire economy across 3000 miles of land to ship components and parts to fully kit out and build 3 ships in just 2 days... Along with all the OTHER ships built. This is just the liberty class. They also had the victory class AND then destroyers, submarines, cruisers, battleships, and of course carriers. Oh, right. and tanks, planes, guns, ammo, and all the other things. AHHH. Dude! It was jaw dropping.
@@feldamar2 Absolutely. And that's not even considering the similarly breathtaking scope of resource production the US put together for all of the other elements of WWII. SIMULTANEOUSLY! Take planes, for instance. Combine fighters, bombers, transports, etc and you'll find that the US produced over 300,000 aircraft between 1939 & 1945. That's more than the next two biggest aircraft producers (the USSR & UK) combined. It's nearly 3x as many planes as Germany manufactured in that period, and well over 4x as many as Japan built in that time. The Axis powers' inability to so much as touch American manufacturing centers, much less destroy them, made the eventual outcome of the war an utter certainty. Maybe a successful German invasion and occupation of the UK could have made the Allies sue for peace... but there's a decent chance that it would've only prolonged the war and not changed the outcome.
This conflict kicked off the week I was born, my dad says he was sitting in the hospital wondering what the hell kind of fucked up world his first child was being born into. Coincidentally, the seven day war in Israel kicked off the day my dad was born and my grandfather thought similarly and that he might get drafted...
My dad was an artillery director in the Vietnam War, and as part of his training, he learned how artillery barrels are made. Get this: They spin the barrel while scorching hot to such extreme RPMs that the heaviest parts of the steel all get pushed towards the outer side of the barrel, leaving impurities and softer parts in the middle. Then, they bore out the soft and impure parts, resulting in extremely tough, pure steel. Now imagine you gotta mill that out. One of the things they did when a barrel was considered "shot out" was they burned them, and twisted them into knots, not dissimilar to General Sherman's railroad "bowties" in the Civil War, and for the exact same reason, so that the enemy couldn't use them. In Vietnam, if an artillery battery was overrun, abandoned, or left in a hurry, the VC would turn artillery barrels into IEDs by jamming them full of explosives, then burying them under roads to be detonated as American convoys drive over, so destroying barrels ASAP was pretty important. So we already knew Howitzer barrels could be bombs. Doesn't really surprise me that someone decided to refine said bomb, then drop it out of a plane. Waste not, want not.
Great job on this one! My uncle was one of the machinists on this project and he said it was a high point in his career.. He also told me that they ran through a lot of carbide tooling to get these pushed out on time to meet the deadline (which in the end was 2 weeks earlier than predicted)..! God bless American ingenuity and persistence!!
This longer format is much much better. At first I was worried that you have written yourself into a corner, so this little innovation was definitely good choice. It definitely paid off, because I appreciate the added detail and the history of it all. Plus there are some elements that I could look at today and say hey that's kind of going on right now. It also allows me to compare and contrast something that happened as little as thirty-five years ago.
I was there with the 101st. General Schwarzkopf was a fantastic leader and skilled commander. I was within earshot during one of his troop visits. Some private (probably) said "What's the plan sir?" The General looked in the direction of the voice and said, "We're going north, we're going to kick his ass and then we're going home." As a young SPC in the Infantry I could not have wished for a better answer than that.
Schwarzkopf: What’s the plan private the plan is that we go north and if people want to fuck around we make them find out we keep doing that till people stop wanting to fuck around and find out then we go home
Well the fact that they were able to machine the gun barrels into bombs is quite remarkable I am a CNC machinist myself I work on lathes and to be honest it's all about how much money you want to spend on tooling and how much time you want to take I can only imagine the amount of tools they broke.
Iraq had the world's 4th largest military. Which honestly isn't a whole lot when it has to stack up against the THREE other, BIGGER militaries AT THE SAME TIME.
The Soviets weren't really involved but we get the point. It's kind of suicidal to try to take on everyone. Many were speculating that Moscow was taking notes on how their defenses would hold up to America's weapons/tactics.
Only one of the top 3 at the time. Russia and China did not join the coalition. The UK, France, Egypt, and Syria all fielded more or less a full division each but most of the other countries only sent small contingents of battalion size or smaller. The most interesting ones I met were some Polish nurses (incredibly friendly and funny). All told, the coalition forces numbered around 1 million, with 700k of those being from the US.
We in Germany were put on alert and locked down for deployment on August 9 for a month. All leave cancelled and every one called back, Which really pissed us off because we had just gotten back from 2 months in Grafenwoehr, and were really looking for some time off. Every unit on post got blank checks to fix everything we had. Parts we had been waiting on for over a year showed up in weeks. We shipped out for Saudi Arabia in November.
I haven't looked all of your videos, however that is incoming. Your style is awesome! I will be going back, liking and commenting on all of them. Thank you
If you can find the information you might like to do a show on the M110 howitzer, the king of battle. The undisputed best artillery package ever developed. It was retired from service because it was replaced by the MLRS, also known as SPLL. If I am correct it was actually brought back into service for the first Gulf War because the MLRS wasn't ready yet. When I was in 8th ID 3/16 FA we had three batteries of M110s and one of MLRS.
Lathe programmer here, I can attest to the annoyance that hard materials bring. They wear down your tooling rather quickly, unless you use specialty inserts made of Cubic Boron Nitride or diamond. Also the butter analogy was pretty good, though I'd say ice cream would work a bit better. The colder the ice cream is, the harder it is to scoop and remove.
@IceFire Downunder wouldn't that be the inverse curve to their comments? The hotter you make a body, the harder to scoop up?😂 I think you've inadvertently found the sin/cosin equivalent to frozen butter/melted ice cream to bad guy body disposal ratio... and I'm here for it.
I hate working with hard material. It doesn't want to cut, holding size is ass, there are problems with chatter, you need extra cuts because of how little material you can take off per pass, and it heats up like crazy.
Cast Aluminum Bronze is pretty high on my least favorite list. Abrasive as F, work hardens like a bastard, and invariably full of foundry sand. And it sneaks up on you, looking like brass, but being oh, so much more evil. Or maybe our foundry was just a bunch of idjits.
When you use an aquatic...mammal? Fish? As a unit of measurement rather than using the metric system, that's the definition of All-American. Hats off to you sir 👏
Kingdom: Animalia. Phylum: Chordata. Class: Mammalia. Order: Cetacea. Family: Balaenopteridae. Genus: Balaenoptera. Species: Musculus. Spot on, mate! Its a marine mammal of the baleen whale variety! 😎👍 And can we take minute to appreciate apparently the scientific classification of a blue whale is essentially "Big muscular filter feeding hairy titty fish"....
My dad was attached to a Combat Engineer corps during Operation Desert Storm, so he can confirm this shit really did happen. God, the world was so different back then.
SO GRATEFUL you explained how dense the AAA and SAM network was. Suppression of Enemy AIr Defenses (SEAD) was our mission, and many Vets as well as most Americans thought it was all just a "video war". Thought I was either gonna get blown out of the sky or be a POW every night for 6 weeks straight. FE is a UA-cam god. Thank You.
The biggest logistical flex you have never heard of, but will hear of now! in June of 1967 Ford was prepping for the 24 hours at Le Mans. They were so powerful, so fast, that all four of their main cars cracked their windshields. Dow Corning's New York plant got a phone that new windshields were needed...Two days later they were on the plane to France where Ford had hired a Brussels, an "adhesives expert", to glue them to the cars! ... They won the race!
Met General Schwarzkopf in 1993 at a he brought us all beer. He was a true leader and it was my greatest momnet in my Army career. he litterally took time to talk to every soldier
@@the_fat_electrician yes he was a great leader. Really. Great.. no he didn't talk to everyone nor buy everyone a. Beer.. I know cause I was in Desert Shield/Storm
Advisor: "Sir, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait!" Uncle Sam: "I don't care yet" Advisor: "Now he raised gas prices and is taking cover in a super bunker!" Uncle Sam stands and cracks his knuckles: "Time to go full McGyver."
Except it wasn't that way at all. We were in Kuwait in 3 days to contain him North of Saudi Arabia while we built up. We committed to his leaving day 1. Sorry. Look it up.
As a new machinist entering the trade, that has to be the biggest “I am better than you” flex as a machinist I can think of. Machining 4 6.1 inch diameter, 19 foot long, 4500 lbs heat treated hardened steel barrels do their correct specs within a week.
Before I start, yes, it was a huge flex. But... It's not like they were boring 19 foot long 6.1" dia. tubes. They started with howitzer barrels. They are already tubes. My guess would be that they were machining the ends to accommodate the cap for the 'nose' of the bomb as well as the guidance surfaces at the tail end. Then there's the mounting and drop system that had to be added. I'm sure there was some other external machining required for other bit and pieces as well.
Politically incorrect, but that was a FUN conflict. I was in Japan on August 2nd, and we flew our helicopters out to the boat on August 15th and sailed for the Gulf... not as impressive as the bunker buster engineering, but we made our ASW helicopters ready for CSAR and other missions we were not built for - stripped out all the ASW gear, added a monkey-rigged FLIR, added two M-2 guns instead of the single puny M-60, and started begging the MEU to give us a half-dozen or more Hellfire missiles. We didn't get to ACTUALLY shoot anything, but we were ready/
Great video as always. My pick for the biggest logistical flex would probably be getting the aircraft carrier Yorktown (CV-5) fixed and back in service for the Battle of Midway in WWII. Yorktown had been seriously thrashed at the preceding Battle of the Coral Sea; taking damage from tons of bombs and multiple torpedoes. It was estimated it would take three months to get her properly fixed. But intelligence had been intercepted that pointed to a pivotal Japanese attack on Midway, and the U.S. needed flat-tops there. So once Yorktown arrived back at Pearl Harbor, the repair crews immediately went to work. Like, IMMEDIATELY. They didn't even wait for the drydock to finish draining; they put on waders and started inspecting the damage and getting shit done. Crews worked around the clock, skipping safety measures and finding creative shortcuts all over the place. Honolulu would experience rolling blackouts as the electric company prioritized power for the repair operation. Yorktown would sail for Midway only THREE DAYS after limping into Pearl Harbor, not nearly at 100%, but more than capable of fighting. While she would ultimately be lost at Midway, her participation there was key in winning what would be one of the most pivotal battles in the Pacific War.
@@kerbalairforce8802 Yeah, but one of those special pit stops where the crew get a smashed-up car back in the race and competitive in just 60 seconds using hammers and duct tape.
The crews were still repairing and fixing it as it steamed out to position for the defensive action. Not only that, Yorktown sustained most of the brunt of the japanese counter attack so the crews got back on and got enough of it fixed that when the japanese attacked again, they thought they sank 2 of the US carriers, but it was just yorktown taking an absolute Randy marsh level beating and still going. The only reason it sank and didn't make it back to Honolulu was a japanese sub hit it with a torpedo when it was under tow back to base.
Thank God the people trying to reach me about my car's extended warranty aren't as persistent about reaching out and contacting someone as the US military.
And during the Floyd demonstrations, the command post for the local law enforcement was right inside the arsenal, because....who wants to climb and the fence to fuck around and find out.
I remember hearing about the Bunker Buster bombs that the yanks had created, I was sceptical. No sooner had they been deployed, I became a convert. Absolutely phenomenal what great inelegance and know how, can be achieved when it is combined with great wealth mixed with great ordinance especially when aimed at a great enemy...
@@gchampi2 yeah I think I have heard of that. From memory it was used to destroy a railway line. He was an amazing inventor as well. He helped develop liquid explosives that we st use today.
@@gchampi2 Also thanks for this comment, I just went down the UA-cam rabbit hole and watched some brilliant documentaries which is an awesome way of spending a Saturday. Cheers buddy.
they also used barrel sections from the cruiser USS Des Moines to make the bombs. this ship was scrapped a few months later. the only ship left in the class is the USS Salem, which is a museum.
2:26 I was a kid during Desert Storm and we lived next to a US AFB. A lot of my classmates were Air Force brats and it was a big thing in my school. I remember the TV always tuned to the news and the surreal footage of all of the glowing tracers floating up into the night sky from the anti-aircraft fire trying to shoot down the bombers.
yeah.. most people either forgot or straight up did not know that Iraq and Iran had been at war for almost a decade at this point.. they stopped combat when nightfall came.
My dad worked for TI at that time (They make more than math boxes) and said there was an internal email about how the guidance system was finished within two weeks. When America gets to work we do OT.
It was actually faster than that according to my pop. He ran the machine shop where these were manufactured. Him and two other machinists were still hand tapping holes enroute to Nevada for testing. The others were machine tapped.
Ok, few detail mixups here. I crewed the F15 that was part of the test during desert storm at Eglin, so I can correct a few details. First, it's the GBU-27 because it only took 27 days from start to drop. The sled test was done in Nevada and the drop test into sand was done at Eglin Air Force base. We couldn't get the F15 off the ground because the tire on the side that had the bomb would shred by the time it got to the end of the runway even though we had the airplane balanced out with a drop tank on the other side. So they switched to the F111.
Your work is awesome, as always. One thing about the start of the war though, there was a lot more than nothing going on in those months prior to January. Me and 500,000 of my closest friends were over there getting ready to chase Sadam out of Kuwait.
I figured a good deal of the delay between invasion and response was logistics of a troop buildup. Looking up details of that, Iraq took over Kuwait on August 2nd and US deployments to Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region started August 7th
Kool channel! I'm a 56 yr old Black Man in the Florida panhandle USA. I can remember hearing and feeling the MOAB, mother of all bombs! Living in the paradise of the Florida panhandle USA you do hear bombs and jets and planes and helicopters from time to time! So ya get used to it But this was different, it was Loud, windows shook, doors rattled,we thought it was an earthquake in Florida. Wtf? Anywho we now know what it was. And let me say a war over oil prices wasn't a good idea. But, at least the USA made a conventional bomb instead of using nukes! War is hell. Y'all stay safe
Having a bomb created, tested and approved for use in 3 weeks... You're right about being the biggest logistical flex. Another massive flex is the Casablanca-Class Escort Carrier/Jeep Carrier as they're sometimes called. Where all 50 hulls (yes, 50) were laid down then commissioned in the span of less than two years.
Laughed my ass off the entire video, though a conclusion that would also work is "Don't give Uncle Sam a reason to improvise!" Love your content man, as well as the new camo "Its Never a War Crime the first time!" hoodie. Going to check that out on your store!
I want to thank you for your interesting stories of heroes and war hardware. You have a gift for presenting your findings in a serious yet at opportune times humorous way. Keep up the great work. I am a fan and a retired electrician to boot!
Love it lol Hey @thefatelectrician, can you do a video on the XB-70 bomber prototype? I think itd be a great craft to talk about. Cancelled program but it did build 2 prototypes that were the closest planes to ever break SR-71’s record speed
My dad was with the 3380th AMS out of Keesler and was in Saudi Arabia for 3 months during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Occasionally, we'll get stories from him telling of how the Iraqi troops would surrender to the media just to avoid conflict with coalition forces and such.
Not only are your videos amazing (love the new longer content), but you somehow make every UA-cam ad cut-in F-ing hilarious and perfectly timed. It's perfection.
Only one technical observation.... Heat treating metals, means to change the materials properties using heat, may it be harder, softer, or any other way.
Yes, I have a sledgehammer/crowbar sponsorship on my bunker buster bomb video. 😅
Lol 😆
Got chest point/chin flicked by Wolverine...? Happens to the best of us.
You should say the United States since America isn't very specific. Just saying.
Seems reasonable
Idea. More violence and explosion clips inserted into the educational videos. Man I love learning. But violence is cool too. 😂
Let's take a minute to appreciate the fact that this man used a *Blue Whale* as a unit of measurement instead of using the metic system. Truly a man of culture.
“Did the metric system land on the moon first, I think not!”
Because a Blue Whale is a Measuring STANDARD, NOT A METRIC!!!! REEEEEEE!!!
I feel like he would use wifi anime tits before the metric system
True, very true the metric system is better but that doesn't mean I won't roast it
@@colekarrh9114 in America we have STANDARDS... Only the woke calculate metrics.
"And while that was economically sound, it turned out to be a tactical fucking error."
Had me dying
That was keeping the "we only have two of these new war-ending bombs to drop on the enemy" tradition from WWII.
Yep, but the drop-ee don't know your cupboard is bare.
@I can read THE Bible and as history would show, that cupboard can be filled. August 19th would have been the next scheduled atomic bombing, this would be the bomb that held what we call "the demon core"
We know a thing or two, cuz we've SEEN a thing or two!
We only have two, now. Having the recipe we can crank them out on demand 😉
Wasn't there actually three?
My dad was working at the Arsenal when this was going on. I didn't see him for 3 weeks. With the amount of overtime he got we took a nice vacation.
"This bunker is so safe, they'll never get us here!"
*The giant rod of steel and explosives punching through the roof:*
you forgot the "are you sure about that"
Amarican anthem starts
Iran comander:ah shi
BOOM
Here's Johnny!
@user-zy6mj2hd6m now I want to see a bunker buster with a time delay fuse that is the US national anthem playing for those stuck inside with it before it blows.
The roof, and then 50 feet further into the ground.
The audio being "fuzzy" doesn't matter if the majority of your audience is half-deaf from gunfire and artillery.
facts lol
What did you say? Something about furries and gunfire/artillery?
@@the_fat_electrician can confirm. I heard literally zero fuzz with my elevenitus screaming at me. Thanks for your service. 🫡
@@alpha9605 close enough
Thank you closed captioning.
I've heard a story that when the weapons loading troops loaded the F-111s, the bombs were still warm from the molten explosive still cooling. That's how quickly they went from "I was wondering..." to warheads on foreheads.
I'm sure I read somewhere that the F-111 took out more Iraqi tanks than the A10
@@aking-plums6985 more tanks, not more vehicles overall.
@@bigtony4930 Hi mate, I bet all those tank/vehicle/bunker crew/personnel wished they had been in a "Warhead on forehead free zone" just at the very moment someone said "What's that noise?".
Let’s take a moment to appreciate that he really did wait till exactly the 1:00 mark to make a dick joke.
I was there.
Enemy “It is impossible to destroy this structure with a high ranking person in it”
Us military “and I took that personally”
Yeah, and they said the Titanic was unsinkable, too.
US: hold my beer
Fun story about the aircraft bunker/revetment FE shows with a big hole in it, other than I have been inside it... The Kuwaitis were assured by the French who built the bunkers that nothing could get through them. Well the USAF and USN took out all the Migs parked in them, punching 20-30 ft holes in the several feet thick reinforced concrete bunkers.
Kuwait took issue with this and complained to France, who said something along the lines of 'Yeah, they are bombproof for everyone, except the Americans.'
The holes are almost the same diameter as the thickness of the concrete, its impressive to say the least. They still had not been repaired or replaced when I was in Kuwait last back in 2004. The highway from Kuwait City to Basra was something for fueling nightmares in Feb-June of 91.
Was there in 2013. Holes were still there.
Challenge Accepted!
As a machinist who has worked in a very large plant with full in-house Forging, Machining, and Assembly I can agree that doing that all in a few weeks is pretty impressive. I'm willing to bet they worked 3 shifts round the clock and all had raging patriotism oozing from the crew, heh. Working with Heat Treated or other super hard materials like Stainless Steel, Carbide, Titanium, etc.... is such a PITA but not impossible.
Rifling with ecm and edm. Sometimes you have to get creative.
The take away, another item on the list of proof that if you give an engineer a goal, explosives, and the us military budget warheads will meat foreheads.
I was going to say it's "Warheads meet foreheads" but I think "meat" works better.
Interesting choice of wording. I truly hope it was done on purpose. 11Bravo checking in.
Huh? No. They’ll make it so stupidly overly complicated that it takes an engineer to find the ‘trigger’.
The only thing better than regular grunts and crafts, is command sponsored grunts and crafts
no kidding lol
The thing about Grunts and Crafts is that, somewhere out there, I'm pretty sure someone has already tried the crazy shit I'm thinking of.
If they've got those tube-fired glide bombs TFE showed recently, you _know_ some grunt has strapped an explosive charge and remote detonator to a cheap-ass quad drone at some point.
@@Just_A_Dude they are dropping bombs from civi drones in ukraine😂
@@moparjr89 you'd think rigging up a downward facing claymore to a drone would be rather easy...
@@Fadaar Kind of the worst combination possible there.
Bomber drones get to be reused after delivering their payload, and FPV drones are easier to fly at a moving target, vs trying to fly over a target to shoot down at them with a claymore.
Reminds me of what MasterLock (here in Milwaukee)did at the start of the build-up for the war. I don't remember the exact number, but the Army order a new lock for EVERY soldier going to the Gulf. MasterLock officials said they can do it in two weeks. Then, when workers of the first shift was told to stop everything and work this special order, they put their heads together and said we can do this! They worked straight through the shift, passed to news & the work to the 2nd shift & the 2nd passed to the 3rd shift. At the end of the 3rd shift, the order was completed! 2 weeks became 24 hours. Why? Because 'merica, that's why!
That's how it is, the US is only in the supposedly sad state it's in right now because we just haven't been poked in the right way to make "it" better, whatever "it" you might be thinking of.
How do you think we made the Covid vaccine so damn quick compared to how long it USUALLY takes to get a vaccine approved by the FDA?
Same way we got that order of locks you were talking about done. Quickly, efficiently, and likely under-budget.
Now if we could only get our government to work so well 100% of the time....
Which, coincidentally, is how long it would take the lock picking lawyer to pick his way through all of those Masterlocks...
Goddammit I fucking love this goddamned country so fucking much it hurts
@@awolfalone2006 true...
Wonder how that would go down today.
As the son of a Mechanical engineer who worked on large pieces of round metal (paper mill rolls and damn parts) I can say from experience, that this was, by far, one of the biggest "Hold my beer" moments for those engineers. "You want what? Oh, penetrate into the ground around 50-60ft? through 10 feet of reinforced concrete and steel rebar? And when's it due? Couple weeks. Jr...hand me my slide rule, we got shit to fuck up."
Gotta love the arsenal
This mans way of explaining things so hilariously is exactly what I need DAILY, I swear to god I don't even think he is trying to be funny half the time lmao
Welcome to US Army issued sense of humor.
Lots of things like this were done during Desert Sheild! We moved things that would take a year to get to Saudi Arabia and had them there in three weeks. We found out what weapons he had, acquired the same weapons, tested them, and found how to defeat them. We then had new weapons/tactics/upgrades to the war fighters in time for the start of Desert Storm. Contractors that were cutthroat competitors worked together like long lost brothers to save lives on our side. After the war they went back to hating each other just like normal.
It was also amazing how after we (1st Infantry Div) were alerted that we were deploying there was a literal avalanche of parts and gear to fix or replace equipment we had.
Sounds like family. The only one allowed to pick on my family, is me.
@@jarink1 We were modifying C-130Hs into the MC-130H but since we were not operational yet our planes were stripped for parts to support the C-130Hs in theater. We literally had one set of parts we would remove from one plane to install on the next so we could fly it to our contractor for modifications. We used that set to do acceptance tests then had to send them back to Lockheed so they could get our next plane delivered so we could fly it to E-Systems for mod. We actually started to look at the costs to truck new C-130s from Georgia to Texas if we could not get the minimum equipment to fly the planes. At one time we had 8 brand new MC-130H aircraft in non-flyable storage waiting to get our parts back from the Middle East.
Truly, nothing brings bickering brothers together faster than some other asshole sticking his nose into their business.
That's right there sure ain't your average insight that everyone gives or gets to read from your basic Boot that deployed . Still Blows my mind with all the war movies and images on the media when I tell people that they have been fighting each other over there since mankind started
I really like that his content is starting to get longer and still hasn't dropped in quality.
I'm trying
@@the_fat_electrician you’re doing great hoss
That's what she said!
YESSSSSS!!! More is BETTER! Especially when he only posts once a week
@@the_fat_electrician You're absolutely fantastic, Sir
One of the things i remember most from Desert Storm was that it was really the country's first exposure to the advances in military tech we'd made in the late 70s and early 80s. There were entire magazine issues devoted to highlighting the tech. M1 tanks, cruise missiles, Humvees, guided bombs, the Apache, the F117, etc. They even slapped a bunch of cruise missile tubes on the Missouri and floated it's big ass over there. It was so awesome to see. Not to mention it was the A10's big debut, which literally blew the socks (and turrets) off the Iraqi tank collumns. Honestly, it was probably our most popular war just because of the sheer spectacle of it.
It's easily the sizzle reel of wars, I remember my grandpa has Desert Storm trading cards with pieces of military tech on each one.
That January gas went up to $1.41 in NJ and I wondered how could I afford to fill my tank.
Point of order - all the recommissioned battleships had Harpoon launchers before hostilities broke out.
@@johnlozauskas778 For perspective, $1.41 in 1991 is $3.18 today. Prices are still higher than they should be but not too significantly higher in reality than they were then.
Hey Nick! I just was watching the charity stream and saw you were a fan of General Schwarzkopf. Thought I’d share this little comment. My father was in desert storm and interacted with the General on a couple occasions. He was only a major back then in military intelligence. He told me about how the one meeting he sat in on where Norman was present, thee was a situation where another officer in the field was too cautious and complaining a good amount about needing more support or supplies or whatnot. The officer explaining this situation used the idiom “squeaky wheel gets the oil” and Schwarzkopf, without missing a beat responded. “Yup and it’s the first one to get replaced!” My dad said he had never served under a finer general. And it was a perfect example of his talents and leadership, tough, no nonsense or bullshit.
Man I wish my Pop lived a little longer!! He would have loved your channel 😢 Pop was Army/Korea 🇺🇸💪🏻 Thank you I feel closer to my Pop listening to all these stories!!!
My Dad was also in during Korea, thankfully behind the lines working on the M-51 "Skysweeper" AA gun. Unfortunately it came out just as jet-powered aircraft were being introduced, and could not track fast enough to hit them.
I love how Iraq went from having the 4th-largest military on the planet to having the 2nd-largest army in Iraq, in just over 24 hours.
From 4th largest army to largest group of hungry POWs ever assembled.
How's a 69:1 K:D sound? And that's counting non-combat deaths.
@@SGobuck I remember they surrendered to AH64s. My favorite moment was Baghdad Bob in 2003 claiming the US army had been defeated in the desert and no tanks were in Baghdad.. while on various news channels there were Bradleys and Abrams rolling past their crossed swords in the middle of town. Hard not to compare it to Leslie Nielson waving his arms saying "NOTHING TO SEE HERE.. MOVE ALONG"
Then twenty years of WTF are we still here ensued. My last trip was 2004, came back with issues regarding walking and standing.
@@SweatyFatGuy Baghdad Bob / Comical Ali, was a psychological WMD, it's impossible not to nearly die of laughter.
I think it was Napoleon who said something like to never ever Interrupt the enemy while he's doing something wrong, and they clearly did something very wrong with him, though in a good way.
@@eldritchmorgasm4018 the only way it could have been funnier is if the tanks were driving by behind him as he said it and some Army guy waved at the camera.
“Grunt slaps tank barrel “ we could fit so many freedom seeeds in this bad boy ….Uncle Sam “ YES! “ 🤣🤣😅
Artillery barrel*
A bunkerbuster is more like hitting them with the whole freedom tree.
"I'll take your whole stock!" -American Taxpayers.
You laugh, but that is basically what happened.
Engineers were trying to figure out how to make a bomb casing that would survive punching into the earth that deep. One went out for a smoke, and saw them sitting behind a container in the yard, asked a soldier what they were, soldier basically said, "scrap were fixing to ship back to the foundry"
"Yeah, but where did they come from?"
"OH! They're spend Howitzer barrels..."
Engineer says, "HA! You just saved the war. Dont touch em, ill be right back" and ran off to get the others, presumably walking into the room with the biggest shit eating grin of all time.
They came up with the idea to use howitzer barrels.....because the yard on the base where their office was just so happened to be storing spent barrels for scrapping..... Yes, the bunker buster was 100% full MacGyver mode happenstance. There are two things you never want America to get.....Crafty, or cruel. Or we just might decide to drop 30 feet of rock into your bunker with a bomb made out of our trash! ;)
The professor I had in an engineering materials course I had to take, was the metallurgist at the Arsenal supervising the heat treatment regime of the gun tubes. The shop had to heat the tubes up and let them cool down slowly enough so they could be machined to spec. The riffling had to go as it would create weakness in the bomb casing, the pointy end of the casing was shaped in the rotary forge to make it strong enough to support the penetrator tip. Now add in all the heat soaking and cooling cycles the tubes went through and you'll see why producing them took so long.
I want to add, the Watervliet Arsenal's landscaping is rather neat as well, who do you know that has a few IOWA Class Battleship GUN Barrels decorating their front yard?
yup.. you can see them from I787. they used to have their own Railroad as well with their own RR crews.. and Yard.. right across from Muddys pub.
Civilian buddy of mine told me (back in 94-95) that he was involved in the initial testing of the GBU-28. They dropped an inert bomb onto a target, hit exactly where is was supposed to hit. They dig down to 200 feet and stopped digging. They never recovered the test article it went so deep. I've loaded many of them on the B-52 in my time.
As an old civilian woman I know nothing about bombs. But I've lived most of my life in Florida so I know a few things about that. If you drill a 100' deep or a 200' deep hole in Florida, you have gone below the water table level and are into limestone (full of holes) and will need scuba gear to go into that hole to look for anything. Now ask a geologist, I am sure I got part of that wrong as the whole state is not the same and that is more the center of the state up near Ocala. But at the Gulfside beach where Eglin AFB is - it will be worse. The sand was only the top layer and not that deep. How did they get 200 foot deep and be digging to find something and be dry? Whatever they dropped (the bomb they tested) had gone through so many layers it was probably in the deep aquifer under the whole state and the bomb was slowly moving toward the gulf. Or it just stopped at the bottom, found a comfortable position and settled in forever. You won't find it!
@@julieenslow5915 The military does it weapons testing a out in the Mohave. You can dig pretty deep and not hit any water out in the desert. Usually aircraft and bombs get tested out there.
@@julieenslow5915 Wrong test. The test in Florida was a horizontal rocket sled into concrete barriers, the test in Nevada was the one dropped into the ground.
@@tremedar
Oh good. I hated the thought the whole aquifer got contaminated.... or might have been.
@@stuglife5514 in my home town there is an old military decommissioned bombing range I used to go out there just to see what I could find and i found a few cool dummy rounds and that was out by Edward’s Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert
That bunker buster round is the most Marines Logic round I have seen in months.
"We need a deep penetration bunker buster"
"How about we use a Howitzer Barrel, those are heavy right? Shove it full of explosives and put a cone on one end."
It might not be Rods from God, but it's damn close. The Ram from Uncle Sam.
To put this in perspective too, they were seriously talking about reinstating the draft for this war. I was about to graduate college so I began to consider enlisting before they drafted me. And then it was over and Iraqi units were surrendering to TV journalists.
Hands up, smiling as they approached a CBS News crew, I'll never forget that.
They were surrendering so much and so fast that at one point we started just tossing MREs to them and pointing them to the back. One of the POW camps actually flew an Opryland flag it was insane. We lost fewer troops in the time we were there for Desert Sheild/Desert Storm than we lost to drunk driving during the same period the year before. We joked that it was safer to be at war with Iraq than at peace in garrison.
@@ninjabearpress2574
Well, they were huge "Northern Exposure" fans. The poor bastards that screwed up and surrendered to ABC were strapped to chairs with their eyelids taped open and were forced to watch "Cop Rock." To this day, you can still hear the screams.
Surrendered to troops, news crews, and a UAV flown from a 47 year old battleship.
we had Iraqi soldiers knocking on our bradley ramp to surrender
"When in doubt throw the gun" George Washington probably
Doom guy has entered the chat
fix bayonets first, make it a spear
Cross the frozen river
Nah. George Washington would have shoved old stale fruit cakes into the howitzers and then crammed an elephant's f*** ton of powder behind it. Sealed the breach and blasted it straight up Saddam's @$$.
I think that might have been Sun Tzu
They created that bomb in 2 days, tested it on the third day, and deployed 6 prototypes to the battlefield within 3 weeks of the initial call asking if it was a possibility. This is according to the scientist who led the team.. Told to me on Christmas Eve as I helped him hang the star on the family tree.
Benet guy
@@joshm887 Benet was an interesting place, where else could you go and talk to a guy who had a desk drawer full of flechettes?
other fun fact about machining harderned steel like that. You have to go slow and gentle so you don't heat the metal enough to mess with the heat treating. Some grey beard machinist spent a lot of hours slowly and carefully machining those things.
Iraq: "haha the Americans are out of ammo.....wait why are they unscrewing the cannon barrels and laughing hysterically?"
America: Out of ammo? That is a grammatically incorrect sentence in American English.
@@ryanpayne7707 I understand those words....just not in that order....
HAHA, YOU'RE OUT OF AMMO!
*Oh no, you're out of ammo*
"I am completely out of ammo. I don't think that's ever happened to me before...?" - Burt Gummer
Let's all be honest with ourselves, it was probably closer to maniacal giggling.
I was a 17 year old engineering apprentice when the Gulf War was winding up,one part of our workshop was turned into a massive spray booth,a lot of green stuff turned up and got sprayed sandy coloured,and a lot of really light weight alloy turned up and was machined into warhead shaped stuff that was 120mm diameter.
Iraq goes from being the 4th largest army in the world....to being the 5th largest army in Iraq.
Let that rattle around in your brain box for a minute or two.
LOL 😆 🤣
They fucked around and found out.
That's a fact
Just like Russia went from having the 2nd most powerful army in the world to the second most powerful army in Ukraine.
Great job guys, let’s go for 6th place!
Having been a machinist, the frozen butter analogy is 100% spot on.
I have machined some big stuff and plenty of heat treated material. This is beyond impressive. Thanks for the great content.
A fellow 462X0 (USAF Weapons loading) who was working the F-111F's from RAF Lakenheath told me that when they got the weapons they were still very warm from casting the Tritonal explosive filler. That's how fast they moved those bombs from filling them.
As amazing as this is, I still believe the most amazing display of American hard work and getting the job done is the USS Yorktown between the battles of Coral Sea and Midway. Yorktown was damaged and managed to limp home to Pearl. The dockyard estimated it would take weeks to repair her and get her back in the fight. The dockyard workers understood how vital carriers were and repaired her to battle ready in two days.
I also love how stubborn the Yorktown class (the first pure carrier class in the USN) were when they got damaged. Yorktown got severely damaged at two different battles and was gonna shrug it off until I-168 got lucky. Hornet took a beating Santa Cruz and even denied the US Navy’s own attempt to sink her. Enterprise would be hit multiple times throughout the war and survive officially giving the finger to the Japanese.
Mr. Fat Electrician I believe you should cover this mighty class of ship that truly displayed American stubbornness, hardiness, and will to keep fighting.
I really wish Enterprise was saved to be a museum ship.
Probably my favorite naval story is of the destroyer USS Johnston. It would, alongside three other destroyers, fight against a Japanese fleet of nearly two dozen ships total including battleships and heavy cruisers, ships out-massing the Johnston many times over. While the Johnston would eventually be sunk in this battle, it first sunk a Japanese heavy cruiser, got into a gunfight with the battleship Kongo, another gunfight with yet another heavy cruiser, and finally engage an entire Japanese destroyer squadron on its own (7 destroyers and light cruisers vs. the heavily damaged Johnston). It won that fight by the way, the entire squadron retreated after the two lead ships sustained heavy damage.
@@Kitkat-986 Ah yes the Battle off Samar. Yamato alone had more displacement than the entire American force.
Dude! Dude. As just drop jaw amazing as that is.
It...isn't even close. For sheer jaw dropping power. Look at the ship BUILDING competition that happened in WW2.
The Liberty ship construction efforts? They built a 440foot ship in less than 4.5 days from keel to champagne bottle on the keel. Including wiring and everything. 250,000 parts in 111 hours.
That was a stunt run for sure...But uh. UHH. Not just 440 feet of hull. But an entire ship.
Oh you want even scarier? Yeah, that was a stunt run ship. So what was the regular construction speed? Well, eventually, averaged across the country it was 42 days. SO much SLOWER
But what about the faster shipyards? what was THEIR average? What could a GOOD shipyard doing average work do? Try a slow sloth like 2 weeks. Yeah. 2 weeks to build a ship.
Yeah.
Honestly FAR more needs to be said about this entire production. How do you re-arrange an entire economy across 3000 miles of land to ship components and parts to fully kit out and build 3 ships in just 2 days... Along with all the OTHER ships built. This is just the liberty class. They also had the victory class AND then destroyers, submarines, cruisers, battleships, and of course carriers.
Oh, right. and tanks, planes, guns, ammo, and all the other things.
AHHH. Dude! It was jaw dropping.
@@feldamar2 Absolutely. And that's not even considering the similarly breathtaking scope of resource production the US put together for all of the other elements of WWII. SIMULTANEOUSLY! Take planes, for instance. Combine fighters, bombers, transports, etc and you'll find that the US produced over 300,000 aircraft between 1939 & 1945. That's more than the next two biggest aircraft producers (the USSR & UK) combined. It's nearly 3x as many planes as Germany manufactured in that period, and well over 4x as many as Japan built in that time.
The Axis powers' inability to so much as touch American manufacturing centers, much less destroy them, made the eventual outcome of the war an utter certainty. Maybe a successful German invasion and occupation of the UK could have made the Allies sue for peace... but there's a decent chance that it would've only prolonged the war and not changed the outcome.
This conflict kicked off the week I was born, my dad says he was sitting in the hospital wondering what the hell kind of fucked up world his first child was being born into. Coincidentally, the seven day war in Israel kicked off the day my dad was born and my grandfather thought similarly and that he might get drafted...
Ares himself has been pranking your bloodline with conflict
I hope you're not planning on having a kid anytime soon... considering the current world situation.
and sometime later this decade, you'll be wondering the same damn thing
So... when were you expecting a kid again?
@@71723 Maybe he'll wise up and stop having kids, clearly the wars are happening because his bloodline is continuing 🙃
My dad was an artillery director in the Vietnam War, and as part of his training, he learned how artillery barrels are made.
Get this: They spin the barrel while scorching hot to such extreme RPMs that the heaviest parts of the steel all get pushed towards the outer side of the barrel, leaving impurities and softer parts in the middle. Then, they bore out the soft and impure parts, resulting in extremely tough, pure steel.
Now imagine you gotta mill that out.
One of the things they did when a barrel was considered "shot out" was they burned them, and twisted them into knots, not dissimilar to General Sherman's railroad "bowties" in the Civil War, and for the exact same reason, so that the enemy couldn't use them. In Vietnam, if an artillery battery was overrun, abandoned, or left in a hurry, the VC would turn artillery barrels into IEDs by jamming them full of explosives, then burying them under roads to be detonated as American convoys drive over, so destroying barrels ASAP was pretty important.
So we already knew Howitzer barrels could be bombs. Doesn't really surprise me that someone decided to refine said bomb, then drop it out of a plane. Waste not, want not.
"Going to war without France is like going hunting without your accordion." Stormin' Norman
Great job on this one! My uncle was one of the machinists on this project and he said it was a high point in his career.. He also told me that they ran through a lot of carbide tooling to get these pushed out on time to meet the deadline (which in the end was 2 weeks earlier than predicted)..! God bless American ingenuity and persistence!!
Big props to your uncle. I used to run a giant ancient manual lathe... that thing was terrifying.
This longer format is much much better. At first I was worried that you have written yourself into a corner, so this little innovation was definitely good choice. It definitely paid off, because I appreciate the added detail and the history of it all. Plus there are some elements that I could look at today and say hey that's kind of going on right now. It also allows me to compare and contrast something that happened as little as thirty-five years ago.
I was there with the 101st. General Schwarzkopf was a fantastic leader and skilled commander.
I was within earshot during one of his troop visits. Some private (probably) said "What's the plan sir?"
The General looked in the direction of the voice and said, "We're going north, we're going to kick his ass and then we're going home."
As a young SPC in the Infantry I could not have wished for a better answer than that.
Schwarzkopf: What’s the plan private the plan is that we go north and if people want to fuck around we make them find out we keep doing that till people stop wanting to fuck around and find out then we go home
You are a great story teller. Thank you for your service.
Well the fact that they were able to machine the gun barrels into bombs is quite remarkable I am a CNC machinist myself I work on lathes and to be honest it's all about how much money you want to spend on tooling and how much time you want to take I can only imagine the amount of tools they broke.
Iraq had the world's 4th largest military. Which honestly isn't a whole lot when it has to stack up against the THREE other, BIGGER militaries AT THE SAME TIME.
and 33 other countries lol
The Soviets weren't really involved but we get the point. It's kind of suicidal to try to take on everyone. Many were speculating that Moscow was taking notes on how their defenses would hold up to America's weapons/tactics.
Only one of the top 3 at the time. Russia and China did not join the coalition. The UK, France, Egypt, and Syria all fielded more or less a full division each but most of the other countries only sent small contingents of battalion size or smaller. The most interesting ones I met were some Polish nurses (incredibly friendly and funny). All told, the coalition forces numbered around 1 million, with 700k of those being from the US.
@@jarink1 1st UK Armor had painted on their tanks "Let us IN to kick some or Let us HOME to get some"
We in Germany were put on alert and locked down for deployment on August 9 for a month. All leave cancelled and every one called back, Which really pissed us off because we had just gotten back from 2 months in Grafenwoehr, and were really looking for some time off.
Every unit on post got blank checks to fix everything we had. Parts we had been waiting on for over a year showed up in weeks.
We shipped out for Saudi Arabia in November.
Every time someone says Graf, I have to drink a beer to get the dust out of my mouth.
@@SGobuck Dust? Its always to frozen to allow for dust. Maybe smoke for gunfire.
Ladies and gentleman this literally a physics math problem with lots of HEDP or thermodynamic explosive ductaped to it
I haven't looked all of your videos, however that is incoming. Your style is awesome! I will be going back, liking and commenting on all of them.
Thank you
If you can find the information you might like to do a show on the M110 howitzer, the king of battle. The undisputed best artillery package ever developed. It was retired from service because it was replaced by the MLRS, also known as SPLL. If I am correct it was actually brought back into service for the first Gulf War because the MLRS wasn't ready yet. When I was in 8th ID 3/16 FA we had three batteries of M110s and one of MLRS.
Lathe programmer here, I can attest to the annoyance that hard materials bring. They wear down your tooling rather quickly, unless you use specialty inserts made of Cubic Boron Nitride or diamond.
Also the butter analogy was pretty good, though I'd say ice cream would work a bit better. The colder the ice cream is, the harder it is to scoop and remove.
which conicidentally also describes the process of collecting the remains of high command officers after sending the mother of all bunker busters
@IceFire Downunder wouldn't that be the inverse curve to their comments? The hotter you make a body, the harder to scoop up?😂 I think you've inadvertently found the sin/cosin equivalent to frozen butter/melted ice cream to bad guy body disposal ratio... and I'm here for it.
I hate working with hard material. It doesn't want to cut, holding size is ass, there are problems with chatter, you need extra cuts because of how little material you can take off per pass, and it heats up like crazy.
@@Kitkat-986 they're still less annoying than inconel because at least the chip breaks
Cast Aluminum Bronze is pretty high on my least favorite list. Abrasive as F, work hardens like a bastard, and invariably full of foundry sand. And it sneaks up on you, looking like brass, but being oh, so much more evil. Or maybe our foundry was just a bunch of idjits.
When you use an aquatic...mammal? Fish? As a unit of measurement rather than using the metric system, that's the definition of All-American. Hats off to you sir 👏
Kingdom: Animalia. Phylum: Chordata. Class: Mammalia. Order: Cetacea. Family: Balaenopteridae. Genus: Balaenoptera. Species: Musculus.
Spot on, mate! Its a marine mammal of the baleen whale variety! 😎👍
And can we take minute to appreciate apparently the scientific classification of a blue whale is essentially "Big muscular filter feeding hairy titty fish"....
My dad was attached to a Combat Engineer corps during Operation Desert Storm, so he can confirm this shit really did happen. God, the world was so different back then.
SO GRATEFUL you explained how dense the AAA and SAM network was. Suppression of Enemy AIr Defenses (SEAD) was our mission, and many Vets as well as most Americans thought it was all just a "video war". Thought I was either gonna get blown out of the sky or be a POW every night for 6 weeks straight. FE is a UA-cam god. Thank You.
The biggest logistical flex you have never heard of, but will hear of now!
in June of 1967 Ford was prepping for the 24 hours at Le Mans. They were so powerful, so fast, that all four of their main cars cracked their windshields. Dow Corning's New York plant got a phone that new windshields were needed...Two days later they were on the plane to France where Ford had hired a Brussels, an "adhesives expert", to glue them to the cars! ... They won the race!
Met General Schwarzkopf in 1993 at a he brought us all beer. He was a true leader and it was my greatest momnet in my Army career. he litterally took time to talk to every soldier
everything thing I've ever read shows him being an amazing leader
@@the_fat_electrician yes he was a great leader. Really. Great.. no he didn't talk to everyone nor buy everyone a. Beer.. I know cause I was in Desert Shield/Storm
Advisor: "Sir, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait!"
Uncle Sam: "I don't care yet"
Advisor: "Now he raised gas prices and is taking cover in a super bunker!"
Uncle Sam stands and cracks his knuckles: "Time to go full McGyver."
Except it wasn't that way at all. We were in Kuwait in 3 days to contain him North of Saudi Arabia while we built up. We committed to his leaving day 1. Sorry. Look it up.
Reminds me of the robot chicken lil hitler sketch. "Now, it's my problem"
@@ElsinoreRacer Well yeah, but that isn't remotely nesr as funny
Me and my dad love watching your videos, my dad actually served in Desert Storm
As a new machinist entering the trade, that has to be the biggest “I am better than you” flex as a machinist I can think of. Machining 4 6.1 inch diameter, 19 foot long, 4500 lbs heat treated hardened steel barrels do their correct specs within a week.
Before I start, yes, it was a huge flex. But...
It's not like they were boring 19 foot long 6.1" dia. tubes. They started with howitzer barrels. They are already tubes. My guess would be that they were machining the ends to accommodate the cap for the 'nose' of the bomb as well as the guidance surfaces at the tail end. Then there's the mounting and drop system that had to be added. I'm sure there was some other external machining required for other bit and pieces as well.
😂😂😂
Politically incorrect, but that was a FUN conflict. I was in Japan on August 2nd, and we flew our helicopters out to the boat on August 15th and sailed for the Gulf... not as impressive as the bunker buster engineering, but we made our ASW helicopters ready for CSAR and other missions we were not built for - stripped out all the ASW gear, added a monkey-rigged FLIR, added two M-2 guns instead of the single puny M-60, and started begging the MEU to give us a half-dozen or more Hellfire missiles. We didn't get to ACTUALLY shoot anything, but we were ready/
I remember watching desert storm on the news as a teenager . Felt like it started on a Monday and was over by Friday.
Great video as always.
My pick for the biggest logistical flex would probably be getting the aircraft carrier Yorktown (CV-5) fixed and back in service for the Battle of Midway in WWII. Yorktown had been seriously thrashed at the preceding Battle of the Coral Sea; taking damage from tons of bombs and multiple torpedoes. It was estimated it would take three months to get her properly fixed.
But intelligence had been intercepted that pointed to a pivotal Japanese attack on Midway, and the U.S. needed flat-tops there. So once Yorktown arrived back at Pearl Harbor, the repair crews immediately went to work. Like, IMMEDIATELY. They didn't even wait for the drydock to finish draining; they put on waders and started inspecting the damage and getting shit done. Crews worked around the clock, skipping safety measures and finding creative shortcuts all over the place. Honolulu would experience rolling blackouts as the electric company prioritized power for the repair operation. Yorktown would sail for Midway only THREE DAYS after limping into Pearl Harbor, not nearly at 100%, but more than capable of fighting. While she would ultimately be lost at Midway, her participation there was key in winning what would be one of the most pivotal battles in the Pacific War.
The "Nascar pit stop" of naval ship repair
@@kerbalairforce8802 Yeah, but one of those special pit stops where the crew get a smashed-up car back in the race and competitive in just 60 seconds using hammers and duct tape.
The crews were still repairing and fixing it as it steamed out to position for the defensive action. Not only that, Yorktown sustained most of the brunt of the japanese counter attack so the crews got back on and got enough of it fixed that when the japanese attacked again, they thought they sank 2 of the US carriers, but it was just yorktown taking an absolute Randy marsh level beating and still going. The only reason it sank and didn't make it back to Honolulu was a japanese sub hit it with a torpedo when it was under tow back to base.
Out Fu*king standing!!! It's nice to know that it came together so quickly. As a Veteran of that little war, it was fantastic!!
Remember mate, this wasn't a "to whom it may concern" bomb this was a bomb that went full formal and said "Dear Mr..."
HAHAHAHA I'm mad I didn't make that joke
I am dead now LOL😂😂
@@the_fat_electrician dude its ok im really just re reading somethings in your voice to up the funny meter to max
"We have tried to reach you at your exclusive bunker resort"
Thank God the people trying to reach me about my car's extended warranty aren't as persistent about reaching out and contacting someone as the US military.
Ive been work at the arsenal for a while. The history behind the facility is amazing.
And during the Floyd demonstrations, the command post for the local law enforcement was right inside the arsenal, because....who wants to climb and the fence to fuck around and find out.
I remember hearing about the Bunker Buster bombs that the yanks had created, I was sceptical. No sooner had they been deployed, I became a convert. Absolutely phenomenal what great inelegance and know how, can be achieved when it is combined with great wealth mixed with great ordinance especially when aimed at a great enemy...
Look up the "Grand Slam" bomb of 1945. 22,000lb of Instant Earthquake, designed by Barnes Wallis, of Bouncing Bomb fame.
@@gchampi2 yeah I think I have heard of that. From memory it was used to destroy a railway line. He was an amazing inventor as well. He helped develop liquid explosives that we st use today.
@@gchampi2 Also thanks for this comment, I just went down the UA-cam rabbit hole and watched some brilliant documentaries which is an awesome way of spending a Saturday. Cheers buddy.
they also used barrel sections from the cruiser USS Des Moines to make the bombs. this ship was scrapped a few months later. the only ship left in the class is the USS Salem, which is a museum.
I’m currently in Kuwait for the Army and there’s bunkers with 10ft thick concrete blown up by American munitions…I freaking love this country. 😎
I was clearing those bunkers in 1991. You're welcome. BTW, I also saw Iraq and Afghanistan.
There's the Operations room for military history, and then there's this masterpiece.
2:26 I was a kid during Desert Storm and we lived next to a US AFB. A lot of my classmates were Air Force brats and it was a big thing in my school. I remember the TV always tuned to the news and the surreal footage of all of the glowing tracers floating up into the night sky from the anti-aircraft fire trying to shoot down the bombers.
Nice story. They tested them at Sandia laboratory outside Albuquerque, NM with seismic sensors mounted in them.
Not only where they the fourth largest Military, they where the single most battle hardened and experienced Military at the time!
yeah.. most people either forgot or straight up did not know that Iraq and Iran had been at war for almost a decade at this point.. they stopped combat when nightfall came.
I think the moral of this story is "never under estimate Uncle Sam's creativity for weapon making!!!".
It doesn't matter where you hide, the U.S. Military will find a way to get at you.
Military industrial complex for the win.....
My dad worked for TI at that time (They make more than math boxes) and said there was an internal email about how the guidance system was finished within two weeks. When America gets to work we do OT.
It was actually faster than that according to my pop. He ran the machine shop where these were manufactured. Him and two other machinists were still hand tapping holes enroute to Nevada for testing. The others were machine tapped.
@@garrettmontgomery9690 Yeesh, talk about rush order...
7:24 Berlin airlift says hold my beer.
"Warheads on foreheads extravaganza" best - line - ever!!!
Ok, few detail mixups here. I crewed the F15 that was part of the test during desert storm at Eglin, so I can correct a few details. First, it's the GBU-27 because it only took 27 days from start to drop. The sled test was done in Nevada and the drop test into sand was done at Eglin Air Force base. We couldn't get the F15 off the ground because the tire on the side that had the bomb would shred by the time it got to the end of the runway even though we had the airplane balanced out with a drop tank on the other side. So they switched to the F111.
We had to hang a 1000lb bomb on the opposite pylon to balance it.
I think we need to make more of these bombs.
Yeah, every time they retire those barrels from service, they should turn them into bombs...
@pkpundit - The GBU-27 uses a BLU-109 improved performance 2,000 pound bomb, the BB is a GBU-28!
22' of concrete and then kept going a quarter mile no that's penetration! Love it❤
it's not the length of the barrel. It's how fast you get the job done.
What?
What?
Your work is awesome, as always. One thing about the start of the war though, there was a lot more than nothing going on in those months prior to January. Me and 500,000 of my closest friends were over there getting ready to chase Sadam out of Kuwait.
I figured a good deal of the delay between invasion and response was logistics of a troop buildup. Looking up details of that, Iraq took over Kuwait on August 2nd and US deployments to Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region started August 7th
@@KingAlanI yep like a hotel loading up on condoms for prom night. planes landing every 15 mins loaded so heavy they could barely take off.
Now, that was an awesome pro recycling segment. Taking four massive howitzer barrels and converting them into bunker busters.
Tips to not being obliterated
1. Don't touch my boat
2. Don't raise gas prices
Ive got to say. The biggest reason i look forward to sundays now is your vids. You are a god.
This was back in a time when if you heard somebody from the U.S. military say the words "I have an idea" you'd start sweating profusely
Please keep doing these longer formats it feels more natural and you're still entertaining the whole time.
Bro I love the long form content, I don't like shorts, but your funny, so I tolerate them, you should be a history teacher.
Kool channel! I'm a 56 yr old Black Man in the Florida panhandle USA. I can remember hearing and feeling the MOAB, mother of all bombs! Living in the paradise of the Florida panhandle USA you do hear bombs and jets and planes and helicopters from time to time! So ya get used to it But this was different, it was Loud, windows shook, doors rattled,we thought it was an earthquake in Florida. Wtf? Anywho we now know what it was. And let me say a war over oil prices wasn't a good idea. But, at least the USA made a conventional bomb instead of using nukes! War is hell. Y'all stay safe
Having a bomb created, tested and approved for use in 3 weeks... You're right about being the biggest logistical flex. Another massive flex is the Casablanca-Class Escort Carrier/Jeep Carrier as they're sometimes called. Where all 50 hulls (yes, 50) were laid down then commissioned in the span of less than two years.
Wow it only took a few weeks to go from can we destroy a bunker to yes we can. Grunts and crafts at its finest. Great video 🍻
Laughed my ass off the entire video, though a conclusion that would also work is "Don't give Uncle Sam a reason to improvise!" Love your content man, as well as the new camo "Its Never a War Crime the first time!" hoodie. Going to check that out on your store!
I want to thank you for your interesting stories of heroes and war hardware. You have a gift for presenting your findings in a serious yet at opportune times humorous way. Keep up the great work. I am a fan and a retired electrician to boot!
I’m a machinest that owns a heat treating company and that time frame is amazing.
Love it lol
Hey @thefatelectrician, can you do a video on the XB-70 bomber prototype? I think itd be a great craft to talk about. Cancelled program but it did build 2 prototypes that were the closest planes to ever break SR-71’s record speed
Awesome video as always, makes Sunday the best day of the week! Also I'd love to see the Accuracy by Volume shirt back in the merch store!
My dad was with the 3380th AMS out of Keesler and was in Saudi Arabia for 3 months during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Occasionally, we'll get stories from him telling of how the Iraqi troops would surrender to the media just to avoid conflict with coalition forces and such.
You're one of the best story tellers I have heard in a long time. Enjoy your videos
Butter on toast was a pretty great analogy
You sir are awesome!! The last time I was this interested in history was the Sam Kinison & Rodney Dangerfield scene in Back to School.
CLASSIC!!!!
"Well I didn't know you wanted to get involved, Mr. Helper...SAY IT! SAY IT"
Sam and Rodney. What a combination!!
😂😂😂
So basically the air force equivalent of firing a musket and then fixing bayonets and throwing them like a spear
So the first one missed? Imagine being in the bunker as it went by!
"WTF was that? .........."
Just before the second one hits
right lol 😆 🤣
Not only are your videos amazing (love the new longer content), but you somehow make every UA-cam ad cut-in F-ing hilarious and perfectly timed. It's perfection.
Only one technical observation.... Heat treating metals, means to change the materials properties using heat, may it be harder, softer, or any other way.