The Higgins Boat: Wood, Steel, and Purpose | Hacker News Reader

The Higgins Boat: Wood, Steel, and Purpose

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58 pointssmacktoward14 comments

The Normandy landings were not in the Bay of Biscay.

It's funny because Operation Ironside - the operation to trick the Germans was intended to get the Germans to believe that the landings would be in the Bay of Biscay.

WW2, the original Worse Is Better:

M4 Sherman

PT Boats

Liberty ships

Almost everything the Soviets built

> Almost everything the Soviets built

The T-34. The epitome of sound, sensible, pragmatic engineering.

In the early part of the war the T-34 outclassed everything the Germans had. More were lost to mechanical failure than enemy action. As the war went on, the Soviets continued to simplify it until it became classic example of Soviet design we know about today (like the AK-47).

The extreme weather conditions and lack of availability of spare parts in the USSR lead to some awesome engineering:

Soviet aircraft can operate from the world's shittiest airfields: https://youtu.be/uWUG1FuALaw

MiG-29 has extra intakes on top so it doesn't suck in junk from said airfields: https://youtu.be/MpPSPQq7oas

Russian trucks: https://youtu.be/5BRu-XGKdgU

Yes if only we had built a version under licence better bigger turret with the 17 Pounder and a bustle to fit the extra radio gear - poor radio coms and training was the soviet tankers weekness

Maybe not worse is better, but quantity over quality.

PT Boats is new to me. I'll have to look up why those were as bad as the others.

I'm not sure that they were bad, but they were cheap, quick to build, and suboptimal after the war was won. I remember one of the older History Channel shows, maybe the Great Ships, where they had one of the PT boat veterans on, describing how they scrapped and burned most of them on a beach in the Philippines after VJ day, with tears in his eyes.

Was that suboptimality, or just admirals' natural prejudice against small boats? After all PT boats were too small for the least senior captains.

Also it seems that if any USA ally could ever have used some surplus boats, then surely Philippines post-WWII could have... what a waste!

Quantity has a quality of its own :-) an allied tank regiment could lose 90% of its tanks and be back in action in a few days as we had much better logistics.

I think it was Max Hastings who wrote about the aftermath of the Normandy landings that there isn't much point your tanks/tankers being six times better than the enemy if your enemy has ten times as many tanks!

There's a theory about the M4 that it wasn't really any more reliable than any other tank of the period. But it's ease of repair meant that the operational readiness was pretty close to 100%.

https://youtu.be/udnEpV160zU?t=7m10s

Also the Sten gun. And the same happened with aircraft; the Spitfire and Lancaster were "better", but the Hurricane and Wellington did a lot of vital work. Somewhere on youtube is the propaganda film of building a Wellington in 24 hours. Also the de Havilland Mosquito, made of wood rather than scarce aluminium, star of 633 Squadron's "trench run".

The "little ships" of the Dunkirk evacuation should probably count (do Americans learn about Dunkirk?)

> do Americans learn about Dunkirk

There's a film coming out this summer about it.

Part of Granddad's unit was at Dunkirk (Cheshire Regiment) but he was not - he was in North Africa.

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