We'll buy back your Typewriter for Uncle Sam
pncnmnp.github.io
pncnmnp.github.io
https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/the-smith-corona-mo...
Yeah, small magazine compared to 9mm, but that's because police tactics have changed; the 1911 was not designed for "fire and maneuver" tactics. 1911 is more "one shot stop", something which 9mm doesn't do reliably.
> yeah, single-action trigger, but there are draw techniques which rack the slide and the gun is designed to enable these
The 1911 is sorta designed to be carried with a round in the chamber and the hammer cocked, relying on the grip safety and thumb safety.
But militaries often didn't (still don't sometimes?) have people outside of MP carry pistols that way, because the pistol is a last resort backup. The accident rate from stupid during normal times outweighs the benefit of a fractionally faster draw in the rare case of use.
Which brings to the second point:
> 1911 is more "one shot stop", something which 9mm doesn't do reliably.
That was the working theory for many decades (like.... 8-9 decades). That's been thoroughly disproved by modern science and ballistics. Size of pistol bullet doesn't really do anything (compared to other pistol calibers that can penetrate far enough), but increased accuracy does work much better. This is especially true in a military context where the rifle is designed around one shot stop (mostly due to 3-4x faster velocities).
Law enforcement agencies will still make bad decisions around this for political / optical reasons. See e.g. the FBI's terrible choice of going to 10mm, backing off to 40s&w, and then finally coming around to 9mm
You use a pistol because you need it to be small, unobtrusive, or it's your last option.
A rifle or a shotgun is almost always better than a pistol if you don't have the size constraints (which are sometimes optics - a police office with a holstered gun looks way less threatening than one with a rifle).
Neither does .45, of course. Handguns (well, 9mm anyway) dispense what is functionally a single pellet of buckshot- the pellets (while still potentially lethal) aren't that powerful on their own, which is why the shotgun launches 8 of them at a time.
>but there are draw techniques which rack the slide and the gun is designed to enable these
The 1911 was designed back when pistol doctrine was "carry with chamber empty" and "fire one-handed", despite that not being particularly conducive to accuracy. Pistols are a badge of rank more than anything else; the overwhelming majority of military casualties caused by them are same-side (used on deserters, etc.).
>small magazine compared to 9mm
Not really. Remember that until the '80s, the concept of a "double-stack" handgun was limited to the Hi-Power; every other 9mm handgun had a capacity of 7-8 rounds, just like the 1911. And now you know why revolvers lasted so long in service- because not only were you not giving up capacity in those days, but you had a consistent and safe (though heavy) trigger pull, and you could use hollow-point ammunition without risk of a jam (which 1911s are just flat out unreliable with).
http://www.activeresponsetraining.net/an-alternate-look-at-h...
I think it’s because the B-17 raids were so dramatic. Airspace still heavily contested, the Allies still figuring out how to use air power.
It was pretty much obsolete at the beginning of the war. The “Flying Fortress” moniker, the (mostly bullshit) notion that the bomber would always get through and defend itself, the powerful imagery of battered bombers coming home, and the terrible sacrifices made by the crews made it a legendary symbol.
The B-24 wasn’t a pretty plane. The B-29 came too late in the war, and was only deployed in the Pacific.
Personally, I find the glorification of the daylight bombing campaigns increasingly gross as I get older. Those men paid a very high price and I wonder if that sacrifice was truly justified.
German here. Given what they fought against, yes it was. Visit any of the too many concentration camp sites across Europe... it's definitely worth the time.
Mass murder of civilians isn't morally acceptable no matter what the "other side" is doing.
Firebombing a kindergarten in the Rheinland doesn't do anything to help someone in an extermination camp in occupied Poland.
Post war analysis of allied strategic bombing indicates that it did not have a large impact on the war effort and probably wasn't worth the high rate of loss of the expensive airframes and crews.
The bombing didn't cause the German people to overthrow their government like Allied leaders hoped it would, but it did significantly impact the war IMHO by decreasing German production of essential materials like refined oil products, particularly lubricants, ball bearings, airframes and probably other materials.
Even if no factories had been hit, just the fact that the Germans underwent the expense and inefficiencies of distributing manufacturing among many small factories, some underground and some in caves (which the Germans did in fact do) would still have significantly decreased German production.
It can make evaluating things like this tricky. So a raid that lost dozens of bombers and cost weeks in training time only put some part of their industry out of action for a couple weeks and diverted a week or so of other factory productivity for the rebuild and retooling effort—that looks bad, but could still actually be a deal you should take every time under certain circumstances.
The deliberate terror bombings that constituted some part of the effort, especially in the mid and late years, were also and separately awful, though the ethics somewhat muddied by the targeting of civilians having undergone a tit-for-tat ratcheting up early in the war, and yeah, the whole death camps thing. But there too the question of whether those deaths served any useful purpose, as far as ending the war sooner or reducing its scope, makes the whole thing even sadder.
Well, given that an utter majority were supportive of the Nazi regime up until and even after the war ended... I'd say it was necessary, if only to set an example for any future offender just how brutal the crackdown will be.
Unfortunately, the world failed to keep the reminder up on "genocide = bad and WILL lead to a brutal response" - the response towards Serbia in the 90s, Russia after 2014 or Syria was way too lackluster IMHO.
The daylight raid aspect, however, seems to me to be more grounded in ego and dogma than military utility. I don’t think avoidance of civilian casualties was a deciding factor. Those airmen were sent into a meat-grinder.
They were, but also remember that back in 1945 there was no such thing as GPS or any kind of more precise navigation than a compass, a sextant and star charts. It was very easy to get lost at night or to hit some mountain, particularly as Germans were pretty strict in enforcing Verdunkelung [1].
Flying during daytime was obviously more risky because AA defense can see you, but it was also less risky because navigation was easier - and more precise, because you could actually see where you were.
I thought the one redeeming feature of daylight runs was that they could at least hit some targets, rather than just… hitting cities and towns in general.
I think the benefits of night fighting were also more mixed than one might think, due to the increase of air accidents—the accident rate in the war was so high that it was responsible for the overwhelming majority of lost airframes, not enemy fire. If you need more missions to achieve the same effect on a target (because accuracy is worse) and your crash rate goes up because flying at night (enemy activities aside) is riskier than during the day, I could see that making it less of an absolute win even before considering increased collateral damage (which, at least at times, they do seem to have genuinely preferred to minimize)
-- unless you use nukes.
Possibly most human and land animal life could be ended if enough ground burst bombs were used to maximize fallout.
Destroying all life is extremely unlikely, e.g. deep-sea hydrothermal vent ecosystems, cave-dwelling life, bacteria, and more will survive even deliberate coordinated attempts by all nations to nuke as much as possible with ground detonations to maximize fallout.
Destroying the Earth (a 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of mostly iron) is not happening with nukes.
When most people say "end the world" they mean "end modern civilization", not "make the planet Earth cease to be a body in hydrostatic equilibrium in orbit of Sol".
Nuclear planners have always planned to use many ground bursts: on hardened targets like command bunkers, but also to destroy communications networks. Specifically, a "landing station" where transoceanic cables make landfall or wherever there used to be a 5ESS switch (the locations of which are publicly known) is a great place to hit with a ground burst to destroy much of the nation's non-wireless communications infrastructure. Estimates during the end of the Cold War are that about half of CONUS's area would be covered with lethal levels of fallout from these expected ground bursts. I guess if the Russians and Chinese were deliberately trying to cover as much area as possible with lethal levels of fallout (which they wouldn't because it is not an effective plan) they could cover 70 or 80% -- if they had as many nukes and means to "deliver" them intercontinentally as the Soviets did, which the Russians don't unless they've been hiding them from US inspectors, but I consider it very unlikely that they could've managed that.
And bomb fallout is very different from radioactive contamination from accidents at nuclear power plants: basically no area continues to have lethal levels of bomb fallout 4 weeks after the last bomb explodes. The method for decontaminating your house is to get up on a ladder and wash down your roof with a garden hose, then wash down all driveways and sidewalks.
So, again, nukes cannot be used to end industrial civilization. Note that this means that if the US ever nukes Russia with everything it has, Russia would bounce back and would again be a military threat (whether that takes 3 years or 15 years I don't know) so it makes little sense to nuke Russia unless the US is going to follow up with a long-term occupation of Russia's ports and maybe some key transportation hubs.
The USSR knew it had no chance to occupy US ports or occupy a substantial portion of US territory: their plan for followup was to grab the rest of the European plain, which includes most of Germany and all of northern France to the border with Spain.
Assuming they all have enough supplies to shelter in place for 4 weeks. Sure, they do. Oh, and where does all that runoff go?
If you were lucky enough that your home was not covered in lethal levels of fallout, then it is likely that all the land within miles of your home is similarly safe, so you can range around looking for water, and most people can survive without eating (or eating only what food they happened to have around at the time of the attack) for a few weeks. It wouldn't be pleasant, of course (and I sure would prefer to be in a fallout shelter pre-stocked with food and water when the attack happens) but the point is that many people would survive even in the countries that were attacked.
There's probably enough food in the US right now (mostly intended to be fed to farm animals, mostly stored on farms) to feed half of the US population. 2 weeks after the attack, it starts to makes sense for altruistically-inclined people (particularly if they have a Geiger counter) to load such food (along with a mill with which to turn it into flour -- also a common item stored on farms) on a truck and take it to where hungry people are. Old people are a good fit for this task: if you are 60 years old, then the prospect of developing cancer in 20 or 30 years is not exactly pleasant, but not particularly scary either.
Which most folks know how to do, of course. And we can be sure that when they encounter other groups of people at their favorite puddle, everyone will get along just fine.
Most people can survive without eating (or eating only what food they happened to have around at the time of the attack) for a few weeks.
And wouldn't be in the least motivated to leave their shelters. Howabout you try it first, and report back to us?
Look, I'm not trying to be cute here. And we agree that it won't end global industry capacity (and even the countries directly affected would eventually spring back, as after WW2). I've also done my time in physics classes, and know about all that neat physics stuff.
But your arguments sound very hand-wavy, and something tells me you're glossing over lots and lots of additional factors, and are basically trying to spin the situation as being far less of a calamity than it actually would be.
While this may be true enough for 'conventional' nukes, there have been proposals to intentionally salt bombs with elements such as cobalt that can render large areas of territory unfit for habitation for many years.
This isn't fiction or speculation, it's basically what MacArthur wanted to do in Korea.
There are many different things that we need that nobody thinks of and all those are disrupted with loss of important people at once.
A corollary of this is that the sacrifices made on bombing raids later in the war, including by US forces, were a lot less relevant. US bombing strategy was typically more targeted towards military assets than UK bombing though
(There is of course also the massive can of worms of how necessary the atomic bombs were: obviously unlike other bombings they actually did bring about immediate capitulation, but in the context that parts of Japanese High Command were opening tentative discussions in the full awareness that they were losing the war, and possibility the US might have been able to offer its surprisingly reasonable ultimate terms instead of unconditional surrender)
Not at all obvious:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-stone-kuznick-hi...
(this op-ed is the first thing that popped up on a quick google but it has been covered much more thoroughly elsewhere - the short of it is that having a city bombed to oblivion wasn't actually a terribly novel thing for Japan at this stage of the war, whereas the Soviet invasion of Manchuria was a Big Deal)
In what way was it obsolete? Can you go into more detail?
The Rifle M1 designed by John Garand was adopted as the standard service rifle in 1936. and on their entry into the conflict the US was the only belligerent that issued a self loading rifle to the general troop. well, except for Uncle Sam's Misguided Children, they always seem the be last in line to get new toys and were still using the 1903 springfield as the standard service rifle.
Unless you are talking about guns in the strict military sense(artillery) in which case I have no idea how advanced US artillery was at the start of the war.
The ATX motherboard form factor was developed in 1995 by Intel. Today motherboards are still made by AMD and Intel that meet that size. Previous attempts to make a modular cell phone by Google's Project Ara ended in 2017.
https://hackaday.io/project/177716-the-femtotx-motherboard-s... If a system reuses even 10%, that still reduces the waste that goes into manufacturing a new replacement, such as a system fan or chassis.
Did they mean "decades"? (English is not my native language)