Reading up on The Battle of the Bulge brought research on just how quickly the Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant (where a quarter of all American tanks were built) was assembled.
Here’s a video on how the the Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant was built. If you can look past the Chrysler rah rah tone, there’s a lot of information on how quickly it was built and what went into building it (including 51,000 tons of concrete, and 13,000,000 pounds of steel).
Skip ahead to 13:40 to see the first tank off the assembly line drive through a house.
Evidently they started producing sample tanks six months after groundbreaking and before the entire building was finished. There were giants in the earth in those days…
Here’s a video of the plant producing and testing M3 Lee/Grant tanks.
The Grant/Lee tanks were well armed and armored when deployed by the British to North Africa, but the exceptionally high silhouette and extremely limited traversal range for the main gun meant they were quickly outgunned when German Panzer IV’s with their own 75mm main guns mounted in full 360 turrets hit the battlefield, and were quickly replaced by the M4 Sherman tank for European battlefield roles. (M3s continued to be used in the Pacific theater with great success, since it was superior to any tank the Japanese fielded outside the home islands before the end of the war.)
On December 16, 1944, Nazi Germany launched The Battle of the Bulge in a last desperate effort to stave off defeat. It failed due to a combination of stiff American resistance and German shortages of materials and manpower, but it was a hard-fought struggle. Next to D-Day it was the most important Western Front battle of World War II, but as it fades from living memory I thought it offered the opportunity for a reminder.
Happy Leap Day, everyone! Enjoy a yuge LinkSwarm, and if you’re in Texas or another Super Tuesday state, take time to dig out your voter registration card for tomorrow.
The Case for Cruz: The Math. “In the states where Cruz is ahead of Rubio in the upcoming Super Tuesday, he is either beating Trump or within striking distance. In the states where Rubio is ahead of Cruz in the upcoming Super Tuesday, Trump has a huge lead. Rubio doesn’t lead in a single state.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Our cultural elites just can’t figure out why those ignorant gun- and religion-clinging redneck freaks of JesusLand keep flocking to Trump when he says he love them. It’s an insoluble mystery…
Trump University was a scam. “Many people believe that higher education is a de facto scam. Trump University, Donald Trump’s real-estate institution, was a de jure one.”
DNC vice chair steps down to support Bernie Sanders. An understandable move, given the DNC is so far in the tank for Hillary under Debbie Wasserman Schultz that supporting Sanders is probably looked on as akin to treason… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Mark Steyn lays out some grim election analysis: “No one loses as expensively as Republicans.”
720,000 taxpayers have their tax form information stolen from the IRS. Our country is in the very best of hands!
Merkel must have a political death wish: “German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday defended her open-door policy for migrants, rejecting any limit on the number of refugees allowed into her country despite divisions within her government.”
Stratfor analyses China’s new military facilities on Woody Island. “While the media’s response to China’s actions on Woody Island suggests that they represent a watershed moment in the militarization of the South China Sea, in reality they are neither surprising nor particularly meaningful.”
The truth about the MiG-29. Longish but interesting piece. Turn out the Soviet super fighter was very good at basic fighter aircraft maneuvers, but had poor avionics that severely limited the pilot’s situational awareness.
Beloved, innocent man shot down by Seattle police. And by “innocent” I mean “a convicted rapist with a gun, crack and heroin.”
“Turn down the fucking music.” “The more and more you attempt to compensate for the fact people have no social skills, making the music so loud conversation is impossible, the more and more intelligent and competent people you will drive away.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Welcome to the final week of traditional summer. Of course, it used to be that everything (school, football, the new TV year, etc.) started after Labor Day Weekend, but that’s not the case any more…
Oh, and he wants to give the Falkland Islands to Argentina. Why, it’s almost as if the hard left yearns for nothing so much as undoing every conservative foreign policy triumph out of spite…
And he also called Osama Bin Laden’s death “a tragedy.”
It was not the end of fighting on Iwo Jima. Of the six men in the famous flag-raising picture, three (Harlon Block, Franklin Sousley, and Michael Strank) died in the battle. The three survivors (John Bradley, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes) survived the war, but all have passed away since.
Before we get into the British and U.S. tanks I saw at the Bovington Tank Museum, let’s look at one British prototype tank they had there, the Valiant, AKA “One of the Worst Tanks Ever Designed.”
The Valiant appears to be one of the worst tanks ever designed in Britain. It is difficult to find any contemporary reports that say anything good about it!
The Valiant was originally designed by Vickers Armstrong to meet a War Office requirement for an Infantry Assault Tank for service in the Far East. During development the project was transferred first to the Birmingham Railway Carriage and Wagon Co. and then to Ruston and Hornsby Ltd. of Grantham.
The designers were required to apply the thickest possible armour while keeping the weight as low as possible. Inevitably the hull was very small; the front hull casting was virtually moulded around the driver while the turret ring stuck out over the sides of the hull. In comparison the turret appeared to be enormous, as it had to accommodate a three man crew, (commander, gunner and loader/radio operator).
The Valiant used the same diesel engine as the Valentine, [although] it had little else in common with the earlier tank. Design documents exist for an improved version, the Valiant II, powered by a Rolls Royce Meteorite engine, converted to diesel operation.
Ruston and Hornsby built one prototype in 1944. Trials in 1944 – 45 revealed serious problems. With a power:weight ratio of 7.8hp per ton, the tank was slow. The ground clearance at the rear was found to be too low and the suspension, located partly under the hull, was easily damaged during cross-country driving. More seriously the driver was almost crippled by the cramped driving position and was in danger of being injured by the controls. Furthermore, the controls required inordinate strength to operate them. The tests were abandoned immediately.
Not surprisingly the Valiant did not enter production, officially because the war was likely to be over before the tank could be introduced into service.
My pics of the Valiant didn’t come out particularly well, but they do show what an odd looking tank it was:
And here’s a better pic from Wikipedia:
Wikipedia (citing David Fletcher’s book Universal Tank: British Armour in the Second World War), says “The sole Valiant was retained by the School of Tank Technology, where students were treated to an inspection of it at the end of their course and invited to find fault. David Fletcher wrote of this: ‘One hopes they started early in the morning.'”
Here’s the first batch of pictures taken at the Bovington Tank Museum in Dorset, which I visited on Saturday as a gift to my inner 12-year old. (There are few prospects more pleasing to the preadolescent male mind than being encased in a 30 ton metal killing machine.) The first batch is all German tanks and tank destroyers from World War II. Let’s face it, the Germans had far and away the best tanks, and shortly after the allies managed to catch up, Germany would be about ready to introduce something better. Germany’s problem (as compared to America or the Soviet Union) was an inability to manufacture enough of them. (Good thing for us.) They had an enormous array of German tanks, and probably the best collection outside Germany’s own tank museum in Munster.
The first picture of the first of two King Tigers (AKA Tiger II, AKA Königstiger, Panzerkampfwagen Tiger Ausf. B) they had on display. The mosty powerful tank Germany produced during the war, its 88mm main gun could destroy any tank on the battlefield. It didn’t get on the battlefield until 1944, and Germany produced less than 500 of them.
The other Tiger II they had there.
Here you can see the Zimmerite anti-magnetic mine coating the Germans used.
Selfie, with tank.
The first of several tank destroyers.
This is a German tank destroyer that ended up in Finland. Stalin thought he could walk all over Finand, but the Finns tore the Soviets nine different new assholes in the Winter War, though this tank destroyer obviously post-dates 1940.
Alternate barrel used for the Sturmtiger close assault variant.
Here’s an early Panzer Mark I command tank. It’s amazing to realize that the initial German blitzkrieg was carried out with relatively slow, under-armed, and underpowered Mark I and Mark IIs, that, with Heinz Guderian’s new tactics of mechanized warfare, were simply Good Enough.
A Mark II.
I think this is the Mark III, would would be the mainstay of the Wehrmacht armored divisions through the end of the war.
Today marks the 70th anniversary of the June 6, 1944 D-Day invasion on the beaches of Normandy. It was a key point in the greatest conflagration the world had ever known.
Dwight mentioned that Chester Nez, the last of 29 original Navajo code talkers, died Wednesday, reminding us that the events of World War II are rapidly passing out of living memory.
To mark the day, here’s Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Poem and Prayer for an Invading Army”, read over NBC the day of the invasion. I’ve always thought it was a fine piece of work. (The text does not appear to be online, and I believe it’s still in copyright.)
And here’s a Pathe newsreel of the invasion (one of many available):
Today is the 72nd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. After that sneak attack, America, roused to righteous fury, picked itself up, and managed to defeat both Hitler’s Germany and Tojo’s Japan in three and a half years. (We had a large measure of help in defeating Hitler from the British Empire and the Soviet Union, less in defeating Japan.)
More time has passed from the signing of ObamaCare to now than passed between the bombing of Pearl Harbor and VJ-Day:
Days from December 7, 1941 to August 14, 1945: 1346 days
Days from March 23, 2010 to December 7, 2013: 1355 days
Let me make it clear that I’m not pulling a Santorum: I’m not comparing the effects of World War II to the effects of ObamaCare (devastating to our economy thought the latter has been, and will continue to be). What I’m noting is how America’s very effective wartime government managed to accomplish a Herculean task, many of whose subtasks (D-Day, The Manhattan Project) probably exceeded in size and scope all of ObamaCare, in three and a half years, while in the same period of time, Obama’s bloated administration, armed with virtually infinite computing power compared to 1945, has been unable to get a single complex piece of software up and running properly.
We all know the Obama Administration felt that ObamaCare was (in Vice President Joe Biden’s own immortal words) “a big fucking deal,” his signature achievement. And with as much time as it took America to win World War II, Obama’s oversight of the project has been an unmitigated, miserable failure.
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