WWII–-75th ANNIVERSARY DISCUSSION--#34---MAY 1942 (3)

Part of the problem that the US Navy ran into when it went to war was that – like many military forces before or since – it had to learn some things for itself before it believed them.  The British had over two years of experience fighting the Battle of the Atlantic at that point, but the Americans didn’t feel that they needed any advice from them on the matter.  It didn’t help that Admiral Ernest J. King was an Anglophobe, in addition to having a generally abrasive personality.  (His wife reputedly once said: “Ernie is the most even-tempered man I’ve ever met.  He’s always in a foul mood.”)  As a result, the Americans made mistakes in their early ASW methods of operations which could have been avoided.  In fairness, the US Army had similar learning-curve problems in North Africa, notably at Kasserine Pass if I remember correctly.

@RJL518:

Do you guys think that Germany DID change their attack plans after the plane had crashed?Â

I haven’t looked at the linked article, but one thing to remember is that the German plans for invading western Europe changed substantially (and many times) between the fall of Poland and the invasion of the Low Countries – so it would be hard to say whether this incident was (if at all) exclusively responsible for any particular changes a plan that was already evolving.

@MrMalachiCrunch:

I saw this movie u-571 where the US navy captured a german submarine.  The movie made a great deal of money.  Obviously, in the movie the US navy was very heroic and therefore it all must be true, cause it was in a movie see……

From wiki on that incident…

U-571 is a 2000 film directed by Jonathan Mostow, and starring Matthew McConaughey, Bill Paxton, Harvey Keitel, Thomas Kretschmann, Jon Bon Jovi, Jack Noseworthy, Will Estes, and Tom Guiry. In the film, a World War II German submarine is boarded in 1942 by disguised United States Navy submariners seeking to capture her Enigma cipher machine.
The film was financially successful and generally well-received by critics in the USA[1] and won an Academy Award for sound editing.[2] The fictitious plot attracted substantial criticism since, in reality, it was British personnel from HMS Bulldog who first captured a naval Enigma machine (from U-110 in the North Atlantic in May 1941), long before the United States entered the war. A German U-boat crew is portrayed in a negative light (See the U-852 story below.) The anger over the inaccuracies even reached the British Parliament, where Prime Minister Tony Blair stated that the film was an “affront” to British sailors.[3]
The real U-571 was never involved in any such events, was not captured, and was in fact sunk in January 1944, off Ireland, by a Short Sunderland flying boat from No. 461 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force.

The movie was not enjoyable for me, thought it was a decent action movie, poor war movie.

Wow, miss a few days drinking and dancing…well watching others dance anyways…but I digress.  We no longer have an expert on the WWII food thingee/justification whatchermacallit?

Your Grandfather did good ABWorsham, thanks for sharing.

Wise words, Worsham.

Like Model , he would have done very well in the halcyon days. I believe he would have done less well, defensively, unlike  Model, though. He would have worried his Army commander, like Guderian, never wanting to pause to regroup. But that would not have mattered to him or to the result.

@DiegoMaxwell

Congratulations to Mr. Prewitt. It should be noted, however, that France’s highest order of merit is called the Legion of Honour (Légion d’honneur), not the Legion of Armour, and also that France doesn’t actually have knighthoods in the same sense as Britain does. “Chevalier” (knight) is indeed one of the Legion of Honour’s five levels, and the name is a holdover from the days when France still had an aristocracy, but the French nobility system went out the window with the French Revolution. I once saw a series of amusing cartoons depicting what life in France would be like today if the Bourbon monarchy hadn’t fallen, and one of them showed an irate air traveler standing at the ticket counter of “Royal Air France” and telling the ticket agent “But I’m a baron and I have a confirmed reservation!” The agent replies, “I’m sorry, sir, but the Duke of So-and-so has precedence over you, so we gave him your seat.” In fairness, the same sort of thing actually happens in real-life republican France. A few years ago, there was scandal involving one of the major D-Day anniversaries (I think it was the 50th one), when the French government contacted various hotels in Normany and appropriated some of their existing reservations so that various French officials could have rooms for the event. Some of those rooms, however, had been reserved by foreign veterans of the D-Day invasion. When the story broke on the front page of French newspapers (under such headlines as “Our Liberators Insulted!”), public opinion was outraged and the French government beat a hasty retreat. The prevailing editorial opinion over this affair was: Do this to our own citizens if you want, but don’t do this to the heroes who ended the occupation of France.

@KurtGodel7:

As you pointed out, actually capturing the city was unnecessary. But having captured the city, Hitler was very determined to hold onto it. Abandoning it would have presumably meant having to recapture it later; and once again suffering that same 1:1 ratio during the recapture.

One thing I’m wondering: why would Germany have to (or even want to) recapture at great cost a city that it was unnecessary (and indeed counterproductive) to capture in the first place?