@SS-GEN said in WWII Mohawk Code-Talkers:
@CWO-Marc
Just love these ww2 stories and learning about all the good and bad hardships during this war !
Me too. One of the things I like about the code-talkers concept is that, in my opinion, it’s an example of the flair which the Allies sometimes showed for coming up with clever, practical, and sometimes deceptively simple solutions to wartime problems. Some of those solutions involved large-scale efforts, but some of them were small-scale nuts-and-bolts devices and practices which required relatively few resources yet produced a big payoff. An example of the large-scale type is the solution the Americans devised to meeting the Battle of the Atlantic’s huge demand for shipping capacity, a demand which could not possibly be met by traditional shipbuilding practices and by existing shipyard capacity. The solution was to design a standard, simple cargo vessel (the Liberty Ship) which could be prefabricated in pieces at inland factories, then sent to the coast for final assembly; this greatly reduced the amount of worktime at the shipyards themselves, and meant that even small shipyards could handle the work. On the small scale, several examples come to mind. When the Allies started running into the new German high-tech (for the time period) acoustic torpedo, for example, they soon devised a low-tech countermeasure: simple mechanical noisemakers (as I recall, bunches of metal bars trailed in the water at the end of a steel cable, which would clang against each other under the influence of the flowing water) to draw the torpedoes away from the ships. When the Allies experienced trouble with Normandy’s dense hengerows, which tended to make tanks go belly-up, a U.S. Army sergeant come up with the answer: welding some steel “teeth” (initially improvised with cut-up railway track sections) to the front of a tank so that it could plow into a hedgerow and crash through it rather being tilted upward by it. These “can do” practical solutions, even when they were small-scale ways of dealing with a local problem, could potentially add up, and they also had the virtue of having an excellent cost/benefit ratio (in contrast, let’s say, with the impractical and wasteful Maus super-tank, which never even saw combat).