Nazi gold found!

@imperious-leader

I think Japan still would have invaded the Soviet Union though, if the Second Sino-Japanese War continued (the oil embargo only really happened once they invaded Indochina).

Other than that I agree with you. That would be curious alternate reality.

@seancb:

My grandfather wasn’t on the Lexington but he was a Sea Bee.

In case you’ve never seen it, you might enjoy watching the 1944 John Wayne movie “The Fighting Seabees”.  It’s a highly romanticized version of the origin of the US Navy’s Construction Battalions; not accurate historically, but fun nonetheless. One of my favourite parts is the one in which the staff captain played by Addison Richards (who often portrays businesslike, non-nonsense military officers, and thus can serve as his own straight man when the occasion demands it) is on the phone with his superior, who asks him what the new construction battalions will be called.  Richards, puzzled by the question, answers a bit blankly, “What’s wrong with ‘construction battalions’?  What?  No ‘oompf’?”  As he says this, he’s doodling on a notepad and he happens to write “C.B.” – at which point he brightens up and tells his superior that he’s just thought of a good name.

There are modern-day echoes, by the way, of the SeaBee name in the fictional Star Trek universe.  Various designs have been used for the emblem of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, and many of them feature a stylized bee (sometimes carrying six tools, one per arm), and some of the small spaceships that serve as work pods in orbital shipyards have been referred to as Work Bees.

To tie this back to A&A …

The cruiser sculpt for the US Navy is based on the US Navy’s Portland class heavy cruisers (CA). The US built two ships to that plan: USS Portland CA-33 and USS Indianapolis CA-35.

So if you get lucky and sink a US cruiser on it’s way to the Philippines with an IJN submarine, you just may have sent Quinn adrift with the sharks…

-Midnight_Reaper

P.S. Edit to correct spelling.

There’s a scene in the movie Across the Pacific in which Sydney Greenstreet shows his pistol (I think it’s a 38-caliber gun) to Humphrey Bogart, who puts his Colt 45 pistol alongside Greenstreet’s and comments, “Mine’s bigger than yours.”

@CWO:

@wittman:

  Nice Pirate. I love submarine stories and films and admire those that could endure the life. I would go mad!

As compensation, the food on modern ballistic missile subs is probably the best military chow in any branch of any service.Â

I would have to agree with that (3 years on one), although when I was out of Italy, had choice of 6 different types of ice cream on the sub tender….

A more realistic distance is over 800 statute miles.

Zero had a range of 1,600 miles, so yes thats consistent with Sakai’s account over Java.

Also, they had over 400 Zeros in active service by July 1940.

@Raunchy:

Was anyone else aware of the most Southerly German grave?

I wrote about it in the “favorite WWII ship post”. The commerce raider Atlantis is my favorite WWII ship.

A year since the last post