Picture of the day

Part of maintaining a reasonable standard of life in a bombed city is clearing rubble from streets. This allows commerce, the free passage of troops and emergency vehicles, aids greatly in firefighting, etc.

Having most of their major cities pasted throughly, the Germans worked up some solutions:

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These would be God's Own Snowplows.
 
Look at old pics and video clips, they put civilians, including women and children to work as well. Didn't take them long to put the country back on track.

Grizz

Up until now I always just envisioned the civilians doing it as seen in countless pictures and war footage, would have thought any functioning armour would have been doing combat duty
 
Der Trummerfrauen ("rubble women") were instrumental in rebuilding German cities after the war.

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This was not uncommon. Here's Klaipeda, Lithuania in 1945.

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It had been Memel, East Prussia since 1921 or so. The Russians pushed the Germans out with their usual lack of subtlety. An old friend of my Mrs. grew up there, at that time. After the front pushed further west, she was paid a penny for each clean brick she brought her Dad. She and her brother and sister hand transported enough of them to the yard to build a three story house. She wasn't ten yet.

If we don't thank whatever God we subscribe to every day for how good we have it here, we're ungrateful frickin' children.
 

When a tool is fit for a job...

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Curtiss P-36 was not a huge success, but sold in some respectable numbers. 1150 total were manufactured and flown by the Yanks, Brazil, Finland, Thailand, both the French and the Vichy French, the RAF, China, Argentina, and several others.

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Consider it the Grandpa of the P-40. From some angles you can see the evolution of the breed...

So: P-36 leads to P-40. In between there are a few numbers. We know the P38 Lightning and the P39 Airacobra, but was there a P-37? Kinda, yeah. Feast your eyes on the pointy-faced majesty of the Curtiss XP-37, the missing link between "Mohawk" and "Warhawk/Kittyhawk":

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Allison engine rather than radial, with the pilot tucked way back from the action, for safety one assumes...

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Oooh! Shiny!

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14 built, including several YP-37s used for trials. It never lived up to the high spped estimates and lost out to the XP-40 which was nearly equally shiny:

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14,000+ P40s were built - a decent success for Curtiss-Wright. The P-40 was jigged and rejigged and rere-jigged in an effort to keep it viable as the war progressed. Experiments included the XP-40Q, a "langenasen" version.

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Everyone who's ever farted around with cars knows that more motor = better. This had an upgraded Allison engine, two-stage blower, and an extra prop blade. It ain't as elegant as a Griffon-powered Spit, but it's not as ugly as it might have been...

Here's the XP-40Q-2A - bubble canopy, clipped wings, modern paint scheme, looking almost like a late-war aircraft:

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Gotta say, that's quite pretty.

Here's the Q3: Smaller canopy, air intakes for the radiators moved about. More jiggery-pokery to remain viable:

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Sadly, all this can be filed under "Day Late / Dollar Short", a subfile within "Pig/Lipstick". Despite all this buggering about, the P-40Q wasn't better than more modern designs like the P-51 and P-47. Time and money wasted, but if that isn't typical of war, I don't know what is.
 
There's exactly one picture extant of P-40 serial no. 41-13456.

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Someone in Maintenance got drinkin' pretty hard and recalled the three wrecked P-40's they towed out to the dump the week before... You know what they say about "idle hands"... There's been some conjecture in the modelling world about what this poor mutant looked like.

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Double the power, 1/3 more weight, quite a lot less fuel, landing speed is roughly identical to cruising speed. There's a reason the eggheads up in Engineering didn't go down this road.
 
The P36 had some success with the Finns in the winter war , the French Airforce acquired the P 36 , and it fought adequately in the Battle of France , though hopelessly outnumbered, five P36 got airborne during the attack on Pearl Harbour and shot down 2 Japanese Zero aircraft
 
Didn’t see it posted here, but one of the major reasons that there has been a major logistical lag is that Russian suppliers to the military bought Chinese tires. Well, it turns out that the quality has been less then stellar and an investigation has been started to see what happened. Apparently the “40” mile long convoy is from lack of tires.
 
Yes I saw that too. I didn’t realize they were Chinese tires but thought the flats were due to old dry tires or roads that were littered with nails in advance of the Russians.
 
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