Picture of the day

That's quite remarkable. Thanks very much for sharing that!

Poor old Prinz Eugen. She ended up beeing nuked at both the Able and Baker shots at Bikini.

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Towed to Kwajalein with 11 of her 12 boilers non-functional, she leaked and capsized. The deck your uncle stood on still exists, but it's under water.

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mikerock said:
Famous footage of a mixed column of surrendering Germans. It's mostly Heer, but a bunch of Waffen-SS and some Luftwaffe/Fallschirmjäger in, I think, Austria. The Obersturmbannführer at 5:35 - was he ever identified?
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All the SS, Death's Head and swastika emblems have been removed from their uniforms.

Little known fact it was the Vlasovites or Russian Liberation Army that drove the Germans out of Prague, before the US troops arrived. After years of being screwed over by the Germans I can't say I blame them.

As for pilots, both Marseille and Rudel almost washed out as pilots for reasons of "flying ability" and discipline.

Makes you wonder how many potential aces the training systems on both sides threw out.

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Notice anything behind the pilot? ;)
 
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RRCo. said:
All the SS, Death's Head and swastika emblems have been removed from their uniforms.

Little known fact it was the Vlasovites or Russian Liberation Army that drove the Germans out of Prague, before the US troops arrived. After years of being screwed over by the Germans I can't say I blame them.

As for pilots, both Marseille and Rudel almost washed out as pilots for reasons of "flying ability" and discipline.

Makes you wonder how many potential aces the training systems on both sides threw out.

tumblr_o185h9nm9k1sfdr4zo5_540.jpg


Notice anything behind the pilot? ;)
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a stowaway? i can see the ad:

experience scenic views and absolutely no stewardess' or in flight services while practicing contortionism...
 
RRCo. said:
All the SS, Death's Head and swastika emblems have been removed from their uniforms.

Little known fact it was the Vlasovites or Russian Liberation Army that drove the Germans out of Prague, before the US troops arrived. After years of being screwed over by the Germans I can't say I blame them.

As for pilots, both Marseille and Rudel almost washed out as pilots for reasons of "flying ability" and discipline.

Makes you wonder how many potential aces the training systems on both sides threw out.
Click to expand...

My grandfather was a welder in the RCAF throughout WWII - he saw the war coming, was a welder, and it was the tail end of the dirty 30's and he saw a chance for a steady paycheque that didn't involve getting shot at.

He spent the entire war rotating through the training bases in North Ontario, mostly working on crash crews. He had to be that special kind of drunk to talk much about it, which when I was younger I thought was odd because he wasn't a combat vet. It wasn't until I was a bit older that I kind of put it all together in my head.

Every crash he attended he would take a piece of the canopy plexiglass (the canopies were inevitably shattered), and in his off hours would cut, then polish them into little hearts to send to my grandma. Grandma showed me the box once, there were hundreds of little plexi-glass hearts.

The allies were desperate for pilots. Not many "washed out", especially in the early years of the war. The solo flight tests proved effective enough at permanently weeding out a large number of young men.
 
Jesus, that's kind of sad and beautiful and horrible all at once. Puts the "final" in "final exam".

Been reading Field Marshall Slim's Unofficial History. The guy was a hell of an author, and was eyewitness to a lot of the backwater fights in WW 1 and 2. he was in on the Anglo-Russian invasion of Iran in 1941. Says it was quite a lot of fun, as few people were hurt and the Russians were great at parties.

Here's a bit of Anglo-Russian cooperation in the desert.

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Ghurkas (seen here) and Indian troops with the British.

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Gawd, I had to go and look up some numbers now that story reminded me of it... These are for the US AAF. If I had to guess, the numbers for Canada would be very similar, because almost all the allies were training in our airfields...

According to the AAF Statistical Digest, in less than four years (December 1941- August 1945), the US Army Air Forces lost 14,903 pilots, aircrew and assorted personnel plus 13,873 airplanes — inside the continental United States. They were the result of 52,651 aircraft accidents (6,039 involving fatalities) in 45 months.
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That works out to 331 fatalities / month... In training. Just in the US.
 
The attrition rate through flying accidents during war has always been high since WWI.

A retired Wingco I knew told me of one that haunted him for years. An Avro Anson was reported missing and found in a field. It appeared that the pilot/instructor had been practicing an emergency landing and the aircraft flew into a single strand of open wire which sliced through the Perspex of the canopy, decapitating both pilots.

The aircraft had been throttled back and trimmed for landing, which it did on it's own. It taxied until the wheels hit a drainage ditch and the engines idled until they ran out of fuel.

Right out of the "Twilight Zone" .....
 
USAF goes Uber...

RRCo. said:
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Notice anything behind the pilot? ;)
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That could be DeNiro at the stick, but that's definitely Yoda in the back seat. Seems to be another guy with his nose smooshed against the windshield--too small to be Chewbacca...wait a MINUTE...that's not a MUSTANG! What izzat? A captured Uber FW-190 Spezialle? Mit doppel propeller?? Was gibts?
 
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