OT WWII Memoirs (was SAFE Winch Launching ...)

At 17:15 26 July 2009, brianDG303 wrote:
On Jul 26, 12:15=A0am, Derek Copeland wrote:
We Brits get tired of always being airbrushed out of history by
Hollywood=
..
For example there were more British and British Commonwealth (e.g.
Australians, Canadians) troops involved in the D Day landings than US
troops, but you might not have noticed this if you watch 'Saving
Private
Ryan' and many other similar movies.

Throughout WW2 we bombed Germany by night without fighter cover, using
bombers such as the Lancaster and the Mosquito, which where less
heavily
amoured than a B17, but could carry a much greater weight of bombs as
a
result. In fact even the little unarmed twin engined Mosquito bombers
mad=
e
out of plywood could carry more bombs than a B17. I believe that they
didn't show up very well on radar because of their construction, so
they
were probably the original 'stealth bomber' =A0

On entering the European war the USAAF was warned by the RAF that
dayligh=
t
bombing raids over Germany would be pretty suicidal, as they had
already
found out the hard way, but of course the Americans (as usual) thought
they knew best and had better technology. The rest, Schweinfurt etc,
is
history!

I have to say however that the US bomber crews who took part in such
raid=
s
must have been very brave men, knowing that their tight, straight and
lev=
el
formations where sitting ducks for German radar predictive flak guns
and
=
a
well organised fighter force. It was only towards the end of the war
when
the Mustangs shot down many German fighters that the odds became a
little
more favourable for them.

Derek Copeland =A0 =A0

Derek,
Taking a single statistic (the number of troops landing on the
Normandy beaches) may be a fact but obscures the truth. The ritish
consider the invasion of Normandy to have begun on June 6 and ended on
August 29 of 1944, and the casualties (Killed, missing, wounded) of
British, Canadian, and Polish troops (there were very few Australians,
with about a dozen casualties I think) totaled 83,045 as against the
US losses of 125,847. These are the British numbers from the War
Diary, 21st Army Group, but other estimates are similar.

Also:
Hollywood movies are intended to make money and not portray history.

Your comment about French gratitude, we Americans like to forget that
without the French we could never have won the war of 1776 and the
cost to them of that help. We never thanked them much for that either.

Your comment about fighting Germany to a draw is simply not
supportable. Hitler's direction was always east but he turned west
when England and France declared war on Germany following his invasion
of Poland. He defeated France and put England in a box, then turned
east again. Two fatal errors in judgment, of which he was in the habit
of making.


Come to mention it, we Brits have never received much in the way of
gratitude from the Yanks for supporting George W Bush's futile and
counter productive invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan! So much for the
'special relationship'....!

Hitler's Germany tried very hard to invade the UK as they had already
done to Poland, Belgium, Holland and France and were beaten off, losing a
fair proportion of the Luftwaffe in the process. As well as shooting down
many attacking aircraft, the RAF also bombed the invasion fleets in the
French ports pretty well non stop, making the invasion non-viable. These
are historical facts.

Derek Copeland