Zyzygie’s Mumbles and Rambles

[swampyankee]

Criminal charges should have been brought against someone for that stupidity.

I still can't believe the government allowed it.

I've read somewhere that its sale was part of a deal that had been put together during WW2, not a post-war deal. On the other hand, the UK economy was a mess, with no foreign currency reserve, and incredible overseas debt, some of it to a country that had been less than forgiving, at least from the rhetoric of powerful is parts politicians, about debt from an earlier war. The UK was probably at the selling-a-kidney state of financial straits.

 

[swampyankee]

The Russians have certainly had their share of dismal designs, no?

The most similar design to a single piston-engined fighter possible. Soviet designers were probably more conservative than American or British ones; being sent to the Gulag was worse than being fired for a mistake. It's kind of akin to the old saw "nobody from IT ever got fired for buying IBM[updated to Microsft]."

 

[Shortround6]

I've read somewhere that its sale was part of a deal that had been put together during WW2, not a post-war deal. On the other hand, the UK economy was a mess, with no foreign currency reserve, and incredible overseas debt, some of it to a country that had been less than forgiving, at least from the rhetoric of powerful is parts politicians, about debt from an earlier war. The UK was probably at the selling-a-kidney state of financial straits.

you are correct. See: Rationing in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia

And this article says nothing about the import tariffs on manufactured goods or Britain's desperate scramble for export goods to pay for food and repay loans.

 

[pbehn]

you are correct. See: Rationing in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia

And this article says nothing about the import tariffs on manufactured goods or Britain's desperate scramble for export goods to pay for food and repay loans.

My mother still had her ration cards in the sixties in case they brought it back.

 

[Zyzygie]

I've read somewhere that its sale was part of a deal that had been put together during WW2, not a post-war deal. On the other hand, the UK economy was a mess, with no foreign currency reserve, and incredible overseas debt, some of it to a country that had been less than forgiving, at least from the rhetoric of powerful is parts politicians, about debt from an earlier war. The UK was probably at the selling-a-kidney state of financial straits.

That's part of the story. The other part is that the US was "keeping its cake and eating it too."
The British could act as the US first line of defence while the US made big money selling them the equipment to do it. Britain with 48 million people spent about the same on the war as the US with 120 million. The lend lease war debt of US$50 billion was equivalent to over a trillion now.

At the same time the US got free access to technology like computers and radar and the jet engine and nuclear weapons, which acted to set the US up as a superpower after the war.
The US has had a "golden age" for the last 70 years, but maybe the chickens are now starting to come home to roost?

"Take what you want and pay for it..."

― Spanish Proverb​

 

[Shortround6]

British information on radar was certainly a help, however the US was also not staggering around in the dark.

Photo taken on late 1938 or early 1939. The New York was the 2nd US ship fitted with experimental radar and the radar was used in fleet exercises in Caribbean in early 1939 with enough success for orders for additional out fits to be placed.

Information from Britain certainly speeded up a number of projects but since many of them are extensions of natural phenomenon a number of people/teams around the world were working on similar projects at the same time. Some just made faster progress than others.

 

[swampyankee]

That's part of the story. The other part is that the US was "keeping its cake and eating it too."
The British could act as the US first line of defence while the US made big money selling them the equipment to do it. Britain with 48 million people spent about the same on the war as the US with 120 million. The lend lease war debt of US$50 billion was equivalent to over a trillion now.

At the same time the US got free access to technology like computers and radar and the jet engine and nuclear weapons, which acted to set the US up as a superpower after the war.
The US has had a "golden age" for the last 70 years, but maybe the chickens are now starting to come home to roost?

"Take what you want and pay for it..."

― Spanish Proverb​

I think the US had to pay licenses. HOWEVER, do note that:

Radar: several countries, including the US, had radar systems in service before the US entered WW2 or even got any significant, direct government technology transfer from the UK.

Computers: the basic bombe used at Blatchley Park was actually derived from work by Polish codebreakers. In any case, the history of the digital computer is very complex. People who are serious students of the history of the computer should chime in, but I believe that active development of digital computers was in progress in both the US and UK before any kind of technology transfer agreement.

Jet engine: Yep, the US got a lot of help from the British here.

Nuclear weapons: you have read the history of their development, haven't you? Major contributors were scientists that the antisemitic, bloodthirsty psycopath in charge of Germany forced out of his country, his allies' countries, and the countries he invaded, mostly so he could murder Jews and enslave Slavs.

Aircraft: despite the nonsense about Germany inventing every advance in aircraft since da Vinci, US aviation technology was not behind anybody else's: US airfoils were used on many aircraft, including those of the Third Reich, and US aircraft were very well designed, and its transport aircraft were easily the best. (what did the Germans have? the Ju52? yea, a fixed gear flying airbrake like that is going to have a chance to actually make money for an airline) In any case, there was a great deal of international cooperation in aerodynamics well into the 1930s.

The US was lucky in that the US was physically isolated from the fighting, but it also entered the war with what may have been the largest national economy in the world: the figures I've seen was that the US, pre-World War II, was responsible for 25% of the World's industrial production.

 

[Zyzygie]

Tacit repayment of Lend-Lease by the British was made in the form of several valuable technologies, including those related to radar, sonar, jet engines, antitank weaponry, rockets, superchargers, gyroscopic gunsights, submarine detection, self-sealing fuel tanks, and plastic explosives as well as the British contribution to the Manhattan Project. Many of these were transferred by the Tizard Mission. The official historian of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, James Phinney Baxter III, wrote: "When the members of the Tizard Mission brought the cavity magnetron to America in 1940, they carried the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores."
Lend-Lease - Wikipedia

Also:
The Tizard Mission: The Top-Secret Operation That Changed the Course of World War II
by Stephen Phelps (Author)

Tizard mission
Main article: Tizard Mission
In August 1940, a British mission, led by Tizard and with members that included Cockcroft, was sent to America to create relations and help advance the research towards war technology with the Americans. Several military technologies were shared, including advances in radar, antisubmarine warfare, aeronautical engineering and explosives.[75] The American radar programme in particular was reinvigorated with an added impetus to the development of microwave radar and proximity fuses. This prompted the Americans to create the MIT Radiation Laboratory, which would later serve a model for the Los Alamos Laboratory. The mission did not spend much time on nuclear fission, with only two meetings of the subject, mainly about uranium enrichment. In particular, Cockcroft did not report Peierls' and Frisch's findings. Nonetheless, there were important repercussions. A barrier had been broken and a pathway to exchange technical information between the two countries was developed. Moreover, the notion of civilian scientists playing an important role of the development of military technologies was strengthened on both sides of the Atlantic.[76]

Oliphant's visit to the United States

Australian physicist Mark Oliphant played a key role in starting both the British and American atomic bomb projects
The MAUD Committee reports urged the co-operation with the United States should be continued in the research of nuclear fission. Charles C. Lauritsen, a Caltech physicist working at the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), was in London during this time and was invited to sit in on a MAUD meeting.[77] The committee pushed for rapid development of nuclear weapons using gaseous-diffusion as their isotope separation device.[78] Once he returned to the United States, he was able to brief Vannevar Bush, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), concerning the details discussed during the meeting.[78]

In August 1941, Mark Oliphant, the director of the physics department at the University of Birmingham and an original member of the MAUD Committee, was sent to the US to assist the NDRC on radar.[79] During his visit he met with William D. Coolidge. Coolidge was shocked when Oliphant informed him that the British had predicted that only ten kilograms of uranium-235 would be efficient to supply a chain reaction effected by fast moving neutrons.[80] While in America, Oliphant discovered that the chairman of the OSRD S-1 Section, Lyman Briggs, had locked away the MAUD reports transferred from Britain entailing the initial discoveries and had not informed the S-1 Committee members of all its findings.[79]

Oliphant took the initiative himself to enlighten the scientific community in the U.S. of the recent ground breaking discoveries the MAUD Committee had just exposed. Oliphant also travelled to Berkley to with meet with Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron. After Oliphant informed Lawrence of his report on uranium, Lawrence met with NDRC chairman James Bryant Conant, George B. Pegram, and Arthur Compton to relay the details which Oliphant had directed to Lawrence.[78] Oliphant was not only able to get in touch with Lawrence, but he met with Conant and Bush to inform them of the significant data the MAUD had discovered. Oliphant's ability to inform the Americans led to Oliphant convincing Lawrence, Lawrence convincing Compton, and then Kistiakowsky convincing Conant to move forward with nuclear weapons. These actions from Oliphant resulted in Bush taking this report directly to the president.[81]
Tube Alloys - Wikipedia

There is much more along these lines outlined in
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
by Richard Rhodes (Author)

Twenty-five years after its initial publication, The Making of the Atomic Bomb remains the definitive history of nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project. From the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan, Richard Rhodes's Pulitzer Prize-winning book details the science, the people, and the socio-political realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb.

The MAUD Comittee Report
The MAUD Report, 1941 | Historical Documents | atomicarchive.com

The Cavity Magnetron
The US, like Germany and Japan had developed very primitive radar, but the critical element to an effective modern radar was the cavity magnetron. That they didn't have, or at least not a design which was anywhere near powerful enough for use in radar:
The cavity magnetron tube was later improved by John Randall and Harry Boot in 1940 at the University of Birmingham, England.[3] The high power of pulses from their device made centimeter-band radar practical for the Allies of World War II, with shorter wavelength radars allowing detection of smaller objects from smaller antennas. The compact cavity magnetron tube drastically reduced the size of radar sets[4] so that they could be more easily installed in night-fighter aircraft, anti-submarine aircraft[5] and escort ships.[4]

 

[pbehn]

While in the area of anti submarine warfare the Americans refused to learn anything from the British and learned the painful lessons themselves.

 

[Shortround6]

There is a difference between " At the same time the US got free access to technology like computers and radar and the jet engine and nuclear weapons, which acted to set the US up as a superpower after the war."

and ".........form of several valuable technologies, including those related to radar, sonar, jet engines, antitank weaponry, rockets, superchargers, gyroscopic gunsights, submarine detection....."

The first rather implies the US had NO exiting technology of it's own in those fields while the second does not. The second quote can be taken as meaning the British contributed to, or added to the existing knowledge in the US and thus speeded up the development of those areas of technology. There may have been areas where the British were offing things the US had none of or they were offering improvements to what the US had.

In the case of sonar for instance the US had eight destroyers equipped with sonar in 1933 and all active US destroyers had sonar at the outbreak of the war. Now it might not have been as good as the British sonar at the time but claiming the British gave the US sonar is really stretching things. Both countries advanced faster by co-operating but there seems to be an undercurrent that somehow the US built it's post war dominance on the back of British inventions while the British starved.

 

[stona]

All this ignores the fundamental problem Britain in particular, but also the U.S. were facing.
German victories in 1940 had completely altered the balance of power in Europe in every imaginable way. If it had been possible to preserve economic activity in the newly established German economic bloc at pre-war levels, then it would have comprised an economy with a GDP greater than the United States or the entire British Empire. The Anglo-Americans HAD to cooperate, and the transfer of some technology was a miniscule price for the British to pay to buy the United States' production potential. By 1941 the United States, a nation still at peace, was producing as much weaponry as either Germany or Britain and at the same time enjoying the first sustained increase in civilian consumption since the 1920s. This is what Britain was buying with its cavity magnetron. Britain's willingness to carry on the fight against Germany was predicated on the understanding that the United States would supply her with massive material aid, and the understanding that this would come at a price, and not just a price in dollars (by the end of the war the British would owe the equivalent of a trillion of those in today's money).
Cheers
Steve

 

[Zyzygie]

The British had sonar in the First World War. It would be remarkable if the U.S. didn't have it by 1930...

 

[Shortround6]

America was the proverbial sleeping giant in the late 1930s with a lot of it's potential manufacturing capability under utilized. However it takes time (years) to bring that potential up to full output. Population of the US in 1940 was 132 million compared to the UKs 48 million.
The US was also in a much better position in regards to natural resources and arable land. These facts have nothing to do with how smart a people are or how hard working or any other personal characteristics.
Post-war it is only natural that a much larger and richer (in terms of natural resources) country would take-over the leadership role that Britain had enjoyed.
Britain's post-war economy was not helped by some in government/the services not seeing the hand writing on the wall and continuing development of some weapons/aircraft in a manner not unsimilar to what was done before the war which meant that a lot of mistakes were repeated. And, unfortunately, some new ones brought in. Way too much money was spent on research/development that either didn't pan out or took to long to compete on the world stage.
Some projects did turn out well, and certainly the US had it's share of turkey's in the post war era, but then the US could afford some mistakes, the British could afford fewer.

 

[Zyzygie]

The Computer
"Colossus"
Colossus was the name of a series of computers developed for British codebreakers in 1943-1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the German highest level code. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) and thyratrons to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is thus regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer.
Colossus was designed by the engineer Tommy Flowers to solve a problem posed by mathematician Max Newman at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. Alan Turing's use of probability in cryptanalysis contributed to its design. It has sometimes been erroneously stated that Turing designed Colossus to aid the cryptanalysis of the Enigma.
Turing's machine that helped decode Enigma was the electromechanical Bombe, not Colossus.

Front view of the Colossus rebuild showing, from right to left (1) The "bedstead" containing the message tape in its continuous loop and with a second one loaded. (2) The J-rack containing the master control panel and jack field. (3) The K-rack with the large "Q" switch panel and sloping patch panel. (4) The double S-rack containing relays and, above the image of a postage stamp, five two-line counter displays. (5) The electric typewriter in front of the five sets of four "set total" decade switches in the C-rack
Colossus computer

 

[Shortround6]

The British had sonar in the First World War. It would be remarkable if the U.S. didn't have it by 1930...

They both had prototypes/test rigs in WW I. Neither country had asdic/sonar in service in WW I. Experiments date to 1906 if not before.

They both had hydro-phones which are not the same thing. Hydro-phones are the ancestor to passive sonar. They listen to existing sounds in the ocean. Asdic/sonar added a sound transmitter to emit the beloved ping of submarine movies. This allowed for accurate measuring of range to target and allowed for searching for quite/slow moving targets rather than depending on the subs to make enough noise to reveal themselves. Of course without the ping the sub also had no idea what the search vessel was doing if it was stationary or slow moving. In fact some WW I flying boats would land in the water and lower a hydro-phone to listen for subs.

British were not fitting ALL new destroyers with asdic even in the late 20s.

 

[Zyzygie]

See attached PDF presentation.

 

[Shortround6]

Oh boy, what a mish mash of fact and bovine excrement.

Have only gotten as far as the tanks and already they have used two wrong photographs and made a total hash of the entry on the Bf 109.

 

[Zyzygie]

Oh boy, what a mish mash of fact and bovine excrement.

Have only gotten as far as the tanks and already they have used two wrong photographs and made a total hash of the entry on the Bf 109.

I'd appreciate your feedback, Shortround.
Most of the data has come direct from Wikipedia in this area, so maybe you can undertake to update Wikipedia at the same time...

 

[Shortround6]

Lets see,
Picture of a 50mm Pak 38 used to illustrate entry on the 37mm AT gun. even wiki didn't get that one wrong.
Entry on the 109 uses a picture of the "E" model (1939-41) . list armament of the G-6 or later (Feb 1943) , makes claim that the 109 was best fighter in 1937. I have no idea where the performance figures came form and can't be bothered to figure them out. again, wiki did a much better job.
MK III tank picture is of a verison using the 50mm L/42 gun and not the 37mm gun in the specifications.
While the photo and data seem to have been cribbed from Wiki they didn't either copy all of it or didn't bother to read captions. The caption on wiki properly identifies the tank in the picture and the data section lists the proper guns to the versions of the tank.

Entry on the T-34 tank lists the 76.2mm F-34 gun as best in the world at the beginning of the war. I guess that depends on when somebody counts the war as beginning. The F-34 gun wasn't installed on production tanks until 1941. Early T-34s (and KVs) used the shorter L-11 gun. The KVs went through in intermediate F-32 gun before getting the F-34. The difference really wasn't all that great but it shows sloppy research.

Section on the Ju-87 is also a bit off, repeats the old refrain about the Ju-87 and the Blitzkrieg. In Poland the Germans had 336 Ju-87B-1s available of which 288 were serviceable on Sept 1st. The Ju-87s only worked in good weather and during the daytime. Credit to the German artillery which was vastly superior to the Polish (and French) artillery in numbers, size and ammunition supply is rarely given.

If somebody can't even copy and paste from wiki correctly I don't need to update Wikipedia but I certainly have little respect for the research or effort that went into that presentation.

 

[Zyzygie]

Lets see,
Picture of a 50mm Pak 38 used to illustrate entry on the 37mm AT gun. even wiki didn't get that one wrong.
Entry on the 109 uses a picture of the "E" model (1939-41) . list armament of the G-6 or later (Feb 1943) , makes claim that the 109 was best fighter in 1937. I have no idea where the performance figures came form and can't be bothered to figure them out. again, wiki did a much better job.
MK III tank picture is of a verison using the 50mm L/42 gun and not the 37mm gun in the specifications.
While the photo and data seem to have been cribbed from Wiki they didn't either copy all of it or didn't bother to read captions. The caption on wiki properly identifies the tank in the picture and the data section lists the proper guns to the versions of the tank.

Entry on the T-34 tank lists the 76.2mm F-34 gun as best in the world at the beginning of the war. I guess that depends on when somebody counts the war as beginning. The F-34 gun wasn't installed on production tanks until 1941. Early T-34s (and KVs) used the shorter L-11 gun. The KVs went through in intermediate F-32 gun before getting the F-34. The difference really wasn't all that great but it shows sloppy research.

Section on the Ju-87 is also a bit off, repeats the old refrain about the Ju-87 and the Blitzkrieg. In Poland the Germans had 336 Ju-87B-1s available of which 288 were serviceable on Sept 1st. The Ju-87s only worked in good weather and during the daytime. Credit to the German artillery which was vastly superior to the Polish (and French) artillery in numbers, size and ammunition supply is rarely given.

If somebody can't even copy and paste from wiki correctly I don't need to update Wikipedia but I certainly have little respect for the research or effort that went into that presentation.

Thanks Shortround, I am appropriately humbled, cowed, squashed, deflated and flattened by your remarks...