swampyankee
Chief Master Sergeant
- 3,974
- Jun 25, 2013
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Criminal charges should have been brought against someone for that stupidity.
I still can't believe the government allowed it.
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]."The Russians have certainly had their share of dismal designs, no?
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.
My mother still had her ration cards in the sixties in case they brought it back.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.
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..."
The British had sonar in the First World War. It would be remarkable if the U.S. didn't have it by 1930...
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.
Thanks Shortround, I am appropriately humbled, cowed, squashed, deflated and flattened by your remarks...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.