During World War II, many of the bigger aircraft carriers were armed with 5 inch gun turrets not entirely unlike what destroyers and smaller cruisers carried. They didn’t intend to use them against enemy ships though, but rather against enemy aircraft. Combined with an early radar-assisted targeting computer and either timed or proximity-fused shells, they found the most effective way to take an enemy plane down quickly was to set off a large cannon shell close to the plane. That, and teaching the gunners not being assisted by such computers to fire randomly in a pre-set zone, rather than try to aim. They made sure the anti-aircraft guns had overlapping fields of fire, so that by firing randomly they could make sure that some lucky pilot wouldn’t get through while everybody was shooting at someone else.
To be fair if you got an order from the big boss to make an exact replica you might take it too far as well!
Perhaps they thought it was for some sort of sneaky undercover spy mission, ie: it was going to be flown back to the West to make the Capitalist dogs think they didn’t hold onto it and so needed to be exactly the same as the original?
During the First World War, before the US joined in, a number of Americans flew for France in the Lafayette Escadrille. Some of these guys were rather well-off, and one of them had a series of commemorative coins minted with the squadron’s insignia to give to the others as keepsakes. One of these pilots was shot down behind enemy lines, and all of his identification was confiscated, with the coin being missed because he kept it in a pouch hanging from his neck.
Soon after this happened, the pilot managed to escape during a fortuitous Allied artillery barrage, making his way back to friendly lines… where he was apprehended and accused of being a spy or a saboteur (something which they would kill him for on the spot if he couldn’t prove his identity). He presented the coin as his only remaining ID, and was fortunate in that the soldiers recognized the insignia and arranged for someone to come and vouch for him. Having that coin on him literally saved his life and proved his identity as an Allied pilot rather than an imposter.
Due to this, it’s tradition in the US Air Force that an Airman have his coin on him at all times. They’re issued an Airman’s Coin upon finishing Basic Training (or the various Officer equivalents) to show that they are officially members of the Air Force, and most units (and high-ranking personnel) have their own coins that they give out either to welcome newcomers or as a reward for some accomplishment.
If you put your coin down on a table (or, you know, accidentally drop it when you are trying to get your keys out of your pocket or whatever), this is considered a Coin Challenge or a Coin Check. All other airmen nearby are required to produce their own coins in a certain short amount of time or else face the consequences (the consequences generally consist of you buying everybody’s drinks). If everybody else has a coin, the guy who instigated the coin check has to pay for the drinks. An airman can be coin checked in any place, at any time, no matter what. (It’s very Serious Business :D)
heh, my [army] dad carried a challenge coin as long as I knew him, and my husband [navy] carries a sub service challenge coin also =)
[I now carry my dad’s challenge coin =)]
I know a 16 year old [who intends to go into the Air Force Academy] who actually has a Secretary of the Navy challenge coin he got during a trip to Washington where he met and asked for one from the SecNav =)
It might be made FROM Uranium, but it’s not made OF Uranium. If you took a hunk of Plutonium apart with a hammer, not only would you possibly get cancer, but you’d also not find any Uranium inside of it.
Yeah, all the services do challenge coins now, but the Air Force started it back before there was an Air Force of any kind in the US military.
My wife (also active-duty Air Force) has a Lieutenant General’s coin that she got by asking the General if she could see it. If I tried that, I’d probably just get shrugged off. :rolleyes:
If your colleague tries to trot out the fact that Churchill’s famous “We shall fight on the beaches” speech was actually performed by impersonator Norman Shelley, tell him it’s a rumor that has been debunked.
Weren’t most of the losses due to kamikaze attack and were destroyers? Aircraft carriers with unarmoured flight decks are really messed up when airplanes full of explosives crash into them.
Why did British carriers have armoured flight decks and American carriers did not?
Armor is very heavy, and requires substantial structural support. If you armor the flight deck, you effectively make the hangar deck smaller because there’s less room down there with all the required framework. They found that it was much more effective to have more planes to shoot down the kamikazis than it was to make the deck much thicker to withstand them after they hit. Also, an armored deck moves the center of gravity higher up, making the ship more unstable and more difficult to operate planes from.
IIRC, without the armor plating on the deck, the American carriers were effectively able to carry double the number of planes as their British comrades. There were some armor-plated carriers after WWII, the Midway Class (which got around the cramped hangar problem by being really REALLY big), but they pretty much went back to unarmored (and very very fast - aircraft carriers are some of the fastest ships in the Navy, and the nuclear ones don’t have to slow down to conserve fuel) carriers after they built the three Midways (the last of which was decomissioned in 1992, nearly 50 years after they entered service)
I don’t know if it’s true, but I was told that the manoeuvre called la rueda (the wheel) or la noria (the Fenris wheel, the watermill wheel) in Spanish was invented during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9.
It consists of several planes looping one after the other, dropping bombs or gunning a specific spot. If a single plane attacked a position which could attack back (anti-aircraft guns, tanks), then they would do it when it tried to climb back; by having several planes roll around, they were able to level the spot before the defenders could do anything about it. Among other locations, it was used to bomb trenches during the Battle of the Ebro, the longest of this war.
Another account.Not much humorous in it, even in safe retrospect, except for mentioning the Russians’ confusion over the name of one of the B-29’s, Ramp Tramp.
