Wasn’t the career length of a WWI fighter pilot measured in minutes?
Not quite. Fighter pilots averaged 40-60 hours of combat time (or a few weeks of “real time”.) It varied by aircraft type, though.
My dad joined up in 1944 as a newly-graduated pre-med student. He was advised that it would be good “experience” for him before he started medical school. He was told they valued young medical personnel and that he wouldn’t be sent to the front. They were right. He wasn’t. But what they did send him to do was serve in the first group that was sent into liberated concentration camps. While there were still a few people remaining for whom medical treatment was possible, the bulk of what dad’s group found was beyond help and the conditions were unspeakable. Literally. My dad was unable to talk about what he’d seen and heard for the remainder of his life. Not to his parents, his brothers, my mother or to me.
Granted, his life was never in jeopardy, but that has to have been a terrible gig.
I do know that he never continued to medical school when he returned from the war. He got a PhD in chemistry and became a college professor.
My grandfather served in an engineering unit in the First World War. He let it slip, just once, that his unit arrived at the site of the Second Battle of the Marne just in time to be assigned to burial duty, and that some of his friends took artillery fire even though they were unarmed. For more than 80 years afterward, he never again spoke or wrote of anything that happened between his arrival in France and the Armistice, even when asked.
Maybe living with the memories of some things is even worse than simply getting killed.
Bill Mauldin’s cartoons…yeah…I recall the medic standing up and lighting his cigarette and replying to infantrymen behind him with, “It’s okay, Joe. I’m a non-combatant.”
May I suggest unexploded ordnance engineer? Does anyone recall the Masterpiece Theatre production from a few years back called “Danger! UXB!”?
[QUOTE=]
Shermans were not especially fire-prone (consider German tanks that also used gasoline engines, but avoid this reputation). Fires were caused by improper storage of ammunition, when it was literally stuffed everywhere inside the tank it could fit. The end of this practice drastically reduced the number of Sherman fires. The Ronson nickname is attributed to the slogan “lights every time”. The slogan was launched post-war, and thus could not influence the nickname.
[/QUOTE]
From Wikipedia:
…in 1927 Ronson began marketed it as the Ronson De-Light Lighter with the slogan “A flip - and it’s lit! Release - and it’s out!”
The Germans also called Sherman tanks ‘Tommy Cookers’. Tommy being a the nickname for British soldiers manning Sherman tanks.
The vivid accounts of the tank crews paint a picture of great cameraderie and espirt de corp. While its armour was no match for 88mm or 75 field guns or tanks, it was effective in a great number of other scenarios. Many crew members survived their tank being hit.
There are probably worse combat roles.
Yep. 92% fatalities among them.
here’s an account , he was only on flame thrower once.
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp-stories/loc.natlib.afc2001001.20719/transcript?ID=sr0001
He mentioned splash back. If you were forced to move, or someone or something came close to you, there could be splash back, its rather more severe than shooting yourself in the foot.
Yes! It was awesome! You are the only person I know on this damn planet who has watched it besides me. Such a pity. Really well made and realistic, unlike Hurt Locker for example.
And yes, their job sucked. If I remember right at some point newcomer could expect to live 2 weeks.
Thanks. Luckily he had to use it only in one occasion, I mean fire it in anger. And sure, that splash back wasn’t nice. You just can’t stick nozzle to any hole and shoot because if the is something stopping the stream all the napalm will fly back at you.
Where did you get casualty rate?
-
Most RAF bombers weren’t Lancasters.
-
Most RAF missions weren’t flown at night, and of course, when they were, night flying has its own hazards.
-
The RAF was proportionately more active early in the war, when the Luftwaffe was stronger.
Was there a most flown RAF bomber?
This is undoubtedly true, but is not far removed, logically speaking, from saying that a Lexus sedan isn’t a very good car because if you’re ever asked to race it in the Daytona 500 you’ll probably lose.
Tiger tanks were awesome when they worked. They rarely worked; they were incredibly terrible, in fact, in terms of reliability. At any given time most Tigers were broken. The Panther was a much better tank and was still glitchy as well; for quite some time after its introduction its engine would sometimes burst into flames and force the crew to run away.
Most armored enemies faced by Sherman crews would have been inferior Panzers, such as the IV and perhaps even III, and tank destroyers.
Geez, this is a great thread, asked and answered by the Op in the first post.
My Dad served in the pacific for the whole war, and he said the flamethrower has a detail every tried to avoid. Not to mention, it was super heavy and you had to stand up out of cover to use it.
Good thread.
Beyond that, it was a doctrinal decision, not merely a case of having shitty equipment. The idea was that Shermans weren’t supposed to even get into tank v. tank fights; the US Army had tank destroyer units whose job it was to engage enemy tanks. Shermans were supposed to do exactly what SenorBeef mentions.
This wasn’t proven to be effective in practice, but by that point, the development of the T-26 Pershing had been delayed enough that it wasn’t going to be available in any kind of reasonable numbers, so the Army doubled-down on the Sherman and made the best of a bad situation.
Plus, infantry AT weapons like the Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck, as well as all the various German AT guns and minefields took out a whole lot of tanks (potentially more than other tanks did) as well, and Shermans were not particularly more vulnerable to them than T-34s or IS-2s.
The final thing to keep in mind is that the German Army wasn’t exclusively outfitted with Panthers, Tigers and King Tigers. The vast majority of their tanks were the various PzKfwIV models, and various sorts of assault guns(Sturmgeschutz III)/tank destroyers(Marder, Hetzer,etc…). None of them particularly outclassed the 76mm Shermans at all.
I assume you are referring to these:
That settles it AFAICT.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Randall Jarrell, 1914 - 1965
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
I was actually talking about the M4A3E8 “Easy Eight” Shermans with the HVSS suspension and 76mm high velocity gun (same as used in the M18 Hellcat tank destroyers). By the end of the war, something like half the Shermans out there were armed with the 76mm gun. making them a match for anything but Panthers or Tigers’ frontal armor at long range. From the side or rear, even the old 75mm gun was effective against them.
Interestingly, they were apparently roughly comparable.