The Night Mail

[Winslow Boy]

1 hour ago, New Haven Neil said:

 

I use the 'Peco' (in reality bought in) servo system (well it was cheaper for me as I was selling them at the time!) and found the answer to the twitching as a totally separate power supply.  I use an old CB radio regulated 5A supply, after changing to that I have not had a single twitch of a servo, despite dirty track in a garage and DCC use.  I also experience no creep, using omega loops in the linkage.

So is the Omega Loop the last line of defence then Neil.

 

Ps overcast here at the moment and sharp wind. No beans have been consumed.

[monkeysarefun]

7 hours ago, Hroth said:

 

More importantly, how did the London Olympics pan out? 🤔

 

And the test series?

[jamie92208]

Having just arrived in Caen before heading to Blighty in the morning we saw several old military vehicles heading south. Also heading south were multitudes of Gendarmes in a real mixture of vehicles, old and new.  We stopped three times and Beth was very surprised when at the first a French lady helped her to wash her hands. At the next stop in @Oldddudders territory, she was even more surprised to be helped by three female Gendarmes, all armed.  In fact if anyone had tried to rob the place they would have got a very warm welcome.  At the next stop nobody offered help but we did buy an 80th anniversary fridge magnet.  All those on display featured only USA participants

 

Jamie

[SM42]

17 minutes ago, jamie92208 said:

  At the next stop nobody offered help but we did buy an 80th anniversary fridge magnet.  All those on display featured only USA participants

 

Jamie

 

Target audience. 

 

The Americzn visitor is unlikely to be a regular visitor. 

 

The Britiish can get to Normandy much more easily. Plenty of time to get money out of them

 

Andy

[SM42]

I played it crafty with the washing / jet washing dilemma. 

 

I waited for the washing to dry and brought it in before starting on the patio. 

 

Ha ha!

 

Victory is mine

 

Andy

[Happy Hippo]

2 hours ago, Winslow Boy said:

So is the Omega Loop the last line of defence then Neil.

 

Ps overcast here at the moment and sharp wind. No beans have been consumed.

I used Z loops (same principle as Omega loops) on Pantmàwr North even though I use Cobalt motors.  They work very well.

 

I am now a few miles further south on Portland Bill.

[Hroth]

2 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

And the test series?

 

We don't talk about that...

 

[iL Dottore]

1 hour ago, jamie92208 said:

At the next stop nobody offered help but we did buy an 80th anniversary fridge magnet.  All those on display featured only USA participants…

Having lived for a while in the US, I can attest that according to US popular culture (Hollywood movies/TV/books and magazines) the US won World War II all by itself (with Britain in the role of the occasionally useful and amusing sidekick). Although some of the better historians and PBS do their best to redress this misconception.

 

Although the following is also a GROSS simplification, it very much sums up how Allied success in World War II was created: the British gave the allies breathing space, the US gave the allies resources and material, whilst the USSR gave the blood.

 

When you think about it, had Lord Halifax been appointed prime minister in 1940, as opposed to Winston Churchill, the likelihood of Britain coming to terms with the Nazi regime would’ve been quite high. Hitler always thought of the British as his natural allies against the communists(basically the Soviet union) and quite a lot of the British establishment was - if not favourable to the Nazi regime -  at least not unsympathetic (the Mitfords and the Duke of Windsor for example). A settlement with Great Britain in 1940 would’ve meant all the men, material and resources squandered in the Balkans, Greece and the Near East would have been directed against the Soviet Union. A final German victory still may not have  happened; but in 1941, with Stalin paralysed by indecision in Moscow (which was true in our real timeline),, the disintegration of the Soviet Union was a distinct possibility and with the extra men, material and resources saved because of Britain not fighting Hitler’s regime, the balance could have tipped in Hitler’s favour.

 

Although the Americans fought in all theatres of the war, contributing significantly to the Allied victory, I think the biggest  contribution that the US made towards final Allied victory was the huge amount of war material that their industrial base – once geared up on a wartime footing – provided to the Allies, so much that the combined efforts of the.Axis couldn’t even begin to hope to match output - even the USSR - itself with huge resources to draw upon - also relied heavily on U.S. made war material.

 

Russia’s contribution was body count. The Western allies had an incredibly difficult time in Normandy, in France, the Low Countries and - finally - in Germany itself, yet the Western allies were fighting - basically - what the Germans could spare from the Eastern Front (where casualties were measured in Army Groups) and the scrapings from the bottom of the manpower and resource barrel. Stalin wanted both revenge and victory and Stalin did not care how many men it cost him. But Stalin’s victory came at a huge cost: around 27 million dead (about 8.7 million military and about 19 million civilians). The Axis powers lost about 5.1 million men on the Eastern Front (in comparison total WWII civilian and military deaths for the Western allies – the UK [including Commonwealth countries] and the US totalled about 1.2 million). As Len Deighton remarked in one of his books, occupied Germany didn’t provide any resistance to the occupiers because they had nothing left to resist with.

 

Returning to the topic of D-Day, according to my German colleague, as originally planned, the seawall defences in Normandy, would have been pretty easy to overcome, then Rommel (in charge of these defences) brought in some Eastern Front combat veterans (the so-called “Alte Hasen” [old hares]) who took one look at the prepared defences, said they were total crap and promptly beefed up the coastal defences to the heavily fortified condition they were in on the 6th of June 1944!

 

 

Edited June 7 by iL Dottore
Typo & corrected date

[Oldddudders]

1 hour ago, jamie92208 said:

Having just arrived in Caen before heading to Blighty in the morning we saw several old military vehicles heading south. Also heading south were multitudes of Gendarmes in a real mixture of vehicles, old and new.  We stopped three times and Beth was very surprised when at the first a French lady helped her to wash her hands. At the next stop in @Oldddudders territory, she was even more surprised to be helped by three female Gendarmes, all armed.  In fact if anyone had tried to rob the place they would have got a very warm welcome.  At the next stop nobody offered help but we did buy an 80th anniversary fridge magnet.  All those on display featured only USA participants

 

Jamie

We are off tomorrow from Torquay to Rugeley, where Sherry's grandson - 8 - is acting in 'Annie' on Sunday. Then Monday we head to Portsmouth, doing what Jamie is in the throes of doing, in reverse. We expect a few exotic cars to be on board, as it's the Le Mans 24 hrs next weekend, and the Brits generally enhance the public paddocks mightily with every exotic make you can imagine. I have given up attending the race. Having spectated on 22 occasions, it isn't that it has lost its appeal so much as age making it less easy to fully engage. Being at Mulsanne Corner at 3 a.m. Sunday has lost some of its appeal! We will stay in France for just over three weeks. 

[Canal Digger]

41 minutes ago, SM42 said:

I played it crafty with the washing / jet washing dilemma. 

 

I waited for the washing to dry and brought it in before starting on the patio. 

 

Ha ha!

 

Victory is mine

 

Andy

Ah but did you:

have clean hand/ clothes (before bringing it in!)?

fold/ sort the washing

put the basket in right place

shut the windows before jet washing

[bbishop]

Flavio, two comments.  You mean 1940, not 1914.  The Mitfords were an odd bunch.  Three fascists (including the brother) a communist and the rest were apolitical but of a conservative inclination.

 

You've assumed a British - German pact in July (?) 1940.  So an invasion of the USSR in May 1941?  No earlier because the horses would need fodder.

 

What would have happened in the Far East.  Would Japan still have attacked the USA and the British / Dutch / French empires?  Would Britain have moved forces east?  Would Hitler have taken the opportunity of a snap invasion?

 

 

[Northmoor]

23 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

But Stalin’s victory came at a huge cost: around 27 million dead (about 8.7 million military and about 19 million civilians). The Axis powers lost about 5.1 million men on the Eastern Front (in comparison total WWII civilian and military deaths for the Western allies – the UK [including Commonwealth countries] and the US totalled about 1.2 million). 

I would like to know how many of those were at the hands of Stalin's own forces.

There is a thought-provoking statistic that during the 20th Century - which contained two World wars and multiple bloody, regional conflicts - more people died at the hands of their own governments than as a result of enemy action.

[Dave Hunt]

Just waiting for No. 1 son to arrive for the weekend. Tomorrow we are going to Manchester to see the Eagles in the last of their farewell concerts in UK. Something both of us are really looking forward to.

 

Dave

[iL Dottore]

23 minutes ago, bbishop said:

Flavio, two comments.  You mean 1940, not 1914.  The Mitfords were an odd bunch.  Three fascists (including the brother) a communist and the rest were apolitical but of a conservative inclination.

 

You've assumed a British - German pact in July (?) 1940.  So an invasion of the USSR in May 1941?  No earlier because the horses would need fodder.

 

What would have happened in the Far East.  Would Japan still have attacked the USA and the British / Dutch / French empires?  Would Britain have moved forces east?  Would Hitler have taken the opportunity of a snap invasion?

 

 

Fat fingers I’m afraid, Bill. I should have typed 1940…

Fodder for the horses (very few realise that very little of the Wehrmacht was actually motorised, they had huge amounts of horse drawn transport)?
 

Hmm! Without having to fight Britain in the Balkans, Greece and North Africa, it is likely that they would’ve been able to increase the rate of mechanisation of their military. In turn, they could have moved up the date of the invasion to just after the end of the spring rains - giving them plenty of time to advance before having to dig in and face общая зима (General Winter).

 

I think that the Japanese would still have attacked the US and the British, Dutch, and French Far Eastern territories; the Japanese were desperate for resources and that would not have changed no matter what Britain’s status was vis-a-vis Hitler’s regime. By the time that the Japanese would have invaded/attacked the US and the European Far Eastern Colonies, Nazi Germany would have been so deep into its Russian campaign that it could not have easily mounted a snap invasion.

[iL Dottore]

29 minutes ago, Northmoor said:

I would like to know how many of those were at the hands of Stalin's own forces.

There is a thought-provoking statistic that during the 20th Century - which contained two World wars and multiple bloody, regional conflicts - more people died at the hands of their own governments than as a result of enemy action.

In Stalin’s case, probably an awful lot. We consider the Nazi regime as particularly odious, but the Soviet regime under Stalin was just as bad and in some cases more so (e.g. genocide by deliberate starvation)

 

I was reading about Stalingrad and that whilst the Russians had plenty of conscripts (AKA “cannon fodder“), they didn’t at the time have enough weapons. So the conscripts were assembled, weapons handed out to the front rows until they ran out of weapons and then everyone was ordered to attack the German positions, including those without weapons - who were instructed to pick up the weapon of the first fallen comrade they came across and continue the attack. Behind them were members of the NKVD (well armed, well equipped, and well fed) who were instructed to shoot anyone who turned back – including scared, weaponless, conscripts. And shoot them they did.

 

Beria’s NKVD Commisars were as bad as Himmler’s SS, perhaps more so as they also killed their own: members of the Russian officer corps, Russian former POWs who had escaped from German captivity, insufficiently zealous party members, anyone “sabotaging the war effort”(which could be something as innocent and trivial as turning up five minutes late for a shift at the ordinance factory) and so on.

And even though now, since the fall of the Soviet Union, all this (and more besides) is well known, there are still people on the fringes of British politics (and sometimes not even on the fringes) who are either apologists for Stalinism or outright Stalinist in their thinking.

 

[Northmoor]

39 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

And even though now, since the fall of the Soviet Union, all this (and more besides) is well known, there are still people on the fringes of British politics (and sometimes not even on the fringes) who are either apologists for Stalinism or outright Stalinist in their thinking.

I suspect you are thinking of the same person as me; a completely unapologetic admirer of the USSR (and also Cuba and the PRC), who was recently elected to the House of Commons.

[bbishop]

Flavio, please remember it happens on both sides of the spectrum: "London is fast becoming a Third World cesspit, where crime is rampant and radical Islamist extremists dominate the streets!"

 

That is a quote from the election address of a candidate to become Mayor of London.  We had a joke candidate, Count Binface, who garnered more votes than the above quoted gentleman.  

 

Bill

[Northmoor]

4 minutes ago, bbishop said:

We had a joke candidate and Count Binface, 

Corrected that for you.

[Winslow Boy]

1 hour ago, Dave Hunt said:

Just waiting for No. 1 son to arrive for the weekend. Tomorrow we are going to Manchester to see the Eagles in the last of their farewell concerts in UK. Something both of us are really looking forward to.

 

Dave

Hope you have a great time. There have have been some really good reviews of the performance.

[Willie Whizz]

Even after Italy entered the war, the original British strategic concept was that the Far East - even though still ‘at peace’ - was in need of higher priority for scarce military resources than the Middle East (the latter itself a concept that seems to have shifted westwards somewhat around this time).

 

Subsequently however, the fear of the loss of the Suez Canal and the road then being open to the oilfields of Arabia (plus the need to supply Russia enough at least to keep her fighting) caused this order of priorities to be reversed, even though it made little short-term difference to the actual British performance in North Africa.  
 

Singapore and Malaya were left even more ill-prepared than they otherwise would have been, compounded by the dreadful attitude of the local colonial administrations to both the Japanese threat and the available remedies to counter it: and the result in 1941-42 was disastrous. 

[rockershovel]

I'd say the Americans DID win WW2, by any meaningful definition. By 1945 they owned pretty much all the money in the world, occupied a commanding strategic position in the Atlantic and Pacific; their industries were at their zenith; their currency was the new World standard. 

 

If that's not a win, it's a pretty good substitute. 

[bbishop]

1 hour ago, Northmoor said:

Corrected that for you.

 The quote came from the manifesto of the Britain First party which I would describe as Reform UK with menaces.  They were deadly serious.  There wasn't a Monster Raving Loony candidate so I would describe Count Binface as the only joke candidate.

 

Farage's methodology fascinates me.  He has fronted a serious of parties: UKIP, Brexit and now Reform UK which are funded by other people (Tice with the present manifestation) whilst Farage creams off millions of pounds, dollars and Euros from media appearances etc.

[rockershovel]

2 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

Fat fingers I’m afraid, Bill. I should have typed 1940…

Fodder for the horses (very few realise that very little of the Wehrmacht was actually motorised, they had huge amounts of horse drawn transport)?
 

Hmm! Without having to fight Britain in the Balkans, Greece and North Africa, it is likely that they would’ve been able to increase the rate of mechanisation of their military. In turn, they could have moved up the date of the invasion to just after the end of the spring rains - giving them plenty of time to advance before having to dig in and face общая зима (General Winter).

 

I think that the Japanese would still have attacked the US and the British, Dutch, and French Far Eastern territories; the Japanese were desperate for resources and that would not have changed no matter what Britain’s status was vis-a-vis Hitler’s regime. By the time that the Japanese would have invaded/attacked the US and the European Far Eastern Colonies, Nazi Germany would have been so deep into its Russian campaign that it could not have easily mounted a snap invasion.

The Japanese had been waging a war of conquest (primarily against China) since 1931. J G Ballard's book Empire of the Sun gives a vivid picture of this, specifically in Shanghai in 1941. 

 

The French, being notionally allies courtesy of the Vichy regime in France, were largely left to their own devices in Indo-China (Viet Nam). I found an interesting account a while ago, of British merchant seamen interned there by the French. 

 

A British accomodation with the Nazis would have left the door open for a similar accomodation in places like Hong Kong and Singapore. 

[rockershovel]

5 minutes ago, bbishop said:

 The quote came from the manifesto of the Britain First party which I would describe as Reform UK with menaces.  They were deadly serious.  There wasn't a Monster Raving Loony candidate so I would describe Count Binface as the only joke candidate.

 

Farage's methodology fascinates me.  He has fronted a serious of parties: UKIP, Brexit and now Reform UK which are funded by other people (Tice with the present manifestation) whilst Farage creams off millions of pounds, dollars and Euros from media appearances etc.

... and yet he produced the biggest upheaval in modern politics. He, more than anyone is the author of Brexit; but it could not have happened had the support not been there. 

 

 

[Happy Hippo]

2 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

In Stalin’s case, probably an awful lot. We consider the Nazi regime as particularly odious, but the Soviet regime under Stalin was just as bad and in some cases more so (e.g. genocide by deliberate starvation)

 

I was reading about Stalingrad and that whilst the Russians had plenty of conscripts (AKA “cannon fodder“), they didn’t at the time have enough weapons. So the conscripts were assembled, weapons handed out to the front rows until 

 

Beria’s NKVD Commisars were as bad as Himmler’s SS, perhaps more so as they also killed their own: members of the Russian officer corps, Russian former POWs who had escaped from German captivity, insufficiently zealous party members, anyone “sabotaging the war effort”(which could be something as innocent and trivial as turning up five minutes late for a shift at the ordinance factory) and so on.

 

 

As an ex Ordnance Officer, I have to take issue with this statement.

 

Ordinances are rules and orders or religious matters.

 

Ordnance is much more about about big bangs And the equipment to make them.