Saving Private Ryan's equipment

[old man emu]

Damaged, abandoned or captured, the detritus of the battlefield is a valuable war commodity.

 

[Bruce Tuncks]

In the real war, there were several groups like in that movie. Some had dogs, and their casualty rate was about half. The dogs ranged out ahead and sniffed out germans.

My uncle at Milne bay nearly died from a sniper up a tree, and a dog would have prevented this. Alas, our generals etc were not smart enough.

[Old Koreelah]

2 hours ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

The dogs ranged out ahead and sniffed out germans…

A fascinating story is told of Churchill arriving at a forward headquarters, very soon after the Normandy landing. He paused  as he walked from his car thru the garden of the large manor house and claimed he could smell Germans. The officers with him dismissed this idea and they walked on. 
Nearby, a couple of heavily-armed Wermacht soldiers were hiding in the shrubbery, but later surrendered.

[willedoo]

36 minutes ago, Old Koreelah said:

A fascinating story is told of Churchill arriving at a forward headquarters, very soon after the Normandy landing. He paused  as he walked from his car thru the garden of the large manor house and claimed he could smell Germans. The officers with him dismissed this idea and they walked on. 
Nearby, a couple of heavily-armed Wermacht soldiers were hiding in the shrubbery, but later surrendered.

It was the bratwurst farts that did it.

[Marty_d]

I bet they were sour krauts after that.

[willedoo]

6 minutes ago, Marty_d said:

I bet they were sour krauts after that.

Cutting edge comedy on this forum, but should we give up out day jobs? Maybe best not at this stage.

[Marty_d]

13 minutes ago, willedoo said:

Cutting edge comedy on this forum, but should we give up out day jobs? Maybe best not at this stage.

Somewhere behind the trailing edge I reckon.

[onetrack]

After the Japs grabbed control of all the rubber plantations in the East Indies during 1942, new natural rubber supplies to the Allies became extremely scarce, new tyres were heavily rationed (a lot of cars were put up on blocks for several years from 1942 to 1947, due to the inability to acquire new tyres for them) - and any old tyres and rubber products were treated like gold, and they were scavenged in huge amounts, for re-use in military tyre repair and remoulding facilities - which also became huge setups.

 

The Allied tyre and rubber shortage problems didn't start to ease until the Americans started producing modest tonnages of synthetic butyl rubber in 1943. But the rubber shortage plagued the Allies all through WW2.

The fascinating story of butyl rubber is in the link below - and possibly the interesting part is that the U.S. Govt knew there would be a major rubber shortage by June 1940 - and took steps to start synthetic rubber production immediately.

 

https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/syntheticrubber/us-synthetic-rubber-program-historical-resourc.pdf

 

Even the Americans were forced onto rubber rationing, and rubber recycling -

 

http://www.sarahsundin.com/make-it-do-tire-rationing-in-world-war-ii/

 

In Australia, the re-utilisation of old rubber to assist in tyre repairs and recapping, reached major heights by 1944. The RAEME No 2 M.T. Workshops at Alice Springs had a sizeable tyre repair and recapping facility that was installed to keep up with the massive demand for tyres for the large truck convoys running from Adelaide to Darwin, on the "North-South Military Road" (now known as the Stuart Hwy).

 

These convoys were restricted to a strict 30mph (48kmh) maximum speed to conserve tyres, and in summer, long troughs of water about 200mm deep were installed at numerous places, and the trucks were driven through them on regular occasions to cool the hot tyres. I sighted photos of these cooling troughs on the AWM site years ago, now I can't find any photos of them.

 

https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C197014

 

https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C11510

 

https://www.awm.gov.au/advanced-search?query=tyre recapping&collection=true&facet_type=Photograph

 

 

 

 

 

[Old Koreelah]

The Axis nations also faced critical shortages of rubber and other resources.

Too late in the war, the Germans and Japanese started co-operating and trading, mostly using some of Japan’s massive submarines to carry cargo. When one was sunk in Atlantic, the ocean was covered in floating debris, including lots of natural rubber blocks.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanagi_missions

[old man emu]

I chuckled when I read this: About 32-million metric tons of rubbers are produced annually in the United States.

 

Can you see the funny thing that my twisted mind saw?

[onetrack]

That an American writer actually wrote "Metric" tons? He/She must be a truly mixed up writer, a proper American writer would have written "70,528,000,000 lbs" of rubber production!

 

Edited November 29, 2021 by onetrack

[old man emu]

 

28 minutes ago, onetrack said:

That an American writer actually wrote "Metric" tons?

Sorry, Onetrack, you went too deep. My thought is in the area of schoolboy humour.

[onetrack]

Yeah, I see it now - "rubbers". Obviously written by someone with English as their second language.

[old man emu]

Actually, "rubbers" is correct in the sense the write was using it as it was describing the various types of rubber one can produce.

 

However, to let you into my twisted mind, " a rubber" is also an American term for a condom.

[Old Koreelah]

41 minutes ago, onetrack said:

Yeah, I see it now - "rubbers". Obviously written by someone with English as their second language.

In 1986 I joined my computer class to an international electronic pen pals group. The kids laboriously typed their letters, saved them to big floppy disks, then I sent them via Telecom, OTC, at least two satellites, and an American network before they finally got to the Alaskan school. The kids quickly learned a few things, largely because they were communicating with much older and more worldly students, from mostly military families. One of my innocent young lovelies got a rush of enthusiastic replies when she posted that her hobbies included collecting rubbers.

[Marty_d]

I heard that in Vietnam, as a psychological warfare tactic, the Yanks airdropped thousands of massive condoms over the NVA.  Theory apparently was that penis size was a matter of some importance to the Vietnamese and if they thought the jumbo ones were what the Yanks normally wore, then it'd screw with their minds.

In my experience the Vietnamese are an extremely practical people so they probably immediately found use as water bottles, food storage etc.

[Old Koreelah]

22 minutes ago, Marty_d said:

In my experience the Vietnamese are an extremely practical people…

As are their neighbours. When the Americans were trying to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail with nightly bombing raids, Lao farmers would lights small fires exactly where they wanted a new fish-pond dug. Next morning they’d find nice deep bomb craters, saving them lots of digging. Or so the story goes.

[onetrack]

After being up close and personal with U.S. bombing results in Vietnam, I doubt if the Americans got within 500 metres of the desired locations! - either their own desired drop points, or the Laotian farmers desired location.

I wouldn't like to be eating fish bred in bomb craters. The highly toxic chemical residues from the explosives are resistant to degradation, and the toxicity effects linger in soil and groundwater for decades.

Many a Vietnam veteran who crawled through bomb craters (which group includes myself) has suffered long-term chemical exposure effects from the explosive residues. 

 

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/21/9002/pdf

[nomadpete]

In Colonlel Hackworth's book 'About Face' the author notes that when in Viet Nam, if he needed a barrage close between his men and the enemy, he always called up contacts in the ADF. Because he could count on the Australians to miss his men.

[old man emu]

My Dad was an infantryman in North Africa. He used to call the artillerymen "Drop shorts".

[nomadpete]

Perhaps I should be more specific. Hackworth said IIRC,

That Australian gunners were much more accurate than their US counterparts and he didn't like losing his men to 'friendy fire'.....

 

BTW 'friendly fire' must be the ultimate oxymoron. There's nothing friendly about being killed, no matter who does it.