Armistice Day

[Brian37]

I was just watching a documentary on D-Day, holy mother fucker, the German machine guns in the pill boxes on the top of the bluffs.  An AR-15 looks at them and says, "I need to speed up a bit." How the fuck anyone survived that.

R. Lee Ermey (RIP) tests the MG-42.

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It's rather simple, at least in theory: detach yourself from your emotions and get the job done. Why, yes, that is a Hell of a lot easier said than done, especially for someone who feels as much as I gather you do, but for a lot of people, it's a lot easier than you think: If you can think of the dead guys on your side of the battlefield as just some miscellaneous grunts and not, say, Jerry from New York, and the people you're shooting at as "The Enemy" and not human beings like you who just happened to be born into another country, you can pull it off.

This may strike you as callous. That's kind of the whole point.

Never achieved that.

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Be happy the Germans did not have crack troops defending those positions.

Some of the troops were, indeed, second rate. But some of them were "stomach troops", men with ulcers and the like. Good troops with problems. And sections were occupied by "rest troops", units taken out of the Eastern Front and sent to the Channel coast to rest and reorganize. High percentage of combat veterans in those units.

I used to find "beauty" in weapons like tanks and jets when growing up. But it is not the same "beauty" one finds in the destructive nature of say, a volcano. A volcano isn't cognitive, humans are.

Firearms and tanks and jets and nukes may demonstrate human creativity, but unfortunately it demonstrates our species failure of diplomacy. 

I find no beauty in our species unfortunate ability to destroy.

[Minimalist]

Be happy the Germans did not have crack troops defending those positions.

Some of the troops were, indeed, second rate. But some of them were "stomach troops", men with ulcers and the like. Good troops with problems. And sections were occupied by "rest troops", units taken out of the Eastern Front and sent to the Channel coast to rest and reorganize. High percentage of combat veterans in those units.

And entire battalions were made up of Russians and Poles who had surrendered to the Germans and decided that being in the Wehrmacht was better than a POW camp.  Americans hate to face up to the fact that we were going up against the German fifth-stringers by 1944.  The Russians had ground them down to nothing.  They did have some superior weaponry which masked the deficiency a bit but the .88s and long-barreled .75 mm a/t guns ( as well as the MG 42 which Brian referenced earlier ) could only do so much.  Panthers and Tigers were great tanks but they did not have enough of them to make a difference especially in the face of unchallenged Allied air superiority.

Nonetheless, the men who went up against those positions deserve more than this.

ttps://www.rawstory.com/2018/11/white-house-confirms-trump-will-not-visit-arlington-cemetery-veterans-day-rain-expected/

White House confirms Trump will not visit Arlington cemetery on Veteran’s Day as rain is expected

Apparently the orange piece of shit is afraid he'll melt.

[The Valkyrie]

Some of the troops were, indeed, second rate. But some of them were "stomach troops", men with ulcers and the like. Good troops with problems. And sections were occupied by "rest troops", units taken out of the Eastern Front and sent to the Channel coast to rest and reorganize. High percentage of combat veterans in those units.

And entire battalions were made up of Russians and Poles who had surrendered to the Germans and decided that being in the Wehrmacht was better than a POW camp.  Americans hate to face up to the fact that we were going up against the German fifth-stringers by 1944.  The Russians had ground them down to nothing.  They did have some superior weaponry which masked the deficiency a bit but the .88s and long-barreled .75 mm a/t guns ( as well as the MG 42 which Brian referenced earlier ) could only do so much.  Panthers and Tigers were great tanks but they did not have enough of them to make a difference especially in the face of unchallenged Allied air superiority.

Nonetheless, the men who went up against those positions deserve more than this.

ttps://www.rawstory.com/2018/11/white-house-confirms-trump-will-not-visit-arlington-cemetery-veterans-day-rain-expected/

White House confirms Trump will not visit Arlington cemetery on Veteran’s Day as rain is expected

Apparently the orange piece of shit is afraid he'll melt.

Well turds float so he probably thinks he'll be washed away...

[Rev. Rye]

Never achieved that.

Yeah, like I said, it's a lot easier for some people to reach that state than others. I suppose my A) being on the autism spectrum and B) living such a messed-up life that when I was re-assessing the world after I stopped believing in God, I kept the view of man as inherently sinful [not in those words, of course] because the alternative was so outside my experience (and to an extent, still is) that it made no sense to me, would certainly make things easier in this regard for me, and thus making the problem for me learning to A) disregsard my own well-being, or B) disregarding my distrust of authorities (especially the ones who think it's a good idea to keep fucking up other nations and make them even more pissed at us than they used to be.)

[Angrboda]

Cadet Bonespurs was askeared of the rat-ta-tat-tat of raindrops!

[Brian37]

WWI trivia question: How many wings does a Trifokker have?

As many as google tells me?

If it is a trick question, no such thing exists. If we go by the first three letters "Tri" it would be 3.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

WWI trivia question: How many wings does a Trifokker have?

As many as google tells me?

If it is a trick question, no such thing exists. If we go by the first three letters "Tri" it would be 3.

From looking at photos, it appears that the middle wing is actually two separate wings, one fixed to each side of the cockpit, while the top and bottom appear to be one piece each.

Failing that, I’m going with ‘Less than 50’, which an absolutely correct answer.

Boru

[Minimalist]

WWI trivia question: How many wings does a Trifokker have?

Which reminds me of...........

A World War II pilot is reminiscing before school children about his days in the air force. (Joke best delivered with a good thick accent)

"In 1942," he says, "the situation was really tough. The Germans had a very strong air force. I remember, " he continues, "one day I was protecting the bombers and suddenly, out of the clouds, these fokkers appeared.
(At this point, several of the children giggle.)

I looked up, and right above me was one of them. I aimed at him and shot him down. They were swarming. I immediately realized that there was another fokker behind me."

At this instant the girls in the auditorium start to giggle and boys start to laugh. The teacher stands up and says, "I think I should point out that 'Fokker' was the name of the German-Dutch aircraft company"

"That's true," says the pilot, "but these fokkers were flying Messerschmidts."

[Amarok]

There is no way anyone could value Rommel in the 2nd World War considering the monster he supported. But it does explain in part the rise of Nationalism in pre WW2 Germany. He was a master strategist in WW1.

Well, to be fair, besides being a master strategist, there was the fact that he had a very complicated relationship with Hitler and the Nazi Party that's ambiguous enough that it became plausible to treat him as less a committed Nazi and as much a victim of theirs as a puppet. I suppose that his consistent well-treatment of POWs (for a side that was infamous for its horrific human rights violations) and his being caught up in the 20 July 1944 plot on Hitler's life has quite a bit to do with it.

It's tempting to wonder what would have happened if Rommel defected to a more decent country, but, really, does defecting from one country's military to another's seem like a plausible thing to do? Especially if you expect to hold as high an office as Rommel?

Just what i was going to say also 
He was even good to the civilians of the places he occupied 
He was good to his men and valued their lives 
There is evidence he was an antisemite  
He frequently praised by his enemies

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WWI trivia question: How many wings does a Trifokker have?

3 wings

[Rev. Rye]

Well, to be fair, besides being a master strategist, there was the fact that he had a very complicated relationship with Hitler and the Nazi Party that's ambiguous enough that it became plausible to treat him as less a committed Nazi and as much a victim of theirs as a puppet. I suppose that his consistent well-treatment of POWs (for a side that was infamous for its horrific human rights violations) and his being caught up in the 20 July 1944 plot on Hitler's life has quite a bit to do with it.

It's tempting to wonder what would have happened if Rommel defected to a more decent country, but, really, does defecting from one country's military to another's seem like a plausible thing to do? Especially if you expect to hold as high an office as Rommel?

Just what i was going to say also 
He was even good to the civilians of the places he occupied 
He was good to his men and valued their lives 
There is evidence he was an antisemite  
He frequently praised by his enemies

To be honest, my philosophy on this sort of thing is "take what you can get." I tend to not have a very positive view of people for reasons that involve having to live with them for 29 years, and, in my experience, we all tend to be deeply flawed. Some are just better at hiding it. And honestly, this sort of thing especially applies when you're something of a Germanophile. I'm a big fan of Weimar cinema, and, honestly, it can be kind of depressing to look into whatever happened to people who worked on these films. Case in point: for Fritz Lang's M, one of my all-time favourites, of all the people involved worthy enough to have earned a Wikipedia article, which ones actually had the sense to get the hell out of there? Director Fritz Lang, Actor Peter Lorre, and actresses Rosa Valetti and Hanna Maron (who played, respectively, an innkeeper, and the little girl who does the nursery rhyme in the beginning.) The rest stayed: The blind balloon-man died in the Lodz ghetto, and, while Inspector Lohman was given special deferential treatment after paying a substantial sum to the Nazi Party, and the Safecracker basically became a collaborator. And that's to say nothing of Emil Jannings, star of The Last Laugh, Faust, and The Blue Angel, who became so active in the regime that he was virtually unemployable when the war was over. And yet the work he made before the Nazis took over remains powerful even close to a century later. I had a teacher of German history who, despite pointing out how poor a teacher Prof. Rath was in The Blue Angel, said that, in the final scene, where he dies, clutching his old teaching desk, that he wanted to go out like that.

Imagine how much worse it would have been for those Germans who actually lived through the war and had to pick up the pieces, to realise that, yes, their side were unequivocally the baddies, trying to reconcile their national pride with all the Hell that Hitler spent the last twelve years inflicting on them. And then, when it turns out that Rommel, the man they rooted for during the war, actually had some good qualities, was praised even by his rivals, and could potentially have even been part of the Resistance (admittedly a stretch, but it's enough for the people and the Rommel Myth), is it any wonder that the cult of Rommel continues?