History buffs, strut your stuff!

[Thaluikhain]

(Snip).

Yep. Bomber Harris had a bit of a dark reputation when it came to the raids on Germany; he seemed to think that the whole country could be brought to its knees by bombing alone.

For a time, it looked like he might be right, Albert Speer was worried about the possibility. Of course, in hindsight it was not going to happen.

Wasn't Little Boy (Hiroshima) later calculated afterward by American scientists to have been a largely inefficient design? That's a disturbing thought considering what it managed to do anyway.

Just confirmed on wiki, but yeah, nobody uses gun type devices anymore.

One day, an Austrian U-Boat surfaces and transmits. The British signals post triangulates the signal, and then sends a quick transmission to HQ in the clear: "U-Boat at position X." Almost immediately after they've sent their transmission, the signals post receives a transmission in the clear from the U-Boat: "Thank you - we had gotten really lost there."

And this, the article concluded, is why you NEVER transmit information like this without encoding it first.

Probably you shouldn't alert your enemies to their mistake either, or hang around to send more signals, though.

 

[rcs619]

America and the UK bombed the city of Dresden, Germany, in 1945. They killed 25,000 people and razed the city.

SNIP

This is one reason the German bombings were not added to the list of charges for the defendants at Nuremberg. It would have been something of an embarrassment for the victorious allies, and may have offered the defendants a platform for criticism.

Speaking of awkwardly-hypocritical war-crimes, the US actually convicted multiple Japanese officers, and executed them, because they had tortured some of their POW's. One of the torture methods they were known to use was waterboarding.

So yeah, the next time someone tries to argue that waterboarding isn't actually torture... we've literally put people to death in the past for doing it to our people.