How the feck did we win WWII?

[MrMark]

Here's 2 inventions/innovations that helped to win WWII

Spam

Penicillin

(ok so they both existed prior to the war)

[Diver]

They did not properly understand how metal sheared until all the liberty ships the US built for us to carry food for the UK snapped in half.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship

And they then realised (after British shipbuilders told them) that holes in bulkheads and decks (I.e. cargo hatches) should not have right-angle corners but should be rounded to stop stress fractures

[minestrone]

And they then realised (after British shipbuilders told them) that holes in bulkheads and decks (I.e. cargo hatches) should not have right-angle corners but should be rounded to stop stress fractures

But when the British built the de Havilland Comet 10 years later with square windows they had a tendency to blow up due to the shear stress razors at the edges. Boeing designed round windows and because of that we lost out on an aircraft industry. A smart person learns from the mistakes other people make.

I thought I was in a metallurgy exam there again.

[The Lone Gunman]

We did not win WW2, we were just on the winning side, the yanks and the soviets were more interested in Europe than us, we were never a concern, just a location to locate troops in.

Yep it was a team effort to win and without the yanks and the reds the Germans would probably have won. As many Brits landed at Normandy as Yanks and if I remember correctly our boys were stopped from taking Berlin for political reasons.
WE did stand alone against the nazis for a year defending the whole of Europe against this formidable foe while the late starters got their arses into gear.
We can be right proud of our role in WW2 and let no one minimise what we did, particularly those who were liberated.



When I say WE I obviously do not mean me as I was not around.

With due deference to the Poles, ANZACS and others.

[thunderlizard]

Don't forget the Pigeon Guided Missile:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

[OwlHoot]

My mum told me stories of having V1 flying parallel to her on a train into London. Many people told me when I was young that as a weapon of terror the V1 was far more effective that the V2. ..

Not that many V2s were launched, only a couple of dozen I think, whereas V1s were sent over in their thousands. Also, the public weren't told about them for some time even after the launches started - It was put about that the mysterious huge explosions that each took out a whole street, were caused by gas leaks!

Curious though, I'd have thought the ever-present risk of bolt out of the blue (landing at 4000 MPH, so you couldn't hear them coming until after they'd struck) was more scary than a noisy bomb you could at least hear for miles, even if its engines suddenly cutting out must have been fairly unnerving.

[HairyArsedBloke]

Curious though, I'd have thought the ever-present risk of bolt out of the blue (landing at 4000 MPH, so you couldn't hear them coming until after they'd struck) was more scary than a noisy bomb you could at least hear for miles, even if its engines suddenly cutting out must have been fairly unnerving.

I remember them saying the opposite. A sudden death without warning was almost a blessing at the time.

[VectraMan]

Not that many V2s were launched, only a couple of dozen I think, whereas V1s were sent over in their thousands.

3,172 (or 264.3 dozen) according to Wikipedia (so it must be true). I remember my grandmother telling me of a V2 coming down at the end of the street and how she had to grab the baby (my uncle) and hide under the table.

I guess the V2 came along too late. The first was fired against Paris, and most were fired against Antwerp, which we'd liberated by then. It might have been a different story if the Nazis had had the V2 a couple of years earlier and could have used all of the coastline to launch rocket attacks on Britain.

"We" really won the war with one of these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy

[Menelaus]

At the grave risk of sounding ungrateful - the war in Europe wasn't won by the UK or the US, it was the Soviet Union who gave of their all.

[minestrone]

At the grave risk of sounding ungrateful - the war in Europe wasn't won by the UK or the US, it was the Soviet Union who gave of their all.

The latter half of the war was not beating the Germans, it was beating the ruskies to Berlin. We should have nuked Stalin and troops in 45.