The Miami Marlins should suspend Ozzie Guillen. A one-month suspension would send a powerful message that Guillen’s thoughtless remarks on Cuban dictator Fidel Castro will not be tolerated. A one-week suspension probably is more realistic.
Yes, we live in a free country, but the Constitution protects free speech only from restriction by the state and federal governments. The Marlins, a private entity, presumably can impose the penalty of their choice on Guillen, who is a management employee, not part of the players union. Still, I’m not confident the Marlins will take action, not when their expectations for the team are so high, not when they just opened their new ballpark.
Sorry, Guillen’s offense is bigger than any of that.
I normally cringe at politically correct overreactions, particularly in response to mindless, preposterous remarks from people who are just spouting off. But when Guillen told Time magazine, “I love Fidel Castro . . . I respect Fidel Castro . . .” well, that’s about as extreme and insensitive as it gets.
...Suspend Guillen.
Not because a protest group wants him out.
Because it’s the right thing to do.
Repoz
Posted: April 09, 2012 at 05:23 AM |
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Not because it's good writing.
Because you saw another sports columnist do it, and you're a beat reporter way out of his depth writing op-ed pieces.
Because much of it consists of paragraphs that don't even rise to the level of a full sentence.
Which is awesome.
They'd have been a lot more offended if he said he loves and respects Obama.
As to Guillen, what he said was pretty dumb to do when you are in Miami but he certainly has the right to say what he thinks and anyone who hires him knows he will do so publicly and often.
This is going to be a fun season to watch the Marlins from afar. I am looking forward to the first 5 run inning spawned by a Hanley throwing error, followed by Ozzie coming out to have a polite discussion with Z.
And the fact that he tried to serve as a base for Soviet nukes, bringing us as close to WW3 as we ever got.
The interesting/terrifying thing is that a not insubstantial number of military honchos WANTED a nuclear war with the logic that it was better to do it now while we still had nuclear "superiority" than wait for the Russians to catch up. The Air Force actually sent planes into Soviet airspace while Kennedy was negotiating in an attempt to provoke the Russians. Crazy ####### times.
Curtis LeMay bows before no man in the callous disregard for human life.
A truly dangerous lunatic. They really should have a chapter on him when they teach American history to kids.
And Rosenthal, get over it. I often feel like there are a lot of 40-60 year old guys in America who are desperately trying to live up to their fathers' Greatest Generation thing.
Tl;dr. Seriously, though, till my eyes glazed over, it was just diplomatic banalities. Does it get better at some point?
Edit: I looked here.
Also, did Robothal break down and get replaced by Punditbot? Or has Rosenthal been doing tangentially sports related Repoz bait for a while?
You mean a product of his time? What you define as lunacy others would define as using reason to make the best choice from a small group of unpalatable choices.
Curtis LeMay was dead wrong during the Cuban missile crisis, and the course of action he recommend could have lead directly to WWIII. But let's not forget the Navy depth-charged a Soviet submarine that was not only armed with nuclear torpedoes, but had orders to fire them if hulled, so he wasn't the only one.
But LeMay was a tough, smart, guy who helped win an important war, and who rebuilt our modern air force from a very lowly state in the 1950s. If you want to win or prevent wars you need guys like him. I just wouldn't elect him vice president.
Well, since the character is based on him, makes sense. I think the Nazi Dr. in the wheelchair is supposed to be Werner von Braun.
Exactly. LeMay was indeed dead wrong during the Cuban missile crisis, but in WW2 his decision to change the tactics of the B-29 raids from high altitude precision bombing to low-altitude incendaries was one of the major factors in defeating Japan.
Only because it turned out that the Emperor had a conscience afterall- whereas in WWII we could (and were) firebombing all of Germany's cities literally at will and it had no effect whatsoever on der Fuhrer...
Any way, there was a play out there based upon Kennedy's taped conversations, apparently the playwright/director based his dialogue on written transcripts- LeMay came off particularly.. wrong- many times what on paper looks like awful things being spouted by LeMay- come across very differently when one hears his voice- it comes across as a question- or even LeMay being funny (in his own odd way). Very hard person to peg - Bomber Harris OTOH...
No, I mean he was a sociopath. Pure accident of birthplace is what differentiates him from say, a Reinhard Heydrich.
LeMay wasn't "wrong" during the Cuban missile crisis, he was just being LeMay. I don't think his role in developing/promoting area bombing in WWII was any manner of strategic genius -- it was a matter of him truly lacking the conscience that others (like say, Churchill) wrestled with in regards to whether utter annihilation and substantial loss of civilian life was a valid trade-off in conduct of a war. Note that I'm not saying it was the wrong call - I'm just saying that nothing that has ever been written by LeMay, said by LeMay, or relayed about him gives me any indication that he even weighed the death of say... civilian women and children.
Such men can be useful in prosecution of a war - Heydrich was certainly of substantial value to Hitler (setting aside the debate for a moment on the overall 'strategy' of Hitler in regards to occupation) - but it takes more than wearing the same team colors and a more scrupulous political leadership above such a man for me not to recognize him for what he is/was.
What I think you miss is that there is no indication that LeMay saw the "best choice" as 'unpalatable' -- even going back to his early command days in the ETO, LeMay was considered to have a rather callous attitude towards casualties.
You mean Dr. Strangelove...
Eh, not really. It may have shortened the war by a few months, and I'm fine with that, but the subs were going to strangle Japan regardless of the outcome of the air war.
on LeMay's genius -- there are plenty of military thinkers who believe LeMay's zealous focus on strategic bombing was a prime culprit for the AF's relative ineffectiveness in Vietnam (setting aside "Vietnam" and all that entails). Clearly, fleets of strat bombers wasn't a particularly wise focus for fighting a jungle war in the backwoods of Indochina...
On the one hand it is a vestige of the cold war and on the other it's due to the Cuban exile community and the political pandering directed their way due to their ability/willingness to vote as a block.
I think most Americans really couldn't care less about Castro, the Cuban government or our Government's policy towards Cuba, but the ones who do care, really really really care.
Castro, the Cuban government or our Government's policy towards CubaGuillen, the Miami Marlins, or MLB's policy towards the Marlins, but the ones who do care, really really really care.The character of Strangelove has a lot of lines lifted from Herman Kahn.
Guillen's comment was the kind of idiotic, thoughtless babble he'll spout. The man has no ideology other than "look at me!" I find Rosenthal's craven response more troubling. <hyperbolic overreaction> The right thing to do would have Fox firing him for cause. </hyperbolic overreaction>
Well it isn't a direct quote, obviously, but Wilbur Morrison's Point of No Return: The Story of the 20th Air Force cites a conversation between LeMay and Nimitz (who originally opposed the firebombing of Japanese cities) where LeMay admits to Nimitz that civilian casualties would be high, but that "What it came down to [LeMay] said, was that the firebombing of these cities, brutal as it was for non-combatants, was the only way to destroy Japan's ability to wage war."
The book also describes LeMay's reaction to the first Tokyo raid of March 9, which was compared by Japanese radio to "the holocaust of Rome caused by the emperor Nero", and notes that "Unlike Nero, LeMay wasn't fiddling with joy, because he wasn't the kind of man to rejoice over the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people."
For that matter, so does General Turgidson ...
It was a complete change of tactics for the B-29s of the 20th AF - as radical as any that I can think of. He took a fleet of aircraft that was designed and trained for
a) daytime
b) high-altitude
c) precision bombing
b) with strong defensive armament
and turned it into a force that operated at
a) night
b) low-altitude
c) incendiary bombing
d) with no defensive armament
It was a 180 degree turn in operations and tactics. Whether you can call it "stragic genius" is up to you. It was a completely novel, out-of-the-box approach to the relative ineffectiveness of the early B-29 raids over Japan. I'm certain that Haywood Hansell, whom LeMay replaced, would never have changed tactics so drastically.
A big problem that both LeMay's and Harris chosen terror tactic had was that firebombing cities DID NOT IN PRACTICE have this effect.
In both Germany and Japan war production was dispersed as a result of bombing, but continued. In the case of Germany, firebombing of cities had zero impact on the leadership's decisions to keep fighting- in the case of Japan it apparently had an impact on one very important individual- Hirohito was freaked out by the fire bombings of Tokyo and other cities- the use of nuclear weapons finally triggered his tipping point (Japan's military wanted to continue).
LeMay/Harris style city incinerations could have been an effective military tactic under a different set of situations-
No lead up strategic bombing- let's say that there were no bombings of German cities prior to 1944, instead bombers used tactically, B-24s/17s used tactically to carpet bomb troop formations, etc. In such a situation manufacturing would not have been as dispersed as it was in 1944, production sites would not have been as "hardened" or as heavily defended as they were. IN such a situation an "out of the blue" 1000 bomber raid against a manufacturing site would have had far more effect. Instead we had repeated raids against the same targets, 50 bombers then 150, then 500 etc... and each time the target would get harder and harder... or even move.
From Germany's POV there was one major significant change in Bomber tactics that caught them flatfooted and incapable of responding effectively- the P-51 Mustang- how do you shoot down a big 4 engined bomber? Seriously? You can put a surprisingly high number of machine gun rounds into a B-17 and the damn thing will keep flying- your anti-bomber aircraft have to be big enough to carry large caliber auto-cannon not just machine guns - they have to be strong enough to carry a lot of ammo - being "stable gun platforms" helps as well- which means less maneuverable - twin engined aircraft like the ME-110 were better at shooting down bombers than dedicated fighters like ME-109s and FW-190s.
The relatively swift introduction of Merlin-engined P-51s as long range escort fighters was not anticipated by Germany and pretty much eviscerated their existing bomber interception force in short order- the Me-110s and 410 and similar aircraft were forced from the skies- the fighters had to be pulled back to attack bomber streams - which meant that German troops effectively no longer had ANY close air support.
"I've sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber. Didn't want to do it. Felt I owed it to them."
LeMay had been in Europe, in Europe Great Britain had turned to night bombings- night firebombings - after daylight bombings had proved ineffective. The US had stubbornly attempted to bomb during the day- and was taking punitive losses- his 180 degree change of tactic was not something "visionary," rather he was merely aping Bomber Harris.
Sure there were problems with high altitude daylight bombing- but at least during the daytime raids the Air Force was trying to hit specific targets- specific military targets- nighttime area bombing? That's a "screw this, let's just kill as many Japs as we can" type of tactic.
The Japanese never mounted the same ferocity of defense the Germans managed until Late 1944. Therefore, LeMay could easily change tactics for maximum effect. His eggheads determined the best approach and Curtis implemented it and with little argument from crews. That said, the reliability of the early B-29s models, especially the extremely complicated engines, made his decisions easier.
The switch to "RAF" tactics in the Pacific was a case of suiting needs and things seemed to change quicker in the Pacific, for many reasons. However, not every mission was an incendiary mission - simply the most devastating. In many ways, the racial overtones of the Pacific campaign allowed for the in discriminant bombing of populated areas by the USAAF, which it did not perform in Europe (the great fire raids were all RAF sanctioned, planned and executed, though 8th and 15th AF units did participate).
Is it cooler to be outraged at Guillen's comments, or Rosenthal's reaction to Guillen's comments?
Aerial mining and submarine warfare actually. The bombing campaign made little dent on the morale or production of the Japanese, especially the military junta decision makers. What was making a large dent was the unrestricted submarine warfare that was quickly sinking every available tonnage of Japanese merchant ships. Couple with the 1945 campaign to sow mines via air, this began to noticeably choke Japanese supply efforts between bastions and the home islands.
The incendiary raids were a hoped for not so subtle hint that we'll burn you into the Stone Age so please surrender. The people suffered and the cities burned, but little impact was felt on the capacity of the actual war machine or production efforts.
British heavy bombers never operated at low altitude - that alone would be a major change of tactics.
As as far the whole precision bombing versus area bombing controversy, I have to admit that I have very strong views on the subject, ones that are best summed up by this passage from Jon Lake's Halifax Squadrons of World War 2:
Hard for me to see how it was any sort of 'strategic genius' considering it didn't really achieve much in the manner of strategic aims... The firebombing of Tokyo produced 250K to 500K civilian deaths, depending on whose numbers you want to believe - yet, that was in March. Yes, I'm well aware that Japan had decentralized a lot machine works - but by that point, Japan was already unable to conduct much in the way of meaningful operations beyond kamikaze attacks... something the firebombing didn't stop, either.
Setting aside the Hiroshima/Nagasaki/Soviets in Manchuria debate -- hard for me to see where LeMay's tactics had much of a strategic impact on ending the war.
Well the campaign in later 1943 and early 1944 was disastrous, but was going to change to support OVERLORD and NEPTUNE anyway. Thereafter the bombers were used in a more tactical fashion. The USAAF and RAF destroyed the French rail network and harassed and disabled much of the infrastructure in and close to the front lines. The heavy scale of strategic bombing did not pick up again until Fall 1944 and then again into 1945.
Your conjecture about the production capabilities is false however, the Germans dispersed starting in 1941 because of the RAF's limited raids and took great pains to keep the production capacity up to speed - there was a war on. Production facilities were incredibly hard to knock out, as the Allies found post-war. What might have helped was what actually happened - sustained bombardment of the transportation network and fuel sources.
The Luftwaffe solved that problem by mounting cannons in the MEs and FWs - highly effective 20mm and 30mm guns that did the job quite well. Since nothing happens in isolation, having the dogfight to the bombers then kill the bombers meant having a large force of planes and pilots that would be able to win each stage of the engagement. Unfortunately, while the Germans produced thousands of MEs and FWs (of sufficient quality) and a sprinkling of highly ineffective jets, they lagged behind on pilots - the expertn system did not rotate pilots to training billets, nor did it produce waves of pilots good enough to match their Allied counter-parts.
The ME-110 was not better in daylight, but proved capable in the night sky, along with Ju-88 covnersions. However, single engine fighters armed with sufficiently large cannons proved quite capable of disrupting the bomber stream. When the USAAF was able to counter with a sufficient screen of escort to and from the target, things change for the worse. The Allies battered the Luftwaffe with an endless supply of men and materials, and evolving tactics.
No, not really. You're conflating two issues - the Mustangs (and Lightnings and Thunderbolts) did great service as escorts for the strategic bombing campaign. Those same fighters and many more like it (Spits and Hurris and Typhoons aplenty) served to maintain aerial superiority of the FEBA. Allied tactical air operations were always superior in quantity to German efforts and it was the strategic bombing campaign that allowed the Allies relative free reign over the battlefield tactically with the A-20s, B-25, B-26, etc.
Also, relatively few Merlin-engined Mustangs existed. The plentiful Packard-engined Mustangs were better since the mass-production of the Merlin engine was impossible. Tweaking the engine design allowed the Mustangs to multiply.
The RAF tried and failed at daylight bombing, but even when the USAAF encountered severe loss rates, the decision was made to continue bombing so as to not allow any rest for the Germans. In fact, the US tactics evolved as any good combat organization will do - bombers alone simply couldn't bludgeon their way to the target as Douhet and his proponents prophesized. However, the value in daylight strategic bombing was clear - the resources devoted to the aerial campaign on all sides was a force multiplier for the Allies.
Now, I happen to think the strategic campaign was not worth the cost, but certainly worth the effort. I think a perusal of the USSBS is worth your time - the USAAF never openly admitted failure, but the careful study of the evolution of the tactics shows an organization that had a mission and confounded itself on how to complete that mission. Same for Bomber Command - pin pricking the Germans had to be done if for no other purposes than morale.
The Packard engine was the Merlin, licensed for production in the US. They were basically interchangable - some Lancasters flew with both versions on the same airframe. Over 150,000 Merlins were produced - I'd hardly call mass production impossible.
No, but his strategic vision was only unleashed a few times and for devastating results - Rolling Thunder, Linebacker. Maintained strategic bombing of North Vietnam was not a political reality, so the burden was left to the mud movers and Thuds. By 1966, that area of focus was evolving as well, but the what hampered the AF in Vietnam were political constraints (maybe not all imposed by politicians) - route planning and coordination were sloppy and rote and the typical local innovation was micro-managed out by career-minded individuals wanting to keep their records clean rather than instigate controversial solutions.
The USAAF did not orient itself to fight a sustained tactical campaign until 1967-68 - the results (pre-Top Gun and Red Flag) changed dramatically, especially as technology caught up (LGB and better radar and targeting systems, for example).
I will agree that the AF never likes or wants to be tactical - even today, the AF is trying to un-burden itself from the highly capable A-10s to maintain F-22 fleets and production lots for the F-35.
One major command decision that paid huge dividends was Jimmy Doolittle's order to allow the 8th AF escort fighters to go after the German fighters, and not tie themselves to the bomber formations. By having enough numbers to seek out the German fighters before they engaged the bomber formations, they both maximized German fighter losses and reduced US bomber losses by engaging the Luftwaffe before they could intercept the bombers. It also aloowed them to strafe German fighters at their home airfields.
While the Packard was undoubtedly based on the Merlin, they are in detail different enough. The Packard was optimized for performance, and the manufacturing techniques Packard introduced.
The 150,000 produced was the entire production run, starting in 1933 and ending post-war. Packard produced 55,000 during the war years (1940-145).
Another thing that Japan was incredibly short on in 44/45 -- if the Germans were lagging behind, the Japanese were starving. Obviously, the whole divine wind mythos may have been a prime mover, but Japan was critically short of skilled pilots and facing even greater fuel shortages than Germany, wasn't going to be training any great quantity even if they had a good regimen for doing so. This went back years - the A6Ms and Ki-27s certainly frustrated plenty of American pilots in their bulky Wildcats and P-40s - but there were also plenty of American fliers who lived on as their Japanese counterparts died after unsuccessful engagements.
Surplus will do that for you, as well as a rotational system that moved experienced pilots back to training billets - Allied pilots were staggeringly better trained than their German counterparts by 1944 and 1945, allowing novice Allied pilots to undertake harder missions sooner, keeping the Germans on edge by not allowing for any operational recuperation.
Oh, and better airplanes helps. Going the entire war with the Me-109 was not a good decision - the airframe could not accept the upgrades necessary to compete with the better performing Allied marks.
Oh, and the gas - the Allies used a higher octane and the performance difference became more noticeable as the quality of German av fuel decreased.
Well, they did have the Fw 190, which for a year after its introduction in mid-1941, was better than any Allied fighter, until the Spitfire Mk.IX came along. I've never quite understood why they kept the Bf 109 in production for so long - peak Bf 109 production was in 1944 - when they had what was a vastly better fighter in wide scale production. Adolf Galland, who was the Luftwaffe's head of fighters at the time, opposed continued production of the 109, but was overruled.
One of the unsung factors in winning the Battle of Britain was the change in aviation fuel used by the RAF from the beginning of the war. Shortly before the Battle of Britain, RAF Fighter Command went to 100 octane aviation fuel, allowing the climb rate and maximum speeds of the Spitfire and Hurricane to be boosted significantly.
LeMay HAD to fly at lower altitude because of the jetstream over Japan, LeMay COULD have his bombers fly at lower altitude since the B-29 was much faster than the British heavies and so had less time over target- a wave of fully loaded British heavies at low altitude would have gotten eviscerated by flak.
A. Because not producing Me-109s didn't equate to immediate simultaneous increase in FW-190 production. (true)
B. Because the War will be over in a year anyway (not true, but believed at one point...)
C. Because, oh my god we are losing, and any disruption in production will be catastrophic)
The 109 with upgrades remained reasonably competitive, plus it used a different engine than the 190.
It was not keeping the 109 in production so long that was the problem, at worst it was a symptom of the problem. They should have been developing a 109 replacement the minute the first production model was airborne, they didn't because the war would be over before any envisioned replacement would be ready (or so they believed)
In any event the 190 program was allowed to proceed largely because it used an engine that no competing projects needed*
*Germany had a "Bomber B" project, a twin engine bomber to replace the medium bombers they started the war with- and they kept designing bombers intended to employ two 2000+ HP inline engines... of course no such engine actually existed, they kept trying to weld two vee engines together -creating an X engine... none of which worked, to be fair to the German engineers the Brits tried this too- but whereas the Brits eventually got vee engines up to over 2000+ hp, the Germans inexplicably kept trying to perfect the X layout... and designing aircraft around engines that did not exist. Sticking two BMW-801s (the 190's engine) onto existing German bombers would have greatly improved them- let alone designing a bomber for that engine, but Germany never did that.
The ultimate "B Bomber" was never actually flown by the Germans, we on the other hand began mass producing equivalents (the A-26, also the P-61 and F7F "fighters") - The people in charge of military aircraft development and procurement in both Germany and the UK had an almost irrational aversion to radial engines, even after the success of the FW-190, Japanese fighters and American fighters ...
The Bristol radial engines, the Mercury, Pegasus and Hercules, were used by many of the successful British aircraft, including the Halifax, Wellington, Beaufighter, Swordfish, and even the Lancaster Mk.II. It is true that the RAF favored in-line engines for their fighters, and that the radials were much more widely used on multi-engined aircraft. The Hercules-powered Halifax Mk.III was regarded as vastly better than the earlier Merlin-powered versions.
I can't recall: Guillen, Castro, or LeMay?
I think we're better with "Casablanca" and "I'm shocked, shocked that (provocative speech) is going on here."
P.S.: Keep the military stuff going...I'm learning a thing or two. Plus, it's a nice threadjack from this "shocked" stupidity.
Which dramatically improved the plane's performance over the Jumo powered variants, but it took them a long time to make the switch,
The DO-217 was basically the last of that "generation" of German Bombers (pre-war design) and was originally designed to use in-line engines, ten inline engined versions were not successful, the radial engined version was - but the Germans still kept trying to convert it back to use inline engines...
The Brits had wonderful radial engines, which wee woefully underemployed the first half of the war, for instance, why on earth did they stubbornly insist on trying to develop the Typhoon around an absurdly unreliable X-inline engine when they already had an available radial of similar power output? They eventually made the switch, and the eventual aircraft such as the Tempest II were far more effective...
The Short Stirling- had the right engines, the wings were too damn short and hampered the plane's altitude, rate of climb, and max takeoff weight- why? So the damn plane could fit in pre-war hangars - well during the actual war the damn planes were parked outside anyway. So the Stirling was a failure, but the Merlin engined heavies (which had better aerodynamic designs) were not- and so it seems the engines were blamed
even though the Stirling's shortcomings had an obvious cause (the wings were too short)
The Napier Sabre was a fine engine - when it worked, which was, um, some of the time. One of my favorite aircraft markings of the war was the pilot who had this painted on the engine cowling of his Typhoon - "IF THIS ENGINE CATCHES FIRE ON STARTING, DON'T JUST WAVE YOUR BLOODY ARMS AT THE PILOT - TRY PUTTING THE BLOODY THING OUT AS WELL". The Centaurus engine in the Tempest Mk.II ran into development problems, which was why it didn't see service until after the war. It led, of course, to the Hawker Sea Fury, which also used a Centaurus radial, and was one of the finest piston-engined fighters ever built, serving with distinction in Korea. The cowling installations in both the Tempest Mk.II and the Sea Fury were very heavily influenced by the Fw 190's cowling design.
The Stirling had a double whammy - not only were the wings limited to the size of pre-war hangars, the size of the fuselage was limited by the need for the components to be able to be broken down to fit standard size Air Ministry packing crates. Shorts had a lot of experience at building large aircraft with their pre-war flying boats. I'm sure that given a free hand they would have come up with a good design for the Stirling, but they just had too many obstacles to overcome. The Lancaster and Halifax, the other two British four-engined heavies, were both developed from twin-engine designs, and so didn't have the limitations put on the Stirling from the beginning.
He's always been an idiot. An idiot who is good at getting scoops and reporting rumors, but an idiot nevertheless. I can't remember a time where his opinion articles were anything but execrable nonsense.
That question is not allowed sir.
According to this editorial in the Washington Post, 6 million soldiers and civilians together killed in American wars since WW2 is a conservative estimate. This empire has murdered a holocaust's worth of people and nobody seems to give a ####. If Robert Bales was a drone pilot who killed 16 civilians in a strike, nobody would ever know his name.
I mean, who here hasn't killed 100,000 innocent people, give or take, in a given year?
Well done.
"Well done indeed. You killed 100,000 people? You must get up very early in the morning."
Kind of like Germany, 1914. Or the Phillies with Halladay/Lee. Get our shot in before our window of opportunity closes. Except those guys actually pulled the trigger.
Exactamente.
Yeah, you can also argue that the sub blockade was also not decisive because of the strategic bombing campaign. Point being you didn't need both. (You arguably needed neither. Just the ability to eventually drop the A-bombs.)
EDIT: Yeah. Should have refreshed.
Same reason they got the FW-190 in the first place. Maximum capacity of a particular type of engine. They couldn't make more FW-190s without re-tooling (and they were getting conflicting feedback on the relative merits of the 109 and 190. Many top pilots swore by the 109) and they didn't want the down time that would have entailed (they always needed massive numbers of fighter)
In a sense it's the same decision the Allies faced with the Sherman. Worked reasonably well to have massive numbers of an inferior tank, but the Germans were basically on the short end of both quality (of plane and generally speaking of pilots) and numbers in the air war.
EDIT: It would also help to catch up after posting the previous.
Except, the Sherman decision was much worse. Tanks were evolving every year; a great tank in '42 was completely obsolete in '44.
And, the US had plenty of spare production capacity. We just could have not sent the Soviets 30,000 Shermans, and we would have had plenty of capacity to get 5,000 Pershings to Europe in '44.
By '43, there was no chance of the Soviets getting knocked out of the war, we should have drastically curtailed Lend Lease to them.
Ummm... we didn't send the Soviets 30K Shermans -- the soviets got about 4k. I think you're confusing Soviet T-34 production - they produced about 30-35k T-34s plus another 20k or so variants.
I don't think the US exported 30k shermans total under lend-lease.
What the Soviets got were a lot of trucks -- a majority of Soviet support vehicles were American built trucks -- but their tank corp was overwhelmingly Russian... and the T-34 was a fine, fine tank.
Like Sosa, does he no habla Ingles?
Meanwhile, baseball can't pander to China hard enough or fast enough...
There's an unbelievable, Bible-length list of things that MLB does that are worse than what Ozzie said.
And I can't stand either Ozzie or the Marlins.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the desire to do business with China, but this whole good authoritarian communist country and bad authoritarian communist country thing is just weird. We're doing more and more business with Vietnam and Saigon is still Ho Chi Minh City. It's pretty clear we don't care about communism anymore so we need to get over Castro and end the ridiculous blockade already.
That just seems awfully, awfully stupid to me. I mean, it was stupid of Ozzie to say something stupid, but he has a long history of saying stupid things. Why exactly should this bring a suspension? Did any of the other stupid things he has said bring a suspension?
I'm not going to run the numbers, but would it be fair to say that... I don't know, the Saudi royal family is as repressive against its citizenry as the Castros? If Ozzie had said "Man, I love that House of Saud. You've got to hand it to them - centuries after most other royal families have reduced to rich window dressing, they're still rich AND ruling a country" would he have been suspended?
The guys in charge of development/procurement had their heads up their back orifices. Pre-war tank "doctrine" evolved in a a particular direction in the US- tanks were for infantry support and breakthroughs- NOT to fight other tanks- well how do you fight tanks then? Bazookas and "Tank Destroyers"- Tank Destroyers were "tanks" that had bigger guns and were more mobile/faster than tanks- how do you get both a bigger gun and a faster tank? That's right you sacrifice armor- not only do you have thinner armor, but in many cases the turrets had no effing roofs (which meant that not only did crews get wet in the rain but they could not fight in urban areas- or heavily wooded areas- the turret crews were sitting ducks...
But we had to keep using the Tank Destroyers, because they were the only AFVs (armored fighting vehicles) we had that could take out the newer German Tanks (Panthers and Tigers)- the stupidity extended to the long refusal to up-gun the Sherman (because you see if you gave the Sherman a better gun the Sherman crews would be tempted to go hunting German tanks and that was not their assigned job) It even got to the point that when the Brits asked for a Sherman with a better gun we said no- they then took lend lease M-4s, cut opened the turrets pulled out the short barreled 75s and out in much more powerful guns - the result was called the Sherman Firefly- eventually in the last year of the war we started up-gunning the Sherman.
The Sherman was not terrible, it was reliable, mobile (not as much as the Tank destroyers- but more mobile than German Tanks)- and had more armor protection than the Tank Destroyers (not as much as the later German Tanks of course). We had many options pre D Day
1: Stick a bigger gun in the Sherman (this could have been done at any time)
2: We could have put the M-6 into production (3 prototypes were built 1941/42, eventually about 40 total were built)- it weighed 57 tons (about the same as the German Tiger)- bizarrely most were fitted with a 75mm gun and a 37mm gun- though eventually some were fitted with 90mm guns- it had problems of course, but it was a rough match for the Tiger Tank- and it *could* have been produced even earlier- but it never went into mass production - why? Because it simply did not fit in with our pre-war doctrine of what a tank was and what a tank was supposed to do. In fact those in charge of that doctrine did not seriously rethink it until 1944- when Sherman crews were getting slaughtered en masse in France - the Shermans prevailed eventually through sheer weight of numbers...
I don't think the US exported 30k shermans total under lend-lease.
What the Soviets got were a lot of trucks -- a majority of Soviet support vehicles were American built trucks -- but their tank corp was overwhelmingly Russian... and the T-34 was a fine, fine tank.
Yes, I think I confused the Lend-lease totals, and the number of trucks was massive. In any case, the US had lots of capacity to build 5,000 Pershings.
I read that the Marlins suspended him. I know everyone here black-hats Selig as per Phil Hartman's Reagan, but I think it's more likely the Marlins themselves decided: you cost us money, you are suspended. - shrug -
Too easy.
I like my M36 in World of Tanks. I think I'll play right now.
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