I have three questions about Twelve O'Clock High that I would like to know:
1) What does it mean when the pilot says that the plane has reached the IP?
2) How does the bombardier control the norden bomb sight and keeping the plane up at the same time?
3) When a pilot gets a Distinguished Flying Cross, shouldn't everyone in the plane get one?
See You Upstairs.
I have three questions about Twelve O'Clock High that I would like to know:
1) What does it mean when the pilot says that the plane has reached the IP?
2) How does the bombardier control the norden bomb sight and keeping the plane up at the same time?
3) When a pilot gets a Distinguished Flying Cross, shouldn't everyone in the plane get one?
Thank you very much for the answers to my questions. They were very informative. Now I have another question.
In the episodes "Here's To Courageous Cowards" and "Faith, Hope And Sergeant Aronson", the Nazi Concentration Camps are mentioned. I was under the impression that for various reasons the Allies (or at least the average soldiers) didn't know about these chambers of horrors until late 1944 or early 1945.
Since as far as I can tell, Season One takes place in 1942. Did any allied intelligence agency know about these camps, and would your typical U.S. GI have access to this information?
See you upstairs.
Allied intelligence knew of the existence of the camp system and knew something was going on in them; there was a lot of speculation, some of it very well-placed, as to what that something was. The shock the GIs on the ground got upon entering these camps was upon learning how truthful those speculations were and how massive the extent of the genocide had reached.
shareThanks for the swift reply. Lately I've been reading and watching about how the average German citizens would tell the allied forces that they had no idea that the camps were killing camps, even though in some cases their towns were very close to the camps. Do you know Of anyone in those towns that really didn't know?
See you upstairs.
The evidence is that the vast majority of German civilians were totally ignorant of what went on in the camps.
After General Patton's 3rd Army liberated Ohrdruf, its first concentration camp, his subordinate corps commander, Lt Gen Walton "Bulldog" Walker, found the mayor of the town and his wife and forced them to walk through the camp and among the corpses. The mayor and his wife were so shocked that they immediately went home afterward and hanged themselves. When Patton arrived on scene, he had the entire town marched through the camp, and the townspeople appeared genuinely shocked and in disbelief.
Before long, General Eisenhower had the practice going for almost every camp liberated by US troops, and if everyone wasn't genuinely shocked, it had to be the greatest spontaneous acting job in history.
MadTom,
I've really enjoyed our conversations about this show and about World War Two.
NOW I'd like to tell you an interesting story about General George Patton (who by the way, attended a church about a mile from were I live). Apparently when Patton's troops got to France, the weather kept the troops from advancing. General Patton asked one of the chaplains, Fathereill, to write a prayer to ask God to make the weather improve the weather so they could advance.
Father O'Neill protested, saying that he didn't think that was right to write a prayer that would lead to other human beings to die. However, General Patton insisted, so Father O'Neill did as he was asked.
So, lo and behold, after Father O'Neill wrote the prayer, the weather improved. General Patton gave the chaplain a Bronze Star. Is that a cool story or what?
See you upstairs.
Apparently you've never seen the 1970 movie Patton, which is surprising for someone as much into World War II history as you seem to be.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066206/combined
This movie won seven Oscars, and the exchange between General Patton and Father O'Neill and the resultant change in weather was well-depicted in it. This is a must-see for you!
I did not know that. You're right. I will now get a copy of the DVD ASAP. Thanks!
See you upstairs.
Howdy, MadTom!
I have another question for you. Every time that I watch The Longest Day and they're showing the scenes where a lot of the German High Command leaving Normandy to attend war games I always think, "WHY do the Germans need to conduct war games when there's ALREADY a war going on?"
Any thoughts?
See you upstairs
Wargaming is an intrinsic part of all operational planning at battalion and higher headquarters levels, even in the middle of combat operations. It exposes flaws and vulnerabilities in the plans and systems, applying Murphy's Law of "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong" to anticipate as many (as practical with the time constraints) of the enemy's moves and plan to counteract them.
shareHi! I just read today that Bleinham Castle, where Winston Churchill was born and which has been home to the Duke Marlborough's family for at least 200 hundred years, is being used to film Transformers 5.
The problem is, that pathetic excuse for a director Michael Bay is some redecorating. He's turning into Adolf Hitler's HQ. Yes, you read me right, the birthplace of Winston Churchill is being used to look like Hitler's HQ!
I am very disgusted about this.
Hi there, MadTom! I just thought I'd let you know that I got the Patton DVD today. I'll let you know what I think about it after I watch it.
By the way, I have another question for you. Every time there's a scene in the Officers Club and one of the Nazi propaganda broadcasters comes on the radio and starts saying all that stuff about the 918th and Frank, I always think: "How do they get that info?" Could you please explain this to me?
See you upstairs.
As long as we're talking about classic World War II movies from the 20th Century Fox studios, if you watch the original 1949 Twelve O'Clock High movie from which the series was developed (starring Gregory Peck as Frank Savage, Dean Jagger as Harvey Stovall and Hugh Marlowe as the Joe Gallagher character, named Ben Gately in the movie), there is a scene early in the movie in which Lord Haw-Haw, the nickname of a real-life British defector to the Germans, makes one of his propaganda broadcasts. He taunts the 918th, and Savage's predecessor by name, and points out that one of their B-17s had crashed in the ocean when the group was on the way to Britain from the US, and he says that its crew was "quite cooperative" once a German U-Boat crew had picked them up.
Contrary to the way they were depicted in Hogan's Heroes, the Germans running the Prisoner of War camps were quite adept at getting Allied prisoners to reveal more military information than they were conscious of, and with little or no torture, just by engaging them in what seemed like innocuous conversation. Then consider the loss rates of the Allied bomber crews early in the war (before the USAAF deployed the P-51 Mustang as an escort fighter capable of accompanying the bombers all the way across Europe and establishing air superiority) and the fact that any aircrews bailing out over Nazi-occupied territory had an infinitely greater chance of getting taken prisoner than being rescued by Resistance guerrillas. The Germans had a large, steady stream of captured Allied aircrews waiting to be unwittingly tapped for current information about their units. Even with US air superiority, and the shrinking of Nazi-occupied territory after D-Day, there were still aircraft losses and aircrews being taken prisoner.
It was also feared by the Allies that German spy networks were able to gather information directly from observing and conversing with Allied military personnel in Britain itself. After the war, it was revealed that MI-5, the British counterintelligence agency, had broken and rounded up the entire German spy network by getting the first few to roll over the rest of the network or else summarily get hanged. They then had the spies transmit bogus disinformation to the Germans, usually with a gun to their head, for the rest of the war. In order to give the disinformation credibility and keep the Germans from learning that their entire network had been compromised, MI-5 had to let them transmit some true and verifiable but innocuous information along with the disinformation. It was a tricky tightrope to walk.
Thanks for the explanation. I do have a copy of the movie DVD. I haven't had a chance to watch Patton yet, but I'll let you know when I have.
Another question. Right now I'm watching season one episode Decision, and I wanted ask you about the U.S. army photo recon plane. What were these planes called, and did the unusual back end of the plane help their pilots around easier?
See you upstairs.