Author: Grumpy
A New York City man who walked cross-country from the Big Apple to California over five months had his belongings stolen after stepping foot in the Golden State. Bronx resident Chantz Rivera started his lengthy trek on May 31, walking continuously for 149 days while dragging all of his belongings in a shopping cart before reaching the West Coast.
After getting to San Francisco on Oct. 26, he went to a McDonald’s near Fillmore Street and Golden Gate Avenue – only to have a bag with his portable charger and USB flash drives swiped. Rivera said that he initially didn’t mind because he was tired and sick.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, somebody took something? I don’t care. It ain’t worth nothing. I’m already here [in California],” he told the San Francisco Standard. But then he realized his memory cards and flash drive contained videos and pictures from his journey. Which really sucks big time in my book! Grumpy
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Kinda kinky to me
Sixteen million Americans served in uniform during World War 2; 418,500 perished. One in every 38 American servicemen gave their lives for their country.
Our flight crews had it the worst: 44.4% of all RAF bomber crewmen died in the rarefied skies above Europe. However, that pales in comparison to the German U-boats.
In the opening salvoes of the Battle of the Atlantic, U-boat wolf packs wreaked unmitigated havoc on Allied transport ships. Over time, however, improvements in countermeasures as well as the breaking of the Enigma code fundamentally changed that calculus. By war’s end, three out of every four German submariners had been killed in combat.
Occurring as it did in the middle of vast oceans, WW2 naval combat was pitiless. The winners might go home to fight another day. The losers almost invariably slipped beneath the waves to either drown or be mercilessly crushed by the weight of the sea. Such stakes ensured that all involved fought like Norse berserkers.
The Players
The night May 5, 1943 was clear with a bright moon. U-66, a Type IXC German U-boat under the command of Oberleutnant Gehard Seehausen, was cruising along the surface recharging its batteries off of the Cape Verde Islands. U-66 was Hitler’s seventh-most successful German submarine now on her ninth war cruise. Her tally included some 33 Allied ships. U-66 had been at sea for four months and was desperately low on fuel.
As luck would have it, a U.S. Navy TBM Avenger launched from the American escort carrier U.S.S. Block Island picked up U-66 on radar some 20 miles from the U.S.S. Buckley, a compact American destroyer escort that was just itching for a fight. The Buckley’s skipper was Lt. Cmdr. Brent Able. In the dim light, the captain of U-66 mistook the Buckley for a German resupply submarine.
The Fight
By the time Seehausen realized his mistake, the two warships were only 4,000 yards apart. The German skipper ordered a snap torpedo shot that passed harmlessly off the Buckley’s starboard side. Lieutenant Cmdr. Able opened fire with everything that would shoot.
The Buckley ravaged the trapped U-boat for the next two minutes with her 3-inch deck guns, 40mm Bofors, 20mm Oerlikons, and sundry .50-caliber machine guns. High-explosive rounds ripped into the submarine’s conning tower and superstructure. Seehausen fired another ineffectual torpedo. Then Lt. Cmdr. Able then gave his ship hard right rudder and drove the nimble vessel up onto the deck of the U-boat.
In desperation, the Seehausen ordered his men topside. Some attempted to surrender. Others fought like Dervishes.
The crew of the Buckley had emptied their small arms lockers. First Officer Klaus Herbig led a German boarding party onto the forecastle of the destroyer escort. American sailors with Thompsons and .50-caliber machine guns tore them to pieces.
To say this was a desperate fight just doesn’t do it justice. Two of the attacking Kriegsmariners were struck in the head with coffee mugs. Gun crews unable to depress their weapons sufficiently began throwing empty ammunition cases down on the advancing Germans. Several enemy sailors still managed to board the American vessel.
The boatswain’s mate pulled his 1911 pistol and shot the first man dead. The Chief Fire Controlman swept the deck of the German boat with his Thompson. Lt. Cmdr. Able later said he enjoyed, “Excellent results.”
One enemy sailor managed to make it into the wardroom where a ship’s cook doused him in hot coffee before pummeling him into submission with the coffee pot. Five Germans were captured alive onboard the Buckley and escorted below by a sailor armed with a hammer. Meanwhile, the German deck gun crew literally disintegrated when struck by a burst of four 40mm high-explosive rounds.
As the U-boat scraped along the Buckley’s starboard side, an American torpedoman tossed a hand grenade through the open hatch to the U-boat’s conning tower. The dying U-boat then veered into the Buckley near the stern, tearing a hole in the engine room and shearing off the starboard screw. However, U-66 was done. The entire fight had spanned a mere 16 minutes.
The Aftermath
The crew of the Buckley expended 300 rounds of .45 ACP, 60 rounds of .30-06, 30 rounds of 12-gauge buckshot, and a pair of fragmentation grenades along with the aforementioned dinnerware and coffeepot. Roughly half of the U-boat’s crew survived. Oberleutnant Seehausen went down with his boat. He was 26.
The Buckley returned to Boston under her own power. Lieutenant Cmdr. Brent Able was awarded the Navy Cross, the Navy’s second-highest award for valor. His crew was authorized to wear a combat star on their European-African Theater ribbons.
The sinking of U-66 was the last close quarters ship-to-ship combat in U.S. Naval history. What a bunch of freaking studs.
So is the old saying “attention to detail”! Grumpy
I pulled this off Quora, I saw it taking a “Microbreak” at work surfing the phone. so I shamelessly clipped it.
In 1974, surviving WWII commanders wargamed Hitler’s invasion of Britain and made a darkly comedic discovery: the Royal Navy wouldn’t even need to fire its guns to sink the German fleet.
The highly detailed simulation of Operation Sea Lion was held at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and featured actual combat veterans making the decisions, including Luftwaffe General Adolf Galland and Kriegsmarine Admiral Friedrich Ruge.
The wargame yielded several unexpected insights, starting with the initial assault. Most historical assumptions suggest the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy would have crushed the invasion fleet before it ever reached the beaches.
Instead, the Sandhurst simulation showed that the Germans would have successfully landed around 90,000 troops in Kent and Sussex. Because the British Army had abandoned most of its heavy equipment during the evacuation of Dunkirk just months earlier, the coastal defenses were too weak and disorganized to stop the initial beachhead. The German army quickly pushed inland, capturing their early objectives.
But the success was short-lived, largely due to the fatal flaw in German logistics. The Kriegsmarine lacked purpose-built landing craft, forcing them to commandeer hundreds of flat-bottomed river barges from the Rhine to transport men and supplies across the English Channel.
Once the British realized a full-scale invasion was underway, the Royal Navy unleashed the Home Fleet from Scapa Flow. When the British cruisers and destroyers arrived in the Channel, they found that they did not need to rely on their main guns to destroy the German supply lines. Simply steaming through the invasion flotilla at high speed would generate enough wake to swamp and capsize the flimsy, unseaworthy river barges.
With the Channel completely severed by the Royal Navy and the RAF, the 90,000 German troops who had successfully landed were suddenly trapped. Cut off from food, medical supplies, and artillery shells, their advance ground to a halt.
The Luftwaffe suffered massive losses attempting an improvised aerial resupply. Facing a fully mobilized British defense and completely out of ammunition, the entire German invasion force was compelled to surrender within six days, proving that without absolute naval and air supremacy, Sea Lion was a guaranteed trap for the German army.
German invasion barges, many of them commandeered river vessels, waiting at Boulogne Harbour in France during the Battle of Britain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.