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You should better explain what you mean by "fully automatic". Usually a weapon is called "fully automatic" if it loads and shoots with bursts (a machine gun, for example). Unlike semi-automatic which only loads
automatically, like an automatic pistol.
Such fully automatic antiaircraft guns of course existed in WW II, and even in WW I. (First specialized ...
19
There were trials and plans, but Mosquitos never actually operated from carriers. Eric "Winkle" Brown who was the chief naval test pilot at RAE Farnborough at the time, did deck-landing and takeoff trials aboard HMS Indefatigable on 25th March 1944. This was the first landing of a twin-engine aircraft aboard a carrier, and his memoirs (Wings On My Sleeve) ...
13
The "Sea Mosquito" was tested in March 1944 with carrier deck landing trials on HMS Indefatigable in the Irish Sea. The pilot (almost inevitably) was the legendary Eric 'Winkle' Brown.
He discussed the trials in a 2015 video, where he noted several problems with using the Mosquito in carrier operation, not the least of which was that the carrier’s ...
12
The 208th (SP) Field Regiment, Royal Artillery is listed on the Order of Battle for the 59 AGRA (Army Group Royal Artillery) as of May 18, 1945. It's HQ staff departed Liverpool on 28 March, 1945, arriving in Bombay 20 April. The 208th SP does not appear to have been part of 59 AGRA during the latter's post-D-Day role in N.W. Europe.
The 130 (Lowland) Field ...
10
Most obvious parts of the lend-lease for an average Soviet soldier were food (especially canned spam etc.) and trucks. Meat conserves and trucks were well familiar not only to the soldiers but also to the rest of population, this was the most common source of meat at the time of war. The word "studebaker" became a Russian word for a generic large truck. Not ...
7
I have not found information relating directly to this individual child you ask about, but there is other discussion of imprisoned children coping with the horrors around them through play.
A blog site article Kids, the Holocaust, and “Inappropriate” Play discusses this topic, and brings up a couple of references you might find enlightening,
Children and ...
6
This has multiple components:
mechanical manipulation of the round's fuze there the round's fusing (explosion height) was done mechanically by a device in the gun, so the gun crew only had to feed the rounds
continous measuring of the target's speed, course and height in the director and from that calculation of the targets estimated position at the future ...
6
this feels like something I barely expect to exist today
In 1957, the Soviet Union introduced the ZSU-23-4. Its guns were radar-guided. The operator would select a target, the radar would track the target and the control system would decide when to fire.
In 1980, the US Navy introduced the Phalanx close-in weapons system into service. It has a fully ...
5
You pose an interesting question. Short of investigating the German military archives, & assuming that they have complete records for Wilhelm Hoffman (the German government did have a notable problem of keeping its records intact in 1945), we'll have to deal with probabilities.
According to the Wikipedia article on the Battle of Stalingrad, as many as ...
4
According to this reference the Soviets fielded anti-tank guns and were added by fog:
The 11th Tank Regiment also attacked the Soviet forces. About 40 Japanese tanks run over the Soviet soldiers and rushed into the beach. The Soviet soldiers fired to the tanks with AT guns, which were unloaded on the beach in a hurry. As a fog gathered over the beach, it ...
4
I'm not seeing anything specifically about the tanks, so something looking at a full action report would probably be a better answer. However, just looking over what's there...
Tanks can be quite vulnerable to aircraft, and to anything with really big guns outside of their own limited firing range that they can't get at, like a ship or offshore gun battery.
...
4
To the question of the OP, what was the effective visibility radius, there is no straightforward answer: it depends of where you are, what was the weather, what is the training of the pilots to detect and identify ships, etc...
But speaking specifically of Midway's battle, there is an answer:
East of the fighting zone, the weather was : Partly cloudy. ...
4
The 'Tank Busters'.
From 'Myth of the Tankbuster' (HistoryNet)
[T]he RAF was the first air force to field a dedicated anti-tank
airplane, the Hawker Hurricane Mark IID, armed with two Vickers S 40mm
cannons firing tungsten-tipped rounds. First in action at Bir Hakim in
June 1942, No. 6 Squadron’s pilots quickly discovered one of the key
...
4
U.S. Lend Lease aid provided only a small portion of Russia's "ammunition," but a large proportion of Russia's transport and communications.
"Transport," such as trucks and jeeps and even aircraft are heavily branded, as is communications equipment such as radio sets. It's the ammunition that is "generic" that didn't carry American identification. But it ...
4
British Responses to the threat of Soviet Collapse.
The Grand Alliance
After the beginning of Operation Barbarossa on 22nd June 1941, the British were well aware of the strategic importance to themselves of keeping the Soviet Union fighting for as long as possible. Churchill announced to the world on the day of the invasion the British government's ...
4
Your first question is why did the British maintain such large forces Iraq and Persia in 1942 to 1943. In addition to the answers you gave in your question, there was at least one more reason. As Wikipedia reports:
"As [the Indian 14th Army's] soon to be promoted commander Major-General William Slim wrote: 'We could move we could fight and we had begun ...
4
According to Wikipedia, jobs that were exempted in the UK were coal mining, ship building and engineering related activities. However,they could still join the Home Guard.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserved_occupation
3
Based on some of the numbers given in quotes of @LаngLаngС answer:
Yes, about one half percent (0.5%) more French were learning German in 1942
Population Paris (city proper) 1936: 2,829,746
Population France 1931, 1946, 1950: 41,524,000, 40,125,230, 41,647,258
The Berlitz language school increased its enrollments from 939 adult students of German ...
3
While I cannot say what really happened, the term "StuKa" refers very narrowly to all variants of the Junkers Ju-87 plane. While it might be understood to refer to the role of dive bomber because that is literally what it means, it does in fact only refer to that specific plane and all it's variants. Germans had no other dive bombers anyway and no German ...
3
The bocage country of Normandy, which the British were just entering subsequent to Operation Jupiter, made offensive action much more difficult. Up to July 2 the British forces were operating almost exclusively in bocage-free Nort-East Normandy.
Normandy Bocage
Marked up manually from Maps #55, #63, #64, and #65 of the West Point Military Atlas - WW2 ...
2
I think your questions are impossible to answer with any precision, except possibly for the first point. Especially at the end of the war, things got confused and desperate.
A number of services proliferated which were not quite Wehrmacht but certainly fighting, like the Volkssturm (kids and cripples with any weapon at hand, from ancient to most modern), ...
2
I am about halfway through reading Case Red: the Collapse of France, by Robert Forczyk.
Despite the title (Case Red is the 2nd phase, post-Dunkirk), Forczyk spends a lot of time analyzing the build up to war, whether the French were just plain incompetent or not, what German capabilities were and some unexpected criticism of British will during that period, ...
answered Mar 7 at 17:58
Italian Philosophers 4 Monica
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2
Great question. According to the British parliaments website, the majority of those who got exempted were either medically unfit or worked in key industries. The link to the website is below.
https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/yourcountry/overview/conscriptionww2/
2
No, because such operation would be completely ludicrous
First of all, since the start of Operation Barbarossa, bulk of German ground forces was always in the East. Therefore, if Soviets could not contain them, few divisions send by British and/or Americans certainly could not do the job. As a remainder, total forces for Operation Overlord were 39 divisions,...
2
Moscow was the center of the country. Both geographical and psychological.
Geographical: If you take European Russia (up to the Urals), Moscow is close to the center of this land mass, on a North-South axis, and also East and West. For instance, Moscow is 600 air miles from Archangelsk in the north and 700 air miles from Odessa in the south. It is 750 ...
2
"No combat ready unit has ever passed inspection"
When we talk about Red Army (RKKA) in period of 1937-1941 (up to, and in first months of German invasion), we are talking about army that was under the shadow of Tukhachevsky Affair, with large part of senior military ranks being purged and even executed. In Stalin's mind, RKKA was perhaps only organization ...
2
Did you already read the book "Der HAPAG Passagier-Dampfer "Hansa"" by Ulf-Normann Neitzel? It describes every single day of the journey with details about where it was, when it waited, what the passengers ate etc.
I briefly read the passages after Jan 31st (page 66-67) and it says the journey continued directly to Kiel, even though there were a lot of ...
1
Because the 9th Army of SS General Felix Steiner existed, but only on paper.
At full strength, this army could plausibly have taken on the First Byelorussian Front. But General Steiner balked because he was outnumbered 10 to 1 by this Russian unit (rather than say, 2 to 1, as might have been the case earlier in the war).
At this late date, much the same ...
1
There is already an answer for the Allies. You might want to note that Major General Urquhart had never parachuted nor landed before.
On the German side, there is Model, a former Eastern Front commander, Student, former airborne troops commander who said "If only I had such means" when he saw Allied airborne troops during Market Garden, and the SS general ...
1
He was Heinrich Georg Stahmer, then the Ambassador to the "China" of Wang Jing Wei (not Chiang Kai Shek's China). According to Wikipedia,
"In October 1941, Stahmer was appointed as German ambassador to the Chinese reorganized national government under Wang Jingwei, established in Nanjing by the Japanese occupation,and remained in that position until late ...
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