Affentitten

Shows how naive and prudish you really are. For many Old Etonians, being partially suffocated by a marine mammal is the ultimate turn on.

Well, I suppose it doesn't. But when I met him, he had a very bushy beard. Might have made it hard to get a seal on the mask.

I can state with authority though that the ASDIC operator on Bulldog that detected the U-110 was an Australian officer on loan to the RAN. So there. We did win the whole war for everyone else, including the auto-erotic Tory establishment.

What bollocks. It was the Australians who captured U-110 and won the whole war.

Bummer. And just as with Iraq and Afghanistan, the exact system of government doesn't matter a toss to them. They just want to be able to go about their daily business feeling safe from the perils of being arbitrarily robbed, beaten and killed.

Over the next several months, the ship was upgraded with the most advanced weaponry available... mounts for 32 BGM-109 Tomahawk missiles, As far as I can see, all four surviving Iowas had the Tomahawk racks, though New Jersey doesn't seem to have ever used them in anger.

Missouri did have Tomahawks. Those famous night shots of the missiles taking off from the deck at the kick off for Desert Storm were on Missouri. But even so, re-purposing those mega ships as missile platforms was a ludicrous big dick luxury. Kind of like me buying an Abrams to drive to work. According to Wiki, the Iowas carried about 32 Tomahawks. Compare that to an Arleigh Burke that has space for up to 90 and 1/6 of the crew required.

And yeah, how much can you train for a tactical solution that people haven’t encountered before? Mounting ‘by the numbers’ training drills against English hedges is probably not going to cover things like Germans lying hidden and allowing themselves to be over-run so they can shoot you in the back. Or Germans press ganging all manner of weaponry into improvised defensive lines. Or the value of telephone handsets at the back of tanks. All these things have to be learnt and adjusted to in the field by trial and error. And the Allies did it pretty quickly.

Except they would have been sitting duck for the shore batteries they thought existed at Pointe du Hoc, for example.

Also the mix of Allied tank types depends a lot on the nationality, the individual unit and the point in the campaign. Eg 7th Armoured was fullly kitted out with Cromwells plus 25% Fireflies, whilst other Commonwealth units had more Shermans. Recon units also used a ratio of Cromwells as their support because they moved faster than Shermans.

The mass smokescreens were used quite extensively in the European theatre, with the best and most successful example being the Rhine crossing. But as Emrys says, the CM thing of banging a smoke round in front of an enemy vehicle to block its LOS is not really the way things worked.

Assuming you see the Panther / Tiger / Jagdpanzer first and probably have time to get one or two shots in before he lights you up, do you opt for (a) a smoke shell that might obscure his field of view, unless of course he just moves a bit, or ( an AP or HE shot that might kill him so you'll survive?

Not to mention the capabilities of the people flying them and whether they actually have the weapons to put on the platform. A Venuzealan pilot in the latest Russian plane versus a USN dude in a 20 year old F-18? I know who I'd put my money on.

Umm, who are the people walking round thinking soil is sterile? Or who chat with each other saying "Soil. Yep. That's fully understood."

The best stages used to be the ones in Morrocco where you couldn't even see the road for the crowds of people scattering out of ther way. I also love this one Crazy Finns Crashing. Some of the best motorsport drivers in the world are Finns. Here are the ones that didn't make the grade. Watch for the quaint Finnish custom of wildly clapping and cheering whenever someone has a really huge wreck. Also watch for the few sequences where three or four cars end up coming off at the same place, leaving a junkyard in the paddock of some poor farmer.

No she's from the Vendee, right by the Atlantic coast.

Well you don't need legs to drive a taxi. Just a willingness to express an opinion on just about anything, regardless of whether your passengers give a toss or not. "I'm not a rascist, but...."

And those names are often just the dead. I was struck by the monument near my wife's home village that has a few dozen names "Mort pour la France". But then I think that there was probably at least 3 times as many wounded. And it's a fishing town. So that's an awful lot of guys who probably couldn't work any more. Hard to work in an Atlantic storm with only one leg. And extrapolating further, hard for a one-legged guy with no hope of a decent job to find a bride.... Imagine the ongoing cost to their society.

I would have said the French surrender thing stemmed from 1940 and their rapid capitulation despite quite reasonable numerical odds, followed by the Vichy collaboration.

I got the DVD of Torchwood series 3 (Children of Earth) for Xmas. There is just no comparison with something as simplistic and moralistic as Avatar, despite both of them having their cheesy moments. I think the test is whether the 3d was removed and the eye candy turned down just a little, would Avatar be as 'classic' as it has become?

Principally because of the massive price difference per litre of diesel vs petrol fuel.

Nor does he have a team of 18 mechanics racing out to change every fluid and component at the end of each trip.

Don't diesels cuase more pollution though? That's kind of the point of hybrid cars.

Of course the Swiss have threat levels along the lines of: Market up Market down Increased rate of deposits