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I stood in the middle of the office, listening to the rhythm
of computer keyboards, printers, copiers... the gurgle of
the water cooler... the soft hum of the air conditioner. I
could hear the sound of a small group of women singing
"Happy Birthday" to someone named Carol, off to my left.
The
smell of coffee and chocolate cake was tantalising. I
breathed deeply.
This was my business!
No-one would suspect that the cubicles hid machines that
simply made those sounds; that the people striding
purposefully from cubicle to office and back were paid
actors.
The staff were all off running their own businesses from
other locations while the work, which they never really did
anyway, was not being done here.
Nothing would change, and on the off-chance that Mr
Bigwig did make an appearance there was little chance he
would notice anything amiss.
Of course, none of this came cheap. I took 1/3 of all
salaries earned here, from the earners, in exchange for
making this straw "village" look realistic. Government
contracts were worth the trouble it took to obtain them,
after all.
Next, the military, and those obsolescent battleships.
decoy planes
http://news.google....BAJ&pg=4194,2588151
[bob, Apr 27 2012]
'The Other Side of the Hill' by Basil Liddell-Hart
http://www.amazon.c...d=1335527793&sr=1-1
[DrBob, Apr 27 2012]
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Hmm, I hope the building has had its entranceways vetted for wheelchair access, the last thing you want would be a pram bouncing all the way down those lovely monumental steps out front, could cause all manner of running about in panic, that. |
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So we're talking Government work here aren't we? I've not done it before, but I think I'd quite like to try working for the Public Sector, I'm not sure the prevailing economic climate makes that a particulary timely aspiration. |
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Yes. I've enjoyed a lovely afternoon, talking with a
friend about one of his cow-orkers, who's under
investigation for embezzling some $16M of
government funds over a 3 year period. |
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Youch. I was hoping for some extended holidays and the occasional tea-cake. |
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I think the guy has already begun his extended
holiday. He's on remand at the moment. Not too
sure how many tea-cakes they allow him each week? |
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I'm sure I've worked there.... |
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Kudos, [UB]; [+]. I've been wondering for years about combining that battleship and that village in an HB idea. I was straining also to involve a bottleshop, and it didn't quite work. |
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[+] for the idea of teleconferencing together all the noises from the home office and the at-home offices to create a unified environment soundscape. (yeah well that's what I read) |
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Would it be possible to have an 'Aurora' office, complete with
blank firing (but real) 6" guns? |
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Is this just a variant of Office Zinderneuf? |
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Are you suggesting call centres aren't productive,
[Simpleton]? |
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Does Australia still have any battleships? I would have
thought they'd been auctioned off to India by now. |
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The only nation retaining battleships (albeit mothballed) is the
USA. |
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HMAS Australia was a battle cruiser; they never had any
battleships of their own. |
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Battleships were obsolete by the end of WWII. No,
Australia never had any of them, though our battle
cruisers didn't do so badly, when they were needed. |
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Hmm, "comfort noise" I was looking for something I heard on the Beeb, about an accounts office being so quiet that people were too startled when the phone rang, so they had artificial office noises playing. |
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"During the siege of Leningrad, the beat of a metronome was used as comfort noise on the Leningrad radio network, indicating that the network was still functioning" - wikipedia, so it must be true.. |
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Oh, that scurrilous, wicked Wikipedia! |
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I know we're the only ones still lamely clinging to our
battlewagons, I was just making a cheap joke, but honestly
thought HMAS Australia was a full battleship. Bluddy big
cruiser. No [UB], they didn't do badly at all, for a war in
which they were largely without a role (battleships and big
cruisers, I mean, not Aussies). |
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Sydney and Kormoran took each other out, in a one-
on-one battle in 1941. Sydney was a cruiser. |
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Jacky Fisher never liked the term" Battle cruiser". Although they
were as big as battleships and carried battleship guns, they
sacrificed armour for speed, making them very vulnerable tto"
real" battleships. |
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The classic battle cruiser action was the Falkland Islands iin WW1
where they overtook and destroyed German armoured cruisers. |
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The concept isn't flawed per se; the flaw is that they were often
misunderstood and wrongly deployed by the Naval staffs. |
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In naval combat terms, battleships are obsolete, but given
adequate air cover they are less vulnerable than flattops and
have an unrivalled ability to act as monitors for shore
bombardment. The ability to deliver a salvo of 400mm HE shells
at a tonne each once a minute for hours at a time still
commands respect. |
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Everytime I see a potemkin in the supermarket, I have the secret urge to smash it. quote unquote. |
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//ability to deliver a salvo of 400mm HE shells at a
tonne each once a minute for hours at a time still
commands respect// |
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The Japanese fleet learned that at Leyte Gulf, I
think. Cruisers did quite a bit of damage in the
Battle of Surigao Strait, which was possibly the
most classical naval battle in history. The
battleships fired between 14 and 93 shells apiece.
One of the cruisers in the action fired something
like 1300 rounds from her main armaments, over
the course of the 60-odd hour action. |
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How great that they're finally coming up with a
sequel, with Liam Neeson in the Admiral's role! |
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//ability to deliver a salvo of 400mm HE shells at a
tonne each once a minute for hours at a time still
commands respect// |
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Respect, yes, but as we rapidly approach the obsolesence
of even the AEGIS systems, perhaps it's time to accept that
respect doesn't win wars and the only real role of a
battleship is as a floating museum. |
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// The Japanese fleet learned that at Leyte Gulf // |
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An understatement, although 'learned' implies there was
anyone left in a position to appreciate the lesson. The last
great crossing of the T, as it were. |
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In terms of ship-to-ship slugfests, the Brits and Aussies
definitely threw the biggest punches of the war. [UB], [8th]
will probably tell you, despite our constant feuding, that
I'm one of the rare American armchair historians who knows
that we didn't win the war all by ourselves. In the ETO, we
just helped; in the PTO, we had a lot of help, and could
not have done without. |
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My satirical-culations place this at 11.3 on the Richturd scale, and well into Fraudmulan space Captian. |
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// // The Japanese fleet learned that at Leyte Gulf // An
understatement, although 'learned' implies there was anyone left
in a position to appreciate the lesson. // |
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"Experience is the harshest teacher, because she always gives the
test first and the lesson afterward…" |
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Not, of course, that the filthy Nips didn't (and don't) ddeserve
every last gram of Pentrite and every last white-hot whining
fragment of hardened steel shrapnel; should the opportunity ever
arise to adorn a suitably malevolent projectile with the phrase,
"Ship that on yer Burma Railroad, Tojo !" we will have our special
stick of chalk ready to hand… |
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It's surprising just how few decisive naval
engagements there have actually been, in history. |
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The US battleships at Leyte did a fair share of the
heavy lifting, though a lot of the damage was also
done by the force of almost 1,000 aircraft the US
brought to bear in the engagement. |
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The Japanese force was heavily outnumbered and
outgunned. |
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I think one of their largest contributing factors was to simply tie up the Germans to help keep supplies coming through, as well as control the Med. |
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Absolutely. The discussion has centered on the Pacific,
where the US Navy was devoting the majority of its forces
to air assault actions and shepherding the Marines, in
roughly equal proportion, but in the ETO the USN definitely
played a decisive role in strictly naval actions. |
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// It's surprising just how few decisive naval
engagements there have actually been, in history.
// |
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I know what you mean, but you've gotten me thinking
about the kind of really serious resources that go into (and
are consumed by) a naval engagement. Soldiers are
relatively cheap to generate and maintain, as are sailors,
but ships are not. Also, a large infantry battle may be, and
often is, decided by the actions of a single platoon,
whereas a naval battle of equal significance is decided by
the dedicated and careful deployment a million of tons of
warships acting in concert while lobbing a massive amount
of ordnance at the horizon and burning fuel like it's free.
Even with artillery and logistics, the cost of fighting a
single battle on land pales in comparison, so it stands to
reason there'd more of them. |
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Also, the ocean is very large and the number of ships in
each navy is relatively small. The infantry only have to
walk for a few minutes if they want to pick a fight, but in
the days before mechanical propulsion navies could spend
months just trying to _find_ each other. |
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Germany tried hard to keep Bulgaria, Italy,
Romania, Hungary and particularly Japan
interested in WWII, to distract Russia, with whom
the majority of the war was actually fought. 60-
80% of German efforts and losses were on the
Eastern Front. Practically none of that, barring
submarine operations, was of a naval nature. |
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However, it bled dry Germany's warchests while
the US and Britain were preparing to invade
Normandy and Italy. The invasion of Italy took
place while Germany was locked in a massive
struggle for the Kursk salient, where 800,000
German soldiers and 2,900 tanks attacked
1,900,000 Russian troops and over 5,000 tanks. |
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The Germans were doing well, especially the 3 SS
armoured divisions in the southern pincer of the
action, until Hitler pulled the plug on 12 July, 3
days after the US invaded Sicily. |
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People tend to forget the Russian contributions,
largely because the history we read glosses over
them because of their post-war ideological
confrontation with the West. |
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WWII: the only time in recorded history when the world
actually benefitted from the interference of a
micromanaging supervisor. |
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The Russian front is actually my favorite subject. It's what I
mean when I say 'we just helped' in the ETO. |
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We probably have similar libraries, [Alter]. I have
about 1200 volumes of military history, though it's
biased towards the Australian involvement in the
Boer War, WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam. |
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I haven't bothered to count the number of books I own,
although my history library is probably half yours at best.
The topics trend according to 'whatever I was interested in
at the time' but generally focus on the 20th century,
probably 60% WWII. I'm very armchair. But yeah, I imagine
we've read a lot of the same stuff. |
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One I keep going back to is 'The Tigers Are Burning'. |
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I only know how many I've got because I recently
insured them, along with the rest of the 7,000 titles I
have. I've a stack of oriental art books as well. |
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A lot of the military history came from my uncle, who
wrote and published a number of books on the
subject. |
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I tend to look at the value of these battleships as more of chess pieces than for their direct offensive maneuver capability. Comparatively, there are relatively few rook vs. rook fights, but they do help shape the board in dramatic ways. |
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Most of what I know about WWII I learned from Churchill's volumes. I wonder if there's a comparative German-perspective work out there? |
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<linky>
Not nearly as voluminous as Churchill's writings but interesting nevertheless. |
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Mein Kampf has just been re-published, with the
blessing of a number of Jewish organisations. |
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Ah, but to appreciate it properly, you have to read it in the
original Yiddish… |
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מ יי ן ש ל אַ כ ט |
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Most of my history books came from my Grandad. There's
quite bit of very dry Cold War stuff in there as well, but
due to the publishing dates it actually qualifies as 'current
events'. My favorite items, of course, are the internal
publications from various intelligence and defense agencies
that I'm probably not even allowed to own. Many of those
are so contextual as to be virtually unreadable, but I still
like having books and folders with 'secret' stamped on the
inside cover. Then there are my Grandad's journals, on any
given page of which one may find a sketch of downtown
Prague and a critique of that day's lunch right in the middle
of a slough of mathematics and diagrams pertaining to
some radar system that's still considered cutting edge to
this day... I have a lot of fun with those old books, even
the ones I don't fully understand. |
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//I wonder if there's a comparative German-perspective work out there?// |
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No, but you might be interested by an English-language work called "The Russian Version of the Second World War" (Graham Lyons), based on extracts from Soviet-era school textbooks. |
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It's quite a lot shorter than Mr. Churchill's version. Then again, so is "War and Peace". |
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// Then again, so is "War and Peace" // |
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Shorter, perhaps, but the body count is
somewhat higher. If the direct and indirect
victims of the Great Patriotic War asked the
question "Went the day well ?", their voices
would number in tens of millions. |
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Wait; I tell a lie: there's Albert Speer's memoir, "Inside the Third Reich". That's probably the closest equivalent. |
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I seem to remember someone'd written a book on WWII making a point that pretty much all Western allied ground action was a bit pointless. The third reich and the soviet union would have fought each other to a standstill, by D-Day just about everyone who was going to die in the Holocaust was already dead. |
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It was an interesting perspective, sometime morality comes before military necessity. |
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That sounds about right, [nmr]. The Western Front
initiatives distracted the Germans enough for the
Russians to run over them from the East... and gave
Russia enough self-belief that they decided to annex
everything they'd invaded while chasing the Huns
back to Berlin and beyond. |
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It took a while to get those worms back in the can. |
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The Western Front was Stalin's prerogative as much as
anyone else's, so let's not entirely discount its importance.
Without the invasion of Europe from the south and
northwest, the war could have gone on another two or
three years. That's another 2-3 years of occupation,
atrocity, subjugation, and indocrtination in most of
Europe. By the end, most or all of the resistance groups
would have been wiped out, and the USA's economy and
industrial infrastructure might have been irreparably
damaged. Even if the Nazis still suffered total defeat solely
at the hands of the Russians, the world would still have
suffered far more for the delay, and almost all of mainland
Europe would have become Soviet territory. |
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//and the USA's economy and industrial infrastructure might have been irreparably damaged.//
Or the Western Allies would've nuked Berlin, and the Japanese would've seen the futility of continuing and folded. |
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// I was straining also to involve a bottleshop, and it
didn't quite work.// |
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[pertinax] An off license called "Bottleshop Potemkin"
would spark an epidemic of arthouse alcoholism |
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Vodka would be much in evidence, I imagine. |
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//, the Japanese would've seen the futility of
continuing //
Doubtful, in my view. Consider the fanaticism, the all-or-
nothing mindset that prevailed form the top down in not
only the Japanese military heirarchy but the very culture of
the nation at the time; Germany was beaten, Hitler dead,
2/3 of the axis dismantled, and still they fought on as
though this were only a setback. We could have nuked not
only Berlin but every major German base of resistance and
the Japanese would have dismissed it as irrelevant. |
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In our scenario of leaving the ETO entirely to the Russians
on the ground, which would have incensed Stalin to the
point of anuerysm and probably led to the near-immediate
continuation of Soviet expansionism into the West, I
believe that the Rising Sun would still have fought to the
end. The Pacific endgame was always going to be either
atomic bombs or a million-man invasion. |
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Furthermore, prolonging the European war would possibly
have given the Japanese more time to develop their own
superweapons. They weren't anywhere close to finishing an
atomic weapon (though they had the rudimentary
understanding and components of an implosion-type device
by war's end), but they were close to developing mass-
deployment biological and chemical weapons, including
anthrax. |
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<sarcasm mode>
So was Saddam Hussein.
</sm> |
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