V1 and V2 NAZI rockets (WW2): another old hoax?

[pov603]

You can imagine the conversation after the 'bombs' started falling:
-'Hey Didier! I will search the nearby quarries one or two kilometres outside of Paris'
-'What about me?'
-'Oh, you? You go search 75km beyond Paris'
-'Which direction?'
-Oh...er...er...any'

[fubarfuthark]

I once spent an afternoon inspecting footage of old WW2 newsreels, looking at maps of where london was bombed, trying to unpick the stories of the battle of britain and the subsequent 'blitz'.

The more I thought about it, the more I started to wonder if the Luftwaffe ever actually entered British airspace at all. If one thinks about it there is a certain logic to it. If you were a hot under the collar Luftwaffe pilot, what is to stop you disobeying orders and bombing, say for example, the houses of parliament, buckingham palace or goodness knows what else. I mean we all know that at the highest levels these wars are not REALLY wars at all, but that individuals could nevertheless get carried away and actually destroy a high value target. The only way to guarantee this not happening would be to sound the air raid sirens, get everyone underground and send the elite RAF air squadrons into the air to bomb london. Then blame it on the beastly Germans.

It might seem implausible, but the opium-dealing, indian and irish-starving, kurd-gassing British crown WOULD do it. Think about them standing there on front of the Cenotaph, while Nimrod from the Engima variations oozes out of the speakers and some doddering tommies show their medals...scum!

[antipodean]

I once spent an afternoon inspecting footage of old WW2 newsreels, looking at maps of where london was bombed, trying to unpick the stories of the battle of britain and the subsequent 'blitz'.

The more I thought about it, the more I started to wonder if the Luftwaffe ever actually entered British airspace at all. If one thinks about it there is a certain logic to it. If you were a hot under the collar Luftwaffe pilot, what is to stop you disobeying orders and bombing, say for example, the houses of parliament, buckingham palace or goodness knows what else. I mean we all know that at the highest levels these wars are not REALLY wars at all, but that individuals could nevertheless get carried away and actually destroy a high value target. The only way to guarantee this not happening would be to sound the air raid sirens, get everyone underground and send the elite RAF air squadrons into the air to bomb london. Then blame it on the beastly Germans.

It might seem implausible, but the opium-dealing, indian and irish-starving, kurd-gassing British crown WOULD do it. Think about them standing there on front of the Cenotaph, while Nimrod from the Engima variations oozes out of the speakers and some doddering tommies show their medals...scum!

Then the icing on the cake being to Carpet/ Fire bomb the inner city residential areas of Dresden and Hamburg. Then say, 'there you go, take that for doing it to us'.
Similar to bombing the crap out of Afghanistan because, the people who flew planes into and knocked down our towers live there.

[Apache]

The only way to guarantee this not happening would be to sound the air raid sirens, get everyone underground and send the elite RAF air squadrons into the air to bomb london. Then blame it on the beastly Germans.

It might seem implausible, but the opium-dealing, indian and irish-starving, kurd-gassing British crown WOULD do it.

Haven't you read Catch 22?

[fubarfuthark]

Yes, and I have also seen the film 'Underground' by Kusturica. Everything to do with wars in Yugoslavia stinks to high heavens.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2 ... yugoslavia

I like the thought of the person who sold it to them being little more than a gypsy pedlar selling trinkets or offering to pave the driveway.

[aa5]

I imagine around that era of the 1940's that large areas of European cities would have to be demolished and rebuilt, to accommodate the new utilities, streets, and density that would be needed in the new era. My own view of history is an adapting political & social organization to the changing technological and scientific advances.

During the 1920's and especially the 1930's the farm combine radically altered Western societies. Before the farm combine, a farmer divided his field into 3 sections; one to farm crops to sell, one for the animals used in farming to graze, and one left fallow. With the farm combine, farmers were able to increase from 1/3rd to 2/3rds of their land under cultivation at any one time. And to carry out the farming with far less labor than before.

The result was that our nations were awash in food, and the farming communities across the land were devastated. This created decades of idiotic 'supply management' farming policies from national governments - still in effect in the West, to try to deal with the surplus of food(although in the 1980's the USA dismantled a fair amount of their supply management.) Hence why American food is so cheap today, relative to other Western nations.

Millions, upon millions of people were forced to flee the farming communities and head to our cities. Fortunately the same technology that enabled the farm combine, the combustion engine, allowed for a huge expansion in cities. The radius that people could live in and still commute to the centers of Western cities for work, vastly expanded. If you are interested look on wikipedia at the parabolic increase in populations of the big western cities during 1925-1955.

To put these millions of people displaced from the farming communities to work, building the commuter highways, the new subdivisions & apartment blocks, and the new utility lines -electrical, telephone, water. There were some barriers in the way. Like the property rights, heritage buildings, many years of 'public consultations', environmental reviews, lawsuits over expropriation, etc.


Unless, of course, there was a national emergency, requiring the national governments to make executive decisions without restraint. Say you have a bunch of old, low density, out of code buildings, and a maze like road structure - with thousands of residents living there, including some with positions of power, fighting you every step of the way... wouldn't it be nice to come up from the subway bomb shelters, and find that sadly, that area was reduced to rubble?