Yes, Native Americans Were the Victims of Genocide

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her latest book is An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States.

Mass Grave at Wounded Knee


This paper, written under the title, “U.S. Settler-Colonialism and Genocide Policies,” was delivered at the Organization of American Historians 2015 Annual Meeting in St. Louis, MO on April 18, 2015.

US policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though often termed “racist” or “discriminatory,” are rarely depicted as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism—settler colonialism. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe writes, “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life.”i The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism.

The extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention and design of the country’s founders. “Free” land was the magnet that attracted European settlers. After the war for independence but preceding the writing of the US Constitution, the Continental Congress produced the Northwest Ordinance. This was the first law of the incipient republic, revealing the motive for those desiring independence. It was the blueprint for gobbling up the British-protected Indian Territory (“Ohio Country”) on the other side of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. Britain had made settlement there illegal with the Proclamation of 1763.

In 1801, President Jefferson aptly described the new settler state’s intentions for horizontal and vertical continental expansion, stating: “However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar form by similar laws.” This vision of manifest destiny found form a few years later in the Monroe Doctrine, signaling the intention of annexing or dominating former Spanish colonial territories in the Americas and the Pacific, which would be put into practice during the rest of the century.

The form of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources. Settler colonialism requires a genocidal policy. Native nations and communities, while struggling to maintain fundamental values and collectivity, have from the beginning resisted modern colonialism using both defensive and offensive techniques, including the modern forms of armed resistance of national liberation movements and what now is called terrorism. In every instance they have fought and continue to fight for survival as peoples. The objective of US authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples—not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide.

The objective of US colonialist authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples—not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide as contrasted with premodern instances of extreme violence that did not have the goal of extinction. The United States as a socioeconomic and political entity is a result of this centuries-long and ongoing colonial process. Modern Indigenous nations and communities are societies formed by their resistance to colonialism, through which they have carried their practices and histories. It is breathtaking, but no miracle, that they have survived as peoples.

Settler-colonialism requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals, which then forms the foundation of the United States’ system. People do not hand over their land, resources, children, and futures without a fight, and that fight is met with violence. In employing the force necessary to accomplish its expansionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes violence. The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical processes. Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency.

So, what constitutes genocide? My colleague on the panel, Gary Clayton Anderson, in his recent book, “Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian,” argues: “Genocide will never become a widely accepted characterization for what happened in North America, because large numbers of Indians survived and because policies of mass murder on a scale similar to events in central Europe, Cambodia, or Rwanda were never implemented.”ii There are fatal errors in this assessment.

The term “genocide” was coined following the Shoah, or Holocaust, and its prohibition was enshrined in the United Nations convention presented in 1948 and adopted in 1951: the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention is not retroactive but is applicable to US-Indigenous relations since 1988, when the US Senate ratified it. The genocide convention is an essential tool for historical analysis of the effects of colonialism in any era, and particularly in US history.

In the convention, any one of five acts is considered genocide if “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”:

(a) killing members of the group;

(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.iii


The followings acts are punishable:

(a) Genocide;

(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;

(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;

(d) Attempt to commit genocide;

(e) Complicity in genocide.


The term “genocide” is often incorrectly used, such as in Dr. Anderson’s assessment, to describe extreme examples of mass murder, the death of vast numbers of people, as, for instance in Cambodia. What took place in Cambodia was horrific, but it does not fall under the terms of the Genocide Convention, as the Convention specifically refers to a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, with individuals within that group targeted by a government or its agents because they are members of the group or by attacking the underpinnings of the group’s existence as a group being met with the intent to destroy that group in whole or in part. The Cambodian government committed crimes against humanity, but not genocide. Genocide is not an act simply worse than anything else, rather a specific kind of act. The term, “ethnic cleansing,” is a descriptive term created by humanitarian interventionists to describe what was said to be happening in the 1990s wars among the republics of Yugoslavia. It is a descriptive term, not a term of international humanitarian law.

Although clearly the Holocaust was the most extreme of all genocides, the bar set by the Nazis is not the bar required to be considered genocide. The title of the Genocide convention is the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” so the law is about preventing genocide by identifying the elements of government policy, rather than only punishment after the fact. Most importantly, genocide does not have to be complete to be considered genocide.

US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twentieth century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment, and a policy of termination.

Within the logic of settler-colonialism, genocide was the inherent overall policy of the United States from its founding, but there are also specific documented policies of genocide on the part of US administrations that can be identified in at least four distinct periods: the Jacksonian era of forced removal; the California gold rush in Northern California; during the Civil War and in the post Civil War era of the so-called Indian Wars in the Southwest and the Great Plains; and the 1950s termination period; additionally, there is the overlapping period of compulsory boarding schools, 1870s to 1960s. The Carlisle boarding school, founded by US Army officer Richard Henry Pratt in 1879, became a model for others established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Pratt said in a speech in 1892, "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man."

Cases of genocide carried out as policy may be found in historical documents as well as in the oral histories of Indigenous communities. An example from 1873 is typical, with General William T. Sherman writing, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children . . . during an assault, the soldiers can not pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.”iv

The so-called “Indian Wars” technically ended around 1880, although the Wounded Knee massacre occurred a decade later. Clearly an act with genocidal intent, it is still officially considered a “battle” in the annals of US military genealogy. Congressional Medals of Honor were bestowed on twenty of the soldiers involved. A monument was built at Fort Riley, Kansas, to honor the soldiers killed by friendly fire. A battle streamer was created to honor the event and added to other streamers that are displayed at the Pentagon, West Point, and army bases throughout the world. L. Frank Baum, a Dakota Territory settler later famous for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer at the time. Five days after the sickening event at Wounded Knee, on January 3, 1891, he wrote, “The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one or more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”

Whether 1880 or 1890, most of the collective land base that Native Nations secured through hard fought for treaties made with the United States was lost after that date.

After the end of the Indian Wars, came allotment, another policy of genocide of Native nations as nations, as peoples, the dissolution of the group. Taking the Sioux Nation as an example, even before the Dawes Allotment Act of 1884 was implemented, and with the Black Hills already illegally confiscated by the federal government, a government commission arrived in Sioux territory from Washington, DC, in 1888 with a proposal to reduce the Sioux Nation to six small reservations, a scheme that would leave nine million acres open for Euro-American settlement. The commission found it impossible to obtain signatures of the required three-fourths of the nation as required under the 1868 treaty, and so returned to Washington with a recommendation that the government ignore the treaty and take the land without Sioux consent. The only means to accomplish that goal was legislation, Congress having relieved the government of the obligation to negotiate a treaty. Congress commissioned General George Crook to head a delegation to try again, this time with an offer of $1.50 per acre. In a series of manipulations and dealings with leaders whose people were now starving, the commission garnered the needed signatures. The great Sioux Nation was broken into small islands soon surrounded on all sides by European immigrants, with much of the reservation land a checkerboard with settlers on allotments or leased land.v Creating these isolated reservations broke the historical relationships between clans and communities of the Sioux Nation and opened areas where Europeans settled. It also allowed the Bureau of Indian Affairs to exercise tighter control, buttressed by the bureau’s boarding school system. The Sun Dance, the annual ceremony that had brought Sioux together and reinforced national unity, was outlawed, along with other religious ceremonies. Despite the Sioux people’s weak position under late-nineteenth-century colonial domination, they managed to begin building a modest cattle-ranching business to replace their former bison-hunting economy. In 1903, the US Supreme Court ruled, in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, that a March 3, 1871, appropriations rider was constitutional and that Congress had “plenary” power to manage Indian property. The Office of Indian Affairs could thus dispose of Indian lands and resources regardless of the terms of previous treaty provisions. Legislation followed that opened the reservations to settlement through leasing and even sale of allotments taken out of trust. Nearly all prime grazing lands came to be occupied by non-Indian ranchers by the 1920s.

By the time of the New Deal–Collier era and nullification of Indian land allotment under the Indian Reorganization Act, non-Indians outnumbered Indians on the Sioux reservations three to one. However, “tribal governments” imposed in the wake of the Indian Reorganization Act proved particularly harmful and divisive for the Sioux.”vi Concerning this measure, the late Mathew King, elder traditional historian of the Oglala Sioux (Pine Ridge), observed: “The Bureau of Indian Affairs drew up the constitution and by-laws of this organization with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This was the introduction of home rule. . . . The traditional people still hang on to their Treaty, for we are a sovereign nation. We have our own government.”vii “Home rule,” or neocolonialism, proved a short-lived policy, however, for in the early 1950s the United States developed its termination policy, with legislation ordering gradual eradication of every reservation and even the tribal governments.viii At the time of termination and relocation, per capita annual income on the Sioux reservations stood at $355, while that in nearby South Dakota towns was $2,500. Despite these circumstances, in pursuing its termination policy, the Bureau of Indian Affairs advocated the reduction of services and introduced its program to relocate Indians to urban industrial centers, with a high percentage of Sioux moving to San Francisco and Denver in search of jobs.ix

The situations of other Indigenous Nations were similar.

Pawnee Attorney Walter R. Echo-Hawk writes:

In 1881, Indian landholdings in the United States had plummeted to 156 million acres. By 1934, only about 50 million acres remained (an area the size of Idaho and Washington) as a result of the General Allotment Act of 1887. During World War II, the government took 500,000 more acres for military use. Over one hundred tribes, bands, and Rancherias relinquished their lands under various acts of Congress during the termination era of the 1950s. By 1955, the indigenous land base had shrunk to just 2.3 percent of its [size at the end of the Indian wars].x


According to the current consensus among historians, the wholesale transfer of land from Indigenous to Euro-American hands that occurred in the Americas after 1492 is due less to British and US American invasion, warfare, refugee conditions, and genocidal policies in North America than to the bacteria that the invaders unwittingly brought with them. Historian Colin Calloway is among the proponents of this theory writing, “Epidemic diseases would have caused massive depopulation in the Americas whether brought by European invaders or brought home by Native American traders.”xi Such an absolutist assertion renders any other fate for the Indigenous peoples improbable. This is what anthropologist Michael Wilcox has dubbed “the terminal narrative.” Professor Calloway is a careful and widely respected historian of Indigenous North America, but his conclusion articulates a default assumption. The thinking behind the assumption is both ahistorical and illogical in that Europe itself lost a third to one-half of its population to infectious disease during medieval pandemics. The principle reason the consensus view is wrong and ahistorical is that it erases the effects of settler colonialism with its antecedents in the Spanish “Reconquest” and the English conquest of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. By the time Spain, Portugal, and Britain arrived to colonize the Americas, their methods of eradicating peoples or forcing them into dependency and servitude were ingrained, streamlined, and effective.

Whatever disagreement may exist about the size of precolonial Indigenous populations, no one doubts that a rapid demographic decline occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its timing from region to region depending on when conquest and colonization began. Nearly all the population areas of the Americas were reduced by 90 percent following the onset of colonizing projects, decreasing the targeted Indigenous populations of the Americas from a one hundred million to ten million. Commonly referred to as the most extreme demographic disaster—framed as natural—in human history, it was rarely called genocide until the rise of Indigenous movements in the mid-twentieth century forged new questions.

US scholar Benjamin Keen acknowledges that historians “accept uncritically a fatalistic ‘epidemic plus lack of acquired immunity’ explanation for the shrinkage of Indian populations, without sufficient attention to the socioeconomic factors . . . which predisposed the natives to succumb to even slight infections.”xii Other scholars agree. Geographer William M. Denevan, while not ignoring the existence of widespread epidemic diseases, has emphasized the role of warfare, which reinforced the lethal impact of disease. There were military engagements directly between European and Indigenous nations, but many more saw European powers pitting one Indigenous nation against another or factions within nations, with European allies aiding one or both sides, as was the case in the colonization of the peoples of Ireland, Africa and Asia, and was also a factor in the Holocaust. Other killers cited by Denevan are overwork in mines, frequent outright butchery, malnutrition and starvation resulting from the breakdown of Indigenous trade networks, subsistence food production and loss of land, loss of will to live or reproduce (and thus suicide, abortion, and infanticide), and deportation and enslavement.xiii Anthropologist Henry Dobyns has pointed to the interruption of Indigenous peoples’ trade networks. When colonizing powers seized Indigenous trade routes, the ensuing acute shortages, including food products, weakened populations and forced them into dependency on the colonizers, with European manufactured goods replacing Indigenous ones. Dobyns has estimated that all Indigenous groups suffered serious food shortages one year in four. In these circumstances, the introduction and promotion of alcohol proved addictive and deadly, adding to the breakdown of social order and responsibility.xiv These realities render the myth of “lack of immunity,” including to alcohol, pernicious.

Historian Woodrow Wilson Borah focused on the broader arena of European colonization, which also brought severely reduced populations in the Pacific Islands, Australia, Western Central America, and West Africa.xv Sherburne Cook—associated with Borah in the revisionist Berkeley School, as it was called—studied the attempted destruction of the California Indians. Cook estimated 2,245 deaths among peoples in Northern California—the Wintu, Maidu, Miwak, Omo, Wappo, and Yokuts nations—in late eighteenth-century armed conflicts with the Spanish while some 5,000 died from disease and another 4,000 were relocated to missions. Among the same people in the second half of the nineteenth century, US armed forces killed 4,000, and disease killed another 6,000. Between 1852 and 1867, US citizens kidnapped 4,000 Indian children from these groups in California. Disruption of Indigenous social structures under these conditions and dire economic necessity forced many of the women into prostitution in goldfield camps, further wrecking what vestiges of family life remained in these matriarchal societies.

Historians and others who deny genocide emphasize population attrition by disease, weakening Indigenous peoples ability to resist. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the United States found it necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them—along with the prior period of British colonization, nearly three hundred years of eliminationist warfare.

In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens or murdered by other means, yet the acts of creating and maintaining the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide. And no one recites the terminal narrative associated with Native Americans, or Armenians, or Bosnian.

Not all of the acts iterated in the genocide convention are required to exist to constitute genocide; any one of them suffices. In cases of United States genocidal policies and actions, each of the five requirements can be seen.

First, Killing members of the group: The genocide convention does not specify that large numbers of people must be killed in order to constitute genocide, rather that members of the group are killed because they are members of the group. Assessing a situation in terms of preventing genocide, this kind of killing is a marker for intervention.

Second, Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group: such as starvation, the control of food supply and withholding food as punishment or as reward for compliance, for instance, in signing confiscatory treaties. As military historian John Grenier points out in his First Way of War:

For the first 200 years of our military heritage, then, Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders. . . . In the frontier wars between 1607 and 1814, Americans forged two elements—unlimited war and irregular war—into their first way of war.xvii


Grenier argues that not only did this way of war continue throughout the 19th century in wars against the Indigenous nations, but continued in the 20th century and currently in counterinsurgent wars against peoples in Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific, Southeast Asia, Middle and Western Asia and Africa.

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part: Forced removal of all the Indigenous nations east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory during the Jackson administration was a calculated policy intent on destroying those peoples ties to their original lands, as well as declaring Native people who did not remove to no longer be Muskogee, Sauk, Kickapoo, Choctaw, destroying the existence of up to half of each nation removed. Mandatory boarding schools, Allotment and Termination—all official government policies--also fall under this category of the crime of genocide. The forced removal and four year incarceration of the Navajo people resulted in the death of half their population.

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group: Famously, during the Termination Era, the US government administrated Indian Health Service made the top medical priority the sterilization of Indigenous women. In 1974, an independent study by one the few Native American physicians, Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, Choctaw/Cherokee, found that one in four Native women had been sterilized without her consent. Pnkerton-Uri’s research indicated that the Indian Health Service had “singled out full-blooded Indian women for sterilization procedures.” At first denied by the Indian Health Service, two years later, a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office found that 4 of the 12 Indian Health Service regions sterilized 3,406 Native women without their permission between 1973 and 1976. The GAO found that 36 women under age 21 had been forcibly sterilized during this period despite a court-ordered moratorium on sterilizations of women younger than 21.

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group: Various governmental entities, mostly municipalities, counties, and states, routinely removed Native children from their families and put them up for adoption. In the Native resistance movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the demand to put a stop to the practice was codified in the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. However, the burden of enforcing the legislation lay with Tribal Government, but the legislation provided no financial resources for Native governments to establish infrastructure to retrieve children from the adoption industry, in which Indian babies were high in demand. Despite these barriers to enforcement, the worst abuses had been curbed over the following three decades. But, on June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling drafted by Justice Samuel Alito, used provisions of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) to say that a child, widely known as Baby Veronica, did not have to live with her biological Cherokee father. The high court’s decision paved the way for Matt and Melanie Capobianco, the adoptive parents, to ask the South Carolina Courts to have the child returned to them. The court gutted the purpose and intent of the Indian Child Welfare Act, missing the concept behind the ICWA, the protection of cultural resource and treasure that are Native children; it’s not about protecting so-called traditional or nuclear families. It’s about recognizing the prevalence of extended families and culture.xviii

So, why does the Genocide Convention matter? Native nations are still here and still vulnerable to genocidal policy. This isn’t just history that predates the 1948 Genocide Convention. But, the history is important and needs to be widely aired, included in public school texts and public service announcements. The Doctrine of Discovery is still law of the land. From the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, most of the non-European world was colonized under the Doctrine of Discovery, one of the first principles of international law Christian European monarchies promulgated to legitimize investigating, mapping, and claiming lands belonging to peoples outside Europe. It originated in a papal bull issued in 1455 that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa. Following Columbus’s infamous exploratory voyage in 1492, sponsored by the king and queen of the infant Spanish state, another papal bull extended similar permission to Spain. Disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies led to the papal-initiated Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which, besides dividing the globe equally between the two Iberian empires, clarified that only non-Christian lands fell under the discovery doctrine.xix This doctrine on which all European states relied thus originated with the arbitrary and unilateral establishment of the Iberian monarchies’ exclusive rights under Christian canon law to colonize foreign peoples, and this right was later seized by other European monarchical colonizing projects. The French Republic used this legalistic instrument for its nineteenth- and twentieth-century settler colonialist projects, as did the newly independent United States when it continued the colonization of North America begun by the British.

In 1792, not long after the US founding, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson claimed that the Doctrine of Discovery developed by European states was international law applicable to the new US government as well. In 1823 the US Supreme Court issued its decision in Johnson v. McIntosh. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Marshall held that the Doctrine of Discovery had been an established principle of European law and of English law in effect in Britain’s North American colonies and was also the law of the United States. The Court defined the exclusive property rights that a European country acquired by dint of discovery: “Discovery gave title to the government, by whose subjects, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession.” Therefore, European and Euro-American “discoverers” had gained real-property rights in the lands of Indigenous peoples by merely planting a flag. Indigenous rights were, in the Court’s words, “in no instance, entirely disregarded; but were necessarily, to a considerable extent, impaired.” The court further held that Indigenous “rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished.” Indigenous people could continue to live on the land, but title resided with the discovering power, the United States. The decision concluded that Native nations were “domestic, dependent nations.”

The Doctrine of Discovery is so taken for granted that it is rarely mentioned in historical or legal texts published in the Americas. The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, which meets annually for two weeks, devoted its entire 2012 session to the doctrine.xx But few US citizens are aware of the precarity of the situation of Indigenous Peoples in the United States.

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It would appear that the US-Australia Alliance here is experiencing something of a communal meltdown. To paraphrase Michael Winner, "calm down dears.."

veya_victaous wrote:

Fred Moletrousers wrote:

Don't be ridiculous.

There are separate war memorials commemorating the sacrifice of Australian and New Zealand service personnel in the prestigious Hyde Park, London, both dedicated during the first decade of this century.

There is also a huge American war cemetery near Cambridge standing on land gifted by the University of Cambridge and visited by many thousands of individuals and groups of people from this country who wish to pay their respects to and make recognition of the ultimate sacrifice of US soldiers, marines, sailors and coastguards.

I led my local branch of the Royal British Legion there on just such a visit only a month ago.

Then, at the National Arboretum in Staffordshire, there are separate memorials to Allied Special Forces, South African Police, Royal Australian Air Force, Greek Veterans, the Maltese Islanders (who received a collective George Cross, our highest civilian decoration during the war), Hong Kong Voluntary Defence Corps, Kenyan Police, King's African Rifles, Malayan Volunteer Force, Northern Rhodesian Police,  Rhodesia Native Regiment, Polish Armed Forces, Rhodesia African Rifles, Royal Norwegian Navy and even The Sultan of Oman's Forces.

As member of the Royal British Legion I have attended three branch visits there with colleagues in order to recognise the debt of honour that we owe to all these nations.

Some "taking it for granted" and "failing to acknowledge the help we received in our hour of need"!

It would appear that you will stoop to any base lie and smear to pursue your spiteful little vendetta against this country.

LOL

YET
Tommy and NICKO both said we didn't do shit and joined late
and you got that Scrat saying you won the war yourself!!

SO i SUGGEST it is exactly as i said and You ARROGANT ASSHOLES NEED TO TAKE A LOOK AT YOUR SELVES Cause You lot Won NOTHING and NEED YOUR ASSES SAVED!! End of, if others didn't travel across the globe to help You'd be gone, no chance. SO to even Suggest Britain is responsible for victory is an INSULT to all those whose help you.
You saved no one but yourself and relied on other to save you too.
So you lot can take You pride you derive from Propaganda and lies and Shove em.
Britain was NOT the hero it was the damsel in distress.

That a factual resume of the proof of Britain's dedicated commitment to the memory of our brave wartime allies should rate one of those infantile "LOL" comments speaks volumes about the relevance of your own so-called considered opinions on the matter.

You lying bugger,I NEVER SAID YOU DID SHIT. and you did join late only after Japan attacked you, and you made us pay for the help you gave.

Veya, large chips on both shoulders, wonder why, must feel frustrated over not being ENGLISH!

Looking at the lies presented here It must be awful trying to come to terms with the fact youre not British and hating the only language you can communicate in, anti British racists like Veya, Wolf and Quill are just another aspect of the racism we witness in the world today, they're blinded by it, reason escapes them and their lives are forced to live within the confines of their own prejudices, a very sad state of affairs.

The "expert" Quill tried to argue against our queens lineage, his hatred for the British exposed the fault in his presentation as it was pointed out that not only is she related to William the conqueror but she is also related to the house of Wessex, something any grade school student knows that family history has two lines, a basic error on his part and in his embarrassment a meltdown ensued and he ran away with his tail between his legs.

He then ranted about lend lease paying for the Battle of Britain despite the fact that lend least took place in the year following the Battle of Britain once again his hatred for the British lead him down the wrong path and once again a meltdown ensued.

We now have the spectacle of Veya completely discounting the Battle of Britain.

Could anyone imagine the magnitude of Hitlers army marching into the Great Britain at the time, when one of the most powerful nations on this planet was basically an aircraft carrier geared up with the resources, machinery and manpower for the production of war.

They are blinded by their own stupidity, and this displays itself so clearly in each and everyone of their posts.

Scrat, we have had our disagreements, but on this I am behind you 100%!

nicko wrote:The Sherman tank,    biggest load of crap to hit the battle field.

The Germans called them " Tommy Cookers" perhaps you can tell us why?

And that's what you are paying attention to: what is the prettiest toy. It proves my point: Europeans are not systems thinkers. You stand around and lolly-gaze a Tiger II tank which never makes it into the field, in the meantime you lose the war.

Europeans cannot figure out what is important. That's why Europe is on the backslide of life. Fook 'em, America has bigger fish to fry in the Pacific community.

You boasted about the Sherman Tank, now again, why were they called "Tommy Cookers"?

nicko wrote:Scrat, we have had our disagreements,  but on this I am behind you 100%!

Scrat is just an America-basher. Jealousy is neither a strong motive, nor a formidable adversary. It's of no significance...as the song goes, We're already gone. The alliance that Churchill built up to save Europe's ass has run it's course. Frankly, there's nothing in it for us.

All the resources, intelligence and energy lies to the west. To the east there are only people wrapped in blankets of entitlements and hand-outs. There are new beginnings over the Pacific horizon. The old world is...well, old and dying.

nicko wrote:You boasted about the Sherman Tank,     now again, why were they called "Tommy Cookers"?

You can figure that out, nicko. Just as Americans are called "Yanks", Brits are called "tommy". I suspect it has something to do with your guys learning to drive on the left...the Sherman pulls to the right.

If you can't operate 'em, you end up in a ditch.

SORRY Quill, you really don't know as much as you think.

The Sherman tank was that easy to catch fire and burn English Tankers the Germans called them Tommy Cookers. PS English Soldiers were called Tommy's by the Germans.

Jesus. Is this a guy thing?
I think all countries are pretty similar in the fact that there's good and bad and shit and sugar, in all of them, in equal measures.

Original Quill wrote:

scrat wrote:
You're just a fucking idiot, it might come as a complete surprise to you but 1940 did actually occur before 1941.

"In December 1940, President Roosevelt proclaimed the U.S. would be the "Arsenal of Democracy" and proposed selling munitions to Britain and Canada."

This is why I firmly believe that IQ's go up the instant you cross the Atlantic.  Europeans simply don't understand systems theory.  They can build a beautiful Rolls Royce automobile, or a German Tiger II tank, but the dumb fucks only build 492 of them.  WTF???!  Americans built 49,234 Sherman M4's, at a rate of a thousand a month.  These Europeans are ignorant people, on the lower development scale.

The Americans understood how to save Britain, as Britain never did.  So, we saved your asses from not only the Germans, but from yourselves.  We stood back and figured out what you needed, not what you wanted.  In less than four months we came up with the Lend Lease Act, which fed you the resources that your little tiny islands didn't produce.  Then we gave you the manpower you needed.

Y'all go saluting and marching and flag-waving, shit like that, and the Americans get the fookin' job done.  We had to replace Montgomery, as he was a first class pompous asshole, idiot, and replace him with an American systems theory man.  So finally--fuck you idiots--the Americans, Canadians, Australians, and others, got the fookin' job done!

Frankly, it was your fucking war, and you couldn't handle it.  The Russians won that war, with American tanks and guns.

Look, there's a higher development of brain power over on the other side of the Atlantic.  That's what the New World means.

What? Like they did in Vietnam? How about 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'? Didn't exactly work out, did it?

Original Quill wrote:

nicko wrote:You boasted about the Sherman Tank,     now again, why were they called "Tommy Cookers"?

You can figure that out, nicko.  Just as Americans are called "Yanks", Brits are called "tommy".  I suspect it has something to do with your guys learning to drive on the left...the Sherman pulls to the right.  

If you can't operate 'em, you end up in a ditch.  

Brit soldiers were called Tommy in WW1 after Tommy Atkins, a mythical Redcoat soldier from the past immortalised in the poem by Rudyard Kipling.

http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_tommy.htm

nicko wrote:SORRY Quill,   you really don't know as much as you think.

The Sherman tank was that easy to catch fire and burn English Tankers the Germans called them Tommy Cookers.

It's a perceptual thing, tommy.  I could give you the secrets of the universe, but you just don't have the eyes to see it.  

You're still in 15th-century admiring tanks as one would Michelangelo, when the real world has moved 6-centuries beyond, thinking about 11th dimension theory and such.  Tanks, like aircraft or canons, are just tools as a way to get a task done.  The world to the west of you concentrates on the task, not the tools.  It's called systems theory.  Look it up. https://www.utwente.nl/cw/theorieenoverzicht/Theory%20clusters/Communication%20Processes/System_Theory/

nicko wrote:PS  English Soldiers were called Tommy's by the Germans.

And by the yanks, too...they're still called that.  You call Americans "Yanks".  The Germans are called "Herman".  American soldiers who have interaction with other people (not just military) come back with lingo about "Tommys" and "Hermans" all the time.

Original Quill wrote:

nicko wrote:Scrat, we have had our disagreements,  but on this I am behind you 100%!

Scrat is just an America-basher.  Jealousy is neither a strong motive, nor a formidable adversary.  It's of no significance...as the song goes, We're already gone.  The alliance that Churchill built up to save Europe's ass has run it's course.  Frankly, there's nothing in it for us.

All the resources, intelligence and energy lies to the west.  To the east there are only people wrapped in blankets of entitlements and hand-outs.  There are new beginnings over the Pacific horizon.  The old world is...well, old and dying.

Remarkable, then, how you had to rely so much on intelligence collated and analysed at Bletchley Park and on the nuclear research conducted in British university laboratories.

German development of "flying wing" aircraft might well have resulted in a Horton-designed bomber penetrating your airspace in 1946/47 and obliterating East coast cities, including New York, had the war gone on that long.

Oh, and did not European (including British) brain power contribute so much to your own Manhattan Project?

Fred Moletrousers wrote:

Original Quill wrote:

Scrat is just an America-basher.  Jealousy is neither a strong motive, nor a formidable adversary.  It's of no significance...as the song goes, We're already gone.  The alliance that Churchill built up to save Europe's ass has run it's course.  Frankly, there's nothing in it for us.

All the resources, intelligence and energy lies to the west.  To the east there are only people wrapped in blankets of entitlements and hand-outs.  There are new beginnings over the Pacific horizon.  The old world is...well, old and dying.

Remarkable, then, how you had to rely so much on intelligence collated and analysed at Bletchley Park and on the nuclear research conducted in British university laboratories.

German development of "flying wing" aircraft might well have resulted in a Horton-designed bomber penetrating your airspace in 1946/47 and obliterating East coast cities, including New York, had the war gone on that long.

Oh, and did not  European (including British) brain power  contribute so much to your own Manhattan Project?

Small pieces came in from everywhere.  Intel from Bletchley Park, heavy water from Norway,  the Hedgehog and the Squid from the Royal Navy, the parabolic wing from North American Aviation, the Merlin engine from Rolls Royce, which was more efficiently produced by the Packard Corporation, all over.  

The genius was in putting it all together and making it work...systems theory, held by Americans as a natural instinct.  It was telling how, as the Americans moved in, they had to replace people in place because the Americans better understood the thinking.  That was why Eisenhower was named Supreme Allied Commander over Montgomery.

scrat wrote:

veya_victaous wrote:



LOL

YET
Tommy and NICKO both said we didn't do shit and joined late
and you got that Scrat saying you won the war yourself!!

SO i SUGGEST it is exactly as i said and You ARROGANT ASSHOLES NEED TO TAKE A LOOK AT YOUR SELVES Cause You lot Won NOTHING and NEED YOUR ASSES SAVED!! End of, if others didn't travel across the globe to help You'd be gone, no chance. SO to even Suggest Britain is responsible for victory is an INSULT to all those whose help you.
You saved no one but yourself and relied on other to save you too.
So you lot can take You pride you derive from Propaganda and lies and Shove em.
Britain was NOT the hero it was the damsel in distress.

You are so eaten up with your hatred of the British that you're prepared to lie for your cause, I never said we won the war alone, indeed I praised the gallantry and heroism of our commonwealth forces, what I did say was that in 1939 as the Nazis conquered mainland Europe Britain stood alone for over two years fighting and defending the freedoms we enjoy today, if Hitler had succeeded in invading mainland Britain the world would be a darker place, the defence of this island and world democracy took place over the skies of mostly southern England by predominately British and Polish and commonwealth pilots in the RAF, your denial of this is steeped simply in your jealousy of not being British, and you just cannot accept that it was Britain's fortitude that stood there firm and resolute when everyone else collapsed under the jackboot of fascism.

Man up, get your facts straight and desist with this anti British bile.

You do know of course that Churchill knew that the Japs were going to attack Pearl Harbor but didn't warn them in advance because he knew that would bring them into the war with a point to prove and they saved our troops arses.

Sorry Blackie, Churchill did not know when Japan would attack the USA.
When America cut off the oil supply to Japan the japs realised that they would have to take over the oil fields in the far east to keep their economy going. They realised the Americans would stop them so they decided to "take out" the American fleet based in Pearl Harbour. This caused the Yanks to declare war on Japan, and as Japan was alied with Germany the Germans declared war on America. Churchill might have suspected that Japan would attack the Yanks but he and others knew nothing about when this would happen. Churchill was glad it happened as he knew it would bring America into the war.

nicko wrote:Sorry Blackie,    Churchill did not know when Japan would attack the USA.
When America cut off the oil supply to Japan the japs realised that they would have to take over the oil fields in the far east to  keep their economy going.    They realised the Americans would stop them so they decided to "take out" the American fleet based in Pearl Harbour.  This caused the Yanks to declare war on Japan, and as Japan was alied with Germany the Germans declared war on America.  Churchill might have suspected that Japan would attack the Yanks but he and others knew nothing about when this would happen. Churchill was glad it happened as he knew it would bring America into the war.

What makes you think that Churchill and Roosevelt didn't cook up the scenario together? Roosevelt moved the fleet from its San Diego base to a new base in Oahu to put a tantalizing morsel in front of the Japanese nose. At the same time he twisted the screws by shutting off the oil.

America had several Acts of Neutrality that Congress had passed prohibiting the US from entering into Europe's war:

Wiki wrote:The Neutrality Acts were laws passed in 1935, 1936, 1937, and 1939 to limit U.S. involvement in future wars. They were based on the widespread disillusionment with World War I in the early 1930s and the belief that the United States had been drawn into the war through loans and trade with the Allies.

I'm always suspicious of that quarter when Churchill lived in the White House in and around December, 1941.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1168185/Revealed-The-terrible-suffering-extraordinary-courage-British-WW2-soldiers-fighting-Japanese-Burmese-jungle.html

nicko wrote:Sorry Blackie,    Churchill did not know when Japan would attack the USA.
When America cut off the oil supply to Japan the japs realised that they would have to take over the oil fields in the far east to  keep their economy going.    They realised the Americans would stop them so they decided to "take out" the American fleet based in Pearl Harbour.  This caused the Yanks to declare war on Japan, and as Japan was alied with Germany the Germans declared war on America.  Churchill might have suspected that Japan would attack the Yanks but he and others knew nothing about when this would happen. Churchill was glad it happened as he knew it would bring America into the war.

It was said by his driver/bodyguard for donkeys years in one book about him so I believe it as it's just the sort of thing he would have done
in my opinion.
He was cold, calculating and devious!

Then there's the question of why the aircraft carriers were out on maneuvers on the weekend of December 6-7, 1941.

It was well known by then that battleships and cruisers were outdated and of no real use in a sea battle. Carriers, however, were the new capital ship. It appears that someone wanted the carriers out of harms way at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attacked.

Original Quill wrote:

Fred Moletrousers wrote:

Remarkable, then, how you had to rely so much on intelligence collated and analysed at Bletchley Park and on the nuclear research conducted in British university laboratories.

German development of "flying wing" aircraft might well have resulted in a Horton-designed bomber penetrating your airspace in 1946/47 and obliterating East coast cities, including New York, had the war gone on that long.

Oh, and did not  European (including British) brain power  contribute so much to your own Manhattan Project?

Small pieces came in from everywhere.  Intel from Bletchley Park, heavy water from Norway,  the Hedgehog and the Squid from the Royal Navy, the parabolic wing from North American Aviation, the Merlin engine from Rolls Royce, which was more efficiently produced by the Packard Corporation, all over.  

The genius was in putting it all together and making it work...systems theory, held by Americans as a natural instinct.  It was telling how, as the Americans moved in, they had to replace people in place because the Americans better understood the thinking.  That was why Eisenhower was named Supreme Allied Commander over Montgomery.

"more efficiently produced..." only because your factories, with all their manpower availablility and uninterrupted R&D and manufacturing facilities had not repeatedly been bombed to ruin several times over the years of the war.

The Packard engine was good, but it was still a Merlin built under licence and it traced its lineage back to the power units developed on the back of the best features of the Supermarine racing seaplanes that took part in the Schneider Trophy events in the early 30s...one of the pilots for which was my late wife's uncle who later flew Spitfires in the Battle of Britain.

The Spitfire was still flying operationally during my first year in the RAF, though all its missions were related to meteorology , and several privately-owned examples regularly overfly my house because I live near an historic aircraft museum and airfield which they regularly visit.

In fact I was at the airfield only a month ago and enjoyed the sheer delight of hearing the distinctive sound of a Merlin engine as the last airworthy Battle of Britain machine made several high speed, low level passes across the field.

I wonder just how many of these veterans still have your "more efficiently produced" Packard engines behind the prop?

Edmund, you must know that everything produced by the Yanks was bigger, faster and better than anything the Brits had.

The Merlin was a fantastic aircraft engine, used by the British in the Avro Lancaster, de Havilland Mosquito, Handley Page Halifax, Hawker Hurricane, and Supermarine Spitfire.  The engine was the best produced during WWII, particularly because it was supercharged with a two-staged supercharger.  The Merlin supercharger was originally designed to allow the engine to generate maximum power at an altitude of about 16,000 ft, but with a two-speed drive, a lower gear, which operated from takeoff to an altitude of 10,000 ft (3,000 m), drove the impeller at 21,597 rpm and developed 1,240 horsepower (925 kW) at that height, while the high gear's (25,148 rpm) power rating was 1,175 horsepower (876 kW) at 18,000 ft (5,500 m).

The Merlin engine was a part of a marriage of British and American designers, resulting in the P-51D Mustang.  North American Aviation, of Los Angeles CA, which made the P-51, was the first to come up with the parabolic wing.  The parabolic wing moved the fat part of the wing aft, so that as air passed over and around it, rather being a resistance, the thrust resulted in lift (so, turning a liability into an asset).  The consequence of this was tremendous fuel efficiency, resulting in a fighter aircraft with many times the range of more ancient designs.


The problem with the original P-51 was that with the Allison carbureted engine.  It bled energy as it climbed, of course because air was thinner at altitude.  But the supercharged Merlin engine was not dependent upon outside air pressure, and so it could be regulated.  The engine that was put into the North American P-51D was the British-designed, Packard-manufactured, Merlin engine.  The marriage was perfect.

The P-51D was the first fighter aircraft that, with the parabolic wing, was able to protect the bombers all the way to East Prussia and back.  And with the Merlin engine it's performance in combat was superb...outclassed anything the Germans had.  The systems-theorists who had the idea to put that aircraft together, were American.  It wasn't the pride in the Merlin engine, nor the lauding of the parabolic wing that was important to them.  It wasn't a Michelangelo they were after, nor even a pretty toy.  It was winning the war.

When the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, looked up in the Berlin skies and saw P-51D fighter aircraft protecting the allied bombers, he declared: The war is over.

When the top German fighter ace was asked by GORING "What do you need to win the war"

He replied "A squadron of Spitfires"

Original Quill wrote:

nicko wrote:Scrat, we have had our disagreements,  but on this I am behind you 100%!

Scrat is just an America-basher.  Jealousy is neither a strong motive, nor a formidable adversary.  It's of no significance...as the song goes, We're already gone.  The alliance that Churchill built up to save Europe's ass has run it's course.  Frankly, there's nothing in it for us.

All the resources, intelligence and energy lies to the west.  To the east there are only people wrapped in blankets of entitlements and hand-outs.  There are new beginnings over the Pacific horizon.  The old world is...well, old and dying.

Oh, the irony.........

Original Quill wrote:The Merlin was a fantastic aircraft engine, used by the British in the Avro Lancaster, de Havilland Mosquito, Handley Page Halifax, Hawker Hurricane, and Supermarine Spitfire.  The engine was the best produced during WWII, particularly because it was supercharged with a two-staged supercharger.  The Merlin supercharger was originally designed to allow the engine to generate maximum power at an altitude of about 16,000 ft, but with a two-speed drive, a lower gear, which operated from takeoff to an altitude of 10,000 ft (3,000 m), drove the impeller at 21,597 rpm and developed 1,240 horsepower (925 kW) at that height, while the high gear's (25,148 rpm) power rating was 1,175 horsepower (876 kW) at 18,000 ft (5,500 m).

The Merlin engine was a part of a marriage of British and American designers, resulting in the P-51D Mustang.  North American Aviation, of Los Angeles CA, which made the P-51, was the first to come up with the parabolic wing.  The parabolic wing moved the fat part of the wing aft, so that as air passed over and around it, rather being a resistance, the thrust resulted in lift (so, turning a liability into an asset).  The consequence of this was tremendous fuel efficiency, resulting in a fighter aircraft with many times the range of more ancient designs.

The problem with the original P-51 was that with the Allison carbureted engine.  It bled energy as it climbed, of course because air was thinner at altitude.  But the supercharged Merlin engine was not dependent upon outside air pressure, and so it could be regulated.  The engine that was put into the North American P-51D was the British-designed, Packard-manufactured, Merlin engine.  The marriage was perfect.

The P-51D was the first fighter aircraft that, with the parabolic wing, was able to protect the bombers all the way to East Prussia and back.  And with the Merlin engine it's performance in combat was superb...outclassed anything the Germans had.  The systems-theorists who had the idea to put that aircraft together, were American.  It wasn't the pride in the Merlin engine, nor the lauding of the parabolic wing that was important to them.  It wasn't a Michelangelo they were after, nor even a pretty toy.  It was winning the war.

When the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, looked up in the Berlin skies and saw P-51D fighter aircraft protecting the allied bombers, he declared: The war is over.

I know that I might as well save my breath, but the Mustang was not designed until 1940 (as a consequence of a specific request by the, er, wartime British Purchasing Commission, I might say, the desperate need for longer operational range having already been learned as a very hard and salutary lesson) while the first Spitfire appeared in, I think, about 1935 as a development of a 1931 R J Mitchell design.

It would be strange, therefore, had the P51 not benefited enormously from both the proven need to provide long range fighter protection for bombers (ours had to go a damn site further than the German air force to drop their eggs because the Germans had so quickly grabbed close-proximity bases along the Channel coast and in Norway) and the rapid developments in airframe, wing and engine technology in response to wartime demands.

As for the carburettor V fuel injection issue, we Brits recognised - and quickly rectified - this during the Battle of Britain when the superior engine performance of the ME 109 became painfully obvious.

nicko wrote:Veya,    large chips on both shoulders,   wonder why,  must feel  frustrated over not being ENGLISH!

Apparently you cant live in any city, town or village in Britain without there being a war memorial within 3 miles.
I think that's abolutely true!

Fred Moletrousers wrote:

Original Quill wrote:The Merlin was a fantastic aircraft engine, used by the British in the Avro Lancaster, de Havilland Mosquito, Handley Page Halifax, Hawker Hurricane, and Supermarine Spitfire.  The engine was the best produced during WWII, particularly because it was supercharged with a two-staged supercharger.  The Merlin supercharger was originally designed to allow the engine to generate maximum power at an altitude of about 16,000 ft, but with a two-speed drive, a lower gear, which operated from takeoff to an altitude of 10,000 ft (3,000 m), drove the impeller at 21,597 rpm and developed 1,240 horsepower (925 kW) at that height, while the high gear's (25,148 rpm) power rating was 1,175 horsepower (876 kW) at 18,000 ft (5,500 m).

The Merlin engine was a part of a marriage of British and American designers, resulting in the P-51D Mustang.  North American Aviation, of Los Angeles CA, which made the P-51, was the first to come up with the parabolic wing.  The parabolic wing moved the fat part of the wing aft, so that as air passed over and around it, rather being a resistance, the thrust resulted in lift (so, turning a liability into an asset).  The consequence of this was tremendous fuel efficiency, resulting in a fighter aircraft with many times the range of more ancient designs.

The problem with the original P-51 was that with the Allison carbureted engine.  It bled energy as it climbed, of course because air was thinner at altitude.  But the supercharged Merlin engine was not dependent upon outside air pressure, and so it could be regulated.  The engine that was put into the North American P-51D was the British-designed, Packard-manufactured, Merlin engine.  The marriage was perfect.

The P-51D was the first fighter aircraft that, with the parabolic wing, was able to protect the bombers all the way to East Prussia and back.  And with the Merlin engine it's performance in combat was superb...outclassed anything the Germans had.  The systems-theorists who had the idea to put that aircraft together, were American.  It wasn't the pride in the Merlin engine, nor the lauding of the parabolic wing that was important to them.  It wasn't a Michelangelo they were after, nor even a pretty toy.  It was winning the war.

When the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, looked up in the Berlin skies and saw P-51D fighter aircraft protecting the allied bombers, he declared: The war is over.

I know that I might as well save my breath, but the Mustang was not designed until 1940 (as a consequence of a specific request by the, er, wartime British Purchasing Commission, I might say, the desperate need for longer operational range having already been learned as a very hard and salutary lesson) while the first Spitfire appeared in, I think, about 1935 as a development of a 1931 R J Mitchell design.

It would be strange, therefore, had the P51 not benefited enormously from both the proven need to provide long range fighter protection for bombers (ours had to go a damn site further than the German air force to drop their eggs because the Germans had so quickly grabbed close-proximity bases along the Channel coast and in Norway) and the rapid developments in airframe, wing and engine technology in response to wartime demands.

As for the carburettor V fuel injection issue, we Brits recognised - and quickly rectified - this during the Battle of Britain when the superior engine  performance of the ME 109 became painfully obvious.

To respond would be gratuitous.

Fred Moletrousers wrote:...the Mustang was not designed until 1940 (as a consequence of a specific request by the, er, wartime British Purchasing Commission,

Lol...erm, made to an airframe company located in America, North American Aviation, of Los Angeles CA. Please...let's hope the British purchasing department didn't keep it a secret. Everyone knew what the necessity was.

Fred Moletrousers wrote:I might say, the desperate need for longer operational range having already been learned as a very hard and salutary lesson) while the first Spitfire appeared in, I think, about 1935 as a development of a 1931 R J Mitchell design.

It wasn't the need this time that was the mother of invention...it was the brilliance of American engineers.  The Spitfire was a quaint design, having a wide wing for housing the long guns it sported.  It was, however, not designed for aerodynamics.  The P-51 was a revolution in aerodynamics that was probably the equivalent of the discovery of DNA in genetics.

Yes, that the Allied Air Forces had a need for a long-distance fighter plane is undisputed--those were American bombers that were being shot down, as the British refused to fly 24-hours a day--and it was the American strategists that identified that need.

Again, I go bock to my real point.  I don't care for Europe's love for their toys.  America is trained in a much broader mode of thinking.  Americans designed the P-51D, not for a piece of art, but for a purpose.  That purpose was to win the war.  There was no systems theorist in Europe that could have merged the need for a long range fighter with the parabolic wing.  That came from America.

Original Quill wrote:

scrat wrote:
Calm your worthless colonial tongue, you're nowt but a loser from a long line of losers, it must be awful knowing that us Brits are still so victorious in many ways and all you've ever done is lose and while you Aussies were running about bare foot in kangaroo hot pants prying witchetty grubs from logs, Blighty stood alone against the Hun.

You and your ilk dishonour your very own people with your disgusting anti British bile which is of little meaning and consequence in the real world, now put the bottle down and go find your own flag, your own culture, your own fucking language instead of sponging everything you are or ever will be off of us British.

Um...Brits?  Victorious?  Are you talking about that great war over that guano-covered penguin sanctuary in the South Atlantic?  Nice job...big guys!!


(I mean as long as we are passing out accolades.    )

You have a wonderful way of cutting to the quick quickly OQ

Blighty is ace and twould be better it there were not so many jealous anti British knocking us.

+1

veya_victaous wrote:


LOL

YET
Tommy and NICKO both said we didn't do shit and joined late
and you got that Scrat saying you won the war yourself!!

SO i SUGGEST it is exactly as i said and You ARROGANT ASSHOLES NEED TO TAKE A LOOK AT YOUR SELVES Cause You lot Won NOTHING and NEED YOUR ASSES SAVED!! End of, if others didn't travel across the globe to help You'd be gone, no chance. SO to even Suggest Britain is responsible for victory is an INSULT to all those whose help you.
You saved no one but yourself and relied on other to save you too.
So you lot can take You pride you derive from Propaganda and lies and Shove em.
Britain was NOT the hero it was the damsel in distress.

You wish ...

Your envy of Brits is still getting to you isn't it?

Original Quill wrote:

Fred Moletrousers wrote:...the Mustang was not designed until 1940 (as a consequence of a specific request by the, er, wartime British Purchasing Commission,

Lol...erm, made to an airframe company located in America, North American Aviation, of Los Angeles CA.  Please...let's hope the British purchasing department didn't keep it a secret.  Everyone knew what the necessity was.

Fred Moletrousers wrote:I might say, the desperate need for longer operational range having already been learned as a very hard and salutary lesson) while the first Spitfire appeared in, I think, about 1935 as a development of a 1931 R J Mitchell design.

It wasn't the need this time that was the mother of invention...it was the brilliance of American engineers.  The Spitfire was a quaint design, having a wide wing for housing the long guns it sported.  It was, however, not designed for aerodynamics.  The P-51 was a revolution in aerodynamics that was probably the equivalent of the discovery of DNA in genetics.

Yes, that the Allied Air Forces had a need for a long-distance fighter plane is undisputed--those were American bombers that were being shot down, as the British refused to fly 24-hours a day--and it was the American strategists that identified that need.

Again, I go bock to my real point.  I don't care for Europe's love for their toys.  America is trained in a much broader mode of thinking.  Americans designed the P-51D, not for a piece of art, but for a purpose.  That purpose was to win the war.  There was no systems theorist in Europe that could have merged the need for a long range fighter with the parabolic wing.  That came from America.

Yeah, yeah...and I suppose it was those brilliant, broader mode of thinking systems theorists that gave us, er, the steam engine, the jet engine, the electric motor, carbon fiber, telephone, tank, marine chronometer, hovercraft...not to mention the programmable computer and world wide web which is enabling you so loudly to celebrate your greatness and superiority over the rest of we hapless dummies...

Thanks for the hot dog and the hamburger, by the way...though come to think of it didn't you pinch the latter idea from the Germans?

I repeat, Edmund, the Yanks invented everything, and every thing they have produced is bigger and better then anyone else has produced,

And they even did it before we did!!!
Quills a nice bloke,but you can't get through to him.

nicko wrote:I repeat,   Edmund,     the Yanks invented everything,   and every thing they have produced is bigger and better then anyone else has produced,

And they even did it before we did!!!
Quills a nice bloke,but you can't get through to him.

I know, I know.

I'm still choking over my late morning G&T at this one: "The Spitfire was a quaint design, having a wide wing for housing the long guns it sported. It was, however, not designed for aerodynamics."

Not exactly the theories drummed into me at all those "principles of flight" lectures I attended during my time as a cadet, and something that might have surprised Herr Leutnant Fritz as he bobbed up and down in his little rubber dingy in the middle of the Channel wondering how the hell that quaint unaerodynamically-designed kite with funny wings and long guns managed to shoot the arse off his state-of-the-art ME109...

Original Quill wrote:

Fred Moletrousers wrote:...the Mustang was not designed until 1940 (as a consequence of a specific request by the, er, wartime British Purchasing Commission,

Lol...erm, made to an airframe company located in America, North American Aviation, of Los Angeles CA.  Please...let's hope the British purchasing department didn't keep it a secret.  Everyone knew what the necessity was.

Fred Moletrousers wrote:I might say, the desperate need for longer operational range having already been learned as a very hard and salutary lesson) while the first Spitfire appeared in, I think, about 1935 as a development of a 1931 R J Mitchell design.

It wasn't the need this time that was the mother of invention...it was the brilliance of American engineers.  The Spitfire was a quaint design, having a wide wing for housing the long guns it sported.  It was, however, not designed for aerodynamics.  The P-51 was a revolution in aerodynamics that was probably the equivalent of the discovery of DNA in genetics.

Yes, that the Allied Air Forces had a need for a long-distance fighter plane is undisputed--those were American bombers that were being shot down, as the British refused to fly 24-hours a day--and it was the American strategists that identified that need.

Again, I go bock to my real point.  I don't care for Europe's love for their toys.  America is trained in a much broader mode of thinking.  Americans designed the P-51D, not for a piece of art, but for a purpose.  That purpose was to win the war.  There was no systems theorist in Europe that could have merged the need for a long range fighter with the parabolic wing.  That came from America.

Quill, my dear chap, I'm not sure how to put this but something that was "not designed for aerodynamics" will, by definition, be somewhat challenged in its ability to, er, fly.

Here's NASA's definition of aerodynamics which I have chosen for the organisation's proven excellence in making various objects get off the ground:

Aerodynamics is the way air moves around things. The rules of aerodynamics explain how an airplane is able to fly. Anything that moves through air reacts to aerodynamics. A rocket blasting off the launch pad and a kite in the sky react to aerodynamics. Aerodynamics even acts on cars, since air flows around cars.

I can assure you, hand on heart, that the venerable old WW2 Spitfire that passed over my head as I sat at the "Flying Proms" display in Bedfordshire a month ago listening to the wonderful music of Walton's "Spitfire Prelude and Fugue" was most definitely airborne...not to mention creating so much noise from its Merlin engine that we could hardly hear the bloody orchestra!

And believe me, given its sheer speed, not to mention all the looping and rolling that went on, the old girl's aerodynamics appeared to me still to be in pretty good shape.

Makes my heart pound quicker, Fred.  Airshows are fun.

The elliptical wing of the Spitfire was supposed to minimize drag while providing a surface that provides an elliptical spanwise lift distribution.  It didn't work, and in fact the design induces "simultaneous stall", meaning the whole wing fails at a sudden, single point.  

That's why the wing of the Spitfire was altered, thinning and twisting it toward the tips to create washout.  In short, all the elliptical wing does is create an unstable aircraft, which then has to be re-compromised in order to give the pilot back control.

Trying to take advantage of elliptical lift was simply proving that a theory didn't always work.  The parabolic wing, on the other hand, created fantastic aeronautical improvements.  A small aircraft, with drop tanks, could fly all the way to Berlin and back...and by the way, pilots had fun strafing trains and such on the way back, adding to the destruction of the Axis industrial capacity.

Nostalgia is great...winning is better.

Quill, why did Adolf Galland, german fighter ace, ask for a squadron of Spitfires?

nicko wrote:Quill, why did Adolf Galland, german fighter ace, ask for a squadron of Spitfires?

Probably to curry favor with the British--who, after all, had won the war.  Also, as you have seen, the British love to wax nostalgic about their glory days, and the Spitfire is a part of that. No doubt he was playing to that sentiment.

But Galland was really a fan of jet propulsion, and he was in love with the Me 262:

Adolf Galland wrote:"If we would have had the 262 at our disposal - even with all the delays - if we could have had in '44, ah, let's say three hundred operational, that day we could have stopped the American daytime bombing offensive, that's for sure.

But again, he didn't have the 262.  Why was that?  That was European thinking; praise the toy, never mind the mission.  No systems-awareness.

Original Quill wrote:Makes my heart pound quicker, Fred.  Airshows are fun.

The elliptical wing of the Spitfire was supposed to minimize drag while providing a surface that provides an elliptical spanwise lift distribution.  It didn't work, and in fact the design induces "simultaneous stall", meaning the whole wing fails at a sudden, single point.  

That's why the wing of the Spitfire was altered, thinning and twisting it toward the tips to create washout.  In short, all the elliptical wing does is create an unstable aircraft, which then has to be re-compromised in order to give the pilot back control.

Trying to take advantage of elliptical lift was simply proving that a theory didn't always work.  The parabolic wing, on the other hand, created fantastic aeronautical improvements.  A small aircraft, with drop tanks, could fly all the way to Berlin and back...and by the way, pilots had fun strafing trains and such on the way back, adding to the destruction of the Axis industrial capacity.

Nostalgia is great...winning is better.

Quill, I'm sure that R J Mitchell would have been both humbled to learn of his obvious deficiencies in the sciences of aircraft design and aerodynamics and deeply concerned by the knowledge that his creation, the Spitfire, actually, ahem, didn't work.

Unfortunately for a lot of German pilots Mitchell had created one of the most beautiful and efficient, yet deadly, fighting machines of the early war years at the very least and I very much doubt whether they would have shared your jaundiced views, or at least those of the sources from which you quote.

And yes, winning is better than nostalgia....that is why we in this little backwater are so delighted to have won the Battle of Britain thanks to brave pilots from a number of countries and the Spitfires and tougher but less glamorous Hurricanes that they flew.

Fred Moletrousers wrote:Unfortunately for a lot of German pilots Mitchell had created one of the most beautiful and efficient, yet deadly, fighting machines of the early war years at the very least and I very much doubt whether they would have shared your jaundiced views, or at least those of the sources from which you quote.

Not only did they share them, but they acted on them.  The Spitfire wasn't phased out finally until 1955, but it was largely reduced to trainers, photo-reconnaissance missions and even floatplanes.  

Only the Spitfire IX was build in sizable numbers in 1942 (5,656).  By 1944, Supermarine produced only 16 of the PR-X.  But it was a fantastic machine for its time, early in the war.  You are right to get nostalgic over it.

Original Quill wrote:

Fred Moletrousers wrote:Unfortunately for a lot of German pilots Mitchell had created one of the most beautiful and efficient, yet deadly, fighting machines of the early war years at the very least and I very much doubt whether they would have shared your jaundiced views, or at least those of the sources from which you quote.

Not only did they share them, but they acted on them.  The Spitfire wasn't phased out finally until 1955, but it was largely reduced to trainers, photo-reconnaissance missions and even floatplanes.  

Only the Spitfire IX was build in sizable numbers in 1942 (5,656).  By 1944, Supermarine produced only 16 of the PR-X.  But it was a fantastic machine for its time, early in the war.  You are right to get nostalgic over it.

The fact that it was still flying operationally some twenty years after its inception and more than 15 years after its debut as an active combat aircraft - and that at a time of unprecedented technical advances in aviation - tends to debunk your source's rather hypercritical criticisms of it. It was truly iconic - in fact it still is - and that can't be said of many wartime aircraft.

It's hardly surprising, is it, that an aircraft which flew in the Battle of Britain should in its autumn years be re-assigned (rather than your slightly derogatory word "reduced" ) to training duties?

It's role as a PR aircraft was not some sort of demotion either;at the height of hostilities and in many theatres of operation during the war of WW2 it proved to be absolutely superb in the role. That's why its abilities were still being exploited well into the jet age.

Fred Moletrousers wrote:

Original Quill wrote:

Not only did they share them, but they acted on them.  The Spitfire wasn't phased out finally until 1955, but it was largely reduced to trainers, photo-reconnaissance missions and even floatplanes.  

Only the Spitfire IX was build in sizable numbers in 1942 (5,656).  By 1944, Supermarine produced only 16 of the PR-X.  But it was a fantastic machine for its time, early in the war.  You are right to get nostalgic over it.

The fact that it was still flying operationally some twenty years after its inception and more than 15 years after its debut as an active combat aircraft - and that at a time of unprecedented technical advances in aviation - tends to debunk your source's rather hypercritical criticisms of it. It was truly iconic - in fact it still is - and that can't be said of many wartime aircraft.

It's hardly surprising, is it, that an aircraft which flew in the Battle of Britain should in its autumn years be re-assigned (rather than your slightly derogatory word "reduced" ) to training duties?

It's role as a PR aircraft was not some sort of demotion either;at the height of hostilities and in many theatres of  operation during the war of WW2 it proved to be absolutely superb in the role. That's why its abilities were still being exploited well into the jet age.

I detect that you are conceding everything I've said. I have no reason to disagree with you...it was a fabulous aircraft back in the day. But it had outlived its usefulness by the time the US took over the war.

Original Quill wrote:

Fred Moletrousers wrote:


The fact that it was still flying operationally some twenty years after its inception and more than 15 years after its debut as an active combat aircraft - and that at a time of unprecedented technical advances in aviation - tends to debunk your source's rather hypercritical criticisms of it. It was truly iconic - in fact it still is - and that can't be said of many wartime aircraft.

It's hardly surprising, is it, that an aircraft which flew in the Battle of Britain should in its autumn years be re-assigned (rather than your slightly derogatory word "reduced" ) to training duties?

It's role as a PR aircraft was not some sort of demotion either;at the height of hostilities and in many theatres of  operation during the war of WW2 it proved to be absolutely superb in the role. That's why its abilities were still being exploited well into the jet age.

I detect that you are conceding everything I've said.  I have no reason to disagree with you...it was a fabulous aircraft back in the day.  But it had outlived its usefulness by the time the US took over the war.

I'm not conceding anything at all; simply agreeing with you when, to use the words of Basil Fawlty, you were stating the bleedin' obvious such as that the Spitfire, like every aircraft built, was eventually overtaken and made redundant by advances in technology.

To attempt to compare it in terms of performance, range and technical advancement with the P51 Mustang was a case in point...the Spit was much older and the product of inter-war technology, and like the Hurricane was designed and built primarily for home defence in the knowledge that we would eventually go to war with Germany, and that the Luftwaffe was growing massively in strength, particularly in its bombing capability.

The Mustang's role was long range bomber protection, aided greatly by the introduction of drop tanks, and that was a job at which it excelled. The reason why it was technologically superior was that its designers were able to exploit everything learned about the performance of aircraft such as the Spitfire and the ME109 under actual combat conditions.

But to claim that the Spit was a quaint,unaerodynamic design and that it "didn't work" was utter nonsense...otherwise I might have served my military time in a postwar Luftwaffe, learned to sing the Horst Wessel Lied, greet everyone by sticking out my right arm and yelling "heil fuhrer!" and drinking German lager instead of good strong English ale.

It's no good Moley, Quill will NEVER admit he was wrong.

Quill, When American Bombers were returning from missions over Germany, some badly shot up, do you know what they looked for?

Spitfires to escort them home, You know what they called them?

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