Daydream Notes

BTW these bullets are coming at you in a muddy hellscape British Zeppelin Defenses: Gentlemen with Carbines If you've read up until this point, you may find it a bit strange that the British have been entirely ineffective against giant flying bags of explosive gas. There's a few reasons for this. This was, of course, the first time anybody had considered how to defend an entire nation against an aerial attacker, so everything was new and unknown. Also, as in WW2, home defense was the last priority for resources, and thus the early defenders often had little training and obsolete equipment. I thought I'd touch on the British defenders, both for story's sake, and because a lot of the early efforts definitely could be described as aeronautical insanity. The British were sufficiently concerned with Zeppelins pre-war that the Committee of Imperial Defense had a high level conference meeting in 1908. Here are the conclusions of that meeting: 1. It is possible that...

Peter Strasser, Airship Enthusiast. Last time, we ended on Peter Strasser, the new Commander of airships. In the year since his appointment, Strasser had worked hard, launching a crash training program for new airship crews. Using airships from DELAG and personnel from the Zeppelin company, he had managed to restart the training process that the L1 and L2 disasters had interrupted. He had also done quite a lot building up the Navy airship base at Nordholz. Still, he had quite a headwind when war was declared in August 1914. The Navy had precisely one airship in operation, L 3, and the Imperial army was using its political clout to take airship-related resources originally going to Strasser's force. While Strasser had one airship in service, the army had now eleven. That headwind, however, was about to become a tailwind, and Strasser was soon to float over almost more resources than he knew what to do with. As to why this happened, we must return to the other point I left off wit...

The place our story starts is with the man Zeppelins were named after: Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin , or Count Zeppelin to his friends. He was a German aristocrat who was born rich and married richer, and had until 1890 been a General in the Kaiser's army. Count Zeppelin was a patriot and decorated war hero, with a reputation for bluntness. This bluntness one day managed to annoy the Kaiser himself, and Count Zeppelin found himself prematurely retired. Denied his passion for the Army, Zeppelin turned to his other great passion: airships. Count Zeppelin and his astonishing moustache. Count Zeppelin and his astonishing moustache.   Count Zeppelin was convinced Germany would need 'sky-crusiers' (as he called them) if she was to continue to rise in greatness. During the American Civil War, Lt. Zeppelin had served in the Union army as a Military Observer, and had been greatly impressed in a balloon ride he took in St. Paul, Minnesota. His first proposal in...

 When I was a teenager reading books about World War 2, I always found the Condor very interesting, because it was always mentioned, but rarely talked about in any detail. So as a kid knowing that it was both really atypical for a Luftwaffe aircraft (being four engined and really long range) and knowing how many problems the 'no long-range bomber' thing caused Germany, I always wanted more detail then I was finding. Many years later, I got into scale modeling again and accomplished a little dream, building a 1/72 model of the Fw 200. Whenever I build a model, I usually end up doing a fair bit of reading, both for historical accuracy, and because if I've bought a model kit of something, it usually mean I find the subject interesting. As this particular kit took me a long time and was very detailed, I ended up doing a metric fuckton of research. And then after the model was done, I had to tell other people what I'd learned... Most of the things on this blog are ...

Fw 200 C-3. The brass exhaust pipes are the big visual clue for the later engine. Two Condors over the ocean. (Part 1 can be found here.)   Attack of the Nazi Big Birds     When the Condor crews of KG 40 returned in January, they picked up where they had left off, and sank 64,000 tons of shipping, while loosing only a single plane. A Condor C-3 had performed a strafing run on a tiny rescue tugboat, the HMS Seaman, and was totally surprised when the Seaman opened up with her quite modern AA armament: a 20mm Oerlikon cannon and two .50 machine guns. Running headfirst into this buzzsaw of fire, the Condor flopped into the sea, and its three surviving crewmen were captured. Intelligence gathered during interrogation of these POWs were the start of effective defenses against the Condors.     In February 1941, a new tactic was tried. With U-boats nearby, Petersen sent five Condors against convoy HG 53, south of Portugal. Each Condor claimed a ...