Daydream Notes

 It is difficult to write about the Ratte for the same reason it is difficult to write about Shakesphere. Shakespeare has had several hundred years of expert analysis, with many brilliant scholars spending their careers trying to fully understand how the Bard constructed his works. Short of finding the legendary lost play, or finding some new, completely different folio of Shakespeare play transcriptions, it's difficult to imagine even the most diligent scholar today could contribute anything new. It is a similar deal when writing about the P.1000 Ratte, the preposterous "land cruiser" ultratank the Nazis briefly considered building. The history of the project is short, and most of what's worth saying about it was said in the book " My Tank is Fight" by Zach Parsons. Parsons has a chapter on the Ratte, and if you search the Internet for Ratte-tales you will find people nearly cutting and pasting what Parsons wrote.Unlike Shakespeare, the Ratte can...

Luftwaffe bombers 1944. [KG 100 under air attack 1944.] When you read The Big Book of Luftwaffe History , one surprising thing you notice is how hopeful the Luftwaffe and its managers in the  Reichsluftfahrtministerium [RLM - Reich Air Ministry] were at the start of 1944. This hope was not irrational, either: there were several factors, even facts, to underpin that hope, and it was a durable hope, too, lasting throughout even the spring of 1944, when the already battered Luftwaffe took terrible losses as they lost control of the skies over Germany. The most impressive fact was Armaments Minister Albert Speer's expansion of German fighter production, while dispersing the factories: 27 big plants were turned into roughly 270 dispersed ones, keeping production of basic fighter types (the Bf 109 and Fw 190) resilient in the face of Allied bombing.  Even as the spring losses mounted, Germany made good and even gained fighter airframes: in January, fighter deliveries were 50%...