NonCredibleDefense
A community for your defence shitposting needs
Rules
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Do not make personal attacks against each other, call for violence against anyone, or intentionally antagonize people in the comment sections.
2. Explain incorrect defense articles and takes
If you want to post a non-credible take, it must be from a "credible" source (news article, politician, or military leader) and must have a comment laying out exactly why it's non-credible. Low-hanging fruit such as random Twitter and YouTube comments belong in the Matrix chat.
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Posts must be about military hardware or international security/defense. This is not the page to fawn over Youtube personalities, simp over political leaders, or discuss other areas of international policy.
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We don't care if you're Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Stalinist, Baathist, or some other hot mess. Leave it at the door. This applies to comments as well.
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Classified ‘western’ information is off limits regardless of how "open source" and "easy to find" it is.
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If you use somebody's art in your post or as your post, the OP must provide a direct link to the art's source in the comment section, or a good reason why this was not possible (such as the artist deleting their account). The source should be a place that the artist themselves uploaded the art. A booru is not a source. A watermark is not a source.
9. No low-effort posts
No egregiously low effort posts. E.g. screenshots, recent reposts, simple reaction & template memes, and images with the punchline in the title. Put these in weekly Matrix chat instead.
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11. No misinformation
NCD exists to make fun of misinformation, not to spread it. Make outlandish claims, but if your take doesn’t show signs of satire or exaggeration it will be removed. Misleading content may result in a ban. Regardless of source, don’t post obvious propaganda or fake news. Double-check facts and don't be an idiot.
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No way. Are you joking or did this really happen?
God yes, all the time. Navigation was more of an art than a science back then. And you have to imagine you’re flying quite high to avoid flak, while looking out for targets that might be obscured by cloud cover and where the lights were turned off so as not to present a clear target for said bombers.
Basically, the crew dropping the bombs might be ‘reasonably certain’ they’re hitting the right target, but a few miles here or there can make a lot of difference. You think you’re looking at A, while you’re really flying over B.
I live in the Netherlands, right on the German border. A local village here was bombed by accident on february 15th 1945, because the bomber crew mistook it for a German industrial complex just over the border. They dropped 35 bombs. They luckily ‘only’ killed 2 and injured 7. There’s a yearly memorial.
It’s terrible that it happened, but honestly… you really can’t blame the crew for it.
Yes, Nijmegen got hit almost as bad as Rotterdam (the worst bombing by the germans) and that was also because of allied forces thinking they were flying over germany. It was the 80 year memorial a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, more than a few people died in Nijmegen.
Especially with night bombing campaigns.
They used to "move" towns by a few km by stringing up lights that matched the pattern of the town's streetlamps in empty fields a few km away, and then having the actual city blacked out. From 30k feet up, they'd see matching light patterns and assume they were over the target.
The daylight bombing raids were a bit more accurate. You may think that being able to match a map to terrain features sounds relatively easy in a plane that's flying relatively slowly along a predictable route. But if it's at all overcast it's much harder. Then add in flak or enemy fighters distracting you and pulling you away from your maps, and suddenly it's a lot harder.
But, under ideal conditions, with the Norden bomb sight, the bombers could be surprisingly accurate. The bomb sight adjusted for ground speed, changing winds, and included a primitive auto-pilot and actually steered the plane, and AFAIK it auto-released the bombs at the right time. Hitting the right cluster of buildings from a height of 30k feet with a gravity bomb is fairly impressive. But, under combat conditions that was pretty rare.
Navigating at night using nothing but maps, compass, altitude and speed indicator is pretty difficult. Especially when the hostile territory you are flying over is forcing everyone to keep their curtains closed and minimize light leaks.
Why didn't they just use the GPS?
time travel hadn't been invented yet.
Because the Earth is flat, they would've had to have used FPS
I've done some night flying by dead reckoning. I had the benefit of meteorologists in the territory I was flying over, so I had pretty good winds aloft data. That makes a DIFFERENCE.
Some cities would go dark and then a mile away have lanterns set up in the night over a large distance so planes would drop their bombs in a field instead of over the actual city, if I recall correctly.
In ww2, sometimes the wrong COUNTRY was hit
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65344370
Russia is just honoring the Great Patriotic War!
Bezuidenhout comes to mind. The Allies bombed The Hague instead of a rocket installation outside of town because somebody got their target coordinates mixed up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_the_Bezuidenhout
Several Swiss cities were bombed during World War II because they were mistaken for Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_incidents_in_Switzerland_in_World_War_II?wprov=sfti1#Bombing_incidents
I was going to make a joke about how it was really because they were hiding Nazi gold but...
The German city of Constanze would deliberately leave all their lights on at night so that allied pilots would think they were part of Switzerland
This actually worked pretty well