Bullethead

Down here in the swamp, it's gotten below freezing (by an RCH, but it counts) only 3 nights this year, 2 of them last month. Today, it never got below 50^F and I was walking around my yard at 1800 this evening in shorts and sandals. But things are changing rapidly, the temps swinging back and forth from a bit cold to balmy every couple of days and giving everybody the flu. In another couple weeks, we'll settle in for our periodically cold rainy season. Nevertheless, house fire season has started. Most buildings around here, especially the low-income types, might as well be tents. Relatively cool in summer even without A/C, they're fridges even in our relatively mild winters, and lack enough heating to make them otherwise. In addition, folks around here aren't very bright so, rather than wear winter clothing indoors, they crank up their improvised heating appliances so they can keep on wearing shorts and going barefoot. Space heaters placed next to beds, piles of clothing on the floor, and sofas. Ovens going full blast with the doors open, etc. 3 only slightly freezing nights, 2 house fires so far. I prevented a 3rd (for the moment) when I went to a ramshackle trailer for a diabetic emergency and noticed a plastic garbage bag full mostly of paper actually leaning against the open door of the oven. It's going to be a long excuse for a winter . Idjits roasting in a trailer fire Burnt flesh tingling up your nose Yuletide carols being sung by sirens Herniating yourself dragging hose

Geez, Lou, don't you know that, despite the words at the beginning that "This story is true...", the movie "Fargo" was BS? There is NO suitcase full of money buried along that fence, so give it up . (Sadly, real people have actually frozen to death looking for that fictional suitcase.....) @Olham I'm enjoying your game. Keep it up.

I figure Carrick does. That's SoCal if I ever saw it. Maybe it's Hawaii, but I'm betting on SoCal, BTTW, I'm sure my bailiwick will be a dead giveaway. Nothing but jungle :).

It means a lot to me because this Xmas I'm on duty at the fire station both the 24th and 25th and my folks are growing old. But also, 20 years ago this year, I flew out of Cherry Point on a C-141 early on 24 December and landed in Jubail, Saudi Arabia on Xmas moring. We nearly crashed in Torejon, Spain en route, got chased by Libyan MiGs all the way from Marsailles to Sicily, flew over the Pyramids, and finally made a very rough assault landing at our destination just over the heads of surrounding terrorists with SA-7s. Then I spent all the rest of the day trying to get a ride to my unit, which didn't know I was coming, so totally missed the big Xmas dinner laid on for the troops. As such, I figure the ghosts will be out in force this time around... That's a good one :)

As Olham says, go to The Aerodrome for more detailed info (more than you can probably stand even ) . If you're looking for decals, the easy part is getting some of the right scale to match your model. The pre-printed lozenge pattern came in long rolls of cloth of a known, fixed width. Thus, if the decal is the correct scale, this fixed width of cloth will be the right size on the model. This is important because the lozenge pattern did NOT match up from side to side of the roll, only along the length of the roll. As such, where strips of fabric were laid side-by-side, there were lines of pattern discontinuity along the seams where the strips were sewn together. You want these the right distance apart on your model; hence, the importance of getting decals of the correct scale. Beyond this, however, things get complicated very quickly. The only answer is to research the particular plane you're building to the limit of your endurance. I'm no expert on the subject, but I do know in general the sorts of things you need to be on the lookout for in your research. 1. 4-Color or 5-Color? As Olham says, both were used contemporaneously. The choice seems to have been up to the factory that built the airplane in question. For instance, Fokker-built D.VIIs seem to have mostly used 4-color, whereas Albatros-built D.VIIs seem mostly to have used 5-color. 2. Which Colors? Both 4- and 5-color preprinted lozenge came in several versions, with the lozenges in the same pattern but using different combinations of colors. This was largely a function of the airplane's role. For daylight operations, the lozenge pattern was typically darker on top (emphasis on green and brown) and lighter on the bottom (emphasis on pink and gray). These are the colors most commonly seen when folks think of lozenge camo. However, airplanes operating at night used an entirely different set of colors (emphasis on black and dark blue), and seem mostly to have used the same colors on upper and lower surfaces. 3. Pattern Orientation Regardless of whether the fabric was pre-printed camo or not, there were 2 standard ways of applying it to airplane wings, the choice of which was the preferrence of the airplane designer. These ways were with the fabric seams parallel with or at about a 45^ angle to the wing ribs. See, wing were covered by sewing together a tube of fabric made from strips cut from rolls of cloth, sliding this over the structure, then sewing and shrinking it down. Thus, there were always seams spaced out along the wing at the width of the rolls of cloth the overall tube was made from. With unprinted cloth, this doesn't matter on the finished model (or game skin) but with the pre-printed stuff, because the pattern doesn't match up across seams, you can really see which way the fabric strips ran. So find out which way they ran on the airplane you're making. In general, it seems that nearly all fighters had the seams parallel to the ribs, while many 2-seaters had them at an angle. 4. Color of Rib Tapes In case you didn't know, the tube of fabric covering the wing was sewn to the ribs. This stitching was protected from the elements (and the holes it made in the fabric sealed) by gluing very narrow strips of fabric (the rib tapes) down on top of the exposed part of the stitching. For normal planes, this doesn't matter because these the rib tapes were painted (or not) just like the rest of the wing. But with the pre-printed lozenge fabric, the rib tapes will naturally make a discontinuity in the underlying pattern so will be quite noticeable. The most common method for rib tapes was to use strips of a single color. This is also the most practical if you're talking about decals--just apply the decal and then carefully paint over it along the top of the molded rib in the desired color. For day aircraft, the upper surface rib tapes seem most often to have been a dark blue-gray approximately (but usually not quite the same as) the similar color in the pre-printed pattern. On the lower surfaces, the usual rib tape color seems to have been a magenta-ish shade, again not quite matching the closest similar color on the fabric. On night aircraft, black rib tapes seem to have been most common. HOWEVER, in both cases, sometimes the rib tapes were made from scrap bits of the pre-printed fabric. And naturally, these were cut from parts of the roll that didn't match the pattern of the underlying main fabric. But this option is generally only really practical for skinners, not model-makers. 5. What About the Fuselage? Most German airplanes had plywood fuselages, and AFAIK none of them preprinted fabric glued over the solid wood. On these planes, the fuselage camo was always hand-painted, and only rarely did it try to match the pre-printed fabric on the wings. Usually, it either made no attempt at camo, or had irregular blotches, or a Monet-esque impressionistic rendering of the preprinted fabric often using fewer color. But a few German planes (mostly Fokkers and large bombers) had rear fuselages covered in fabric. In general, these seem to have used the upper surface colors and to have had the seams running vertically. But you really need to research your particular plane to be sure.

OK Unc, the DEA's got your meth lab surrounded. Come out with your hands up Seriously, though, crank has a long history of military usage. It was commonly available on both sides in WW2. See the movie "The Cruel Sea" for an example of British usage. And one of today's homebrew meth recipes is called the "Nazi method" because it's broadly similar to the WW2 German recipe. Hell, into the 1960s, crank was available over the counter under the name "NoDoze". You can still get "NoDoze", but since then it's just been caffiene pills. And some diet pills well into the 1980s had a fair amount of crank in them.

Here's mine, which hits home in so many ways: <A href="http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/show/50355-Robert-Louis-Stevenson-Christmas-At-Sea">http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/show/50355-Robert-Louis-Stevenson-Christmas-At-Sea</A>

Welcome aboard, Dokken! New guy buys the drinks! Just drop your bag on any old bunk. There are always quite a few vacancies around here and if you happen to pick an occupied cot, the current owner will probably go missing before sundown. C'est la guerre Anyway, I'm sure you'll find OFF completely addictive. I recommend reading the "Survial in the Air" sticky topic above, as well as Uncle Al's collectd wisdom over in the Help forum.

Thanks for the work, Lou

Warband is the new and improved M&B. Besides MP, it has a number of imrpovements and expansions to the SP side, so I'd get Warband for SP. As for Steam, I have no idea how that works. I just downloaded the game from the Tale Worlds site and have never touched Steam. I don't do MP. One thing: Warband is still fairly new so there aren't that many mods for it yet. The great mass of mods are for the original M&B and a number of them ain't compatible with Warband.

I've made a good living looting villages myself, but only do that if you have no intention of ever owning them later. For some reason, memory lingers even if you kill all the people, so that looted villages will hate you ever after, so won't make you any money. It's a real pain rebulding their opinion, especially when you can't take time off from major wars to herd their cows and such. Still, it's lots of fun Actually, M&B started out as SP. The new version, Warband, introduced a lot of MP action. On the SP side, it's a "realistic" medieval RPG. That is, no magic, no monsters, just normal people. Your job is to fight your way into the nobility and perhaps even become king somewhere. This requires raising, training, and equpping an army, which requires money, which requires fighting. Basically, think of yourself as Sir Thomas Hawkwood or some such :). The stock "native" SP campaign is set in an imaginary world, but there are beaucoup mods for other worlds, such as historical places at historical times. Other mods have magic, firearms, etc. One of my favorites is 1866, which is a Wild West total conversion :).

This should only be a factor if the fuselage tank is full, which moves the CG well aft. If you have a choice, don't fill the fuselage tank unless you need it for the range of the mission, and even then burn it first before the drop tanks. With little or no fuel in the fuselage tank, the Pony shouldn't spin unless 1 or both of 2 things happen: You don't use the 1st notch of flaps, which is there to increase your turn performace. But they also increaces drag so you need to constantly be going on and off with them. You try to turn hard below about 250 knots. Even with the maneuver flap setting in use, that will make you go tits over teakettle because of the stall characteristics of the Pony's laminar flow airfloil section. Of course, if you're blacking out, you're obviously trying to turn too hard. The Pony is an E-fighter primarily, although it CAN turn fairly well. But NEVER turn below 250 knots, and NEVER get below 275 knots unless the enemy is already much slower. The secret to turning with things like 109s is to take the outside track. That is, your corner speed is higher than theirs, but when both are at corner speed, their turn rates are nearly identical. So, you turn at your corner speed of about 250 (using maneuver flaps) , staying on the 109's low 6, and you can keep pace with him. Just fly formation there until he gets frustrated and reverses, and then you have him. Barrel roll over him if you don't nail him when he crosses your nose, but NEVER go for lead pursuit when he's turning at HIS corner speed or you'll stall out. IMHO, M&B is the greatest 1st person hack&slash game ever. And it's SO gratifying to lead an army to victory while standing amongst them and limited to very simple commands. I was playing M&B Warband today at the fire station between calls and had a most satisfying battle against a rather larger herd of Sea Raiders (aka Viking marauders). My character is still in the early going so is doing the merchant thing to build up seed money. I've only got a half-dozen compainions (although they're rather pimped out) and 10 or so Mercenary Cavalry. I had my companions (all of whom have bows) distract the enemy while I led my cav around their flank through a gully, then charged them from the rear. I had to do this a couple times, but in the end victory was ours. Great renown due to the disparity in numbers, minimal casualties, and lots of loot .

Over here, it's not so cold, but it's a humid cold. It only takes about 35^F for my joints to all start hurting. The summer heat down here nearly kills me, but at least it's not painful. I couldn't stand to live any place colder We have a number of new products in work, a couple of which will be released before the end of the year, or at least come close. We'll be announcing them shortly.

Ah yes. I love Fallout 3, although for some reason my characters always end up wearing Regulator dusters for armor . Seriously, that takes long, hard word to achieve. I get better stuff more easily, but I give it to my homey Jericho because I like the style of the duster, the fedora, and the shades. No matter how I start out or what plans I have, things always end up this way, just before I nuke Megaton :whistle: . My only complaint with FO3 is that you can't join the coolest factions, the Raiders and The Enclave. Haven't tried FOLV. It's on my Xmas list I hope not much longer. This time of year, the cold damp air makes all my maltreated joints remember all the sins of my misspent youth. I need to get back to my real job guarding the Lake of Boiling Blood down in Hell. See, I'm just here on a "work release" thing Us indies are all that's left of a great tradition, which few folks these days even know is a tradition at all. Those of them who notice us at all think we're a new breed of subversives trying to disturb the tranquility of their Xbox world, rather than the last holdouts of the old guard. Which makes me bring up a couple of my favorite games. I've already mentioned Mount & Blade, which is a Turkish product. It's VERY much worth it if you're into swords. Plus, you can make characters every bit as weird as those in Oblivion There's also the X Universe by Egosoft, a German product from what I can tell. This is an incredibly complex space opera game that combines 1st person action with strategic stuff where you can command whole fleets. Which you build yourself from the ground up, at bases you also build yourself. I'd post some screenies from both but they're on my other computer.

Excellent work with the character editor there, sir. That girl's just become my desktop picture As a game developer, IMHO 4 main plagues hit the PC game industry. Piracy is the 5th and quite baneful these days in relative terms, but it's only picking over the bones left by the previous 4 plagues so isn't don't as much damage in absolute terms. However, given the depressed state fo the ecomony, ANY harm leaves a deep scar right now. Anyway, IMHO things went like this: 1. Retailer Tyranny This is the single greatest cause and it started nearly 2 decades ago. Everything else is minor in comparison.... Back in The Ancient Days of Gods and Heroes (early-mid 90s), virtually everybody was on dial-up at hourly usage rates, so even downloading still shots of porn (forget videos) wasn't common (most browsers were still text-only, after all). IOW, the ONLY place you could buy a game was at a store, even if back in the DOS days an excellent game would still fit on 1-3x 5.25", 512-KILObyte floppies (anybody else old enough to remember those?). Downloading anything more than text was too slow and too expensive, and e-commerce as we know it today was still a wet dream. So, the retail stores had a chokehold on the entire software industry, like robber barons with a castle overlooking an important river. And because forums like this existed back then, and also ways to search for them, folks communicated their likes and dislikes globally just as much then as we're doing here right now. This coincided with PCs finally becoming as common as toasters. Just a few years before, only affluent geeks owned computers and most folks didn't see the need to spend the price of a good used car (decent new cars were still available for less then $10k then) on something to balance their checkbook. The bottom line was, where previously computer wargames (the staple food of affluent geeks) had dominated the market, now all the new non-geek PC-owners wanted cheap thrills. And they learned they could share their views and receive peer approval. Thus, schlock like Myst (IMHO, a medium-level crossword puzzle combined with for-then-cool graphics) sold like condoms at Subic Bay, while games for those with more discriminating tastes languished relatively unsold on the shelves. Retailers saw this happening, and retailing is all about shelf-space turnover. If it doesn't move, take it off the shelf. So retailers started telling game developers that they wouldn't stock their games at all unless the devs could guarantee X amount of sales, and those sales had to happen within X days of release. After that time, the retailers would either toss them in the bargain bin at ridiculously low prices, or send them back to the devs. Thus, most PC game devs went belly-up, except for a very few established franchises, which became fewer over time. 2. Developers Releasing Crap In response to retailer tyranny, quite a few developers decided that the only way to stay in business was to speed up their product cycle. That is, build up pre-release hype, sell in large numbers a very green product that often didn't work at all, then not support it but go on to the next release ASAP. After all, in those days, it was still physically and fiscally impossible to download patches of the size needed to fix such crap, so why bother making them? But they hadn't reckoned with the ability of an exponentially expanding number of customers to communicate their displeasure, so the customers voted with their feet. Now the serious PC game industry not only had a small market share in comparison to the schlock, but had alienated most of their share with this tactic. As such, most makers of serious PC games went tits up. Those that didn't mostly switched to making schlock. 3. The Rise of the Console Meanwhile, the next generation was growing up playing console games. These were also schlock, but this generation developed a lasting taste for it, which they've mostly carried over into what should be their years of wisdom and broader horizons. As such, they want more schlock now that they can afford PCs. Hence, the Sims and such. Even worse, having grown up with nothing but the vastly inferior console interface, these folks see nothing wrong with it, so don't demand anything better, and it's nearly impossible to convince them of the MANY superiorities of the PC as a gaming platform. The PC industry has responded by dumbing down computers, so the current generation, and their kids, will do the vast bulk of their gaming on consoles and only use their emasculated iPad-esque PCs for browsing the web and such. IOW, the future of PC gaming is already lost. 4. The Rise of MMORPGs As you mention, this has sucked away a large fraction of the customer base who are still interested in buying serious PC games. 5. Piracy and DRMs The very few devs still making serious PC games STILL face the retail tyranny, and that's even worse these days than it was 15 years ago. First, console games totally dominate the shelf space, so retail pressure is even worse now. Second, wargames are now a very small niche of PC gaming (when they used to be the ONLY games in town). Thus, apart from massive franchises like Unreal and things that also are on consoles (and usually released there first), you don't see PC games on shelves anywhere. The very few devs who still make them are necessarily very small, usually part-time operations with all employees having other jobs to really pay their bills. Making games is for beer money, nothing more. And because these games will NEVER be able to find shelf space, most are now only available via download. Honestly, I don't know how OBD can stand the expense of burning DVDs for us. Fortunately, these days nearly everybody has broadband so downloads of several hundred megs are no big deal. The problem with this business model, however, is that with no CD or DVD involved, the good old copy protection method of needing the disc in the drive is no longer possible. And such games only sell a few 10s of thousands of copies at most, barely enough financially to justify making them even for beer money. Thus, EVERY sale lost to piracy leaves a visible scar on the bottom line. As a result, we have DRMs, early forms of which were so tyrannical that they alienated much of what litlte customer base such companies still have. ---------------- I like serious PC games, and I like beer, so I'll keep making both of them probably will until my liver gives out. But don't expect anything to change on this score, and as us old-school devs die off from jake-leg, expect the world of serious PC games to go with us. Don't forget "Mount & Blade", which IMHO is at least as good as Oblivion. Not in grahics or polish, but in the nuts and bolts. Besides, not having magic or monsters makes things quite interesting.

Well, there are scads of non-fiction tribute pieces out there in all sorts of media, such as "Band of Brothers", not to mention all the memories and the ships, bases, buildings, etc., named for specific guys. So I think that ground is pretty well covered. That leaves room for other things, and IMHO WW2 isn't so sacrosanct that it can't have some fiction thrown in, too. Sure, the story of SPR is pure fiction, to the point where it can be classified into one of the handful to narrative types that have occurred in literature since writing was 1st invented. All that time and we're still telling the same old stories, just with different names and settings. But that's because these are good stories, time-tested :). But put that aside for a moment and consider the portrayal of the characters. You can't say that was in any way disrespectful of veterans, past or present. SPR's heroes are brave, resourceful, disciplined, skillful, etc: good soldiers all. They get a stupid, highly dangerous job, which they don't agree with at all ("why do I have to get killed so this other SOB can go home?") but they salute and march because they're good soldiers, even if they bitch about it. And the whole thing about their mission is the ultimate temptation to disobey orders. After all, they're out there operating completely on their own, in a very confused situation where nobody knows whats going on and their bosses can't keep an eye on them. It would have been VERY easy for them to have found a deserted shack somewhere, taken a few days off catching up on sleep, then come back home saying they'd tried their best but couldn't find the guy anywhere. I've been known to do that sort of thing myself when given stupid missions. But these guys carried on with it, not because they were driven forward by some hard-dick, long-service bastard, not because they were brainwashed militarized zombies, but because they decided, as a result of being good people as well as good soldiers, that it was the better thing to do. Then Ryan himself didn't want to leave his unit just before what was sure to be a desperate battle, so they all stayed for that when they could have walked out. He was also a good person and a good soldier. So anyway, I think the whole movie was a very respectful tribute to the conduct of the real troops in their Hellish surroundings. The actual story might be BS, but real people were indeed faced with similar situations and usually behaved quite admirably. And IMHO, I'd rather have a fictional story presenting this type of message because it's a tribute to every swingin' Richard, then, before, and since. The problem I have with things like "Band of Brothers" is that by picking out a single unit, and an elite one at that, they tend to foster the notion that other units weren't as good, didn't go through just as much if not more Hell, didn't have such admirable people in them, etc. Well, one of my great-grandfathers and his 4 brothers were marching side by side in Pickett's Charge and the same cloud of grapeshot did for the 4 brothers all at once. Nobody made a movie about that, so I hope that makes you feel better .

Well, I'm sorry your fun's over. I was never into MMORGs very much (did some EverCrack when it was new, got over it), but I was bigtime into MMOFS games for since the early 90s. I rode several such games, warts and all, until they died, then moved on to the next. I only gave it up a few years ago when I had to get broadband for my job and the only option for me was satellite with a built-in lag of 2-3 seconds. I still miss the fun of blasted dweebs out of the sky and flying regular missions with my old squadron, so I feel your pain. But OTOH, I'm also a game designer. If the game was intended to be played in a certain way, then you should always expect changes to make that happen if it wasn't already. While I've never played WoW, I know it's all about cooperation all across the game world from combat to crafts. If you have a class that can go it alone, then you'd expect significant numbers of folks to go that way, thus making a less-diverse and less-healthy game "ecosystem". Like in my old MMOFS Aces High, the damn La-7 was not only almost the fastest regular plane in the game, it also turned with the best of them, so the sky was full of them at the expense of everything else. But OTGH, if a significant portion of the customers don't have the regular time and devotion necessary to play with the same group all the time, then you NEED some way to play solo and still be rewarding to them. Now that IS good news! I still play Oblivion from time to time. Half the fun of the game is making weird-looking characters. Here are a couple of my favorites: Fer de Lance, son of Vegeta and a mandril Speedicut, a soccer hooligan who became the head theif, the head assassin, and also Shegorrath

Yeah, that's pretty cool. In the fire department, we use it a lot to see what all sides of a large, complex building looks like for pre-planning purposes. BTW, did you now that Diamond Head used to be a massive fortress? It's still got beaucoup gun emplacements all over it. DId you see any of them in the pictures?

Interesting. I've never saw SPR as having any sub-plot. It's all about exactly what it's name says, which is a military "ripping yarn" that just happens to be set against the background of the first few days of the Normandy campaign. There's no attempt to explain the context and IMHO no need to, given the scads of books, movies, and documentaries on that subject. Besides, it's a tale of small cogs being jerked around chaotically in a huge machine. None of the characters know what's going on beyond rifle range from him, so to me it's more realistic that the movie doesn't try to tell you while squeezing in some cheesy love story or whatever. I've also never seen SPR's story as cheesy. It is, after all, the classic story format of the "Heroes' Quest". It's pretty much a retelling of King Arthur and the Holy Grail, in fact. You can't call that cheesy :). Now, SPR's quest might seem far-fetched, but that sort of thing could easily have happened and possibly actually did. Even if not, it's still a good representation the wild-haired missions that come down frequently from on high that guys at the bottom get killed proving are stupid ideas in practice, no matter how good they looked at GHQ. In Desert Storm, a few equally stupid and bizarre missions found their way into my foxhole, so it would not have surprised me in the least to have been sent out on the same mission. and march.... But that's just me. Also, I will say that SPR's combat scenes were extremely realistic and gave me flashbacks for a couple weeks. I remember when the movie was over, not one person in the theater so much as twitched for several minutes after the lights came on. IMHO you rate combat pay for watching it. So maybe I just like this movie because of the effect it had on me.

Here's one we used to sing on route marches when we were out of earshot of the brass. In its original form, it was called "The Pioneers Have Hairy Ears", "pioneers" in this case being the old title of military engineers, not settlers of the wild west. Thus, it soon became "The Engineers...." My forefathers in the artillery liked it so much they changed it to "The Cannoneers....", which is admittedly a bit lame but it was the best they could come up with :). There are a few other verses, and variations on those shown at the link below, but all of them are at least as nasty as these, so I shant type them up here http://www.csufresno.edu/folklore/drinkingsongs/mp3s/1940s/1940s-anonymous-(78)/plain-white-label-black-text/the-pioneers.htm

Here are some of the more printable versions of the WW1 classic "Mademoiselle from Armentiers". http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=859 And here are some of the less printable versions, which are rather more to my thinking what soldiers really sang :D http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/english/armentir.htm For some snatches of IMHO real WW1 marching songs, check out Somme, by Lyn McDonald. This has such all-time classics as: John Brown's baby has a pimple on his bum An' the little bastard can't sit down (and so on) And Do your balls hang low? Do they wobble to and fro? Can you tie 'em in a knot? Can you tie 'em in a bow? Can you throw 'em o'er your shoulder Like a stupid f***ing soldier? Do your balls hang low? (this goes on for many verses wth an amusing anecdote thrown in) It also, of course, has quite a few bits of gung-ho crap from the then-new recruits to Kitchener's Army, before they saw the elephant on 1 July. These are rather poignant in retrospect., along the lines of such things as He was just a way-out country gink From afar out West where the horntoads blink He was just as brave as he was thin When the war broke out he jumped right in Sayin' "Good-bye Ma, good-bye Pa "Good-bye mule with your ol' hee-haw "I really don' know what this war's about But gosh-a-mickle I'll soon find out" But if other wars are on the table (and keeping with an aeronautical theme), we can't forget such things as: Oh the starting of the Beaufort is a most peculiar art No matter how you prime the bitch the best she'll do is fart And sometimes in the morning when the dew is on the grass You're tempted to insert the choke up Pratt & Whitney's ass (Chorus) See, oh see, oh everybody come Come and see the Beaufort boys a-sittin' on their bums Tryin' to start their engines amidst the mighty roar Of the LIberators that were started long before

I figure that happened on 7 December 1941. But even before then, WW1 was spoken of as little as possible and not remembered with joy in the US. In the US, WW1 was NOT a popular war. Remember, Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election on the slogan, "He kept us out of war", although he then turned around and got us into it during his 2nd term, much against popular sentiment. Despite Entente propaganda to the contrary, there really was no way to spin WW1 as "free world vs. tyranny" in anything like the same way that was possible with WW2. WW1 was, at the bottom line, just another in the millennia-long series of European power struggles. The US was getting rich off it and also growing in world stature as the European powers bled each other to death. Thus, not only would getting actively involved cut into both types of profits, besides getting a bunch of US troops killed, but coming in with the Entente was actually helping what was then viewed as the US's hereditary enemy, the UK. Not only had we fought the UK more than any other power up to that point, but we were then intense rivals in the maritime trade business. In fact, the Washington Treary on naval limitations shortly after WW1 probably staved off a 3rd war between the US and the UK. On top of all this, you had a significant fraction of the US population being either immigrants from Germany or their recent progeny, plus the general isolationist views of most US citizens (maintained until at least Pearl Harbor). Such folks remembered (either 1st hand or from their parents' preaching) that one major reason for settling the American Wilderness in the face of hostile natives and other hardships (then still an on-going process) was getting away from being cannonfodder in the incessant European power struggles. The very abstract and rather ludicrous idea that US citizens should be able to wander about war zones under belligernent flags was in no way a just causus belli to most Americans. And then, of course, once in WW1, Pershing's dedication to pre-1914 tactics wrought their bloody work. So, you have an episode most US citizens wanted to forget. Hence, the "Roaring 20s". And back then, men were men, so vets didn't go around whining afterwards about how brutal it had been to their poor psyches--there were enough shellshock cases to say that for them. Thus, compared to Europe, there were practically no US war memoirs published. Besides, it all happened when even voice radio and newsreels were in their infancy, if they existed at all, and television, with its contempoary penchant for anniversary documentaries, was still half a century in the future. Thus, there was never a WW1 version of "Band of Brothers", and even if somebody today wants to make one, there are no living survivors to interview and precious little archival footage to kludge together into a coherent whole. WW1 has, for all intents and purposes, become the realm of archaeology, such as "Digging up the Trenches". Both my grandfathers and all their numerous brothers served in WW1 on the US side. Numerous cousins at greater or lesser remove served on all sides. I'm not yet 50, but my family breeds late, so I'm a generation behind most of my contemporaries. They have even less knowledge of such things, just has I have practically zero knowledge of any of my 8 great-grandparents beyond their names. More than 2 generations behind us, it's all quite literally ancient history. It might as well have happened Xenophon for all we really know about it.

Here's one the RNAS lads might have sung, although it was probably too old and stodgy for the youngsters of WW1. Their daddies certainly sang it, though: Gosport Nancy Gosport Nancy she's my fancy She's the girl to make good sport How she greets you when she meets you When your ship gets into port! All the Gosport ladies they loves a sailor man But at findin' a way to spend your pay There's none like Gosport Nan! Now Gosport girls are good at dancin' There the best there is no doubt When the music sets 'em prancin' How they fling their skirts about! All the Gosport ladies can do the French can-can But for real high kicks and fancy tricks There's none like Gosport Nan! Now Gosport girls they love to garble Gosport girls they likes their tot Rum and brandy, gin and shandy Gosport girls al go the lot All the Gosport ladies they swigs the flowin' can But at knockin' it back with Honest Jack There's none like Gosport Nan! Gosport Nancy keeps a parlor Where the lads can take their ease She'll wake you, she'll shake you She will do whate'er you please All the Gosport ladies, they does the best they can But at makin' a bed for a sailor's head There's none like Gosport Nan!

Not many, from what I can tell. The Franks/Guest/Bailey book tries had to show the cause of every lost plane and I don't recall many being from collisions. In "Black September", the Entente lost way more planes than in "Bloody April". However, it was a rather lower percent of the forces engaged, and the Germans really didn't stop the Entente from carrying out its missions, so it wasn't as noticeable as it had been earlier.

If you want an example of how bad this is, read the introduction of To Conquer Hell, by Edward G. Lengel in 2008. Note that date. As it says there, this is the ONLY serious historical study of the Meuse-Argonne battle in US print since the official recap by the US Army just after WW1. Yet this was the BIGGEST BATTLE EVER FOUGHT by the US Army, at least in terms of numbers of troops engaged. And more guys got killed in that battle, which lasted just a couple months, than in 10 years in Viet Nam. That was the result of Pershing still believing in French 1914 bayonet tactics. Anyway, you wanted WW1 books, so I recommend this one. I don't have a single favorite WW1 book, but I have a fairly long list of good ones everybody should read. Besides the above, these include: A Rifleman Went to War and The Emma Gees, by H.W. McBride Infantry Attacks, by Irwin Rommel A Naval Histroy of World War One, by Paul G. Halpern The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman Tannebert: Clash of Empires, by Dennis E. Showalter The Brusilov Offensive, by Timothy C. Dowling The Forgotten Front: The East African Campaign, by Ross Anderson Jutland: Analysis of the Fighting, by NJM Campbell The Rules of the Game, by Andrew Gordon Bloody April... Black September, by Norman Franks, Russell Guest, and Frank Bailey Note that more than half of these were published in the last decade or 2. I wish I could find some English-language books on the Gebirgskrieg along the Austrian-Italian Front, but even the German and Italian originals are long out of print, I'm afraid. If anybody can point me to something, I'd be most appreciative. Movies.... I haven't seen many WW1 movies, actually, and have liked even fewer. Those I liked included: The Price of Glory The Light Horsemen The Battleship Potemkin (a bit pre-WW1, but the best propaganda film ever made so worth seeing <G>). Hell's Angels (mostly because it's SO bad--great to watch while drunk)