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Wreck of Australian Warship HMAS Sydney Found?
Mendy writes "Tim Ankers, a British archaeologist, claims to have found the wreck of the HMAS Sydney, lost with all hands in the Indian Ocean during World War II. He says that he's done this from the comfort of his home using software he wrote called Merlindown, which can analyze satellite photographs at different wavelengths to 'peer 75 meters into the earth and 16,000 meters beneath the seas.'"
*Fires up Google Earth to search for treasure and naked women in the shower*
Big deal - a ship is rather large. Can you find my keys?
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
I'd be interested in knowing how his algorithm works. Finding sunken vessels 2 miles under water using existing satellite photos of the ocean(even if they are "optimum-quality") seems almost too good to be true. Not only that but to supposedly be able to make out gun turets of those ships? Seems like a bit of hocus pocus.
Perhaps he is going public with this in hopes that someone will want to purchase the software for treasure hunting.
When will this be available as a layer in Google Earth?
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
OK, let's fire up a robot and check his work...
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
My brother in law was an archeologist who utilized ground based sonar devices to look for Native American ruins. The resolution on the unit he was using was something like 10 meters below the ground, and required a very slow transit time and a good deal of energy.
Yes, tech progresses, but 75 m from outer space using only UV, Xray, and Infra photography? I am very skeptical.
On another note... if this new process is true then construction will have to pretty much halt in many areas of Southern California. There are stringent rules in place governing building on areas that contain either significant fossil remains or any sort of Native American relics. Several hundred million USD per year is spent on archeological surveys to determine what may be beneath a construction site. Various companies have reputations for finding little if anything, and so environmental groups sometimes employ other companies that usually find a good deal of things that will prevent construction.
Decently resolved pictures up to 75 m below the surface will prove what some archeos in the field already believe to be true... under current laws it should be almost impossible to build anywhere in the greater L.A. area because of the shear volume of fossil record.
They pulled two gigantic whales out of a toll road excavation in the middle of the desert... etc.
Regards.
What if you have an uncomfortable home?
Nobody ever considers this end of things.
free music
Uh, if this is true then it is a big dea. A very big deal.
7 5.stm
Do you have any idea of how valuable salvage rights of all the sunken wrecks that this tool could potentially uncover would be? No? Well, here's a clue:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/66719
That's one wreck. Worth half a billion dollars. Makes you think, doesn't it?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
If true, this guy just obsoleted the submarine. But by the same token, I don't think we'd be hearing about it if it were true. Any number of security agencies would have pounced on him by now.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
The Australian gov is still really 'closed' about this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_between_HMAS_S ydney_and_HSK_Kormoran
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAS_Sydney_II
http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/reps/dailys/dr260802 .pdf
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Well they used to, until an unfortunate incident during the second world war.
75 meters under the ground? 16,000 meters under water? There are going to be some very unhappy governments if that were the case. I call shenanigans!
That? That was a pigeon.
Mariana trench is only about 10900 meters. Whats he imaging at 16000? Sounds a bit crusty to me.
H.
he's popped this in to sound clever, but the reality all he could have done is take exisiting data the same as whats on google earth and examined the colour gradients in an attempt to identify shapes which could possibly be a sunken ship. problem is the resolution on those photo's is WAY too low to identify a ship let alone confidently proclaim to know WHICH ship it is.
in other words he's an attention seeking moron. i'll take that back when he goes there's a brings back some proof. i'm confident he won't
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
in IR, UV and X-ray frequencies ... so what radiation is he seeing from 3km under the water? (not to speak of 75m into the earth).
Theory is nice and fine, but until it is verified by experiment I'd take it with a grain of salt.
... with imagery that is publicly obtainable, then it is almost a certainty that with the more detailed imagery at various specific wavelengths available from spy satellites, real-time tracking of submarines -- as well as monitoring of various subterranean activities should have been possible for years. In particular, we should have been able to determine where Saddam's supposed hidden facilities were -- or that they were nonexistent -- and we should also be able to determine with a high degree of accuracy, the exact location of the Iranian nuclear weapons production facilities.
Unless, of course, a British archeologist has outdone the entire technical expertise of the NSA and CIA. But that would make them look pretty much like bumbling civil servants rather than the sleuthing savants that we are led to believe they are.
Let's get it on with the underwater UFO bases already!! ... they *are* there, right?
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
Whale, I don't know whether or knot his clams of being able to sea that deep will hold water, but he's certainly making waves in his scientific turf, or is that surf, anyway.
You tried that in 1812, and it didn't work.
This is obviously a hoax. The sea isn't even that deep in its deepest spots and there is no way that usable light will get down there and back up again and still yield a remotely usable image through all the turbulence and suspended muck.
Noah's Ark Found! Noah's Ark!
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
interestingly enough, if it is egotism, the veterans in OZ perpetuate it. When I was down under for two years, all the old diggers could say to me was "if it weren't for you yanks, we would be speaking Japanese. You came when England abandoned us, just in time."
Fact of the matter is, the US was the driving force behind keeping the UK, USSR, AUS, and anyone else against Hitler and the Japanese in the war. They would have all lost to Hitler very quickly if the US had not shipped all the guns, ammo, food, clothing, aircraft, tanks, trucks, etc... for them to fight with, long before Pearl Harbor or the Pacific Theater.
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to govern any other" -John Ada
Again, that's not the point I was arguing, and as a matter of fact I agree with you.
Did the Aussies have a navy? Yes - and they had a damned good one, too. And let's not forget the contributions made by the Aussie coastwatchers during the entire Pacific campaign. If not for them and the intelligence they supplied before and during the Island-hopping campaign, most of the American island landings would have been MUCH more costly than they already were. And you could certainly make a strong argument that without those intelligence assets, the campaign costs, in both men and materiel, could have been prohibitive.
Did the American navy make a difference? HELL, yes. They did the vast majority of the work - there's no argument there from anybody sane, as far as I know.
MY point was that even though the American military did most of the work, the contributions from the Australian forces was a long way from being negligible.
Nowadays we don't need to capture your territory for you and the Brits to kowtow to us. Hell, what little military you have is fighting *for* us. Why would we want to screw that up?
Um, yeah. I work with a lot of Aussies and one of the things we teach (here in Japan) is WWII history, since it's mostly stricken from the Japanese education system. They all seem teach that the Americans pushed the Japanese back after the Brits abandoned them.
On a related note, I also work with a fair number of Canadians, and most of them never met a piece of erroneous US-bashing misinformation they didn't like. Even things demonstrably false. I can never really figure this out because, I mean, and I say this as an American, it's not like you need to make things up to bash the US. We've done enough real stuff to complain about without resorting to fabrication. I suspect the problem is that the majority of crappy things we've done has also done a lot to help our neighbors to the north, so they don't really like to mention them.
The only combat the Canadian Forces are involved in right now is Afghanistan
If you're going to troll, please at least try to come up with something that's *reasonably* close to accurate, so you have a better chance of getting a rise out of somebody?
Meanwhile, the Canucks were busy playing hockey and taming rabid beavers eh.
Please, half of these comments are "16km lol, deepest point is only 11km deep". How the hell is a theoretical limit ridiculously high when it is higher than the naturally observed limit ?
HMAS Sydney find 'nonsense'
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
I pointed out contributions that Aussies & Brits DID make, and as you can see in subsequent posts I made in this thread, you'll see that I freely acknowledge that the Americans did most of the heavy lifting.
Criticising the proclivities on one American general doesn't constitute anti-americanism, any more than critiquing Churchill for Gallipoli or Lord Mountbatten for Dieppe means I'm anti-english.
There is a lot of ill feeling in Australia (from veterans and their familes) against McArthur. I believe most of those come from his perceived mismanagement of the Australian forces under his command, like the invasion of Balikpapan. "Balikpapan was one of the most controversial Australian operations of the Second World War. By this point it was clear that the Australian operations in Borneo were not contributing anything to the final defeat of Japan and many high-ranking Australian officers considered them strategically unsound. The Australian Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Thomas Blamey, advised the government to withdraw its support for Oboe 2. The government, however, stood behind the Commander-in-Chief of the South-west Pacific Area, General Douglas MacArthur, who had devised the Oboe operations, and the Balikpapan landings went ahead. They resulted in the deaths of 229 Australians and around 1,800 Japanese." From AWM website : http://www.awm.gov.au/units/place_1913.asp My grandfather fought at, and was wounded at Balikpapan. That being said, there is no doubt that the industrial and military might of the United States saved Australia from invasion, however it should also be noted that Australian forces inflicted upon the Japanese the first decisive LAND battle defeat of the war, on the Kokoda track in the Owen Stanley ranges in New Guinea, at a time when Australia was under direct threat of invasion. To the parent, please note that previous to this, the sea-bourne threat the Port Moresby was ended due to the US victory in the Battle of the Coral Sea.
of foil to the hat.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
not picking on you for being from Canadia :) , but you mean Port Moresby and the Northern Territory.
Besides, the West Papuans had helped us Aussies a great deal in defending the norther frontier from the Japs. The Australian government has recently and shamefully turned their backs and allowed the West Papuans to suffer terrible human rights abuses at the hands of the Indonesian dictatorship.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
No see, what happened there is we tried to send in the Kentucky folks. And they got crushed. He's saying that Alabamans could take you. That's something else. And besides I blame Napoleon for that loss anyhow. We were suppose to beat up the Dominion (Canada) with our navy, but Napoleon lost out and started to suck so all the Brits were there and we were in a lot more trouble.
We lost a war to the Dominion which was part of the British empire. Canada came long after...
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
To take nothing at all away from the exceptional job done by the Royal Australian Navy, the defense of Port MorEsby is generally placed at the feet of the Battle of the Coral Sea, which was a combined operation between the US Navy (2 carriers, 6 cruisers, 13 destroyers), and the RAN (2 cruisers).
The Queen is still Head of State (or Monarch if you prefer) for Australia and Canada. So no, Australia doesn't have a navy so much as the Queen has naval forces in Australia. Why do you think the names of all the ships begin with "HM"?
In the World Factbook, scroll down to "Executive branch" on these pages:
Australia
Canada
The same information could easily be found in other places, pick your source of preference.
Of course you could argue that Canada gained it's independence in 1982, but the fact remains that it is still a Commonwealth Realm.
There. All of that and not one reference to Homer Simpson's comment about "America junior."
Ramen
Then supposedly a more real time version of this software using up to date satellite feeds could detect all of the submarines "hiding" in the oceans? Hoax?
His claims of course are WAY suspect - light of whatever wavelength needs to get to the target, then reflect BACK to the sensor, and well, the reason water is blue is that it's pretty much impervious to most wavelengths, and as far as IR, that wreck that deep would probably have cooled down really well by now to the ambient water temperature. I have seen sunken wrecks from satellite images though ... Scapa Flow has quite a few scuttled wrecks from WW II. See http://www.scapaflow.co.uk/graphics/blockship.jpg and then http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=58.927777,- 3.310318&spn=0.059626,0.126343&t=k&z=13&om=1
(.... Hmmm, been spending WAY to much time looking at synthetic aperture radar scenes .... )
But americans tend not to be aware of it, because a certain egomanicial general by the name of McArthur had this nasty tendency to ignore allies and claim that everything was done by the Americans.
Australia had, and still has, excellent soldiers. Mac Arthur was an egomaniac and no one other than Mac Arthur got credit for anything, regardless of whether they were American or Australian. However things are not as simple as you suggest. Australia had many of its forces in Europe trying to save England. Recall that the war had started in Europe years earlier than in the Pacific and England was just barely hanging on and absolutely needed Canadian, Australian, South African, etc forces. When Mac Arthur was ordered/tricked to leave the Philippines he was expecting to mount a counterattack to rescue the American forces left behind. When he arrived in Australia he found no counterattack/rescue force, not even enough of a force to defend Australia should Japan attempt a major invasion. The Australian generals were planning to trade most of the country for time and only defend the south eastern (?) quarter, to be fair that was where most of the population and development was located.
Actually, MacArthur had some justification for the claim.
Roosevelt and Churchill had tried to force the 6th and 7th Australian Divisions to remain in Burma, effectively abandoning New Guinea and Northern Australia to the Japanese. The Prime Minister of Australia at the time, John Curtin, made the decision to recall the troops despite intense pressure from the other allied leaders. At the same time, MacArthur needed Australia as a supply and staging post, so the agreement was made that the Australian troops would be returned to defend their country, but commanded by MacArthur. So in that sense, they were part of the American military effort rather than acting as an independent force.
It's worth emphasising though, both America and Britain initially wanted to abandon Australia, and allow us to be occupied by Japan. If it wasn't for Curtin's leveraging of those two divisions, it'd likely have happened
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
Interesting. You switch tactics once he brings up a valid point about the War of 1812.
And I doubt the American forces have enough firepower to *hold* Canada. Our country is massive, and we still have all your oil. Couple of charges on that pipeline, and - boom! - no more fuel for your tanks.
He probably left out a decimal point or some other mundane detail.
Canny Canuck trying to start fights between Aussies and Yanks.
Bad Canuck! No cookie.
Canadians were in WWII... Scotty lost a finger!
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Since 90% of your population is within 100 miles of the border, I don't think it will be a problem bringing your craphole of a country to its knees.
Having Scuba Dived regular on 100-150 ft deep wrecks, I too find this a little hard to believe. Even at that depth the amount of light getting through, the colour of the "wreck" and so on, would suggest that this is unlikely, even more so at greater depths. And that was in the pristine waters of PNG.
We found that the best mechanisms for finding as yet unfound wrecks were plain old research. We requested and got a copy of the microfilms of the WW2 records for the area from the US Archives. Slowly and meticulously (reading Microfilm projected onto the fridge door), following each report, we ultimately ended up finding around half a dozen new wrecks. The report of a Corsair that clipped a tree, while trying to line up for the airstrip, and spun into the bay, prompted a search for a tree stump, and and following a logical path to the airstrip, a probably location - sure enough a deep dive (180 ft - lots of decompression) found it. Biggest coup was the talk of an abandoned airstrip on a remote island in the Solomon Islands. Sure enough, worked out roughly where, found a single like reference to the "local name" for it, and sure enough, found three WWII fighters still sitting at the end of a punched metal runway, as if waiting for orders...
As someone said, an archaeologist developing software that the spooks, and/or mining types haven't been able to. That's a bit far fetched.
I would suggest "text scans" of historical documents may be more useful.
q
Not "some light goes through some matter"; not "certain frequencies penetrate well through water for a certain distance" but "light passes through matter". Trust me; Superman is going to be coming after this guy with a patent claim on his X-ray vision invention.
A satellite with a hugely powerful microwave or broad-spectrum radar would do the trick I guess. Riches will be mine and the company I founded for distributing cooked fish will take over the global market.
George Carlin, R.I.P.
Funny while he lasted.
EJ in reference to (US of) America.
You may have gotten the strategic oil bit sorted out, and you're slowly coming to terms with history, but this whole "using HTML" thing looks like it's getting the better of you. Maybe you shouldn't be trying so hard.
Plus, there may be ten times more Americans than Canadians as you say, but looking at your mentality, looking at your ignorance-promoting culture, looking at your president, looking at your policies and hell, looking at you, population numbers aside, the overall amount of brain cells seems to be about the same on either side of your Canadian border.....
Mate, pull your head out of yer arse. Who the FUCK (bar 3rd world refugees) would WANT to be an American? Why do you think people in other countries strive to be there? Gimme a break. The best advantage Australia has over Canada is the fact that America is much further away from you dumb-ass Americans.
Done. Mod me to hell, American Fanboys. My karma can take it.
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's/the fact that America is much further away from you dumb-ass Americans/the fact that Australia is much further away from you dumb-ass Americans/'
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Fact of the matter is, the US was the driving force behind keeping the UK, USSR, AUS, and anyone else against Hitler and the Japanese in the war. They would have all lost to Hitler very quickly if the US had not shipped all the guns, ammo, food, clothing, aircraft, tanks, trucks, etc... for them to fight with, long before Pearl Harbor or the Pacific Theater.
Oh really? The US was supplying the USSR, a superpower, with packed lunches and American tanks to help them fight hitler on russian soil? News to me. Time to ask your high school history teacher for your money back.
One of his other favourite cons was the Deep Sea Gold..... While running the startup-con, he was also trying to start this con on the same investors.
He would claim to have intimate knowledge of an ancient wreck somewhere. There was the lure of lots of gold. All that the investors needed to do was stump up some cash to hire dive-boats and a little sundry, and they would get all the gold retrieved.
This guy had fake Lordships [where you buy a tiny plot of land in Britain and get the title] and fake ids. But in essence the fact that the wreck was out to sea and the investors didn't have an independent source of verification made the con a good one. The investors put in lots of cash, some deep sea divers were hired, but the fictitious wreck remained undiscovered long enough for the conman to drain all the cash from the investors. Then the conman disappeared back to whatever country he had never fled to before. No cash, now wreck, no gold, no money.
So now I'm always wary of deep sea discoveries... Special software to spot wrecks from the comfort of Google Maps and your couch??? The conmen will have a field-day if people start to believe this. Not saying this guy is wrong, but how soon until other people leech his achievements?
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
That was never the argument. Following Pearl Harbor, the American armed forces did a lot of the work across the rest of the world purely because the British forces had to focus on western Europe to avoid being spread too thinly.
Fact of the matter is, the UK, USSR, AUS, an everyone else were the primary force against Hitler and the Japanese in the beginning of the war. All of Europe would have fallen to Hitler very quickly, and with the economic mass of the continent (Not something to be underestimated) the US would likely have been screwed before they could get their war machine into gear.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
The Japanese navy was responsible for planning an invasion of Australia. In February 1942, Admiral Yamamoto had set a plan before Japanese General Staff to land two Divisions on the northern coastline of Australia. They would then follow the north-south railway line to Adelaide, thus dividing Australia into two fronts. The plan was opposed by the Japanese army, and was not approved by Emperor Hirohito.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
This is nonsense: I work in the earth observation satellite industry and there are no ultraviolet or x-ray sensors on earth observation satellites (for obvious reasons - the earth does not emit x-rays, and UV is absorbed by the atmosphere.)
Optical sensors can see at most a few metres into clear water. At infrared wavelengths water is black and opaque. "Light passes through matter"? No, it doesn't. Didn't The Times use to have a science correspondent?
Science fiction for grown-ups...
My first thought when I read it, was "HOLY $H*^! I WONDER WHAT HE COULD FIND IN THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE!"
Then I realized it was probably a hoax. The media is excited by news of wrecks, after that recent $500M find.
Its a shame really, would be so much easier to get anime and manga in Aus then ^_^
...
While I agree that this story sounds like nonsense, you have probably found the most unreliable source for a rejection: A competitor who is receiving public funds to achieve the same goal.
"Plus, there may be ten times more Americans than Canadians as you say, but looking at your mentality, looking at your ignorance-promoting culture, looking at your president, looking at your policies and hell, looking at you, population numbers aside, the overall amount of brain cells seems to be about the same on either side of your Canadian border....." ... said the guy generalizing about 300 million people.
"Done. Mod me to hell, American Fanboys. My karma can take it."
Be thankful that I don't do as you do and count your asshattedness against everyone in Australia.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
OK, I'll take that back: I should have said "no realistic plans". Two divisions for the whole of Australia is hardly credible. There was no railway line to Adelaide in 1942, unless they parachuted in at Alice Springs -- the line to Darwin was only completed a few years ago. And imagine the attrition rate marching through the desert for a couple of months! It's nearly 3000km; there'd be nothing left by the time they got to Adelaide, even if they'd met no resistance. It's a ridiculous plan.
This site (which supports the idea of a Japanese invasion plan) has a slightly different story: Nagano instead of Yamamoto, 3 divisions instead of 2, limited objectives (occupation of Darwin and the north, no drive south). That seems more plausible but it also wouldn't lead to the conquest of Australia. But that site does a lot of reading between the lines, it seems to me; there was a lot of competition between the Japanese Army and the Navy and some of it was just political, ambit claims, not realistic planning.
Anyway, my larger point remains: at no time was an invasion of Australia ever a concrete Japanese plan (in the sense of something which at some point in time was intended to be carried out, rather than just a vague proposal), and they never had enough resources for the job. Yes, Australians stopped the Japanese at Kokoda; but they didn't stop the invasion of Australia, because that was never going to happen. (Or rather, if it did, it would quickly have become a disaster for the Japanese, and conversely a major victory for the Allies.)
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
And I relish that distance. :D
Oops, sorry.
Plans change rapidly in wartime, and circumstances meant that the Japanese did not get the opportunity to mount the invasion. Nevertheless, the intention was there as early as 1938 (Operation Mo). The planning included Yamamoto, Tomioka, Fukudome and Nagano, and involved landing the main force in North Queensland, not Darwin, hence the use of rail transport.
You might also want to re-read the linked page. To quote:
I found nothing in that book to support Dr Stanley's claim that only "middle-ranking naval staff officers" were proposing an invasion of Australia in 1942, and his claim that "The plans got no further than some acrimonious discussions." On the contrary, Professor Frei provides very clear evidence that a limited invasion of the northern Australian mainland was being planned and proposed at the highest level of Japan's Navy General Staff through December 1941, and January and February 1942. This site is probably a more informative reference for the plans. http://www.answers.com/topic/planned-invasion-of-"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The whole story was created to deceive an unknown operational target; we can only guess who that might be - in this case perhaps Iranian or AQ agents. It would help probe their intel personnel and their capabilities - for instance, to study the manner in which the target reacts to the disinfo. Mr Akers knows exactly what is going on. He is clearly no fool (his background). It is hardly the first time somebody with credentials has been used, and perhaps paid, as a participant in disinfo ops.
No, Operation Mo was for the occupation of Port Moresby, not Australia. (Coral Sea was the outcome of the actual attempt to carry out Mo.) I'm sure the naval staff did consider a follow-on invasion of Australia after Mo. Military and naval staffs make plans all the time: it's their job to be prepared. It's not the same thing as having the intention to carry out those plans. Example: when the US Great White Fleet visited Australia and New Zealand in 1908, its officers made plans for the attack and invasion of their host cities -- they're still in the archives of the Naval War College. It doesn't mean they ever had the slightest intention of carrying them out; it was just a training exercise. Obviously the IJN plans were much more than that, but it's still not the same as intention.
As for the bit you quote, that's just the author's opinion. Whoever wrote it quotes extensively from Frei on that page, yet none of the quotes are conclusive. If Frei does provide 'very clear evidence', then why isn't it quoted?
The answers.com page is just an old version of the Wikipedia equivalent, which is considerably slimmer now. No doubt because just about every claim in there is unreferenced! Not persuasive.
There's still Japan's lack of capability to carry out an invasion, btw. The idea of a successful Japanese invasion of Australia is just silly. Look at what actually happened. By March 1942 the initial Japanese offensive had run out of steam, and the few offensive thrusts they made thereafter failed. And they were for far more limited objectives than the conquest of an entire continent! (Eg Guadalcanal.) Maybe the Japanese could have had better luck, but basically they'd reached their strategic limits by then. So aside from the fact that there was no intention and no concrete plans for invading Australia, it just would not have been possible to carry it out successfully.
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
He must be using a neutrino based sensing device. Obviously.
sig sig sig siggy sig
Oh really? The US was supplying the USSR, a superpower, with packed lunches and American tanks to help them fight hitler on russian soil? News to me. Time to ask your high school history teacher for your money back. I figure you're trolling, but you really should consider asking your community college for a refund. Although there were dozens of runs like it, I'll single out one specific Merchant Marine run:
"Through the Murmansk Run, the United States supplied the Soviet Union with 15,000 aircraft, 7,000 tanks, 350,000 tons of explosives, and 15,000,000 pairs of boots. American boots made a difference on the Eastern Front, especially during the harsh winters."
Yes, this was a series of convoys that delivered war material to Murmansk. If you ever feel like reading I can throw a million other references your way, but America supplied Australia, Russia, and Great Britain, among others, with crucial supplies even before officially joining the war.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
"I'd sure like to be a fly on that wall... It isn't every day you get to see one divinity talking to another.
I don't know whether that conversation ever happened in reality but that quote sure sums up what many people who knew him seem to have thought of MacArthur.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The real story here is the one-on-one battle between the German raider Kormoran and the much more powerful Australian cruiser Sydney, which resulted in the Sydney being lost with no survivors, and the Kormoran being so badly damaged that it had to be scuttled, but with most crew surviving. Many questions, and some conspiracy theories, have arisen as to why the Sydney could have been so comprehensively destroyed by an inferior opponent. Suggestions put forward include the idea that a Japanese submarine was involved - a scandal as Japan and Australia were not yet at war (this was before Pearl Harbour).
Finding the remains of the Sydney might help piece together its final hours, and explain why it vanished with over 600 men on board. According to German survivors of the battle, the badly-damaged Sydney had sailed away from the sinking Kormoran, with only one of its four gun turrets working and with fires raging on board. It sailed off over the horizon with periodic outbursts of flames, and was never seen again. Why did no crew abandon the mortally wounded ship? The only confirmed remains of the Sydney was an empty bullet-ridden life-raft found in the ocean. A life-raft with a dead body was later found on an island some distance from the battle - it may also have been from the Sydney, but this cannot be confirmed.
Given the controversy around the battle, perhaps it is not surprising that further controversial claims should appear, alleging that the ship's remains have been found. No one seems too impressed by these latest claims, however.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Just in case others don't know (I am guessing you do), PNG = Papua New Guinea.
Infuriate left and right
... which is a NATO mission. And we're fighting there for the Afghanis, not for Americans.
Rationalize it however you like, but the point remains that King George the W marched his army into Afghanistan and you lot followed. So did the rest of NATO, but that's neither here nor there; we all know who really wears the daddy pants in NATO command (and it's not Canada).
I have no idea where he gets his 16,000m figure from but one thing that immediately springs to mind is that he's almost certainly not looking straight down at the ocean floor.
The Marianas Trench might only be 10,900m deep but it and other parts of the oceans would be obscured by a lot more than 10,900m of ocean when viewed at an angle.
That to me seems to be one logical explanation. Another would be that, having found at least 31 sunken vessels, he's tested his software enough to be able to confidently extrapolate that it would be effective to 16,000m beneath the waves.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
PNG = PADI National Geographic dive approved site. Papua New Guinea has several qualifying sites.
This is nonsense: I work in the earth observation satellite industry and there are no ultraviolet or x-ray sensors on earth observation satellites (for obvious reasons - the earth does not emit x-rays, and UV is absorbed by the atmosphere.). Optical sensors can see at most a few metres into clear water. At infrared wavelengths water is black and opaque. "Light passes through matter"? Doesn't The Times have a science correspondent?
Grant Thompson, Rome,
Apparently there is some dispute about this...
"In June 2007, British maritime researcher Timothy Akers a former employee of David Mearns, claimed to have located the wreck of the Sydney along with other wrecks from a Japanese Battle Group in the vicinity, using high quality satellite imagery he purchased.[2] However, this claim has been disputed, and Ted Graham, the chairman of the Perth-based volunteer company HMAS Sydney Search, has dismissed the possibility the wreck can be located using satellite imagery.[3]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAS_Sydney_(1934)
Jon, Ventura, CA, USA
Unfortunately the ocean isn't 16,000 metres deep.
Also, light doesn't go through matter in many cases. In particular, UV and x-ray don't penetrate the atmosphere, never mind water or solid ground. Infrared is absorbed in water even before red light and anyone who scuba dives knows how quickly red light disappears with depth.
Robb, Calgary, Canada
"if the US had not shipped all the guns, ammo, food, clothing, aircraft, tanks, trucks, etc... "
Shipped? I think the word you are looking for is 'sold'. You know, as in making a profit?
The worse slashdot post in a while. Didn't the editors finish highschool? Ok, I do have a degree in Physics, but since highschool I have known that the deepest trench in the ocean is 11km deep, that we cannot photograph the earth in X-Rays (they don't penetrate the atmosphere, and the earth certainly does not emit them), that we cannot "analyze a picture in different wavelengths" (we can only take pictures in different wavelengths and THEN analyze them).
Non-highschool level physics of course invalidates the rest of the points of this article. Why are we still discussing this?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
"Maritime researcher Timothy Akers claims to have discovered the wreck of the HMAS Sydney, along with the location of the German raider Kormoran that sank the Sydney off the coast of Western Australia in November 1941, killing all 645 men on board."
"He said the wrecks of a number of Japanese warships and submarines, also believed to have been involved in the battle, were lying on the ocean floor nearby."
In November 1941 Australia and Germany were at war. Japan and Australia were not at war at that time.
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Steve Stites
We paid a heavy price, but we got what we really wanted out of that fight, so it's solidly in the "lost, but objectives achieved anyway" column.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Either the ship is where he says it is or it is not. Someone should go there, look, disprove him and this all goes away and he looks like a fool (or a genius)
You can count?
others have posted that you probably can't spot wrecks in deep water in visible light. however, cosmic ray backscattering (similar to muon radiography) can evidently spot submarines and whales, even from orbit
... you would launch specialized military satellites designed to find subs in real-timeThere's only one possible thing at that depth - Cthulhu!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Probability that this could be useful at very shallow depths, with objects whose size are far more significant in the scheme of things: Pretty good, but reverse computations of this kind are regarded as cutting-edge at the supercomputer fairs. The odds of seeing that kind of calculation being done, even at a near-trivial level, in the home is so close to zero you might as well watch the cartoons instead.
Probability of this working at the depths cited, with an object of negligible relative size, under probably highly unfavorable conditions: Definitely watch the cartoons. You'll have a far better chance of success.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yeah, it's a lot easier when you're sober.
I would believe all the stories in the Weekly World News before this crap.....
Were there regexs involved?
Speaking as an Aussie who's currently working in the USA, this is pretty much dead on.
..... ancient trade routes buried under meters of sand. I've been away from the remote sensing community to even know what the current sensor packages are even capable of. The SAR stuff has revealed a lot of fascinating archaeological discoveries and is re-writing a lot of history. The current platforms are the same just better resolution, more coverage, more spectral bands, same basic principles. Only fairly new stuff is non-military SAR of a decent resolution (5 meters), true color stereo is now being done at 3 meter, and they have a few things bouncing laser beams off the surface. Biggest innovation is just being able to find the stuff, most data centers have their databases online, so that is easier.It would greatly interest the current director of the Australian National War Museum in Canberra if there were 'irrefutable evidence' of Japan's plans to invade Australia. He is convinced there weren't. The problem is that it has become a nationalistic 'Brit-bashing' rallying cry to say that Menzies and Churchill left Australia undefended so that Australian troops could be wasted in the African desert and in SE Asia.
However the actual Murmansk Runs were usually done escorted by the Royal Navy. For a very moving fictional account - I recommend HMS Ulysses by Alistair MacLean. As far as supplying the UK, yes, America did; however they made very sure they were well paid for it. Britain only finished paying off it's war debt to the US in 2006, that's right.. last year. That and the small matter of bases in the Caribbean in exchange for 50 obsolete destroyers that were little better than death-traps.
(If you really liked the man, you'd buy him a Toohey's Old instead!
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
I'd have to research all of your claims, and I haven't, so I'm not going to argue them. But I'm not claiming that the US did everything out of the goodness of its heart. I'm simply refuting the previous assertion that the USSR was a superpower therefor didn't need any supplies from America. American supplies were instrumental in the winning of the war. So were the millions of Russians who died on the eastern front. So were the Brits and Aussies. Without the pure industrial power of America it is unlikely that the Allies would've won the war. Without the concessions granted to America during this war America likely would not be the superpower that it is today.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
in russia, warships find you!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Toohey's? Don't even joke about that swill. (I'm a Melbournian.)
How about I get us some Coopers and we'll keep everyone happy?
Actually,
Hitler would have still been defeated, Mainland Europe would belong to Soviet Russia with possibly a small part of it being liberated by Britain (France or Scandinavia) and the Brits would have been quiet successfully at pushing rommell out of Africa. Operation Torch was only meant to prevent the Afrika Korps from retreating back to Italy. A hammer and anvil operation, the US as the anvil and the Brits as the hammer. The Kasserine pass proved how ineffective the US army at the time was as an anvil.
As for the Asia Pacific region, that would belong to Japan, weather Australia would have been invaded is a matter of some debate (a large tract of the Japanese army was involved in an attempt to invade India during the war). Without pearl harbour who know if the British empire would have been attacked (Pearl Harbour happened because of economic sanctions against the empire of Japan which had a limited supply of oil which the US had essentially cut off in response to their invasion of China in the 30's).
Japan would never have been able to help Hitler, they were blocked by the Soviets who had a quiet peace with the Japanese but would never have allowed open aid to pass between Japan and Nazi Germany. In actual history the Soviets never declared war on Japan until the writing was well and truly on the wall.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Perhaps that's why you can't spell Port Moresby.
Other than Wikipedia, how do you conclude this? The Albacore (1953 vintage) was the first modern hull submarine, and official USN documents place her speed at 34 knots in 1966. (BTW since then, the 'official' speed for nuclear subs has always been (35+ knots). As far as SSBNs go, hydrodynamic efficiency actually increase with size in general (the precise curves relating to contour, prismatic, wetted area, appendages, etc. is more actually more complicate than that, but it'll do unless you want the actual hull parameters to put into FASTSHIPS or other CFD algorithm ). I'd agree with 20 kn as a patrol or stealth speed, but some basic math on the non-cavitating RPM on a particular size propeller, the estimated shaft horsepower from steam turbines of that era would indicate a much higher possible speed than 20 kn. It's certainly doubtful that the top possible speed (along with max depth) was ever attempted outside of initial trials, but all the external publicly viewable does not indicate a design maximum of only 20 kn. One only has to look at some of the experimental swath vessels to see that a submarine like hull can reach 50 kn speeds. Even if the sub only moved at ten knots, my point about sat tracking still stands, a fixed predictable sensor has little chance to detect a moving target with knowledge of the sensor' approximate position. If someone wants to work the math to prove otherwise there are several excellent web accessible sources), I'd happily change my opinion, but not from wikipedia as a source.