History Forum / War History / World War II / April 2005

During WW2, the US broke the Japanese diplomatic (and military) codes and
read their messages. The Japanese never caught on and continued using their
code system even after WW2. When exactly did the Japanese finally figure it
out?

A recent issue of Invention & Technology had an article
on the development of air conditioning.  By the 1930s,
Carrier had developed and installed practical systems
to air condition buildings.  By those years it was

I was wondering why the RAF used Brownings for forward firing guns, and in
turrets, but had a penchant for Vickers K guns in manual installations.
Handling/loading issues? I don't think there is an age issue, as the Vickers
K was used on relavtively "new" aircraft as the A-20 and ...

For a year and a half in the 1950s, I was stationed at Coligny Caserne
in Orleans, south of Paris. I was given to understand that the caserne
had earlier been used to house German troops during World War II, as
well as French troops before that. It was a walled compound not far

several books and articles only the German surrender in Reims on May 7
is mentioned. However, as most of you will know, Stalin did not accept
this German surrender as valid and demanded another, in Berlin, with
Zhukov present. There is no disagreement among any sources that this

Can anybody please clarify something for me ?
I have been looking on the internet for details of a US army unit with
which my grandfather served with during world war II. The US army say
most of his records where destroyed in a fire in the 1980's, but the

I'm looking for information about General Army Hospitals in France, in
particular a unit that became the 224th General Hospital of the U.S. Army
Medical Corps.  I know that the unit shipped to England in 1944, prior to
the Battle of the Bulge and then went to France, at least as ...

Greetings.  IS it true that japanese americans started WW2?   I think
the japanese bombed pearl harbor for americans imprisoning japanese
americans, but those japanese americans were being disobedient to the
government and betraying the US acting as japanese spies.  So who was

http://www.bookcase.com/~claudia/mt/archives/000606.html
This blog posting quotes from the memoirs of Charles Simic,
a well known American poet who was born in Belgrade and
came to the US as a boy.

After discussing the plausibility of the German conquest of the Middle
East during World War Two, I got into an argument with my professor,
who asked me to provide sources as to why Germany couldn't transport
the oil out of the Middle East. I said that the Royal Navy could

"Hal Hanig" <halhanig@charter.net.nospam.lga.highwinds-media.com> posted
April 21:

called

Apart from geographical reasons,why was there so little aircraft
carrier activity in the European theatre when compared to the
Pacific,and what,if any,capability did the Germans have in this regard?

Really, were they bad or was it just circumstance?
I mean, for the majority of the war japanese defeats were pretty
lopsided.  At first i thought this was because of the logistics
situation, but I think Okinawa disproves that notion.  It seems to me

I have hit a not-common but not-rare problem with some US soldiers killed in
Holland, whose remains could no be recovered when they were killed because
of the World War I nature of the battles that either left them dead in a
no-man's-land or else in ground that had come once again ...

On http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/library/donovan/hitler a wartime US
psychological study on Hitler can be found.
It discusses possible ending scenarios to Hiler's life and makes an
interesting proposal what to do with him should he fall into Allied