Convoys

[len mazza]

Yesterday I was watcning a programme on Sky called Mysteries At The Museum.One segment was about the Enigma machine and how it helped to beat the the U Boats,who were attacking AMERICAN ships in American convoys carry Ammerican goods to the UK,needless to sat the narrator was American too.

[Keith at Tregenna]

Fiction:

Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 film Das Boot includes an Enigma machine which is evidently a four-rotor Kriegsmarine variant. It appears in many scenes, which probably capture well the flavour of day-to-day Enigma use aboard a World War II U-Boat. The plot of U-571, released in 2000, revolves around an attempt to seize an Enigma machine from a German U-boat.

Like other rotor machines, the Enigma machine was a combination of mechanical and electrical subsystems. The mechanical subsystem consists of a keyboard; a set of rotating disks called rotors arranged adjacently along a spindle; and one of various stepping components to turn one or more of the rotors with each key press.

[j.sabourn]

I seem to remember during the Cuban Crisis as we were trading with Cuba at various times a lot of personnel were called upon to do the M.N. Defence course, run by the Admiralty. I seem to recollect that they still adhered to the old convoy system even though one nuclear airburst would have wiped out all the ships in the convoy. Always wondered about the correctness of adhering to this world war 1 and 2 system which was effective for those times, but seemed to be out of date for later periods. Would be interesting to know what the thinking is today. John Sabourn.

[happy daze john in oz]

Post #3 I doubt we will ever see any nuclear detonations ever again. There are so many warheads around the globe thta we would all be gone in a poof. But if I have one then you will want to have one as well, and so it goes. Conventional weapons, though of modern style, will all that is ever used.