Americans owe an awful lot to our veterans. So do others around the world. Thank a couple today. Murdoc will be.

Meanwhile, a little graphic I came up with a couple years back continues to get a lot of attention, bringing in tons of search engine traffic and clicks from emails. I’m taking it that it’s appreciated, so I’ll post it once again:

A lot of our allies have Remembrance Day, Armistice Day, and maybe other special days today. Though I’m understandably biased, there is no shortage of courage in the veterans of other nations, too.

And on this week of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it’s important to note that the vets who didn’t serve during a shooting war were performing the mission, too.

Thank-you all.

UPDATE: Murdoc’s been remiss about blogging the Valour-IT drive. Got a couple extra bucks? Support our guys who are doing the heavy lifting.

Also, the Smithsonian Channel has a new six-part documentary premiering tonight: Apocalypse: The Second World War

Here’s the trailer:

Female Soviet WW2 Pilots near a US-built P-39 Airacobra

A reader sends a link to a BBC audio slideshow about the 588th Night Bomber Regiment (later called the 46th Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment) in the Soviet military, an all-female attack unit.

Despite the photo above and an IL-2 in the slideshow, the Night Witches actually flew Po-2 biplanes.

The graphic novel mentioned in the slideshow is available from Amazon.

This is a conversation I’ve had a number of times over the years, but this article is a great read about just how far behind the United States Japan was in industrial capability. I thought the gap was really huge, but I was wrong.

It was, in fact really, really huge. Or maybe even huger:

To an outside culture, particularly a militaristic one such as Japan’s, America certainly might have appeared to be ’soft’ and unprepared for a major war. Further, Japan’s successes in fighting far larger opponents (Russia in the early 1900’s, and China in the 1930’s) and the fact that Japan’s own economy was practically ’superheating’ (mostly as the result of unhealthy levels of military spending — 28% of national income in 1937) probably filled the Japanese with a misplaced sense of economic and military superiority over their large overseas foe. However, a dispassionate observer would also note a few important facts. America, even in the midst of seemingly interminable economic doldrums, still had:

• Nearly twice the population of Japan.
• Seventeen time’s Japan’s national income.
• Five times more steel production.
• Seven times more coal production.
• Eighty (80) times the automobile production.

Furthermore, America had some hidden advantages that didn’t show up directly in production figures. For one, U.S. factories were, on average, more modern and automated than those in Europe or in Japan. Additionally, American managerial practice at that time was the best in the world. Taken in combination, the per capita productivity of the American worker was the highest in the world. Furthermore, the United States was more than willing to utilize American women in the war effort: a tremendous advantage for us, and a concept which the Axis Powers seem not to have grasped until very late in the conflict. The net effect of all these factors meant that even in the depths of the Depression, American war-making potential was still around seven times larger than Japan’s, and had the ’slack’ been taken out in 1939, it was closer to nine or ten times as great!

Of particular interest is the discussion of how much difference a loss at Midway would have made in the long run.