Let's have another WW2 quiz

I used to play a lot of B17 The Mighty 8th.

 

My understanding is they never were adopted by the Australian army because they didn't pass trials.

 

Yeah, they were used only for evaluation purposes, which as you said, they didn't pass. The Australian Army decided that the Stuart was more suitable for jungle warfare.

 

I thought that the Churchill was selected.

Please, ask another question.

 

Lucky you! I know that there was one B-17 and one B-24 that were giving rides and I am tempted- though did the B-17 crash?

I did have a chance to see a B-29 fly. It had been stored on an airstrip in my home town and was fired up and flown to air museum- had a chance to see it on the ground and be there when it fired up and took off. Lovely plane. When I was younger i used to go to the Reno Air Races and watch the Unlimited classes fly- P-38's were never competitive, but boy were they pretty when they came around the course.

 

Tired, can't think. Um...... probably being asked somewhere in the thousands of pages we've had so far but...........

What was the Wehrmacht?

 

The German military during the Hitler years.

 

No, someone else is supposed to come along first and say, "Easy! The German army!" at which point I point and laugh at them.

 

It was the German version of our Department of Defense.

The Red Ball Express was, in the 1940s, an enormous truck convoy system created by Allied forces to supply their forward-area combat units moving quickly through Europe following the breakout from the D-Day beaches in Normandy. Why was it named the Red Ball Express?

 

"Red Ball" was a railroad term, signifying an express train. Primarily this was for perishables, so station managers would know to quickly route these supplies through over regular freight.

What Austrian born actress is recognized as the inventer of among other things a "secret communications system" which involved what is now known as frequency hopping" during WWII as a way to try and make unjammable radio guided torpedoes?

 

That's not the correct answer.

 

The Red Ball Express took its name from a railroad term meaning express freight. To “red ball” something meant to give it first priority.

http://www.nww2m.com/2012/02/keep-em-rolling/

About three years ago the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe put into general use on its main line trains between Chicago, Galveston, Denver, El Paso, San Francisco and Sandiego a system of handling all high-class and special freight, known as the Red Ball system, which had been in use on some parts of that road since 1892. The movement and tracing of freight had been greatly facilitated by the change and the auditor's office relieved of a mass of correspondence relating to car movements and dealys. The list of commodities handled under this system include nearly every class of general merchandise and perishable goods; but unless by special instructions, or in order to full up trains to the tonnage rating of the locomotive, no dead freight such as lumber, coal, cotton, wheat, or similar classifications, is handled in Red Ball trains.

From the Railroad Gazette, Volume XXXIX, 25 August 1905

http://books.google.com/books?id=yJxMAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA184#v=onepage&q&f=false

The reason I knew this is that my grandfather told me many stories about the Red Ball Express. He was an MP that worked on it during WWII.

 

Sorry, but that is not the correct answer.

 

That would be Hedy Lamarr. But there is another I am trying to think of...

 

How did the Red Ball Express gain it's name? Because the route it used was closed to civilian traffic and had red balls as traffic route markers. The vehicles were identified as having express priority by way of a red ball on the vehicle. It had nothing to do with railroading.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Ball_Express

 

Time for another....

Thanks
Shangrila
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