Comments on: Godwin’s Law of Astrology

By: Astrology wins World War 2!!! « The BS Historian

Astrology wins World War 2!!! « The BS Historian — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 02:25:26 +0000

[…] it seems that the astrologer in question, Louis de Wohl, is rejected even by his own. The excellent Bad Astronomer blog has some nice quotes on the guy. Nonetheless, it’s still being used to make mileage for […]

By: Nik

Nik — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:03:47 +0000

“You mean, beyond the idea that Englishmen were entitled to all the bits of the globe they’d pinched off other people in the past century?”

Yeah, us Brits called it “manifest destiny”

By: Jim Atkins

Jim Atkins — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:10:23 +0000

Re Stuart’s comment on the ME 262 and its conversion to a bomber: turning a plane into a bomber is a lot more complicated than racks and string- it has to be able to handle all that weight hanging from one part of the structure and actually drop things without airflow from something else causing the bomb to clunk into part of your airplane- kind of spoils your day. The reason this was important is that all those planes that were being built as bombers didn’t have fighter equipment to decimate Allied bomber formations (Google ME 262 and R4M rockets to get an idea of just how destructive that plane could have been). We got lucky, very lucky that a) Hitler was a complete twit about air power and b) the Junkers engines in the 262 were just not up to the task, metalurgically. Time between failures was about 4-6 running hours in some cases. Yes, I’m a major airplane geek along with being an astronomy fan.

By: Sue Mitchell

Sue Mitchell — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:53:10 +0000

The U.K. did, in fact, use magic very successfully during WWII.
Check out Jasper Maskelyne. While stationed in North Africa, he moved Alexandria further up the coast, preventing its devastation in a bombing attack, and also concealed the Suez Canal, resulting in the loss of a number of the Luftwaffe’s aeroplanes. He also baffled the Germans as to where our troops actually were. Very clever bloke!

He was also an “anti-spiritualist”, and enjoyed exposing the ’supernatural’ feats of mediums.

Is it my imagination or do I sense his spirit here…? –

By: Stuart

Stuart — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:25:38 +0000

The bit about Hitler demanding that the engineers of the Me262 build a bomber (close air support) version is a well know “factoid”. It’s usually told as a “scary camp-fire story” to frighten people: “If it hadn’t been for that one silly decision of Hitler’s to interfere, the 262 would have flown sooner, pwned the allied fighters, and won the war!”

But I’ve also heard that development of the 262 was not going well anyway, and it couldn’t have flown much sooner than it did. And anyway, how much time and effort does it take to add a couple of bomb-racks to the wings, and feed a length of string from the cockpit to the rack release?

In general, though, Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis placed a disproportionate amount of faith in “wonder weapons”. Many of which failed to achieve anything, and those that were of use on the battlefield, were so expensive and unreliable (eg. Tiger tank) that it would have been more effective to use the precious time and materials building tried-and-true weapons.

By: Andrew S.

Andrew S. — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:52:16 +0000

Reminds me of Rasputin a little bit. Especially the part about how to properly dispose of him, since Rasputin survived quite a few assassination attempts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasputin

By: Irishman

Irishman — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:38:58 +0000

It is widely believed that Hitler believed in the occult. So much so, that sets the basis for the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Whether or not Hitler really believed in astrology I do not know.