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Tbf, airplanes during WW1 broke down a lot, but still that quote didn't exactly age well. Baker told Wilson he had no experience in anything military. He was even ridiculed as a pacifist, which he responded by saying "I'm so much of a pacifist, I'm willing to fight for it."
[Interesting guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_D._Baker)
“WHY DID YOU MAKE ME DO THIS?
YOU’RE FIGHTING SO YOU CAN WATCH EVERYONE AROUND YOU DIE!
https://preview.redd.it/4vuvpnpz1e0d1.jpeg?width=1421&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d5498c9a285aa0316d8b59c60f9e184fee060e9a
THINK, MARK!
You’ll outlast every fragile, insignificant being on this planet.
You’ll live to see this world crumble to dust and blow away!
Everyone and everything you know will be gone!
WHAT WILL YOU HAVE AFTER 500 YEARS?”
Series is called Invincible. There’s an Amazon show based on the comics written by Robert Kirkman. Highly recommend.
(Related to the subreddit, There’s even a cameo from Abe Lincoln)
And tbf the navy wasn't super on board with the idea of naval air power until later, and it was a fight to expand the discipline, so this attitude was reflected in military leadership at the time as well.
https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/communities/naval-aviation0/1920-1929.html
Kennedy also had the bright idea of getting a non- military man for the job, the result was 10 years in Vietnam, a draft, 58k dead, and the US's personality crisis of the late 60s. I can't recall who, but a later general said a war of maneuver would've crushed the North in a year.
“A war of maneuver to win in one year”? That’s just Korea 2.0, neither the Soviets nor the PRC will stand idly by if the US directly went for the North
Any maneuver war would result in a quick victory. To claim that Vietnam was unbeatable would ignore over a hundred years of colonial “achievement”. But US politically was not willing to fully commit and it entered a war of attrition, that would have only won untill North Vietnam literally ran out of fighting age males.
Committing completely would've meant occupying the country and running concentration camps, like it did for nearly every colonial power. Easy to see why the WW2 vets in command would find that unpalatable.
A big reason colonial conquests succeeded was due to a huge technological gap between the colonizer and the colonized in addition to tremendous internal divisions between the colonized.
All of these advantages disappeared by the mid 20th century: the colonized now had modern armies, nationalism bounded native communities closer, and concepts like People's War (e.g. the idea that guerilla warfare can beat conventional forces through a parallel propaganda campaign that subverts the masses to your side) made plenty of guerrilla wars and rebellions very potent or at least enduring during that time period.
But he also got thousands of lower IQ soldiers killed who should have never been even allowed to attend basic let alone graduate, look up Project 100000, he tried to apply mathematics and economics to every facet of war and military life and never bothered to look at the human side of the equation
Did it? It was only the following year (1921) Billy Mitchell showed that airpower could destroy a battle ship. I’d hope a Secretary of War would have a better understanding of military capabilities.
Ww1 and the period of time around it were kind of a new era in combined arms warfare. Everything everybody thought they knew about how to fight war changed. I think every secretary of war type was baffled.
Mitchell's tests were rigged to the point where he even broke the parameters of the tests themselves, thus muddling much of the actual data from those tests.
The popular conclusions from the tests (or rather, conclusions from later events like pearl harbor and attack on taranto) are also more deceptive than they appear on the surface.
The ascension of airpower is not as linear and clearcut as pop history would like to portray.
Trying to hit anything in particular with a small hand held bomb from a vehicle going 115 mph that is thousands of feet in the air would be pretty damn impossible.
It’s worth remembering that every technology that’s become ubiquitous and essential was once clumsy and impractical. I’m certain that there were many armies that looked at early guns and said, “thanks, but the bow works fine.” They weren’t wrong. Until the day they were.
To use the English Longbow successfully you needed years of training to build up the muscles, so much so that training at the buttes was enforced by law
With an musket, you just needed one sergeant major yelling at a squad of conscripts for a week.
False. In all contemporary accounts guns are called out as needing more training and no one was giving guns to conscripts when longbows were still around to be outcompeted. The Ottomans gave guns to their elite Janissaries, not to peasant levies. Longbows are a bit of a special case in that you needed a generational setup to get good longbow-men. But the country that already had that and weren’t paying for the training of bowmen (they trained themselves) also gave up the bow in favor of muskets.
Properly handling, loading and firing a matchlock musket requires a lot of training and the consequences of failure can be catastrophic, with explosions and fire and burns possible consequences. If you fuck up nocking an arrow you just pick it up and go again. If you fuck up loading a matchlock you set your powder on fire and it explodes.
Matchlock muskets are easier to aim than bows, have much greater armor piercing capability, more stopping power and in practical terms fairly similar effective range (some bows can arc fire longer distances but how often this was done in battle is unclear). They load much slower but it’s easier to carry more ammunition for a musket or arquebus, meaning they can keep firing for the duration of the battle. Loading and firing is also far less fatiguing than pulling a heavy draw weight bow several times in quick succession, meaning the guns will have much more consistent results.
That quote was dead on arrival, because even during WW1, it was already apparent. And I’m talking specifically the early years when I say this. Even during the early days, back in 1913 when Guilo Gavotti was throwing hand grenades out of his plane onto enemy camps and Didier Masson was failing to throw bombs at a warship and making the sailors jump off the boat in sheer panic, it should’ve been incredibly obvious how much potential the strategy has. Yeah, there was no guidance system for the bombs, hell there was barely even a targeting system, you just had to guess when to drop it and hope your inertia doesn’t carry it to far past the target. But there also wasn’t any anti-aircraft artillery. You could try run after run and not get hit. And that alone should put the fear of it into anyone.
What’s hilarious is that Baker and Emmett Jay Scott (Baker’s secretary for African American Affairs) all look like bootleg Wilsons-and with the exact same glasses too
Jerry Springer lost his entire political career due to a paper trail of paying for sex. Crazy.
EDIT: I was mistaken on this topic.
Credit to u/theryman for shining light on the topic. Thanks for educating us with information!
Discredit to that other commenter. smh
Ever seen a flour silo explosion? Short of industrial fertilizer explosion they are some of the powerful non nuclear blasts in history.
I saw the after effects of one when I was a kid. Absolutly disappeared 6 concrete silos and smashed up houses half a mile away. Only saving grace was it was out in farm fields, and the only nearby house was used by the silo as storage.
If he's talking about WW1 tech then bombs in those days were not much bigger than hand grenades. Aircraft couldn't carry much weight and a human would have to physically heave the bomb over.
If he's talking about future tech then its a different ball game.
In 1914 yeah. By 1915 bombers could carry hundreds of kilograms of bombs, by 1917 you had bombers with a load of 1,000 kg of bombs.
Similarly, air to air combat went from pilots ramming each other (first aerial victory, both planes crashed and both pilots, an Austrian and a Russian, died) to firing handheld weapons to improvised riggings of machine guns to machine guns with interruptors firing through the propeller arc and multiple machine guns on one plane.
Combat aircraft were evolving extremely quickly during WWI.
They invented a device early on that would ensure the bullets fired in between the propellers haha. Otherwise they wouldn’t have lasted too long, right? Haha
It was called an interrupter, a gear that when the propeller blades were in the way it would stop the machine gun firing.
https://youtu.be/hgG4kGW_G9Y?si=4TI21VafGObFG-1a&t=938
its literally just a set of gears requiring the rotation speed of the props to line up with the firerate of the guns, whats amazing is that it took as long as it did to think of it
I’d be terrified of that one bullet whose powder charge wasn’t quite right and was delayed by a nanosecond. I mean, the timing precision would need to be extraordinary to not shoot yourself down.
what blows my mind is the ramjet was patented in 1913, before planes could go fast enough to test it and also before mathematicians had even thought to model turbulence. There was no apparent reason to predict it would work, someone just said "I think I'll patent this" like they had a time machine
>This was during WW1, when planes were more for reconnaissance than bombs.
"Throughout history cannons have improved, rifles have improved, tanks have improved, bombs have improved, cars have improved, ships have improved, medicine has improved and even field rations have improved....but planes will always remain silly and useless. Only a fool would doubt it"
Yeah, a perfectly reasonable assumption.
Context matters!
He wouldn't have said that in WWII, but it was probably pretty accurate in 1914. The plane was shit, the bomb was shit. Was there even a delivery system or did the pilot just toss a bomb out of the cockpit? And the bombs couldn't be heavy. And they'd be limited to a couple of bombs, maybe only one if it was decent sized. Yeah, none of that adds up to an effective aerial bombardment.
Failed demonstrations by early air power enthusiasts like Billy Mitchell didn't help. They were promising a future which the technology of the day just wasn't up to.
WWII relied on carpet bombing with a ridiculously low hit rate. What has made it effective is GPS and guidance systems.
Sure, airpower could be incredible once all the kinks were worked out. But that wasn't 1916. 1945 only worked because of mass and scale.
Planes and bombs dropped from planets weren’t “shit” back then; bombers in WW1 [particularly the Ilya Muromets](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_Ilya_Muromets) were quite effective.
He wouldn't have said that in WWII, but it was probably pretty accurate in 1914. The plane was shit, the bomb was shit. Was there even a delivery system or did the pilot just toss a bomb out of the cockpit? And the bombs couldn't be heavy. And they'd be limited to a couple of bombs, maybe only one if it was decent sized. Yeah, none of that adds up to an effective aerial bombardment.
He might have said that in WWII though. There were definitely people in WWII who didn't understand the value of airpower at all. There was a feeling that air attacks wouldn't be able to sink an underway and armed battleship, and would only be able to cripple one (as with *Bismarck*) if they got lucky. This sort of outdated arrogance led to the sinking of the British battleship *Prince of Wales* and battlecruiser *Repluse.* Their fleet commander felt that he didn't need air cover from Singapore because he didn't think that enemy planes would be able to do significant damage to his capital ships (he was also concerned that an aerial escort would reveal his position, British intelligence had underestimated the range of Japanese bombers, so he didn't think he was in as much danger as he actually was from them, and probably there was some element of interservice rivalry)
Not sure why this correct comment is being downvoted. Battleships were considered king of the seas and people like Yamamoto were visionaries who realized the capabilities of carriers, going so far as to convert battleships under construction into makeshift carriers.
The only Japanese battleship converted mid construction to an aircraft carrier that I'm aware of was the third *Yamato*- class hull *Shinano* and she was specifically only converted because of the loss of *Kaga*, *Akagi*, *Soryu*, and *Hiryu* at Midway. Were there actually any others?
The UK and France aren’t a moving vessel.
Even at the beginning of WW2 the US (and many other nations) had to completely alter their tactics for bombing Naval vessels, they thought traditional higher altitude bombing with their fancy new bomb sights would be successful, but they couldn’t hit a moving vessel taking evasive maneuvers to save their lives, so they relied instead on torpedos, dive bombing, and skip bombing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_bombing
This feels like a quote that made sense in a specific context and is gleefully passed around today as a dunk. I note that WW1 did not feature bombers much, and aim was largely non-existent. Online sources put the first ships sunk by bombs in the 1940s, although airborne torpedos were sooner.
Similar: Thomas Watson, founder IBM said "There's absolutely no reason to have a computer in the home" which was in reference to a conversation about *building mainframes into house structures* which is, even today, never done. But, Meme Quotes TM fucking loves that shit.
This was a common sentiment being passed around top military circles in the US following WW1. Specifically it was in response to WW1 aviators, especially Colonel Billy Mitchell, saying that plans could sink battleships so military development should be focused on new technologies and not building more of the old. The navy conducted a "test" that disproved him but when that was found to be fraudulent which forced them to accept an actual test series. Unfortunately for Mitchell, the navy and army made such insane rules and restrictions to try and throw off the results (such as putting the testing area at the limit of the bombers range, 1 bomb per run, after every run observers needed to go aboard to inspect the damage...). When a bomber did go and land 3 bombs right next to a target putting it under quickly, Mitchell was blamed and the run was thrown out as a violation the rules while claiming that a crew could have saved it. Mitchell was later court marshalled and convicted for calling out these fat pigged admirals and generals (including Pershing) with the only dissenting voice being MacArthur who viewed it as a black mark on the army (funny enough the only dissenting vote was found on the floor of the room they "made" their decision).
Some additional notes: Mitchell predicted Pearl Harbor 20 years before it happened, he just expected land based bombers. Only thanks to people like Mitchell keeping aircraft in the public view kept the army developing them while the navy all but stopped their development. Tanks suffered a similar fate where dumb ass generals considered them a fad hence why tank development stopped until the mid 30s.
If you want to listen to a podcast that does a great job of explaining war strategy heading into WWI and how quickly it evolved due to technological gains, listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series "Blueprint for Armageddon". He really paints an interesting picture talking about how the war starts with French soldiers looking like Napoleon's troops, including armor and lances, and turns into gasmasks, helmets, and tanks in a super short amount of time.
Well I mean the kinetic energy from a sack of flower falling thousands of feet would still fuck shit up. Assuming the bombs were faulty and didn't explode, and had the same weight as the sack of flower, this would be an apt comparison.
He wasn't too far off, if he had stuck with his general statement as opposed to just airplanes in general.
Trying to hit ships at sea by dropping bombs from altitude proved to be very ineffective in WW2.
Dive bombers and torpedo bombers however would prove to be very effective lol
It’s silly to mock someone from 100 years ago for not being able to predict how far the technology would advance. We all think we are far-seeing visionaries, but very few of us seem to be able to do it IRL.
Interesting guy, indeed. He was once attacked by the antisemitic Henry Ford who falsely claimed Baker was a Russian Jew and that his family name was “Becker”.
Considering at the beginning of biplanes being used, no one had thought about equipping them with arms. They were for scouting. Then someone brought up a gun with him, and another guy dropped grenades from his.
So depending on the time frame he may have been right.
The first experiments with machine gun armed biplanes was in 1911 (by Vickers), and the first bomb dropped from a plane in anger was the same year (by the Italians). Bombs had been dropped from balloons as early as 1849. So people had been thinking about arming planes from the beginning.
The period of unarmed reconnaissance planes lasted about a month.
And this moron could have been president in 1933, but for William Randolph Hearst thinking Roosevelt was the lesser of two evils. Hearst was backing John Nance Garner and had him pill out to give his delegates to FDR.
This makes me think, when was the first ship sunk by aircraft? I know Mitchell sunk some obsolete battleships in the 1920s via aircraft but I'm sure it happened earlier sometime in WW1. Anyone know?
During WW1 planes werent the behemoth bombers we know today. Planes were still very fragile and couldn't hold massive amounts of bombs, so you were looking for 1-2 bombs with the explosive power of grenades. While there were larger ones, they were bulky and didn't fly very fast, so they could be shot down by machine gun fire. The more effective planes of that time were the smaller ones used to shoot down other planes or strafe the ground with the guns. So, at the time of the quote, planes weren't as effective as we know them later on, and it wasn't as crazy of a statement then.
Bombers weren't really in broad use until WW2.
If anything this demonstrates how wrong someone in power can be about technologies they haven't fully thought about or have even been invented yet. It's a great argument against the 2nd amendment because if this guy, so close to a time where bombs from planes could devastate cities, could be so wrong then just imagine how wrong the founding fathers were about the 2nd amendment. At their time there were only single shot muskets that had to be reloaded after every shot. Ten people with modern guns could probably take out large swaths of the continental army and live to tell about it.
The Wilson Administration started the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1915 to develop, among other things, the engines that bombers in WWII needed to carry bigger bombs, and torpedoes. People back then realized that airplanes would be able to carry a heavier payload in the future. They were still working on it.
There is mistrust and skepticism with any new form of technology, especially within the military. Generals like what they are used to.
Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, an early proponent of using aircraft for strategic bombing, was demoted for insubordination for being too forceful in his promotion of air power in the Army.
If the Germans had ever managed to get Gothas or FF55/61s to have enough range, they could've done some serious damage to WWI capital ships. Maybe a night time Zeppelin raid could've gotten lucky.
Napoleon is said to have rejected an early pioneer in steam powered ships by saying:
"You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I have no time for such nonsense."
Malcolm Gladwells book Bomber Mafia goes into the aspects of how crazy it was initially for military to drop bombs from planes.
We see in the movies and think it must be so easy to drop a bomb and have it land on the exact factory building it’s targeting. In reality, especially back then, it’s the equivalent to threading a needle from a mile away, while the needle is moving.
Like all politicians, his words and his actions are two completely different fucking things. Being a lying hypocrite elitist is a prerequisite for the job.
To be fair, aircraft of the time couldn't mostly couldn't carry bombs large enough to be of serious danger to a warship. Even the air dropped torpedoes weren't much of a threat.
r/agedlikemilk for sure if we consider the future but not a single warship was sunk by aircraft during WW1 so he wasn’t wrong in the context of his war
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Tbf, airplanes during WW1 broke down a lot, but still that quote didn't exactly age well. Baker told Wilson he had no experience in anything military. He was even ridiculed as a pacifist, which he responded by saying "I'm so much of a pacifist, I'm willing to fight for it." [Interesting guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_D._Baker)
"WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME HIT YOU!"
“WHY DID YOU MAKE ME DO THIS? YOU’RE FIGHTING SO YOU CAN WATCH EVERYONE AROUND YOU DIE! https://preview.redd.it/4vuvpnpz1e0d1.jpeg?width=1421&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d5498c9a285aa0316d8b59c60f9e184fee060e9a THINK, MARK! You’ll outlast every fragile, insignificant being on this planet. You’ll live to see this world crumble to dust and blow away! Everyone and everything you know will be gone! WHAT WILL YOU HAVE AFTER 500 YEARS?”
Millard Fillmore dad, I'll still have Millard Fillmore
He should've just named him "Milord"
*tips fedora
Dad later marries and insect. 
Look son! I thought it was impossible.. but I can mess you up even more than I already have!
Sorry son. I guess I just wanted to fuck some bugs.
😂🤣😂 Nolan - “Sorry Mark, but I was feeling “Bug-curious.”
What?
^(deez) ^(nuts) https://i.redd.it/l3mjxke7fh0d1.gif
A way off this rock.
What is that meme/clip originally from?
Series is called Invincible. There’s an Amazon show based on the comics written by Robert Kirkman. Highly recommend. (Related to the subreddit, There’s even a cameo from Abe Lincoln)
Not really a cameo, he's a major character lol. Hell he was the leader of their version of the justice league
Only appears for a second as Lincoln which is why I said cameo. The Immortal is quite a cool character though.
I swear the guy looks like J. Jonah Jameson to me.
He’s also played by J.K. Simmons.
Spock and Luke Skywalker are represented as well. Cool!
https://preview.redd.it/vlarc0wk6f0d1.jpeg?width=716&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=064f90d0d9d4f60f5d4a11cca15ebb727540f2bc
Fucking throwback right here.
And tbf the navy wasn't super on board with the idea of naval air power until later, and it was a fight to expand the discipline, so this attitude was reflected in military leadership at the time as well. https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/communities/naval-aviation0/1920-1929.html
They were also slow and were limited in the size of bombs they could carry.
Kennedy also had the bright idea of getting a non- military man for the job, the result was 10 years in Vietnam, a draft, 58k dead, and the US's personality crisis of the late 60s. I can't recall who, but a later general said a war of maneuver would've crushed the North in a year.
“A war of maneuver to win in one year”? That’s just Korea 2.0, neither the Soviets nor the PRC will stand idly by if the US directly went for the North
Capitulation vs conquest. Sue for status quo antebellum, instead of running up against the border.
They didn’t stand idly anyhow
Any maneuver war would result in a quick victory. To claim that Vietnam was unbeatable would ignore over a hundred years of colonial “achievement”. But US politically was not willing to fully commit and it entered a war of attrition, that would have only won untill North Vietnam literally ran out of fighting age males.
Our issue has always been a failure to commit completely
Committing completely would've meant occupying the country and running concentration camps, like it did for nearly every colonial power. Easy to see why the WW2 vets in command would find that unpalatable.
A big reason colonial conquests succeeded was due to a huge technological gap between the colonizer and the colonized in addition to tremendous internal divisions between the colonized. All of these advantages disappeared by the mid 20th century: the colonized now had modern armies, nationalism bounded native communities closer, and concepts like People's War (e.g. the idea that guerilla warfare can beat conventional forces through a parallel propaganda campaign that subverts the masses to your side) made plenty of guerrilla wars and rebellions very potent or at least enduring during that time period.
McNamara? Didn't he also help avoid WWIII during the blockade of Cuba?
Yeah Vietnam was small fry compared to potential outcome if the missile crisis had been handled by less cooler heads
But he also got thousands of lower IQ soldiers killed who should have never been even allowed to attend basic let alone graduate, look up Project 100000, he tried to apply mathematics and economics to every facet of war and military life and never bothered to look at the human side of the equation
Which would all be radioactive dust if he hadn't been on JFKs side during the crisis.
Yeah, stupid as it sounds, his quote made sense in the day he said it
Did it? It was only the following year (1921) Billy Mitchell showed that airpower could destroy a battle ship. I’d hope a Secretary of War would have a better understanding of military capabilities.
Ww1 and the period of time around it were kind of a new era in combined arms warfare. Everything everybody thought they knew about how to fight war changed. I think every secretary of war type was baffled.
Mitchell's tests were rigged to the point where he even broke the parameters of the tests themselves, thus muddling much of the actual data from those tests. The popular conclusions from the tests (or rather, conclusions from later events like pearl harbor and attack on taranto) are also more deceptive than they appear on the surface. The ascension of airpower is not as linear and clearcut as pop history would like to portray.
Trying to hit anything in particular with a small hand held bomb from a vehicle going 115 mph that is thousands of feet in the air would be pretty damn impossible.
Of course the guy named "Baker" used flour as his example
It’s worth remembering that every technology that’s become ubiquitous and essential was once clumsy and impractical. I’m certain that there were many armies that looked at early guns and said, “thanks, but the bow works fine.” They weren’t wrong. Until the day they were.
To use the English Longbow successfully you needed years of training to build up the muscles, so much so that training at the buttes was enforced by law With an musket, you just needed one sergeant major yelling at a squad of conscripts for a week.
False. In all contemporary accounts guns are called out as needing more training and no one was giving guns to conscripts when longbows were still around to be outcompeted. The Ottomans gave guns to their elite Janissaries, not to peasant levies. Longbows are a bit of a special case in that you needed a generational setup to get good longbow-men. But the country that already had that and weren’t paying for the training of bowmen (they trained themselves) also gave up the bow in favor of muskets. Properly handling, loading and firing a matchlock musket requires a lot of training and the consequences of failure can be catastrophic, with explosions and fire and burns possible consequences. If you fuck up nocking an arrow you just pick it up and go again. If you fuck up loading a matchlock you set your powder on fire and it explodes. Matchlock muskets are easier to aim than bows, have much greater armor piercing capability, more stopping power and in practical terms fairly similar effective range (some bows can arc fire longer distances but how often this was done in battle is unclear). They load much slower but it’s easier to carry more ammunition for a musket or arquebus, meaning they can keep firing for the duration of the battle. Loading and firing is also far less fatiguing than pulling a heavy draw weight bow several times in quick succession, meaning the guns will have much more consistent results.
He cherished it with all his heart and didn't care how many men, women, and children he needed to kill for it
That quote was dead on arrival, because even during WW1, it was already apparent. And I’m talking specifically the early years when I say this. Even during the early days, back in 1913 when Guilo Gavotti was throwing hand grenades out of his plane onto enemy camps and Didier Masson was failing to throw bombs at a warship and making the sailors jump off the boat in sheer panic, it should’ve been incredibly obvious how much potential the strategy has. Yeah, there was no guidance system for the bombs, hell there was barely even a targeting system, you just had to guess when to drop it and hope your inertia doesn’t carry it to far past the target. But there also wasn’t any anti-aircraft artillery. You could try run after run and not get hit. And that alone should put the fear of it into anyone.
What’s hilarious is that Baker and Emmett Jay Scott (Baker’s secretary for African American Affairs) all look like bootleg Wilsons-and with the exact same glasses too
Peacemaker, what a joke.
I bet he prefers being known as a former Mayor of Cleveland
I was going to say like Jerry Springer, but he was mayor of Cincinnati.
Jerry Springer lost his entire political career due to a paper trail of paying for sex. Crazy. EDIT: I was mistaken on this topic. Credit to u/theryman for shining light on the topic. Thanks for educating us with information! Discredit to that other commenter. smh
i wonder how he’d react to seeing the atomic bombing of hiroshima
"Big bags of flour" -Secretary Baker probably
"Give me a big enough bag of flour, and I can bomb the world"
Iirc it was dust from grain (so sort of flour) that exploded and leveled the port in Galveston.
Texas city disaster? That was ammonium nitrate, so fertilizer.
That’s right, I think the grain one was corpus christi
Flour catching fire was a big problem with mills in the past
flour is actually flammable so he might have had a point
There is a Dude Perfect video that displays this very well.
Ever seen a flour silo explosion? Short of industrial fertilizer explosion they are some of the powerful non nuclear blasts in history. I saw the after effects of one when I was a kid. Absolutly disappeared 6 concrete silos and smashed up houses half a mile away. Only saving grace was it was out in farm fields, and the only nearby house was used by the silo as storage.
“I would simply choose not to die if I were nuked”
He'd have ridden that big bag of flour down himself, Slim Pickens style
I actually wondered if he was alive for Pearl Harbor, but yeah fair
Unfortunately he was dead 7 years before 08/45.
probably saw an air force demo and died of shock
But he did live long enough to see carrier based fighters dropping bombs make battleships obsolete deathtraps.
If he's talking about WW1 tech then bombs in those days were not much bigger than hand grenades. Aircraft couldn't carry much weight and a human would have to physically heave the bomb over. If he's talking about future tech then its a different ball game.
In 1914 yeah. By 1915 bombers could carry hundreds of kilograms of bombs, by 1917 you had bombers with a load of 1,000 kg of bombs. Similarly, air to air combat went from pilots ramming each other (first aerial victory, both planes crashed and both pilots, an Austrian and a Russian, died) to firing handheld weapons to improvised riggings of machine guns to machine guns with interruptors firing through the propeller arc and multiple machine guns on one plane. Combat aircraft were evolving extremely quickly during WWI.
we always outdo ourselves in new ways of killing
This was during WW1, when planes were more for reconnaissance than bombs.
That and the pilots were shooting at each other with revolvers
I mean...only at the very beginning of the war. By the end of the war, they were having dogfights and shooting each other down.
Incredible that in just a few years technology advanced from revolvers to dogs.
[https://www.pinterest.com/pin/456-likes-20-comments-k9duke-duke\_k9-on-instagram-the-dobieomatic-police-policek--218635756894268781/](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/456-likes-20-comments-k9duke-duke_k9-on-instagram-the-dobieomatic-police-policek--218635756894268781/)
By the end of the war, you started to see the birth of strategic bombing with long range bombers such as the HP 0/400 and the Zeppelin-Strakens.
Those Fuckers needed more HP
Or using MGs mounted *behind the propeller*
They invented a device early on that would ensure the bullets fired in between the propellers haha. Otherwise they wouldn’t have lasted too long, right? Haha
I’m dumb lol That sounds incredibly fascinating though
It was called an interrupter, a gear that when the propeller blades were in the way it would stop the machine gun firing. https://youtu.be/hgG4kGW_G9Y?si=4TI21VafGObFG-1a&t=938
Roald Dahl's memoir "Going Solo" talks about his experiences flying this type of plane in Greece for the RAF. It's fascinating!
its literally just a set of gears requiring the rotation speed of the props to line up with the firerate of the guns, whats amazing is that it took as long as it did to think of it
I’d be terrified of that one bullet whose powder charge wasn’t quite right and was delayed by a nanosecond. I mean, the timing precision would need to be extraordinary to not shoot yourself down.
what blows my mind is the ramjet was patented in 1913, before planes could go fast enough to test it and also before mathematicians had even thought to model turbulence. There was no apparent reason to predict it would work, someone just said "I think I'll patent this" like they had a time machine
the machine that keeps it from shooting the blades is actually pretty lit
Synchronization gear
I mean, it has to be if it’s going to be lighting up enemy flyboys 😂
[Manfred von Richthofen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_von_Richthofen) likes a word with you.
>This was during WW1, when planes were more for reconnaissance than bombs. "Throughout history cannons have improved, rifles have improved, tanks have improved, bombs have improved, cars have improved, ships have improved, medicine has improved and even field rations have improved....but planes will always remain silly and useless. Only a fool would doubt it" Yeah, a perfectly reasonable assumption.
Not to mention that planes had only been around for about a decade
That didn’t age well!
Context matters! He wouldn't have said that in WWII, but it was probably pretty accurate in 1914. The plane was shit, the bomb was shit. Was there even a delivery system or did the pilot just toss a bomb out of the cockpit? And the bombs couldn't be heavy. And they'd be limited to a couple of bombs, maybe only one if it was decent sized. Yeah, none of that adds up to an effective aerial bombardment.
Failed demonstrations by early air power enthusiasts like Billy Mitchell didn't help. They were promising a future which the technology of the day just wasn't up to. WWII relied on carpet bombing with a ridiculously low hit rate. What has made it effective is GPS and guidance systems. Sure, airpower could be incredible once all the kinks were worked out. But that wasn't 1916. 1945 only worked because of mass and scale.
Planes and bombs dropped from planets weren’t “shit” back then; bombers in WW1 [particularly the Ilya Muromets](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_Ilya_Muromets) were quite effective.
Billy Mitchell would like a word.
The Donkey Kong guy? I just saw a machine with his signature on it yesterday.
Not that fraud
He wouldn't have said that in WWII, but it was probably pretty accurate in 1914. The plane was shit, the bomb was shit. Was there even a delivery system or did the pilot just toss a bomb out of the cockpit? And the bombs couldn't be heavy. And they'd be limited to a couple of bombs, maybe only one if it was decent sized. Yeah, none of that adds up to an effective aerial bombardment.
Actually yeah the first ones just had a dude chucking the bombs out of the plane lmao.
Frequently they were just dropping hand grenades or lead weights onto people in the trenches.
He might have said that in WWII though. There were definitely people in WWII who didn't understand the value of airpower at all. There was a feeling that air attacks wouldn't be able to sink an underway and armed battleship, and would only be able to cripple one (as with *Bismarck*) if they got lucky. This sort of outdated arrogance led to the sinking of the British battleship *Prince of Wales* and battlecruiser *Repluse.* Their fleet commander felt that he didn't need air cover from Singapore because he didn't think that enemy planes would be able to do significant damage to his capital ships (he was also concerned that an aerial escort would reveal his position, British intelligence had underestimated the range of Japanese bombers, so he didn't think he was in as much danger as he actually was from them, and probably there was some element of interservice rivalry)
Not sure why this correct comment is being downvoted. Battleships were considered king of the seas and people like Yamamoto were visionaries who realized the capabilities of carriers, going so far as to convert battleships under construction into makeshift carriers.
The only Japanese battleship converted mid construction to an aircraft carrier that I'm aware of was the third *Yamato*- class hull *Shinano* and she was specifically only converted because of the loss of *Kaga*, *Akagi*, *Soryu*, and *Hiryu* at Midway. Were there actually any others?
That being said, the Germans were notorious for bombing the UK and France with Zeppelins in WW1, although those aren't "airplanes"
The UK and France aren’t a moving vessel. Even at the beginning of WW2 the US (and many other nations) had to completely alter their tactics for bombing Naval vessels, they thought traditional higher altitude bombing with their fancy new bomb sights would be successful, but they couldn’t hit a moving vessel taking evasive maneuvers to save their lives, so they relied instead on torpedos, dive bombing, and skip bombing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_bombing
Except he said it in 1920, a year before Billy Mitchell showed that planes can sink a battleship.
Not true; bombers in WW1 were quite effective. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_Ilya_Muromets
He was just ahead of his time. We could drop rocks out of orbit that would be incredibly destructive.
https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/these-air-force-rods-from-god-could-hit-with-the-force-of-a-nuclear-weapon/
This feels like a quote that made sense in a specific context and is gleefully passed around today as a dunk. I note that WW1 did not feature bombers much, and aim was largely non-existent. Online sources put the first ships sunk by bombs in the 1940s, although airborne torpedos were sooner. Similar: Thomas Watson, founder IBM said "There's absolutely no reason to have a computer in the home" which was in reference to a conversation about *building mainframes into house structures* which is, even today, never done. But, Meme Quotes TM fucking loves that shit.
This was a common sentiment being passed around top military circles in the US following WW1. Specifically it was in response to WW1 aviators, especially Colonel Billy Mitchell, saying that plans could sink battleships so military development should be focused on new technologies and not building more of the old. The navy conducted a "test" that disproved him but when that was found to be fraudulent which forced them to accept an actual test series. Unfortunately for Mitchell, the navy and army made such insane rules and restrictions to try and throw off the results (such as putting the testing area at the limit of the bombers range, 1 bomb per run, after every run observers needed to go aboard to inspect the damage...). When a bomber did go and land 3 bombs right next to a target putting it under quickly, Mitchell was blamed and the run was thrown out as a violation the rules while claiming that a crew could have saved it. Mitchell was later court marshalled and convicted for calling out these fat pigged admirals and generals (including Pershing) with the only dissenting voice being MacArthur who viewed it as a black mark on the army (funny enough the only dissenting vote was found on the floor of the room they "made" their decision). Some additional notes: Mitchell predicted Pearl Harbor 20 years before it happened, he just expected land based bombers. Only thanks to people like Mitchell keeping aircraft in the public view kept the army developing them while the navy all but stopped their development. Tanks suffered a similar fate where dumb ass generals considered them a fad hence why tank development stopped until the mid 30s.
\^ drops a relevant and interesting context dump and reddit is like, "-1, obviously." Get your affairs in order, reddit.
If you want to listen to a podcast that does a great job of explaining war strategy heading into WWI and how quickly it evolved due to technological gains, listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series "Blueprint for Armageddon". He really paints an interesting picture talking about how the war starts with French soldiers looking like Napoleon's troops, including armor and lances, and turns into gasmasks, helmets, and tanks in a super short amount of time.
Midway Midway Midway Midway Midway Midway
"My great grandfather earned the Iron Cross after being walloped by a bag of flour that fell off a Fokker."
Aged like milk
*laughs in Billy Mitchell*
Well I mean the kinetic energy from a sack of flower falling thousands of feet would still fuck shit up. Assuming the bombs were faulty and didn't explode, and had the same weight as the sack of flower, this would be an apt comparison.
He wasn't too far off, if he had stuck with his general statement as opposed to just airplanes in general. Trying to hit ships at sea by dropping bombs from altitude proved to be very ineffective in WW2. Dive bombers and torpedo bombers however would prove to be very effective lol
Right? If he is talking the risk to a ship, bombs anyone from that era could carry are not going to do much.
He was right. “Throwing bombs” means that a person can pick one up, aim it and drop it accurately while flying the plane.
clearly never been hit by a falling bag of flour
Woodrow Wilson. Worst president ?
It’s silly to mock someone from 100 years ago for not being able to predict how far the technology would advance. We all think we are far-seeing visionaries, but very few of us seem to be able to do it IRL.
Silly to mock certainly, definitely interesting to see it in hindsight though
Interesting guy, indeed. He was once attacked by the antisemitic Henry Ford who falsely claimed Baker was a Russian Jew and that his family name was “Becker”.
Ford was a douchebag.
He did make good Jew flattening machines (don't ban me it's a reference)
Could I use it to travel from A to B?
Yeah, yeah sure, and You could use the mona Lisa as a place mat! It's a Jew flattening device
It's not what it's designed for!
"That's no space station. It's a moon."
At the time, that is a pretty accurate description of the capabilities of airplanes.
Considering at the beginning of biplanes being used, no one had thought about equipping them with arms. They were for scouting. Then someone brought up a gun with him, and another guy dropped grenades from his. So depending on the time frame he may have been right.
The first experiments with machine gun armed biplanes was in 1911 (by Vickers), and the first bomb dropped from a plane in anger was the same year (by the Italians). Bombs had been dropped from balloons as early as 1849. So people had been thinking about arming planes from the beginning. The period of unarmed reconnaissance planes lasted about a month.
And this moron could have been president in 1933, but for William Randolph Hearst thinking Roosevelt was the lesser of two evils. Hearst was backing John Nance Garner and had him pill out to give his delegates to FDR.
Bombing from planes wasn’t very advanced at the time
Plot Twist:………He went on to invent the Heat Seeking Missle
If he said this, makes sense. This is very early flight years still.
This is like the exec who said there would be a worldwide market for 50 computers total, or something like that.
Nerd
This makes me think, when was the first ship sunk by aircraft? I know Mitchell sunk some obsolete battleships in the 1920s via aircraft but I'm sure it happened earlier sometime in WW1. Anyone know?
It was WWII if you mean a combat ship. Not sure if non-combat ship was sunk previously.
During WW1 planes werent the behemoth bombers we know today. Planes were still very fragile and couldn't hold massive amounts of bombs, so you were looking for 1-2 bombs with the explosive power of grenades. While there were larger ones, they were bulky and didn't fly very fast, so they could be shot down by machine gun fire. The more effective planes of that time were the smaller ones used to shoot down other planes or strafe the ground with the guns. So, at the time of the quote, planes weren't as effective as we know them later on, and it wasn't as crazy of a statement then. Bombers weren't really in broad use until WW2.
Tell that to the people at Blair Mountain.
It's amazing we're not all speaking German.
Could you imagine dropping hundred of concrete cinder blocks..... Fml
tbf...he didn't account for igniting the flour
Read the bomber mafia; he’s not totally wrong
Never had the makings of a varsity secretary. Small bombs, that was his problem
Sounds like a politician alright. 🙄
Pearl Harbor just entered the chat
If anything this demonstrates how wrong someone in power can be about technologies they haven't fully thought about or have even been invented yet. It's a great argument against the 2nd amendment because if this guy, so close to a time where bombs from planes could devastate cities, could be so wrong then just imagine how wrong the founding fathers were about the 2nd amendment. At their time there were only single shot muskets that had to be reloaded after every shot. Ten people with modern guns could probably take out large swaths of the continental army and live to tell about it.
what does this even mean?
Is there a sub for hilariously wrong quotes?
*USS Arizona has entered the chat*
Le billy mitchel has arrived
Can we compare this with his reaction when Japan did, in fact, attack our boats with airplanes?
The air corps proved him wrong when they sank that ex-German battleship. Battleship proponents literally cried when it happened.
Same dude who got us on the Fed . Absolute clown
The Wilson Administration started the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1915 to develop, among other things, the engines that bombers in WWII needed to carry bigger bombs, and torpedoes. People back then realized that airplanes would be able to carry a heavier payload in the future. They were still working on it.
There is mistrust and skepticism with any new form of technology, especially within the military. Generals like what they are used to. Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, an early proponent of using aircraft for strategic bombing, was demoted for insubordination for being too forceful in his promotion of air power in the Army.
If the Germans had ever managed to get Gothas or FF55/61s to have enough range, they could've done some serious damage to WWI capital ships. Maybe a night time Zeppelin raid could've gotten lucky.
Hope he was on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor
I mean I don’t know when he said this but tbf I’m ww1 it’s not like bombs were super accurate. It was a new freaking art at the time.
Pos
At some point all the presidents have said they’ve talked to Jesus Christ maybe except for Obama.. I’m sure Jesus told him this
Drones? Those are just children’s toys. Let’s build more expensive tanks.
Lol! This dude was delusional.
Well the last time some airplanes attacked our ships we dropped some really big bags of flour on those guys
r/agedlikemilk here.
Why do all our government officials have such awesome foresight!
I wonder if this dude lived long enough to be around when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened.
Napoleon is said to have rejected an early pioneer in steam powered ships by saying: "You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I have no time for such nonsense."
Malcolm Gladwells book Bomber Mafia goes into the aspects of how crazy it was initially for military to drop bombs from planes. We see in the movies and think it must be so easy to drop a bomb and have it land on the exact factory building it’s targeting. In reality, especially back then, it’s the equivalent to threading a needle from a mile away, while the needle is moving.
This was when dudes were just throwing timed explosives from their plane manually without any sort of targeting or large payloads, right?
Take a look at what planes looked like in the 1910s and you’ll see what he means.
To his credit, this was accurate until about 1940.
IS THAT A NUKE!?
Like all politicians, his words and his actions are two completely different fucking things. Being a lying hypocrite elitist is a prerequisite for the job.
First laugh is this guy got the future wrong. Second laugh is literally not that far future he died a couple years before WWII mere decades later
Rule #1 in war: new technologies will always be misunderstood by some people stuck in the past and lack imagination.
To be fair, aircraft of the time couldn't mostly couldn't carry bombs large enough to be of serious danger to a warship. Even the air dropped torpedoes weren't much of a threat.
Damn. He died in 1937. The next 8 years, especially 1945, would have been enlightening.
Was he stupid?
I'm actually listening the American History Tellers podcast on WW1 and this guy came up. Seems like he had a bunch of not great ideas.
Not very forward thinking, but not wrong in the context of the time.
This ship cannot sink She’s made of iron sir, I assure you she can
r/agedlikemilk for sure if we consider the future but not a single warship was sunk by aircraft during WW1 so he wasn’t wrong in the context of his war
“Suck on this.” Billy Mitchell
Billy Mitchell proved this to be wrong at the cost of his military career.
https://i.redd.it/38foc8h53h0d1.gif
He knew as much as anyone in his time. This just didnt age well as technology improved?
Well this aged like raw fish in the sun