Here is this week’s challenge for “What is it Wednesday?” - a close up of something in the museum or our collection for you to guess what it is in the comments!![]()
![]()
What is it?! We are looking for what it might be part of within the museum and, for more of a challenge, what the exact part is and what it does! ![]()
![]()
Thanks to everyone who played last week… the answer for August 28 was a ballistic computing cam in the Kommandogarat 40 fire control computer… see the previous post for the full details!![]()
![]()
Good luck on this week’s challenge! ![]()
![]()
#americanheritagemuseum #historymuseum #visitma
The answer to the “What is it? Wednesday” question of August 28th is one of the ballistic cams used in the German Kommandogerät 40 that is part of the anti-aircraft battery exhibit in the Defense of the Reich gallery. The Kommandogerät (“command device”) is a fire control computer that used a combination of optics and mechanical computing to develop a firing solution that would be relayed to the anti-aircraft gun crews, like the 8.8 cm Flak 36 German 88 mm anti-aircraft cannon we have displayed. What is pictured is a solid computing cam that, when combined with precision gears connected to rollers on follower arms, could solve multivariate calculus problems in real-time to provide accurate fire to track bomber formations and time shells to detonate at precise altitudes. There are a number of these cams within the Kommandogerät 40 and combined they made a powerful mechanical analog computer that made Flak the most dangerous defensive weapon against daylight precision bombing. ![]()
![]()
Stay tuned for the next “What is it? Wednesday” later today! ![]()
#americanheritagemuseum #whatisitwednesday
Join us for a great 5K run around the American Heritage Museum grounds this Saturday, September 7th in support of the Travis Manion Foundation. We invite you to run, walk, or ruck to honor our nation’s first responders who selflessly sacrificed on September 11th and service members who have served in the wars since. Join us to raise awareness and honor the fallen. Participants get a 50% admission discount to the American Heritage Museum. For more information and to register see: www.travismanion.org/events/911-heroes-run/2024-bostonnew-england-ma/
The American Heritage Museum not only honors those who served in the service of the United States, but we also honor those who served with our allies during all wars and conflicts. Because of this, we’d like to take a moment in honor of Polish Aviation Day on August 28th, to highlight the story of Stefania Wojtulanis-Karpińska, a female pilot of the Polish Air Force at the outbreak of WWII. After the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, she evacuated to Romania with the Polish Air Force and made her way to France where she once again had to flee in 1940 as France fell. She made her way to England and was assigned to the Polish Air Force Headquarters in London until later in 1940. In January 1941, she and Anna Leska became the first two Polish women pilots to join the British Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), which delivered aircraft to operational units from factories and ferry aircraft for maintenance. This role, very similar to that assigned to female WASP pilots in America, required pilots to learn and fly a wide variety of aircraft types in all sorts of weather and mecahnical conditions.![]()
![]()
As it turns out, the American Heritage Museum’s Supermarine Spitfire IX, BR601 was one of the aircraft that Wojtulanis-Karpińska flew in her career with the ATA. On July 9, 1942, she ferried BR601 from Prestwick, Scotland to its first operational unit, 64 Squadron at Hornchurch, Essex, stopping in three places in poor weather before arriving on July 11th. The photo in this post is her in BR601 and her logbook entries of those flights!![]()
![]()
74 years later, BR601 would fly once again after a full restoration by Biggin Hill Heritage Hangar and arrive shortly after in the United States to join the collection of the Collings Foundation. Though not currently on display at the American Heritage Museum, Spitfire BR601 is maintained in flying condition and is stored off site to fly at events. The next event it will be taking part in will be Green Mountain Aviation Field Days in Burlington, VT on September 14-15, 2024. Eventually, when our expansion is built, BR601 will be displayed at the AHM.![]()
![]()
#polishaviation #wwii #spitfire #supermarinespitfire #worldwarii #femaleaviator
Here is this week’s challenge for “What is it Wednesday?” - a close up of something in the museum or our collection for you to guess what it is in the comments!![]()
![]()
This one might be a little more challenging! What is it?! We are looking for what it might be part of inside the museum and what exactly it might be for even more challenge!![]()
![]()
Thanks to everyone who played last week… the answer for August 21 was the crew compartment of the Daimler Mk.I Dingo scout car in the Pacific War Gallery. The Dingo was used in Burma by the 16th Light Calvary of the British Indian Army armored car regiment.![]()
![]()
#americanheritagemuseum #historymuseum #visitma
Eastern Front
T-34/76 – RUS | TANK
7.5 cm Pak 97/38 – GER/FRA | ANTI-TANK GUN
Sd.Kfz. 251/1 Ausf. D – GER | PERSONNEL CARRIER/PRIME MOVER
Sd.Kfz. 2 Kleines Kettenkrad – GER | PERSONNEL CARRIER/PRIME MOVER
15 cm Nebelwerfer 41 – GER | ROCKET LAUNCHER
StuG III Ausf. G – GER | TANK DESTROYER
3.7 cm Pak 35/36 – GER | ANTI-TANK GUN
Borgward IV Ausf. B – GER | REMOTE DEMOLITION VEHICLE
PM M1910 – RUS | HEAVY MACHINE GUN
The battles on the Eastern Front constituted the largest military confrontations in history. They were characterized by unprecedented ferocity, destruction on a massive scale, mass deportations, and immense loss of life due to combat, starvation, exposure, disease, and massacres. Of the estimated 70-85 million deaths attributed to World War II, around 40 million occurred on the Eastern Front. The Eastern Front was decisive in determining the outcome in the European Theater of Operation in World War II, with the Red Army inflicting by far the most damage on the armies of Nazi Germany and the Axis nations. The two principal powers were Germany and the Soviet Union, along with smaller Axis allies like Finland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Italy. Though never engaged in military action in the Eastern Front, the United States and the United Kingdom both provided substantial material aid to the Soviet Union.
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were essentially allied in the ruthless double invasion of Poland in September 1939, and their cooperative annexations of other small states, in whole or in part, in 1939-1940. However, in terms of ideology and imperial and territorial ambition they remained deeply at odds. Germany thus launched Operation Barbarossa, its invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 22nd, 1941, the summer solstice and hence true “longest day” of the war. From the first hours, Nazi death battalions (Einsatzgruppen) carried out mass murder campaigns. The fighting between the armies was brutal and merciless. In the first winter alone, 3.5 million Soviet POWs were starved to death or murdered by the Nazi regime. But the invasion slowed by December 1941, halting out just miles from Moscow. Another effort by the Germans stalled in Stalingrad in late 1942, before the turning point came at Kursk in the summer of 1943, while the Western Allies landed in Sicily and stepped up their bombing campaign against Germany itself. In the ‘bloodlands’ of the Eastern Front, years of hard attritional war were made worse by multiple genocides and two of the worst, bloodiest tyrants in all history: Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Together, they oversaw mass death and a war without garlands on the ground that exceeded in horror and malice and death and destruction any other war in human history.
A strategic air offensive by the United States Army Air Force and Royal Air Force played a significant part in reducing German industry and tying up German air force and air defense resources, while the Red Army engaged by far the lion’s share of German forces on the ground.
