Did anyone ever consider putting radio homing beacons like those used on aircraft carriers on cruisers or battleships (or U-Boats) during World War II so that friendly fighter planes (or bombers) could find them at night and already be overhead to provide air cover (or attack a convoy) at dawn?

The scenario I'm imagining is around 2:00AM on August 9, 1942, a bunch of specially trained Zeros and G4Ms take off from Rabaul, form up using their running lights, fly east, and home in on the beacon once they detect it. The sun comes up and Admiral Turner finds his transports sharing Ironbottom Sound with Admiral Mikawa's cruisers and a squadron of G4M torpedo bombers with a swarm of Zeroes protecting the lot while all of Admiral Crutchley's cruisers are at the bottom of the sea. (alternatively, this happens on October 13, only now there's two Kongo class battleships hanging out in Ironbottom Sound instead)

One of the main reasons Mikawa turned around instead of hitting the transports was because he didn't think he could reform his squadron, sink the transports, and get out of range of Fletcher's carriers before the sun came up and exposed him to air attack since he didn't know Fletcher had already pulled out. Pulling something like this off would at least give him air cover during his withdrawal. Did anyone ever try it, did no one think of it, was the technology just not there yet, or was there some other reason it wasn't done (to my knowledge at least)?

Hey guys, so I went a little digging into my family’s background since the time I spent not being outside due to COVID-19 has given me that liberty.

I recently found out that through my dad, my great-grandfather was an officer for the RAF as an Assyrian Levi at RAF Habbaniya. I’m trying to find out how can I find more information about him? Possibly records of service? I am a third year university student and I think it would be great if I had this information for my WWII history class next semester!

A side note, I am Assyrian myself, my dad is from Iraq but we live in Canada. I don’t know what hurdles that might put in front of me but if anyone has some information and would like to give me a hand, it would be more than appreciated!

From what I have found, abortion is never mentioned in the Bible, in either the Old Testament or the New Testament. Obviously, the Republicans in the States are using abortion as the number one argument to have Christians vote for Trump again, but how did we get here? When and how did abortion get such a bad rap and become so evil?

I'm assuming the answer has something to do with the influence of the Roman empire (hence "Romance" language).

Title.

I'm reading Neil Gaiman's "Norse Mythology", and he made a comment that the amount of Norse mythology we have left is equivalent to if all we had of Greek myth were tales of Hercules and Theseus. But WHY are we missing so much context for Norse myths? Both cultures practiced oral traditions that were later taken down in paper (thinking of the Norse Eddas and then things like Homer's Odyssey). So, WHY are we lacking? What happened to the myths for us to lose them?

Were these cities crucial to weapon development, financial resources, to get the most casualties, or for other reasons?

The UK has had a census every 10 years since 1801. Why nothing before? Why 1801?

Denmark imported slaves to the Virgin Islands and practiced chattel slavery but I don't see much evidence of slavery in Greenland (imported or Intuit).

Sometimes when I see mummies in a museum I wonder what those persons might have said if they’d known that their bodies would be on display millennia later.

It is perfectly normal that archeologist study old graves. However, people would be appalled if someone were to dig up their grandmother in order to examine her jaw bone. So, at what point does it become ok?

I know that "citizen" may be an incorrect term for someone within the medieval era, however, did that title or thinking exist within the Papal States? If was a commoner would I be indistingushable from any other Italian peasant or even any other European Peasant? If I were a noble of some reputation would I have vassals and would I pledge my allegiance to the Pope himself?

I have been interested how someone's life would or could be different living at the heart of western Christendom as opposed to living in more secularly held areas.

If you want to answer something more specific instead of giving a general description:
How well-defined were borders in the first place? How different could life be on different sides of, for example, one border-defining river? How much effort was put into restricting free travel? Were there posts and patrols, like those you can find in modern times? What was the general procedure for crossing the border?
That sort of stuff.

And like I said, feel free to describe any place and any time period that you know about, within set limits of course.

Pol Pot, leader of Khmer Rouge; Cambodia's infamous and genocidal Communist Party, lived in Paris in the 1940s. There (like Ho Chi Minh before him) he joined the French Communist party. Here the similarities end.

While both men were regarded as nationalists first, Communists second, Ho Chi Minh adopted a relatively pedestrian set of Marxist-Leninist beliefs. For various reasons the Vietnamese distrusted Mao's China, and rejected Mao's peasant revolution.

Pol Pot however was regarded fondly by Mao, who is alleged to have said Khmer Rouge were doing a better job of a peasant revolution than his men ever did.

But there's something odd about Khmer Rouge, even by the standards of Mao's bloodthirsty Cultural Revolution. It certainly departs from orthodox Communism in eliminating the greyzone between peasants and everyone else, taken to extremes: like imagining anyone with glasses could read and thus was permanently corrupted by the capitalist system.

I was reading 'Virtue and Terror' by Slavoj Žižek, a compilation of Robespierre's speeches and essays during the French Revolution, and the comparisons with Khmer Rouge seem uncanny.

Specifically, what seemed to motivate the Jacobins to venture into extremism was a union of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's conceptions; of the innate goodness of the noble savage, of civilisation's corrupting effect upon morals, with a wartime mentality that the revolutionaries cannot go too far.

In fact, that phrase, that the revolutionaries cannot go far enough, appears exactly from what I've read of Robespierre and Pol Pot's thoughts. All this leads me to think it can't be a coincidence that Pol Pot lived in Paris and then helped develop a toxic mix of Jacobism and Maoism. But I can't find specific references to Pol Pot and the French Revolution. Just his relationship with Mao.

Is there any evidence to prove or disprove this apparent connection? Or noting Pol Pot or Khmer Rouge's thoughts on the French Revolution or Robespierre?

I know this is a pretty niche topic, but I am somewhat lost about where to look after drinking what I can from Wikipedia.

Even by far left standards, Khmer Rouge are regarded as pariahs and mad men, so there isn't much writing available in comparison with say Lenin or Mao. Furthermore, Khmer Rouge themselves weren't exactly big on literacy, further reducing the number of written sources.

Hi. I saw another user here say in a post about the tv show Chernobyl that by 1985, executions in the Soviet Union were down to 700 or so a year, and by 1988 200. I was wondering what the larger trends of capital punishment in the Soviet Union starting with Kruschev? Did he significantly scale back executions, or was it still common place?

I’m taking a political theory class for uni. The professor was talking about Polybius and in the background info mentioned that the Greeks had a large empire under Alexander the Great.

I have always understood that Macedon was a separate empire from the Greek city states. Even in a class on Ancient Greece that I took, it was talked about as if it was different.

Is this a case of me misunderstanding what I was taught previously or is it a case of world history is complicated?

I have been recently reading Stephen Kotkin's Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1929, and he seems to believe that WWI made the Russian Revolution possible. Without the war causing the conditions for the revolution, Tsarism would have continued. However, there were internal fissures and also much social unrest before the war as well. However, the main radical leaders (Lenin and Trotsky) were in exile in Europe, whereas Stalin was in internal exile in Siberia during the war. So, was the Russian Revolution inevitable?

By the 1930s and 40s, Europe was in the midst of an shift towards new aesthetic styles including Surrealism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism. At the same time, much of the continent fell under totalitarian rule. The Nazis rejected modern art, shutting down the Bauhaus and even holding an exhibit of what they called "degenerate art." The USSR also rejected the avant-garde, forcing artists to conform to the style of socialist realism. On the other hand, Fascist Italy embraced the Futurist modern art movement. What factors account for the Italian government's acceptance of avant-garde art movements compared to other totalitarian regimes at the time?