I think you should read the posts properly no one has suggesting nuking Russia to save Poland.

Read posts 13 and 16.

Defeated the Germans, but failed to liberate Europe, we lost the war …

Not quite – we finally “won” in 1989, if “won” is the appropriate terminology. Russia like Britain never recovered from the economic strains imposed by their role in WW2. It just took Russia longer to finally succumb.

I thought that the problem was that Russia (the Soviet Union) was spending nearly 50% of GDP on defence up until the 1980s when the NATO average was 12%.

As I said it finally succumbed die to the economic strains imposed by WW2, however this was not helped by the colossal post-war one way street of military spending engaged in by the Soviets. People tend to ignore the fact that in reality defense spending tends to be way over comparable civilian spending in terms of value for money, and essentially wasteful given the high obsolescence rate both in equipment and time terms of the product purchased. If a government wants to throw away money at prodigious rates for little return the sad truth is throw it at the military.

Did the Germans pioneer EMF propulsion or what?

Dunno, but they did do a lot of the pioneer work on how to lose wars. 😀

@ comments above that the Red Army would have wiped the floor with the Western Allies forces in 1945:

Not factually supported (avoiding to say BS). … Anyway, sandbox games …

The West has since 1945 consistently over-estimated its role on the destruction of the Nazis. In 1944 Allied generals like Patton and Montgomery made the mistake of equating the Germans rapid withdrawal from France after the Normandy breakout with German military collapse in the west. The unfortunate truth as we found out in late 1944 in France and in 1944 and 1945 in Italy was that the Germans were a very tough nut to crack. And that sudden withdrawal was strategic not a retreat.

I think the consensus is that in comparison with the Russian tactics of ruthless human wave advances the Western Allies simply did not have the political will to suffer the sort of casualties those tactics would entail. Further, at most only 1/3 of the German forces were engaged against the Western Allies while the remaining 2/3 were deployed against the Russians. We received a similar lesson in how ruthless tactics work in Korea when the Chinese using human wave tactics swept up the over-confident and over-extended UN forces after they got perilously close to the Yalu river – MacArthur ignored intelligence, and like Patton had an over-enthusiastic view of his military skills.

The Russians were not a nation where the leadership was accountable to the people – Stalin had the power to use the Russian troops in whatever way he felt. If either Churchill or Roosevelt had adopted such tactics at any stage in the final year of the war the political fall out for them would have been catastrophic. The British forces were war weary with good cause, while the US forces were taking sufficient casulties due to poor training that men were being drafted out of the USAAF to fill the gaps in infantry numbers.

As for the putative lack of artillery – the Russian tanks would have had a field day against our tanks and the Russians also had control of the air on their front. Their aircraft and fighter skills were as good as ours so we would not have had guaranteed air superiority. Our troops were by May 1945 showing all the signs of war weariness, especially the British (a fact which the British Chiefs of Staff who were asked by Churchill to draft a plan to attack the Russians to free Poland made explicit in their draft plan which just basically said that such an attack would have been suicide), but unlike the Russian troops we didn’t have the equivalent of the NKVD to ginger them up into human wave tactics. Politically neither the US nor the UK could have resorted to that.

The fundamental point is that it was the Russians who beat the Germans not us – just because the Germans initiated the surrender with us rather than the Russians was not because we were the strongest military force but because we were the lesser of the two evils as they saw it. Our commanders, the sane ones not the insane like Patton, were well aware that they would lose a fight with the Russians. Not only in pure military terms but also in propaganda terms because since 1941 the West had been glorifying the Russians for their defiance of the Germans – turning all that propaganda on its head in 1945 to support a losing attack on Russia would have been completely inexplicable to our citizens and to the relatives of all the casualties we would have suffered.

25 Squadron had Blenheims and as we know three Whirlwinds for a short time, but moved over to the Beaufighter…

So they might have had both types present at one point and at that time didn’t the early Whirlys have a black underneath, on the port side anyway as they were meant to be a day & night fighter…

The early ones in service carried standard temperate scheme of Sky unders with the undersurface of the port wing in Night and Dk Earth/Dk Green uppers with Sky codes and fuselage band, as introduced for the daylight fighter ops over France after the Battle of Britain.

Came across this photo in another forum, identified as an A6M, but I don’t think so – it’s a 2 seater (at least) for starters. Anyone here got any clues?

There was, as already pointed out, a 2 seater trainer version of the Zero. That looks like one.