The amount of luck that goes into winning a battle and summarily a war is insane. Here you have the United Kingdom desperately trying to get supplies into the ports and are stymied by these new magnetic mines.

Only through the absolute luck of a Luftwaffe plane ditching its cargo prematurely, the contact switch not being set, and the salt water not self-priming the mine because the air-dropped mine lands in a swamp does the United Kingdom short-cut research / spying efforts and address the magnetic sea mines.

The countermeasure tests being done through live tests must have been fun to volunteer for: "Take this plane, fly 35 feet off the water and when the mine goes off the blast will shoot you into the air."

Not just luck, the bravery of those men who had to field strip that lucky find. Really, just reading that part of the story gave me chills.

Agreed. I try to put myself in the shoes of the person accomplishing a task and after reading about the mine not being set properly, gave me the same chill.

For those more interested in a full documentary on beating the magnetic sea mines: http://youtu.be/wKrweOqNxz0?t=1m49s

New rule: Don't use images with source resolution <= 800px for full width headers.

I dunno, it kind of fits the grainy WWII wartime photography source.

Nah, he's right - pixellation and macroblocking on a supposedly vintage photograph just kills it for me - it's become my test for whether an Irish bar is fake or not :-)

One handy trick if your historical source photo is just too small is to resize and then apply a halftone effect - at least the analog-type distortion is consistent with that of newspapers, textbooks etc.

It makes the JPEG artifacting around the edges highly visible, though. They didn't really have macroblocks in WWII.

Its interesting to call things as they are. In politically correct world title would say "How Britain Beat Nazist...".

Interesting read for sure!