my journal 3

[Yamato]

Today I had a gigantic failure at work in terms of everything I've been training for, but, since I am training myself to also accept failure, this is no big deal.

I was being asked for help on the phone, then I had some problems with some expired password - from a screwed up online procedure (not because I forget passwords).

Then the boss called me to give me even more problems.

On top of it, there's a new guy, who, even from the first day, has proven to be a complete idiot, who sneezes very loudly, about once every hour. He's even louder than that other guy I hate, who yawns out loud, and whom the "Orang-Utan".

So this was excellent training for me, and I put up with it for my 5 and a half hours, but at 13.40, I just couldn't take it anymore, also because the boss didn't address me respectfully regarding whatever she was talking about..

well, basically I just turned off my computer and I left, because I was about to yell at someone: either the idiot, or the boss.

Total failure of everything I've been saying. Imagine what I would have done had I been trading, not exactly then but even near this event, because I usually stay frustrated for the entire day.

Anyway, total failure, but since I am not supposed to be perfect, this is good, too. I failed at not taking offense, but now i can succeed at accepting failure.

Anyway, the way I should have handled this is as follows:

1) the boss treats me like an idiot
2) I don't get offended, I don't leave the office
3) I think of how this can damage me, if it doesn't do damage, I let it be. If it harms me (other than offending me), then I should find a way to avoid it. In some cases what you do after you get offended might solve the problem. In some cases, it doesn't work like that. But in those cases, you could still not get offended and pretend you got offended. You should instead not learn to let your being offended dictate to you the course of action, because that is the very behavior that caused me to lose all my money. I got offended by the market, got mad at GBL, took my revenge, and lost everything I had.

So, whatever you do, you should not listen to your pride. But it is so hard because it is always the only thing I hear in my mind.

That is why I often doubt that I'll ever be profitable. Because I don't have the necessary emotional balance to handle trading. At the office, nothing happens if I leave early because I feel like killing someone. If I behave this way while trading, I never close the platform. I immediately take it out on the markets, which means taking out on my account.

Actually what is funny is that the boss even apologized to me in some way, by being nice, when I told her "why are you getting angry at me?" (she was probably nervous for other reasons). But that very moment she showed to me that she had been offensive, that is probably when I realized that I was offended. So, never apologize, because you make things worse.

 

[Yamato]

The luckiest man in World War 2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alistair_Urquhart

 

[Yamato]

http://www.militaryeducation.org/10-deadliest-snipers-of-world-war-2/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_Häyhä

 

[Yamato]

 

[Yamato]

Even my last overnight position, ZC, has been closed, due to lack of margin. Now I am at 2k. I can only trade NQ intraday. That's it. Began 2 years ago with 4k, brought it to 47k, and now I am again at 2k. I lost 50%. Ah ah, I only lost 2k. Pretty funny that I am not killing myself.

I've been thinking about this, a parallel between 911 and the Reichstag fire, and how Bush and Hitler after those events, seized power, by passing laws that allowed them to put in jail people without a trial.

People today wonder, on the internet, why didn't Germans react and protest against Nazism, but how many are we seeing protesting against 911?

Just the same 1% or even less. The Germans protested against Nazism even more than the Americans are protesting against their blind nationalism, that makes them accept anything from their presidents, and makes them go fight unjust wars.

Hitler set fire to his own parliament and blamed someone else, the communists, or rather: he let the media blame them, and then put all opposition in jail and threatened the others into submission.

Bush demolished his own sky scrapers, even worse, because they had people in them, unlike the Reichstag. Then he went on to blame someone in the middle east, the "terrorists", or rather: he let the media do that job:

So, what he did was even worse than Hitler, the initial event, but then he didn't go as far, or rather he didn't do things as openly. He did pass the same laws as Hitler, but it's not like he had Paul Wellstone put in jail. Nope, after Wellstone was complaining a bit too much about 911, his plane crashed. And other people, too, they weren't all put in jail as terrorists. Nope: a civilized country like the US couldn't get away with it.

They simply mysteriously died during the last 10 years, dozens of people, due to being witnesses and speaking out on what really happened on 911. And so the others were still convinced to stay quiet. Actors, journalists, famous people. They didn't want to die in strange accidents or commit suicides against their own will. So how can we blame heinz rühmann for hanging out with Hitler and Goebbels, when George Clooney and the others hang out with Bush and Obama, who by the way won the Nobel Prize for peace?

One day, we will remember, if the muslims ever become powerful, one day the US will be blamed for its wars in the middle east. And so all the Europeans, too. And this is not as bad as Hitler's wars: it is worse. Germany was poor, and it looked for resources, and went against the whole world: everyone, including its leaders, put their lives on the line to conquer more resources. The Western powers were already the richest on earth, instead, the strongest, and all allied together, went on after the weakest countries, to rape the middle east to squeeze out of it a little bit more resources. While they were doing this, Bush was sitting safely in the USA, having a good time, not like Hitler and the others (including the Japanese), committing suicide once they had been defeated. And Hitler had 41 assassination attempts in his lifetime, most of them before he was losing the war.

So, you see how the propaganda can brainwash you, and lead you (at least if you're a dumb american) to think you're bringing democracy to the middle east, while in fact your country, the strongest and the richest, is raping a poor country. And those whom you call your heroes are testing their new laser/microwave weapons on innocent civilians, as this documentary shows:

So here we're getting really to the same exact level as SS doctors like Mengele and similar. Needless to say, when people have power, they abuse it. So you see, yes it is a smaller scale and they didn't kill as many muslims as the Germans killed jews, and yes, they didn't argue a rationale for it, such as the fact that they're racially inferior, but what they did was quite shameful. And it is quite shameful to hear such stupid idiots arguing for America and showing their flags. This is not the Americans who liberated Europe. This is different people. Different soldiers and different people at home.

Things are very similar in many areas, although there's more a semblance of democracy today, but it's not real, and if you speak out, something usually happens to you. Death or other problems with the law.

There are plenty of examples you can find if you do a little search.

The media is certainly gone, bought and paid for, or scared into submission, just the way it was during nazism. Politicians are gone, too. Maybe the only ones who are still free, it's unknown people on the web, like me, especially if one isn't living in the US. Then they're still free to write about 911 and the police state. During nazism this wasn't possible for sure.

So, we're not at that stage, and everything is on a smaller scale (only maybe a few hundred thousands Iraqis were killed by the Americans), in the sense that they're not rounding up the muslims in the way hitler was rounding up the jews. Although here there's another parallel, once again: then it was the jews, and now the hate is directed at the muslims.

Also, bush didn't change the laws to stay in power forever.

However, there is an elite in the US and you can't become president unless they want you. It doesn't matter who the people want. They're going to rig the elections, and if it's not enough to have their way, then they have no problem with killing you. They tried with Reagan, too, and we all know that it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald who killed JFK. Mind control for Robert Kennedy... and, well, if you haven't looked it up by now, I have not been writing this post for you. You're probably one of the 95% of idiots who constantly surround me anyway.

In some cases, I am an idiot, too. Especially when it comes to trading. In other cases, I am unplugged, surrounded by people living in the matrix. Unfortunately, as a trader, I am still plugged. Plugged by my own pride and mental illusions and garbage.

The child neighbor is jumping around, and training me to take **** from others. Why? Because I don't have to go crazy if everything isn't organized exactly according to my plans. I have to get rid of my maladaptive perfectionism. I have to get rid of all these feelings that have been... hindering... my progress.

 

[Yamato]

Thinking back to yesterday and how I left the office because I felt disrespected, I realize that I am a long way from becoming the emotionless machine I want to become, and that it feels so much against my nature.

At the same time, I will not be able to have my way both ways. I can't keep my touchiness, pride and perfectionism and at the same time expect to also make money and keep the money I make in the markets. The past proves that sooner or later my extreme pride/touchiness/perfectionism cause me to blow out my account.

Since I can't have it both ways, and since being this way (taking things personally, basically) also causes me daily useless frustrations, then I will try to abolish my emotions and my taking offense at everything that doesn't go my way. But it's going to be hard.

I think I need to devise an intensive boot camp, where I experience all sorts of frustrations and time myself and see if my endurance to frustration can be raised, in terms of time, for starters.

It all boils down to finding out IF it is possible to raise my tolerance for things not going my way. First one minute, then 2 minutes, then no limit. Hopefully it can be done.

Only if I can raise that threshold to "no limit", will I be able to trade, because with trading just one moment of madness is enough to blow out your account.

 

[Yamato]

24 HOURS SINCE BEING FLAT

How do I feel? Ok.

I was forced by margin calls and forced liquidation to be flat.

I have been flat for the first 24 hours in years.

I guess in some ways, being on the market... was like a drug.

I feel relaxed and I am now relieved of all that hoping, involved in having positions open. My hoping skills are now resting - as if they ever had any effect on the market!

Anyway, how's my trading boot camp going? How am I training myself to take the emotional pain produced by trading?

Every situation that is frustrating in life simulates the same frustrations from trading. So, with this approach, going to work is like going to the gym.

The neighbor slams the door? No more urges to kill her. Now I say to myself: "training", "exercises", finally!

I am using every frustration as an opportunity to train for trading.

Let alone the chart game. I am playing it now. And I never end up a game with a loss, and if I did, that would be great training, too: taking losses after a streak of wins is one of the hardest things. I got so used to winning, that I could not conceive losing money. That is why I had to double up and all that: I just could not accept a loss. All the times I blew out my accounts, it happened because, after a winning streak (my usual 4k to 40k streak), I encountered a market that wasn't behaving according to my plans... got mad... doubled up... and got killed.

So, I am now practicing on the chart game, as I said, and I enjoy every second of it. I can read my emotions by now.

As I play one free chart game, where no one sees me, I still come across this range of emotions:

1) how boring to wait for the right moment to enter...
2) how frustrating to have to enter long after missing a big rise...
3) how sick is this? when I lose, I remember other burning defeats felt in my life?
4) how shameful I am feeling to perform worse than buy and hold...
5) how frustrating to get out right before being proven right by the chart
6) when I win, I feel great, like I am a genius and will soon own the world, and this is just as dangerous as the other emotions, because if you feel really good when you succeed, you feel really bad when you don't, and then you will react with revenge trading.

And this is free and no one can see me. Imagine if you're playing with real money and tell people about your results.

For someone like me, the chart game is the greatest chart gym ever, and that is why I avoided it until now. Because it causes me a lot of frustration, regardless of the fact that no reputation or money is involved with it. This just shows how much important... how much my father has inculcated in me the importance of winning. Biggest mistake ever. I think he wasn't training me for my own good. I think he's a sick mother ****er who used education as an excuse to harass others. But let's suppress this urge to kill him that I feel, because this is one of the things that hurt my trading.

Only when I will be emotionless (or similar, you know what I mean), only then will I be able to invest real money in the markets again. I am not ready. It doesn't matter whether you give me the 50k or I reach it again by luck. I am not ready to keep it once I have it. So no point in having it right now.

But I want more now. I can't just be happy with the opportunities of frustration that life will give me. I need to subject myself to all sorts of frustration and all sorts of intensity. I want to become good at this. This is necessary.

It is certainly not enough to have understood this principle or having written about it in the journal. Until I solve this attitude problem, of having to be right, of having to win each time, I won't be ready for trading. I need to step it up. I need to be ready for the most frustrating experiences, because trading will create them, and you have to be ready for them.

Situations for example where the market really relaxes you, by making you win, and making you think you are infallible, and then will cause you a loss, for which you will be totally unprepared, if you have allowed the market and the wins to relax you, and if you have allowed them to fool you into thinking you're infallible, you're a genius, you're the chosen one, and you're the one whom the gods always loved. All of which apply to me.

 

[Yamato]

today leaders are better, but people are the same

I've been watching this (on Kristallnacht):
http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/haup...o/2006504/Nacht-über-Deutschland:-Pogrom-1938

As I watched it, I realized that nazism, and all its injustices, did not happen because the people back then were worse than they are today. And nazism isn't prevented today by the fact that people are better.

People today are just the same animals as they were in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

The only reason it happened is that the Germans happened to have leaders who told the young violent ones (the old are usually wiser and less violent) to go ahead and abuse a given number of people on their list: jews, communists, gypsies, homeless, etcetera.

If even just my colleagues were allowed to do what they want, they would probably to the same to the Romanians, about whom they complain every day, or at the very least they would allow it to happen.

I've heard a guy on the subway ask a foreigner why he didn't go back to his country, merely for the fact that he was a foreigner (probably indian). I didn't say anything because he replied perfectly and no one else was ganging up on him. In these situations, I tend to get involved, it happened a few times before, without even thinking about the risks. This is not good. I should stay away from these situations, because otherwise one of these days I will get punched or stabbed.

My colleague, the Orang-Utan, one morning told me how he asked a guy (probably romanian), or rather how he made a guy get up to let an old lady sit on the bus. I replied to him: the law doesn't force anyone to let others sit, and you wouldn't have made him get up had he been Italian instead of being a foreigner from a poor country.

These animals exist today just as they existed in Germany - the only difference is that leaders aren't encouraging them to act, as they were in Nazi Germany. And the story of black Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi, who lived as a young man in Nazi Germany reminded me (cf. start of movie) that blacks were living in even worse conditions in the US at the same time.

Check it out, all you need to realize that we're surrounded by the same people as in Nazi Germany, is see what happened to Muslims in the US after 911, even without a guy like Hitler telling his citizens that Muslims were to be exterminated:
http://www.splcenter.org/get-inform...ng/fbi-dramatic-spike-in-hate-crimes-targetin
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/20121230135815198642.html
http://www.arabamericannews.com/news/news/id_6246
http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/11/opinion-american-muslims-live-in-fear-11-years-after-911/

Ah ah, imagine what would have happened to US muslims, after US-made 911, had the Americans had Hitler rather than Bush as president. Yep, precisely what happened to the Jews on Kristallnacht.

But an even clearer example is the fact that while the Americans were fighting the Nazis also based on the fact that they persecuted the jews, in their own country they were persecuting blacks, after having kept them enslaved for hundreds of years.

So, let's open our eyes and realize that if today we are not being persecuted, it is not because of our good neighbors, but because we don't have leaders inciting their population against us, whatever minority we happen to be: jew, black, homosexual, handicapped, or merely intelligent and free-thinkers.

Right, Rwanda... did you ever wonder why the Americans went to liberate Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan but never bothered to help out the people in Rwanda?

minute 7: "...what that meant was anybody that was white-skinned got to get on the airplane and fly to safety, and anybody who was black-skinned got to stay in Rwanda and get killed".

minute 11 (same video, above), hero:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Wilkens

Yep... "american" hero:

Not to be confused with the American soldiers who went to Iraq:

 

[Yamato]

I am thinking that probably German has more words than Italian:
https://translate.google.com/#de/it/beinahe, kaum, knapp, fast, nahezu, quasi



But this guy here says we have twice as many words:
http://www.lingholic.com/how-many-words-do-i-need-to-know-the-955-rule-in-language-learning-part-2/

 

[Yamato]

All this celebrating of the 911 anniversary, the pictures in the magazines, all this stupidity, the confirmation that I am surrounding by either dishonest or stupid people, and leaders, is really disgusting me.

13 years later, people are still unable to hear/speak the truth. 50 years after JFK, we're at the same point.

Here's how it works, i guess. If you're the loser, like Hitler, your mistakes and lies surface immediately, and immediately enter history books, newspapers, films, documentaries. All your mistakes are publicized, and you're called the devil.

If you're the winner, your lies can last up to 50 years. Everywhere. In history books, in newspapers, in movies, and in documentaries, and even among the people.

So the only way you can know the truth about someone is by waiting until he is not powerful anymore, and also you have to wait until his children aren't powerful, because of course George W. Bush is going to cover up what his father did (he most likely assassinated JFK).

So, history and the truth, and time being a good source of honesty... all this only applies to whoever lost (whether right or wrong). Whoever wins, like the US, and its western allies, will successfully keep a good image by effectively hiding all the unpleasant truths about him.

Which is by the way what they say in the first 2 minutes of this video:

 

[Yamato]

 

[Yamato]

 

[Yamato]

 

[Yamato]

I really doubt this May 1940 film is "Captured German War Film", as it says in the title. I think that the US was neutral so they bought it or traded it with something else. This is too perfect, and the narrator seems a little too happy to narrate the event, so this is bull****. It's not "captured" but "received from the germans". Besides, many parts of it are staged, so it was purposefully filmed and edited to be released. Yeah, ah ah, and at the end he comes out with his "we did this to study the nazis". WRONG choice of music then. You did this to entertain american audiences at the expense of the dutch.

This, instead, sounds more credible, but it's from 1943:

 

[Yamato]

Here's the key to success as far as my own trading and it's not going to be easy.

I can resume trading only after I will have spent one entire week of serenity, without experiencing anger nor frustration about anything. Indeed, this is the only way to know that I have defeated my problems of:

1) always having to be right/perfect
2) taking offense and becoming vengeful when something/someone doesn't act according to my plans/expectations.
3) getting bored (and frustrated) and trading my way out of it (or scratching my head or similar)

The list could go on, but basically the only way I know I am ready to trade is if I don't experience the state of mind that I experienced when I made the choices that blew out my account.

Of course, this doesn't mean that I should allow frustrating things to happen. I should still optimize my life, and avoid useless problems. But when unavoidable problems happen, I must react with rationality, and therefore not add my own frustration (and complaining) to the problem itself. So I should still be able to identify problems, and assess what is optimal. Yet, at the same time, not build up anger towards what I consider a problem. So this is to say that I should not become a messy slob in order to be relaxed and serene, but I should still be an "adaptive" perfectionist, one who reaps the advantages of being a perfectionist without suffering from the disadvantages. I think it is possible.

 

[Yamato]

https://www.khanacademy.org/about/b...mail (Students - Remaining)&utm_content=Final

My 5-year-*old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it after a fairly painful minute. He then said, “Dad, aren’t you glad how I struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing.” I smiled: my son was now verbalizing the tell*-tale signs of a “growth* mindset.” But this wasn’t by accident. Recently, I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach.

Researchers have known for some time that the brain is like a muscle; that the more you use it, the more it grows. They’ve found that neural connections form and deepen most when we make mistakes doing difficult tasks rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones.

image

What this means is that our intelligence is not fixed, and the best way that we can grow our intelligence is to embrace tasks where we might struggle and fail.

However, not everyone realizes this. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University has been studying people’s mindsets towards learning for decades. She has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or growth. Fixed mindsets mistakenly believe that people are either smart or not, that intelligence is fixed by genes. People with growth mindsets correctly believe that capability and intelligence can be grown through effort, struggle and failure. Dweck found that those with a fixed mindset tended to focus their effort on tasks where they had a high likelihood of success and avoided tasks where they may have had to struggle, which limited their learning. People with a growth mindset, however, embraced challenges, and understood that tenacity and effort could change their learning outcomes. As you can imagine, this correlated with the latter group more actively pushing themselves and growing intellectually...

[...]

 

[Yamato]

[...]
...The good news is that mindsets can be taught; they’re malleable. What’s really fascinating is that Dweck and others have developed techniques that they call “growth mindset interventions,” which have shown that even small changes in communication or seemingly innocuous comments can have fairly long*-lasting implications for a person’s mindset. For instance, praising someone’s process (“I really like how you struggled with that problem”) versus praising an innate trait or talent (“You’re so clever!”) is one way to reinforce a growth *mindset with someone. Process* praise acknowledges the effort; talent* praise reinforces the notion that one only succeeds (or doesn’t) based on a fixed trait. And we’ve seen this on Khan Academy as well: students are spending more time learning on Khan Academy after being exposed to messages that praise their tenacity and grit and that underscore that the brain is like a muscle.

The Internet is a dream for someone with a growth mindset. Between Khan Academy, MOOCs, and others, there is unprecedented access to endless content to help you grow your mind. However, society isn’t going to fully take advantage of this without growth mindsets being more prevalent. So what if we actively tried to change that? What if we began using whatever means are at our disposal to start performing growth mindset interventions on everyone we cared about? This is much bigger than Khan Academy or algebra — it applies to how you communicate with your children, how you manage your team at work, how you learn a new language or instrument. If society as a whole begins to embrace the struggle of learning, there is no end to what that could mean for global human potential.

And now here’s a surprise for you. By reading this article itself, you’ve just undergone the first half of a growth*-mindset intervention. The research shows that just being exposed to the research itself (**for example, knowing that the brain grows most by getting questions wrong, not right**) can begin to change a person’s mindset. The second half of the intervention is for you to communicate the research with others. We’ve made a video (above) that celebrates the struggle of learning that will help you do this. After all, when my son, or for that matter, anyone else asks me about learning, I only want them to know one thing. As long as they embrace struggle and mistakes, they can learn anything.

FROM:
https://www.khanacademy.org/about/b...mail (Students - Remaining)&utm_content=Final

This article from Salman Khan, the creator of Khan Academy, which I used to learn and practice math a few years ago... I was sent this article by email, and coincidentally it has something in common with what I wrote about not being frustrated by problems.

He ends the article with "As long as they embrace struggle and mistakes, they can learn anything". That is one problem with "maladaptive perfectionists". While they have a desire to be perfect and therefore learn as much as possible, the frustration from experiencing problems might keep them from learning. For example, this is why I wanted to trade right away without practicing on the chart game first. I felt that it was useless frustration. What I did not realize was that I precisely had to practice with frustration.

"As long as they embrace struggle and mistakes, they can learn anything"

I know that I should embrace struggle, and I know the power of effort. What I did not know, until recently, and did not put into practice is the fact that I should not experience anger when things do not go my way.

By being a maladaptive perfectionist, I avoided things where I would not prove to be perfect or at least good, and therefore, by avoiding them, I could not learn them and could not become good at them. This applies to using the chart game and a lot of other things, such as playing tennis... I could go on for a while, but you got my point, or rather I got my point, since I wrote it to think about it.

 

[Yamato]

exemplary anger test during the chart game and other sources of stress

As you know I've been testing my anger threshold.

The test in the last few minutes was to play the chart game, trade by trade, with whatever strategy and rules (exit rules, because I entered when I pleased) I had set for that specific trade, and without feeling any anger no matter what happened. Usually I'd feel a whole range of emotions:
1) damn, entered too early
2) damn, entered too late
3) damn, I should have exited sooner
4) damn, I should have exited later

Well, it worked. And I made money. Now, having made money in the last few chart games, now I am getting used to winning, so it will soon be an extra source of anger if I'll lose one of them, and an extra opportunity to test how I will react.

I have to learn this: I can't always win, but I can always react optimally to defeats. By taking them as the simple statistics that they are.

In the meanwhile, my dad was here, which added extra stress, and the tv was on, with advertisements, which added another extra stress. Well, despite all this, I didn't get angry, nor scratched my head with frustration.

As I said the objective was to 1) observe my anger/stress, 2) even better, try to not feel my anger/stress, by expecting it and reacting to it with what I've recently learned (that it is useless).

http://chartgame.com/play.cgi?37fc4s-1







Now I am testing with watching the (propaganda) news, which I totally despise. Now the ads again, trying to get me to buy useless things. I must retain the ability to distinguish good from bad, and garbage from gold, while not getting angry when I am being served garbage, whether from people talking or any other situation.

 

[Yamato]

Hans-Georg Hess

I was watching this u-boat documentary, and came across Hans-Georg Hess, who speaks at minute 12:28:

This guy is amazing. He was born in 1923, and when the war started in 1939, he was only 16. Not only was he commander, at age 21, of a u-boat, U-995, with a crew of 50 people, but he sunk ships, and never got sunk:
http://www.uboat.net/men/hess.htm

Then, after the war, he became a lawyer.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Georg_Hess

Hess joined the Kriegsmarine as a volunteer in April 1940, when he was 16. He was initially assigned to the surface fleet, where he spent two years on minesweepers before transferring to the U-boat force in April 1942. He was first assigned to U-466 under the command of Captain Gerhard Thäter and was with her for her last five patrols, which were mostly spent in the North Atlantic. She broke into the Mediterranean during her last patrol, but was caught in Toulon during the Allied invasion of the south of France and was scuttled on 19 August 1944. Hess returned to Germany, having been promoted to Oberleutnant zur See on 1 March 1944.

He was appointed to command U-995 and took command on 10 October 1944. He eventually carried out a total of five patrols with her in the Arctic Sea, sinking a number of Soviet ships and causing one American one to be written off. He was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on 11 February 1945. With the end of the war, U-995 surrendered on 8 May 1945 in Trondheim. Hess was imprisoned by the Norwegians, eventually spending a year in captivity.

After his release he returned to Germany, eventually becoming a lawyer in Hannover.

Despite all this, he only has a wikipedia entry in English and in Russian, but not in German. I don't think you can find someone who, in world war II, did more at such a young age. There are very young flying aces, such as Erich Hartmann, top ace of all time, born in 1922, but one thing is to command a crew of 50 people, and another is to be alone on a plane:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_flying_aces

 

[Yamato]

speed of Allies advances in Europe 1943-1945

I am setting out to calculate the speed of Allies advances in Europe between 1943 and 1945, using these sources for maps:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_World_War_II_(1943)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_World_War_II_(1944)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_World_War_II_(1945)

1943-07-15


1944-06-15


1945-05-01


Here's the result of my calculations:


I can't draw many conclusions, except obviously that the slowest advances were in Italy, with 45 km per month (the Allies reached Berlin before they controlled the entire Italian peninsula), but I don't know why. Then on the Eastern front, with 68 km per month. And the fastest advances were in Western Europe, with 100 km per month, maybe because they started a year later and by then Germany was much weaker. Maybe the slowness of Italy vs. the speed of Western Europe is due to the difference in mountains, of which we have a lot more. This would also explain the slowness in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Norway.

By the way, I just realized I made some mistakes in what I wrote on my final map, because it was only the Red Army which conquered Berlin 1 May 1945, whereas the others arrived later. So I would say that the Soviets went as fast as 70 km per month, because they reached Berlin in the middle of April, and the other Allies went a little slower. On the other hand we should compensate the other Allies for the fact that in France they started from Cherbourg rather than Brest, so that they had to go back.

So basically this is 45 vs 70 vs 100. I would roughly say a ration of 2 to 3 to 4, to remember it better.

Another thing to remark is that while I did cheat by drawing a straight line in Italy, whereas Italy isn't a straight line, it is also true that in Italy, being much thinner, there was much less to conquer, compared to the Eastern and Western fronts. So it was 2 to 3 to 4, and I still can't explain why it was so slow in Italy, but I should study this much more in depth, because the first thing to look at is how many armies vs how many armies were fighting in all these places.