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There is an animal who is famous in Poland and in Scotland.Wojtek was a fine chap so I’ll give him a bit of fame on Quora too.It started when he was picked up as a tiny newborn in Iran in 1942 by some Polish soldiers who were forming a Polish division fighting alongside the British army. They had just been released from the Siberian gulags and made an arduous journey to Iran. Many of them had lost their families and were facing an uncertain future, so spirits were low. As they were making their way towards Palestine they found a half starved bear cub. Seeing how their faces lit up the officer in charge allowed them to keep the baby, although it was against army protocol.The officer probably thought that the bear would be a great morale booster and would take their minds off the tragedy they were going through. Judging by their big adoring smiles, he was right :During the long drive the soldiers played with him, mollycoddled him, fed him with some rationed condensed milk using an empty vodka bottle. As he grew a bit older they shared a beer and cigarettes with him. He must have known that “smoking is bad for you” so he used to eat the ciggies instead. He opened beer cans with his claws and he was dexterous enough to use the can by himself.He became a bit of a celebrity and an attraction for soldiers from other units. Especially the female units couldn’t resist visiting the Polish soldiers, just to see the bear, of course :)But Wojtek was not “just a pretty face”! He was a great partner for practising skills of hand to hand combat. He never hurt anyone. He used to draw back his sharp claws when he was boxing and tumbling with the guys. A considerate gentle giant.He was useful as a female substitute in dancing practice too.One of his many achievements was discovering a spy:He used to love soaking himself in water….. (it was hot in the desert for a mountain bear)In Palestine there was a restriction on water usage so he used to try sneaking into the showers at night, when no one was looking. One night he came across an Arab saboteur hiding there. The noise raised by the terrified Arab woke the soldiers. His capture and questioning resulted in some useful information falling into their hands.Wojtek was a great thief deterrent. He always insisted on sitting next to the driver, not in the back. He used to stay sitting in the cab of the truck when the driver was busy elsewhere. Apparently NOTHING ever got stolen from his trucks, while other trucks were robbed regularly.After months on the road the time came to transfer to Italy. Animals were not allowed on the ship so the Polish general secured official army papers for Wojtek. Wojtek became an army private (some reports say – a corporal) and started getting soldiers’ rations. In fact he was getting double rations because of his size - he weighed 485 kg by then. AFAIK he is the only bear in the world ever registered as an army soldier.Off to Italy! :At Monte Casino his unit had to unload many consignments of ammunition. Wojtek was not bothered by the smoke and the constant sound of shelling going off around him. After watching the soldiers lift and carry the boxes Wojtek decided to join in. He was great help until he got bored with it. No one tried to force him. It was all his own good will. One of the soldiers commemorated his help with the ammunition by turning it into their unit logo:After the war Polish soldiers were stationed in Scotland while they were waiting for the political situation to become clear. Most of them didn’t speak English. Wojtek was their ambassador among the locals. He used to go to dances with them and go on school visits, charming and disarming the locals and letting children ride on his back. He made a lasting impression on all who came in contact with him. To this day in Scotland, where the soldiers were stationed, there are plaques with his name appearing on the trees which he used to climb.In 1947 the soldiers got demobilised. They had to leave the barracks. They scattered around the UK, the US and Canada. Some went back to Poland. Wojtek couldn’t be accommodated in private dwellings. After some painful soul searching he was sent to the Edinburgh zoo.Someone said that, just like the Polish soldiers, “he won the war and lost his freedom”.He died at the age of 22, which is not bad for a Syrian bear. He had a swimming pool at the zoo and visits from his former army mates. They used to jump across the barriers and have boxing fights with him to the delight of the visiting public. The Zoo keepers looked the other way :)Edinburgh Zoo was the most progressive Zoo of the time. It was run by an animal welfare enthusiast who had left his well paying job as a lawyer in order to become the director of the zoo.Wojtek was forgotten both in Poland and in Scotland for many years. However, one of the little Scottish girls who met him in real life all those years ago has made it her mission to keep his memory alive and, when she grew up, pestered in both countries for recognition for him. Thanks to her a monument to Wojtek was put up in Edinburgh a few years ago, so he is famous there again.The people who met him would argue that he was more of a human in a bear’s body than an animal.

I’m not hideously ugly, just kinda unattractive, short, fat guy. I’m Peter Jackson's (the director) lookalike, only that my hair is blonde/gray and from some time I keep shaving regularly. I’m 168 cm high which is short for a man in my culture (I’ve many times heard from women that “real man starts at 180cm of height”) and now my weight is about 110 kilograms. I’ve fought weight my whole life and as an adult, my least weight was 96 kilos. I also have a deformation in my upper jaw that makes me look like I’m missing a tooth - actually it is two teeth in a place for one - and I’ve never had enough money and self-determination to fix it.What it is like? From what I am able to infer from what others talk, in comparison I’m invisible. As a teenager I was’t invited to come to the cool parties, or later only to bring alcohol. Everybody else would pair up and make out in the dark, and I was sitting alone at the center of the party drinking vodka, because that was the only thing left for me to do.It is lonely and feels constrained. As a teenager you have no friends or you have friends who come only to play with your computer (home computers were uncommon then), and the only other friends you have are outcasts like you, that you don’t really like or feel connected to, but those are the ones that talk to you so you hang out with them. From playing with computers which was only fun thing to do in your life you learn stuff that later gives you a nice job but it always will be back office job, consigned to a small room or cubicle, while beautiful people who rely on your work get promoted and travel the world on company dime doing business or vacation in exotic places. You work at nights to create the next big product for the company and strike it big at last, get promoted to a manager and start working on your real career and not this low-level technical stuff and the promises always fail and the products get cancelled, and you are again sent to the back office, company after company.Second thing is funny but sad - you don’t have any choice in clothes. Nice clothes are made for good looking people with regular figures. I’m looking for nice clothes constantly (I like to dress well and I'd like to dress poshy), and what’s best fits me only to some point. Even if you can after a few years of looking find a Pierre Cardin suit jacket that roughly fits me, there are no clothes of really posh brands like Ralph Lauren or Vesace, their “XXL” or “XL” are for “L” people in real world at best. What’s funny - they usually have lines of underwear that fit. So they want me and other unattractive people to buy their stuff, but not to be seen wearing it. When I walk through a departament store and try on clothes - this always undermines my sense of confidence or self-worth, because every shirt that’s too small or too big, every jacket that is too long crushes your soul a little.And when the owner of Abercrombie and Fitch says that no ugly people should wear his brand’s clothes I feel discriminated against.I’m smart, I now work for a top organization in my field, but I’ve never did any significant work myself because that’s not what I really want to do, I only do this because I am accepted as expert in the field, and have a good enough memory to be good enough at the stuff. If I woke up tomorrow as a 20-years old stud I’d aim at becoming a athlete, or actor, or any other thing that is based on body and looks and not mind. I’m considered wise and mature and just, but I long to being shallow, vain and judging and immature while not pushing people away because they would be attracted to my looks anyway.I’m constantly sad and I’ve been in some form of therapy or treatment for more than ten years. It makes life bearable but cannot fix me.What’s the worst: you are invisible to women.From what you see, what what your friends say and do, there is another paralell layer of reality where the sexual relationships take place: hookups, flirts, dates, pick-ups, finding mates, one night stands, everything, and you are cut out from this all. You live in a weird, asexual world where only some parts of human nature express themselves, like you were a different species, friendly but completely alien. Love is what I see while looking at other people lives. Lust is what I see in porn. There was one moment in my life, when a woman looked at me with lust in her eyes.There were two occassions in my life where I found myself in center of sexually charged attention: when I went to Amsterdam Red Light District and all the prostitutes in the vicinity were trying to attract me; and the second one was when I went online as a woman.Otherwise, when trying to make contact with women you feel stonewalled. When you look at a woman you are attracted to in a subway or a bus, they usually turn away or walk away, and visibly feel threatened. I’ve never ever had a girl smile to me or hold my gaze. You start secretly snapping photos of beaufiful women in public places and then you realize you turned into a creep, a pervert.You try internet dating but the women stop responding after you send them your photo.Finally you meet a girl, a woman online, from away but not far away, and it is deep and intense at first, but there are some circumstances that she won’t divulge to you, and she asks you to wait for her, and you wait for two years and you two meet at last, and it turns out that she’s half crazy and she was looking for a ugly guy so he won’t leave her (she actually tried to make me fatter) and all she wants is from you to take care of her and sit in a room with her and read sci-fi books together, but you don’t want that because you now have a girlfriend and want to do all the things wanted you do with a girlfriend like going to dates and parties and vacations together, as a couple, and she won’t do that, so it falls apart.Then you meet another woman, and you think this is it, she is funny, nice, and seems to like similar things, but it turns out that she is looking for a man to bear four children for, and you want to be just a DINK couple for a few years, so you could live the life you always wanted, so it falls apart too.So you give up a lot of yourself just to get a stable relationship.You have female friends, but the friendships end when you fall in love with them and say so, and they say “I like you, but only as a friend”. You listen to your beautiful and intelligent friend that you are half in love with, whining about being unable to meet a man, or saying that if she would date a not her ideal man she would turn off lights in the bedroom while making love. You try to make a pass at her, but she ignores all your attempts to ask her out - from asking out for dinner to half-joking invitation for a romantic weekend in Vienna. It is like what you say is inaudible when you stray off the friendship subjects and express anything besides admiring and “liking” her hot selfies in social media.Finally you take courage to ask out the nice pretty girl from work that seems to like you, and she says yes, and you are happy, and arrange things and then she calls the date off because her girlfriends are here for the weekend, then you SMS her “It’s OK, how about Tuesday, I reserved a nice table in a nice place” and she stops answering your calls or SMS-es and ignores you from the point afterwards.You ask another woman and she asks if this is going to be a date, and when you say "yes, of course", she declines, so next time a woman asks you the same question after you ask her out, you lie "of course not" just to get her to say yes.And then you turn forty and you realize that for a few years just to feel loved and desired you manage a second online persona - persona of a hot promiscious woman - that you turn to when you feel bad, and you feel creepier and bad because of that, and you start to visit prostitutes just to be able to touch a woman you like for a few moments and to be able to choose this woman too, and to feel that she wants you to be sexually aroused by her looks and actions, even if it is her job. That is something that not a woman that you had “real” relationships with ever cared for, and what is what you longed for since you were a teen.That’s basically it.

It wasn’t so clear cut. The major naval powers - American, Britain and Japan did not prioritise battleships over carriers. They built more aircraft carriers than battleships in the interwar period.An argument could be made over why money was still being spent on battleships instead of using it to build more carriers.And that answers lies in: Bureaucracy and leaders, and money.Prior to WW2, and for the last 100+ years, the biggest gun warship aka battleship ruled the waves. It was the lynchpin that controlled the balance of power.Submarines of course embarrassed the BB captains in WW1. Before that torpedo boats.But conventional countermeasures were found to nix their threat.The British toyed with the idea of battlecruisers, believing that “speed was armor”; the idea fell flat in the Battle of Jutland.It takes 3 years to build a battleship. A shorter time is spent on constructing submarines and destroyers. So the thinking went - the side that had the most/best battleships could destroy the enemy’s fleet battleships, then cruisers, then destroyers, then submarines. And the battleship was the ace in the pack. A similar time is required to build a fleet carrier. The problem with the aircraft carrier was it was highly unconventional depending on flimsy aircraft as its main weapon and looked vulnerable compared to the battleship which looked every inch the winner.Of course, no one said they wanted a fleet full of battleships - you had to have “a balanced fleet” - a “right” mix or ratio of warships. They all had a part to play. The London Naval Conference in 1930 ended in disaster because the American and British admirals quarrelled over the size and number of cruisers each side was permitted to have while the bemused Japanese looked on.The BB was the most heavily armed and protected naval vessel and considered the most valuable — literally. The aircraft carrier with its big flight deck was inherently vulnerable. In the 1920s - 1930s, the naval designers had not come up with a “proven” way to protect it. And even up to 1942, aircraft carriers still carried sizable naval guns to protect themselves in case of surface duels.(photo of an IJN fleet carrier circa late 1920s or early 1930s with a (unsuccessful) triple flight deck configuration - you can see the 8 inch gun turrets mounted near the bow, to be used in case of surface action.)A lot of time, money and effort had to be spent on this weapon system. You can’t just throw it away based on a new invention.An aircraft carrier on the other hand was unproven in combat. If the aviators’ claims were true, then the carrier with its long unarmored flight deck would be more vulnerable to air attack than the battleship. And at first contact in battle be the first to be targeted and destroyed. If a navy placed all its bets on aircraft carriers, the fear was that they would be easily destroyed in the first battle leaving nothing in reserve.Most of the battleship admirals even in 1920 realised that naval aviation couldn’t be ignored. That is why the major naval powers devoted resources into naval aviation and the aircraft carrier.But in the 1920s - 1930s, things like carrier aircraft bomb capacity and accuracy, radar, and the inherent vulnerability of aircraft carriers was a big question mark. Aircraft also had problems operating in bad weather or at night. These were issues that remained unresolved until WW2.It was only in the 1940s that carrier aircraft demonstrated they had the ability to sink operational warships manoeuvring in open sea. In the 1920s and 1930s, people assumed that warships could shoot down aircraft, or aircraft carriers would be the first things to be wrecked at the start of every battle.You still have the problem of retiring senior officers who had trained all their lives to operate in one particular weapon system and training up a new generation of military leaders and crew to operate a new weapon system, not to mention the naval designers, builders who had dedicated their professional lives to build them. This is the problem of bureaucracy. How do you transit and shift to a new and unproven weapon system.How do you get cavalry officers to retire their beautiful horses and train in lumbering mechanical beasts that constantly broke down?How do you get naval planners to consign the battleship which had taken generations to develop in favor of a ship carrying expensive aircraft that kept on crashing? Too many of the pilots of that period - 1920s - 1930s - perished in accidents. The first USN Bureau Chief of Aviation perished in an air accident. Air crashes were very common in those days.In the USN, you had admirals like William Sims, head of the Naval War College, who argued persuasively for the power of aircraft carriers. He said why invest in battleships when you could build 100 torpedo planes which would sink any battleship fleet?(Photo of Admiral Sims - not Sean Connery)The water was muddied somewhat by air power advocates like Army Air General “Billy Mitchell who argued if aircraft could sink ships - then it was pointless spending millions of dollars building a vulnerable ship that could only operate 30 - 60 planes when you could devote the money into land based airfields with land based heavy bombers who would, as they predicted, would sink every single ship using level bombing techniques. If you believe the USAAF propaganda at that time, it was US Army bombers that destroyed the Japanese Navy in the Battle of Midway. lolThe Japanese thought about this for awhile and said why not have both? So they built aircraft carriers and also allowed the navy to operate a fleet of effective land based torpedo bombers.Inter-service disputes in Britain and America hindered such developments until WW2. For example the RAF and RN quarrelled over the use of long range bombers. RAF Bomber Command insisted that all land based bombers belonged to them and wanted to use most of them to bomb German factories and cities which they promised would win the war by “next week”.The Navies of the world were also hampered by naval arms limitation Treaties. In 1921, the major naval powers - US, UK, and Japan signed off on the Washington treaty limiting the number/tonnage of warships they could have. It also restricted capital ship construction. These restrictions lasted for most of the interwar period, ending in December 1936. The Yorktown class carriers were Treaty carriers made to fit within a tonnage limit. CV-7 USS Wasp was deliberately built with less armor protection so that it could fit into the treaty limits.The British did built the Rodney class battleships in the 1920s instead of scrapping their aircraft carriers and replacing them with better ones. But they also had a serious problem that the Americans and Japanese did not have. In April 1, 1918, RN Naval Aviation officers and aircraft were transferred over to the newly formed military service, the RAF; thus igniting a decade+ long dispute between the RAF and the Royal Navy. They bickered over the ownership of naval aviation - was the aircraft carrier a floating airfield or a ship with an airfield? Were carrier pilots RN personnel or RAF personnel? Who was in control? What rights did a RN captain have to order a RAF pilot around?This dispute ruined the British lead in naval aviation which it held undisputed supreme in 1918. The RN was hesitant in investing in a weapon system it had limited control over. The RN was even hindered from operating aircraft from land bases.The Japanese built the two Shokaku class carriers and Yamato class battleships after the Treaty expiration.The Americans also built the new South Dakota class BBs and the North Carolina BBs prior to its entry into WW2 instead of more carriers.Meanwhile, the admirals and pilots quarrelled over whether naval funds were better spent on battleship programs or on aircraft.There was also the big problem of funding, money.There was a terrible economic Depression in the 1930s. Governments were having problems feeding its people, restarting their economies, much less building expensive carrier aircraft that would become obsolete in a couple of years. And where do you spend the money on? Each side was vigorously defending their point of view. The battleship side had more admirals than the carrier side prior to WW2 and they pushed for their slice of the budget.Everyone in leadership positions prior to 1941 was still unsure whether aircraft carriers would fulfil what their proponents predicted. So when the Naval Arms Limitation Treaty ended in 1936, the navies of the world started restarted their battleship building projects.The Japanese spent a fortune on the Yamato and Musashi when the resources would be better spent on producing more Shokaku class carriers.The Americans still spent a fortune on building battleships and battlecruisers in WW2 and completed 4 Iowa-class battleships. Ironically, they scrapped CV-6 Enterprise, the most highly decorated warship, and preserved the battleships instead. The Missouri actually played a part in Operation Desert Storm in 1991.In hindsight, the superiority of the carrier over the battleship seems patently obvious.But when you have a cohort of military leaders trained in mass infantry charges, big gun warships, heavy armored cavalry, archery, pike phalanx, for them to think that the weapon they had devoted their lives to is obsolete and the future is now in AI drones, muskets, rifles, tanks, machine guns, or an aircraft carrier - the future seems clouded.Years from now, people may be wondering why so much money was “wasted” on expensive fighter jets, aircraft carriers, or main battle tanks when the money could have been spent on AI or remote controlled drones.Or on another train of thought, look at how difficult it is for an economy to transit from using environmentally damaging fuel to “clean-green” energy in calm, rational logical efficient steps instead of a a cloud of angst and hyperbole.Source:Y. Chiam, Admirals and Airplanes: USN General board and the Development of Naval Aviation, unpublished MA thesis.