Talk:USS Rhind

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Invasion of Sicily

The article describes how Rhind commenced offensive sweeps on 3rd August 1943, "sinking an E-boat on the first night". This is wonderful, and makes for fun history, but it's hugely misleading, thanks to the Wikipedia article naming convention. The link takes one to the "E-boat" article, which is of course all about the Schnellboote - the German small diesel-powered motor torpedo boats.

Except, no S-boats were actually lost to Allied gunfire in August of 1943.

This means that, if Rhind did indeed engage and sink an 'enemy boat' that night of the 3rd/4th August 1943, then the 'enemy' boat in question was something other than the vessel which the linked article describes & discusses.

This problem only arises, as I say, because of the WP policy which insists that "common usage" from the 1940s, reused in literary references for decades, is still the most appropriate "common usage" to the present day. (For those in the 2020s seriously interested in the naval history of WW2, the "common usage" term is the more correct & specific schnellboot or the anglicised abbreviation "S-boat" - sadly for common usage, legions of internet-based experts regularly discussing such matters do not have books published, particularly without the snappier-sounding and copy-selling historical brevity code "E-boat" in the title.)

So, what was the boat which USS Rhind engaged and sank? It surely wasn't a German motor torpedo boat, whatever the link suggests. Could it have been an air-sea rescue boat? Could it have been a small submarine-chaser of some type? An auxiliary minelayer? We simply don't have the answers at present. What we probably *should* do is remove that link to an inappropriate article, at least until someone gets round to sorting out the misleading nature of an article which smacks heavily of outmoded technical ignorance in a day when we are blessed with the luxury of better and more complete resources than ever before, with the general awareness to go with it.

TL:DR - it was an 'E-boat', but the facts show that an "E-boat" was a wide variety of possible enemy light naval units and not specifically an MTB. 2A00:23C7:3108:4D01:3D49:84FE:83A9:D67B (talk) 01:12, 16 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]