"Very interesting. Perhaps a little dihedral made it a bit more stable?"
Brewster already has dihedral and my point was that as the wings were bent the dihedral was actually increasing towards the tip of the wing. This is pretty much the same effect the sailplanes experience due to flexible wings. The "winglet" in the wingtip is an application of vortex control at wing tip but I'm not sure if the variable dihedral gains benefit from that. Maybe the stabilizing effect comes from front of the wing, not back. By this I mean that the pressure distribution at leading edge may be different, maybe it resembles even that of an elliptic wing.
http://www.sailplanedirectory.com/data/planes/images/99_4_B.jpg***
"A few years later the more experienced Russians mauled the Finns!"
Well that claim does have some factual basis. In short: Mannerheim was not convinced that Germany could defeat USSR so he chose a careful political path and did not threaten Leningrad despite continuous German requests, this caused the lines to freeze at the old border which Finland hoped to maintain after peace negotiations. This policy, along with a big part of the troops being sent home, caused a decline in morale and readiness. The massed Russian onslaught later on generally did come as a surprise and it managed to penetrate several sloppily fortified defense lines and massive artillery, air support and tank concentrations helped a lot, along with a general increase in experience and cohesion of their military tactics and organization that Stalin had so severely wounded earlier. One reason for Russian attack for losing momentum was their rapid advance which stretched their support lines and also advancing to areas which were easier to defend for Finns. Also the Finnish forces became more concentrated near the new border along with reinforcements from occupied far reaches of Karelia being pulled back. If there was not the race for Berlin at hand the Russians would have probably tried to invaded Finland. However, there was already political pressure from western powers for USSR not to invade Finland as it had already done to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania so they chose to negotiate a peace (if you can call dictating the rigid terms "negotiating"). After all USSR could invade Finland later after the Germany was dealt with, but his was hampered by political climate post 1945 and Finland proved to be more useful political than military buffer between east and west, but the threat was still there for a couple of decades after the war.
There's irony that the heroic actions of German Gefectsverband Kuhlmey to stop the Russian onslaught in 1944 gave Finland a chance to negotiate for peace, something Germany absolutely did not want!
Well this is again an interesting BW thread. Anxiously waiting for the next one.
-C+
