World War Two
Published on 15 Dec 2018In the second week of the Winter War, during multiple counteroffensives, including the famous Sausage War, the Finnish Defence Forces dash any hopes of a quick victory that the Red Army and Stalin might have had.
WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_t…
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
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Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvWritten and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns
Map animations by: Mikk Tali aka Eastory
Community Manager: Joram AppelColoring by Spartacus Olsson
Thumbnail depicting Finnish soldiers using a slingshot to lob grenades at the Red Army. Colorized by Cassowary https://www.flickr.com/photos/cassowa…
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Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.comA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
December 16, 2018
Perkele! Finland Strikes Back – WW2 – 016 15 December 1939
Mackenzie King at war
Ted Campbell remembers Canada’s Second World War Prime Minister:
Prime Minister Winston Churchill greets Canadian PM William Lyon Mackenzie King, 1941.
Photo from Library and Archives Canada (reference number C-047565) via Wikimedia Commons.
I was born in 1942, William Lyon Mackenzie King was the prime minister; my mother often said that, in the 1940s, it seemed that he would never cease to be prime minister, and she thoroughly detested him; it wasn’t all of his policies she hated, it was, mainly, how he approached the war, and a few other things ~ she was, later, fond of the Canadian poet F.R. Scott’s rather bitter epitaph:
He seemed to be in the centre because we had no centre,
No vision to pierce the smoke-screen of his politics.Truly he will be remembered wherever men honour ingenuity,
Ambiguity, inactivity, and political longevity.Let us raise up a temple to the cult of mediocrity,
Do nothing by halves which can be done by quarters.Now, Canada fought a good war, we made four absolutely vital contributions:
- We were the true “breadbasket of the empire,” our farmers fed our large Army and much of Britain’s, too;
- We were a major part of the “arsenal of democracy,” our factories and shipyards turned out all of the things, from tanks and trucks and bombers and corvettes to Bren guns and grenades that were needed to help defeat the Axis powers;
- We managed the all important British Commonwealth Air Training Plan that was a key element in the allies’ eventual success; and
- We played a huge and a significant leadership role in the Battle of the Atlantic ~ the only battle Churchill said that he really feared losing.
But under King we did each with apparent reluctance, seemingly trying to never serve any vital interest if there was even a remote chance that any political constituency might be offended ~ something that reminds me of Justin Trudeau in 2018. Our large and entirely commendable war efforts were, in the main, directed, sometimes despite King, by the indefatigable C.D. Howe, and the national unity concerns were assuaged by recruiting the universally respected Louis St Laurent.
The King era was characterized by extraordinarily tepid leadership at the top but brilliant work by strong ministers in a small cabinet. It also began Phase 1 of a national political civil war. I think that in the First World War many Canadians had either understood or had been, largely, indifferent to Quebec’s objections to conscription. But in the 1940s we had better mass communications and many Canadians were less understanding of Quebec’s reluctance to participate in that war, especially as Canadian casualties mounted after Hong Kong and then in Italy and then in France, Belgium and Holland. Louis St Laurent did not try to explain French Quebec’s misgivings to English Canada, his job was to maintain, by force of his own stellar reputation and personality, just enough support in Quebec and, as he easily did, to “outclass” the vocal, crypto-fascist, French Canadian opponents to the war. But there was another division fomenting inside the Liberal Party of Canada: both Howe and St Laurent had a new vision for Canada in the post war world; both saw Canada as an important actor on the world stage; both were frustrated by King’s timid leadership; it is very probable that had St Laurent, the foreign minister, rather than King, [been] the prime minister, led Canada’s delegation to the UN’s founding conference in San Francisco in June of 1945 that Canada, not France, would have been the fifth member of the Security Council (or that it would have had only four members. as originally planned). St Laurent, especially, was known, liked and respected in both London and Washington; both he and Howe were highly regarded as leaders and as statesmen … King was not; Churchill distrusted him because he has actively supported Chamberlain’s appeasement policy and it seems to me that both Churchill and Roosevelt saw him as little more than an errand boy.
The Last British Battleship?
Mark Felton Productions
Published on 13 Nov 2018Does a British battleship still exist? Yes, but not in Britain. Find out the full fascinating story of the last of her kind.
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Photos: Nesmad, Ningyou, nattou, Mikasa Historic Memorial Warship
Video: YouTube Creative Commons
QotD: Transferring nationalist passions
The intensity with which they are held does not prevent nationalist loyalties from being transferable. To begin with, […] they can be and often are fastened up on some foreign country. One quite commonly finds that great national leaders, or the founders of nationalist movements, do not even belong to the country they have glorified. Sometimes they are outright foreigners, or more often they come from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful. Examples are Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, de Valera, Disraeli, Poincare, Beaverbrook. The Pan-German movement was in part the creation of an Englishman, Houston Chamberlain. For the past fifty or a hundred years, transferred nationalism has been a common phenomenon among literary intellectuals. With Lafcadio Hearne the transference was to Japan, with Carlyle and many others of his time to Germany, and in our own age it is usually to Russia. But the peculiarly interesting fact is that re-transference is also possible. A country or other unit which has been worshipped for years may suddenly become detestable, and some other object of affection may take its place with almost no interval. In the first version of H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, and others of his writings about that time, one finds the United States praised almost as extravagantly as Russia is praised by Communists today: yet within a few years this uncritical admiration had turned into hostility. The bigoted Communist who changes in a space of weeks, or even days, into an equally bigoted Trotskyist is a common spectacle. In continental Europe Fascist movements were largely recruited from among Communists, and the opposite process may well happen within the next few years. What remains constant in the nationalist is his state of mind: the object of his feelings is changeable, and may be imaginary.
But for an intellectual, transference has an important function […]. It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — that he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. When one sees the slavish or boastful rubbish that is written about Stalin, the Red Army, etc. by fairly intelligent and sensitive people, one realises that this is only possible because some kind of dislocation has taken place. In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion — that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware — will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack — all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognised for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one’s conduct.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
