Quotulatiousness

November 25, 2020

Switzerland: Neutral or Nazi Ally? – WW2 Special

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 24 Nov 2020

After the fall of France in June 1940, neutral Switzerland found itself surrounded on all sides by a hostile expansionist power. The small nation would have been a valuable possession but the jaws of the Reich hesitated to swallow it. How did Switzerland manage to exit the conflict intact and largely unscathed?

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Sources:
– Pictures of Swiss Army by Strübin Theodor courtesy of Archäologie und Museum Baselland Lizenzbedingungen
– Bundesarchiv
– Imperial War Museums: HU56131
– ETH-Bibliothek Zürich: 03258, LBS MH05-02-04, M01-0756-0001
– Fortepan:3889, 92301
– National Archives
– Staatsarchiv Bern – P362
– Plan of the defence lines of the National Redoubt courtesy of Auge=mit from Wikimedia Commons
– Picture of Swiss Soldiers with anti-aircraft gun courtesy of Paebi from Wikimedia Commons
– Picture of Swiss aircraft in 1943 from theM.Pilloud – Archive familiale
– United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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– “Other Sides of Glory” – Fabien Tell
– “Moving to Disturbia” – Experia
– “Remembrance” – Fabien Tell

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A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
1 hour ago
As we draw close to the end of 1941, it becomes clear that neutrality is not a guarantee of safety. Its utility as a diplomatic strategy has been discarded and is non-existent.

A total of 12 sovereign and neutral nations have been invaded by Allied or Axis powers since the beginning of the war — Denmark and Norway on 9 April 1940; Belgium, the Netherlands, Iceland and Luxembourg on 10 May 1940; Lithuania on 15 June 1940 and Latvia and Estonia on 17 June; Greece on 28 October 1940 and Yugoslavia in April 1941; Iran in August 1941. Even those that are spared are compelled to assist either the Allies or the Axis or both in financial and economic terms, such as Switzerland and Sweden. Others offer voluntary military assistance such as Portugal and Spain.

Jan Morris, RIP

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

By an odd co-incidence, I began reading the third volume of Morris’s British Empire trilogy just last night and today I discovered that she recently died at age 94. The particular edition I have has Morris’s original male name on the cover, but her female name in the “note about the author”:

Jan Morris, who died last week at the age of 94, may have lived one of the more various and accomplished lives on record. She was, in turn, a soldier, a newspaper correspondent with a number of scoops to her name, a fine memoirist, and a writer of books whose scope encompassed the world.

Any dutiful obituarist must also note something else which happened fifty years ago. It is likely for ever to feature in the first paragraph, if not the first line, of everything written about Morris. She was born a man, named James by her parents, and underwent what her publishers and profilers term “a change of sexual role” in 1972 – back when such a thing was a rarity and rather dangerous to accomplish.

I hope to leave that subject aside for a moment while contemplating her place in letters. By the end of her long life, Morris had become something of a national treasure and an institution. Her quixotic obsessions – a personal, mythical interpretation of the Welsh side of her family and her home in that country, and the late First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher – became the subject of stories shared by friends, editors and admirers.

She gave wise and funny interviews to the papers about savouring mussels without dignity and why whether what one is doing is kind ought, in a good world, to be the modest test applied to action.

Other profilers note her long companionship with Elizabeth (née Tuckniss) – first through marriage, then a legally-divorced close friendship, and finally a civil partnership, with the ceremony witnessed by a local couple who afterwards invited the two for tea. Elizabeth survives Jan, but a visiting journalist or two was shown the headstone which is planned for both of them. They will lie on a Welsh island they owned in the Dwyfor, a river that runs by their home. The stone reads: “Here lie two friends, at the end of one life”.

These are beautiful stories, but they should not retroactively colour in fully our impressions of Morris. Nor should a sense – repeated in some otherwise careful obituaries – that as “James”, Morris’s “written voice always sounded certain”. Whereas as Jan, her writing grew more introspective and aware of the ways that time and tide conspire to decay the facades of men as much as they do institutions and places. This was exhibited notably in her Pax Britannica trilogy, which chronicled Britain’s imperial decline.

The Coolest Gun You Will See All Day: China’s Type 64 Silenced Pistol

Filed under: China, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 14 Aug 2020

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The Type 64 is a dedicated suppressed pistol first introduced in 1965 and used in the Vietnam War. It uses a rimless version of the .32 ACP cartridge (7.65x17mm) in a 9-round Makarov-like magazine. Despite outward similarity to the Makarov (especially the grip), the design is wholly unique internally. It uses basically a miniaturized AK bolt to allow the shooter to select between blowback semiauto functioning and single shot manual operation. The bolt’s rotating locking lugs prevent it from cycling when locked, in a very clever alternative use of the rotating bolt system. The suppressor has two chambers, using a combination of baffles and wire mesh as suppressor elements. In addition to standard ammunition, a plastic-sabot frangible load was also developed for use in situations like airline hijackings, and this loading is why some sources reference a maximum effective range of 15 meters.

For all its technical cleverness, the Type 64 is a rather heavy pistol, at 1.8kg / 4 pounds. It was replaced in 1967 by the substantially lighter and simpler Type 67, which weighed only 1.05kg / 2.3 pounds. This particular Type 64 was originally owned by Mitch Werbell III, giving it an even more interesting history …

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QotD: Tonnage measurement(s)

Filed under: Military, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The easiest tonnage to understand is displacement tonnage. This is the actual weight of the ship, called displacement because the weight of the ship is equal to the amount of water it displaces, per Archimedes’ principle. Of course, the displacement of a ship can change greatly depending on what’s aboard, so several different displacements are often used. A good reference will give three values, light, normal, and full. Light is basically an empty ship. There are some technical details, but in essence it’s what the ship weighs if we take all the people, fuel, cargo, ammunition, and supplies out of it. Full displacement is exactly what you’d expect from the name. The ship is as heavy as it’s ever going to be, with full fuel, ammo, and cargo. Normal is essentially a ship with full cargo and crew, but two-thirds fuel and ammunition. On warships, it’s common for light displacement to be 75% or so of full displacement, so it’s obvious that a poor choice of reference numbers can cause confusion about the actual sizes of the ships in question. Displacement tonnage in non-metric references is always given in long tons of 2,240 lb each. This is to allow easy conversion, as a long ton of salt water has a volume of almost exactly 35 cubic feet.

Displacement tonnage is the only tonnage value commonly used for warships, while merchant ships use a completely different set of tonnages, usually deadweight tons, gross tons, and net tons. Deadweight tonnage is at least an actual measure of weight, and specifies how much cargo the ship is able to carry, excluding the weight of the ship itself. Gross tonnage and net tonnage are both basically volumetric measures, specified using complicated formulas. Gross tonnage is based on the total volume of all enclosed spaces of the ship, while net tonnage is based only on the volume of the spaces that carry cargo or passengers. These values are used to calculate things like port duties and what regulations apply to the ship. They replaced gross and net register tons, which were also volumetric, of 100 cubic feet to the ton. These were based on a phenomenally complicated set of rules to determine what spaces were and weren’t counted, with shipowners trying to game the system and drive down their tonnage. Worse, different countries had different regulations on what counted under each value, so in 1969, register tonnages were abolished and replaced with the existing system.

While distance, speed, and “tonnage” measurements are the most prominent nautical idiosyncracies, there are a few other values that bear mentioning. The maximum width of a ship is the beam, apparently from the beams that used to run across ships during the days of sail. Draft (or draught) is how deep the hull is below the waterline. This is a very important number to make sure the ship doesn’t run aground, but it varies continually with the amount of stuff on the ship. Air draft is sometimes used for height above the water, important for clearing bridges and the like. Length, much like tonnage, comes in several values. The obvious one is length over all, LOA, which is exactly what it sounds like, measured from the furthest forward to the furthest aft point on the ship. This is obviously useful, but for hydrodynamic purposes another value, waterline length (LWL), is what the designer cares about. The last value is length between perpendiculars (LBP), measured between the vertical stem (bow) post and the vertical stern post. This is another value that was developed for civilian use. Some ships of a given LOA have a great deal of overhang at bow and stern, making them much smaller than other ships with the same nominal LOA. Using LWL is not a good solution, as it varies with draft. LBP solves both of these problems, but isn’t of great importance to warships.

Bean, “Nautical Measurements”, Naval Gazing, 2018-08-10.

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