Quotulatiousness

February 17, 2022

Andrew Doyle on our current age of hoaxes

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Last week in UnHerd, Andrew Doyle, the comedian behind the wonderful Twitter troll account “Titania McGrath”, explained why trolling today is so likely to succeed:

“Titania McGrath” and Andrew Doyle

This technique is the precursor to what we now call “trolling”. The term is often misused as a synonym for malicious and bullying online behaviour but, as traditionally understood, trolling is the art of coaxing people into a reaction. Motivations vary from troll to troll. For some, it is simply a matter of revelling in the gullibility of strangers. For others, the intention is to expose the vices and shortcomings of those in power.

Jonathan Swift was an early exponent of this kind of trolling in the creation of his alter-ego Isaac Bickerstaff, who wrote pamphlets which predicted, and then announced, the death of the astrologer John Partridge. Swift resented Partridge because of his attacks on the church, and must have been immensely gratified that Bickerstaff’s announcement had been taken on trust by so many. It is said that Partridge was thereafter continually having to fend off queries about his uncanny resemblance to a dead man.

[…]

Many of those duped by [Chris] Morris [in the TV series Brass Eye, 1997] were seemingly happy to read aloud any hogwash from an autocue in return for television exposure and the impression that they were on the right side of history. Such hoaxes could potentially be even more effective in today’s climate, with so many soft-witted celebrities eager to endorse fashionable but illiberal notions they barely understand. All major political, educational, artistic and corporate bodies are seemingly in submission to a new identity-obsessed religion of “social justice” that couches its regressive ideas in progressive terminology.

But, unlike the days of Brass Eye, the jesters are now in lockstep with these establishment lines, and so the most pertinent sources for satire are generally left untapped. They are, as Morris recently put it, more interested in “doing some kind of exotic display for the court” than exposing the follies of the powerful.

It is perhaps inevitable, then, that one of the most impressive hoaxes of recent years has come from outside the comedy industry. In October 2018, it was revealed that Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose had spent a year writing and submitting bogus academic papers to various journals in order to show how certain branches of the humanities were now routinely prioritising ideological goals over the pursuit of truth and knowledge. By the time the hoax was exposed, seven of their 20 articles had been accepted for publication, and a further seven were in the process of review.

As a work of satire, this project was an undoubted success. It provided evidence of what many had long suspected, that nonsensical ideas could thrive within the academy so long as they were camouflaged in vogueish jargon. One paper purported to be a study of the sexual activity of dogs in urban parks, and used this phoney data to draw conclusions about contemporary “rape culture”. Another argued that white male students ought to be chained to the floor during lessons as a form of reparation for slavery. Most audacious of all was the article based entirely on a chapter of Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of intersectional feminist theory.

That all of these articles were accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals should have alerted academics to a troubling strain of corruption and fraudulence in their field. They should have resolved to rectify the problem, but instead chose to demonise and smear the hoaxers who had exposed it. When satirists hit on uncomfortable truths, they are rarely thanked for their efforts.

Pick the RIGHT vise for woodworking

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rex Krueger
Published 16 Feb 2022

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P.J. O’Rourke’s Holidays in Hell

Filed under: Books, Europe, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Arthur Chrenkoff remembers the first of P.J. O’Rourke’s books he discovered in Australia after his family emigrated from Poland:

I haven’t heard of this O’Rourke fellow, but Holidays in Hell is a great title. I’ve always enjoyed reading about other countries, and the concept of travelling to war zones and other shitholes seems like a fertile territory for satire. Plus, as I see in the table of contents, O’Rourke had travelled to Poland a year before my family had left it. We were roughly in the same place at the same time. Now I just have to find out what this zany American thought of my homeland. I’m sold. So is the book.

It was a 50 cents well spent. I have the book next to my keyboard as I’m typing these words. It’s the first British edition, printed in in 1989 by Picador, so it would have been four or five years old when I bought it. It doesn’t look like it has aged at all since then. Maybe the paper is a tad more yellow but that’s about it. “What do they do for fun in Warsaw” is on page 83 (in the table of contents, the city is misspelled “Warshaw”, which actually makes it closer to the original Warszawa, the English “sh” being the same as the Polish “sz” sound – don’t say you didn’t learn anything new today). It was glorious, capturing with all of O’Rourke’s sardonic majesty the death rattles of the system that would collapse only three years later (not that any of us foresaw it). “I didn’t see any Evil Empire,” wrote P J, “that would have been too interesting. Communism doesn’t really starve or execute that many people. Mostly it just bores them to death”.

I enjoyed the rest of the book too, from civil war-torn Lebanon to divided Central America – the rightist El Salvador and the commie Nicaragua. Over the next few years I feasted on Republican Party Reptile. Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance. I even managed to get to O’Rourke’s original non-political writing, Modern Manners and The Bachelor Home Companion, which I found just as funny if also less depressing than politics. Then I read all the new books as they came out. While it’s impolite to speak ill of the dead, I have found P J O’Rourke after 2000 increasingly struggling to be funny. His last output over the past six or so years as this “Republican Party reptile” and arch-libertarian ended up voting for Hillary Clinton because he didn’t like Donald Trump was cringeworthy and sad to read, which is did less and less of, until I did none at all. But it doesn’t change the fact that when P J was good – in the 1980s and 90s – he was a god. There was no one and nothing like him. He singlehandedly made right-of-centre sensibilities hip and the left ridiculous, which is the best weapon against those who fancy themselves too much.

At this point in time I should probably apologise for lying – P J O’Rourke did not save my life, though that sounded a lot sexier than any other title I could think of. What P J had done for me, however, was just as important: he set me on the right path.
The line from growing up in communist Poland forty years ago to The Daily Chrenk today might seem pretty straightforward in hindsight, but for a while in the early 1990s it got somewhat twisted and crooked, as lines tend to do when you attend university. Not only was I suddenly exposed in my Arts degree (majoring in Government, or political science, with a minor in History) to 50 Shades of Left, but I had embarked on wide-ranging reading spree of my own (nothing wrong with that; I still do), involving writers and topics as diverse as Noam Chomsky, the JFK assassination conspiracy theories, Robert Anton Wilson and Edmund Burke. Being a late developer, I went through the teenage phase of hating everyone and everything while in my early 20s. I was alone and homeless; not really angry but cynical and disenchanted.

At Samizdata, Johnathan Pearce also regrets O’Rourke’s death:

I met Mr O’Rourke about a decade ago, in what was the aftermath of the 2008 financial smash. He was charming company (my wife was bowled over by him – you have to watch these silver-tongued Irishmen) and retained the fizz that I recall from his coruscating book, Republican Party Reptile. I read that, I think, in around 1989, and then got my hands on anything he wrote. When he became a traveling correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine (a fact that today strikes one as impossible, such is the tribalism of our culture), I followed his columns closely. Parliament of Whores, written in the early 1990s and on the cusp of the Bill Clinton decade, stands the test of time as a brilliantly funny takedown of Big Government. Then came classics such as Eat The Rich and All The Trouble In The World.

I don’t quite think he kept the standard of searing wit + commentary at that level into the later 90s and into the current century. He did “serious stuff” with an amusing turn, such as a fine book about Adam Smith […] and could turn on the brilliance, but I think some of the energy had fallen off. He was a Dad with all the responsibilities that brings, and younger and less funny and more aggressive voices began to dominate the noise level in the public square. (Or maybe that is a sign that I am getting old, ahem.) O’Rourke, to the anger of some, wasn’t a Trump fan, and said so. He moved quite more explicitly libertarian, having a gig at the CATO Institute think tank. By his early 70s, I did not read or hear much of his doings, and that was a shame in the age of Greta, Cancel Culture, “Save the NHS”, Great Resets, Chinese nastiness and the Keto Diet. (I am kidding slightly about the last point.)

P J O’Rourke’s death saddens me as much as did that of two other fine men whom I met over the years and who died from cancer over the past couple of years: Brian Micklethwait and Sir Roger Scruton. They were all very different men, but they shared a common love of liberty, a mischievous wit and a hatred of cant.

I think the first of his books I ever read was Republican Party Reptile, and my copy got a bit dog-eared from being lent out to many friends and acquaintances over the next few years. As I understand it, O’Rourke had children late in life, and it may have been one of the reasons that some of the character and energy of his earlier works are somewhat lacking in writings from the last fifteen years or so … there are few activities that can absorb energy like caring for young children (I love seeing my grand-nieces when they visit, but I’m totally knackered by the time we’re waving goodbye).

Tank Chats #139 | M9 Half Track | The Tank Museum

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 5 Nov 2021

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QotD: What your book collection says about you

Filed under: Books, Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One tweet noted that the loss of prominent book collections meant you couldn’t judge someone as easily as before. Another noted that book collections are a way of reminding ourselves of our own constructed identities — you look at the spines, note the authors and topics, and you are reminded of who you are, or rather who you wish to be at your best.

Both are correct. It has been my experience over the years that if people have explicitly political / social books in abundance, they are not really interested in contrary observations, no matter how genially offered; criticize the citizens of the shelves and you are criticizing them in an intimate fashion. The oft-expressed desire for a “conversation” on these matters rarely results in such.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2019-01-30.

February 16, 2022

Roman Republic to Empire 02 The Carthaginian Curse

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

seangabb
Published 5 Feb 2021

[Update 2023-03-02 – Dr. Gabb took down the original posts and re-uploaded them.]

Here is the second lecture, which describes the vindictive treatment of Hannibal and Carthage, and explains this in terms of how the Second Punic War destabilised both Italy and the Roman Constutition. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this transformation with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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Germany’s dual economy during WW2 (and why Himmler would have succeeded Hitler if the Nazis had won WW2)

At Founding Questions, Severian looks at the way the Nazi economy was actually two entities — the “wartime” economy and the effectively separate SS economy under the control of Heinrich Himmler:

Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, 1938.
German Federa Archive via Wikimedia Commons.

Here’s where the Nazis really blew it. “Nazism” should really be called “Hitlerism”, as it was a true cult of personality; there was no ideology without the specific individual man. That’s the tension at the heart of any collectivist ideology — somebody’s got to be The Boss, however temporarily — but Nazi Germany suffered it worse than most. Had the Nazis won the war, the bloodbath at the top would’ve been as spectacular per capita as the war itself. As thoroughgoing Social Darwinists, they only had one possible principle of succession …

Let’s provisionally call that the first consequence of an ideology in power: The personal is the political and vice versa. That seems trite, I realize, but I’m putting it here to emphasize its literalness – in an ideological state, building your own “affinity”, Bastard Feudalism-style, just IS politics. There’s no other possible political activity. And as much as the Nazis seemed to have screwed it up by going all in on the Fuhrerprinzip at the very top, their out-and-proud Organizational Darwinism (for lack of a better term) made them super-efficient at the lower levels.

Let’s bring Khrushchev back in. In many ways, he’s the Soviet Himmler. He was one of Stalin’s right hand men throughout the war, but somehow didn’t get tagged as a major player in the succession crisis until it was too late for all the other contenders for the purple to take effective countermeasures. In the same way, Hitler did announce a successor, sort of. In fact he did it twice: Before the war, it was Rudolf Hess; during the war, Hermann Goering. Neither of those guys had anything approaching the power Himmler had, but like Khrushchev, his personality was such that the other bigshots couldn’t help overlooking him. Just as the rest of the Politburo couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea of this uncouth quasi-Ukrainian peasant being a major threat, so the rest of the Nazi leaders couldn’t help seeing Himmler as this fussy little file clerk.

It’s a hell of a trick, and I’ll admit, I’m buffaloed. Even if Himmler (Khrushchev) was one hell of an actor, and the egos on the other top Nazis (Soviets) were gravity-defying, they still should’ve been able to see that this fussy little file clerk had some seriously hard boys working for him. Reinhard Heydrich was as ruthless a fuck as was ever born, and Himmler kept him in check. Ditto barbarians like Odilo Globocnik and Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski — they don’t come any nastier than those two, yet Himmler managed them easily. What other conclusion can you possibly draw about Himmler, other than that he was nastier than all of them put together? And yet, apparently, nobody did …

The only explanation for this that I can think of is the Nazis’ ideologization of governmental structures. As opposed to the Soviet experience, where the Party and the Bureaucracy were supposed to be, and often actually were, distinct. After some disastrous experiments with demoting technical experts to field hands, and vice versa, the Russian Communists learned that ideological correctness and “soviet power” does not, in fact, obviate the need for stuff like math. (See also: Mao’s backyard blast furnaces). So the Soviets made sure to separate what they called the “technical intelligentsia” from the Party. The head honcho at Gosplan, Gossnab, etc. would be a Party hack from way back, of course, but the actual brainworkers wouldn’t be. I don’t know just how many of them had Party membership cards, or if any of them did, but nobody I know of rose through the Party’s ranks via Gosplan.

Once a Gosplanner, always a Gosplanner. The technical intelligentsia got all kinds of perks in the Soviet system, but one thing they did not do was get perks inside the Party. You can be a technical expert, or you can be an up-and-coming Party man, but you can’t be both.

The Nazis did the exact opposite of that. The way the Third Reich actually functioned is still opaque in a lot of ways (especially to non-specialists), and of course the pressures of wartime forced a lot of ad hoc measures, but it seems like the SS was supposed to be a sort of All-Purpose Expert Corps. Not only did they have their own army and intelligence service, but they had their own economy — the brief history of the Third Reich makes a lot more sense when you realize that half or more of the official Reich economy was hamstrung by the informal but very real SS economy, operating largely (but far from exclusively) through the labor camps.

Indeed, the SS had their own administration. As incredible as it seems, the Nazis had no grand plan for what to do once they’d conquered Europe. Himmler did, at least as far as the East was concerned, and he tried his damnedest to put it into action in Poland (which is why the General Government was so legendarily brutal). Hitler apparently thought in terms of Germany’s lost late 19th century colonies, when he bothered to think about it at all … which wasn’t often. In his typical Fuhrer-riffic style, he just ignored the problem, trusting to Organizational Darwinism to sort it out …

… which is where the All-Purpose Experts of the SS stepped in. The General Government, for instance, was headed by a civilian lawyer, Hans Frank, but the day to day governance largely fell to the SS, because that’s who stepped up. Poland was an occupied zone, with vital war industries, but it was far behind the front for most of the war; the army couldn’t waste vital manpower garrisoning it. Thus the SSPF (the SS and Police Leader) stepped in, drawing manpower as needed from a wide variety of sources — the camp guards, the Wehrmacht (when garrison troops were available, and when they could wrangle them from the various army commanders), the civilian police, the “General SS”, and so on.

The details aren’t nearly as important as the big picture, which is: Unlike the technical intelligentsia in the Soviet Union, members of the SS could climb to the highest ranks of the Party. Indeed they were expected to: the SS was rapidly becoming a Party-within-the-Party at the outbreak of the war, not least because Himmler awarded a “ceremonial” SS rank to anyone who mattered politically in the various departments. The savvier guys refused the “honor,” of course, because they didn’t want to be subordinate to Himmler, even ceremonially, but many didn’t. Which meant that had the Nazis won the war, not only would Himmler have been the next Fuhrer, but the SS would’ve closed ranks, essentially taking over The Party — they’d be the Inner Party, as opposed to the “mere Nazis” of the Outer Party.

The railway built for dead passengers – London Necropolis Railway

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Train of Thought
Published 29 Oct 2021

It’s close to Halloween, so lets have a look at a railway built to transport a very macabre type of cargo … the recently deceased …

Please subscribe for more

This video falls under the fair use act of 1976

If you’re interested in a bit more than is covered in the video, here’s a post from 2013 discussing this railway.

QotD: The fall of Kabul was “a margin call”

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

The fall of Kabul will make the United States less willing to use military power to achieve national goals and, at the same time, make the use of decisive and overwhelming military force more necessary when the U.S. does decide to act. For years, America used her military scorecard in World War II as “credit” with our allies and adversaries. The positioning of a small American military force in some corner of the world provided deterrence at a fraction of the cost of placing a large enough force to actually win a decisive engagement or a campaign. We can all think of innumerable examples where America “held the fort” in a variety of strategically valuable locales while in reality planning to fight no more than two — I mean one and a half or maybe even just one — actual conflicts at any given time. America was and is securing key terrain “on margin”.

Kabul was a margin call. From now on, America may well be obliged to “pay cash”, viz., deploy combat capable formations of sufficient size to engage and win if we want anyone to take us seriously. A token “speedbump” force or a promise of “over the horizon” support — which is the majority of what the U.S. military now does — isn’t going to reassure any friends or deter any adversaries. At least not anyone who is paying attention.

Our adversaries will be emboldened. It is not so much that America’s military reputation has been irretrievably damaged, but the lessons that the Vietnamese, the Hmong, and now the Afghans have learned so painfully cannot fail to be appreciated by us or by the wider world. It appears that America (not the military, but America herself) has lost her stomach for a real fight. Americans taught the world the same lesson about the British Empire during the Revolutionary War (although Britain recovered enough to build her “second empire”), it would be foolish to fail to now see ourselves through that particular historical prism.

Garri Benjamin Hendell, “The Day After Kabul”, The Angry Staff Officer, 2021-11-02.

February 15, 2022

“Freedom”. You proles keep using that word. The CBC doesn’t think it means what you think it means

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Monday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh considers what this mysterious and esoteric word “freedom” seems to mean to the CBC:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

You may have heard that truck-driving protesters have taken over downtown Ottawa and several important border crossings here in Canada. These festive but obstructive people often claim, it is said, to be seeking some esoteric substance known as “freedom”. NP Platformed, unable to locate this “freedom” in the conventional periodic table, consulted a range of chemists in search of expert advice.

One suggested that the word was plainly a misspelling of “friedium”, implying the existence of an element or other matter known only to the Germans. Several hypothesized a molecular relationship with the abolished industrial refrigerant “freon”, raising questions about whether the Montreal Protocol has been subverted. Firm conclusions eluded our quest, but we are sure that a royal commission of inquiry will eventually be convened to get to the bottom of it all.

CBC News, confronted with the same information, did not appeal to the good old exact sciences for help. Instead, its reporters rang up every “hate” expert in their Rolodex of left-wing academics. This yielded tidbits of wisdom, such as this one: freedom “is a term that has resonated … You can define it and understand it and sort of manipulate it in a way that makes sense to you and is useful to you, depending on your perspective.” We’re pretty sure our chemical theories are less stupid than whatever this is supposed to be, but it does bear the imprimatur of Ontario Tech University, the renowned (checks notes) Oshawa-based home of the (checks notes again) Ridgebacks.

The CBC’s obtuse explanation of how the word “freedom” has been used in the past by fascist nasties, and absolutely nobody else in the annals of history, is rightly coming in for plenty of heckling. NP Platformed couldn’t resist joining in, but we would observe that this news copy bears signs of an actual journalistic crisis. If you are paying attention, you have heard about, or even seen video of, the torrents of abuse received by CTV and Global news reporters visiting the “Freedom Convoy” in Ottawa. One can only imagine the fear and frustration of CBC News employees, who know that they are much more attractive targets for misbehaviour — being a recognized part of the Ottawa blob that hinterland protesters are in town specifically to torment and terrorize.

Most of them are no doubt staying well clear of the protests, and for the public broadcaster to develop good sources within an amorphous CBC-hating right-wing movement is a plain impossibility. What’s left is Rolodex journalism. We did a lot of it back in the day, at the late, legendary Alberta Report — which, in our time, was vigorously hated by somewhere between half and two-thirds of the population of Alberta.

Total War on Valentine’s Day – WW2 – Reading Comments

Filed under: Americas, Australia, Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 14 Feb 2022

Another installment of Across the Airwaves, where we highlight some of the best viewer comments under our videos. It’s Valentine’s Day and we’re feeling pretty romantic, so Indy and Spartacus will be reading comments that are all about love, humanity, and relationships.
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King James I and his court favourites

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

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes continues the tale of King James I of England (also King James VI of Scotland at the same time, the crowns still being legally separate) and his use of favourites to help him avoid going back to Parliament to ask for money:

Portrait of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1625.
Oil painting by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) via Wikimedia Commons.

At the same time, James found a way to filter many of the petitions before they even reached him. This was something he already did in his original kingdom, Scotland, occasionally sending a noble “favourite” — like his kinsmen the duke of Lennox and the marquess of Hamilton — to dispense patronage and manage its parliament. Yet he increasingly, and even scandalously, relied on favourites in England too.

Using a favourite could make some sense from a political standpoint. Favourites often owed everything they had in terms of wealth, protection, titles and standing to the king personally. As creatures of the king, their loyalty was assured. They served an important practical function by dispensing patronage and absorbing pesky petitions, and could insulate the king himself from blame. Should the king make a mistake, his favourite was the obvious man to take the fall.

But for James, the use of favourites went beyond mere practicality, if they were ever practical at all. His interest could also be romantic.

Although James was married with kids, his favourite by 1607 was one Robert Kerr, the younger son of a minor Scottish laird. A mere groom of the bedchamber, about twenty years James’s junior, he had fallen from his horse in a jousting accident and broken his leg. The king helped nurse him back to health, and was soon besotted. Kerr — often anglicised to Carr — was very rapidly given money, titles, and lands. Within a year he had been knighted, after four years made a viscount, and in 1613 an earl.

But what had been so rapidly gained, could be just as rapidly lost. In 1614, a rival faction at court made sure that another, even younger and more attractive man would catch the king’s eye. This was George Villiers, the 22-year-old younger son of an obscure knight. With his “effeminate and curious” hands and face, as well as a remarkable physique — a clergyman, later a bishop, marvelled at his “well compacted” limbs — Villiers’s rise made Kerr’s seem slow. Every year brought him a new title: in 1615 Villiers was made a knight, 1616 a viscount, 1617 an earl, and 1618 a marquess — a very rare title in England, last given to an influential co-regent of Edward VI, and before that to Anne Boleyn so that she could marry king Henry VIII.

Eventually, incredibly, in 1623 James made Villiers a duke. This was a title that was typically reserved for members of the royal family, or else given by very powerful regents to themselves — Villiers was the first in neither of those categories to be made a duke in 140 years. And he hadn’t even been born into the nobility! The apparent lesson: working on your triceps can really, really pay off.

Yet Villiers had more than just an angelic face and muscles. He seems to have had a real talent for politics, very quickly asserting independence from the faction that had put him before the king. And he would somehow remain the favourite even after James died and was succeeded by his heterosexual son, Charles I. In the dangerous waters of courtly faction — Robert Kerr had meanwhile been found guilty of murder and was imprisoned in the Tower — Villiers knew how to keep himself afloat, and even to chart a course of his own.

And he was extraordinarily corrupt.

Krieghoff: Lugers for the Luftwaffe

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Oct 2021

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One of the scarce, small-production manufacturers of the Luger is Krieghoff — Heinrich Krieghoff to be exact. Kreighoff Waffenfabrik was a smallish arms company that wanted to get into major contracts with the rearming German military in the 1930s. They began by bidding on a contract for 10,000 Luger pistols for the Luftwaffe, and won. Krieghoff had previously worked as a subcontractor for the Simson company rebuilding Lugers under the Weimar government. Kreighoff got control of the Simson Luger tooling, and used it to manufacture a new set themselves.

Krieghoff built a total of 13,825 Luger pistols. The first 10,000 were delivered to the Luftwaffe between 1935 and 1937. A further 2,000 were delivered in small batches between 1940 and 1944, with a final 200 in 1945. In addition to these, 1,625 were sold commercially, including a few highly embellished examples. They are renowned for their excellent quality, and have always attracted particular collector interest.

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QotD: Breaking the trench stalemate with tanks

Where the Germans tried tactics, the British tried tools. If the problems were trenches, what was needed was a trench removal machine: the tank.

In theory, a good tank ought to be effectively immune to machine-gun fire, able to cross trenches without slowing and physically protect the infantry (who could advance huddled behind the mass of it), all while bringing its own firepower to the battle. Tracked armored vehicles had been an idea considered casually by a number of the pre-war powers but not seriously attempted. The British put the first serious effort into tank development with the Landship Committee, formed in February of 1915; the first real tanks, 49 British Mark I tanks, made their first battlefield appearance during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Reliability proved to be a problem: of the 49 tanks that stepped off on the attack on September 15th, only three were operational on the 16th, mostly due to mechanical failures and breakdowns.

Nevertheless there was promise in the idea that was clearly recognized and a major effort to show what tanks could do what attempted at Cambrai in November of 1917; this time hundreds of tanks were deployed and they had a real impact, breaking through the barbed wire and scattering the initial German defenses. But then came the inevitable German counter-attacks and most of the ground taken was lost. It was obvious that tanks had great potential; the French had by 1917 already developed their own, the light Renault FT tank, which would end up being the most successful tank of the war despite its small size (it is the first tank to have its main armament in a rotating turret and so in some sense the first “real” tank). This was hardly an under-invested-in technology. So did tanks break the trench stalemate?

No.

It’s understandable that many people have the impression that they did. Interwar armored doctrine, particularly German Maneuver Warfare (bewegungskrieg) and Soviet Deep Battle both aimed to use the mobility and striking power of tanks in concentrated actions to break the trench stalemate in future wars (the two doctrines are not identical, mind you, but in this they share an objective). But these were doctrines constructed around the performance capabilities of interwar tanks, particularly by two countries (Germany and the USSR) who were not saddled with large numbers of WWI era tanks (and so could premise their doctrine entirely on more advanced models). The Panzer II, with a 24.5mph top speed and an operational range of around 100 miles, depending on conditions, was actually in a position to race the train and win; the same of course true of the Soviet interwar T-26 light tank (19.3mph on roads, 81-150 mile operational range). Such tanks could have radios for coordination and communication on the move (something not done with WWI tanks or even French tanks in WWII).

By contrast, that Renault FT had a top speed of 4.3mph and an operational range of just 37 miles. The British Mark V tank, introduced in 1918, moved at only 5mph and had just 45 miles of range. Such tanks struggled to keep up with the infantry; they certainly were not going to win any race the infantry could not. It is little surprise that the French, posed with the doctrinal problem of having to make use of the many thousands of WWI tanks they had, settled on a doctrine whereby most tanks would simply be the armored gauntlet stretched over the infantry’s fist: it was all those tanks could do! The sort of tank that could do more than just dent the trench-lines (the same way a good infiltration assault with infantry could) were a decade or more away when the war ended.

Moreover, of course, the doctrine – briefly the systems of thinking and patterns of training, habit and action – to actually pull off what tanks would do in 1939 and 1940 were also years away. It seems absurd to fault World War I era commanders for not coming up with a novel tactical and operational system in 1918 for using vehicles that wouldn’t exist for another 15 years and yet more so assuming that they would get it right (since there were quite a number of different ideas post-war about how tanks ought to be used and while many of them seemed plausible, not all of them were practical or effective in the field). It is hard to see how any amount of support into R&D or doctrine was going to make tanks capable of breakthroughs even in the late 1920s or early 1930s (honestly, look at the “best” tanks of the early 1930s; they’re still not up to the task in most cases) much less by 1918.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.

February 14, 2022

In The Highest Tradition — Episode 2

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

British Army Documentaries
Published 22 Oct 2021

This episode includes the story of Millie the Mule and just why a rose is still eaten, raw, in one battalion’s mess. It also features the “White Helmets”, a team of motorcycle stunt riders. One team of retired soldiers has an average age of 74 years but they still meet up to perform stunts in front of their successors.

© 1989

This production is for viewing purposes only and should not be reproduced without prior consent.

This film is part of a comprehensive collection of contemporary Military Training programmes and supporting documentation including scripts, storyboards and cue sheets.

All material is stored and archived. World War II and post-war material along with all original film material are held by the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive.

I have to mention that the primrose hackle, once worn with great pride by the Lancashire Fusiliers is still worn by the Lorne Scots (Peel, Dufferin & Halton Regiment) of the Canadian Army Reserve.

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