World War Two
Published 30 Dec 2023In the west, the Allies break the siege of Bastogne, but the fight for the Ardennes continues. and British commander Bernard Montgomery is maneuvering to take command of the Western Front ground forces. In Hungary Budapest is cut off by the Soviets and under siege, with hundreds of thousands of civilians still in the city. The fight in Italy is winding down for the winter, but the fight in the Philippines continues. In fact, American landings on Luzon are planned to go off soon.
00:00 INTRO
01:22 The Siege of Bastogne
03:10 The failure of 5th and 6th Panzer Armies
06:11 Montgomery wants command
09:27 Guderian appeals to Hitler, “stop the Ardennes Offensive!”
12:11 Budapest surrounded and under siege
17:04 Wrapping up the Gothic Line Campaign
19:29 Churchill in Athens
20:30 The fight in the Philippines
23:07 SUMMARY
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December 31, 2023
Budapest Under Siege – WW2 – Week 279 – December 30, 1944
December 24, 2023
The Siege of Bastogne Begins – WW2 – Week 278 – December 23, 1944
World War Two
Published 23 Dec 2023The German Ardennes Offensive, called by the Allies the Battle of the Bulge, is in full swing in Luxembourg and Belgium this week, and the Germans have the key junction town of Bastogne under siege. On the Allied side there comes a large American surrender, plans for counterattacks, and tension growing between British and American Commands. The fight in both Italy and the Philippines continues, and in Hungary the Soviets have nearly surrounded Budapest.
00:26 Intro
01:06 The Battle of the Bulge
03:54 The Malmedy Massacre
06:25 Bastogne
10:00 American Surrender on Schnee Eifel
12:06 Patton plans a counterattack
15:44 Bernard Montgomery and Omar Bradley
18:12 The Red Army advances around Budapest
21:39 Fighting in Italy and Greece
22:45 Leyte and Mindoro
25:07 Conclusion
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December 22, 2023
Camouflage
World War Two
Published Dec 19, 2023Camouflage comes in many forms, shapes, disguises, and even processes, for there are indeed many ways to hide your soldiers, guns, tanks, and even ships at sea. Today we take a wee look at camouflage during the war.
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December 17, 2023
The Battle of the Bulge Begins – WW2 – Week 277 – December 16, 1944
World War Two
Published 16 Dec 2023Adolf Hitler’s Ardennes counteroffensive finally goes off this week, and it does indeed catch the Allies by surprise, and they suspend other offensive operations in the west. They are still attacking in Italy, and the Soviets are still advancing in Hungary, trying to cut off Budapest. In the Far East, there are Allied landings on Mindoro, and they are also on the march in Burma, hoping to pin down the enemy.
0:00 Intro
0:55 Recap
1:22 Street fighting in Athens
04:07 Operation Queen ends
06:33 Autumn Mist Offensive plans
09:51 Allied intelligence failures
12:26 The Ardennes Offensive Begins
16:57 Allied attacks in Italy and Soviet plans to surround Budapest
20:07 The Allied offensive in Burma
22:10 Mindoro Landings
24:33 Summary
25:14 Conclusion
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December 10, 2023
Can the Americans Stop the Kamikazes? – WW2 – Week 276 – December 9, 1944
World War Two
Published 9 Dec 2023This is a very busy week of the war. In the west, the Americans manage to reach the Roer River in force, but haven’t taken any of its dams; in Italy, the Allies liberate Ravenna; the Soviet advance in Hungary continues, and the Soviets even set up a new Hungarian government; martial law is declared in Greece; the Japanese make a corridor to Indochina; the fighting on Leyte continues, and the kamikaze menace becomes ever more worrisome.
00:00 INTRO
01:10 British intelligence failure
01:55 Allies reach the Roer River
05:35 Problems with Devers’ 6th Army Group
07:41 Allies liberate Ravenna
08:50 Soviet advances in Hungary
12:10 Soviets set up a new Hungarian government
13:47 A deadly demonstration and martial law in Greece
18:33 Japanese establish a corridor to Indochina
19:59 Leyte and kamikaze attacks
23:45 CONCLUSION
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December 3, 2023
Was Hürtgen Forest Worth it? WW2 – Week 275 – December 2, 1944
World War Two
Published 2 Dec 2023The bulk of the fight for Hürtgen Forest is now over, and today we look at the results. We also look at Soviet plans for their January offensive. In the field this week, the Red Army is still fighting in Hungary, the Allies are still trying to reach the Roer River in the west, and in the Pacific Theater the kamikaze menace is wreaking havoc with Allied scheduling.
00:00 INTRO
01:06 Soviet Offensive Plans for 1945
03:12 Red Army attacks in Hungary
06:19 The Port of Antwerp is clear for use
07:23 The Battle of Hurtgen Forest is Over
12:20 Allied advances to the Roer
14:19 Tension builds in Greece
15:32 The aerial situation in the Philippines
21:36 CONCLUSION
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November 26, 2023
General Patton’s Metz Obsession – WW2 – Week 274 – November 25, 1944
World War Two
Published 25 Nov 2023Metz finally falls to Patton’s 3rd Army, but boy, it’s taken some time. To the south, the Allies also take Belfort and Strasbourg, and to the north Operation Queen continues trying to reach the Roer River. The Soviets complete their conquest of the islands in the Gulf of Riga and continue advancing in Hungary to the south, but it’s the Axis Powers — the Japanese — who are advancing in China, taking Dushan and Nanning.
01:15 Operation Queen Continues
04:49 9th Army attacks toward the Roer
05:54 Pattons 3rd Army takes Metz
09:22 Allies take Belfort, Mulhouse, and Strasbourg
13:56 8th Army Attacks in Italy
15:42 Soviet advances and German indecision
18:05 Japanese take Dushan and Nanning
19:21 The fight for Peleliu ends
21:43 Notes from all over
22:23 Conclusion
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November 19, 2023
How Himmler Learned to Love the Russians – WW2 – Week 273 – November 18, 1944
World War Two
Published 18 Nov 2023Heinrich Himmler wants to build an Army of Soviet POWs, but that has some problems; Patrick Hurley becomes US Ambassador to China, but even before that he’s in hot water with Chiang Kai-Shek; and in the field in the west, the Allies launch Operation Queen to try to cross the Roer River and reach the Rhine.
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November 12, 2023
The Futile Fight in Hurtgen Forest – WW2 – Week 272 – November 11, 1944
World War Two
Published 11 Nov 2023The struggle for Hurtgen forest, one tiny piece at a time, continues. The Allies have, however, secured Walcheren Island, and also launch Operation Queen to try and reach and cross the Roer River, and further south even launch a new offensive aiming for Metz. Things are not going well for the Americans on Leyte, though, but they’re even worse for the Chinese as both Guilin and Liuzhou fall to the Japanese. As for the Soviets, they are busy making big plans for a gigantic offensive to drive in to Germany when the new year comes.
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November 7, 2023
Birth Gap, the future none of us expected
Elizabeth Nickson takes the warnings of infertility from BirthGap quite seriously:
Jordan Peterson’s face morphed through a series of changes as he realized that nine out of ten women who don’t have children, wanted them. Ready to blame the culture of narcissism, he stalled confused, wrestling his face to neutral. I knew that fact from experience. For the many women I know who don’t have children, it is an abiding sorrow. From country to country, class to class, race to race, the sorrow is coruscating and it is ignored or diminished.
Only one in ten women actually don’t want children. One in ten is infertile, but the rest who don’t have children and that is one-third of us and counting, wanted them. By the time they are in their 40’s and incapable, badly.
Steven F Shaw searches for answers in Birth Gap, his masterwork documentary, the first part of which you can watch here. The most obvious is that they waited too long, thinking it was possible, their “career” taking precedence. He interviews two prominent women in their late 30’s, both journalists. One of whom has a child, and having had one, wanted more but it was too late. “No one told us”, she said. Throughout her childhood and education, no one told her that the hammer would come down, that fertility drops off a cliff in your 30’s. That if you are 30 and childless, there is a 50% chance you won’t have children. The other, Megan McArdle, who writes for the Washington Post, left it too late. McArdle is a brilliant woman. If she didn’t know she was playing with fire, who could?
The catastrophic statistics run across all cultures but sub-Saharan Africa. Every industrialized country is racing to the bottom, which is to say extinction within four or five generations. Cities left to ruin, old people without help, decaying schools, hospitals, and no employees to be found. The unretrievable extinction of the culture and its people. I’ll leave it to you to follow Shaw’s math, but it is convincing. And he is by no means, alone in his analysis.
Europe, Japan and especially South Korea are by far the most in trouble. But Spain, Italy, the Scandis, are not far behind. America’s massive migration is masking the effect now, but, as Shaw doesn’t point out, but others have, immigrants quickly default to the current zeitgeist. Even in Muslim countries, pace Mark Steyn, women are choosing to not have children until too late. And forget multiples, even for the devout, it’s no longer on the cards.
To me, one underlying reason is the firehose of overpopulation propaganda that we have endured for the past fifty years. Women, in general, as kids, are good girls, accepting of authority, and compassionate. When told their desire for children is stressing the earth, they are more likely to accept that nonsense without question if it is coming from every authority figure in every sector of the culture. Today from kindergarten on, we are taught that we are a virus, a plague on the earth. Who among us, at the age of 15 or 25, can contravene that level of brainwashing? Contrast Peterson saying this week, “we can make the deserts bloom”. When was the last time you heard that sentiment from anyone in authority?
October 31, 2023
As we’re always told in a pious tone of voice, “violence never settles anything”
Chris Bray, ever the iconoclast, begs to differ:
One of the things everyone knows about Gaza is that the Israeli attack is just creating more violence, as the next generation of Palestinians watches the bombs fall. Inevitably, the story goes, the young are learning hate and rage, and will pay it forward. Here’s the upscale think tank version of the argument, under the headline, “Israel risks creating a newly traumatized and radicalized generation of Palestinians”:
What will remain of Gaza’s population, and among Palestinians elsewhere in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and inside Israel proper, will be a newly traumatized and radicalized generation of youth, none of whom were born or of voting age when Hamas was elected … As a result, Hamas’s self-declared raison d’etre — “resisting the [Israeli] occupation with all means and methods” — will only grow in the minds of Palestinian youth. This will render unsuccessful Israel’s attempts to eliminate Hamas militarily.
Here’s an example of the Twitter rando version, which you’ll see over and over again if you engage with social media at all:
But is that true? Without advocating for brutality, I find myself looking for historical examples and mostly coming up with the opposite. To start managing the “yes, but” up front, there are many ways of waging war, and the extractive nation-building warfare of an imperial constabulary — low-grade fighting, prolonged counterinsurgency without decisive violence — does seem to often lead to more violence and “blowback” over time. But what Israel is doing now in Gaza seems like something else entirely.
If this violence will create “the next generation of Hamas”, then the children of the Germans who were firebombed in Dresden and Hamburg should be constantly strapping on suicide vests and attacking Ramstein air base. After the Wounded Knee massacre, it shouldn’t be safe for white settlers to live near the Lakota, and South Dakota should be a hellscape. Or consider North Vietnam, which won its war: “The US carried out more than a million bombing raids during the 20-year conflict, dropping some 5 million tonnes of ordnance on the Southeast Asian country.” After the war, a substantial Vietnamese population resettled in California. Violence trains the next generation to hate, right? So the Vietnamese must constantly attack Orange County.
The horror of total war has mostly not seemed to produce more violence. It seems to have mostly left later generations brutalized and horrified, and highly unlikely to go on fighting. Waging war decisively seems to be historically … decisive? The experience of crushing defeat seems to be a cycle-breaker, and even a horrifyingly costly victory — as for the North Vietnamese — seems to limit the appetite of next generations for more war.
Japan nurtured a profoundly violent warrior culture for a long time, with the nation’s soldiers serving as brutal invaders and horrible occupiers, then faced a ghastly campaign of firebombing and two nuclear bombs. Japan no longer has a brutal martial culture; the next generations didn’t become the new warriors. The currently popular theory says that they had to: the children witnessing this horror will be the next generation of militants, because trauma teaches violence. Tomorrow’s Hamas comes from today’s JDAMs. The people who lost World War II don’t seem to prove that theory.
Someone is going to say in the comments that I have blood on my fangs, but the point isn’t to cheerlead for the killing in Gaza. The point is to consider evidence about what comes next, and to ask what the comparable examples are. Is it factually true that youth, traumatized by war, become the violent next generation? We ran this experiment a lot in the twentieth century, and I think we have some strong hints at a consistent answer.
As Robert Heinlein had retired Lt. Col. Jean V. Dubois say to his History and Moral Philosophy class in Starship Troopers:
Anyone who clings to the historically untrue — and thoroughly immoral — doctrine that “violence never settles anything” I would advise to conjure the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.
October 29, 2023
The Battle of Leyte Gulf – WW2 – Week 270 – October 28, 1944
World War Two
Published 28 Oct 2023This is it — the big showdown between US and Japanese Navies, and the largest naval battle ever fought in terms of total tonnage. American landings on Leyte itself are still in progress, and the Soviets’ Debrecen Operation comes to its end.
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October 28, 2023
Smith versus Smith: US Army/Marine relations in 1944
World War Two
Published 27 Oct 2023When Marine Corps General Holland “Howling Mad” Smith removed Infantry General Ralph Smith from command in 1944 during the Battle of Saipan, it began a controversy that soon snowballed, threatening to sabotage Army-Marine relations at a time when cooperation was the key to victory.
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October 22, 2023
SS Commando Coup in Hungary – WW2 – Week 269 – October 21, 1944
World War Two
Published 21 Oct 2023The Germans engineer a coup in Hungary to keep the Hungarian army in the war, but the Allies have finally entered Germany in force, taking Aachen in the west. The Soviets liberate Belgrade in the east, and launch new attacks in Baltics, and at the other end of the world come American landings in the Philippines, and the recall of Vinegar Joe Stilwell from China.
00:00 Intro
01:00 Recap
01:21 Raids on the Philippines
04:42 The Invasion of Leyte
06:11 Joe Stilwell is recalled from China
08:12 The Battle of Aachen
12:24 Battle of the Scheldt
14:03 Soviet attacks in the Baltics
16:23 Horthy’s fall- a coup in Hungary
19:45 Germans close in on Slovakia
21:55 Belgrade Liberated
24:47 Summary
25:01 Conclusion
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“Grandpa Nambu” Japanese Pistol
Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Nov 2016The 1902 “Grandpa” Nambu is one of the first wave of successful military automatic pistols, developed by Kijiro Nambu and his team over the course of five years, from 1897 to 1902. It was the first automatic pistol to be used by the Japanese military, although it was a private-purchase sidearm for officers and not formally purchased or issued by the military. It took several design cues from the C96 Mauser, in the form of a pivoting locking block and a bottlenecked cartridge.
The Grandpa was only made from 1902 until 1906, with less than 2400 examples produced in total — many of which were sold to Thailand. In 1906 a series of improvements were made to the gun, including increasing the size of the trigger and trigger guard, a swiveling lanyard ring, a slightly larger grip, new magazine, and deletion of the shoulder stock slot that had been standard on all previous Nambu pistols. The formal Japanese designation (Type A) did not change as a result, but in American collector parlance the new model became the “Papa” Nambu.
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