World War Two
Published 12 Oct 2022This week the Nazis go on the record about their genocide of the Jews. Meanwhile the Jews in Denmark are coming closer to safety, and the Roman Jews are again at peril.
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October 13, 2022
The Nazis’ Justification for the Genocide – October 9, 1943 – WAH 081
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October 10, 2022
Chinese Warlords and the Royal Canadian Navy – WW2 – OOTF 028
World War Two
Published 9 Oct 2022In today’s episode of Out of the Foxholes, we discuss the role of Chinese warlords played in the war against Japan, while also shining a bit more light on the Canadian Navy and its impact on WW2.
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Look at Life — Trouble Shooters (1964)
PauliosVids
Published 20 Nov 2018
From the comments:
David Mills
1 year ago
We never wore berets but jungle hats. This is an honest attempt to illustrate their role but so obviously, painfully stage managed. In reality, it was a hot, sweaty, stinking environment with constant tensions. Contacts were few and far between. Going into the IBAN long houses and chatting with the headman (Kampong Ketua) was fascinating, useful and, for the short period, relaxing. Between June 1965 and Aug 1982 I had four tours in the area. Learning Malay was essential and welcomed by the indigenous population.Iolis
1 year ago
The late Paddy Ashdown at 6.36. Later in life he would becone leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrat Party. He sadly died on 22 December 2018.
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October 9, 2022
Could the Soviets Cut Off Crimea? – WW2 – 215 – October 8, 1943
World War Two
Published 8 Oct 2022The Germans booby-trapped Naples when they evacuated last week and local civilians now pay the price. In the Mediterranean, Kos falls to the Germans while Corsica is liberated by the French. There is action all along the Dnieper in the USSR, and the Australians advance in New Guinea, and the Japanese evacuate Vella Lavella in the Solomons.
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October 2, 2022
Smolensk and Naples Liberated! Both in ruins – WW2 – 214 – October 1, 1943
World War Two
Published 1 Oct 2022Major prizes are taken by the Allies this week on two fronts — Naples in Italy and Smolensk in the USSR, but they are advancing all over the Eastern Front, across the Italian peninsula, and in the South Seas, but the enemy is leaving a trail of destruction as he pulls back.
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QotD: US intelligence failures in the Tet Offensive
[In The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War, James] Wirtz argues that Tet was not an intelligence failure in the sense that “the Allies” (his term) had no idea it was coming. US analysts had lots of information indicating a pending attack — indeed, sometimes too much information. Nor was it a complete failure to analyze the available information — lots of US analysts were in the ballpark about the size, direction, and even timing of the attack, and one analyst, Joseph Hovey, produced a report that predicted the whole thing with astonishing accuracy. Rather — and this is my term, not Wirtz’s — it was a failure of narrative.
By summer 1967, MACV (for convenience) had convinced itself that the North Vietnamese no longer had the resources to win the war militarily, and they knew it. This conclusion was based in large part on metrics coming in from field commanders. Specifically, MACV argued that by mid-1967, the Communists had passed what they, MACV, termed the “inflection point” — the North Vietnamese were losing more forces than they could replace, which led to a significant decrease in NVA / VC fighting capacity, plummeting morale, etc.
At no point, it seemed, did they question this assumption, or the bases of this assumption, the key to which was: Kill ratio. We all know how that goes, no need to get into the weeds, but note that everything hinges on the North Vietnamese not only losing the war, but knowing themselves to be losing.
[…]
So, too, with ever-increasing reports that the Viet Cong were going to launch major attacks on South Vietnamese cities. Since US analysts assumed the VC didn’t have the forces for that, these reports were dismissed as propaganda.
Finally, the assumption that the NVA knew themselves to be losing was seemingly confirmed with the siege of the big US firebase at Khe Sanh. It shared a similar geography with Dien Bien Phu, and when some of the same units that had participated in the original battle showed up to take on the Marines, US analysts concluded that the Communists, desperate for a psychological victory, were trying to make another Dien Bien Phu out of Khe Sanh.
At most, US analysts reasoned, Khe Sahn was another Battle of the Bulge — a last-ditch “saving throw”-type attack by an almost-beaten enemy. Much like German forces in the Ardennes, then, the North Vietnamese would attack the Americans, because they were the strongest part of the Allies, and therefore the most immediate military threat.
In fact, almost the exact opposite was true, pretty much all the way down the line. The NVA’s plan was to attack ARVN (the South Vietnamese Army) because they were the weakest, and would be even weaker during Tet, when half of them would be on furlough. But ARVN wasn’t out on the perimeter and along the DMZ. They were in the cities. The whole point of the attack on Khe Sanh (and of a whole series of skirmishes called “the border battles”) was to keep US forces out on the perimeter and away from the cities.
It worked spectacularly, too — even as Tet was unfolding, Gen. Westmoreland assumed it was a diversion, to draw American troops away from Khe Sanh. Half the country had been overrun before Westy began to think maybe Khe Sanh wasn’t the target after all; he only really believed it when the NVA broke off the siege and withdrew.
It was Narrative uber alles.
Severian, “Book Rec: Tet, Intelligence Failure”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-30.
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October 1, 2022
American Empire, question mark
An interview with Niall Ferguson in the Dartmouth Review by Lintaro Donovan revisits Ferguson’s 2005 book Colossus in light of what has happened during the nearly two decades since it was published:
TDR: In your 2005 book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, you advance the thesis that the United States is an empire in denial and that such denial will be our undoing, both domestically and abroad. Does that thesis still hold in the world of 2022?
NF: I think it has withstood quite well the test of nearly 20 years. If you recall, the analysis was that the United States was trying essentially an imperial enterprise in Afghanistan and Iraq and that there were three deficits that were going to make it fail. There was the manpower deficit, because people really did not want to spend that much time in Afghanistan and Iraq – hence the short tours of duty. There was the fiscal deficit, which was already obviously a problem and has only gotten worse. And then there was the attention deficit. The prediction was that the US [BREAK] public would become disillusioned with these endeavors just as it became disillusioned with Vietnam. And if anything, the surprising thing is how long it took to get out of Afghanistan.
I wouldn’t have predicted it would be 2021. I expected it sooner than that. But I think that the overall framing of the US as an empire-in-denial works because it’s so deeply rooted in the way Americans think about themselves and the language that their leaders use. What was odd was that some neo-conservatives back then really were willing to say, “We’re an empire now”.
Of course, it kind of blew them up politically so that they’re now an irrelevant bunch of never-Trumpers. So I feel that book stood up remarkably well to the test of time. I’d stick by it.
TDR: What I’m hearing from your answer is that our denial is sort of endemic to what Americans are and that there were issues that were already present before the invasion of Iraq. Do you think that there’s any personality in American public life today who might be able to get us out of our denial and fix these issues that you’re talking about?
NF: No, because I think, if anything, the kind of aversion to empire has grown on both the left and the right. And so you have different versions of it.
Those wings, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the Trumpian wing of the Republican Party, are much stronger than they were then. I don’t think we are going to see any revival until the US suffers the kind of attack that it suffered at Pearl Harbor or 9/11.
Until there’s a punch landed, what will happen is that the US will try to exercise power through indirect means like sanctions or getting Ukrainians to fight Russians or arming the Taiwanese. And, in that sense, I think we’ve reverted to a Cold War playbook without calling it a cold war.
The problem is that we aren’t as far ahead [of China] economically and technologically as we were relative to the Soviet Union. If you’re doing a cold war with China, you have to reckon with quite a formidable antagonist, but that I think is where we are.
It’s amazing how far there is now a bipartisan consensus that China’s the problem. The continuities from the Trump to Biden Administration are very striking in that respect. I don’t see that changing until something bad happens, whether it’s a showdown over Taiwan that the US actually loses, or the collapse of Ukraine, which I guess is a conceivable if now unlikely scenario, or another terrorist attack, though I think that’s not especially likely these days.
The other thing to watch out for is the Middle East. Basically, as in the Cold War, you’ve got the potential for a crisis to happen. The problem for the US is that it’s quite overstretched. If there’s a crisis in Eastern Europe and a crisis in the Far East, say Taiwan, and one in the Middle East, then the US is going to be completely unable to respond to all of those.
It’s already in the position that it can’t give Stinger and Javelin missiles to the Taiwanese, because they’ve already been given to the Ukrainians and we can’t actually make that many new ones. It feels like we are doing Cold War but with quite a bit more overstretch than was true certainly in the 1980s.
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September 25, 2022
Red Army Reaches the Dnieper – WW2 – 213 – September 24, 1943
World War Two
Published 24 Sep 2022Benito Mussolini proclaims a new fascist republic in Italy, but this time it is a full puppet state to Germany. There is scattered fighting around Italy and the Dodecanese — including a massacre of Italian POWs, but the big Allied advances this week are the Australians in New Guinea and the Soviets retaking their own territory. They take ground, in fact, from near Smolensk all the way south to the Sea of Azov.
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September 21, 2022
QotD: Why postwar western economic and humanitarian “interventions” almost always failed
Prior to the Cold War, America’s interference in other countries’ internal affairs was practically nonexistent outside of the Caribbean where America’s preoccupation was with the stability in the region. What went on in Egypt, Thailand, Argentina, or Greece was none of our business, nor did we frankly care. However, having just survived the cataclysm of WWII, and the realization that Communism was a danger bent on world domination, and that each country that became Communist made that possibility much more likely changed that laissez faire attitude 180 degrees. Whereas NATO was formed for the purpose of deterring a military attack on Western Europe by the Soviet Union (the generals mentally fighting the last war as is always the case, not realizing that the war now was ideological and propagandistic rather than military), diplomats began to question how to best combat Communist insurgencies in the Third World. The arrived (wrong) conclusion was that the reason a country became Communist was because the dirt-poor people were so desperate that they became Marxists in order to improve their lives, so if the West helped poor countries economically Communists could not gain a foothold. As such, they ignored the fact that most Communist movements are organized and headed not by poor people, but by a cadre of power-hungry middle-class intellectuals.
As has been mentioned, the first approach was with foreign aid. The second was with military intervention, in Korea, Vietnam, Santo Domingo, Grenada, and Lebanon. Although such interventions were mostly successful, they carried a heavy price as American blood was spilled in foreign countries. America’s supposed allies hardly helped at all, including the citizens of the countries (Korea and Vietnam) that themselves were in danger of being conquered by Communist forces.
Armando Simón, “Schlimmbesserung“, New English Review, 2022-06-16.
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September 19, 2022
Albania – Hitler’s Latest Ally? – WAH 078 – September 18, 1943
World War Two
Published 18 Sep 2022The German Nazi Genocide of the Jews surpasses four million deaths, while the Soviet Union and US step up oppression against some their own citizens.
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September 18, 2022
Jailbreak! Mussolini on the Loose Again! – WW2 – 212 – September 17, 1943
World War Two
Published 17 Sep 2022
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September 16, 2022
Look at Life — East of Suez (1966)
PauliosVids
Published 20 Nov 2018More than 50,000 British soldiers, sailors and airmen police the rivers and jungles of Borneo.
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September 11, 2022
The Allies’ Latest Victory – WW2 – 211 – September 10, 1943
World War Two
Published 10 Sep 2022Dwight Eisenhower publicly announces the secret armistice signed last week, and Italy is now officially out of the war. The Italian fleet sails for Malta and Allied captivity. The Allies have landed in force in Southern Italy and they do face some heavy opposition from German forces — who have no intention of giving up Italy. In the USSR, though, the Soviets continue liberating territory all over Ukraine as they force the Germans back to the Dnieper River.
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September 8, 2022
Chinese Type 56 AK-47 (Shooting and History)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Sep 2016One of the most common types of AK rifle in existence today is the Chinese Type 56 in its several variations, although very few of those rifles are in the United States in authentic full-auto form. This particular one was captured by a US soldier in the Vietnam War, who brought it back and registered it, making it a fully transferrable gun.
The Chinese received the technical package for the AK (and also the SKS, among other weapons) from the Soviet Union in the 1950s, as part of the USSR’s policy of providing military and technical aid to other nations sympathetic to the Communist cause (although a rift would grow between the USSR and China later). China would manufacture tens of millions of AK rifles, both of this milled receiver type (the Type 3 style) and the later stamped AKM pattern. The standard fixed-stock rifles like this one were fitted with under-folding spike bayonets. Folding stocked types were also made, both underfolding (Type 56-1) and side folding (Type 56-2). These weapons have become extremely prolific, and can be found in virtually any significant international conflict zone to this day.
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September 5, 2022
Amon Göth: The Super Nazi – WAH 076 – September 4, 1943
World War Two
Published 4 Sep 2022While the Allies give up on the first Battle of Berlin, Amon Göth goes on a murderous rampage in the Tarnow Ghetto.
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