World War Two
Published 12 Feb 2022Operation KE, the Japanese evacuation of Guadalcanal, concludes this week and the campaign has been a big loss for the Japanese. The Axis forces are also withdrawing — and the Red Army advancing — in the Donbas and the Caucasus, closing in on both Kharkov and Rostov. And a front that’s been quiet for a while, the Burma front, begins heating up again with an Allied advance out of India.
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February 13, 2022
Victory at Guadalcanal – WW2 – 181 – February 12, 1943
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In full: Rowan Atkinson on free speech
Defend Free Speech
Published 15 Aug 2018The forerunner of the Defend Free Speech campaign was called “Reform Section 5”. This speech by Rowan Atkinson at the launch event in Parliament in 2012 should be heard by every politician, journalist and campaigner before they start calling for laws to silence those they regard as “extremists”.
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February 12, 2022
Victorian Vinegar Valentines
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 11 Feb 2022Hayman Sloe Gin: https://bit.ly/maxbottlescollection
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Bachelor’s Rose
Juice of a half a lemon
Juice of half a lime
Juice of half orange
White of an egg
25% raspberry syrup
75% Sloe gin
Fill glass with cracked ice.
Shake well, strain and serve.
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Subtitles: Jose Mendoza | IG @ worldagainstjose
PHOTO CREDITS
Sloe berries: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…#tastinghistory #valentinesday
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From the “it could actually be worse” file — royal succession alternatives
Chris Selley and Colby Cosh had an exchange on Twitter where Colby actually somehow made me appreciate Prince Charles a tiny bit:
For some reason, the Twitter UI is only showing a portion of the exchange here:
And here’s the part that ever-so-slightly improved my opinion of Charles, not for his own sake, but for succession reasons:
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February 10, 2022
MI6’s Secret War – WW2 – Spies & Ties 13
World War Two
Published 9 Feb 2022Britain’s MI6 is caught off guard when war breaks out. As the Germans advance across Western Europe MI6’s networks collapse, and Britain becomes almost blind. MI6 have their secret weapons at Bletchley Park but they now face a painful struggle to rebuild their eyes in Europe.
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HMCS Quebec – Guide 145
Drachinifel
Published 28 Sep 2019HMCS Quebec, formerly HMS/HMCS Uganda, is today’s other entry.
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February 9, 2022
In The Highest Tradition – Episode 1
British Army Documentaries
Published 18 Oct 2021[From the episode transcript – “Apart from discipline what emerges when you delve into British military tradition is that there’s no such entity as a British army. What you find is a confederation of regiments hopefully fighting on the same side all fiercely preserving their individuality by being as different from one another as possible.”]
First transmitted in 1989, this is the first episode in a six-part series that delves into the world of regimental tradition. This programme includes looks at the origins of Emperor Joseph Bonaparte’s chamber pot, a druid oration, and the story of a goat who escaped being eaten to become a regimental mascot.
© 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.
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February 8, 2022
Neil Young and the rebellion of “the Grumpy Old Woke Bros”
Julie Burchill on the (one hopes) last opportunity for elderly, wrinkly 60s and 70s rock stars to virtue signal their protests to a rapidly diminishing body of fans:
For a while now the generation gap has been making a comeback in politics in a way not seen since the youthquake of the 1960s. “Don’t trust anyone over 30” has become “OK Boomer”. Oldsters have been demonised for everything from Brexit to Covid. Personally, at 62, looking at the lives today’s teenagers can expect, I thank my lucky stars that I was young in the 1970s and 80s, when you could say what you liked and go where you wanted. But this dwindling of fun and freedom has as much to do with the stifling nature of woke culture as it does with the other virus.
So I wouldn’t blame teenagers if they were cross. But those doing the most to promote the alienation of young and old aren’t hot-blooded bright young things. They are old men who appear to identify as young, despite sharing the same unsavoury grey whiskers. Of course, if someone with a penis can be a woman, a greybeard can be a teenager. They’re the Grumpy Old Woke Bros.
We can trace this unhappy breed from the then 68-years-young Ian McEwan spluttering at an anti-Brexit rally in 2017: “A gang of angry old men, irritable even in victory, are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth. By 2019 the country could be in a receptive mood: 2.5million over-18-year-olds, freshly franchised and mostly Remainers; 1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves.” Since then the likes of Alexei Sayle, Billy Bragg and Stewart Lee have joined in from the monstrous regiment of woke entertainers, adding Damon Albarn (a youthful 53 – and an OBE, the rebel!) to their rankled ranks last week when he said of Taylor Swift “She doesn’t write her own songs”. (This isn’t the first time Albarn has had beef with young female pop stars. He said of Adele in 2015: “She’s very insecure”, to which she replied “It ended up being one of those ‘Don’t meet your idol’ moments … I was such a big Blur fan growing up. But it was sad, and I regret hanging out with him.”)
Though we think of grumpiness as being an English trait, let’s not forget Neil Young (76) who spat his dummy out last week over sharing Spotify with Joe Rogan. Young is a latecomer to the wonderful world of wokeness, whose welcome to the spotless ranks was somewhat marred by the emergence of a 1985 interview in which he backed Ronald Reagan’s gun control policy and added for good measure, AIDS having recently been discovered, “You go to a supermarket and you see a faggot behind the cash register – you don’t want him to handle your potatoes”.
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QotD: The East India Company’s rise to power
We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by an unstable sociopath – Clive.
In many ways the EIC was a model of corporate efficiency: 100 years into its history, it had only 35 permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history. For all the power wielded today by the world’s largest corporations – whether ExxonMobil, Walmart or Google – they are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company. Yet if history shows anything, it is that in the intimate dance between the power of the state and that of the corporation, while the latter can be regulated, it will use all the resources in its power to resist.
When it suited, the EIC made much of its legal separation from the government. It argued forcefully, and successfully, that the document signed by Shah Alam – known as the Diwani – was the legal property of the company, not the Crown, even though the government had spent a massive sum on naval and military operations protecting the EIC’s Indian acquisitions. But the MPs who voted to uphold this legal distinction were not exactly neutral: nearly a quarter of them held company stock, which would have plummeted in value had the Crown taken over. For the same reason, the need to protect the company from foreign competition became a major aim of British foreign policy.
The transaction depicted in the painting [Wiki] was to have catastrophic consequences. As with all such corporations, then as now, the EIC was answerable only to its shareholders. With no stake in the just governance of the region, or its long-term wellbeing, the company’s rule quickly turned into the straightforward pillage of Bengal, and the rapid transfer westwards of its wealth.
Before long the province, already devastated by war, was struck down by the famine of 1769, then further ruined by high taxation. Company tax collectors were guilty of what today would be described as human rights violations. A senior official of the old Mughal regime in Bengal wrote in his diaries: “Indians were tortured to disclose their treasure; cities, towns and villages ransacked; jaghires and provinces purloined: these were the ‘delights’ and ‘religions’ of the directors and their servants.”
Bengal’s wealth rapidly drained into Britain, while its prosperous weavers and artisans were coerced “like so many slaves” by their new masters, and its markets flooded with British products. A proportion of the loot of Bengal went directly into Clive’s pocket. He returned to Britain with a personal fortune – then valued at £234,000 – that made him the richest self-made man in Europe. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, a victory that owed more to treachery, forged contracts, bankers and bribes than military prowess, he transferred to the EIC treasury no less than £2.5m seized from the defeated rulers of Bengal – in today’s currency, around £23m for Clive and £250m for the company.
William Dalrymple, “The East India Company: The original corporate raiders”, Guardian, 2015-03-04.
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February 7, 2022
History Summarized: Vikings
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 14 Jul 2017Huge thanks to our friend Shad at Shadiversity! Check out his channel for historical weaponry and much more: https://www.youtube.com/user/shadmbrooks
Grab your swords and hop in your longboats, because it’s time to learn a thing or two about the Vikings!
This video was produced with assistance from the Boston University Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.
Thanks to patron Karl Erik L Hoftaniska for suggesting this topic!
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From the comments:
Finn Chitwood
4 years ago
In the words of a brilliant Icelandic magazine: “Viking was a seasonal, temporary occupation, not an ethnicity.”
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February 5, 2022
A new biography of Nigel Farage
For a man who’s never been elected to Parliament, Nigel Farage has been a major mover-and-shaker in British politics. In the Literary Review, Steve Richards reviews One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage by Michael Crick:
Most political figures come and go. Nigel Farage, in contrast, seems always to be around, close to the centre of the political stage. Sometimes he is leading a political party. Occasionally he is setting up a new one. Between such roles he is on television. Currently, the former leader of UKIP and the Brexit Party hosts a nightly show on GB News.
The consequences of Farage’s ubiquity have been seismic, reshaping the UK and the wider political landscape. He sought a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU and then a hard Brexit, and ultimately got everything he wanted. The Conservative Party’s embrace of a form of English nationalism was partly a response to the threat that Farage posed. The near-silence of the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, on the subject of Brexit is a form of vindication for him. Starmer knows that Brexit is having calamitous consequences but does not dare to say so. No wonder Michael Crick concludes that “it’s hard to think of any other politician in the last 150 years who has had so much impact on British history without being a senior member of one of the major parties at the time”.
Among Crick’s admirable passions is his interest in those individuals or forces that have shaped the major political parties from outside the mainstream. He wrote an important book on Militant, the left-wing group that in the 1980s sought to infiltrate the Labour Party and for a time made life hellish for Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, the two party leaders during that stormy decade. His biography of Jeffrey Archer, the Conservative MP who became a bestselling author and then a convicted prisoner, was revelatory. Now he has set his sights on Farage, who has never been an MP and yet has been such a prominent figure in recent years.
As Crick always does with his subjects, he has researched meticulously every twist and turn in Farage’s life. He regrets that his investigations were constrained by the pandemic. He need not worry too much. His diligence has enabled him seemingly to have unearthed every internal dispute in UKIP and the Brexit Party, along with the eccentric figures who lined up on different sides in them. The characters that emerge would fit neatly into a Dickens novel. One of the most unsavoury right-wingers to feature in the book is now an avid supporter of the Green Party, lives in Germany and is passionately opposed to Brexit – a novelistic metamorphosis. We are also reintroduced to Farage’s old friend Godfrey Bloom, a UKIP MEP and economics spokesman, who in 2013 famously hit Crick with a party conference brochure as the journalist pursued him down the street after he had made characteristically indiscreet and outrageous remarks in a speech to UKIP members.
This book is full of fights, usually between party members. We see Farage repeatedly falling out with other potential leaders. More prominent members who cannot hide their real views in public have to be admonished. Some flirt with the BNP. Even during the triumphant 2016 referendum campaign, there were two pro-Brexit camps, one led by Farage and the other by Dominic Cummings. Farage and Cummings loathe each other and their campaign groups fought bitterly for pre-eminence. This is the most striking theme of the book. UKIP and the Brexit Party, which Farage set up in 2019 to campaign for a hard Brexit, were utterly dysfunctional most of the time. They make the UK’s main political parties, all going through various existential crises at the moment, seem models of smooth, sophisticated professionalism. The amateurism extended well beyond the eccentric characters near or close to the top. Neither party offered coherent policy programmes beyond opposition to the UK’s membership of the EU.
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
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Centurion – Tiger Tank’s Nemesis
Mark Felton Productions
Published 22 Oct 2020The Centurion, the famous Cold War tank, was actually developed to take on the dreaded German Tiger in WW2. Find out whether they ever met on the battlefield in 1945.
Dr. Mark Felton is a well-known British historian, the author of 22 non-fiction books, including bestsellers Zero Night and Castle of the Eagles, both currently being developed into movies in Hollywood. In addition to writing, Mark also appears regularly in television documentaries around the world, including on The History Channel, Netflix, National Geographic, Quest, American Heroes Channel and RMC Decouverte. His books have formed the background to several TV and radio documentaries. More information about Mark can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fe…
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Credits: David Holt; Simon Q.; Tony Hisgett; Danie van der Merwe; Oliver Gottlob.
Thumbnail: The Tank Museum
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QotD: I get a faint sense that he’s not a fan …
His new band, anyway, consists of four competent but unimaginative player-songwriters, and him. And the album’s a turgid lukewarm brew of reworked Oasis numbers which Liam’s brother Noel, every bit as ugly, every bit as unpleasant but a fraction less stupid would have rejected; the band switch between a dazzling selection of Rickenbaker and Gretsch guitars — funny, isn’t it, how a fiddler will manage with one Stradivarius, Robert Johnson played only a two-dollar guitar, Rory Gallagher the same battered old Strat and yet the current lot switch from one expensive instrument to another between songs, maybe even during songs, the rock’n’roll of Consumerism — to produce the same sounds, the same chords, the same figures over and over, to sing the same harmonies, the same shouty, angry, miserable, hateful, retarded adolescent drivel, tripe, every fucking bar of it; Liam, stooped inside his ugliness, howling and frothing his whining, meaningless doggerel; forty year old men, there oughta be a law against them doing this shit. Liam, rock hero caricature posturing, grunts at one point that this is whaditsallabout knoworramean, fucking keeping on playing and touring, selling the albums, to the kids, otherwise I’d end up working in fucking McDonalds, knoworramean; setting his sights way too high, there, overestimating his personal qualities, I mean, Billy Bragg might get a job in McD’s, on the mop bucket, Paul Weller, maybe, but they wouldn’t let Gallagher within a hundred yards.
Ishmael, “The Sunday Ishmael 31/10/2021”, Call Me Ishmael, 2021-10-31.
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February 4, 2022
The Origins of the SAS – WW2 Special Episode
World War Two
Published 3 Feb 2022“Who dares, wins”. Nowadays the British SAS — Special Air Service — is considered one of the best special forces in the world. Yet its wartime origins are shrouded in mysteries and legends. From the first ideas of top-secret “special raiding squadrons”, to the first raids in North Africa accompanying the Long Range Desert Group, the SAS’s beginnings resemble one big experiment. An experiment from which a truly legendary special service would emerge.
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February 3, 2022
Colonies Lead the Way: Charger-Loading Lee Enfield MkI India Pattern
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Sep 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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While the Indian Army was looked down upon by much of the British military, it saw much more combat service than its European counterpart. The Indian Army was actually faster than the British to recognize and adopt a number of small arms improvements, and the CLLE MkI India Pattern is a good example.
When the mobile charger guide was first adopted by the British military, no effort was made to retrofit earlier rifles with it. The Indians, however, saw the advantage and began to convert Long Lees to the Charger-Loading configuration as early as 1905. Between then and 1909, some 22,000 of these MkI I.P. rifles were assembled at the Ishapore Arsenal. Following the adoption of the fixed charger bridge, a MkII I.P. became the new standard, with the fixed guide instead of the mobile one.
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