World War Two
Published 13 Jul 2021How did Germans with Jewish heritage still serve in the Luftwaffe? And what happened to the Allied POW’s from the German invasions of France and Belgium? And what the hell happened with those tiny Vichy islands near Canada? We answer all of this in today’s Out of the Foxholes.
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July 14, 2021
Jewish Luftwaffe Officers, Allied POW’s, and Vichy Islands near Canada – WW2 – OOTF 023
July 7, 2021
Poland’s Forgotten Spy War against the Nazis – WW2 – Spies & Ties 05
World War Two
Published 6 Jul 2021The Polish played a big part in cracking the Enigma codes. From there, the Polish spy and intelligence operation became even bigger.
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June 14, 2021
How To Defend A Star Fortress Forever
SandRhoman History
Published 13 Jun 2021Thanks to Audible for sponsoring this video! Start listening with a 30-day Audible trial. Choose one audiobook and two Audible Originals absolutely free: http://audible.com/sandrhoman or text sandrhoman to 500-500.
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Sources:
Hoppe, S., s.v. “Festungsbau”, in: Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit.
Lynn, J. A., “States in Conflict 1661-1763”, in: Parker, G. (Ed.), The Cambridge History of Warfare, Cambridge 2005.
Lynn, J. A., “The trace itallienne and the Growth of Armies”, in: Rogers, C. J. (Ed.), The Military Revolution Debate. Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe, Boulder / San Francisco / Oxford 1995.
Ortenburg, G., Waffe und Waffengebrauch im Zeitalter der Landsknechte (Heerwesen der Neuzeit, Abt. 1, Bd. 1) Koblenz 1984.
Parker, G., “The Limits to Revolutions in Military Affairs: Maurice of Nassau, the Battle of Nieuwpoort (1600), and the Legacy”, in The Journal of Military History, 71;2, 2007; S. 331 – 372.
Rogers, C.J. / Tallet F. (editors), European Warfare, 1350–1750, 2010.
Van Nimwegen, O., The Dutch Army and the Military Revolutions, 1588-1688.
June 13, 2021
Sevastopol Must Fall! – WW2 – 146 – June 13, 1942
World War Two
Published 12 Jun 2021It’s a week of starts and stops. The Battle of Sevastopol kicks into high gear, and the Battle of Gazala enters its third phase. And what is going on in the Pacific just one week after Midway?
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June 12, 2021
Normandy – 1944 | Movietone Moment | 11 June 2021
British Movietone
Published 11 Jun 2021On this day in 1944, five days after the D-Day landing, the allied forces converged in Normandy. Here is a British Movietone report covering the event.
More and more reinforcements and supplies arrive in Normandy each day. In the skies Allied air power continues to bomb and strafe the enemy. Captured German film shows Rommel and von Rundstedt visiting the vast concrete fortifications on the coast which were thought to be impassable. Mr Churchill arrived onboard HMS Kelvin and was greeted by General Montgomery as he came ashore.
Cut story – Dusk or dawn shot of destroyer with sun rising or sinking in background. Sunrise with armada in fore. Yanks board LCIs. Shots of LCTs. Beached equipment unloaded. GV of activity on beach. British troops of LTC. CU Tedder on bridge of ship. GS of Ramsay & Vian. Tedder, Ramsay & Vian walk along raft into camera. Elevated shot of activity on beach, very good. Troops build airstrip, bulldozers etc. at work. Plane takes off. Camera gun – shooting up trains, transport, & other targets, several large explosions. British pass through street, Frenchmen look on. AFU – British soldiers at look-out with field glasses. Troops (Canadian or British) run through fields & wooded country. Troops through street, French clap. Army transport passes through street, directed by soldier. Yanks march through streets. POW along roads, & over beach, wade out to LCT, one attempts to pull up sock while walking. Captured German reel GS of Rommel & Rundstedt. CU Rommel. SCU of coastal guns, & various shots of fortifications, pillboxes etc. Rommel & Rundstedt walk round inspecting same, look at double barrel coastal gun. SCU of barrel of guns, & various shots of Atlantic Wall (AFU British troops knock part of “Wall” down which they have captured). Eisenhower, Marshall & Arnold on bridge of ship. GV of destroyer Kelvin at sea – very good. CU Churchill in Trinity House uniform, wearing glasses. Churchill assists Brooke with “Mae West” life jackets. Both seated on deck Kelvin at sea. CU Churchill. Kelvin passes Nelson, Ramillies & other warships also large part of armada. Churchill transfers … ships, sailors cheer as he leaves. CU Churchill. CU Smuts both very good. Churchill, Smuts & Brooke in “Duck” [DUKW]. Churchill leans over side talks to Montgomery, Churchill alights from “Duck”. Shakes hands with Monty. The above four in group on beach, walk through crowds of soldiers. AFU – Monty stands on raised platform addresses troops (silent) Monty & Churchill through crowds. Churchill with Monty & climbs into Jeep. SEE STORY NUMBER 44914/2 & 44914/3 FOR CUTS
AP Has HD copy – HD ProRes 422 4:3 – 24fpsDisclaimer: British Movietone is an historical collection. Any views and expressions within either the video or metadata of the collection are reproduced for historical accuracy and do not represent the opinions or editorial policies of the Associated Press.
You can license this footage for commercial use through AP Archive – the story number bm44914
#Normandy #WWII #DDay
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Sail to Steam to Iron – Half a Century of Change
Drachinifel
Published 19 Dec 2018Today we look at the development of warships from 1815 to 1860.
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June 6, 2021
Turning Point of History: D-Day Juno Beach
ch1201
Published 8 Nov 2014Examines Canada’s role on June 6th, 1944 and the advance through Normandy, France.
May 26, 2021
QotD: Modern architecture is ugly … or worse
The British author Douglas Adams had this to say about airports: “Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of special effort.” Sadly, this truth is not applicable merely to airports: it can also be said of most contemporary architecture.
Take the Tour Montparnasse, a black, slickly glass-panelled skyscraper, looming over the beautiful Paris cityscape like a giant domino waiting to fall. Parisians hated it so much that the city was subsequently forced to enact an ordinance forbidding any further skyscrapers higher than 36 meters.
Or take Boston’s City Hall Plaza. Downtown Boston is generally an attractive place, with old buildings and a waterfront and a beautiful public garden. But Boston’s City Hall is a hideous concrete edifice of mind-bogglingly inscrutable shape, like an ominous component found left over after you’ve painstakingly assembled a complicated household appliance. In the 1960s, before the first batch of concrete had even dried in the mold, people were already begging preemptively for the damn thing to be torn down. There’s a whole additional complex of equally unpleasant federal buildings attached to the same plaza, designed by Walter Gropius, an architect whose chuckle-inducing surname belies the utter cheerlessness of his designs. The John F. Kennedy Building, for example — featurelessly grim on the outside, infuriatingly unnavigable on the inside — is where, among other things, terrified immigrants attend their deportation hearings, and where traumatized veterans come to apply for benefits. Such an inhospitable building sends a very clear message, which is: the government wants its lowly supplicants to feel confused, alienated, and afraid.
Brianna Rennix and Nathan J. Robinson, “Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture”, Current Affairs, 2017-10-31.
April 23, 2021
Treaties and War, The Washington Naval Conference
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 17 Aug 2017The History Guy remembers the Washington Naval Conference, a watershed in diplomacy.
The episode discusses events and shows some artwork depicting warships, which some viewers may find disturbing. All events are described for educational purposes and are presented in historical context.
The History Guy uses images that are in the Public Domain. As photographs of actual events are often not available, I will sometimes use photographs of similar events or objects for illustration.
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The History Guy: Five Minutes of History is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.
Awesome The History Guy merchandise is available at:
teespring.com/stores/the-history-guyThe episode is intended for educational purposes. All events are presented in historical context.
#ushistory #thehistoryguy #militaryhistory
April 16, 2021
Following Bienville: The Founding of New Orleans
Atun-Shei Films
Published 15 Apr 2021The origin story of New Orleans is a tale of rampant corruption, unchecked greed, fiendish vice, and gross incompetence – not much has changed!
Join me on an epic journey of discovery as I trace the route of the first French explorers to this area by paddling down Bayou St. John and walking overland to the French Quarter, exploring the geography and history of the city along the way.
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~REFERENCES~[1] B.F. French. Historical Collections of Louisiana and Florida, Including Translations of Original Manuscripts Relating to Their Discovery and Settlement (1875). Albert Mason, Page 24-25
[2] Lawrence N. Powell. The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (2012). Harvard University Press, Page 11-15
[3] Philomena Hauck. Bienville: Father of Louisiana (1998). Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Page 12-13
[4] Richard Campanella. “Link to the Past: From French Colonists to the Beginnings of Jazz, Spanish Fort Traces its History Across Three Centuries” (2019). Times Picayune/New Orleans Advocate https://richcampanella.com/wp-content…
[5] Hauck, Page 23-25
[6] Hauck, Page 6
[7] Hauck, Page 44-57
[8] Powell, Page 25-32
[9] Richard Campanella. Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans (2008). Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Page 109-110
[10] Campanella, Page 77-78
[11] Andrea P. White. “Archaeology of the New Orleans Area.” 64Parishes https://64parishes.org/entry/archaeol…
[12] Campanella, Page 111
[13] Powell, Page 43-51
[14] Powell, Page 68-73
[15] Karen Ordahl Kupperman. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados by Richard Ligon (2011). Hackett Publishing Company, Page 19
[16] Hauck, Page 89
[17] Powell, Page 56-58
April 13, 2021
The Washington Naval Treaty – The parties, the motives, the negotiations, the loophole abuse…
Drachinifel
Published 10 Feb 2021Today we look at the Washington Naval Treaty, why it came to be, the broad aspects of negotiation, what it meant and how people turned it into a legal pretzel.
Sources:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/pre-war/19…
www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00KIXWLE2
www.amazon.co.uk/Kaigun-Strategy-Technology-Imperial-1887-1941-ebook/dp/B01DRYEMH2
www.amazon.co.uk/Treaty-Cruisers-RE-ISSUE-International-Competition/dp/1526748509
www.amazon.co.uk/Naval-Policy-Between-Wars-Anglo-American/dp/1473877407Free naval photos and more – www.drachinifel.co.uk
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Episodes in podcast format – https://soundcloud.com/user-21912004
From the comments:
Gamebook
2 months ago (edited)
The Americans didn’t want to build the ships, but could have afforded to do so.
The Japanese did want to build the ships, but couldn’t have afforded to do so.
The French wanted other people to think that they wanted to build the ships and could afford to do so, but in fact they didn’t want to and couldn’t have afforded to do so.
The Italians did not want the French to build the ships, and thought they had prevented them from doing so, but in fact see above. The Italians themselves could not afford to build the ships any more than the French could.
The British sort of wanted to build the ships, and could sort of have afforded to do so, but would rather everyone just restrained themselves as that would leave the Royal Navy in a better position than they could have paid for in the event of another naval arms race.
QotD: The Hundred Years’ War and information velocity
One of the reasons the “Hundred Years’ War” lasted so long, they’ll tell you first off, was that it was punctuated by long periods of (relative) peace. Another was the inability of medieval militaries to conquer and hold territory — the feudal system really doesn’t work for garrisons. Most important, though, was the fact that the “countries” fighting were no such thing. In medieval parlance, “France” and “England” meant “the person of the monarch, plus his immediate feudal retinue.” Your average peasant might’ve been aware, in some vague theoretical way, that his lord’s lord’s lord owed homage to some guy called “Edward III” or “Jean II,” but unless ol’ Whatzisface was actually marching through with an army, it didn’t matter in the slightest. “France” was as abstract a notion as “Christendom” …
… at least in the early phases of the war. Low information velocity meant that even big changes at the top — the capture of the King at Poitiers, say — didn’t have much impact out in the sticks. By the time you found out about it, you’d been “subjects” of “England” for months, years, decades. Whatever, it didn’t matter, since the whole thing worked like loan sharking in Mob movies. Does it matter if it’s Rocco or Vito who’s collecting the vig this week? Maybe the Godfather got rubbed out, and now all the under-bosses from the Solozzo family report to the new capos of the Corleone family. None of that matters to you. All you know is, the new guy is going to break your legs if you don’t pay, same as the old guy would’ve done.
By the war’s later phases, though, the velocity of information had dramatically increased. Necessity is the mother of invention, and the French have always had a knack for cultural propaganda. Joan of Arc wasn’t worth much, militarily, but it’s one hell of a story, the kind that rallies troops. Nobody cares who the legal King of France is — that is, the guy whose name the lawyers finally hack out of the undergrowth of however-many family trees. The guy who is divinely anointed, though, by a prophet, in person? That’s a big deal. That’s the kind of story that spreads like lightning; the kind of story that makes “France” far more than just the name at the top of the org chart.
Moreover, the new guy — the divinely ordained guy — is competent. You can tell, because he’s winning. Your average feminist scholar knows as much about strategy as she does about heterosexuality, so we can ignore all their claims about Joan’s military genius. There are times when total incompetence is, in fact, a virtue, and this was one of them. Joan’s military strategy didn’t make any sense, because she wasn’t thinking in military terms — which is why it worked. Victory followed victory, until the English got wise … by which point it didn’t matter, because the Dauphin had been crowned as Charles VII and had solidified power behind him. In fact, you don’t have to be Machiavelli to see that Joan’s capture and execution by the English were all to Charles’s benefit — Charles gained a martyr to his cause, but only after Henry VI finally managed to beat a little girl. Information velocity guaranteed that both stories were all over France almost from the minute they happened.
Over in England, meanwhile, it was their turn to have an insane, incompetent king, and we know how that turned out. The point is, you can have a bad king. You can have a mad king. You can even have a bad, mad king and things can still work out ok — see Charles VI, who remained King of France for 42 years of the Hundred Years’ War despite believing he was made of glass — provided your mad, bad king reigns in a period of low information velocity. Not that things were hunky-dory in France from 1380-1422 — you know, Agincourt and all that — but the Charles VII who was anointed by God via Joan of Arc was the mad, bad guy’s direct lineal descendant. Charles VII’s main antagonist, Henry VI, was also a mad, bad king, and his successor, Henry Tudor … well, you know. I don’t think it’s an accident that the printing press was invented in the 1440s and made its first appearance in England in 1476, in the nastiest part of the Wars of the Roses.
Severian, “Crises”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-25.
April 9, 2021
Leading the Resistance – WW2 – Gallery 03
World War Two
Published 8 Apr 2021Under the violent occupation by Axis forces, dozens all over the globe resisted or took up arms to fight for the survival of their nation, ethnicity, ideology or ideals.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
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Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesHosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Joram Appel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Miki Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)Colorizations by:
Mikołaj Uchman
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/Sources:
Marxist Internet Archive
Picture of Tito during a Partisan gathering, courtesy of Музеј Старе Херцеговине
Yad Vashem 75FO4, 4613/899, 4248/20, 1605/91
Bundesarchiv
USHMM
IWM NA 15129Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Phoenix Tail – “At the Front”
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
Hakan Eriksson – “Epic Adventure Theme 4”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Fabien Tell – “Last Point of Safe Return”
Howard Harper-Barnes – “London”
Rannar Sillard – “March Of The Brave 10”Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
April 7, 2021
Bring back the … guillotine?
I’d always generally assumed that Colby Cosh was a libertarian-leaning chap, but here he is banging on the table for executing criminals with that revolutionary French device, the guillotine:
The history of the death penalty in the English-speaking world looks extremely bizarre from any vantage point in the year 2021. The electric chair, now abolished throughout the United States, has always been a stupid, barbarous idea: it sprouted from a time when electricity was a fashionable new technology, and then just kind of stuck around for a century. Gas chamber arrangements came and went.
Hanging, which is still employed in Japan, has centuries of technique behind it, but is recognizably a holdover from a period when the risk of prolonged death was considered a feature, not a bug. Now the U.S. depends on lethal injection methods, some of them antiquated or illogical, that are very capable of being screwed up.
And in the meantime, the guillotine had its foolproof two-century run in France. The famous Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was a revolutionary opponent of capital punishment who advocated for the device as being more humane than existing methods. Can this be argued against even now? Measurement of the suffering involved with various methods of execution (or euthanasia) involves more uncertainty than anyone likes to admit, but patients receiving lethal injection, whether at their own request or the law’s, do receive sedation before actually being administered a fatal substance. The maximum duration of suffering in a beheading is a matter of seconds, not minutes; and if you believe in capital punishment without cruelty, there is no reason a person with a guillotine appointment should not be permitted to load up in advance on drugs of their own choosing.
The guillotine’s last use in France, and anywhere else in the world, took place on Sept. 10, 1977. It is associated in Anglo-Saxon minds with everything from French revolutionary terror to the Gestapo and the Stasi. There are good reasons to be reluctant to introduce mechanization of any kind into the process of executing murderers. Perhaps it makes the fatal step toward killing mere political enemies a little easier.
But, again, Americans used the electric chair without noticeable shame for more than 100 years: it came into use on a wave of passion for modernity before anyone even knew exactly how electricity kills you. Beheading’s principal problem, assuming one is willing to contemplate the taking of a human life by the state, is janitorial.
March 30, 2021
Caesar in Britain II: There and Back Again (54 B.C.E.)
Historia Civilis
Published 21 Mar 2017Patreon | http://historiacivilis.com/patreon
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