Published on 25 Feb 2016
The Germans start the biggest battle in history with an artillery barrage of over 1000 guns on a 20 km front. The Battle of Verdun is the first major German offensive since the Race to the Sea and Erich von Falkenhayn has high hopes to break through the French lines. Right before the offensive starts, the French are able to reinforce their defences, so they are barely able to hold the line. The French credo is: “lls ne passeront pas!” – they shall not pass!
February 27, 2016
The Battle of Verdun – They Shall Not Pass I THE GREAT WAR – Week 83
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February 19, 2016
The Ghost Of The Lusitania – Russia Takes Erzurum I THE GREAT WAR – Week 82
Published on 18 Feb 2016
The sinking of the Lusitania is still causing diplomatic tensions between Germany and the USA. While the Germans insist they were forced by the British blockade to adopt unrestricted submarine warfare, the Americans think otherwise. In the meantime the Russian Army is taking Erzurum in the Caucasus and the big offensive at Verdun is delayed for a week.
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February 6, 2016
Germany Aims For Verdun – Russia Goes South I THE GREAT WAR Week 80
Published on 4 Feb 2016
The preparations for the huge German offensive at Verdun are almost complete. Thousands of artillery pieces are moved, millions shells brought to the front. Erich von Falkenhayn would soon unleash is offensive on the Western Front. At the same time, Russia headed south to the Caucasus once more in search for a desperately needed victory against the Ottomans.
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January 12, 2016
Prelude to Verdun And The Road To the Somme I THE GREAT WAR – Week 76
Published on 7 Jan 2016
1915 was a year in favour of the Central Powers. But in early 1916, the Russians, British and French were sending more fresh troops into battle than ever before – and better equipped too. French General Joseph Joffre was confident that a huge combined offensive at the Somme in summer would turn the tide. But German Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn had his own plans to bleed the French dry at Verdun.
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January 11, 2016
Dancer, Lover, Spy – Mata Hari I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
Published on 4 Jan 2016
Mata Hari or Margaretha Geertruida Zelle is one of the most fascinating women of the 20th century. Not only did the Dutch woman charm half or Paris with her exotic and erotic dancing. After several up and downs she ended up as a spy for love gathering intelligence for the German secret service. When she was caught by the French, her live ended as unglamorous as it started.
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January 10, 2016
How Accurate Is Blackadder Goes Forth? I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
Published on 2 Jan 2016
Indy is answering your questions about the First World War again and this time we are talking about the neutrality of Greece, the accuracy of Blackadder Goes Forth and the contribution of Asia and Africa.
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December 1, 2015
Hell’s Handmaiden – Canadian Flying Ace Billy Bishop I WHO DID WHAT IN WORLD WAR 1?
Published on 30 Nov 2015
William “Billy” Bishop was not only the top Canadian flying ace but also one of the most successful flying aces of World War 1. With 72 confirmed victories, he soon became the fear of the German Jagdstaffeln who actually put a bounty on his head and called him Hell’s Handmaiden. Surviving one of the bloodiest theatres of war, the sky above the Western Front, Billy Bishop’s skill made him a national hero.
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November 28, 2015
“Free speech” means more than just allowing speech you happen to agree with
Brendan O’Neill reminds us that being a supporter of free speech requires you to support those who don’t always agree with you or express themselves in ways you’re comfortable with:
It’s the 21st century and Europe is meant to be an open, enlightened continent, and yet a man has just been sentenced to jail — actual jail — for something that he said. Will there be uproar? It’s unlikely. For the man is Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, the French comedian, and what he says — that Jews are scoundrels and the Holocaust is a fiction — is deeply unpleasant. Yet if we’re serious about freedom of speech, if we are truly committed to ensuring everyone has the liberty to think and say whatever they please, then the jailing of Dieudonné should outrage us as much as the attempts to shut down Charlie Hebdo or the jailing of a Saudi blogger for ridiculing religious belief. We should be saying ‘Je Suis Dieudonné’.
Due to the regimen of hate-speech laws in 21st-century Europe — which police and punish everything from Holocaust denial to Christian denunciations of homosexuality — Dieudonné has been having run-ins with the law for years. In 2009, a French court fined him €10,000 for inviting a Holocaust denier on stage during a gig. In March this year, a French court gave him a two-month suspended prison sentence for saying he sympathised with the attack on Charlie Hebdo and with the anti-Semite who murdered Jews at a Parisian supermarket a few days later. Now, this week, a Belgian court has given him an actual prison sentence: a court in Liège found him guilty of incitement to hatred for making anti-Semitic comments during a recent show and condemned him to two months in jail.
In all these cases, Dieudonné has been punished simply for thinking and saying certain things. This is thought-policing. It’s a PC, spat-and-polished version of the Inquisition, which was likewise in the business of raining punishment upon those who said things the authorities considered wicked. To fine or imprison people for expressing their beliefs is always a scandal, regardless of whether we like or hate their beliefs. Dieudonné really believes the Holocaust is a myth, as much as a Christian fundamentalist believes that people who have gay sex will go to hell or American liberals believe Hillary Clinton will make a good president. He is wrong, massively, poisonously so; but then, so are those Christians about gays and those liberals about Hillary. If every person who says wrong, malicious or stupid things were carted off to jail, Europe’s streets would be emptied overnight.
[…]
It is incredibly illiberal for the state to police hatred. Hatred might not be big or clever, but it’s only an emotion. And officialdom has no business telling us what we may feel — or think, or say, or write. Allowing the state to monitor belief represents a brutal reversal of the Enlightenment itself. John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), set the tone for the Enlightenment as an attempt to ‘settle the bounds’ between the business of government and the business of morality. ‘The business of laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of every particular man’s goods and person’, he wrote. That ideal is now turned on its head. Across Europe, governments ‘provide for the truth of opinions’, and in the process they silence those they don’t like and patronise the rest of us, reducing us to imbeciles incapable of working out what is right and wrong, and of speaking out against the wrong.
All hate-speech laws should be scrapped. Dieudonné should be freed. And a continent whose governments argue against the imprisonment of bloggers in Saudi Arabia while jailing comedians at home needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror.
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November 17, 2015
Beyond Wires and Pigeons – Communications in World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special
Published on 16 Nov 2015
If one thing was vital to the the new kind of modern warfare in the First World War, it was communications. The Industrial Revolution had brought wireless transmission of signals with it and the huge armies of World War 1 needed to be in contact constantly to be successful in the field. In this special episode we introduce you to the birth hour of modern military communication and signals.
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November 16, 2015
Accepting the truth in the wake of the Paris attacks
Douglas Murray on the slow, unwilling movement toward accepting the true reasons for anti-Western violence like the Paris terror attacks:
The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault.
In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have ‘nothing to do with Islam’. It was said by George W. Bush after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7 and Tony Abbott after the Sydney attack last month. It is what David Cameron said after two British extremists cut off the head of Drummer Lee Rigby in London, when ‘Jihadi John’ cut off the head of aid worker Alan Henning in the ‘Islamic State’ and when Islamic extremists attacked a Kenyan mall, separated the Muslims from the Christians and shot the latter in the head. It was what President François Hollande said after the massacre of journalists and Jews in Paris in January. And it is all that most politicians will be able to come out with again after the latest atrocities in Paris.
All these leaders are wrong. In private, they and their senior advisers often concede that they are telling a lie. The most sympathetic explanation is that they are telling a ‘noble lie’, provoked by a fear that we — the general public — are a lynch mob in waiting. ‘Noble’ or not, this lie is a mistake. First, because the general public do not rely on politicians for their information and can perfectly well read articles and books about Islam for themselves. Secondly, because the lie helps no one understand the threat we face. Thirdly, because it takes any heat off Muslims to deal with the bad traditions in their own religion. And fourthly, because unless mainstream politicians address these matters then one day perhaps the public will overtake their politicians to a truly alarming extent.
If politicians are so worried about this secondary ‘backlash’ problem then they would do well to remind us not to blame the jihadists’ actions on our peaceful compatriots and then deal with the primary problem — radical Islam — in order that no secondary, reactionary problem will ever grow.
Yet today our political class fuels both cause and nascent effect. Because the truth is there for all to see. To claim that people who punish people by killing them for blaspheming Islam while shouting ‘Allah is greatest’ has ‘nothing to do with Islam’ is madness. Because the violence of the Islamists is, truthfully, only to do with Islam: the worst version of Islam, certainly, but Islam nonetheless.
Theodore Dalrymple expresses a bit of sympathy for the politicians who must say something in the wake of atrocities:
One has to pity — a little — politicians obliged to react publicly to events such as those on November 13 in Paris. They can’t pass over them in silence: but what can they say that does not sound banal, hollow and obvious? They can only get it wrong, not right.
That does not excuse inexactitude and evasion, however. French president François Hollande called the attacks cowardly, but if there was one thing the attackers were not (alas, if only they had been), it was cowardly. They were evil, their ideas were deeply stupid, and they were brutal: but a man who knows that he is going to die in committing an act, no matter how atrocious, is not a coward. With the accuracy of a drone, the president honed in on the one vice that the attackers did not manifest. This establishes that bravery is not by itself a virtue, that in order for it to be a virtue it has to be exercised in pursuit of a worthwhile goal. To quote an eminent countryman of the president, Pascal: Travaillons, donc, à bien penser: voilà le principe de la morale. Let us labor, then, to think clearly: that is the principle of morality.
President Obama was not much better. He made reference in his statement to “the values we all share.” Either he was using the word “we” in some coded fashion, in spite of having just referred to the whole of humanity, or he failed to notice that the attacks were the direct consequence of the obvious fact that we — that is to say the whole of humanity — do not share the same values. If we shared the same values, politics would be reduced to arguments about administration.
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November 9, 2015
Shocking cheese-related crime in France
Ace of Spades H.Q. has the details:
Sacre Vache! Thieves Steal 4 Tonnes of Comte Cheese, In What Police Are Calling “A Crime That Happened This Century”
Four tonnes of comte. Street value: almost one half of one million dollars, maybe more if you step on it and cut it with brie.
Police describe themselves as “vaguely interested” in this case.
Interpol has been called, but didn’t pick up a phone. So an email was sent. The email was marked, “When you get to it.”
Some thieves in France have made off with a rather odd prize recently — four tonnes of cheese.
Police were called to a break-in on Monday in which the owner of the Napier dairy in the town of Goux-les-Usiers discovered some crooks had stolen roughly 100 wheels of comte, a luxury cheese which can only be made in the Franche-Comte region using unpasteurised cow’s milk.
Unpasteurized — that’s the good shit. That’s what hooks you, that’s what makes you a junkie. Once you’re hooked on cheese made of unpasteurized milk, you’ll spend the rest of your life “Chasing the Cow,” walking down lonely streets and breaking into seedy fromageries looking to score your next “wheel.”
…
It might seem like a crime by someone with a fairly extreme dairy fetish, but police believe the cheese was stolen by a gang who will sell it on the black market.
Comte can sell for 40 [Euros] a pound, making it just as valuable to thieves as jewellery or electrical goods.
You can tell how “pure” cheese is by sticking your pinky into it and then rubbing the cream on your gums. If your gums feel like they’re on fire — that’s pure, baby.
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November 8, 2015
QotD: Small bits of French revenge
But [the German] is no gourmet. French cooks and French prices are not the rule at his restaurant. His beer or his inexpensive native white wine he prefers to the most costly clarets or champagnes. And, indeed, it is well for him he does; for one is inclined to think that every time a French grower sells a bottle of wine to a German hotel- or shop-keeper, Sedan is rankling in his mind. It is a foolish revenge, seeing that it is not the German who as a rule drinks it; the punishment falls upon some innocent travelling Englishman. Maybe, however, the French dealer remembers also Waterloo, and feels that in any event he scores.
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel, 1914.
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November 6, 2015
The Third Battle of the Isonzo – French Despair On The Western Front I THE GREAT WAR Week 67
Published on 5 Nov 2015
For the third time the Italians had tried to conquer the Austrian positions at the Isonzo front and for the third time they had failed. And like the other defeats before, the Third Battle of the Isonzo came with an extreme amount of casualties due to the difficult terrain in the Alps. At the same time, Lord Kitchener visits the front in Gallipoli and realises that evacuation is the only logical decision to make. On the Western Front, the French had suffered well over 200.000 casualties during the autumn offensives at Artois and in the Champagne.
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October 20, 2015
The French Uniforms of World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR – Special
Published on 19 Oct 2015
We are starting a new irregular series about the various uniforms of the warring nations of World War 1. Starting with the French uniforms we are exploring everything from helmets to boots. The French were the first army to adapt a real military helmet with the M15. In the beginning of the war they were still wearing the traditional Kepi from Franco-Prussian War, however. Find out all about the French equipment in the trenches with Indy.
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October 2, 2015
The Battle of Loos – New Offensives On The Western Front I THE GREAT WAR – Week 62
Published on 1 Oct 2015
After weeks of preparation the French and British Armies unleash a new offensive on the Western Front. Not only is it supposed to relieve pressure on the Russians on the Eastern Front but the Entente wants to achieve the decisive breakthrough. The French actually break through German trenches only to realise that they have a second line of trenches completely intact right behind the first line. The British attack at Loos also turns into carnage even though the British use gas for the first time.
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