Published on 8 Aug 2017
Pronunciation of German ship names from World of Warships with some background information on the person and location.
Military History Visualized provides a series of short narrative and visual presentations like documentaries based on academic literature or sometimes primary sources. Videos are intended as introduction to military history, but also contain a lot of details for history buffs. Since the aim is to keep the episodes short and comprehensive some details are often cut.
August 22, 2017
How to Pronounce German Ship Names – World of Warships & Historical Background
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August 21, 2017
Top Five Tanks – Indy Neidell
Published on 11 Aug 2017
For the fourth in our Top 5 series, Great War Channel presenter Indy Neidell came to The Tank Museum to share his 5 favourite tanks. https://www.youtube.com/TheGreatWar
It’s all about opinions, so please feel free to agree or disagree in the comments below.
Whose Top 5 would you like to see next?
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August 20, 2017
Trench Mortars – German Double Standards – Hughes’ Shovel I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
Published on 19 Aug 2017
Out Of The Trenches is finally back! In this episode Indy talks about the role of trench mortars in contrast to artillery, how the Germans could condemn the use of shotguns and saw-back bayonets while using chemical weapons, and a shovel with a hole in it.
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August 19, 2017
Dieppe Raid 19 August, 1942 – Assault, escape and aftermath
Published on 22 Mar 2009
The Dieppe Raid was one of the costliest days for the Canadian Army in the entire Second World War. 907 Canadians were killed, in addition more than 2,500 were wounded or captured, all on August 19 of 1942.
At the BBC site: Julian Thompson’s summary of the Dieppe Raid.
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August 18, 2017
The Battle of Hill 70 – Mackensen Advances in Romania I THE GREAT WAR Week 160
Published on 17 Aug 2017
The Battle of Passchendaele has turned into a muddy mess, the weather conditions take a toll on both the defenders and the attackers alike. The Canadians relieve some pressure on the British Army in the Battle of Hill 70 south of Ypres. Meanwhile, August von Mackensen is fighting back the Romanian offensive that was unleashed last week.
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August 14, 2017
Tank Chats #16 Panther
Published on 18 Mar 2016
Probably the best German tank design of the Second World War.
The Panther was not as thickly armoured, nor as heavily armed, as tanks such as the Tiger but was probably a much more balanced design. It was one of the fastest German tanks, highly manoeuvrable and equipped with an accurate gun. Its worst defect was a propensity to catch fire if the engine backfired.
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August 13, 2017
War-Weariness I THE GREAT WAR Summary Part 10
Published on 12 Aug 2017
In this special Recap Episode we summarize the events from May to July 1917. Two major Allied spring offensives at Arras and on the Aisne come to an end with mixed results. The Macedonian Front flares up again as does the 10th Battle of the Isonzo. Mutiny in the French army. A stunning British victory at the Battle of Messines. A vicious battle on the heights of Mount Ontigara. The first American troops are landing in France. July sees the great strides of the Kerensky offensive featuring the Russian Women´s Battalion of Death. A showdown between the Bolsheviks and the Provisional Government. The first usage of the dreaded Mustard Gas.
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August 9, 2017
Ernst Zündel, “the Zelig of Holocaust denial”
In the National Post, Colby Cosh tells the tale of Canada’s “favourite” holocaust denial specialist:
Ernst Zündel, the Zelig of Holocaust denial, died suddenly this weekend at his ancestral home in the Black Forest of Germany. If he had died sooner, before his 2005 deportation from this country, I am afraid he would have been widely described in obituaries as “German-Canadian.” He lived here from 1958 to 2000, unsuccessfully trying a couple of times to obtain official citizenship, and was visible for years as a self-styled opponent of Germanophobic stereotypes in the popular media.Ernst Zündel in 1992 on the day of his legal victory in R. v. Zündel (via Wikipedia)
Foreseeably, Zündel turned out to be the ultimate German stereotype himself: a war baby who used Canada as a refuge from conscription and anti-Nazi laws back home, all while obsessively re-litigating the Second World War in pseudonymous anti-Semitic pamphlets and books. Most ethnic Germans abroad wouldn’t deny the Holocaust or complain of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, as Zündel did, but… well, if you have studied German history seriously enough to talk about it socially, you will have run into folks who have funny ideas and tiny chips on their shoulder about, say, First World War reparations or the bombing of Dresden.
[…]
It should be remembered that by 1986 Zündel was already well on his way to establishing his place in Canadian legal history. He had already been convicted once under the Criminal Code’s “spreading false news” section, eventually struck down by the Supreme Court in 1992’s R. v. Zündel. Free speech absolutists argued then that the legal and social pursuit of Zündel merely served to increase his notoriety.
As a purely empirical question of history, this is hard to resolve. But we know that protests and the exertions of the police failed to stop Zündel from winning over Irving, and thus acquiring international influence. It may have done nothing but enhance his credentials as a pseudo-intellectual grappler, defying social scorn and the force of law.
The authorities were eventually able to bundle Zündel off to Germany through a legal door that has since closed. He was deported as an undesirable alien on the basis of a ministerial “security certificate” — not long before the Supreme Court denounced the use of secret evidence in deportation proceedings, and made such certificates harder to obtain. After Zündel’s deportation, an apparatus of progressive opposition to security certificates was quick to materialize. One cannot help wondering: if he were still alive in Canada in 2017, and the state tried to banish him, who might be out marching on his behalf, defending him as an “undocumented Canadian”?
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August 6, 2017
Shock, horror – “local or organic food is … often available only in Canada to the wealthy”
Chris Selley just got back from a European vacation, where he observed some odd German activity:
Last month, on vacation, I happened across what might be the platonic ideal of a fancy urban farmers’ market. The smell of wood smoke led me to a quiet street in Berlin’s leafy Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood, where a man was smoking various kinds of fish in the middle of the road. As one does. There was a little mobile bicycle-powered coffee shop selling vastly overpriced espresso. There was the requisite improbably expensive produce and charcuterie and cheese. (My God, the cheese. Why do Canadians put up with our benighted dairy industry?) And to shock my Ontarian senses, there was a big booth selling local wines — which one could drink, out of glasses, in whatever quantities one saw fit, right there out in the open. Tipplers weren’t even confined to a secure pen. There wasn’t even a security guard!
Even more than at Toronto’s fancier farmers’ markets, it was abundantly clear this was a place for wealthy people with time to spare. And it never occurred to me that was a problem. A new study co-authored by Kelly Hodgins and Evan Fraser of the University of Guelph suggests it is, however — and a recent headline on the matter made my eyes roll so far back in my head I feared they might get stuck: “Access to ‘ethical’ food often available only to the wealthy, study says.”
“While eating local or organic food is often touted as superior from a health, environmental and oftentimes ethical perspective, such foods are often available only in Canada to the wealthy, with limited access for those living on lower or even middle incomes,” The Globe and Mail reported.
I know. I’m just as shocked as you are. Who would ever have expected that?
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August 4, 2017
The Battle of Passchendaele – Mutiny in the German Navy I THE GREAT WAR Week 158
Published on 3 Aug 2017
Douglas Haig had been busy since the Battle of Arras came to an end. He amassed huge artillery concentration, got his hands on the new British Mark IV tanks and had a cunning plan that even involved a naval landing along the Belgian coast. And the opening of the battle was definitely more promising than the Battle of the Somme one year earlier. In Germany, a small naval mutiny is put down at the same time.
G.J. Meyer – A World Undone: http://bit.ly/WorldUndoneWW1
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July 28, 2017
Three Years of World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Week 157
Published on 27 Jul 2017
Christmas 1914 – that’s when the war was supposed to be over. And now, in the summer of 1917, it entered its fourth year and there was no end in sight. The British Army was about to launch a new offensive near Ypres, Russia drowned in chaos and the central powers’ defences were still holding. Though in Romania, the combined Russian and Romanian attack put a few cracks into the German self esteem.
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July 27, 2017
QotD: The Blitz
And now this stage set was illumined by incendiary bombs — their white glowings as they came down, their yellow flashes, and the rings of fire from the buildings they’d ignited. And the barrage balloons, shining bright and pink, in the clouds of pink smoke from artillery and flares. And the aircraft themselves, glowing pink, in their remorseless parade — giving the illusion they were close enough to touch. And through it all, here and there, an opening in this shroud, and a star twinkling; an old familiar star.
Seventy-five years ago; three generations. Here, you can mark them off with a ruler: 1965, 1990, 2015. And soon, not one living to remember. …
And the noise of the explosions, and the grinding of the aeroplane propellers, as if they were churning through the sea; the lady heard all this. Heard the sirens, the sirens, the sirens; heard the “all clear.” And everywhere the shouts of firemen, and of the working-class heroes in the cratered streets, dousing the flames with dirt and sand.
“It was so beautiful.”
From September to May, it was like this almost every night, and often in the daytime. It became a routine: “Oh bother, it’s the Luftwaffe again.” Fear was in the air, but compressed under boredom, and sometimes in the heat of it the fear went away. “How long can they keep this up?” Perhaps, forever.
One night, an odd thing happened. A row of old tenements came flopping down like cards, but one plumbing column remained standing. There was a man sitting on the toilet at the top, with his trousers at his knees. It was ludicrously comic. In the middle of all this pain and death, people saw him and chuckled. Somehow, eventually, he slithered down the pipes, leaping into arms as the column tilted over. Made a joke of it, the man did, when he saw his wife alive; said he was thinking about complaining to the landlord.
And people were emerging everywhere from the rubble — bloody and hurt, though patient and good-willed. Others digging, frenetically for the most part. Only names on their lips, but tears in their eyes; expecting to find corpses. “The bricklayer sounds,” the crunch of plaster, the creak of joists. But no screaming, with so much work to do. Ears being used as stethoscopes.
“We were all trying to be British,” the lady said. “One mustn’t get it started. One mustn’t be the first to wail.”
Bodies coming up from the ground; people suddenly standing. It was the end of the world, and she was watching the resurrections.
David Warren, “Seen & unseen”, Essays in Idleness, 2015-10-08.
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July 24, 2017
Great Blunders of WWII: The German Blunder At Dunkirk 1
Published on 4 Nov 2016
From the History Channel DVD series “Great Blunders of WWII”
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July 22, 2017
Dunkirk Myth vs. Reality – Operation Dynamo
Published on 7 Jul 2017
The evacuation of British, Belgian, and French troops at Dunkirk – Operation Dynamo – was a crucial event in the early stages of the Second World War. Although the Allies were ultimately severely beaten in the Battle of France, the events at Dunkirk were mostly portrayed and perceived as a victory for the British. Quite naturally various myths surround this event.
» SOURCES «
Palmer, Alice: Dunkirk: The Defeat That Inspired a Nation
http://repository.wellesley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=library_awardsAlexander, Martin S.: French grand strategy and defence preparations. In: Cambridge History of the Second World War, Volume I
Frieser, Karl-Heinz: The war in the West, 1939-1940: an unplanned Blitzkrieg. In: Cambridge History of the Second World War, Volume I
Amazon.com link (affiliate): http://amzn.to/2tuFtuMGardner, W.J.R. Gardner: The Evacuation from Dunkirk: ‘Operation Dynamo’, 26 May-June 1940 (Naval Staff Histories)
Amazon.com link (affiliate): http://amzn.to/2uoqMFVHistory of The Association of Dunkirk Little Ships
http://www.adls.org.uk/t1/content/history-association-dunkirk-little-shipsMrs. Miniver
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Miniver
July 18, 2017
Tunnel Warfare During World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special
Published on 17 Jul 2017
Check out the WW1 Centennial Podcast: http://bit.ly/WW1CCPodcast
Tunnel and mining warfare was an important part of World War 1, especially on the Western Front and to a lesser, but still deadly, degree on the Italian Front. The dangers for the tunnelers were immense. And the destruction they caused with explosions was too.
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