Quotulatiousness

September 1, 2024

The supermarket master plan to defeat the “far right” in Germany

Filed under: Business, Food, Germany, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

There are elections ongoing in the German states of Thüringen and Saxony, and the polls show that the “far right” Alternative für Deutschland is potentially going to get 30% of the votes, which would give them more representation in those states than any of the other parties. Panic and hysteria have set in not only among the politicos and the mainstream media, but even among some businesses:

In Germany, all political parties have a colour. The Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union are black, the Social Democratic Party is red, the liberal Free Democratic Party are yellow and the evil fascist Alternative für Deutschland are blue. This coming Sunday, Thüringen and Saxony will hold state elections, and the blue AfD are leading the polls in both states with about 30% support. This has a lot of people very, very upset. Most of them are merely upset with the AfD, but some psychologically unstable people have allowed their anger to embrace the colour blue more generally, because there can be no limits when it comes to resisting the evil antidemocratic forces of fascism.

Among the new sworn enemies of the blue band of the visible electromagnetic spectrum are the marketing team at Germany’s largest supermarket corporation, the Edeka Group. A few days ago, this supermarket chain, whose own logo strangely enough is primarily blue …

… ran an ad in Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung explaining “WHY BLUE IS NOT ON OFFER AT EDEKA”.

That wall of text in the middle reads as follows:

    Yellow bananas, red tomatoes, green lettuce, purple grapes, orange carrots, pink dragon fruit … EDEKA’s fruit and vegetable department is full of colourful diversity. Or is it?

    If you look closely, there’s one colour you won’t see: blue. And that’s no coincidence. Because blue food is nature’s way of warning us: ‘Watch out! I could be harmful!”

    Evolution has taught us that blue is not a good choice.

    And speaking of choices: Blue is not only the natural enemy of a healthy diversity of fruit and vegetables. In Germany, “the blues” are also the biggest threat to our diverse society.

    So let’s read the warning signs correctly ahead of the state elections in Saxony, Thüringen and Brandenburg in September – and ensure that we can live together in harmony. Because we love diversity.

For those wondering whether Edeka have decided to cease selling fascist blue fruits like blueberries, there is a helpful note down in the corner:

There we learn that, while “‘Blueberries’ or ‘Blue cabbage'” may have “‘blue’ in their names”, their “colour pigments” are not blue. This is “at least what Science tells us – and as we know you should always listen to Science more”. Nothing about this is remotely obnoxious; indeed, if current-year Germany needs anything, it is more blind platitudinous calls to Follow the Science – particularly when it comes to exonerating innocent fruits and vegetables from suspicion of blue fascism.

August 27, 2024

QotD: Who were the good guys?

Filed under: Germany, History, Media, Military, Quotations, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Valkyrie plot was really a thing that happened (the cognoscenti call it the Schwarze Kapelle), and it’s got all the makings of a great spy thriller … except one: There’s no good guy. Claus von Stauffenberg was a better guy than Hitler, I suppose, but that’s a bar so low it’s subterranean. Von Stauffenberg was a Wehrmacht colonel who’d seen action in pretty much every theater up to that point, including the invasions of Poland and Russia. It’s safe to say that one does not rise to the rank of colonel via combat in the Nazi armed forces without being involved in some shady shit. Indeed, as Wiki informs us, von Stauffenberg was fine with the way things ran in Poland, and initially declined to participate in the resistance out of a sense of personal loyalty to the Führer.

A movie can get away with showing mostly shades of gray, but in the case of the Valkyrie plot, both shades are pretty damn close to black.

Nor was the 2008 movie, starring Tom Cruise, an isolated case. A few years earlier, Jude Law and Ed Harris squared off as dueling snipers in Enemy at the Gates … set during the Battle of Stalingrad. Who do you root for, the Nazi or the Commie? The producers opt for “commie”, obviously, but their attempts to humanize the Jude Law character are embarrassing — even if we accept Law’s character as totally apolitical, no movie featuring a political commissar in a vital supporting role, not to mention “cameos” by Khrushchev and Stalin himself, can fail to remind viewers that everyone involved was awful. Even the most gripping battle scenes (and to be fair, some of them were pretty good) can’t make up for the fact that the world would be a far, far better place if they somehow both could’ve lost.

Those are high-level failures, conceptual mistakes, the kind that professional storytellers simply shouldn’t make. Not only that, though, both movies have unforgivable mistakes in the execution, at almost every level. Tom Cruise, for instance, is comically miscast as Stauffenberg. I’ve written before about how weird it is that casting directors seem to obsess over finding actors who look like even obscure historical figures. Cruise looks a bit like Stauffenberg, I guess, but there’s simply no way a guy with his … ummm … distinctive acting style should be anywhere near a historical drama. Tom Cruise only ever really plays Tom Cruise, so “Tom Cruise dressed up as a Nazi” is really jarring.

And that’s before you consider the accents. Maybe Tom Cruise can’t do a German accent, I dunno. I seem to recall he did an Irish accent in a movie once, and that turned out ok, but again, whatever character he was playing was just “Tom Cruise with an Irish accent.” So maybe if you feel you must cast him as a German, letting him use his “natural” American accent is the way to go. But if you’re going to do that, please, for pete’s sake, make everyone else do an American accent, too. I know Kenneth Branagh can do one. So either cast guys who can do the right accent, or, failing that, who can do each other’s accent. Otherwise you get a huge, distracting mess.

Enemy at the Gates was actually worse: Law, Joseph Fiennes (the commissar), and Rachel Weisz (the love interest) all used their native British accents … but they’re different kinds of British accent, at least in Law’s case. Meanwhile, Ed Harris (the Nazi antagonist) uses the “neutral” American accent, while supporting player Ron Perlman, who is American, does a comically over-the-top Russian … as do the guys playing Khrushchev and Stalin. It’s just weird. In both movies, you’ve got supposedly tight groups of friends (or, at least, co-conspirators) talking to each other in wildly different accents. That kind of thing is bad enough in a movie like Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, which made no pretenses to historical accuracy; it’s movie-destroying in a supposedly serious, historically-based thriller.

Severian, “Storytelling Fail”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-13.

August 25, 2024

After Wittmann’s Tiger Tank Rampage – The Fight back at Villers-Bocage

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published May 10, 2024 16 products

Michael Wittmann’s rampage at Villers-Bocage was just the start of a fight that was far from the great victory the Germans would claim it to be. At 0930 on 13 June 1944, in the chaos that followed Wittmann’s fortuitous lunge into the British column, the men of the 4th County of London Yeomanry lick their wounds and set up their defences. They’ve been given the order to hold the Villers-Bocage at all costs — and will soon be fighting for their lives against a superior German force.

By the end of the day, a young Lt. Bill Cotton will have earned the Military Cross and a promotion to Captain. His Sergeant will earn a Military Medal and his Corporal a Distinguished Conduct Medal … In the hype surrounding the career of Michal Wittmann, has the role of Bill Cotton and his troop been overlooked? Was he the real hero of Villers-Bocage?

Watch our video on Wittmann’s Tiger Tank Rampage:
• Wittmann’s Tiger Tank Rampage | Ville…

00:00 | Introduction
00:56 | Aftermath of Wittmann’s Rampage
01:48 | Reconnaissance and Reinforcements
03:24 | Lt. Bill Cotton
05:26 | Bayerlein Strikes
07:05 | Three Tigers Taken Out
08:18 | The Heroes of Villers-Bocage
10:42 | Bramall’s Ingenuity
14:48 | The End of the Assault
16:16 | Conclusion

This video features footage courtesy of British Pathe.

#tankmuseum #tankactions #villersbocage

August 24, 2024

Hitler’s People by Richard J. Evans

Filed under: Books, Germany, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Critic, Daniel Johnson reviews Richard Evans’ latest book on the history of Hitler’s Germany, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich:

History records nothing more vile than Hitler and his henchmen. At the height of his power in 1942, Heinrich Himmler boasted that “the Führer has laid this very serious command [extermination of the Jews in occupied eastern Europe] upon my shoulders. No one can take it away from me.” By the end of the Third Reich, Hermann Göring had become a “voluptuary”, wearing lipstick and dressing in a toga, accompanied by a suitcase containing most of the world’s supply of the drug paracodeine. Joseph Goebbels, meanwhile, devoted his brief reign as Hitler’s successor to poisoning his six children.

The word “Nazi” has become synonymous with evil. Inevitably, therefore, it has also lost much of its original meaning — a case of Hegel’s “night in which all cows are black”. There is a danger that new generations will no longer know what made the Nazis and their crimes uniquely heinous.

Professor Sir Richard Evans has gathered a representative sample of “Hitler’s people”, ranging from the monstrous to the grotesque, into a single volume. It’s not a work of original research but a collective portrait of “the faces of the Third Reich”. Their unifying factor is the Führerprinzip — their unquestioning obedience to and adulation for Adolf Hitler.

Hero-worship in this, its most sinister form, is still with us. From Narendra Modi to Donald Trump, from Marine Le Pen to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, democracies are still menaced by demagogues. If we are honest, we have all felt the gravitational attraction of “charisma” — a secularised theological concept coined by Max Weber to denote the political authority exerted by an extraordinary individual. Evil often elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Charisma in this sense is contemporaneous with the emergence of Hitler. His cult of charismatic leadership is indistinguishable from the ideology of National Socialism. Cults of this kind had already been prefigured in his day by those of Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin. But the case of Hitler, who cultivated the phenomenon in its most extreme form, remains the paradigm. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and other contemporary despots are still in his debt.

Nazi Germany was indeed run by legions of little Hitlers, each demanding obeisance whilst lording it over their frequently competing or overlapping jurisdictions. The Third Reich was, in this sense alone, a diabolical reincarnation of the First, the Holy Roman Empire, with its patchwork of feudal domains. No medieval monarch, though, had the technological means to inflict such mayhem and misery upon humanity.

Eating on a German U-Boat in WW1

Filed under: Food, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published May 7, 2024

Sauerkraut soup served with German black bread, or schwarzbrot

City/Region: Germany
Time Period: 1915

The food aboard a German U-boat could get really monotonous, especially after the first ten days or so, when all of the best and freshest ingredients would have gone bad. This simple soup uses ingredients that would have been available on board, and comes from a German cookbook from WWI. There are actually several variations of this soup in the cookbook, the only difference being swapping out the sauerkraut for other ingredients like pickles, cabbage, or beets.

You need to like sauerkraut in order to enjoy this soup, as there isn’t anything else going on to contribute other flavors. I highly recommend eating it with some schwarzbrot, or black bread. It balances the sourness of the soup and the two go together very nicely.

    Sauerkrautsuppe
    The fat and flour are whisked and the water is slowly added. When the soup has simmered, the sauerkraut is added. Salt and vinegar are added to the soup and seasoned.
    — Kriegskochbuch, 1915.

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August 21, 2024

MG08: The Devil’s Paintbrush

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published May 6, 2024

The MG08 was the German Army standard Maxim gun in World War One. The Germany Navy adopted the Maxim first in 1894, followed by the Army in 1899, then a new pattern in 1901, and finally the MG08 in 1908. This was actually a somewhat old-fashioned pattern of Maxim when it was adopted, as the Germans chose to use the 1889-style lock, which was neither headspace-adjustable nor field-strippable. Their decision was based on the idea that they could produce locked to perfect interchangeable headspace, and field stripping was not really necessary — and they were not wrong in these assumptions. MG08 guns were issued with two spare locks in each sled mount, and that handled any broken parts that might occasionally happen. During the war, about 106,000 MG08s were built by two main factories, the Spandau Arsenal and the DWM company. This remained the standard German Army heavy machine gun until the adoption of the MG34.
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August 20, 2024

German magazine Der Spiegel warns about “The Secret Hitlers” of the far right who threaten western civilization

Filed under: Gaming, Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The spectre of Hitlerian fascism looms over the western world once again, but Der Spiegel won’t take this threat lying down:

“How Fascism Begins”: The present cover of Der Spiegel, depicting Björn Höcke, Marine le Pen and Donald Trump as the new fascists. Establishment German hysteria about “the right” is now achieving an intensity to rival American hysteria about race during the Summer of Floyd.

Hitler is not like other mortals; he may not really be dead, and his spirit is likely to return at any moment. Perhaps it already has. This is why our foremost news magazine, Der Spiegel, chose this image to head their cover story on “The Secret Hitlers“, a bizarre opus of current-year political lunacy penned by Lothar Gorris and Tobias Rapp.

“Is fascism returning?” Gorris and Rapp want to know. “Or is it already here, in the form of [Donald] Trump, [Viktor] Orbán [or Björn] Höcke? And if so, could it disappear again?” What follows, they explain, is “an attempt to identify evil”.

This is the kind of insanity that comes over you when you elevate establishment political ideology into a civic religion. You reduce the entire project of state politics to a dubious exercise in piety, where the aim is not to achieve good outcomes or develop pragmatic solutions, but to engage in moral peacockery. For the Gorrises and the Rapps of our discourse, the greatest problem facing the liberal faithful of the Federal Republic is not mass migration, deindustrialisation, soon-to-be-insolvent pension programmes or the overblown state entitlement system, oh no. It is finding and rooting out mythological political demons and preventing the second coming of the secular antichrist.

Gorris and Rapp (for convenience, I will refer to these feeble-minded men henceforth as Grapp) open with an extended anecdote about a 2016 board game called Secret Hitler.

    The setting is the year 1932, the Reichstag in Berlin. The players are divided into two groups: Fascists and Democrats, with the Democrats making up the majority, which sounds familiar. The Fascists have a decisive advantage at the start: they know who the other Fascists are, which also reflects the truth in the history books. The Democrats don’t have this information; every other player could be friend or foe. The fascists win the game if they get six laws through the Reichstag or if Hitler is elected Chancellor. To win, the Democrats must pass five laws or expose and kill Hitler.

    The basic premise of the game is that everyone pretends to be democrats. In truth, the real democrats would only have to trust each other and the fascists wouldn’t stand a chance. But it’s not that simple, because sometimes the democrats have to vote in favour of a fascist law for lack of options and therefore fall under suspicion of fascism. Which is exactly what the fascists want.

    One realisation: there is no guarantee of the right strategy that will ultimately see the good guys win and the bad guys lose. One wrong decision that feels right, and Hitler is Reich Chancellor. It was all chance, just as there was no inevitability in 1933. The other realisation: it can be fun to be a fascist.

The cryptofascist myth will never cease to amaze me. Absolutely everybody in 1933 knew who “the fascists” were. The ones in Italy literally called themselves fascists, which was one way to identify them. The ones in Germany openly derided liberalism and dreamed of a nationalist revolution that would put an end to the hated bourgeois democracy of the Weimar Republic. Hitler was a national politician who wrote and spoke openly of his aims. Secret Hitler in no way “reflects the truth in the history books”. It is a deformed fantasy about modern politics, which reflects nothing so much as the burning demand for and the vanishing supply of actual Nazis to hyperventilate about.

Now it is true that a lot of erstwhile liberals went over to National Socialism after the Nazis seized power, but these were not the secret fascists of Grappian fever dreams. The were just followers, as are a great many of the self-professed liberals active today. Were communists or illiberal nationalists to take over tomorrow, millions of people would line up behind the new political ideology like the sheep that they are, and I suspect that Grapp would be right at the head of that line.

Because our crack fascist identifiers suffer from a crushing lack of self-awareness, they declare that “relapsing into fascism is the primal fear of modern democratic societies”. Such a relapse, they explain, “long sounded hysterical and unimaginable”, but “now it seems serious and real”.

QotD: The printing press was to the Reformation what social media is in the Current Year

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Quotations, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Consider the Reformation. I’m in no way qualified to walk you through all the various doctrinal issues, but in this case a superficial analysis is not only sufficient, it’s actually better. Instead of getting lost in the theological weeds, I want to focus on the process. So let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that nothing Luther said was all that original, theologically — you can find pretty much any tenet of “Lutherism” (as it then was) somewhere in the past, often among the Church Fathers (the “double predestination” that drove Calvinists insane is straight out of St. Augustine, for example). Wyclif, Hus, Nicholas of Cusa, Marsilius of Padua, all those guys were proto-Luthers, at least in part.

The thing about Luther, then, wasn’t what he said, so much as how he said it.

Martin Luther was the world’s first spin doctor. Though he insisted for a long time that his famous 95 Theses were, and were always intended to be, a scholastic debate between clergymen, Luther mastered the use of printed propaganda. His opponents soon followed, or tried to, in an ever-increasing spiral of printed viciousness. Mutatis mutandis, the exchanges between Luther, Erasmus, Thomas More (to say nothing of a thousand lesser lights) and their opponents all sound shockingly Current Year. They’re snarky and waspish at best, grotesque ad hominem at worst. Modern flame wars have nothing on the way Thomas More and William Tyndale tore into each other, for instance, and More and Tyndale were rank amateurs compared to Luther.

As with the Current Year, where being first on social media is the only criterion that matters, so the printing press injected something very like “hot takes” into the late-Medieval intellectual atmosphere. If you tried to respond to your opponents the old-fashioned way — with closely reasoned, heavily cited arguments, on parchment, hand-copied by monks — you might win the intellectual battle … 500 years later, among historians who thank you for providing such a useful glimpse into late-Medieval mentalités, but in your own time you’d get fired at best, get burned at the stake at worst, if you didn’t respond instantly, in kind.

The printing press, in other words, represented a quantum leap in the velocity of information. Those who grasped its fundamentals prospered, while those who fell behind perished. King Henry VIII, for instance, fatally damaged his cherished intellectual reputation when he deigned to attack to Luther in person. Luther hit back with a tirade that wouldn’t be out of place on Twitter1, and Henry responded in kind, and now the king, who was hip-deep in self-inflicted shit by that point, had to drop the fight. Having been publicly abused by a mere ex-monk, he had to quit the field with his tail between his legs.

Severian, “Velocity of Information”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-10.

    1. Again, mutatis mutandis. Though this sounds to modern ears like an abject apology on Luther’s part (“especially as I am the offscouring of the world, a mere worm who ought only to live in contemptuous neglect”, etc.), in context it’s a vicious attack. For one thing, what’s a great king like Henry doing responding to a “mere worm”? And Henry had to know, since Wolsey did nothing without his master’s orders … except everyone had heard the rumors that Henry was just a dimwitted playboy, and Cardinal Wolsey was really the king in all but name, so maybe he didn’t know. Either way Henry, who prided himself on being an intellectual, was a fool. That’s the kind of thing that would get you executed in the 16th century, and here’s this “mere worm” publishing it, for all the world to see, with no possibility of reprisal from a supposedly puissant monarch.

August 19, 2024

Evolution of WW2 German Tank Destroyers

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published May 3, 2024 19 products

Used extensively by the German army of World War Two, the “tank destroyer” was developed to counter the increasing dominance of the tank on the battlefield.

Germany would field a massive 18 different types of tank destroyer in World War Two – compared with the 7 or 8 different types used by US, British and Commonwealth forces. One of these in particular, Sturmgeschütz III, would destroy more tanks than any other AFV in the entire conflict.

In this video we look at the development, strengths and weaknesses of German tank destroyers: from the 17 tonne Hetzer to the massive 70 tonne Jagdtiger — the heaviest tracked vehicle of the War.

00:00 | Introduction
00:59 | The First Tank Destroyers
04:14 | Avoiding Close Combat
06:59 | Jagdpanther
12:05 | Jagdtiger
15:31 | Hetzer
18:01 | Stug III
22:51 | Conclusion

This video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.

#tankmuseum #jagdpanther #stugiii #hetzer #jagdtiger

August 16, 2024

“Operation Dragoon … was described by Adolf Hitler as the worst day of his life”

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The “other” D-Day landing in France that few people know much about: Operation Dragoon.

Southern France, 15-28 August 1944.
West Point Military Atlas.

Often referred to as “the other D-Day”, Op Dragoon ran until 14 September 1944 and was a pivotal turning point in the Second World War.

Op Dragoon was a huge and complex operation by land, sea and air that liberated nearly two-thirds of France by linking up with troops from the Normandy invasion on 11 September and pushing the German forces right back to their frontier.

It also secured the ports of Marseilles and Toulon so Allied troops could flood into France.

This was a bitter blow for Hitler, who during conversations with his generals that were discovered in records written in shorthand, said: “The 15th of August was the worst day of my life”.

Dr Peter Caddick-Adams, a military historian and defence analyst, spoke to BFBS Forces News about Operation Dragoon, a largely French/American operation with support from countries including the UK and Canada.

He said: “It set the victory over Germany firmly on its way — and the end of the Second World War couldn’t really have been achieved without Operation Dragoon.

“This is the D-Day that you’ve never heard of.

“Originally there was planned to be two invasions of France on the same day — in Normandy and on the south coast of France along the Riviera.

“It was found that we didn’t have enough landing craft to do both at the same time simultaneously.”

It also didn’t help that Winston Churchill was against the idea and tried to cancel the operation.

The Prime Minister wanted the Italian campaign to remain dominant and was worried Dragoon would take troops and other resources away from Italy.

However, despite his best efforts, the Americans and French prevailed and Operation Dragoon went ahead.

Initially, the operation was given the codename Anvil, because Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, was originally going to be called Sledgehammer.

The plan was for Germany’s armed forces to be smashed between the hammer and the anvil.

Churchill never changed his opinion about the operation despite its eventual success, as Dr Caddick-Adams explained: “At the last minute Churchill had the name changed to Dragoon and, legend has it, because he felt he was being dragooned into an operation that he didn’t want to undertake”.

August 15, 2024

Yet another revisionist history of World War II

Filed under: Books, Britain, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest anonymous review at Astral Codex Ten, the book to be considered is How the War Was Won by Phillips Payson O’Brien:

To a first approximation, there are a million books about World War II. Why should you care about How the War Was Won (hereinafter “HtWWW”) by Phillips Payson O’Brien?

  • It provides a new, transformative view of the conflict by focusing on production of key goods and what affected that production instead of the ups and downs of battles at the front.
  • That particular lens used can (and should) be applied outside of just World War II, and you can get a feel for how that might be done by reading HtWWW.
  • I have lectured about World War II and read many, many books about it. I have never texted friends more excerpts of a book than this one.

I have some criticisms of HtWWW, but if the criticisms dissuade you from reading the book, I will have failed. These complaints are like tut-tutting Einstein’s penmanship.

The Wikipedia-Level Story of World War II (and O’Brien’s Counterargument)

To understand why O’Brien’s argument is so novel, you need to know the modern-day conventional understanding of the story of World War II. Here is my summary of the conventional narrative of World War II:

  • Germany conquered Poland and France. It tried to bomb the UK into submission/maybe enable an invasion. That effort failed when Germany was defeated in the Battle of Britain, thanks largely to the plucky efforts of British airmen (memorably summarized by Winston Churchill: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”.)
  • Stymied in the West, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, won a bunch of crushing victories, but then got turned back at the gates of Moscow. The Soviets moved all of their factories east of the Ural Mountains and produced a vast tide of T-34 tanks that overpowered the Germans.
  • The Germans suffered a catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad and a bloody strategic defeat at Kursk, after which the Soviets relentlessly pounded Germany to defeat.
  • The US and the UK sent a lot of material help and eventually fought the Germans too, most notably in the D-Day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge. However, most of the fighting was done by the Soviets.
  • It is very difficult to say how important the aerial bombing campaigns of the Western Allies were in defeating Germany. The Germans moved much of their production underground, insulating them from truly disastrous effects.
  • The U.S. mostly fought alone against Japan, which won a series of impressive early victories (e.g., Pearl Harbor, the conquest of Singapore) until the decisive Battle of Midway, after which the vastly larger US industrial base outproduced Japan into oblivion.
  • The US bombed the Japanese into submission by destroying Japanese cities, ultimately by dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

By examining where the Axis focused their productive capacities and how the Allies disrupted those capacities, O’Brien challenges virtually every part of that narrative:

  • The Battle of Britain was not a close-run thing. The fact that British fighter planes were flying over their own territory meant their attrition rate of pilots and aircraft were far lower than the Germans’.
  • American and British bombing mattered far more to the war’s outcome than the battles of the Eastern Front, which consumed a much smaller portion of German expenditures.
  • American and British airpower made German battlefield victories on the Western Front virtually impossible and dramatically limited the force Germany could bring to bear in the East.
  • Japan (really, Japan plus the giant empire it conquered at the beginning of the war) was an industrial behemoth to rival the Soviet Union. However, the destruction of the Japanese merchant fleet by American air and sea forces wrecked Japan’s economy.
  • The firebombing of Japanese cities and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had an ambiguous strategic effect. American air power played a much more important role in severing Japan from the natural resources it had conquered in the early part of the war.

August 8, 2024

Panzer III: Versatile stalwart of the Panzer force

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published Apr 19, 2024

See inside the Panzer III and discover the story of the most numerous German armoured fighting vehicle of World War II.

Intended as the German army’s main gun tank, with its brother, the Panzer IV, acting as support, the Panzer III fought in Europe and North Africa but was effectively obsolete by 1942 in the face of better opposition like the Soviet T-34. So the two changed places – an up-gunned Panzer IV becoming the gun tank with the Panzer III — now with a short barrelled 75mm gun — in the support role. This wouldn’t last long — but the Panzer III chassis would form the basis of the highly successful Stug III.

00:00 | Introduction
00:15 | Background
02:12 | Two Similar Designs
02:57 | Panzer III Designs
10:22 | Take a Look Inside
14:46 | An Interview with Mike Hayton
23:52 | What’s it like to Drive?
26:00 | Conclusion

This video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
#tankmuseum #panzeriii

August 7, 2024

Maxims in the Skies: the German LMG 08/15

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Apr 24, 2024

As soon as the MG08/15 “light” machine gun was adopted by Germany, it was recognized as an ideal basis for an aircraft gun. Weight was of the essence for WW1 aircraft, and a lightened Maxim was just the thing to use. So the Spandau Arsenal began producing the LMG08/15 (the “L” in which might stand for either air-cooled or lightweight; we really don’t know which) in May 1916. In addition to cutting a ton of lightening slots in the water jacket, the guns also had mechanisms added to allow a pilot to cycle both the bolt and the feed system from behind the gun (something not possible with a standard ground model). The example we are looking at today has a great example of an early style of such device completely intact …
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August 6, 2024

Me262 – Why It Was Rubbish

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

HardThrasher
Published Feb 16, 2024

A brief and sober discussion of the multi-faceted nature of aircraft development in the 3rd Reich, and an assessment of the aircraft itself in context of the political and organisational challenges and changes from 1939-1945. Or to put it another way, why it was rubbish from start to finish.

Timestamps
00:00 – 00:22 – Trailer
00:22 – 01:49 – Introduction
01:49 – 05:14 – Willy Messerschmitt’s World Falls Apart
05:18 – 08:03 – Udet’s Flying Circus
08:07 – 11:26 – Me262’s Development
11:26 – 11:32 – Popcorn
11:33 – 13:37 – The Me163 Affair
13:42 – 19:30 – Milch Tries to Break His Willy
19:33 – 30:18 – Hitler’s Big Brain Moment
30:21 – 42:03 – Speeds and Feed of the Me262
42:05 – 46:53 – Operational History
46:54 – 48:50 – Survivor’s Club
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August 4, 2024

Mokusatsu! – WW2 – Week 310 – August 3, 1945

Filed under: Britain, China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 3 Aug 2024

The Japanese reaction to the Allied ultimatum for unconditional surrender is … mokusatsu. This can be translated several ways, but all involve not giving a response. Meanwhile, materials for atomic bombs to be dropped on Japan are delivered to Tinian, though the ship making the delivery is sunk by a Japanese submarine days afterward. The active war continues in Burma and China, and the Potsdam Conference ends in Germany with the map of Poland very much re-drawn.

00:00 Intro
00:56 Mokusatsu
05:47 Delivering Atomic Material
07:22 Sinking The Indianapolis
09:26 Bombing Japan
12:22 The War In Burma And China
14:07 Potsdam Confernece Ends
17:02 Conclusion
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