World War Two
Published 8 Jun 2024The plans to invade the Japanese Home Islands in the fall grow ever more concrete, with the main issue being not just how to transport men by the millions around the world, but where to put them once they get there. On land the fight continues in Okinawa and the Philippines, and at sea the American fleet is savaged by a typhoon for the second time in six months.
Chapters
00:34 Recap
01:22 The Allied Control Commission
02:29 Okinawa
03:50 The War in the Philippines
06:22 Halsey and another typhoon
09:13 Operation Downfall
19:07 Summary
19:24 Conclusion
20:28 Dedication to Donald Wilson Round
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June 9, 2024
Operation Downfall: 2 Million Men to Invade Japan – WW2 – Week 302 – June 8, 1945
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June 8, 2024
Battlefield Normandy – The battles for Norrey, Bretteville & Putot
The AceDestroyer
Published Jun 27, 2019Hello, welcome to The AceDestroyer and welcome to the third and final episode of the Battlefield Normandy Series. In this episode we follow the Canadians defending Putot-en-Bessin, Bretteville-L’Orgueilleuse and Norrey-en-Bessin. In the two days of heavy combat with the 12th SS Hitlerjugend, the 7th Canadian Infantry brigade managed to hold on to all three towns. Find out how in this episode …
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June 7, 2024
Redeployment! – Millions of men from Europe to Asia
World War Two
Published 5 Jun 2024Now that Japan is the only Axis power still in the fight, Allied forces — especially American ones — must redeploy to prepare for the final invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. But how do you move millions of men halfway around the globe? And which ones go — veterans, new recruits, or some combination? Who decides? Where exactly do you send them to prepare too, with some many eastern ports like Manila a shambles? Let’s take a look.
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Battlefield Normandy – The battle of Authie D-DAY + 1
The AceDestroyer
Published Dec 20, 2018June 7, also known as D-Day +1 marked the first battle between the Canadians and the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend during the Normandy campaign. When the Canadians attacked Authie, the German 12th SS counterattacked and a large tank on tank battle commenced. The first encounter between the two divisions was immediately a bloody one. The battle unfortunately had a barbaric end as members of the SS murdered several Canadian POW’s in cold blood. Here’s the battle of Authie.
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June 6, 2024
The reason Germany failed on D-Day (Ft. Jonathan Ferguson)
Imperial War Museums
Published Jun 5, 2024Adolf Hitler was looking forward to D-Day. His plan was simple. Reinforce the western defences, launch a furious counterattack, and “throw the Allies back into the sea”. After that, he could turn his full strength against the Soviet Union and end the war. For Hitler, the outcome of this campaign would be decisive.
In the previous episode of our D-Day series we looked at the air battle for Normandy. This time IWM Curator Adrian Kerrison covers the fighting on land. Why were some beaches bloodier than others? Why did German counterattacks fail? And why did it take so long for the Allies to breakout?
To help us answer some of those questions we’ve brought in the Royal Armouries’ Jonathan Ferguson to look at some of the most important weapons of D-Day.
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Battlefield Normandy – The Battle of Juno Beach 6 June 1944
The AceDestroyer
Published Nov 18, 2018Hello and welcome to the first episode of my Battlefield Normandy series. This part is all about the landings at Juno beach on June 6 1944, and what happened on the first day of the Allied landings in Normandy. In this episode we will take a look at all the landing beaches and the subsequent fighting. You can find the maps on my Facebook page. The next episode will be about the battle of Authie on June 7, when the Canadians first met the 12th SS Hitlerjugend. I hope you’ll enjoy this video and find it helpful.
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June 4, 2024
Snipers in World War 1
The Great War
Published Feb 9, 2024In fall 1914, the British and French armies on the First World War’s Western Front were wrestling with a problem: unseen German riflemen were picking off any man who showed himself above the trench. Something had to be done about it – and the result was the birth of the modern sniper.
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June 2, 2024
Japan vows to fight to the end! – WW2 – Week 301 – June 01, 1945
World War Two
Published 1 Jun 2024This week President Truman and his aides meet to discuss the use of the atomic bomb. In Japan, the Imperial government vows to fight on even as Yokohama is turned to ash by firebombing. On Okinawa, Japanese 32nd Army withdraws from the defences of Shuri Castle but there is still plenty of hard fighting left for the Americans. There are US Navy command reshuffles and the stage is set for an Allied conference in Potsdam.
Chapters
01:21 Recap
05:08 The Fight on Okinawa
08:38 The Interim Committee And The Bomb
14:02 Notes
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May 30, 2024
The Bloody Birth of Socialist Yugoslavia
World War Two
Published May 29, 2024In the final months of the war, Partisan leader Josip Tito and his forces complete their conquest of Yugoslavia. They destroy Draza Mihailovic’s Chetniks and Ante Pavelic’s Croatian Independent State and they outmanoeuvre King Peter. As Tito’s forces take revenge on their vanquished foes, Socialist Yugoslavia is born in a cradle of fire and blood.
02:08 Mihailovic’s Last Roll of the Dice
04:35 Tito Aligns himself with the Soviets
07:06 Albania
08:25 Tito begins state building
10:51 Hoxha purges his enemies
12:00 The Fall of Mihailović
13:08 The End of the Independent State of Croatia
14:54 The Events at Bleiburg
17:08 The Massacres
19:41 The Birth of Socialist Yugoslavia
20:54 Conclusion
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May 29, 2024
“The more they rant, scream and lecture, the more cool singing ‘Ausländer raus‘ and ‘Deutschland den Deutschen‘ will become”
Our deep undercover secret informant in Deutschland, eugyppius, recounts the latest scary outbreak of deadly neofascist singing in the beleaguered country:
The latest threat to German democracy including “one of the men in the video can be seen offering a slack, distinctly metrosexual Roman salute and giving himself a two-fingered Hitler moustache”
“Fascism”, as popularly understood, is both very bad and also very ill-defined, being a negative political vice characterised primarily in opposition to that equally ill-defined political virtue known as “democracy”. This “democracy”, whatever it may be, is distinguished above all by its fuzzy associations with a wide array of other virtues, like diversity, inclusiveness, equity and transsexuality. Fascism is mostly the opposite of all of these things, which sounds bad enough, but it gets much worse: Because democracy is a very fragile virtue, forever requiring vigilant defence and social fertiliser, fascism has become the most ineradicable and indestructible of weeds.
Or perhaps it is better, in our post-pandemic era, to say that fascism is like a virus. It is always spreading, despite (or because of?) our best efforts to kill it off. We vaccinate children against the fascist virus with years of indoctrination about the evils of National Socialism in school, but to judge from the present state of our political discourse, this programme has worked about as well as the mRNA jabs worked against Covid. Never have we preached so stridently against fascism, and never has it been so omnipresent.
Another curious property of fascism, is that it does not merely infect human brains. It can also taint cultural artefacts, like phrases. All of the very best people can use a specific phrase, but that does not matter at all should the fascists get ahold of it. Once they have run the benign words through their evil fascist mouths, anyone who utters them afterwards – whatever his intentions – may well be guilty of fascism. If only democracy were that effective and powerful.
As we’ve learned from the events of the past week, the Germ Theory of Fascism applies also to songs, even vacuous pop music. All of the most democratic people in Germany have worked themselves up into a collective outrage against an unremarkable 1999 Italodance tune called “L’amour toujours” (“Love always”) by Gigi D’Agostino, because some very bad fascists have been caught singing some very naughty lyrics to its indifferent melody. The fascists themselves have been cancelled of course, and the song is on its way to its own separate cancellation as well.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
[…]
The SPD only deepened their performative self-parody by posting this graphic to Instagram:
The Sylt revellers had chanted “Germany for the Germans”, but in this image the SPD proposed an improvement: “Germany for those Germans who defend our democracy”. Checkmate fascists! Except, “Germany for the Germans” is a slogan most closely identified with Der Heimat (formerly the NPD), an “ultranationalist” and “neo-Nazi” party. Realising that they had unwittingly reproduced the forbidden Nazi incantation, and were therefore guilty of spreading this horror virus, our crack SPD social media team swiftly deleted their post and threw up a hasty apology:
We just published a post condemning in the strongest possible terms what we all saw in a video from Sylt. We did not manage to strike a tone that would resonate with everyone. We would like to sincerely apologise for this. Our aim is to make it clear that we do not want to leave this country to the far right and hate preachers. We want to defend our democracy and our freedom. Let’s continue this fight together in solidarity!
This is one of those missteps that really leaves you scratching your head. After hours of foaming at the mouth about “neo-Nazi slogans”, our virtue-mongering social democrats posted their own version of those very same tainted words to Instagram, in apparent ignorance of their origins and deeper significance. We are left to ask what they imagined they were angry about in the first place.
It’s hard not to agree with eugyppius’ conclusion:
I have my own theory about all of this.
Once upon a time, teenagers sustained a vibrant countercultural leftism, which was all about telling the establishment to go fuck itself, ingesting inadvisable quantities of drugs and engaging in a lot of inadvisable sex. All of that was very transgressive and exciting, directed as it was against a much more conservative and straight-laced German society. They shocked people, and that was the point. In the decades since, all of those hippies have grown old, and the most ideologically committed of them have become that which they used to hate, namely a lot of insufferable shrivelled scolds. As is the way with scolds everywhere, they’ve unwittingly inspired a new countercultural movement on the opposite side of the political spectrum. The more they rant, scream and lecture, the more cool singing “Ausländer raus” and “Deutschland den Deutschen” will become. Maybe, if they don’t like these words, they should try chilling out and finally shutting the fuck up about fascism. God knows there are more important things to screech about.
In the meantime, our new fascist anthem L’amour toujours has hit the top of the German charts.
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Why Germany Lost the Battle of the Atlantic
Real Time History
Published Feb 2, 2024In March 1943, German U-boats are on the attack – they sink 108 Allied vessels that month alone. Some Allied officials fear a German victory in the Atlantic is imminent. If the Allies lose the Atlantic, Britain loses its lifeline – and maybe even the war. But by May 1943, it will be the U-boats limping home in defeat. So how, in just two months, did the U-boats go from hunters to hunted?
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May 26, 2024
The Last Battles in Europe – WW2 – Week 300 – May 25, 1945
World War Two
Published 25 May 2024This week, the fighting in Europe finally comes to an end and the Allies round up more leading Nazis including Heinrich Himmler and Karl Dönitz. In Asia, the fighting continues on Okinawa even as the Japanese start pulling back. The Australians continue fighting on Tarakan, and the Chinese are victorious in western Hunan.
00:00 Intro
01:45 Fighting In Europe Ends
04:30 Notes From Europe
06:57 Japanese Begin To Withdraw On Okinawa
12:41 The Battle Of Tarakan Island
14:35 Chinese Victory In Western Hunan
18:51 Conclusion
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May 25, 2024
Fathers of Light and Darkness – Rockets and Explosives – Sabaton History 126 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published Feb 7, 2024There are many inventors whose creations have been turned into weapons of war. A couple that really stand out are Alfred Nobel and Wernher von Braun. Today we’ll take a deep dive into their stories and the paradox of using destructive weapons for good, or creative weapons for destruction.
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May 19, 2024
Kamikazes versus Admirals! – WW2 – Week 299 – May 18, 1945
World War Two
Published 18 May 2024The kamikaze menace continues unabated, with suicide flyers hitting not one but two admirals’ flagships. There’s plenty of fighting on land, though, as the Americans advance on Okinawa and take a dam on Luzon to try and solve the Manila water crisis, but even after last week’s German surrender there is also still scattered fighting in Europe.
Chapters
01:34 The Battle of Poljana
06:32 American Advances on Okinawa
10:37 Kamikazes Versus the Admirals
13:58 The Battle for Ipo Dam
19:39 Soldiers Must Go From Europe to the Pacific
23:16 Summary
23:38 Conclusion
25:50 Call to Action
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May 16, 2024
The Thüringen Project – “where our greatest legal minds are at this very moment brainstorming ways to defend Thuringian democracy from the grave threat of ordinary people expressing their political preferences via voting”
eugyppius on the brave defenders of German democracy in Thuringia (and Brandenburg and Saxony) who are doing everything they can to ensure that the unwashed masses don’t disturb the stately progress toward their long-dreamed-of utopia:
To live in Germany in 2024 is to be lectured constantly about democracy. An endless parade of doubtful personalities – pundits, experts and a lot of very shrill women – appear on the television every night to tell you which parties are democratic, which people are democratic and therefore who enjoys democratic legitimacy. As we have seen, however, the whole concept of democracy is very confusing. Those people and organisations who want to mute free expression and ban political parties are all held to be extremely democratic, while those parties that demand more direct democracy and talk constantly about respecting the popular will are the direct modern equivalent of illiberal antidemocratic fascists.
To make all of this even harder, we are told that the upcoming September elections in Thüringen, Brandenburg and Saxony present a grave threat to democracy. To counteract this threat we have things like the Thüringen Project, where our greatest legal minds are at this very moment brainstorming ways to defend Thuringian democracy from the political preferences of actual voters. Crucially, the very existence of the Thüringen Project means that democracy must still reign supreme in Thüringen. Otherwise, there would be nothing for the democratic police of the Thüringen Project to defend. We therefore need only study Thuringian politics in their present state to gain a better idea of what this mysterious, shape-shifting, elusive phenomenon we call German democracy might be.
We will start at the top. The current Minister President (i.e., governor) of Thüringen is a highly democratic man named Bodo Ramelow:
Ramelow is a member of Die Linke, or the Left Party, which is the direct successor of the Socialist Unity Party (or SED) that used to govern the DDR. That might seem baffling, as the SED and the DDR were anything but democratic. Still more baffling is the fact that the constitutional protectors suspected Ramelow of antidemocratic tendencies and even surveilled him for many years. But democracy as we have learned is extremely complicated, and whatever antidemocratic essence Ramelow may have harboured in the past, he is a stalwart democratic politician today. He is also a huge fan of the mobile game Candy Crush, which he enjoys playing during government meetings. That at least seems unambiguously democratic, and perhaps it is even enough to overcome Ramelow’s political unreliability in other respects.
[…]
In summary: A constitutional protector who owes his office to a Minister President who was appointed to a second term via the anti-constitutional interventions of outsiders is now vowing to use his office to forestall political developments that may deprive his Minister President of power in the future. It is almost like “democracy” in Thüringen is synonymous with left-wing government. Elections which threaten to deprive Bodo Ramelow of office or his left-wing coalition of power are by definition anti-democratic, deplorable and perhaps even illegal.
Thuringians can vote for whichever party they want, but their votes are only democratic if they are cast for those specific parties. If Kramer has his way, Thuringia will soon achieve the democratic end-state – one in which the sad reality of popular sovereignty in practice will be replaced with a theoretical popular sovereignty that exists entirely in an ideal, Platonic form, unchanging and as it ought to be, now and forever.
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