World War Two
Published 24 Dec 2022Twas the night before Christmas and the war was grinding on. The Moro River Campaign continues in Italy with Canadian infantry pushing past the Gully and into “Little Stalingrad”. Generally, the Allied advance to Rome is turning into a stalemate though, but Winston Churchill still believes an amphibious landing is the way to break this. Joseph Stalin also has some pretty big plans to bring the USSR back to its pre-Barbarossa borders. In the Pacific, there is attrition over Rabaul and stalemate on Bougainville.
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December 25, 2022
Stalin’s Christmas Surprise – Major Offensives to Come – WW2 – 226 – December 24, 1943
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December 23, 2022
A Jungle Miracle – War Against Humanity 092
World War Two
Published 22 Dec 2022Two escapes, one from the Nazis in Kovno (Kaunas) Lithuania, from the prison at Fort IX, and one from Japanese terror on Panay in the Philippines this week, will help to document the crimes of the Axis powers.
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December 21, 2022
The Nazi Quest for Thor’s Hammer – WW2 Documentary Special
World War Two
Published 20 Dec 2022Books, films, and comics are filled with Nazi scientists and explorers travelling the globe to get their hands on ancient artifacts or summoning daemons with black magic. But how much of it is grounded in reality? Well, some of it. In the neo-pagan religion invented by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the world can only be explained through the occult.
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December 19, 2022
Napoleon’s Downfall: German Wars of Liberation 1813
Real Time History
Published 16 Dec 2022After Napoleon’s defeat in Russia in 1812, the situation on the European continent is rapidly shifting. Prussia and Austria are leaving their unhappy alliance with the French. Prussian general Yorck even pledges his support to the Russian Army which is on the move towards Berlin. At Lützen and Bautzen Napoleon still manages to beat the new coalition, but his losses from Russia put him on the backfoot.
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December 18, 2022
A Super Bomber to Break Japan – WW2 – 225 – December 17, 1943
World War Two
Published 17 Dec 2022This war has now lasted as long as the Great War did, but there’s no signs of it slowing. The Soviets have three offensives going on on the Eastern Front, in Italy the Allies are attacking at San Pietro and over the Moro River, in the Pacific there are Allied landings on New Britain, but in Pacific Command, the big talk is all about a new super bomber.
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December 17, 2022
The RAF’s Worst Day of the War – War Against Humanity 091
World War Two
Published 15 Dec 2022The United Nations Allies has some success bombing the Nazi German Reich, but it comes at a heavy price. In the village Kalavryta in Greece, the Wehrmacht massacre hundreds of men and boys.
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December 15, 2022
Kraut Space Magic: the H&K G11
Forgotten Weapons
Published 25 Dec 2018I have been waiting for a long time to have a chance to make this video — the Heckler & Koch G11! Specifically, a G11K2, the final version approved for use by the West German Bundeswehr, before being cancelled for political and economic reasons.
The G11 was a combined effort by H&K and Dynamit Nobel to produce a new rifle for the German military with truly new technology. The core of the system was the use of a caseless cartridge developed in the late 60s and early 70s by Dynamit Nobel, which then allowed H&K to design a magnificently complex action which could fire three rounds in a hyper-fast (~2000 rpm) burst and have all three bullets leave the barrel before the weapon moved in recoil.
Remarkably, the idea went through enough development to pass German trials and actually be accepted for service in the late 1980s (after a funding shutdown when it proved incapable of winning NATO cartridge selection trials a decade earlier). However, the reunification with East Germany presented a reduced strategic threat, a new surplus of East German combat rifles (AK74s), and a huge new economic burden to the combined nations and this led to the cancellation of the program. The US Advanced Combat Rifle program gave the G11 one last grasp at a future, but it was not deemed a sufficient improvement in practical use over the M16 platform to justify a replacement of all US weapons in service.
The G11 lives on, however, as an icon of German engineering prowess often referred to as “Kraut Space Magic” (in an entirely complimentary take on the old pejorative). That it could be so complex and yet still run reliably in legitimate military trials is a tremendous feat by H&K’s design engineers, and yet one must consider that the Bundeswehr may just have dodged a bullet when it ended up not actually adopting the rifle.
Many thanks to H&K USA for giving me access to the G11 rifles in their Grey Room for this video!
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December 14, 2022
The Polish Armed Forces in Exile
World War Two
Published 13 Dec 2022The Polish state was the first to fall in this war, yet across the globe Polish soldiers are fighting on land, air, and sea as part of the United Nations alliance. The story of the tens of thousands of men and women fighting for Polish liberation is equal parts hope and hardship as they battle the enemy and even sometimes their own allies.
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December 13, 2022
Well, the modern Weimarites were getting overdue for another putsch…
Apparently, we just missed having a new German Reich last week, due to the lack of a few key ingredients, including mass support, weapons, good planning, and competent coup leaders … or maybe the German government just over-reacted to a non-existential threat:
The proclamation of Prussian king Wilhelm I as German Emperor at Versailles, by Anton von Werner. The first two versions were destroyed in the Second World War. This version was commissioned by the Prussian royal family for chancellor Bismarck’s 70th birthday.
The German state oversaw one of its largest anti-terror operations in its modern history last week. Approximately 3,000 police officers arrested 54 suspects in raids carried out on Wednesday morning. Those arrested were members of the Reichsbürger – one of the oddest and most obnoxious movements to have emerged in Germany in recent years. It is alleged that those arrested were conspiring to overthrow the state and install a shadow government headed by an obscure German nobleman.
German chancellor Olaf Scholz was clearly pleased with himself after the raid. He hailed it as an example of Germany’s “defensive democracy” (wehrhafte Demokratie) in action. This refers to the modern German state’s willingness to curtail certain democratic freedoms to protect itself from the far right.
The Reichsbürger are deeply reactionary, anti-democratic and conspiratorial. They claim that the old German Reich, which collapsed at the end of the First World War, was never legally abolished and that modern-day Germany is therefore an illegal construct. They believe Germany’s democracy is a sham, which conceals a secret deep state pulling the strings behind the scenes. In its place, the Reichsbürger want to recreate the Germany of the late 19th century, which includes reinstalling a Kaiser as ruler.
The fact that such a bizarre movement has been growing in size – from around 19,000 supporters in 2019 to an alleged 23,000 in 2022, according to the police – shows us that something is clearly going wrong in Germany. The Reichsbürger have not been growing in a political vacuum. Indeed, they have grown partly as a response to the German government’s authoritarian handling of the Covid pandemic. The Reichsbürger’s black, white and red flags (the colour of the flag of the old pre-1918 German Reich) could often be seen at anti-lockdown demonstrations. This made it all too easy for the pro-lockdown lobby to present any opposition to Covid restrictions as the product of far-right conspiracy theorists.
The Reichsbürger have also been violent at times. During a raid on a Reichsbürger building in 2016, three police officers were injured and one was killed. Earlier this year, one member ran over and seriously injured a policeman with his car. They also have members with military skills. Some of those arrested last week were former German soldiers, including a member of an elite military unit (the KSK).
Yet it is important not to exaggerate the threat the Reichsbürger pose to the German state. Which is what the government deliberately seems to be doing. Interior minister Nancy Faeser spoke of the alleged plotters as a “terrorist threat”, despite the fact those arrested looked more like confused pensioners than hardened insurgents. Indeed, the alleged head of the conspiracy, a 71-year-old member of a largely unknown former noble family, is called “Prince Reuss” (or Prince Henry XIII). A relative of the prince told reporters that, while the “prince” does have nutty ideas and is bitter about his loss of social status, it is hard to imagine him as the ringleader of a conspiracy. At the time of writing, there is also no trace of the huge cache of military hardware that was alleged to be somewhere on the prince’s estate – although some swords, rifles and crossbows have been found.
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Egypt’s postwar Nazi military advisors
In The Critic, James Barr reviews a book on the roles of former Nazi military and political figures in the Egyptian forces, Nazis on the Nile: The German Military Advisers in Egypt 1949-1967 by Vyvyan Kinross:
One of the paradoxes of the early postwar era is that, after Germany’s defeat, the Nazis were vilified at the same time that their expertise was sought after by both Cold War superpowers. Germans played key roles in both sides’ space programmes. Less infamous is the part they also went on to play in the Egyptian rocket programme, one of the subjects in this fascinating and disturbing book.
After suffering a humiliating defeat in the war that followed the establishment of Israel, the Egyptians wanted revenge. As the British had refused to help them — despite maintaining a deeply unpopular and large presence astride the Suez Canal — Egypt’s sybaritic King Farouq turned to his enemy’s enemy instead. In 1949 he commissioned an Afrika Korps general, Artur Schmitt, to review the Egyptian army.
Having checked in to a Cairo hotel under the name “Herr Goldstein”, Schmitt inspected Egyptian units and went on to Syria to survey Israel from the Golan Heights. The Egyptians’ failure to combine tanks, artillery and infantry effectively, he decided, explained their “inability to take advantage of the early stages of fighting to wipe the State of Israel off the map”.
Schmitt’s forthright conclusions were unwelcome, and he did not stay long. But some younger Egyptian army officers shared his views and, after they had overthrown Farouq in 1952, they picked up where the king had left off. Within days they offered Fritz Voss, the former head of the Skoda arms factory in Pilsen, the job of masterminding the retraining of the army and the establishment of a military industrial base that could produce jet aircraft and missiles.
Voss in turn invited old contacts to join him, including Wilhelm Beisner, an SS officer who had been part of Einsatzkommando Egypt, which would have spearheaded the Holocaust in Palestine had Rommel won at El Alamein. The Germans found Egyptian working conditions challenging. “Here one has to act much more slowly than in Prussia,” complained a German instructor who found “Oriental sloppiness” irritating. Of forty tanks lined up for a parade to celebrate the first anniversary of the coup, just twelve made it past the junta’s rostrum.
The author, Vyvyan Kinross, is a consultant by profession. He has advised Arab governments and clearly understands the fundamental problems. “The battle” for the Germans, he writes, “was always to reconcile finance, resourcing and the expertise required to execute a sophisticated manufacturing process with the challenging conditions and logistics that prevailed in a country that was late to industrialise and financially underpowered.”
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QotD: Postwar Germany
Nowhere in the world (except, perhaps, in Israel or Russia) does history weigh as heavily, as palpably, upon ordinary people as in Germany. Sixty years after the end of the Second World War, the disaster of Nazism is still unmistakably and inescapably inscribed upon almost every town and cityscape, in whichever direction you look. The urban environment of Germany, whose towns and cities were once among the most beautiful in the world, second only to Italy’s, is now a wasteland of functional yet discordant modern architecture, soulless and incapable of inspiring anything but a vague existential unease, with a sense of impermanence and unreality that mere prosperity can do nothing to dispel. Well-stocked shops do not supply meaning or purpose. Beauty, at least in its man-made form, has left the land for good; and such remnants of past glories as remain serve only as a constant, nagging reminder of what has been lost, destroyed, utterly and irretrievably smashed up.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Specters Haunting Dresden”, City Journal, 2005-01.
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December 11, 2022
An Amphibious Landing to take Rome? – 224 – December 10, 1943
World War Two
Published 10 Dec 2022There are plans afoot to hit the enemy from behind in Italy. Allied leaders are meeting again in Cairo to go over other plans, notably what to do about China and Burma. There is active fighting on two fronts in Italy too, though this week it doesn’t go particularly well for the Allies. Attacks in the USSR are unsuccessful for the Soviets, but do go well for the Germans, and there are Allied attacks by air in the Marshall Islands and over France.
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December 9, 2022
V-1: Hitler’s Deluded Revenge Plan – War Against Humanity 090
World War Two
Published 8 Dec 2022Japanese planes bomb Calcutta when it is still being crushed by the weight of the Bengali famine. Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer are obsessively trying to increase war production so Germany can begin launching its vengeance weapon against Britain. The wars of resistance continue across the Balkans with continued brutality and a new resistance force emerges in Italy.
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Rod Bayonet Springfield 1903 (w/ Royalties and Heat Treat)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Nov 2016(Note: I misspoke regarding Roosevelt’s letter; he was President at the time and writing to the Secretary of War)
The US military adopted the Model 1903 Springfield rifle in 1903, replacing the short-lived Krag-Jorgenson rifle. However, the 1903 would undergo some pretty substantial changes in 1905 and 1906 before becoming the rifle we recognize today. The piece in today’s video is an original Springfield produced in 1904, before any of these changes took place.
The most notable difference is the use of the rod bayonet. When the 1903 was in development, the Ordnance Department opined that the bayonet was largely obsolete, and that it was unnecessary to encumber soldiers with a long blade hanging from the belt. Instead, the new rifle would have a retractable spike bayonet that could double as cleaning rod and would be stored in the rifle stock, unobtrusive to the soldier. This ended in 1905 with a critical letter from Theodore Roosevelt (who was Secretary of War at the time). As the rod bayonet was replaced with a traditional blade bayonet, the cartridge would also be improved to a new style spitzer projectile at higher velocity, and the rifles’ stocks, hand guards, and sights were redesigned.
In this video I also discuss two often misunderstood elements of the Springfield’s history: heat treating and patent royalties. Are low serial number 1903 Springfields safe to shoot, and why or why not? And did the US government actually pay royalties to Germany for copying Mauser elements in the 1903?
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December 8, 2022
Is the Luftwaffe Defeated in 1943? – WW2 Documentary Special
World War Two
Published 7 Dec 2022Outnumbered and outproduced, the once mighty Luftwaffe is battling to hold its own across three fronts. Every month brings new pain for the force. But the Luftwaffe still has a few tricks up its sleeves and can make the Allies bleed heavily. If only Hitler and the Nazi leadership weren’t sabotaging its chances …
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