The Great War
Published 13 Oct 2023The First World War was a catalyst for modern warfare with tanks, poison gas, flamethrowers and more. Cavalry didn’t have a place anymore on the modern battlefield – or so the common misconception goes. In this video we show how useful cavalry still was in WW1.
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October 17, 2023
Why WW1 Cavalry Was Essential On The Battlefield
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October 16, 2023
The Allied Rape Wave of 1944 – War Against Humanity 116
World War Two
Published 12 Oct 2023Since the earliest days of humanity, where there has been war, there has been rape. This war is no different. As vast armies battle across Europe, the chaos in their wake breeds an epidemic of rape. In its action and its punishment the European rape wave is also highly racialised. It adds up to a storm of suffering.
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October 15, 2023
The Isolation of Army Group North – WW2 – Week 268 – October 14, 1944
World War Two
Published 14 Oct 2023Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt meet at the Moscow Conference and talk about future “spheres of influence” in the Balkans. They also make plans for the future of Poland. In the field the Soviet Red Army completes the isolation of Army Group North and also advances in Hungary and Yugoslavia. The Allies enter Aachen in the west and cross the Rubicon in Italy. The Americans are still fighting the Japanese on Peleliu, and this week also make raids against Japanese airfields ahead of next week’s invasion of the Philippines.
01:00 Recap
01:22 The Moscow Conference begins
03:43 Isolating Army Group North
06:29 Soviet advances toward Belgrade
08:14 The Debrecen Operation
13:20 Horthy and Hungary
14:30 Chiang Kai-shek accuses Joe Stilwell
16:19 American raids on Formosa
19:29 The fight for Peleliu continues
20:01 Antwerp and Aachen
22:01 The Allies cross the Rubicon
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October 13, 2023
Elvira, the Party Girl Double Agent
World War Two
Published 11 Oct 2023She’s the gambler with a hotline to the Abwehr. The party girl tearing up the London social scene. Now she’s doing her bit to hold back the Panzer divisions and pave the way for D-Day. This is the story of Elvira Concepcion Josefina de la Fuente Chaudoir, Double Cross’s most flamboyant double agent.
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Gewehr 43
Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Oct 2013German ordnance began looking for a military self-loading rifle to augment the K98k as early as the 1930s, although the pressures of war initially made that development a second priority. By 1941, though, two competing designs from the Walther and Mauser companies had been developed to the point of mass production, as the Gewehr 41(W) and Gewehr 41(M) rifles. These both shared a gas-trap operating system to comply with an HWa requirement that no gas ports be drilled into the barrels. When it came to locking systems, the two designs differed greatly, with the Walther being the more successful of the two. Thousands of examples of both designs were put into field testing, mostly in the East, and it became clear that the gas-trap system was not suitable for combat. The Walther company responded with a new version of their design which used a much more modern short-stroke gas piston, basically copied from the Soviet SVT-40 rifle.
The G43 was very quickly recognized as a significant improvement over the G41(W), and was very quickly put into production, with approximately 400,000 being manufactured by the end of the war. Well, I found an example of the G43 that I could shoot (thank you, Mike) and took it out for some video …
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October 11, 2023
How Britain Broke Hitler’s Brain
World War Two
Published 10 Oct 2023In a re-upload of one of our D-Day 24 Hour videos, Astrid introduces you to the war’s most effective counter-espionage and deception programme, The Double Cross system. Today she’ll talk about their operations before and during D-Day and introduce you to some of the most important double agents. Their mission: fool the Führer.
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October 8, 2023
The End of the Warsaw Uprising – WW2 – Week 267 – October 7, 1944
World War Two
Published 7 Oct 2023The Warsaw Uprising comes to its conclusion, a tragic one for the Poles. In the field in Europe, there are Allied attacks toward Aachen, Bologna, and Debrecen, while in China the Japanese have begun a new phase of their Ichi Go Offensive.
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October 7, 2023
Eastern Front Tank Warfare 1944
World War Two
In this conflict, we’ve seen armored warfare on a greater scale than anything before or since. Indy takes a look at some of the tanks slugging it out on the Eastern Front, from the long-serving Panzer III and IV, to the newer and more powerful Tiger and T-34 85, and the monstrous IS-2.
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Rearming West Germany: The G1 FAL
Forgotten Weapons
Published 19 Jun 2023Today we are taking a look at a German G1 pattern FAL. The initial purchased of the G1 were actual made by the German Border Guard (the Bundesgrenschutz). In the aftermath of World War Two, the western Allies decided to perpetually disarm Germany, and German security was provided by French, British, and American forces. As the Iron Curtain fell across Europe, that attitude softened — West Germany was on the front lines of the Cold War, and could be a valuable ally against Communism in the East. Thus in 1951, the West German Bundesgrenzschutz (Border Guards) were formed and armed — basically with all WW2 Wehrmacht equipment. Looking to improve its small arms in 1955/56, the BGS tested a number of modern rifles and decided to adopt the FAL.
The BGS initially ordered 2,000 FAL rifles from FN, with wooden hand guards and a fixed flash hider (essentially a standard Belgian FAL) — these are known as the “A” pattern. A second BGS order for 4,800 more rifles followed, this time of the “B” pattern with a metal handguard and folding bipod. This was the first use of an integral bipod on the FAL, and would go on to be a popular option for other buyers.
In 1955, the German Army was reinstated as the Bundeswehr. Looking over the BGS rifle testing, the Bundeswehr also decided to adopt the FAL, and placed and order for 100,000 rifles — the “C” pattern. These include sights lowered 3mm by specific German request, as well as a set of swappable muzzle devices (flash hider and blank-firing adapter).
Ultimately, FN was unwilling to license FAL production to West Germany, and this drove the Germans to adopt the Spanish CETME as the G3 rifle, which it was able to license. The Bundeswehr G1 rifles were eventually transferred to the BGS and later sold to other allies as surplus.
Special thanks to Bear Arms in Scottsdale, AZ for providing access to this rifle for video!
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October 5, 2023
The Great War: Its End and Effects, Lecture by Prof Margaret MacMillan
McDonald Centre
Published 25 Jan 201922 January 2019, “How far did the Versailles Treaty make Peace?”, Professor Margaret MacMillan, Warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford. The lecture was sponsored by Christ Church Cathedral and the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life, Oxford.
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October 4, 2023
Paris under the Swastika – Collaboration and Resistance – On the Homefront 019
World War Two
Published 3 Oct 2023Occupied Paris, a paradoxical city of banality and brutality, of resistance and collaboration. Join Anna as she takes you on a tour of the city from occupation, the establishment of the Pétain regime and collaboration, the growth of resistance, and finally liberation. But the story doesn’t end there and into the 21st century, the city of lights is haunted by its occupation.
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Last Gasp of the German Maxim: the Air-Cooled MG 08/18
Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Jun 2023The MG 08/18 was developed at the very end of World War One as a lighter alternative to the MG 08/15. It used an air-cooled barrel, and between not needing water and having lighter parts it managed to weigh about 6 pounds less than the 08/15. Only a few hundred appear to have been produced before the end of the war, and they were not used by the German military during the Weimar era (the Mg 08/15 was). The 08/18 barrel jacket served as the basis for the MG34 barrel shroud, interestingly.
Thanks to Limex for giving me access to this very rare gun to film for you!
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QotD: The Witchburning and the “Mandate of Heaven”
Turning to more familiar Western examples, look at Germany, especially in contrast to England. Germany was on the forefront of every big social and economic change in the late Middle Ages, but you couldn’t blame their rulers for not handling it, because they didn’t have any. The minor princely states, the Electors of the Holy Roman Emperor, the Emperor himself, the Hanseatic League, and what have you — what could any of them do in the face of plagues and economic dislocations and terminal papal corruption and the massive intellectual upheaval of the printing press, even if their authority extended more than a few miles in any given direction, which it didn’t?
So they burned witches. The “European Witch Craze” of the 15th century has been a feminist bugbear for a long time, and one must naturally assume that pretty much all modern scholarship on it is uber-politicized hooey1, but it’s clear that there really were a lot of witch burnings in Germany in the 1400s. All that free-floating anxiety has to land somewhere, and since it’s pointless to blame the Margrave — he of the one decrepit castle and three square miles of territory — “witches” are a prime target. See also “the Period of the Wars of Religion” — is it any surprise that the most famous witchcraft stuff came from Germany just before the Reformation, or France in the depths of the religious wars, or England around the Civil War?
Clearly something is wrong with the universe – the Mandate of Heaven has been lost, not by any individual ruler necessarily, but by society. “Purity spirals” are also characteristic of these periods, and they quickly spiral out of control — see e.g. the Anabaptist Commune at Munster, or of course the Puritans.
Speaking of, the most famous-to-Americans example is the Salem Trials, and here we see all the trends converge. Not that the Puritans of Plymouth Bay would be so hubristic as to claim the Mantle of Heaven for themselves — Puritans were nothing if not ostentatiously self-effacing — but claim it they did, in deed if not in word, since Plymouth Bay was the closest thing one will ever get to a theocracy this side of Calvin’s Geneva (they burned their “witches”, too). And they just as clearly lost the Mandate — economic dislocations, a devastating Indian war brought about largely by their own hubristic incompetence, even a plague.
The aftermath of all this is fascinating. COVID, of course, is our new witch panic, and feel free to prognosticate on our current situation based on the life of Cotton Mather. The colony’s hottest young intellectual superstar in 1693, he went all-in on “spectral evidence” and the like, and by 1700 he was a joke on both sides of the Atlantic. So, too, with “critical race theory” and all the rest. There’s a racial awakening happening, kameraden, no doubt about that, but it has nothing to do with the eggheads’ fantasies. Those are just witch panics, and while witch panics are devastating to those caught in them, the wheel always turns sooner than later …
Severian, “Witch Trial Syndrome”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-27.
1. Which was also true of earlier scholarship, most famously Miss Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, which is Marxist economics-level disproven, but still fervently believed by “Wiccans” everywhere.
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October 1, 2023
The End of Market Garden – WW2 – Week 266 – September 30, 1944
World War Two
Published 30 Sep 2023This week, Operation Market Garden comes to its unsuccessful conclusion, but there’s a lot more going on — the Soviets launch an offensive in the Estonian Archipelago, the Warsaw Uprising is on the ropes, the Allies advance in Italy, the Americans on Peleliu, and Tito and Stalin make plans to clear Yugoslavia of the enemy.
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September 30, 2023
Why did the North Africa Campaign Matter in WW2?
The Intel Report
Published 8 Jun 2023As Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps rolled into Egypt in 1942, the only thing standing between them and Cairo and the Suez Canal was the British 8th Army. In this video we look at what was at stake for both sides, and why the North African campaign made a crucial impact on the outcome of the Second World War.
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