Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Sept 2017Once it became apparent that the MAS-36 was going to be used in a substantial amount of frontline combat (contrary to its intended role as a reserve or secondary rifle), it became important to provide it with grenade launching capability. The French military really liked rifle grenades as a way to have explosive support firepower always available with the frontline infantry, without needing to call for specialized units like mortar crews.
After various experiments with clamp-on launchers (like and including the WW1 VB launcher), the LG48 (lance grenade, or grenade throwing) rifle was adopted in 1948. It used the same basic projectile as the Mle 1937 50mm light mortar, but with a new tail assembly fitted which allowed it to slide over the muzzle of a MAS-36 rifle. The LG48 rifle was essentially just a MAS-36 with a new nosecap assembly which included a simple grenade sight and a range-setting adjustable sleeve over the barrel.
The LG48 pattern rifles were made both brand new in the St Etienne factory and also supplied as conversion kits to be applied in the field. Neither type ever received new or special markings to identify their grenade launching status. The Mle 1948 grenades and the LG48 rifles were declared obsolete in 1968, as the French had switched to the NATO standard type of rifle grenades in the early 1950s. In 1968 the existing rifles were ordered to be retrofitted back to standard MAS-36 pattern, and their lack of special markings makes those retrofitted rifles virtually indistinguishable from original MAS-36 rifles. The surviving examples, like the one in this video, are almost all from nations which received the rifles as military aid from France and were not subject to the French retrofitting order (this particular rifle was imported as part of a batch from Lebanon in the 1990s).
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October 10, 2023
MAS-36 LG48: A Grenade Launcher for the Bolt Action Infantry
QotD: The production of charcoal in pre-industrial societies
Wood, even when dried, contains quite a bit of water and volatile compounds; the former slows the rate of combustion and absorbs the energy, while the latter combusts incompletely, throwing off soot and smoke which contains carbon which would burn, if it had still been in the fire. All of that limits the burning temperature of wood; common woods often burn at most around 800-900°C, which isn’t enough for the tasks we are going to put it to.
Charcoaling solves this problem. By heating the wood in conditions where there isn’t enough air for it to actually ignite and burn, the water is all boiled off and the remaining solid material reduced to lumps of pure carbon, which will burn much hotter (in excess of 1,150°C, which is the target for a bloomery). Moreover, as more or less pure carbon lumps, the charcoal doesn’t have bunches of impurities which might foul our iron (like the sulfur common in mineral coal).
That said, this is a tricky process. The wood needs to be heated around 300-350°C, well above its ignition temperature, but mostly kept from actually burning by lack of oxygen (if you let oxygen in, the wood is going to burn away all of its carbon to CO2, which will, among other things, cause you to miss your emissions target and also remove all of the carbon you need to actually have charcoal), which in practice means the pile needs some oxygen to maintain enough combustion to keep the heat correct, but not so much that it bursts into flame, nor so little that it is totally extinguished. The method for doing this changed little from the ancient world to the medieval period; the systems described by Pliny (NH 16.8.23) and Theophrastus (HP 5.9.4) is the same method we see used in the early modern period.
First, the wood is cut and sawn into logs of fairly moderate size. Branches are removed; the logs need to be straight and smooth because they need to be packed very densely. They are then assembled into a conical pile, with a hollow center shaft; the pile is sometimes dug down into the ground, sometimes assembled at ground-level (as a fun quirk of the ancient evidence, the Latin-language sources generally think of above-ground charcoaling, whereas the Greek-language sources tend to assume a shallow pit is used). The wood pile is then covered in a clay structure referred to a charcoal kiln; this is not a permanent structure, but is instead reconstructed for each charcoal burning. Finally, the hollow center is filled with brushwood or wood-chips to provide the fuel for the actual combustion; this fuel is lit and the shaft almost entirely sealed by an air-tight layer of earth.
The fuel ignites and begins consuming the oxygen from the interior of the kiln, both heating the wood but also stealing the oxygen the wood needs to combust itself. The charcoal burner (often called collier, before that term meant “coal miner” it meant “charcoal burner”) manages the charcoal pile through the process by watching the smoke it emits and using its color to gauge the level of combustion (dark, sooty smoke would indicate that the process wasn’t yet done, while white smoke meant that the combustion was now happening “clean” indicating that the carbonization was finished). The burner can then influence the process by either puncturing or sealing holes in the kiln to increase or decrease airflow, working to achieve a balance where there is just enough oxygen to keep the fuel burning, but not enough that the wood catches fire in earnest. A decent sized kiln typically took about six to eight days to complete the carbonization process. Once it cooled, the kiln could be broken open and the pile of effectively pure carbon extracted.
Raw charcoal generally has to be made fairly close to the point of use, because the mass of carbon is so friable that it is difficult to transport it very far. Modern charcoal (like the cooking charcoal one may get for a grill) is pressed into briquettes using binders, originally using wet clay and later tar or pitch, to make compact, non-friable bricks. This kind of packing seems to have originated with coal-mining; I can find no evidence of its use in the ancient or medieval period with charcoal. As a result, smelting operations, which require truly prodigious amounts of charcoal, had to take place near supplies of wood; Sim and Ridge (op cit.) note that transport beyond 5-6km would degrade the charcoal so badly as to make it worthless; distances below 4km seem to have been more typical. Moving the pre-burned wood was also undesirable because so much material was lost in the charcoaling process, making moving green wood grossly inefficient. Consequently, for instance, we know that when Roman iron-working operations on Elba exhausted the wood supplies there, the iron ore was moved by ship to Populonia, on the coast of Italy to be smelted closer to the wood supply.
It is worth getting a sense of the overall efficiency of this process. Modern charcoaling is more efficient and can often get yields (that is, the mass of the charcoal when compared to the mass of the wood) as high as 40%, but ancient and medieval charcoaling was far less efficient. Sim and Ridge (op cit.) note ratios of initial-mass to the final charcoal ranging from 4:1 to 12:1 (or 25% to 8.3% efficiency), with 7:1 being a typical average (14%).
We can actually get a sense of the labor intensity of this job. Sim and Ridge (op cit.) note that a skilled wood-cutter can cut about a cord of wood in a day, in optimal conditions; a cord is a volume measure, but most woods mass around 4,000lbs (1,814kg) per cord. Constructing the kiln and moving the wood is also likely to take time and while more than one charcoal kiln can be running at once, the operator has to stay with them (and thus cannot be cutting any wood, though a larger operation with multiple assistants might). A single-man operation thus might need 8-10 days to charcoal a cord of wood, which would in turn produce something like 560lbs (253.96kg) of charcoal. A larger operation which has both dedicated wood-cutters and colliers running multiple kilns might be able to cut the man-days-per-cord down to something like 3 or 4, potentially doubling or tripling output (but requiring a number more workers). In short, by and large our sources suggest this was a fairly labor intensive job in order to produce sufficient amounts of charcoal for iron production of any scale.
Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II, Trees for Blooms”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-25.
October 9, 2023
QotD: Roman views of sexual roles
There is always a temptation to emphasise the way in which the Romans are like us, a mirror held up to our own civilisation. But what is far more interesting is the way in which they are nothing like us, because it gives you a sense of how various human cultures can be. You assume that ideas of sex and gender are pretty stable, and yet the Roman understanding of these concepts was very, very different to ours. For us, I think, it does revolve around gender — the idea that there are men and there are women — and, obviously, that can be contested, as is happening at the moment. But the fundamental idea is that you are defined by your gender. Are you heterosexual or homosexual? That’s probably the great binary today.
For the Romans, this is not a binary. There’s a description in Suetonius’s imperial biography of Claudius: “He only ever slept with women.” And this is seen as an interesting foible in the way that you might say of someone, he only ever slept with blondes. I mean, it’s kind of interesting, but it doesn’t define him sexually. Similarly, he says of Galba, an upright embodiment of ancient republican values: “He only ever slept with males.” And again, this is seen as an eccentricity, but it doesn’t absolutely define him. What does define a Roman in the opinion of Roman moralists is basically whether you are — and I apologise for the language I’m now going to use — using your penis as a kind of sword, to dominate, penetrate and subdue. And the people who were there to receive your terrifying, thrusting, Roman penis were, of course, women and slaves: anyone who is not a citizen, essentially. So the binary is between Roman citizens, who are all by definition men, and everybody else.
A Roman woman, if she’s of citizen status, can’t be used willy-nilly — but pretty much anyone else can. That means that if you’re a Roman householder, your family is not just your blood relatives: it’s everybody in your household. It’s your dependents; your slaves. You can use your slaves any way you want. And if you’re not doing it, then there’s something wrong with you. The Romans had the same word for “urinate” and “ejaculate”, so the orifices of slaves — and they could be men, women, boys or girls — were seen as the equivalent of urinals for Roman men. Of course, this is very hard for us to get our heads around today.
The most humiliating thing that could happen to a Roman male citizen was to be treated like a woman — even if it was involuntary. For them, the idea that being trans is something to be celebrated would seem the most depraved, lunatic thing that you could possibly argue. Vitellius, who ended up an emperor, was known his whole life as “sphincter”, because it was said that as a young man he had been used like a girl by Tiberius on Capri. It was a mark of shame that he could never get rid of. There was an assumption that the mere rumour of being treated in this way would stain you for life; and if you enjoy it, then you are absolutely the lowest of the low.
Tom Holland, “The depravity of the Roman Peace”, UnHerd, 2023-07-07.
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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Richard Blair’s memories of his father, George Orwell
Jonathon Van Maren contacted Richard Horatio Blair, the adopted son of George Orwell to discuss his memories of his famous father:
“My story starts on the 14th of May, 1944, when I was adopted by Eric Arthur Blair and his wife Eileen,” he told me. “This was during the Second World War. He’d been wanting a child for several years because he felt, rightly or wrongly, that he was unable to have children himself. I think this was compounded slightly by the fact that Eileen — my mother — was not very well herself, and in fact when I was ten months old, in March of 1945, she went to the hospital in Newcastle, which was the area where she was born and had gone to school. She went into a nursing home and died very soon after being anesthetized to have a hysterectomy. She probably had cancer, was very anemic, and simply had a heart attack on the operating table and died.”
The adoption had come about when Eileen was told by her sister-in-law, Dr. Gwen Shaughnessy, that she knew of a pregnant woman whose husband was off fighting. Orwell and Eileen adopted Richard when he was only three weeks old, and Orwell ensured that he alone would be known as Richard’s father by burning the names of the birth parents from the birth certificate with a cigarette. Richard would never know Eileen, as she died a mere nine months after the adoption took place, leaving the little boy and Orwell to fend for themselves. Some of Orwell’s friends suggested that perhaps he turn Richard over to someone else, but Orwell was having none of it. “I’ve got my son now, I’m not going to give him over,” Blair recalled. Blair even remembers Orwell “changing my nappy and feeding me after my mother died.”
“Meanwhile, my father had been asked to go to Germany at the end of the war by his friend, a gentleman by the name of David Astor of the Astor family,” Blair told me.
He was the proprietor of a newspaper called The Observer, and he asked my father — they had met during the war and become friends — to go to Germany after the war to observe what was happening, and it was while he was in Paris that he got a telegram telling him that Eileen, my mother, had died. He had to rush back and attend to the funeral and funeral arrangements. He decided the best thing he could do would be to go back to Germany and continue his war report, so that’s what he did. I was placed in the hands of relatives and friends to be looked after. I was cared for from that period onward by a nanny.
In 1946, he had decided to give up his reviews and extra work, because by now he had published his first major book, Animal Farm, which gave him enough resources to think about what to do next. And he had in his mind by then that he wanted to write what turned out to be 1984, and he decided to take the invitation of his friend David Astor to go to a remote island off the west coast of Scotland called Jura. He went up for a holiday and spent a couple of weeks there in the early part of 1946, came back, and announced that he would like to move out of London to this island of Jura and rent a farmhouse called Barnhill. A few weeks later I joined him with my nanny at the farmhouse, a place he had indicated to a friend was a very ‘un-get-at-able’ place.
Indeed it was. To reach the remote Hebridean island from London, “you had to take a train and several ferries, and then a taxi from the top part of the island, and then for the last five miles you had to walk,” Blair recalled. At first, it was Richard, Orwell, and his nanny, Susie Watson. This didn’t last long: Watson clashed with Orwell’s younger sister Avril and returned to London. “From that point on,” Blair told me, “I was cared for by my father’s sister Avril, and that continued well past when he died in 1950.” In the meantime, Blair still had a few precious years with his ailing father, who was trying to balance his fear of passing on his tuberculosis to his son with wanting to be an involved father. “He was really hands-on in a way that was really unusual for that era,” Blair told one interviewer.
In fact, he was so hands-on that he even worried about Richard’s television consumption, which is perhaps not surprising from someone who was so concerned about how people absorbed information — but Richard was, at this point, a very small child. “As a father he was completely devoted to me,” Blair told me. “He was terribly worried about my emotional development simply because he had TV, and he was very concerned that the views [on TV] might be passed on to me.” Blair still bears a scar on his temple from balancing on a chair while “watching him make a wooden toy for me”. He fell off the chair, cracked his head, and was bustled down to the village for a few stitches in the enormous gash on his forehead. “There’s a groove in the bone,” he ruefully told one interviewer. But there were no tests in those days, and so his head was sewn shut and he was sent back home again.
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 6, 2023
Farnborough Airshow – 1959 (in colour)
spottydog4477
Published 28 Dec 2009Farnborough Airshow – 1959 (in colour)
QotD: The “Marian Reforms” to Roman legions
In short, the things that are supposed to have happened here are:
- (Tactical-Organizational) A shift in battle tactics from the two-century maniple (c. 120 men) to the six-century cohort (c. 480 men) as the primary tactical unit on the battlefield,1 as well as the primary organizational unit of the Roman army. Elements of the older Polybian legion persist in names and titles.
- (Organizational) A shift from poorly paid conscript soldiers drawn from Rome’s propertied class (the assidui) drawn up through the dilectus to the use of volunteers drawn from Rome’s property-less poor (the proletarii or capite censi) who served as effectively professional soldiers, lacking any other means of subsistence.
- (Organizational) The practice of granting land and/or citizenship to Roman soldiers on discharge as a regular feature of Roman service.
- (Organizational) The end of the light infantry velites and Roman citizen cavalry (the equites) as part of the legion, as a product of the next point making such wealth distinctions unimportant.
- (Logistical) The introduction of state-supplied equipment (in place of self-supplied equipment) which enabled the mass-recruitment of the proletarii, as they no longer needed to be able to afford their own equipment, as part of a reform ascribed by some scholars to Gaius Gracchus (trib. 123-2).
- (Equipment) The introduction of a new design of pilum with a wooden rivet designed to break on impact with enemy shields (Plut. Mar. 25).
- (Equipment) The prioritization of the aquila, the eagle standard, over other standards in the legion (Plin. NH 10.16), often framed as the aquila fully replacing these other standards.
- (Equipment) The introduction of the furca, a Y-shaped pole for carrying the soldier’s pack (the sarcina), leading to better legionary logistics.
As we’re going to discuss, some of these things happened – but not because of Marius – and some of them didn’t happen at all. So how on earth did this idea of a big “Marian Reform” end up so pervasive in how we (used to) understand the Roman army of this period? The answer really has a lot to do with gaps (lacunae) in our sources. For the early second century, we have two really quite good sources on Roman military activity, Livy and Polybius. But both give out by mid-century,2 leaving us relatively blind until Julius Caesar‘s comentarii (de Bello Gallico and de Bello Civili) suddenly give us a massive infusion of information as we can see Caesar’s army functioning often in quite minute detail.
And we see what seem to be quite different armies! Caesar is using cohorts as tactical and operational units, rather than maniples. His armies don’t seem to have any citizen cavalry in them and they seem to be very loyal to him; he’s using a lot of non-citizens in auxiliary roles in a way that we know will become very standard in the imperial period (eventually making up half the army by Tiberius‘ reign). And indeed, moving forward, the legions of the early empire end up a lot more visible to us, both because of the literary evidence (Tacitus!) and also because, as they become more stationary on fixed frontiers, they leave forts and inscriptions and other evidence we can see far more clearly than the ever-moving armies of the Roman Republic.
And then into that there is Gaius Marius. Remember that our sources in this period are a bit patchier, without a strong continuous narrative (but with a lot of sources so we generally have someone for most of it). But Marius gets a lot of focus because of his roles in the civil wars and his spectacular seven consulships, and the one thing we are told quite clearly about him is that in 107 when he raised his first consular army he broke tradition by accepting volunteers from the proletarii (Sall. Iug. 86.1; Plut. Mar. 9.1). The temptation then to see that substantial change (which, to be clear, our sources are exaggerating for reasons I’ll discuss in a moment) as connected to all the other changes from the “Polybian” legion to the “Caesarian” legion and thus to assume that Marius is doing all of them, reading far too deeply into a few lines of Sallust and Plutarch (the latter not generally a particularly good guide on military affairs).
And I should note finally at the outset that this all also plays into a tendency in our sources generally: ancient authors really like narratives where one particular aristocrat can be credited with making major reforms or innovations as an expression of their particular virtue. We’ve talked about this with Lycurgus, but it shows up consistently with rulers supposedly introducing new weapons and new practices as big, top-down reforms that, on closer inspection, turn out to be gradual changes we can see signs of happening over quite some time. It’s an understandable if irritating bias of habit for authors whose purpose in writing is the education of aristocrats on how to be leaders – every big change has to be a product of the character and leadership of aristocrats (even when it wasn’t). Plutarch, especially, of all ancient authors, loves these sorts of just-so stories and guess who we are heavily reliant on for the life of Gaius Marius? But until relatively recently, historians were often far more willing to accept these sorts of just-so stories than they should have been (in part because late 19th and early 20th century historians shared some of those same assumptions about elite leadership and in part because singular reforms make for compelling stories).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Marian Reforms Weren’t a Thing”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-30.
1. Note that the size of the century has changed, from 60 to 80 as well.
2. Polybius’ history, already incomplete as we have it, ends, while Livy’s continuous narrative which originally went through the first century cuts out almost completely in 167, leaving us with just summaries of his work.
October 5, 2023
The Soviet Spies who Kickstarted the Nuclear Arms Race
World War Two
Published 4 Oct 2023Last episode we saw Klaus Fuchs steal details of the American atomic bomb for the Soviet Union. But he’s only one component of a much bigger conspiracy. Today, Astrid introduces you to the mysterious web of Soviet atomic spies. Their work changed our world forever.
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From Hilaire Belloc’s sailboat to your nearest international airport terminal
The most recent review at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf considers Hilaire Belloc’s The Cruise of the “Nona”:
Late in the May of 1925, around midnight, Hilaire Belloc climbed into a tiny boat and put out to sea so that he would have some time to think. The sea gives ample time to think, especially if like Belloc you disdain the use of a motor. Some wag once jested that sailing is like being at war: long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of abject terror. I suppose in some sense that’s correct, but give me the boredom of the sailboat any day over the boredom of the trench, the boredom of the cubicle, the boredom of endless doomscrolling.
Sailing is productive boredom, and seems unusually well calibrated for causing the mind to wander in interesting or delightful or just plain ridiculous directions. Maybe it’s the stimulating effects of the wind in your face and the smell of salt in the air, or maybe it’s the weird altered state of consciousness that comes from staring at the ocean. I think it’s because sailing is the human condition in miniature. It places you perfectly-balanced on a knife’s edge between agency and helplessness, and in so doing it both spurs the mind to activity and gives it space to relax and reflect.1
[…]
Anybody who’s travelled extensively in the third world has seen the modern version of this. There’s nothing intrinsic to being a reformer or a liberalizer that makes you an agent of American power, and yet … there’s a better than even chance that you are. After a while these people all blend together — the idealistic students, the LGBT activists, the NGO staffers, the embassy employees recruited from amongst the locals. They come from a hundred nations, from every conceivable race and religion, and yet something invisibly and inexorably molds them all into the same shape, like iron filings lining themselves up in the presence of a powerful magnet.
Soon they have American souls, and divided loyalties to match. The local regime panics and views them as an internal enemy, which only furthers their alienation from their motherland and their flight into the bosom of Global America. Most empires rule primarily though influence, not coercion, and this class of people is one of America’s most powerful weapons for maintaining and extending its hegemony.
A related phenomenon is the awful sameness that is slowly taking over the whole world. Perhaps your cruise ship docks at a dozen ports over the course of its journey, and every one of them looks exactly the same — the same tiki bar with the same sign, the same shops selling the same ornamental kitsch probably all made in the same factory. You aren’t visiting a place, you’re visiting a psychic manifestation of the Buffetverse, another outpost of Margaritaville, a Potemkin seaport with frozen daiquiris. You all know what I’m talking about. We make fun of it all the time, because cruise ships are for chuds. But it doesn’t just happen with cruise ships.
The cancer usually starts in an international airport. Form follows function, so it’s superficially reasonable that every airport on earth should look and feel exactly the same. But the real reason is that it follows in the wake of the kinds of people who fly into those airports, praising the broadening effects of foreign travel whilst terraforming everything they touch until it resembles the “arts district” of a midsize American city, replete with distressed wood finishes, gravid with craft beers. Real foreignness would cause these people to recoil in shock, or to demand a peacekeeping intervention. It’s not unusual for the imperial functionary class to be parochial, but what’s surreal about ours is how they combine the blinkered innocence of a farm boy with an ideology of weary cosmopolitanism.
None of this was as far along when Belloc took his little cruise, but the seeds had been planted, and he could feel in his bones that something horrible lay across the horizon. So he fights it the only way he knows how — by noticing and celebrating everything distinctive and local and weird about every place he visits. No island is too small for him to mention by name and recall a ghost story or two associated with it. No village is too commonplace for him to remark on the habits, physiognomy, and vices of the people who live in it. It’s the same spirit as that which animates Chesterton’s essay on cheese, but applied to a hundred hamlets and fishing ports, a paean to the regional diversity and distinctiveness that was already slipping away.
1. Oh hey, it’s the focused-mode and diffuse-mode of cognition! The best way to think deeply about anything is to toggle between them.
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.
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”
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.
