World War Two
Published 23 Apr 2022The mastermind of Pearl Harbor meets his fate this week in the Solomons, as do a great many Italian airmen and sailors in the Mediterranean in the Palm Sunday Massacre trying to supply the desperate Axis forces in Tunisia.
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April 24, 2022
Ladies and Gentlemen, We Got Him – Yamamoto – WW2 – 191 – April 23, 1943
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April 23, 2022
Spring 1917: Why the Allies Failed (WW1 Documentary)
The Great War
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The Allied 1917 Spring Offensive masterminded by French general Robert Nivelle was supposed to end the stalemate on the Western Front and bring a decisive breakthrough. But the German Army also knew they couldn’t win the war on the offensive and thus prepared a new type of defensive system: The Hindenburg Line.
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John Ozment, James Darcangelo, Jacob Carter Landt, Thomas Brendan, Kurt Gillies, Scott Deederly, John Belland, Adam Smith, Taylor Allen, Rustem Sharipov, Christoph Wolf, Simen Røste, Marcus Bondura, Ramon Rijkhoek, Theodore Patrick Shannon, Philip Schoffman, Avi Woolf,» SOURCES
Cook, Tim, “Storm Troops: Combat Effectiveness and the Canadian Corps in 1917” in Dennis, Jeffrey & Grey, Peter (eds), 1917: Tactics, Training and Technology: the 2007 Chief of Army’s Military History Conference, (Canberra: Australian History Military Publications, 2007)Coombes, David, Bloody Bullecourt, (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2016)
Doughty, Robert T, Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)
Doughty, Robert A, “How did France Weather the Troubles of 1917?” in Dennis, Jeffrey & Grey, Peter (eds), 1917: Tactics, Training and Technology: the 2007 Chief of Army’s Military History Conference, (Canberra: Australian History Military Publications, 2007)
Farr, Don, A Battle Too Far: Arras 1917, (Warwick: Helion & Company, 2018)
Foley, Robert T, “The Other Side of the Wire: The German Army in 1917” in Dennis, Jeffrey & Grey, Peter (eds), 1917: Tactics, Training and Technology: the 2007 Chief of Army’s Military History Conference, (Canberra: Australian History Military Publications, 2007)
Lupfer, Timothy T, “The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine During the First World War” Leavenworth Papers, No. 4, Combat Studies Institute, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, (Fort Leavenworth, KS: 1981)
Nicholls, Jonathan, Cheerful Sacrifice: The Battle of Arras 1917, (London: Leo Cooper, 1990)
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Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Jesse Alexander
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
Sound: Toni Steller
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Motion Design: Philipp Appelt
Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
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Historic “innovation prizes” (somewhat) debunked
In the most recent Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes does a bit of heavy lifting to debunk some accreted nonsense about the origins and success of early innovation prizes:
Admiral of the Fleet Sir Cloudsley Shovell (1650-1707).
Portrait by unknown artist from the National Maritime Museum collection via Wikimedia Commons.
Yesterday I had a piece in Works in Progress magazine, on the best ways to design modern innovation prizes — and why many of them fail.
I examined the famous “Longitude Prize” of 1714, and in the process busted some major myths about it. Almost every element of the popular story is wrong — something that experts on the topic like Richard Dunn and Rebekah Higgitt have been going on about for years. The popular story’s hero, John Harrison, often portrayed as an inventor shunned by a haughty scientific establishment, actually received massive amounts of funding from the committee for awarding the prize. The story’s villain, the Astronomer Royal Neville Maskelyne, was no villain at all. And there’s very little evidence that the prize actually incentivised people to innovate. The Board of Longitude, for that matter, ended up more like a grant-giving agency — a kind of navigation-themed DARPA — than just a committee of prize judges.
You can read the full piece here.
So what is the rest of this week’s newsletter about? Well, I’d like to take the chance to bust even more myths about innovation prizes!
Let’s start with a fairly small one, to do with longitude, that I’d missed. Take the narrative about the 1707 naval disaster off the Isles of Scilly, which led to the demise of the wonderfully-named admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell. The disaster is usually cited as having been the direct cause of the institution of the 1714 reward, and, of course, gives most Youtubers, bloggers, and TV presenters discussing longitude the opportunity to say the name “Sir Cloudesley Shovell”. Who wouldn’t?
I had already been sceptical of the disaster’s relevance to Parliament’s creation of the longitude reward, because of the seven-year delay. I had then noticed, when researching for the piece, that the disaster was hardly mentioned at all by those lobbying for the reward, by those consulted on it, or by the MPs who voted on it. It seemed to be irrelevant as a cause, so I repurposed that part of the popular story to simply use as a general example of a naval disaster caused by not knowing one’s position at sea.
But even my downgrading of its relevance, it turns out, may have been over-generous. Yesterday, after I published my piece, Richard Dunn pointed out to me that not only was the 1707 disaster irrelevant as a cause of the 1714 reward, but that the disaster itself may not have had very much to do with a specific failure to find longitude. It certainly wasn’t singled out as a cause at the time.
As for the actual causes, they were probably compass error, inconsistent charts, and even uncertainty over the fleet’s latitude, not just its longitude. And to the extent that not knowing the fleet’s longitude appears to have been a major part of the problem, it was also related to failures to accurately calculate longitude on land — something that could already be done using existing techniques. The navigational text-books, for example, disagreed on the position of Cape Spartel, in Morocco, from which the fleet departed and took its bearings. As the maritime historian William E. May put it, when he looked into the detail of the fleet’s route and navigational measurements, “the errors in longitudes in the accepted text-books must have introduced a danger just as great as any errors in reckoning the longitude.”
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Tank Chats #144 | Staghound | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
398K subscribers
Dissent This
Our Patreons have already enjoyed Early Access and AD free viewing of our weekly YouTube video! Consider becoming a Patreon Supporter today: https://www.patreon.com/tankmuseumHistorian David Fletcher is kicking off 2022 with the Staghound! It is an American armoured car that was designed and produced during the Second World War. Watch the video to find out more!
0:00 – Intro
0:30 – What is the Staghound
5:17 – Other variants
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April 22, 2022
How Russian Partisans Waged Guerilla War Against Napoleon
Real Time History
Published 21 Apr 2022Sign up at https://curiositystream.com/realtimeh… and get Nebula bundled in.
The face of war was changing in 1812. While the Russian Army retreated and left behind scorched earth, Russian partisans took up arms against Napoleon’s troops. They harassed and attacked vital supply lines and we a true menace to the Grande Armée‘s rear.
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John Ozment, James Darcangelo, Jacob Carter Landt, Thomas Brendan, Kurt Gillies, Scott Deederly, John Belland, Adam Smith, Taylor Allen, Rustem Sharipov, Christoph Wolf, Simen Røste, Marcus Bondura, Ramon Rijkhoek, Theodore Patrick Shannon, Philip Schoffman, Avi Woolf,» SOURCES
Boudon, Jacques-Olivier. Napoléon et la campagne de Russie en 1812. 2021.
Chandler, David: The Campaigns of Napoleon, Volume 1, New York. 1966.
Durova, Nadezhda. Cavalry Maiden. Journals of a Female Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars. 1990.
Lieven, Dominic. Russia Against Napoleon. 2010.
Mikaberidze, Alexander. “The Lion of the Russian Army”: Life and Military Career of General Prince Peter Bagration 1765-1812. PhD Dissertation, 2003.
Rey, Marie-Pierre. L’effroyable tragédie: une nouvelle histoire de la campagne de Russie. 2012.
Zamoyski, Adam. 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. 2005.» OUR STORE
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Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Jesse Alexander
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
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Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
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Research by: Jesse Alexander
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Lucy Worsely on The Jacobites & the Scottish Enlightenment
Whitehall Moll History Clips
Published 22 Jul 2018A segment on the Jacobites and the Scottish Enlightenment that blossomed in the face of Hanoverian oppression.
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April 21, 2022
EU accuses Le Pen of financial skulduggery, in what I’m sure must be purely co-incidental timing
Theodore Dalrymple on the surprisingly frequent “charges made against anti-EU politician late in election campaign” phenomenon that seems to have become standard practice in France:
Marine Le Pen speaking in Lille during the 2017 French presidential election
Photo by Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick via Wikimedia Commons
A disturbing pattern has emerged in French presidential elections: A credible candidate is found almost at the last minute to have committed an illegal act, the revelation of which is intended to spoil or destroy altogether the candidate’s electoral chances.
The latest “victim” of this pattern is Marine Le Pen, who is facing the incumbent president, Emmanuel Macron, in the forthcoming second round of the French presidential election, a repeat of the contest of 2017. The main difference between the two contests is that, this time round, the polls give Le Pen at least some slight chance of victory, while last time Macron gained not only an overwhelming victory, but from the first had also appeared likely to do so. The outcome was never in any kind of doubt, as it is now.
Le Pen is usually described as being of the far right, though in fact her economic ideas are in some respects not very different from those of the candidate of the far left, Jean-Luc Mélanchon, who came not very far behind her in the first round of the election, in which the two candidates who receive the most votes go forward to the second, and decisive, round.
Perhaps economic affinity helps to explain why almost as many voters for the far-left candidate say they will vote for the candidate of the far right as say they will vote for the centrist candidate, Macron. Mélanchon himself has expressed the wish that not a single one of his voters should vote for Le Pen, without, however, having asked them to vote for Macron. He seems, then, to be hoping for a high rate of abstention, which would strengthen his argument that the current French political system is undemocratic and illegitimate, and that the country needs yet another new constitution.
Le Pen has just been accused by the European Union’s antifraud office of malversation of funds, 136,993.99 euros (about $148,000) of the Union’s money to be precise, while she was a member of the European Parliament between 2004 and 2017. For example, she is accused of having claimed 23,100 euros (about $25,000) for the purchase of little objects such as pens and bags to be given out at her political party’s annual conference in 2014, which is not allowed under the rules.
It might be a coincidence that the accusation of something that was allegedly done eight years ago has emerged in the week before the election, but I do not think many people will be found to believe it. After all, Le Pen is decidedly hostile to the European Union, while Macron is almost a religious devotee of it. There are no prizes for guessing, then, which of the two candidates the Union would prefer to win.
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L8(T) Enfield: The British Army Fails to Make a Sniper
Forgotten Weapons
Published 14 Dec 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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We looked at the 7.62mm conversion of the No4 Enfield into Rifle L8 yesterday. Part of that program was an attempt to develop a new sniper rifle on the L8 platform. To this end, six good-quality No4(T) Lee Enfield sniper rifles were tested for accuracy, then made into L8 rifles and fitted with No.32 telescopic sights (the standard scope from the .303 days) and tested for accuracy again. Much to the chagrin of the Army, the new L8(T) rifles were barely able to match the performance of the .303 rifles they began as. The goal was to significantly improve on the No4(T) accuracy, and that was clearly not happening.
However, at this same time, British civilian competition shooters were having excellent success making 7.62mm versions of the No4. It was only when Enfield was willing to collaborate with the British NRA and others that they were able to successfully create the L42A1 rifle, which at last met the accuracy goals of the program.
The rifle we are looking at today is one of those original six trials L8(T) rifles. Many thanks to the generous collector who allowed me to film it for you!
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QotD: Self-promotion in the modern job market
Self-promotion is not new, but never before has it been what theology was in the Middle Ages, the queen of the sciences.
A friend of mine, an Indian pediatrician, applied for temporary jobs in England and was considered for none of them. My friend was puzzled by this, for he had worked in England before and had good references. My wife, who knew the system from having worked in it at a senior level, asked to see his curriculum vitae that he sent to prospective employers, and soon spotted the problem: He boasted of nothing, and the culture had changed. What was necessary, my wife said, was to inflate his accomplishments as boastfully as possible. There was no risk that anyone would discover his exaggerations. He had once worked as a voluntary pediatric consultant to Mother Teresa’s charity in Calcutta; he had not even mentioned it in his CV, let alone made it sound as if he were all but the founder of her charity. If he once had helped an old lady across the road with her shopping, he should transmute this in his CV into a lifelong concern for the condition of the elderly; and so on and so forth.
It was all rather disgusting, but it worked like a charm: He immediately had offers of jobs aplenty, though of course his real worth as a doctor remained precisely the same. Reticence, which is to me a far more attractive quality than boastfulness, will get you nowhere, and nothing must be left to speak for itself. You must blow your own trumpet, if possible louder than anyone else’s.
Nowadays there are professional coaches in how to “big yourself up”, as the charming phrase has it, in applications for jobs or places in institutions. The son of a friend of mine used one to get into medical school. Lying will go undetected, but even if detected will do you no lasting harm. The most minor accomplishment can and should be made to sound like evidence of genius. It is almost a condition of employment that one should boast and write an advertisement for oneself.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Be Your Own Advert”, Taki’s Magazine, 2022-01-13.
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April 20, 2022
Khrushchev – Stalin’s Loyal Enforcer?
World War Two
Published 19 Apr 2022Nikita Khrushchev has served Joseph Stalin faithfully for the past decade. He’s a career commissar and party man. So, when war breaks out, are commissars like Khrushchev little more than Stalinist enforcers? Or is there more to the institution than that?
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De Tocqueville once called it “sleeping on a volcano”
Joel Kotkin looks at the first round results of the French Presidential election and wonders how long the working classes are going to put up with everything the elites dish out:
Whatever the final outcome, the recent French elections have already revealed the comparative irrelevance of many elite concerns, from genderfluidity and racial injustice to the ever-present “climate catastrophe”. Instead, most voters in France and elsewhere are more concerned about soaring energy, food and housing costs. Many suspect that the cognitive elites, epitomised by President Emmanuel Macron, lack even the ambition to improve their living conditions.
The French elections reflect the essential political conflict of our time. On one side, there is a powerful alliance between the corporate oligarchy and the regulatory clerisy. On the other, there are two beleaguered and angry classes – the small-business owners and artisans, and the vast, largely unorganised service class. The small-business class generally tends to favour the populist right, whether in America, Australia or Europe. These people want the government out of their business and to be left alone. Meanwhile, workers tend towards the populist left, which promises to relieve their economic pain.
The common feature is the politics of anger and resentment. In the first round of the French elections, a majority voted either for Marine Le Pen and other rightist candidates, or for the old Trotskyist warhorse Jean-Luc Mélenchon and other candidates of the hard left. The establishment parties, like the centre-left Parti Socialiste and the Gaullist Républicains, were left way behind. The ultra-green Parti Socialiste mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, won less than two per cent – a pathetic performance from the onetime ruling party. Intriguingly, voters under 35 went first for Mélenchon and then Le Pen, leaving the technocrat Macron in dismal third place among the young. Macron only won decisively among voters over 60.
We may, as de Tocqueville put it during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, be “sleeping on a volcano”. A still inchoate rebellion from below against the concentration of wealth and power above seems to be gathering momentum. Across the 36 wealthier countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the richest citizens have taken an ever-greater share of national GDP in recent years as the middle class has become smaller. Heavily in debt, mainly because of high housing costs, the middle class “looks increasingly like a boat in rocky waters”, suggests the OECD.
One key indicator of the declining middle class is rates of home ownership, which are stagnant or plummeting, particularly among the young, in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. In the United States, the chance of middle-class earners moving up to the top rungs of the earnings ladder has dropped by approximately 20 per cent since the early 1980s. Life expectancy in the US has dropped to the lowest levels in a quarter of a century.
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The Unbreakable ROCKEX: Canada’s answer to the Enigma machine
Polyus Studios
Published 30 Dec 2021Well before digital encryption and VPNs there was Rockex, Canada’s unbreakable cipher machine that rivaled the German Enigma in its day. Although completely hidden from the public, Canada has played a noticeable role in the history of espionage. During the Cold War Canadian cipher machines worked alongside those of her allies to keep communications secure and helped to preserve the peace.
Check out cryptomuseum.com for more information about Rockex and to find the source of most of the pictures of the device I used.
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April 19, 2022
Alexander’s Successors (the Diadochi): Series Introduction and Historical Context
Thersites the Historian
Published 24 Nov 2018This video introduces my series on Alexander’s Successors by talking about what the series will be like and by going through the historical context that the viewer might need to understand the age of the Successors.
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When the Germans had to surrender twice
The end of the war in Europe is usually noted as being the 8th of May, 1945, when General Eisenhower received the surrender of German forces, but the Soviets (and now the Russians) mark the anniversary on the 9th:
ADN-ZB/Archiv
II.Weltkrieg 1939-1945
Die bedingungslose Kapitulation der faschistischen deutschen Wehrmacht wird am 8. Mai 1945 in Berlin-Karlhorst unterzeichnet.
Links: Der Vertreter des Oberkommandos der Roten Armee, Marschall der Sowjetunion G. K. Shukow, am Tischende Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel.
J 0422/600/2 N
It was at three in the morning on Tuesday, 8 May 1945, that Generaloberst Alfred Jodl of the German High Command, signed a surrender document at General Dwight Eisenhower’s headquarters in Rheims, France. The European war was over. It was VE-Day. Stalin’s representative, General Ivan Susloparov, cabled his chief the great news.
However, the Russian leader flew into a rage. He wanted his own observance and insisted on a further ceremony at the Soviet military HQ in Karlshorst, a former Wehrmacht officers’ mess, six miles south-east of central Berlin. Chosen simply because it was one of the few buildings in the capital left with windows and a roof, the formalities were presided over by the captor of the city, Marshal Georgy Zhukov.
This time, it was Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, Jodl’s superior, who read over a near-identical document. Susloparov was again present, along with Carl Spaatz for the Americans and Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, representing France. Newsmen were unaware of the diplomatic spat that delayed proceedings.
De Lattre refused to sign unless the French tricolore was in evidence among the standards and pennants decorating the surrender room. The first Soviet solution hilariously produced a Dutch flag. To pacify an even-more outraged de Lattre, a Red Army seamstress was summoned to run up the appropriate banner. More delays ensued while the Allies bickered over the order of signatures and witnesses, only agreed after the mollifying effects of vodka and some food.
This is why the final ceremony began shortly after midnight. Cameras captured Keitel in full dress uniform, arriving in pompous mood. Flashlights caught the glint of his many medals, and the arrogant flourish of his marshal’s baton, held with gloved hands. He gazed around the room, haughty contempt written across his face. The field marshal removed only his right glove, screwed his monocle into his left eye and applied a fountain pen to the two-page, typewritten document. It was 00:16 local time on Wednesday, 9 May, which became Soviet Victory Day and remains so in Eastern Europe.
Each subsequent year on Victory Day, Red Square has echoed to the “Hurrahs” of vast numbers of Russian soldiers, sailors, marines and paratroopers, national guardsmen and airmen. They are drawn up to listen to their commander-in-chief and inspected by generals. Banners are saluted; swords flash through the air. Serenaded by massed bands playing stirring tunes, they march past the top brass, assembled on the roof of Lenin’s Mausoleum.
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History of Rome in 15 Buildings 05. The Colosseum
toldinstone
Published 27 Sep 2018Six lions fighting eight tigers! A troupe of performing elephants! Executions, accompanied by a full orchestra! Twelve gladiatorial combats, guaranteed to the death! So might a day of games at the Colosseum, the subject of our fifth episode, be advertised. No monument better encapsulates Roman imperialism – or its costs.
If you enjoyed this video, you might be interested in my forthcoming book Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants: Frequently Asked Questions about the Ancient Greeks and Romans. You can find a preview of the book here:
https://toldinstone.com/naked-statues…
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https://www.instagram.com/toldinstone/To see the story and photo essay associated with this video, go to:
https://toldinstone.com/the-colosseum/Thanks for watching!
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