Forgotten Weapons
Published on 15 Aug 2018More info: https://www.forgottenweapons.com/germ…
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
In the aftermath of World War One, every military force immediately began to assess what they thought was most important to improve in their arsenals for the next war. For Germany, one thing they felt lacking was a light howitzer that could be organic to infantry units, mobile enough to remain with the front lines in an advance to provide easy and immediate supporting fire. The Rheinmetall company would develop just such a gun and the German military adopted it in 1932 under the designation 7.5cm leichtes Infanteriegeschutz 18.
The 7.5cm le.IG 18 fired a roughly 12 pound (5.5-6 kg) 75mm high explosive shell out to 4,000 meters, and was capable of both direct and indirect fire (elevation maxed out at 90 degrees). These guns would see service on all fronts with the German military in World War Two, remaining inservice throughout the entire war.
The mechanical operation of the gun is rather unusual for an artillery piece, with a fixed breech and a barrel which tips up from the muzzle for loading and ejection. This did not really convey any particular advantage, but it also did not have any particular weakness and was quite satisfactory in action.
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
September 5, 2018
Germany’s New Light Howitzer: the 7.5cm le.IG 18
QotD: Why did appeasing the Fascist dictators seem such a sensible policy?
It is a familiar student essay question, whether the revolution could have been averted, but for the world war and resultant loss of up to three million Russian lives. It seems more useful merely to suggest that, in the political and ideological climate of the early 20th century, the collectivist experiment was bound to be attempted somewhere, and Russia or China were obvious testbeds. The consequences for millions of Russian peasants, together with the ferocity of Soviet oppression, were successfully concealed from most western eyes for half a century. The 1789 French revolution killed only a few thousand aristocrats and transferred land to peasants, who thus became ardent upholders of property rights. The Russian version required liquidation of the entire governing class and transfer of land to collective ownership, an incomparably more radical proceeding. Douglas Smith’s 2012 book Former People gives a harrowing account of the fate of the Tsarist aristocracy.
In the West, the gullibility of the Webbs, Bernard Shaw and the rest of the ‘true believers’ was fed by a desperation to suppose the Soviet example viable. ‘Looking around us at our own hells,’ wrote the historian Philip Toynbee, who became a communist at Cambridge, ‘we had to invent an earthly paradise somewhere else’. As late as 1945, the leftist publisher Victor Gollancz brought posterity’s contempt upon himself by declining to publish Animal Farm, George Orwell’s great satire on Bolshevism.
For a counter-revolutionary contemporary perspective, it is impossible to understand the 1930s appeasement of the dictators without grasping the traumatic impact of events in Russia on the propertied classes everywhere. The Winter Palace was stormed only 16 years before Hitler came to power. For at least two decades, Europe’s ‘haves’ were far more frightened of Bolshevism than of fascism.
The ‘clubland hero’ novels of John Buchan and Sapper offer embarrassing glimpses of the British bourgeois view of Lenin’s people and their followers in the decades following the revolution. A belief took hold in polite circles that the bloodiest revolutionaries were not merely communists but also Jews, which meant they were doubly damned in St James’s clubs.
Max Hastings, “The centenary of the Russian revolution should be mourned, not celebrated”, The Spectator, 2016-12-10.
September 4, 2018
WW1 Trucks and Logistics I THE GREAT WAR On The Road
The Great War
Published on 3 Sep 2018Indy and David Willey of the Tank Museum talk a bit about trucks and logistics during WW1 while sitting in some sweet vintage World War 1 trucks.
September 3, 2018
WW2 – September 1 1939 – The Polish German War
World War Two
Published on 1 Sep 2018When Germany invades Poland on September 1 1939, the world is already at the brink of a new world war…
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Spartacus OlssonJoin us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
Apologies for this going out a day later than usual … I was out of town on the weekend with very limited internet connectivity. Future TimeGhost/Between2Wars episodes will appear closer to their release days (usually the next day).
September 2, 2018
Adrian Carton de Wiart – WW1 Paratroopers? I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 1 Sep 2018Chair of Wisdom Time!
World of Warships – Public Test 0.7.9 – The Queen, God Bless Her!
The Mighty Jingles
Published on 31 Aug 2018The Public Test Server is currently experiencing large doses of tea, Union Jacks and digestive biscuits that don’t look like much but are in fact strangely tasty. I hear the song of my people, I came as fast as I could.
HMS Eagle: Royal Aircraft Carrier (1969) | Extra! | British Pathé
British Pathé
Published on 13 Apr 2014This Pathé ‘Extra!’ segment depicts the carrier HMS Eagle in 1969, which was the 15th in a long line of Royal Navy ships to carry that name. This particular ship was an Audacious-class aircraft carrier that hosted all manner of planes from the de Havilland Sea Vixen to the McDonnell Douglas Phantom.
#BritishPathé #RoyalNavy #RAF #Ships #Navy #Military
(FILM ID:2221.15)
Extra ! HMS Eagle.Aerial shot of the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle of the Royal Navy. M/S of radar tower. Several shots of jet aircraft on the deck of the ship including Sea Vixens, Gannets and Phantoms. Shots of jet plane taxiing on runway. M/S to L/S of Sea Vixen taking off from the deck. M/Ss of three men working in the control tower. M/Ss of pilot sitting in cockpit of jet on the deck. Good shot of deck crew at work preparing jet plane for takeoff. L/Ss of Phantom aircraft taking-off. L/S and M/S of the aircraft in-flight. L/S of deck of ship. An aircraft lands on the deck of the ship. M/S of arrester wire. Another shot of plane landing. M/S of Westland Wessex helicopter hovering nearby. Air to air shot of phantom in-flight. M/S shots of plane landing. L/Ss of the aircraft carrier.
September 1, 2018
The Tartan Myth | Stuff That I Find Interesting
Jabzy
Published on 22 Jun 2017
August 31, 2018
Experimental strip farm demonstrates why strip farming was eventually abandoned
Tim Worstall uses an article in the Guardian about a National Trust experimental replication of medieval farming patterns to point out exactly why modern farms do not use them:
Plan of a fictional medieval manor. The mustard-coloured areas are part of the demesne (owned by the lord), the hatched areas part of the glebe (reserved to support the parish priest).
Illustration from William R. Shepherd’s Historical Atlas, 1923 via Wikimedia Commons.
The proof of the inefficiency is in the presence of that lots more wildlife. We’re trying to grow food for humans to eat recall. So, more wildlife eating off the same earth is less food for humans. We have more butterflies around? That’s nice, but that does mean more caterpillars munching on those now not for humans crops. Hen harriers? Great, but they’re eating the mice and the voles living off those crops. Land that’s growing wildflowers isn’t growing grain or veggies for us, is it?
Sure, it’s nice to have hen harriers, great to have wildflowers. But their very existence on this land shows that this method of farming is less efficient at doing the job of farming – growing food for us. Which is why we abandoned this method of farming of course. Under the simple and basic pressures of trying to gain more output from our inputs. And yes, land is, obviously enough, an input into farming.
And if we’d like to have flowers and harriers? Then we should be using the most efficient farming methods on those areas we do farm so as to leave more space, more land, for the pretty things we’d also like to have. That is, prairies of glycophosphate drenched wheat for us, the other 30 or 50 or 70% of the land left alone for them. And the more chemicals we use on our bit the smaller that bit devoted to us is going to be.
The very fact that we’ve more wildlife as a result of this inefficient farming method shows us that we must be using the more efficient industrial methods. You know, to save the wildlife?
The American First Army Gears Up – Germany Retreats I THE GREAT WAR – Week 214
The Great War
Published on 30 Aug 2018As the German Army withdraws along the Western Front, the Entente prepares for ever more offensives. This includes the newly founded American First Army which will have the task to attack the Germans in the Meuse-Argonnes area.
How did Britain Conquer India? | Animated History
The Armchair Historian
Published on 10 Aug 2018Check out History With Hilbert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs1sw…
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Sources:
https://dailyhistory.org/Why_was_Brit…
1857 Indian War of Independence: 1857 Indian Sepoys’ Mutiny, Shahid Hussain Raja
The East India Company, Brian Gardner
The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational, Nick Robins
A History of India, Peter Robb
August 30, 2018
Britain “forgets” to regulate e-cigarettes, youth smoking drops substantially
Last month, Matt Ridley sang the praises of the regulators who didn’t regulate:
A selection of e-cigarettes
Photo by Ecig Click via Wikimedia Commons.
Britain is the world leader in vaping. More people use ecigarettes in the UK than in any other European country. It’s more officially encouraged than in the United States and more socially acceptable than in Australia, where it’s still banned. There is a thriving sector here of vape manufacturers, retailers, exporters, even researchers; there are 1,700 independent vape shops on Britain’s streets. It’s an entrepreneurial phenomenon and a billion-pound industry.
The British vaping revolution dismays some people, who see it as a return to social acceptability for something that looks like smoking with unknown risks. Yet here, more than anywhere in the world, the government disagrees. Public Health England says that vaping is 95% safer than smoking and the vast majority of people who vape are smokers who are partly or wholly quitting cigarettes. The Royal College of Physicians agrees: “The public can be reassured that ecigarettes are much safer than smoking.”
Lots of doctors are now recommending vaping as a way of quitting smoking. It is because of vaping that Britain now has the second lowest percentage of people who smoke in the European Union. The youth smoking rate in the UK has fallen from 26% to 19% in only six years.
How did this happen here? It’s partly the fault of the advertising executive Rory Sutherland; he is the Walter Raleigh of this revolution. In 2010, he walked into an office in Admiralty Arch to see an old friend, David Halpern, head of David Cameron’s new “nudge unit”, formally known as the Behavioural Insights Team. Sutherland pulled out an electronic cigarette he had bought online, and inhaled. By then, several countries including Australia, Brazil and Saudi Arabia had already banned the sale of electronic cigarettes — usually at the behest of tobacco interests or public-health pressure groups. California had passed a bill banning them, though Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the governor, had vetoed it. It looked inevitable that Britain would follow suit.
“I was a very early convert,” Sutherland tells me now. “Partly because I was a longtime ex-smoker myself who found them much better than constant relapses; I was also interested in the placebo effect they offered by mimicking the act of smoking. But I was almost equally fascinated by the psychology of the people who instinctively wanted to ban them.”
Halpern took notice. He knew the theory of “harm reduction” — that it is more effective to give somebody the lesser of two evils than insist unrealistically on immediate abstinence. So he asked his nudge team to get digging. Over coffee at No 10, he was surprised to learn that even the anti-smoking group Ash was leaning in favour of ecigarettes. So when public-health nannies started calling for them to be banned, Halpern made sure the government resisted.
In his book Inside the Nudge Unit, Halpern wrote: “We looked hard at the evidence and made a call: we minuted the PM and urged that the UK should move against banning e-cigs. Indeed, we went further. We argued we should deliberately seek to make e-cigs widely available, and to use regulation not to ban them but to improve their quality and reliability.”
H/T to Rafe Champion for the link.
August 29, 2018
Out of Context: How to Make Bad History Worse | World War 2
Knowing Better
Published on 5 Mar 2018Churchill was a genocidal maniac. The Japanese were rounded up into concentration camps. FDR let Pearl Harbor happen. When you take history out of context, you can make it say whatever you want – including making bad things worse.
A long list of links to sources is included, but I’m too lazy to re-link ’em all, just go to YouTube to see them. Back in 2009, I did a short fisking of Pat Buchanan’s hit-piece on Churchill’s “reponsibility” for the outbreak of WW2.
August 28, 2018
Inside the Medium Mark A “Whippet” Tank I THE GREAT WAR On The Road
The Great War
Published on 27 Aug 2018Check out the Tank Museum’s YouTube Channel: http://youtube.com/thetankmuseum
The Medium Mark A “Whippet” Tank was a new kind of tank design for exploiting breakthroughs and wrecking havoc in the rear of enemy positions. It could could reach a, for the time pretty fast, top speed of 8 miles per hour. When looking at the tanks of the First World War it is often overlooked.
