The Great War
Published on 25 Jun 2018The 369th Infantry Regiment from Harlem, New York was an all-black unit that served on the Western Front. But not under American command, but loaned tot he French Army.
June 26, 2018
Henry Johnson And The Harlem Hellfighters I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
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Saragarhi – The Last Stand – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 5 Aug 2017A humble signal station manned by only twenty one Sikh soldiers of the British Empire finds itself beset by 10,000 attackers. There is no hope for relief, but even knowing it will come at the cost of their lives, the Sikhs refuse to stand down.
Twenty one men in the 36th Sikh Regiment stand against thousands of attackers, prepared to make their final stand.
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June 25, 2018
The oddly variable careers of Royal Navy ships named HMS Lion
Every now and again, a random question leads me to odd results … in this case I wondered about the Royal Navy ships named HMS Lion, which I remembered as being used for a First World War battlecruiser (Vice-Admiral Beatty’s flagship through the actions at Heligoland Bight and Jutland) and a Cold War light cruiser (whose sister ships were converted into hybrid light cruiser/amphibious assault ships). Earlier ships of that name had even more interesting careers (from the Wikipedia disambiguation page):
HMS Lion, lead ship of the Lion-class of Royal Navy battlecruisers.
Photo from the Imperial War Museum, via Wikimedia Commons.
- English ship Lion (1511) was a 36-gun ship of the Royal Scottish Navy captured in 1511 and sold in 1513.
- English ship Lion (1536) was a 50-gun ship built in 1536 and on the navy list until 1559.
- English ship Lion (1547) was a Scottish ship captured in 1547 and later lost off Harwich.
- English ship Lion (1557) was a 40-gun ship, also known as Golden Lion. She was rebuilt four times, in 1582, 1609, 1640 and 1658. After her 1609 rebuild she was renamed Red Lion, but this was reverted to Lion after the 1640 rebuild. She was sold in 1698.
Modern naval ships are considered long-in-the-tooth after 25-30 years of service. HMS Lion (the HMS was not consistently applied to royal ships until the eighteenth century, but let’s just let that slide here) of 1557 was only undergoing her first rebuild/life extension at the point a modern ship would already be under consideration for dismantling. She was still in royal service for three more rebuildings, and was sold (not scrapped) after 141 years of active service. But the Royal Navy was far from done with using this name:
- HMS Lion (1665) was a 6-gun ketch, also known as Young Lion. She was captured from the Dutch in 1665, sold in 1667, repurchased in 1668 and sunk as a foundation at Sheerness in 1673.
- HMS Lion (1683) was a fifth rate captured from the Algerians in 1683 and sold the same year.
- HMS Lion (1702) was a 4-gun stores hoy of 99 tons burthen purchased in 1702. A French privateer captured her off Beachy Head in 1708, but she was recaptured in 1709.[1]
- HMS Lion (1709 hoy) was a 4-gun hoy launched in 1709. She was wrecked in 1752.[2]
- HMS Lion (1709) was a 60-gun third rate launched in 1709, rebuilt in 1738 and sold in 1765.
Another longer-service veteran than the vast majority of modern naval ships.
- HMS Lion (1753) was a transport launched in 1753, hulked in 1775, and sold in 1786.
- HMS Lion (1763) was a cutter purchased in 1763 and sold in 1771.
- HMS Lion (1774) was a discovery vessel in service from 1774 to 1785.
- HMS Lion (1777) was a 64-gun third rate launched in 1777. She was used as a sheer hulk from 1816 and was sold for breaking up in 1837.
One assumes the name was changed before 1781, even though the hull was still in use for long after other ships named HMS Lion were respectively in commission and then out of service with the Royal Navy:
- HMS Lion (1781) was a schooner purchased around 1781 and sold in 1785.
- HMS Lion (1794) was a 4-gun vessel, originally a Dutch hoy. She was purchased in 1794 and sold in 1795.
- HMS Lion (1823) was a schooner in service from 1823 and sold in 1826.
- HMS Lion (1847) was an 80-gun second rate launched in 1847. She was converted to screw propulsion in 1859 and became a training ship after 1871. She was sold for breaking up in 1905.
- HMS Lion (1910) was a Lion-class battlecruiser launched in 1910 and sold in 1924.
- HMS Lion (1939) was to have been a Lion-class battleship. She was laid down in 1939, but work was suspended later that year, and again in 1942. The order was finally cancelled in 1945 and she was broken up on the slipway.
- HMS Lion (C34) was a Tiger-class cruiser launched in 1944 as the Minotaur-class HMS Defence. She was finally completed to a revised design in 1960. She was placed in reserve in 1964 and was scrapped in 1975.
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Differences between the United States and the “idealized” United States of Europe
Tim Worstall, in the Continental Telegraph:
There are those who think – urge, wish for perhaps – the European Union is or should become the United States of Europe. Lots of central bureaucratic control, the nation states left as just the remnants of once independent countries like the US states are these days. In some ways the two systems are very much the same already. No US state has any control at all over trade across its own border. Nor does any EU one. Trade is an issue solely the competence of the central organisations, respectively Washington DC and Brussels. Equally, both systems use this central control of trade and trade only to expand that central control.
In the US there was a case that Federal control of trade meant that the Feds got to decide who could grow wheat where and when. The usual sort of planning idiocy led to the Feds telling farmers who could grow how much and when. One farmer claimed he was only growing for his own consumption and this shouldn’t be limited. The centre (the Supreme Court) disagreed, the crux being that if he didn’t grow for his own consumption he would buy, this affected inter-state commerce, he had to obey the Feds. The EU takes this a step further. The Single Market rules are nominally about trade. Anything legal to be buying and selling in one place is such in all is a reasonable explanation of the nub of the matter. Sure, exceptions and all that. But this then smuggles into all law that continental (Roman Law really) idea that what is legal to do is something that the legislation defines. Instead of that Common Law idea that legislation, the law even, defines what it is illegal to do all other things being legal.
Once this is accepted then of course the next step is that there must be regulation of all things so as to tell people what it is legal to do. In this manner all sorts of things get smuggled in. Vacuum cleaner motors must be limited to a certain size or power. Because those whose lives are unfortunate enough that they’ve time to spare to be concerned about legislation on such matters note that they can be and thus incorporate their trivialities into legislation. The extent of this reach is larger than you think. The underlying legal, not political, justification for recycling targets is that some countries – Holland, where digging a hole gains nothing but wet boots – don’t have space for landfill. This would put them at a disadvantage if other countries do have the space, therefore all must recycle.
Giving the centre power always, but always, means an extension of the centre’s power. The two systems aren’t so different then.
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June 24, 2018
Europe and the refugees
Theodore Dalrymple on the various European governments’ attitudes and actions on the refugee problem:
Europe, despite its Union, is as divided as ever. Recently, when Italy’s new right-wing government — anxious to prove its credentials — refused to allow a boat carrying 629 African migrants to dock in Italy, Spain’s new left-wing government — equally anxious to do the same — accepted the boat. When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, criticized the Italians for their decision, the Italian government accused the French of hypocrisy, inasmuch as they had refused to take more than 9,000 migrants from Italy that they had previously agreed to accept.
This story is revealing in several aspects. The first is that, whatever attitude governments take to the migrants, no one truly believes that they are more of an asset than a liability. Madrid’s action, for example, was taken on “humanitarian” grounds, rather than because it believed that Spain would benefit from the migrants’ presence. When European leaders discuss the migrant question, it is always in terms of sharing the burden, not the assets, equitably. No one speaks of foreign investment in this way, which suggests that European politicians believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that the free movement of people and capital are different in an important way.
The leaders speak of sharing the burden, then, and are incensed when countries such as Hungary and Poland refuse point-blank to take any migrants from Africa or the Middle East. But I have never seen mentioned in this context the question of where the migrants themselves want to go. They might as well be inanimate toxic waste as far as the discussion is concerned, rather than human beings with wishes, desires, ambitions, and so forth. They are but pawns in a political game. Hungary, for example, is deemed duty-bound to take x number of migrants: no one asks whether x number of migrants can be found who want to go to Hungary. Nor is the question ever discussed in public whether Hungary, having open borders, would be held responsible for making the migrants stay there once they had arrived. Short of penning them in, how exactly would you keep them in Hungary, or in Poland?
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Life In The Tomb – WW1 Author Stratis Myrivilis I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
The Great War
Published on 23 Jun 2018Get Life In The Tomb: https://amzn.to/2MF8TMZ [Affiliate Link]
Stratis Myrivilis was a Greek Author, but he was also a soldier that fought in the Balkan Wars, World War 1 and the Greco-Turkish War. His experience in the First World War, was the basis for his most famous novel Life In The Tomb.
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Berlin protest planned against EU’s proposed copyright changes
If you’re a regular internet user and you’re anywhere near Berlin, you might want to consider supporting this protest:
On Wednesday, the Legislative Committee of the European Union narrowly voted to keep the two most controversial internet censorship and surveillance proposals in European history in the upcoming revision to the Copyright Directive — as soon as July Fourth, the whole European Parliament could vote to make this the law of 28 EU member-states.
The two proposals were Article 11 (the link tax), which bans linking to news articles without paying for a license from each news-site you want to link to; and Article 13 (the copyright filters), requiring that everything that Europeans post be checked first for potential copyright infringements and censored if an algorithm decides that your expression might breach someone’s copyright.
These proposals were voted through even though experts agree that they will be catastrophic for free speech and competition, raising the table-stakes for new internet companies by hundreds of millions of euros, meaning that the US-based Big Tech giants will enjoy permanent rule over the European internet. Not only did the UN’s special rapporteur on freedom of expression publicly condemn the proposal; so did more than 70 of the internet’s leading luminaries, including the co-creators of the World Wide Web, Wikipedia, and TCP.
We have mere days to head this off: the German Pirate Party has called for protests in Berlin this Sunday, June 24 at 11:45h outside European House Unter den Linden 78, 10117 Berlin. They’ll march on the headquarters of Axel-Springer, a publisher that lobbied relentlessly for these proposals.
If you use the Internet to communicate, organize, and educate it’s time to speak out. Show up, stand up, because the Internet needs you!
Original post, with embedded links, at BoingBoing.
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June 23, 2018
Word of the day – Kakistocracy
Ann Althouse does the etymological heavy lifting:
“Kakistocracy” — based on the Greek for “worst” + “rule” — means ” The government of a state by the worst citizens”(OED).
1829 T. L. Peacock Misfortunes Elphin vi. 93 Our agrestic kakistocracy now castigates the heinous sins which were then committed with impunity [“Agrestic” = rural, rough and uncouth.]
1876 J. R. Lowell Lett. II. vii. 179 Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?I see that Salon got to the OED and deployed that word and those quotes before Trump was even sworn in: “Degeneration nation: “It takes a village of idiots to raise a kakistocracy like Donald Trump’s/Donald Trump’s government will be ‘for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools’” (December 17, 2016):
As Amro Ali explains in a piece calling for a revival of the term “kakistrocracy” [sic] “In a world where stupidity penetrates multiple levels of government, policies and personalities; it is strange that the term coined to best describe it has actually ended up in the endangered and forgotten words books.”…
Forbes contributor Michael Lewitt reminds us that “kakistocracy” should be used to describe a state or government run by the most unscrupulous or unsuitable people: “Corrupt, dishonest and incompetent politicians, regulators and bureaucrats were put in charge by self-absorbed, selfish and ignorant citizens.” He goes on to acknowledge that we are probably not the first society to consider our leaders as part of a kakistocracy….
The word kakistocracy comes to us from Greek. Kakistos means “worst,” which is superlative of kakos — “bad” — and if it sounds like shit, that’s because it is.
That link on “if it sounds like shit” goes to an etymology dictionary entry for “kakistocracy”:
…. from Greek kakistos “worst,” superlative of kakos “bad” (which perhaps is related to PIE root *kakka- “to defecate”) + –cracy.
In that view, the real “shithole country.” When will the U.N. give us credit for having the most nerve and confidence to criticize those we elect and continually threaten to oust?
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Ian Explains the French Mutinies of 1917
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 24 May 2018http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Check out my new series of WW1 shirts!
https://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weaponsWhile on the road with Military Historical Tours visiting American battlefields of World War One, I was asked to explain the French mutinies of 1917. This was an extemporaneous lecture, so please forgive any factual errors I may have made (and such errors are entirely my fault, not that of MHT). Please not that I am not a regular tour guide or anything for MHT; I’m on this tour as a participant. Want to take one of their tours yourself? They go all over Europe and Asia, covering sites form WW1, WW2, Korean, and Vietnam:
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June 22, 2018
Second Battle of the Piave River I THE GREAT WAR Week 204
The Great War
Published on 21 Jun 2018Even though Austro-Hungarian Field Marshal Svetozar Boroević von Bojna warns against, the Austro-Hungarian Army goes on the offensive in Italy again. In a two-pronged attack Borojevic and Conrad von Hötzendorf attack the Italian positions.
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June 20, 2018
Tank Chats #31 Mark IX | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 3 Feb 2017The thirty first in a series of short films about some of the vehicles in our collection, presented by The Tank Museum’s historian David Fletcher MBE. The First World War Mark IX, the first armoured personnel carrier, was designed to solve the problem of moving infantry across the battlefield with the fighting tanks.
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June 19, 2018
Flying Aircraft Carriers – Reversed Bullets I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 18 Jun 2018
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Time to throw Mutti Merkel under the bus?
Sabine Beppler-Spahl thinks Angela Merkel’s time is running out:
Angela Merkel’s days may be numbered. ‘She will never recover from this crisis’, said an article in a German newspaper last week, about the rift within her government over immigration.
This latest crisis began after the interior minister, Horst Seehofer, announced that he wanted to introduce tougher rules for asylum seekers, including turning away those who have already been registered in another EU country. Merkel responded by saying that Europe needed a common solution to the refugee crisis, and that she would discuss it with French president Emmanuel Macron during his upcoming visit, and at the EU summit later this month. She blocked Seehofer from unveiling his immigration ‘master plan’, and he has insisted that a solution should be found by today. He has also threatened to sidestep Merkel and impose his plan regardless, leading to speculation about a government breakdown, and a confidence vote, little more than 100 days since the new ruling coalition, led by Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), was formed.
[…]
Merkel’s decision to put the brakes on Seehofer’s ‘master plan’ reflects her evasive and anti-democratic style. No voter has yet been able to read this plan, let alone discuss it. Her concern about publishing it reflects the contempt in which she holds democratic debate. Meanwhile, her carefully prepared statements on the issue (mostly in the form of TV interviews with choice journalists or her own weekly podcast) rarely tell us very much at all. Despite opening Germany’s doors to refugees in 2015, she has never made a proper public case for the benefits of immigration. Her inability, or unwillingness, to explain her politics to the electorate has contributed to the narrow and technical way in which immigration is being discussed in Germany these days, with a focus on numbers and deportation practices.
Taking an issue to the ‘European level’ has become Merkel’s default solution to everything. ‘This is a European challenge that also needs a European solution’, she said in her latest podcast. Of course, a joint European solution would be preferable, but not if this means bypassing national electorates. Her original plan of imposing migrant quotas on other EU member states has failed completely. Excluding the public from the debate, and discussing politics behind closed doors, is simply not cutting it with voters. Whatever one thinks of Seehofer’s ‘master plan’, he is right that immigration needs to be discussed and decided upon at the democratic, national level.
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QotD: Homophobia and racism in the USA and in Europe
Outside the very privileged top of society, feminism doesn’t get the traction it gets in the US ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD. Not even in England. In fact every other country in the world is far more “ist” than the US, because being “ist” (racist, sexist and homophobic[ist for completism]) is the way things are done. I find it mildly amusing whenever gay friends think that the US is worse than Europe “because of all the religious stuff.” Uh. No. The US is more tolerant than Europe because we’re richer and more vast and we can ignore that which annoys us more easily. In Europe they live in each other’s pockets on what is for us tight resources. They have no “give” and cohesion and conformity is enforced, which means if you stick out, you get it. Not publicly and certainly not if you’re a tourist, but if you live there among the people you’ll find you don’t need to hunt for microaggressions.
And before people from Europe say it isn’t so — you don’t know. Anymore than Americans do who’ve never lived there as locals. You don’t know how much LESS of the racism and sexism and homophobia there is in the US than in your area. Hint, what you see in our movies and read in our papers is the greatest bullshit around. Those PRACTICALLY don’t exist in the US, for any functional purpose. I mean, sure, people might think women are inferior, or might hate gays, but unlike the internet sites colonized by the alt.right (and how many of those are Russian agent accounts no one knows) people expressing such feelings (actual hostility not imaginary micro-aggressions) are likely to be laughed at or mocked. Not so in Europe.
And then there’s the more tan areas of Europe, and what we’ll term the first world minus a quarter.
I’m not ragging on my birthplace. It has some admirable qualities. But if you think that it is more tolerant or laid back than the US you haven’t lived there. Sexism is internalized at such a level people don’t see it. They give lip service to women having jobs, etc, but those women still have to be “good housewives” no matter what their job is. Men still get the choice seats in cars (be fair, they are so tiny most men have to sit up front to fit, but it has become internalized, too), men still take pride of place without a thoughts. No, not everywhere, not in every family. BUT at a cultural level, it exists at a point that feminists here would have a heart attack. Again no time to look for micro aggressions, you’re too busy working through the macro ones.
But here is the thing that these people forget: They’re not AGGRESSIONS. They’re just culture. When a man as a matter of course takes the best seat, he’s not making a comment on YOU. Hell, he’s not making a comment at all. He’s just doing something so deeply ingrained that he didn’t think about it. If you think that’s enough to make it so that you can’t succeed or that you need to run around saying you live in a patriarchal or male-supremacist society, let me tell you, cupcake, you wouldn’t have succeeded anyway.
Sarah Hoyt, “A Very Diverse Cake”, According to Hoyt, 2016-08-31.
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June 18, 2018
The Only German Submarine Attack On US Shore in WW1 I OUT OF THE ETHER
The Great War
Published on 16 Jun 2018Paul Hodos’ Book about U-Kreuzer: https://amzn.to/2JzXkIY
After a long time, we are back with our format Out Of The Ether and this week we tell you about the only time Germany directly attacked US mainland with a submarine.
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