HardThrasher
Published 8 Jun 2025References
1. https://tinyurl.com/yc74kmed
2. Britain’s Jet Age, Guy Ellis, 2016, Amberley Publishing
3. Genius Of The Jet | The Invention Of The J… – Frank Whittle and Powerjets documentary, originally aired on the BBC
4. Meteor, Gloster’s First Jet Fighter, Steven Bond, Midland, 1985, Chpt 1
5. The British Aircraft Specifications File, Meekcombs and Morgan, 1994, p.298
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klimov_…
7. Most Secret Place, Johnson & Hefferman, Janes, 1983
8. https://mikesresearch.com/2020/12/25/…
9. Bond, op cit. p18
10. Bond, op cit.p34
11. QUEEN OF THE SKY: Meteor Night Fighters, U…
12. https://hushkit.net/2020/05/12/my-fav…
13. https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase… and https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase…
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June 9, 2025
The Mighty Meteor – The World’s First Operational Jet Fighter
Q&A: British Small Arms of World War Two
Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Jan 2025Today’s Q&A is brought to you by the fine folks at Patreon, and by Penguin Brutality: https://www.varusteleka.com/en/search…
01:11 – Was the Vickers .50 any good, and why did the British use four different heavy cartridges instead of consolidating?
07:35 – The Sten and its single-feed magazine design
10:27 – Owen versus Sten, and German use of the Owen.
14:38 – British wartime work on an “assault rifle” sort of weapon?
15:44 – Why no British semiauto rifle during WW2? – Jonathan Ferguson on British semiauto rifle trials: Q&A 43 (feat. Jonathan Ferguson): Mil…
18:04 – EM2’s automatic bolt closure system
20:46 – Did the British use other allied weapons besides American ones?
23:15 – Is the PIAT a Destrucitve Device under US law and why?
26:07 – Bren vs Degtyarev
27:50 – Why not make the Sten in .45 to use Thompson ammo?
29:37 – Did the British get M3 Grease Guns?
31:01 – British SMG in .455?
32:03 – Sten vs Lanchester
33:26 – Was there an LSW version of the EM1/EM2 planned? EM1 Korsac: The Korsac EM1 – a British/Polish Bul…
34:25 – Why wasn’t the BESA in .303?
36:34 – Biggest British missed opportunity during the interwar period?
38:40 – British naval service small arms
41:45 – Did .280 cartridge development begin during the war?
43:24 – Impact of MP44 on British post-war small arms development?
44:25 – Gallilean sights on the Enfield
46:25 – Why is there a semiauto selector on the Sten?
49:17 – Did American soldiers use British small arms?
50:29 – Why did the British choose the Lee action over the Mauser action?
51:16 – Which was better, Sten or Grease Gun?
52:34 – Why did the whole Commonwealth not switch to the No4 Enfield?
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QotD: “Defending” democracy with totalitarian methods
One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that “bourgeois liberty” is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can defend democracy only by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who “objectively” endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought. This argument was used, for instance, to justify the Russian purges. The most ardent Russophile hardly believed that all of the victims were guilty of all the things they were accused of: but by holding heretical opinions they “objectively” harmed the regime, and therefore it was quite right not only to massacre them but to discredit them by false accusations. The same argument was used to justify the quite conscious lying that went on in the leftwing press about the Trotskyists and other Republican minorities in the Spanish civil war. And it was used again as a reason for yelping against habeas corpus when Mosley was released in 1943.
These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won’t stop at Fascists. Soon after the suppressed Daily Worker had been reinstated, I was lecturing to a working men’s college in South London. The audience were working‐class and lower‐middle‐class intellectuals — the same sort of audience that one used to meet at Left Book Club branches. The lecture had touched on the freedom of the press, and at the end, to my astonishment, several questioners stood up and asked me: Did I not think that the lifting of the ban on the Daily Worker was a great mistake? When asked why, they said that it was a paper of doubtful loyalty and ought not to he tolerated in war time. I found myself defending the Daily Worker, which has gone out of its way to libel me more than once. But where had these people learned this essentially totalitarian outlook? Pretty certainly they had learned it from the Communists themselves!
Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England, but they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort. The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous. The case of Mosley illustrates this. In 1940, it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible Quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symptom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley’s release was partly factitious and partly a rationalization of other discontents. But how much of the present slide to ward Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the “anti‐Fascism” of the past ten years, and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?
George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press“, 1945 (written as the introduction to Animal Farm, but not published in Orwell’s lifetime).
June 8, 2025
Day Two – Panzers Stuck in Europe‘s Biggest Traffic Jam! – Ten Days in Sedan
World War Two
Published 7 Jun 2025May 11, 1940: Our WW2 documentary continues as the Battle of France rages and German Panzers rumble through the Ardennes. The Battle of Sedan is on the horizon and Heinz Guderian has one objective: break the French defences! But all is not well for the Germans as Europe’s largest-ever traffic jam threatens to stall the Blitzkrieg.
00:00 Intro
00:51 The Ardennes Advance
08:55 The Air War
15:05 Conclusion
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The Canadian Retribution at Normandy | History Traveler Episode 196
The History Underground
Published 16 Feb 2022Throughout the Battle of Normandy, the Canadians of the 3rd Infantry Division and the Germans of the 12th SS Panzer Division found themselves locked in a battle of attrition that would mark some of the most vicious fighting of the entire campaign. After suffering a blow at Buron and Authie (as seen in the last episode) the fight shifted over to a place that has now become legendary in Canadian military history: Bretteville-l’Orgueilleuse. In this episode, we’re joined by Paul Woodadge of @WW2TV to show a small part of one of the most epic fights in the battle to take Normandy.
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June 7, 2025
The US President Saves Germany – Rise of Hitler 18 – June 1931
World War Two
Published 5 Jun 2025In June 1931, Germany teeters on the edge of collapse — facing riots, unemployment, and a banking crisis. Amidst chaos and international pressure, US President Herbert Hoover offers a dramatic moratorium on war debts, giving Germany a critical lifeline. Can this American intervention stabilize the Weimar Republic, or is disaster still on the horizon? Explore how global politics, economic turmoil, and desperate diplomacy shape a nation’s fate.
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Doctor Who fades further
I still have vague affection for the British TV show Doctor Who, but I certainly wouldn’t call myself a fan of more recent times. “My” Doctor was William Hartnell and then Patrick Troughton, with a few look-ins from Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker later on. I certainly haven’t been closely following the show as it became more and more woke, so I can’t comment on the news that the show is being, if not technically cancelled, at least given an indefinite pause in production:
“This wasn’t a finale it was a funeral, and the undertaker wired the corpse to be giving his mourners two middle fingers“
The show isn’t canceled because technically it has never been canceled, it’s just being given another “rest.” Besides you couldn’t possibly use the word “canceled” when you go as far off the Woke deep-end as Doctor Who did. That wouldn’t be an admission of failure, it would be an admission of complete rejection.
Disney Doctor Who felt like a parody from the start. It was Doctor Who as written by Jon Waters. It genuinely felt like Russel T. Davies was making fun of his own time on the show, in the 2000s. Truth be told I don’t think he has anywhere near enough talent for that. In 2005 he came to the show wanting to use it as a platform to tell his stories about the Doctor. In 2024 he returned to it to use it as a political platform.
This season of Doctor Who was so politically driven that even leftie newspapers were saying, lay off the Woke crap.
When you have a show that is this far off the rails it means that the company that bought it, while financially obligated to keep paying for it, has written it off so completely that no one is bothering to read the scripts anymore. The last three episodes were so bad that I’m not sure anyone was bothering to write them either. It had all of those weird little ticks of verbal dyskinesia that strongly indicate the script was mostly written by an AI that Russel T Davies had trained with last season’s scripts. It’s a pity he didn’t use his first season’s scripts; it would have been a much better show. This season was purest clown world. If I was making a sarcastic, mocking sendup of what I thought a completely Woke Doctor Who would be like, I am not sure I could have done better.
I’m in this really bad position of trying to make fun of something that is so bad that nothing I can say will get more laughs than what I saw. I can’t even make jokes about him being gay because it’s old hat at this point, the last four Doctors introduced have been gay. Whitaker, Tenant (2), Gatwa and they brought back Jo Martin for one scene to make her a lesbian.
This season did have an objective; to attack the longtime fans of the show, it was the Joker II of Doctor Who. That is what the final eight episodes of Doctor Who did, attack the long-time fans of the show who hated the fact that people like Russel T. Davies and Chris Chibnall had utterly ruined it. Granted, Davies is now by far the more hated.
Even the BBC, you know the company that actually owns Doctor Who, condemned it as “nothing but an intolerant program”.
[…]
This wasn’t a finale it was a funeral, and the undertaker wired the corpse to be giving his mourners two middle fingers.
In the end, this wasn’t just bad Doctor Who — it was anti-Doctor Who. A shrill, directionless, AI-scripted fever dream written by a man who now seems to loathe the franchise’s history and its fans. What was once clever, charming, and strange was in the end loud, smug, and hollow. The Doctor hasn’t just wandered back into the wilderness — he’s been abandoned there to be eaten by Bad Wolf.
I never thought I’d say this about Doctor Who but given its raw hatred of its fanbase and blithering narrative incompetence I have no choice but to pronounce my doom upon it.
The Dark Herald Says Avoid Doctor Who Like the Plague. (0/5)
As you might expect, The Critical Drinker also feels the show needs to take a nice, long regenerative vacation. Ten years? That might be enough.
The 12th SS Massacre of the Canadians in Normandy | History Traveler Episode 195
The History Underground
Published 9 Feb 2022In the days after D-Day, the Canadians of the 3rd Infantry Division found themselves up against the German 12th SS Panzer Division as they were making their way south through Normandy. Tragically, some of these men would find themselves as the victims of one the battle’s worst atrocities at a place called Abbey Ardenne. In this episode, we’re joining Paul Woodadge of @WW2TV as we retrace the final steps of these men as they made their way to a tragic fate at the hands of Kurt Meyer and a division of the most fanatical fighters that Germany threw into the Battle of Normandy.
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QotD: The decline and fall of the Soviet experiment
The early communists, including Marx, looked at work and the pursuit of material goods as a burden on mankind. Capitalism turned men into slaves to their own desires for wealth and property. This crude desire for material goods made them easy to exploit by the capital class. The point of overthrowing the capitalist system and replacing it with communism was to free man from that burden. The resulting material prosperity of communism would allow mankind to reach its full creative potential.
The Soviet empire that emerged from the Second World War was noticeably short on talk about mankind reaching its full potential. The practical necessity of feeding, housing and clothing its people consumed the regime. The great dream of a post-scarcity world of mankind united in brotherhood had given way to figuring out how to produce enough necessities to prevent rebellion. The last half of the 20th century was communism trying to keep pace with capitalism in the production of consumer goods.
The Z Man, “Human Progress”, The Z Blog, 2020-04-27.
June 6, 2025
“All the Little Ships” (1964 – CBC Telescope)
Royal Canadian Navy / Marine Royale Canadienne
Published 5 Jun 2025🇨🇦 Honouring 80 Years of Courage at Sea ⚓
To mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the Battle of the Atlantic, the Hamilton Naval Association is proud to reintroduce a long-lost Canadian treasure: “All the Little Ships”.
Originally aired in 1964 on CBC’s Telescope, this rare film features recently retired Admiral Harry DeWolf aboard HMCS Haida as he tells tales not only of HMCS Haida but of “All the Little Ships” of the wartime RCN. Never-before-seen footage shot by Bill Pugsley, a wartime officer who resigned his commission so he could serve two years on the lower deck, as a gunner, and document it.
🎥 A story of sacrifice, memory, and Canada’s naval legacy — rediscovered. A special thank you LCdr Doug Martin (Ret’d, former CO of HMCS Star).
The opinions expressed in this video are those of the original creators and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Royal Canadian Navy. Any references to outside organizations, products, or services do not constitute endorsement or affiliation.
#WeTheNavy #CanadaRemembers #HelpLeadFight
Former Putin advisor claims nuclear strike is an appropriate reaction to Ukraine attacks
Mark Steyn surveys the media reaction to Sergey Markov’s foaming-at-the-mouth threats of nuclear escalation in the Russo-Ukraine conflict:
Here’s a cheery headline from the Russian press:
Markov: an attack on Russia’s strategic aviation is grounds for the use of nuclear weapons.
That would be Sergey Markov, former advisor to Tsar Vlad, who admittedly is somewhat partial to nuke-rattling: in the early stages of the Ukraine war, he threatened to nuke the UK, for what reason I forget — the exciting new Islamic blasphemy laws? the paedo rape gangs?
This time, however, Mr Markov was responding to the weekend’s Ukrainian drone strike deep inside Russia. By “deep”, I mean Siberia. Which supposedly took out forty of Putin’s 120 strategic bombers using drones smuggled into the country via trucks which then fanned out and parked within range of various air bases.
Which is brilliant and innovative, in the sense that Castro blowing up a third of the USAF during the Cuban missile-crisis negotiations would have been. Right now, the only thing standing between the planet and the Third World War is Vladimir Putin’s forbearance. And, as all the smart people assured us in the spring of 2022, the Russian not-so-strongman was “dying” (Christopher Steele, sole proprietor of Dossiers R Us) or dead, either of which condition can make one’s nuclear-war judgment a little erratic. Headline from the UK Daily Mirror, almost exactly three years ago:
Vladimir Putin may already be dead with body double taking his place, MI6 chiefs claim
That headline is 100 per cent accurate if you remove the words “Vladimir” and “Putin” and replace them with “Joe” and “Biden” respectively. Incidentally, analyse each nation’s advances in body-double technology by comparing “Biden”‘s ability to host a G7 with “Putin”‘s ability to host a BRICS summit. That’s the way to bet if it comes to World War Three. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R – Zakarpattia), was in Kiev to meet with Zelenskyyyy the day before Operation Bring It On. He had the affect of a chap who knew what was coming — although one notes he has yet to make good on his comparatively less ambitious pledge to sink Greta Thunberg’s Gaza boat.
Forty years ago, everybody claimed to be super-worried about imminent mushroom clouds. A bestselling poster of the day:
Anyone care to remake the above with Senator Graham and Victoria Nuland, She-Wolf of the Donbass? Ah, but maybe it doesn’t work as well with Deep State non-household-names in the leads. It’s not so long since Lindsey was telling Zelenskyyyy to resign, but he’s apparently back on board. And, more generally, most western media were happy to report the drone strike as more of a poke in the eye to Trump than to Putin. Headline from National Review:
Country That Allegedly Had No Cards to Play Keeps Finding New Cards to Play
This is in reference to Trump’s jibe from February that Ukraine had “no cards to play”. The question then arises: Where did Z find these “new cards”? When Pete Hegseth took over as US Defence Secretary, he quickly confirmed what every sentient creature had long suspected — that the Pentagon had been micro-managing Ukraine’s end of the war for the previous three years. Are they still doing so? In defiance of their nominal commander-in-chief?
Juno Beach Landings | D-Day Normandy June 6, 1944
World War II – Epic Battles
Published 30 Jun 2021Juno Beach was assigned to the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division and the 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade. It was one of the five invasion beaches of Normandy on D-Day and the second deadliest beach after Omaha.
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QotD: D-Day landing on Sword Beach
Lovat had asked his personal piper, Bill Millin, to pipe his men ashore. Private Millin pointed out that this would be in breach of War Office regulations. “That’s the English War Office, Bill,” said Lovat. “We’re Scotsmen.” And so Millin strolled up and down the sand amid the gunfire playing “Hieland Laddie” and “The Road to the Isles” and other highland favorites. The Germans are not big bagpipe fans and I doubt it added to their enjoyment of the day.
There was a fair bit of slightly dotty élan around in those early hours. As I mentioned during On the Town, I knew a chap who was in the second wave of gliders from England, and nipped out just before they took off to buy up the local newsagent’s entire stack of papers — D-Day special editions, full of news of the early success of the landings. He flew them into France with him, and distributed them to his comrades from the first wave so they could read of their exploits.
But for every bit of dash and brio there were a thousand things that were just the wretched, awful muck of war. Many of those landing craft failed to land: They hit stuff that just happened to be there under the water, in the way, and ground to a halt, and the soldiers got out waist-deep in the sea, and struggled with their packs — and, in the case of those men on the Prince Henry, with lumpy old English bicycles — through the gunfire to the beach to begin liberating a continent while already waterlogged and chilled to the bone.
The building on the other side of the Bénouville Bridge was a café and the home of Georges Gondrée and his family. Thérèse Gondrée had spent her childhood in Alsace and thus understood German. So she eavesdropped on her occupiers, and discovered that in the machine-gun pillbox was hidden the trigger for the explosives the Germans intended to detonate in the event of an Allied invasion. She notified the French Resistance, and thanks to her, after landing in the early hours of June 6th, Major Howard knew exactly where to go and what to keep an eye on.
Shortly after dawn there was a knock on Georges Gondrée’s door. He answered it to find two paratroopers who wanted to know if there were any Germans in the house. The men came in, and Thérèse embraced them so fulsomely that her face wound up covered in camouflage black, which she proudly wore for days afterward. Georges went out to the garden and dug up ninety-eight bottles of champagne he’d buried before the Germans arrived four years earlier. And so the Gondrée home became the first place in France to be liberated from German occupation. There are always disputes about these things, of course: some say the first liberated building was L’Etrille et les Goélands (the Crab and the Gulls), subsequently renamed — in honour of the men who took it that morning — the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada house. But no matter: the stylish pop of champagne corks at the Café Gondrée was the bells tolling for the Führer‘s thousand-year Reich.
Arlette Gondrée was a four-year old girl that day, and she has grown old with the teen-and-twenty soldiers who liberated her home and her town. But she is now the proprietress of the family café, and she has been there every June to greet those who return each year in dwindling numbers […] The Bénouville Bridge was known to Allied planners as the Pegasus Bridge, after the winged horse on the shoulder badge of British paratroopers. But since 1944 it has been called the Pegasus Bridge in France, too. And in the eight decades since June 6th no D-Day veteran has ever had to pay for his drink at the Café Gondrée.
Mark Steyn, “June 6th, 1944”, SteynOnline, 2024-06-06.
June 5, 2025
German judges seem to be dedicated to ensuring that the government never changes policy, regardless of voter preference
The times I despair of the pathetic Canadian government, I look to Germany where eugyppius helpfully explains that German judges are even more dedicated to thwarting the will of the voters than Canadian judges are (and that’s a major achievement):
At the start of May, CSU Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt effectively abolished asylum as a path into Germany, empowering federal police to push back all illegal migrants at our national borders.
There ensued a period of messaging chaos, in which Chancellor Friedrich Merz assured our neighbours and the EU that nothing much was happening, while Dobrindt quietly insisted that yes, indeed, he was serious. He gave police orders to step up border checks and to send back all illegal migrants regardless of asylum claims – save for pregnant women, the underage and the sick.
These new borders policies have yet to exercise any significant influence on asylum statistics. It is relatively easy to cross into Germany despite the police spot checks, and we don’t yet know how many asylees are managing to evade them.
The deeper legal issues are much more significant right now. We want to know whether Dobrindt’s intervention is workable in theory, and whether our judges will swallow it. Unfortunately, he is already under siege from asylum advocates on the left and the broader migration industry, who have set and sprung a very telling trap, with the aim of getting courts to overturn even these preliminary and quite meagre interventions.
To understand the issues here, we need a brief legal primer: According to German law (the so-called Asylgesetz), foreigners who enter Germany from “secure” states do not get to claim asylum. They are to be sent straight back to wherever it is they came from. Because Germany is surrounded entirely by secure states, that should really be the end of this insane problem. Alas, this sensible law has been superseded since 1997 first by the Dublin Convention, and later by the Dublin II and now the Dublin III Regulation. The latter forbids the Federal Republic from using her own laws, holding that foreigners entering Germany from secure third states must be welcomed pending a procedure to establish which EU member state is actually responsible for them. Effectively, this means that almost all of these aspiring asylees remain in Germany indefinitely, because deporting people who do not belong here is beyond the meagre capacities of our enormous bureaucracy.
Dobrindt sought to get around Dublin by appealing to Article 72 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which allows member states to set aside EU regulations when this is necessary to maintain order and security.
Many have eyed this Article 72 strategy for a long time, but nothing is easy, particularly not in countries unduly enamoured of “the rule of law”, which is a lofty euphemism for “the rule of obscure crazy people in robes for whom nobody ever voted and who enjoy lifetime appointments”. These days the government cannot do anything at all except what it was already doing (and sometimes not even that), or unless it is obviously stupid, expensive and inadvisable, because lurking around every corner is a clinically insane judge eager to explain why sensible things are not allowed. In recent years, our extremely learned and far-sighed judiciary has explained why combating climate change is anchored in the German constitution and why basically everybody is entitled to exorbitant social welfare. All that remains for them is to explain why everybody on earth is also entitled to live in Germany and draw benefits from the state, and they will have completed their suicidal triad.
On Monday, 2 June, the Berlin Administrative Court struck the first blow in this direction. Effectively, they called the whole basis for Dobrindt’s new border policy into question, issuing what amounts to a preliminary injunction in the case of three Somalis (two men and one woman) who had crossed from Poland into Germany on 9 May. Federal police intercepted the trio at the train station in Frankfurt an der Oder; they claimed asylum and the police, in line with Dobrindt’s order, sent them back to Poland anyway. Lawyers from the advocacy organisation Pro Asyl then helped them bring suit in Berlin, and the court intervened in their favour. They get to be professional asylees in Germany now.
D-Day and the Battle of Normandy on screen
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 4 Jun 2025Following on from the video about tank battles on screen, we look at the coverage of D-Day and the Battle of Normandy in movie and television dramas. This will be posted two days before the 81st anniversary of D-Day. As usual, this is a little about how good they are as drama and more about the historical background.
00.00 Introduction
02.50 Churchill
11.38 “Men on a mission” movies INTRO
16.45 Female Agents
20.20 The Dirty Dozen
32.06 The Big Red One
38.10 D Day: The Sixth of June
41.58 Patton
46.00 Night of the Generals
47.48 Breakthrough (1950)
49.36 Breakthrough (1971)
50.24 Pathfinders
57.48 Overlord
01.00.00 Storming Juno
01.04.48 My Way
01.12.12 They were not divided
01.17.24 Band of Brothers
01.51.00 Saving Private Ryan
02.33.45 The Longest Day
03.00.48 Conclusion and the “Ones that got away”For the discussion of the Pegasus Bridge project:
• Fighting On Film Podcast: Pegasus Bridge S…
