World War Two
Published 7 Sep 2024In this issue of the Weimar Wire, we dive deep into the critical events of January 1930. Political violence in the streets, uncertainty over the nation’s very character and Nazis entering a governing coalition provide a veritable treasure trove of political intrigue, hidden aspirations, and grand schemes.
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September 8, 2024
Hitler’s Victory in Thüringen – Rise of Hitler 01
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Romney Marsh and the Battle of Britain (BBC 1976)
BBC Archive
Published Jun 2, 2024Romney Marsh has been dubbed the “sixth continent”, due to its size and the sense that it has its own rules.
A shingle beach that silently grows bigger every year, scattered debris from the Battle of Britain, an old-fashioned lighthouse hidden from the sea by a nuclear power station. It has a character unlike anywhere else in the UK.
Presented by Dilys Morgan and Bernard Clark.
Clip taken from Nationwide on the Road: Romney Marsh, originally broadcast on BBC One, Wednesday 7 April, 1976.
You have now entered the BBC Archive, a time machine that will transport you back to the golden age of TV to educate, entertain and enlighten you with classic clips from the BBC vaults.
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QotD: Life in pre-mechanical times
Anyway, because I’m actually interested in how people are and how they lived, I love “living history”. I know, I know, I’m the one who brought up the Civil War, but though I admire (in a very limited sense) the dedication of “reenactors”, we ain’t going there, lest the comments get way off track. Instead, I’ll refer you to the works of Ruth Goodman. She apparently shows up on a lot of “living history” shows in Britain, which are apparently quite popular over there, and she writes good books about the experience, most with “How to” in the title: I’ve read How to be a Victorian and How to be a Tudor, and they’re both great fun.
The thing you’ll notice right away if you read them is how utterly tedious life was pre-electricity. Actually, no, tedious is the wrong word, since in our usage it implies “mindless” and that’s exactly the opposite of Victorian and especially Tudor life. A much better word is “laborious”, maybe even just “hard”. Life was hard back then. Even the simplest tasks took hours, because everything had to be done by hand. You had a few simple machines, of course — simple in the mechanical sense, though nearly every page brings its “gosh, I never would’ve thought of that!” surprise — but mostly it’s muscle power. If you’re lucky, a horse’s or a donkey’s muscles do some of the heaviest work, but mostly it’s straight-up human effort.
And it’s far from mindless. How to be a Tudor has a long section on baking bread, for instance, and it’s fascinating. There’s a reason bakers had their own guild and were considered tradesmen; it takes a lot of well-honed skill to make anything but the coarsest peasant stuff. And of course that coarse peasant stuff takes a decent amount of skill itself, which is just one of a zillion little skills your average housewife would have. If you read the section on bread-baking and really try to imagine doing it, you’ll find yourself almost physically exhausted … and that’s just one minor chore among dozens, maybe hundreds, that everyday people had to do each and every day.
In other words, everyday Tudor people were “simple”, in the old sense that means “unsophisticated”, but they were never, ever bored. Even the relatively well-off, even when everything was peaceful and prosperous and functioning perfectly, were constantly mentally engaged with the world. They had to be. Imagine if getting your daily bread took not just two hours’ labor, but an actual plan. If you didn’t start your day figuring out how you were going to get fed that day, you wouldn’t eat. They had dozens, probably hundreds, more daily tasks than we ever have, and while any one of those tasks can probably be performed on autopilot if taken in isolation, they were never taken in isolation. Maybe the housewife could bake bread on autopilot, but while her hands were doing that seemingly of their own volition, her mind was lining up the zillion other things she had to do that day. Her mind was constantly engaged.
And “housewife” was a deeply meaningful term back then. The next thing that strikes you, after the sheer amount of effort everything took, is the necessity of communal life. Just the basics of day-to-day living pretty much requires a nuclear family — husband, wife, a few kids. And that’s your hardy yeoman type on the edge of starvation on the forest’s fringes. In any larger settlement, everyone knows everyone, intimately, because your very life depends on it — not only do you know the miller personally, you’ve got a major, indeed mortal, interest in how he lives his life, because if he’s shorting you, you die … or, at least, your already hard life gets a whole lot harder. There’s basically no such thing as privacy, because there can’t be.
Severian, “On Boredom”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-17.
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September 5, 2024
Matilda I – The Little Tank That Did | Tank Chat #176
The Tank Museum
Published May 24, 2024In 1940, this small but well armoured tank was pretty much all that stood between the German Blitzkrieg and a battered British Army that was retreating to the coast.
Slow, small, and armed only with a machine gun, the A11 Infantry Tank (Matilda I) would achieve great things in its only significant battlefield action – effectively saving the British Expeditionary Force from annihilation.
At Arras on 21st May 1940, Matilda Is and IIs of 4th and 7th Royal Tank Regiment counterattacked the rapidly advancing 7th Panzer Division. In doing so, they successfully halted the German advance and unnerved Hitler so much that he issued an order forbidding further advances — thus giving the British and French chance to organize the Dunkirk evacuation.
In this video, David Willey covers the history of this diminutive and often ridiculed little tank which altered the course of history by saving an entire army.
This video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
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QotD: Common misunderstandings about the title of “Dictator” in the Roman Republic
The nearest equivalent to this I can think of would be if Olaf Scholz suddenly announced that he was reviving the position of Deutscher Kaiser (German Emperor) for himself, except without the legal structure of that title (e.g. the Prussian crown acting as the permanent president of a federation of monarchs) or the constitutional limits it used to have. We would rightly regard that as a new office, using the title of the old one.
This point is often missed in teaching Roman history because Roman history is very long and so gets very compressed in a classroom environment. Even in a college course focused entirely on the history of Rome, the gap between the end of the old dictatorship and the start of the new one might just be a couple of weeks, so it is easy for students to accept the new dictators as direct continuations of the old ones, unless the instructor goes out of their way to stress the century-long discontinuity. This is, of course, all the more true if the treatment is in a broader European History (or “Western Civ”) course or in a High school World History course – which might be able to give the Roman Republic as a whole only a week of class time, if even that much. In that kind of compressed space, everything gets mushed together. Which in turn leads to a popular view of the Roman dictatorship that this office was always a time-bomb, ready to inevitably “go off” as soon as it fell into the hands of someone suitably ambitious, because the differences and chronological gap between the old, customary dictatorship and the new irregular one are blurred out of vision by the speed of the treatment.
Just as a side note, this is generally a problem with the Roman Republic. Popular treatments of how the Republic worked – much less pop-culture representations of it – are almost always badly flawed […] The opening minutes, for instance, of the Crash Course video on the Romans is a series of clear errors, one after another, in describing how the Republic functioned as a matter of law and practice. If for some reason you want to not be wrong about the structure of Roman government, the book to read – though it is more than a bit dry and quite pricey – is A. Lintott, The Constitution of the Roman Republic (1999). I keep thinking that, as a future series, I might take a look at the basic structures of Greek and Roman civic government (“How to Polis, 101″ and “How to Res Publica, 101″) – especially if I can talk a colleague into providing a companion treatment of medieval Italian commune government – both as a historical exercise but also for the world builders out there who want to design more realistic-feeling fictional pre-modern governments that aren’t vassalage/manorialism systems.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Roman Dictatorship: How Did It Work? Did It Work?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-18.
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September 4, 2024
The Korean War Week 011 – Destroy the Perimeter! – September 3, 1950
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 3 Sep 2024The North Korean forces launch a huge new offensive against the entire Pusan Perimeter, hoping to break through at least somewhere along the line. They are aware that time is of the essence, for the UN forces grow in number daily, while they are losing a battle of attrition. Some new UN arrivals this week are the first British ground troops in Korea for the fight. Meanwhile, Douglas MacArthur’s plans for his upcoming surprise counteroffensive hit all sorts of snags thanks to Korean geography.
Chapters
00:51 Recap
01:26 The British Arrive
03:47 New KPA Strategy
06:49 The New KPA Offensive
12:26 More Incheon Issues
15:16 The US and China
17:12 Summary
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British Foreign Secretary David Lammy indulges himself with a Trudeau-esque bit of geopolitical posturing
In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill outlines the British government’s odd choice of timing to announce suspension of (some) arms shipments to Israel:
Bereft of vision, the modern politician is obsessed with “optics”. Which makes foreign secretary David Lammy’s announcement this week that the UK will be suspending some arms exports to Israel all the more surreal. The optics of withholding weapons from the Jewish State the day after we discovered that its enemy is so ruthless it will happily murder young Jews in cold blood are atrocious. Did not one functionary in the Foreign Office think to raise his or her hand and say: “Sir, should we at least wait until the bodies of those six Israeli hostages are cold before we shame and punish the nation they came from?”
This goes way beyond optics, of course. It is more than a failure of spin. It is a failure – a colossal, unforgivable one – of morality. As the bodies of the six slain Jews found in one of Hamas’s hellish lairs in Rafah were being transported back to a grief-stricken Israel, our government took action not against the Islamist extremists who carried out this unutterable atrocity, but against the nation that suffered it. Mere hours after the discovery of an act of fascistic savagery, our government handed a propaganda victory to the fascists by dragging Israel’s name through the mud. What were they thinking? Shameful doesn’t cover it.
Mr Lammy has said around 10 per cent of arms sales to Israel will be suspended. Thirty out of 350 arms-exports licences will be cancelled, primarily affecting parts for fighter jets, helicopters and drones. The reason for this smug, haughty smackdown of the Jewish State? Because there’s a “clear risk”, said Lammy, that such equipment will be used to “commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law”. Big talk from a politician who noisily supported the West’s imperial bombardment of Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the widescale torture and rape of prisoners.
Many are damning Lammy’s partial embargo as gesture politics. “What is the point?”, headlines wonder. Denying Israel a few parts for planes won’t make much difference, some moan. For the frothing Israelophobes of the iffy left, nothing less than a complete arms embargo will do. They want not one gun to go to crazy Israel. If only there was a word to describe people who agitate morning, noon and night for the disarming of a Jewish nation that recently suffered the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust.
The obsession with the partial nature of Lammy’s reprimanding of Israel misses the point. What the Foreign Office has just done is huge – and profoundly troubling. Sure, it won’t make much of a dent in Israel’s ability to fight Hamas, but it will cast aspersions on Israel’s fight against Hamas. It won’t militarily weaken Israel’s war on the pogromists that slaughtered more than a thousand of its people on 7 October, but it might morally weaken that war with its sly implication that there’s a criminal element to this crusade against Hamas’s army of anti-Semites. The partial arms embargo is indicative of something far more unsettling: a solidarity embargo as Britain slowly but surely turns its back on the Jewish nation.
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QotD: The modern tribal divide – the “Somewheres” versus the “Anywheres”
Boris Johnson’s election victory has once again brought this divide to the surface.
Anywheres tend to be younger and place more value on career and education – that is, they see themselves in terms of what they have achieved. They are also more comfortable with ethnic diversity and mass immigration, precisely because their identities are less rooted to place and group.
Somewheres, by contrast, are older and place greater value on the communities in which they live. This is not to say that Anywheres do not care about their community. Rather, Anywheres can see themselves prospering in any community.
Goodhart estimates that around 50 per cent of the population are Somewheres, 25 per cent are Anywheres, and the remainder occupy the grey area between the two camps. Both worldviews are perfectly legitimate, but the problem is that they can conflict.
From sitting in seminar after seminar, packed with policymakers, politicians, journalists and academics, Goodhart became painfully aware of how much the Anywhere view dominates public discussion, despite being a minority view.
Richard Norrie, “The revenge of the Somewheres”, Spiked, 2020-01-13.
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September 3, 2024
The End of World War Two – WW2 – Week 314B – September 2, 1945
World War Two
Published 2 Sep 2024The Japanese sign the official document of surrender and the Second World War is over. There are still some Japanese garrisons yet to surrender, but they begin doing so one after the other. However, war is not over — and there is serious foreboding for future events in places like Vietnam and China — where Mao Zedong is meeting with Chiang Kai-Shek, even as Josef Stalin lurks in the background to secure Soviet interests no matter which Chinese regime comes out on top.
00:00 Intro
00:59 Vietnam Declares Independence
04:04 The Importance Of Manchuria
06:28 Japan’s Surrender
11:22 The Final Surrenders
13:18 Casualties
15:50 The End
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Sten MkII: Just When You Thought It Couldn’t Get Simpler
Forgotten Weapons
Published May 29, 2024The Sten MkI had barely been approved for production when the Sten MkII was born. Initially requested to produce a version of the gun suitable for paratroopers, in March 1941 Harold Turpin redesigned the front end of the Sten to have a quickly detachable barrel and a rotating magazine well (for compact storage). This new model was tests in late June and early July, approved for use, and contracts for it were issued in August 1941.
Named the MkII, this model of the Sten would quickly become the standard, and it was ultimately produced by six major factories (with the assistance of hundreds of subcontractors) on three continents to the tune of 2.6 million examples made. In addition to the barrel removal, the new model has a simpler front sight, simpler stock, and a revised bolt locking notch (upward, instead of downward like on the MkI).
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September 2, 2024
Roman auxiliaries – what was their role in the Imperial Roman army?
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published May 8, 2024The non citizen soldiers of the Roman Auxilia served alongside the Roman citizens of the legions. In the second and third centuries AD, there were at least as many auxiliaries as there were legionaries — probably more. Some were cavalry or archers, so served in roles that complemented the close order infantry of the legions. Yet the majority were infantrymen, wearing helmet and body armour. They looked different from the legionaries, but was their tactical role and style of fighting also different. Today we look at the tactical role of Roman auxiliaries.
Extra reading:
I mention M. Bishop & J. Coulston, Roman Military Equipment which is one of the best starting places. Mike Bishop’s Osprey books on specific types of Roman army equipment are also excellent. Peter Connolly’s books, notably Greece and Rome at War, also remain well worthwhile.
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September 1, 2024
Can Chiang and Mao Unite China? – WW2 – Week 314 – August 31, 1945
World War Two
Published 31 Aug 2024Mao Zedong takes his first ever journey by plane to go and meet with Chiang Kai-Shek. They begin what will be several weeks of talks and negotiations. However, Chiang is not aware that Josef Stalin is lurking in the background. And the Soviet Red Army is lurking in Manchuria, having defeated the Japanese there, and are giving tacit support to the Chinese Communists, whose power base is very strong in the north. As for Japan, a motley collection of Allied fleets arrives in Tokyo Bay, for Japan’s surrender document is to be officially signed two days from now.
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The supermarket master plan to defeat the “far right” in Germany
There are elections ongoing in the German states of Thüringen and Saxony, and the polls show that the “far right” Alternative für Deutschland is potentially going to get 30% of the votes, which would give them more representation in those states than any of the other parties. Panic and hysteria have set in not only among the politicos and the mainstream media, but even among some businesses:
In Germany, all political parties have a colour. The Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union are black, the Social Democratic Party is red, the liberal Free Democratic Party are yellow and the evil fascist Alternative für Deutschland are blue. This coming Sunday, Thüringen and Saxony will hold state elections, and the blue AfD are leading the polls in both states with about 30% support. This has a lot of people very, very upset. Most of them are merely upset with the AfD, but some psychologically unstable people have allowed their anger to embrace the colour blue more generally, because there can be no limits when it comes to resisting the evil antidemocratic forces of fascism.
Among the new sworn enemies of the blue band of the visible electromagnetic spectrum are the marketing team at Germany’s largest supermarket corporation, the Edeka Group. A few days ago, this supermarket chain, whose own logo strangely enough is primarily blue …
… ran an ad in Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung explaining “WHY BLUE IS NOT ON OFFER AT EDEKA”.
That wall of text in the middle reads as follows:
Yellow bananas, red tomatoes, green lettuce, purple grapes, orange carrots, pink dragon fruit … EDEKA’s fruit and vegetable department is full of colourful diversity. Or is it?
If you look closely, there’s one colour you won’t see: blue. And that’s no coincidence. Because blue food is nature’s way of warning us: ‘Watch out! I could be harmful!”
Evolution has taught us that blue is not a good choice.
And speaking of choices: Blue is not only the natural enemy of a healthy diversity of fruit and vegetables. In Germany, “the blues” are also the biggest threat to our diverse society.
So let’s read the warning signs correctly ahead of the state elections in Saxony, Thüringen and Brandenburg in September – and ensure that we can live together in harmony. Because we love diversity.
For those wondering whether Edeka have decided to cease selling fascist blue fruits like blueberries, there is a helpful note down in the corner:
There we learn that, while “‘Blueberries’ or ‘Blue cabbage'” may have “‘blue’ in their names”, their “colour pigments” are not blue. This is “at least what Science tells us – and as we know you should always listen to Science more”. Nothing about this is remotely obnoxious; indeed, if current-year Germany needs anything, it is more blind platitudinous calls to Follow the Science – particularly when it comes to exonerating innocent fruits and vegetables from suspicion of blue fascism.
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August 31, 2024
Forgotten War Ep2 – You Walk, You Walk Or You Die Mate
HardThrasher
Published 30 Aug 2024Please consider donations of any size to the Burma Star Memorial Fund who aim to ensure remembrance of those who fought with, in and against 14th Army 1941–1945 – https://burmastarmemorial.org/
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Britain’s police double down on “non-crime hate incidents” as a tool of repression
Andrew Doyle admits he was over-optimistic by predicting that the British police forces’ use of “non-crime hate incidents” — after court judgments and Home Office instructions to stop using them — would not last for much longer. That was in 2022:
“Metropolitan Police London England” by William Mewes is marked with CC0 1.0 
.
I have a tendency to be over-optimistic. In my 2022 book The New Puritans, I wrote about “non-crime hate incidents” and how they were still being recorded by police, in spite of the Court of Appeal’s ruling that they were “plainly an interference with freedom of expression” and direct instructions from the Home Office that the police must stop this illiberal and unethical practice. However, I concluded that ultimately “it seems unlikely that ‘non-crime hate incidents’ will last for much longer”.
Of course I was wrong, because I had not counted on just how authoritarian a new Labour government might be. It was bad enough that the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson scotched the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act just one day before parliament went into recess — presumably to avoid having to debate the matter — but now the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has reversed the Conservatives’ pledge to limit the recording of “non-crime”. Labour is bringing back this absurd policy, and has convinced itself that this is somehow a progressive measure.
It should go without saying that the police have no business recording “non-crime”, particularly when such records are based on accusations alone (that is to say, the “perception” of the “victim” is what counts, rather than actual evidence of hatred). The Tory government should have eliminated the entire practice in its entirety, but instead decided that such “incidents” ought to stay on record if there was a “real risk of escalation causing significant harm or a criminal offence”. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick had a phrase for this: “pre-crime”.
So let’s leave aside the woefully inadequate restrictions put in place by the Tories. Let’s also leave aside the obvious point that hatred, along with all other emotions, will never be eradicated through legislation and that the state is wasting its time trying to alter human nature. Let’s focus instead on why the Labour government is so determined to control the speech and thought of its citizens.
How does it help anyone for the name of the schoolboy who accidentally scuffed a copy of the Koran at a school in Wakefield to be on police records? His “non-crime” was duly recorded after the event, but why? Does the government really suppose that this child is one step away from torching a mosque? Even if he had deliberately scuffed the Koran, what has this to do with the police? I don’t much approve of defacing books, but vandalism of one’s own property is a matter for individual conscience.
Of course, Labour will say that the recent riots have proven the necessity for cracking down on the private thoughts of citizens. In truth, these acts of violence are being exploited to justify further authoritarian policies. We have seen how quick our politicians are to seize upon these moments to advance their own goals. The murder of Sir David Amess had precisely nothing to do with social media, and yet politicians immediately began to argue that his death was evidence of the need to curb free speech online. This was grotesque opportunism from a political class that does not trust the public.
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