Quotulatiousness

February 8, 2024

The lead-up to the Russo-Ukrainian War

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Founding Questions, “El Barbudo” has a guest-post on the situation in Ukraine, including a lot of background to the outbreak of full-scale combat with Russia’s “Special Military Operation” strike that was intended to decapitate the Ukrainian government and capture Kyiv in February, 2022:

Britain’s Ministry of Defence regularly posts these situation maps through their Twit-, er, I mean “X” account. This is the most recent one from 2024-02-02.

One framing point: the Russians are fighting a conventional, industrial war, for real-world (economic, territorial and national-security) objectives. The Ukrainians are fighting a proxy information war — large-scale armed propaganda, if you will — where the primary purpose of battlefield action is to feed political-warfare objectives, and thereby maintain western support. Seen from Kyiv, the centre of gravity (the thing from which Ukraine draws its strength and freedom of action) is western support — making narrative (as seen from the west) central, while the media is enlisted as a conduit for narrative warfare. Hence, through a western media lens, what you’re seeing is carefully curated to influence rather than inform. (Nothing new here — I defer to the historians, but I think Paul Fussell made this point about World War Two. Ask yourself when was the last time you saw a dead Ukrainian soldier, intact or otherwise.)

What that means is that battlefield defeats can be managed, as long as the narrative — the core of the war, as western sponsors see it and as the Ukrainians therefore are forced to see it — can be maintained. What’s causing the current crisis is not so much the death, destruction or loss of territory (though those are real). It’s that the mismatch between rhetoric and reality has finally reached the point that people are noticing.

[…]

Ukraine has been at war with Russia in some fashion since 2013, with violence first spiking into the open in February 2014. The Ukrainians call the 2014-2022 period the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) but it involved fairly heavy fighting — against Russian-backed separatist militias in the east, and internal to Ukraine among various factions including, yes, the Banderite nationalists (“neo-Nazis”) beloved of Russian media and Canadian parliamentarians alike, though they’re less prominent now (mainly because a lot of them are dead).

We should also note how this arose — first Russia and the U.S. forcing Ukraine to give up its nukes in 1994, then NATO expansion after Bosnia, and (publicly acknowledged) US interference in Russia’s 1996 election to ensure Boris Yeltsin got re-elected, creating a sense of threat in Moscow. Then Kosovo 1999, Bush and Putin’s failed attempt to make nice after 9/11, Estonia, Georgia, the Reset Button of 2009 and betrayal over Libya in 2011. (Hillary promised no ground troops or regime change, persuading then-president Dmitry Medvedev to abstain on the UN Security Council Resolution that authorised the intervention, only to renege on all counts then laugh on live TV when she found out Gaddafi had just been sodomised to death with a bayonet).

All of which infuriated the Kremlin, and confirmed the West was not “agreement-capable” (they have euphemisms in Moscow too) leading them to intervene in Syria to support the Assad regime. Then came the Ghouta gas attack of September 2013 — in which Obama failed to enforce his own Red Line, and John Kerry had to beg Sergey Lavrov (Russian foreign minister) to save us from the consequences of our own weakness … which convinced Russian leaders we were not only threatening and untrustworthy, but also weak. More great work there.

Russia’s seizure of Crimea followed, four months after the red-line debacle. It was clearly a result of Russian hatred and contempt. (Oderint dum metuant — the hatred was long-standing; what was new was the realisation, after Ghouta, that they had nothing to fear). Crimea was also a reaction to a US-backed revolution in Ukraine (Euromaidan), and the operation’s popularity should have made it clear that Ukraine is seen by Russians, of all political orientations, as integral to their identity, along with Belarus. No Russian politician could tolerate western advisers or weapons in Ukraine … which was the policy pursued after 2014. (There’s a chicken-and-egg security dilemma here. The west was reacting to perceived aggression from Russia, which was reacting to perceived western aggression. Both sides saw themselves as innocently defensive, and the other as aggressive.) [NR: Emphasis mine.]

Putin, by Russian standards, is a relative moderate on Ukraine — he frequently gets panned by war bloggers, retired generals and divers chickenhawks for being soft on the west, not prosecuting the war hard enough. If the neocons got their way and he was regime-changed, his replacement would likely be far worse for their interests — someone like, say, Nikolai Patrushev. Putin gets painted as Hitler in the media, but this is an artefact of the Alinskyite approach American political/media players take to any conflict: first freeze the target (no negotiation is possible) then personalise the enemy via an individual leader (Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Saddam, Gaddafi, Kim etc), then paint that leader as irrational and evil (without limits, restraints or goals except to be evil). From that point, it’s good versus evil, any means necessary, war as moral imperative. Putin is the latest foreigner to get this treatment, Trump the latest domestic equivalent. Trump’s greatest foreign policy crime, in fact, may have been his willingness to treat Putin, Kim, Xi, MBS etc. as rational actors worthy of respect (for Trump values of “respect”) rather than moral pariahs. This has hilarious consequences when people previously given the pariah treatment (Maduro, MBS, the Taliban) need to be rehabilitated via creative retconning so the narrative can keep rolling.

Anyway, from 2014 to 2022 the war was pretty static, with a few bigger battles (Debaltsevo the main one), artillery exchanges and trench warfare: a foreshadowing of how things are today, though without the massive tech acceleration we’ve seen since February 2022, and far fewer casualties.

Trump’s people have suggested Putin was frightened of him, which is why Russia didn’t invade during Trump’s term. There may be some truth to that (Trump after all reversed Obama’s prohibition on lethal aid) but it’s more likely the Russians just saw Trump as dangerously unpredictable, a decision-maker who never fully controlled his own government, especially on Ukraine (see Impeachment #1). The Russian way of war involves predicting an adversary’s reaction to provocation, then doing just enough, ambiguously enough, to achieve a fait accompli without triggering a response. This goes back to Trotsky and Tukhachevsky in the 1920s, but when your adversary is Trump, it becomes impossible to predict the trigger or the reaction if you piss him off. (Qasim Soleimani says hi). There was also one particular battle in Syria in February 2018 where US SOF killed some large number of Wagner guys by refusing to play their little games, and when the Russians complained Trump basically said it served them right.

Once Trump was gone — with Washington in disarray after January 6th — the Russians sensed an opportunity, and began building up around the Ukrainian border from April 2021. Then in August, when we covered ourselves in glory during the Great Kabul Pants-Shitting, the Russians probably thought they had the measure of Biden — who they knew of old — and decided we were so flaccid they’d get away with a lightning move against Kyiv, “Crimea 2014 on steroids”. (PS: when neocons start overtly asserting, in their in-house journal, that “the Afghan withdrawal did not trigger the Ukraine invasion” you know it’s true — even if the Russians hadn’t already said as much, in as many words.)

So, the Russians tried Crimea on Steroids in February 2022 — and their plan failed by breakfast on D Day, triggering the protracted war of attrition we have now. The reasons were partly bad luck for the leading Russian air-assault units attempting to seize the airfield at Hostomel outside Kyiv, partly good initiative by U.S. and U.K. trained Ukrainian SOF and territorial defence guys, partly over-compartmentalisation on the Russian side — key players were kept out of the loop for OPSEC reasons, and the invasion was mostly planned by political hacks with limited military understanding. (Why should we have the monopoly on that?) This video is a decent open-source account of that happened.

February 5, 2024

“Why can’t these Russians see how they’re being oppressed?”

Filed under: Food, Media, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As the war in Ukraine has gone on, western media seem to have completely lost track of what ordinary Russians think about their government, replacing reality with a westernized imaginarium of Russia somehow being little more than a mirror of western progressive opinion:

For the average western normie, Russians are suffering under a brutal and vicious dictatorship, and cannot wait for the day that Putin loses power and western liberal democracy becomes the law of the land.

None of you reading this are normies, and all of you know full well that the overwhelming majority of Russians are not buying what western media and think tanks are selling. They have a unique (and foreign) history and culture that has at times moved towards Europe, but they have always managed to stand apart. This informs how Russians view their country and how they deal with the rulers that rule over them.

Many had hoped that the War in Ukraine would finally see Russians rise up against their own government and remove it from power. Those hopes were always misplaced and naive. Western journalists have long been blinded by their own false assumptions regarding the “superiority of western liberal democracy” and Russian sentiment. “Why can’t these Russians see how they’re being oppressed?”, is the generalized refrain. Harper’s Magazine sent two journalists to explore Russia along the Volga River, and what they found was a culture far removed from the West, and very proud of its own. It’s a long piece, so here are some highlights:

    Piotrovsky, who is mild-mannered and cerebral, and who wore his jacket loosely over hunched shoulders, seemed to have become a warrior. “Russia is many people, but one nation,” he asserted. “Russia along the Volga was able to incorporate everyone. Islam is just as much a religion of Russian tradition and identity as is Christian Orthodoxy. In Europe, in America, you speak of nothing but multiculturalism, but your cities are bursting with hate. For us, it didn’t take much to include everyone, because we’re an imperial civilization.” Then he grew more animated. “Look at the Hermitage!” he said, opening his arms to the room around us, widening his eyes. “It’s the encyclopedia of world culture, but it’s written in Russian because it’s our interpretation of world history. It may be arrogant, but that’s what we are.”

On renewed trade with Asia:

    Sergeeva took me to see the Jewish, Armenian, and Iranian neighborhoods of Astrakhan. An exhibition of photographs highlighting the civilian volunteers supporting the military was being set up outside of a park. At sunset, the elegant riverfront was swarmed with families and groups of young people talking and laughing in hushed tones. Couples sat on railings eating watermelon while food stalls projected multicolored lights on the Volga. There was a fin de siècle quality to the atmosphere, curls of smoke emanating from shashlik grills, a warm breeze delivering the lament of a distant violin. No military uniforms in sight.

    The café façades and the wrought-iron balconies reminded me of New Orleans. Sergeeva pointed out the renovations along the canal that runs through the old town, indicating the nineteenth-century wooden villas that will soon become hotels and luxury homes. “They seemed destined to crumble,” she said. “But now that money is going around, Astrakhan is once again the gateway to European Russia, Central Asia, and India. This is how it is for now. Later, we’ll see.“

and

    In Astrakhan, it was rumored that the Iranians had invested billions in the development of the Caspian-Volga-Don corridor. There was talk of trafficking agricultural products and oil, but also turbines, spare mechanical parts, medicine, and nuclear components. I couldn’t verify this, but it was clear that Astrakhan is central to the anti-Western economic bloc’s efforts to turn east.

The general opinion in February of 2022 was that the Russians would easily seize much of Ukraine, but that they would pay a very large economic price, possibly the destruction of their entire economy. This was a safe bet, and it was totally wrong.

Import substitution:

    “The Russians are reacting to the sanctions in an extraordinary way, even with a weak ruble and the inevitable inflation. The prices of essential goods have held steady. And now we’re consuming better and healthier products than before the war, even exceptional cheeses.”

    I had never imagined that the rise of hyperlocal food would be one of the recurring themes of this trip. But it appears that the Western sanctions and war economy have intensified a traditional Russian gastronomy movement. Western products had piqued the palates of average urban Russians, and local producers were trying to fill their vacuum, proudly offering Russian-made Camembert and prosciutto, as if to provide some material evidence of Russkiy Mir, Putin’s ideology of Russian supremacy. As I dined along the Volga, menus often specified the farms from which ingredients had been sourced. Restaurants served svekolnik and okroshka, simple cold summer soups, exalting the quality of local radishes grown without Western fertilizers.

An ethnic Tatar foodstuffs producer from Kazan, Tatarstan on the sanctions regime leveled against Russia:

    Since then, the company’s net worth has become the stuff of legend. But Kazankov, too, is a great supporter of Western sanctions: “They’re an incredible developmental tool for Russia,” he told me. “The West should have imposed them back in the Nineties. We’d be the engine of the world by now. Too bad.” For him, the sanctions are pure adrenaline, and to prove it he added that his company has copied Italian, German, and Israeli “production means” to the letter: “We doubled processing in one year and we supply almost a thousand supermarkets in all of Russia.” Ivan believes that his “full-circle communist company” is the ideal model for “rebuilding a new Soviet Union with healthy local food from our lands.”

On the loss of vacationing in Europe:

    Was this fatalism? Indifference? Or arrogance, as Piotrovsky had implied back at the Hermitage? I struggled to find room in hotels or on ferries, all of which were overflowing with tourists forced to give up on the Mediterranean and make do with the Volga. Take Tatiana, the middle-aged manager of a supermarket chain. When I met her on a ferry in Yaroslavl, she wore a Panama hat, Gucci sunglasses, and capri sandals; she was heading downstream, to the same dacha where she had spent her summers as a girl. “I’ve had a boat docked in Mykonos for three years — who knows when I’ll see it again,” she told me. “I’m getting to know my river again. I’m running into friends I haven’t seen in thirty years. An interesting vacation.” I told her she looked a bit sad and resigned. “Russians have been sad and resigned for thousands of years,” she replied. “It’s how we stay resilient. I’m against this war, but I can’t do anything but wait, like everyone else. They manipulate us with artificial ideas. Garbage. But the West has been humiliating us for too long. Don’t we also have a right to be who we want to be without feeling like barbarians?“

February 4, 2024

Is the Red Army too fast for its own good? – WW2 – Week 284 – February 3, 1945

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 3 Feb 2024

Soviet forces have reached the old German border in force, however, logistical issues and a strong enemy presence possibly threatening their flanks means that a drive on Berlin may not be doable just now. Heinrich Himmler is in charge of the new Army Group to defend the Reich, and he has a host of problems. On the Western Front, the Allies finally eliminated the Colmar Pocket, and in the Philippines, the American advance reaches Manila, and the battle for the city is about to begin.
(more…)

January 29, 2024

Peter Hitchens isn’t onboard with the march to yet another war

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Writing in the Daily Mail, Peter Hitchens decries the apparent drift by western politicians into yet another war:

Are we the baddies? What if the Ukraine war is just as stupid and wrong as the Iraq war, but the state propaganda has been more successful and hardly anybody has realised … yet?

Many people to this day still think the damaging and morally dubious Western attacks on Serbia and Libya were justified. Many still think the gory attempt to destroy Syria was a good thing. It took ages for opinion to swing on the Vietnam war, back in the 1960s. And, as one who opposed the Iraq war, I remember only too well just how many (who now think they were against it all the time) were fooled into backing Sir Anthony Blair and George W. Bush.

The issue is more pressing as generals and admirals warn we must live in a militarised society and prepare for what they think is an inevitable war against Russia. They could get their way. If you go on backing this policy, you could be condemning yourself, your children or grandchildren to a world of war, privation and perhaps conscription into some sort of military service.

[…]

This is what I have never been able to work out. We have a Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, who has perfected the art of shouting loudly while carrying a very small stick – thunderous, belligerent declarations while our Armed Forces melt away thanks to neglect and badly targeted spending. Perhaps, if the long-feared Russian invasion of Western Europe takes place, we can fend it off by dispatching our troops on the pestilential e-scooters and e-bikes which are this former Transport Secretary’s major contribution to the nation.

Certainly these vehicles are terrifying to those not riding them. They have nearly killed me more than once. And, piled up in heaps, they make formidable obstacles, as the people of London are finding.

What Mr Shapps does not seem to grasp is that Britain became great by staying out of continental conflicts, and letting others do the fighting. Even in the battle against Bonaparte, we paid our European allies to do most of the hard work.

Our greatness ceased when bombastic moralising took over, in 1914. We flung ourselves, supposedly nobly, into a Russo-German war. Within two years we were bankrupt, and bereft of the flower of our young manhood.

People still refuse to believe me when I say accurately that Britain has not paid off its huge 1914-18 war debts (now worth about £40 billion) to the USA. But I promise you it is true.

Four years of terrible loss left the Russo-German problem unsolved and we had to do it all again in 1939. After that we were even more bankrupt, and in 1946 had to ration bread, like some desperate People’s Republic. But for many years afterwards we were largely governed by grown-ups who had fought in actual wars and been wounded, and had seen death very near them, or endured bombing and a war economy. And so we largely stayed out of major foreign trouble.

January 28, 2024

Himmler Takes Command – WW2 – Week 283 – January 27, 1945

Filed under: Asia, Britain, China, France, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 27 Jan 2024

A new German Army Group has been formed, tasked with protecting the Reich from the east and commanded by none other than Heinrich Himmler, who has never held such a command. The Soviets are really on the move in the east and have even begun reaching the prewar German border. In the west the Allies have cleared the Roer Triangle and are also working hard to eliminate the Colmar Pocket. In the Far East the Americans are advancing on Luzon, and in Burma the Allies have success on the Arakan and the Shwebo Plain, and finally manage to re open the Burma Road with China.

01:27 Soviet advances in East Prussia
09:23 Hungary and the fight for Buda
11:19 Operations Nordwind, Cheerful, and Blackcock
14:23 Block 5
16:14 American advances on Luzon
18:55 Allied successes in Burma
22:06 Summary
22:26 Conclusion
(more…)

January 27, 2024

QotD: McCarthy was right

Filed under: Bureaucracy, History, Politics, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s likely that just about everything you know about Joe McCarthy, his life, his political career and his work against the Soviet infiltration of American government is incorrect, the history having been almost without exception written by his staunch enemies, in turn building on the work of McCarthy’s contemporaries to delegitimise and destroy the junior Senator from Wisconsin. Even in the conservative circles, the memory of McCarthy is often treated as a bit of family embarrassment; in part the testament to how successful the left-wing narrative has been but also perhaps the faint memory that half of his own party (the so called liberal wing) despised him at the time and worked hand in hand with the Democrats to destroy him.

Yet McCarthy was right – not just in a general sense of clearly understanding that communism is not merely an alternative path to a brighter future but an evil and inhuman ideology at war with the liberal, democratic and Christian West, but also in focusing on the federal bureaucracy’s strangely ineffectual response to the presence in its ranks of many people, often in very senior and influential positions, suspected of working for the communist cause.

Contrary to the official version, it was never McCarthy’s role to unmask Red agents; a job more appropriately done by investigative agencies. In his legislative role overseeing federal bureaucracies, he made it his mission to inquire why so many individuals, whose loyalty has already been put under the question mark by numerous internal and external investigations, had no problems staying in sensitive jobs for years and moving unhindered from one agency to another. Those named by McCarthy (on the Democrat insistence) were not simply some random individuals with vaguely progressive sympathies; already at the time many of them have been identified as Soviet agents and security risks in the testimony of communist renegades (like Whitaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley) or through secret FBI surveillance. Others were suspects on the account of their associations with Eastern European or local communists and causes.

Over the following decades, most have been further incriminated from a variety of sources, including Soviet defectors and the deciphered Venona transcripts of secret Soviet intelligence cables, which mention some 400 individuals in the 1940s and 50s United States as active agents and contacts or abettors and helpers. The problem was not Reds under the beds, but Reds quite literally in positions of access to highly valued classified information or positions of influence over the shape of US policy, from the White House, through the State Department, to a host of other departments and agencies. All this is now beyond any dispute, but these weren’t mere idle speculations at the time either. Lauchlin Currie, Owen Lattimore, Harry Dexter White, Nathan Silvermaster, T.A. Bisson and dozens and dozens of others did conspire in small groups and networks to pass on classified information to the Soviets or steer the American foreign policy into the direction favourable to the communists (particularly in China during and after the war). And yet, despite all having serious question marks over them, they were allowed to work in government for years undisturbed. It was not because of some giant communist conspiracy at the highest levels of government but because of the bureaucratic inertia, old boys’ networks and the organisational reluctance to admit problems – but also because communist agents within protected and promoted each other. Time and time again mistakes got buried instead of rectified. McCarthy dared to shed the public spotlight on the continuing outrage and ask why. It was like a poor country cousin being invited to a formal dinner by his big city relatives and dropping a loud fart between the entree and the main.

But the story of McCarthy goes beyond these well-established historical facts to the campaign of character assassination and falsification of the record that succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. There is truly nothing new under the sun when the entrenched liberal establishment wants to protect its turf and fend off its enemies and as you read what McCarthy has been subjected to in relatively short period of 1950-54 you will no doubt experience a sense of deja vu from recent history: indiscriminate mud throwing in a hope that something sticks; blatant lies, misrepresentations and misinterpretations of evidence; politicians working hand in hand with public servants to coordinate the attacks; destroying and withholding of information and evidence (for example, the security information about the suspected individuals being physically transferred from the State Department to the Truman White House so that it could not be subpoenaed or otherwise accessed; a practice condemned by the Republicans and then continued by the Eisenhower White House); blackmailing witnesses or preventing them from testifying; biased media running the narrative (fake news is nothing new); whitewashing the accused and discrediting the accusers; incessant lawfare; trumped up charges and defamation. Coincidentally, McCarthy too was compared to Hitler while at the same time being accused of helping Russians. McCarthyism is not what McCarthy has done to his supposed victims; it’s what the left has done to him. It’s what it keeps doing to people who get in the way and threaten to disturb the business as usual.

Arthur Chrenkoff, “Before there was Trump, there was Joe McCarthy”, Daily Chrenk, 2019-09-30.

January 23, 2024

The Korean War: The First Year

Filed under: Asia, China, History, Japan, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Army University Press
Published Jan 22, 2024

Created for the Department of Command and Leadership and the Department of Military History at the US Army Command and General Staff College, The Korean War: The First Year is a short documentary focused on the major events of the Forgotten War. Designed to address the complex strategic and operational actions from June 1950 – June 1951, the film answers seven key questions that can be found in the timestamps below. Major events such as the initial North Korean invasion, the defense of the Pusan Perimeter, the Inchon landing, and the Chinese intervention are discussed.

Timestamps:

1. Why are there Two Koreas? – 00:25
2. Why did North Korea Attack South Korea? – 02:39
3. How did the UN stop the Communist invasion? – 06:30
4. Why did MacArthur attack at Inchon? – 10:24
5. Why did the UN attack into North Korea? – 14:27
6. Why did China enter the Korean War? – 18:51
7. How did the UN stop the Communist invasion … again? – 21:44

T-34: The tank that won WWII

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 27 Oct 2023

The Soviet T-34 was the most prolifically produced tank of WWII. Basic and austere in design, it was highly effective and capable of being mass-produced. In this video we take a close look inside and out at the tank that made victory over Nazi Germany possible.
(more…)

January 21, 2024

The Red Army Overruns Poland! – WW2 – Week 282 – January 20, 1945

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 20 Jan 2024

The huge new Soviet offensives charge ahead this week, taking Warsaw and Krakow; in the west the Battle of the Bulge is officially called over … though there is still fighting there. On Luzon, the Americans push out of their beachhead, though there is heavy fighting to secure their flank.
(more…)

January 18, 2024

Kalashnikov vs Sturmgewehr!

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Sept 2016

The German Sturmgewehr and the Soviet Kalashnikov are widely and rightly considered the two most influential and iconic of the modern military rifles. While the German rifle certainly influenced the Soviet design, the two were designed with different intentions and goals. The Sturmgewehr was an attempt to blend the roles of rifle and light machine gun, while the Kalashnikov was intended to blend the roles of rifle and submachine gun — and yet they both reached largely the same practical reality.

Which do you think was the better system?

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

January 14, 2024

Soviet and American Massive Attacks – Week 281 – January 13, 1945

Filed under: Asia, Britain, France, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 13 Jan 2024

In the East, the Soviets launch a massive series of new offensives. In the West, Monty holds an ill-judged press conference about the Battle of the Bulge. Operation Nordwind, the German offensive in Alsace, continues. In Hungary, there’s house to house fighting as the Red Army besieges Budapest. In Asia, the Allies wrestle with the Kamikazes, begin their landings on Luzon, and advance in Burma.

00:54 Intro
01:12 Recap
01:22 Montgomery’s Press Conference
05:53 Operation Nordwind
07:07 The battle for Hungary
09:38 The huge Soviet offensive begins!
12:22 American landings on Luzon
15:29 Anti-Kamikaze tactics
18:11 Slim’s advance in Burma
21:11 Conclusion
(more…)

January 12, 2024

Eastern Front Deployments, January 11, 1945 – a WW2 Special

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 11 Jan 2024

The Soviets are just about to kick off a series of enormous offensives all along the Eastern Front. Here’s a look at the forces who are to attack, and those who will be defending.
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January 7, 2024

1945 Begins! – WW2 – Week 280 – January 6, 1945

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 6 Jan 2024

The Germans launch a new offensive, Operation Nordwind, in Alsace, even as their offensive in the Ardennes is stalled. The Allies in the west don’t just have to fight these, they are also having serious issues amongst themselves in High Command that threaten their unity. The siege of Budapest is in full swing and is a hard, fought, bloody battle, and the Soviets and the Americans have big plans for new offensives soon to kick off in Eastern Europe and the Philippines (respectively).

00:00 INTRO
01:20 The Siege of Budapest
04:51 German defense plans in the East
06:38 Montgomery versus Eisenhower
08:32 Eisenhower versus the French
10:35 New German Offensive in Alsace
13:49 Monty’s plans for the press
15:04 The Battle of the Bulge
17:45 Preparations for the Luzon Landings
20:56 Notes to end the week
21:51 Summary and conclusion
(more…)

December 31, 2023

Budapest Under Siege – WW2 – Week 279 – December 30, 1944

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, Greece, History, Italy, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 30 Dec 2023

In the west, the Allies break the siege of Bastogne, but the fight for the Ardennes continues. and British commander Bernard Montgomery is maneuvering to take command of the Western Front ground forces. In Hungary Budapest is cut off by the Soviets and under siege, with hundreds of thousands of civilians still in the city. The fight in Italy is winding down for the winter, but the fight in the Philippines continues. In fact, American landings on Luzon are planned to go off soon.

00:00 INTRO
01:22 The Siege of Bastogne
03:10 The failure of 5th and 6th Panzer Armies
06:11 Montgomery wants command
09:27 Guderian appeals to Hitler, “stop the Ardennes Offensive!”
12:11 Budapest surrounded and under siege
17:04 Wrapping up the Gothic Line Campaign
19:29 Churchill in Athens
20:30 The fight in the Philippines
23:07 SUMMARY
(more…)

December 29, 2023

The Soviet follow-on operation after Bagration

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Big Serge discusses the state of the Germans on the Eastern Front at the end of the massive Soviet attacks that collapsed Army Group Centre in 1944:

But now, as Bagration began to run out of momentum, the Soviets really did put Model’s army group in the crosshairs with an enormous follow up offensive — the second phase of their summer blockbuster. Model’s army group consisted of two Panzer Armies (the 4th and 1st), and an allied Hungarian force guarding the southern flank. On paper, a pair of Panzer Armies was a formidable force, but like all German units at this stage in the war they were understrength, and by this point they were already bleeding strength as panzer divisions were scrambled north to try and slow down Operation Bagration.

Arrayed against Model’s force were two Soviet Fronts (the equivalent of an Army Group) under a pair of the Red Army’s best operators. The lead off assault came on July 13, with Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front forcing positions in the interstitial zone between Model’s two Panzer Armies. Konev’s intention was to split the two armies apart, force a penetration between them, and then curl into the rear to encircle one, or if possible both of them. Therefore, Konev’s initial assault was highly concentrated, with as much as 70 percent of his artillery and 90 percent of his armor assembled in a few narrow sectors selected for breaching.

With this level of force concentration by the attackers, there was really little that the Germans could do. Nevertheless, a somewhat lethargic and stiff German response helped make the disaster even worse. 4th Panzer Army headquarters initially believed Konev’s opening assault to be only a local attack – later defensively arguing that “there were as yet no signs of the attack being extended to other sections of the front” — and so attempted to respond with local counterattacks by its own reserves. As a result, by the second day of the Soviet offensive the Panzer Army had already committed all of its organic reserves while failing to withdraw from defensive positions that were already compromised. By the time they realized that Konev was launching a serious offensive operation, it was too late. Konev had already bashed into critical seams in the German front, turning his forces into a giant splitting wedge, in place to pry the whole front open.

[…]

What the Soviets had achieved with their enormous assaults on Army Group North Ukraine was remarkable. By precisely targeting the seams in the German formations, the initial attacks had pried open the German position like a clam, forcing the two panzer armies to retreat in opposite directions — the 1st pulling back to the south towards Hungary, and the 4th withdrawing westward towards Krakow. These diverging withdrawals opened enormous voids in the German line — the official German history of the war simply refers to this sequence of events as “the loss of a continuous front”. In a war where the enemy wielded vast mechanized forces, such gaps were fatal.

Rokossovsky and Konev had essentially overrun an entire German army group — and the best equipped group in the east, at that — in the space of about ten days, wedging the German line open and creating vast voids to drive into. Most importantly, Rokossovsky now faced one of the more tantalizing opportunities of the entire war. A great space now beckoned him to drive north towards Warsaw, and in his path was only the tired remnant of German second army — a force with no armor whatsoever, caught completely out of position.

Any wargamer could look at the map as Rokossovsky saw it and see that the opportunity to win a seminal, world-historical victory was now within reach. A sharp drive on Warsaw would put him in position to not only capture the city (a major transportation, administrative, and supply base), but also smash through the threadbare German 2nd Army and drive to the Baltic Coast. If he could achieve this, fully half of the German eastern forces would be encircled — the entirety of Army Group North (still fighting on the Baltic Coast) and everything that remained of Army Group Center. Rokossovksy now saw little standing between his powerful Front and one of the greatest encirclements — perhaps the greatest — of all time. No less than six German armies were sitting, naked and vulnerable, on the proverbial silver platter.

The Eastern Front was on the verge of total collapse. If Rokossovsky could bash through Warsaw (a seemingly simple proposition, given the enormous overmatch that he enjoyed over German 2nd Army), he would wipe out half the German eastern army and face no meaningful German forces between him and Berlin.

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