World War Two
Published 14 Oct 2021Resistance against occupation starts rising in the Autumn of 1942. It faces opposition not only from the occupiers, but also from collaborators killing their own countrymen.
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October 15, 2021
Nazis “Restore” Law and Order – WAH 044 – October 1942, Pt. 1
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RV Petrel – The Pac-Man of Wartime Shipwrecks
Drachinifel
Published 13 Nov 2019A quick summation of the excellent work being done by the RV Petrel crew and the Paul Allen Foundation.
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QotD: England and the English
When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning – all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?
But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and you are brought back to the same thought. Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.
Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip. It is therefore of the deepest importance to try and determine what England is, before guessing what part England can play in the huge events that are happening.
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
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October 14, 2021
Canada’s carrier-borne fighters onboard HMCS Bonaventure; the story of the McDonnell F2H-3 Banshee
Polyus Studios
Published 2 Apr 2021Don’t forget to like the video and subscribe to my channel!
Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudiosUp until the late 1960s the Canadian Navy operated a modern aircraft carrier. It had an angled flight deck, steam catapults, and fighter jets. The jets were comparable to land-based aircraft like the CF-100 but could pack a vicious air-to-air punch with their Sidewinder missiles. They saw a brief service aboard HMCS Bonaventure before being retired without replacement. It was the McDonnell F2H Banshee, Canada’s premiere sea-based jet fighter.
0:00 Introduction
0:29 Canadian Navy aircraft carriers 1945 to 1957
2:13 New Fighter Selection
3:34 Specifications
5:07 Comparison to the CF-100
5:50 Operational Service
8:23 Accidents and RetirementMusic:
Denmark – Portland Cello ProjectResearch Sources:
CASM-Aircraft Histories – HMCS Bonaventure CVL-22 by Robert T. Murray
McDonnell Banshee – Royal Canadian Air Force – http://www.rcaf-arc.forces.gc.ca/en/a…
Magnificent Moments by Vintage Wings of Canada – http://www.vintagewings.ca/VintageNew…
McDonnell Banshee – Shearwater Aviation Museum – http://www.shearwateraviationmuseum.n…
HMCS Bonaventure: Canada’s Last Aircraft Carrier by Kevin Patterson – http://www.sevenyearproject.com/canad…Footage Sources:
HMCS Magnificent (CVL 21) – Majestic Class Light Aircraft Carrier – Camildoc – https://youtu.be/_Zvnz06-MRc
HMCS Bonaventure (CVL 22) – Majestic Class Aircraft Carrier – Camildoc – https://youtu.be/QmFD5bijrok#Banshee #CanadianAerospace #PolyusStudios
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Tank Chats #128 | Panzer 61 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 4 Jun 2021Curator David Willey examines one of Switzerland’s first indigenously designed and produced tanks, the Panzer 61, put into service during the Cold War.
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October 13, 2021
Josip Broz Tito — The “Maharaja of the Balkans”
In The Critic, Thomas Gallagher looks at the man and the myth of Yugoslavia’s communist leader, known to the world as “Tito”:
Decades after his death in 1980, Josip Broz Tito still casts a spell as a larger-than-life figure.
The legend portrays him as a famous military leader and anti-fascist guerrilla fighter who fought off the Nazis and defied Stalin. He then went on to be a champion of peace who stood up for various small nations snapping the coils of European overlordship. He was at home on imperial estates or, more often, on his secluded luxury home on the island of Brioni, with Old Masters adorning his walls and kings, emperors and fellow communist strongmen paying homage.
Despite clumsy language and hyperbole in places, as well as some avoidable errors, Tito’s Secret Empire seeks to debunk Tito’s legend and in several key respects it succeeds. The authors William Klinger and Dennis Kuljiš accord some honours to their subject.
He was a unique character well-equipped to surmount various obstacles during his 88-year life. For the British diplomat, Sir Fitzroy Maclean, he was “a fail-proof survivor”. In 1974 he was hailed by Germany’s Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, as “the greatest of the winners of the Second World War”.
A benign image persisted, despite Tito being responsible for more acts of mass cruelty than any other European communist leader with the exception of the Soviets. He was admired as a wheeler-dealer in international affairs, from murky transactions to the most delicate undertakings in statecraft. This well-researched book deserves attention for those who wish to peer beyond the carefully cultivated image.
[…]
His 1954 state visit to then-royalist Greece, a regime which he had spent years trying to topple, was an unmistakable indication that he was placing himself at the head of a hybrid regime. Britain’s foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, had already visited him and urged the United States to prop up Tito financially. The favour was not returned. Evidence is provided that Tito played a major role in encouraging Egypt to nationalise the Suez Canal. He saw President Nasser as a kindred spirit, a populist unencumbered by ideology. Tito even more keenly sought to end French rule in Algeria, arming the rebels and offering diplomatic support.
In September 1961, he welcomed dozens of leaders from the promising new “non-aligned” bloc to a conference in Belgrade. Next year China invaded India and his soul-mate, Nehru, turned to the West for help. Thereafter, the non-aligned movement’s influence waned, as did Tito’s with it.
He increasingly became a pensioner of the Soviet Union. American ardour cooled as it became clear how reliant he was on Soviet arms and industrial licences which enabled this supposed ambassador of peace to export weapons to the Third World.
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A War Without Hate? – The Officers and Gentlemen of North Africa – WW2 – Gallery 05
World War Two
Published 12 Oct 2021In the history of European-style warfare, there has always been the ideal of “rules of warfare”. The horrors of the Eastern Front and the Pacific prove how hollow this ideal can be, but there is one theatre where some officers are trying to maintain it: North Africa.
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500 Year Old Apple & Cheese Pie
Tasting History with Max Miller
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QotD: The POW/MIA theories from the post-Vietnam War era
It routinely showed up on the “news magazine” shows, and of course there were whole series of movies about it: The Missing in Action flicks with Chuck Norris, Rambo II, I’m sure I’m forgetting a few. And though the “firsthand testimony” for this thesis was always of the “somebody knew somebody who heard from somebody that Lt. Smith suddenly disappeared from a POW camp back in 1968,” there was one seemingly strong piece of archival evidence: The seemingly disproportionate number of soldiers and airmen officially listed as “missing in action”.
And yet … c’mon, man, as a guy who dodged that war probably said back when he could still remember what century he’s living in. Why would the Vietnamese do that? All the mooted explanations — slave labor, selling captured pilots to the Russians for training purposes — didn’t pass the smell test. So a historian started digging into it, and while I read MIA: Mythmaking in America 30 years ago in college, I remember the crux of his argument:
In the war’s early days, the military used a statistic called KIA/BNR — killed in action / body not recovered. Everyone knows Lt. Smith is dead, but since his aircraft was vaporized by a SAM over Haiphong, his remains can’t be returned to his people. As Al notes, though, when a pilot was killed in action, his wife and kids got a puny condolence check from the government and kicked out of base housing. Thus the surviving pilots, acting from noble motives, started fudging. “Well … maybe Lt. Smith’s plane wasn’t vaporized. I might’ve seen a chute. It’s all very confusing; remember I was going Mach 1 at the time, dodging flak …” Mrs. Smith and the little Smiths get to keep drawing a paycheck, keep living on base housing, etc. So the official MIA list grew.
Enter Richard Nixon and that sneaky rat fuck Kissinger. Needing a way to prolong the war while concluding “peace with honor” — that is, to weasel out without seeming too weaselly — they needed a sticking point at the treaty table. The MIA issue was perfect for that. What about Lt. Smith? Of course the Vietnamese government can’t account for him; he was blown to atoms over Haiphong; but there’s his name on the missing list. Perhaps he’s in double secret prison!
And thus “the narrative” — the perfectly understandable-in-context lie that changed KIA/BNR to MIA — became “The Narrative”, that the Vietnamese were, for some unfathomable reason, still hanging on to captured American servicemen. Who knows why those inscrutable Orientals do anything, and what kind of America-hating hippie scum are you to ask questions? Don’t you want to bring our boys back home?
Severian, “Kayfabe”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.
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October 12, 2021
Richard Overy looks at the “Great Imperial War” of 1931-1945
I missed Rana Mitter‘s review of Richard Overy’s latest book when it was published in The Critic last week:
Imagine there’s no Hitler. It’s not that easy, even if you try, at least if you’re a westerner thinking about the Second World War. But for millions of Asians, those years of conflict had little to do with the horrors of Nazi invasion and genocide, and it is their experience that frames Richard Overy’s account of a seemingly familiar conflict. For most non-Europeans, the war was not a struggle for democracy, but a conflict between empires, and in this book, that imperial struggle begins not with the invasion of Poland by Germany in 1939 but the occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese in 1931.
Blood and Ruins is really two books in one. The first is perhaps the single most comprehensive account of the Second World War yet to appear in one volume. You might think that by reading extensively, you could construct a book like this one. You could not — unless you have Overy’s control over a staggering range of World War II scholarship, much of it drawn from his own decades of research on the economics of total warfare, the development of technology, from radar to aerial bombing, and the idea of the “emotional geography” of war, encompassing morale, hope, and despair. Then you’d need to go back and cover all those categories for each of the major Allied and Axis belligerents: Britain, the US, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and China among them.
The second book is an argument about what kind of conflict the Second World War really was. Overy is clear: on a global as opposed to European scale, it was not (just) a war about democracy, but about empires and their fate, although “the starting point in explaining the pursuit of territorial empire is, paradoxically, the nation.”
Overy points out what is generally lost to view when the European war is placed at the centre of the historiography: both Britain and France were undertaking an “awkward double standard” in their defence of democratic values, as their Asian and African possessions “rested on a denial of those liberties and the repression of any protest against the undemocratic nature of colonial rule”. While this argument has been made before (not least by figures such as Nehru and Gandhi in India at the time), Overy does something unusual and revealing: he compares the western empires with Japan’s justification for its own imperial project in the early twentieth century.
The book is scrupulously careful not to endorse or excuse the worldview of Tokyo’s imperialists, and gives full weight to the voices of the Chinese nationalists and communists who were bitterly opposed to Japan’s expansion on the Asian mainland. Still, the comparison of Japan’s pre-war and wartime empire to those of the western powers provides an important and original broadening of a contemporary debate.
There is ongoing public British (and to some extent French) argument about whether empire was a “good” or “bad” thing. Yet neither attackers nor defenders of the British empire tend to analyse it alongside the Japanese equivalent that lasted nearly half a century. Britain committed colonial massacres (Amritsar) and deadly repression (Mau Mau). So did Japan (the rape of Nanjing, invasion of Manchuria).
Britain’s empire also created an aspirational middle class full of cosmopolitan nationalists, and drew on ideas of loyalty to recruit its subjects to fight in world wars. All these things are also true of Japan, which like Britain was a multi-party democracy for much of its period as an overseas empire (between 1898 and 1932), and whose capital city was an intellectual hub for political activists from across Asia.
As a colony of Japan between 1895-1945, Taiwan developed a middle class that was Japanese-speaking and keen to draw on new economic opportunities brought by empire: Lee Teng-hui, the first democratically elected president of the Republic of China on Taiwan, always thought of Japanese as his mother tongue. Park Chung-hee, the American-sponsored dictator of Cold War South Korea, learned his political craft as an army officer in the Japanese Manchukuo Army that occupied Manchuria.
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Worthless Paper Money – German Hyper-Inflation Starts After WW1 I THE GREAT WAR 1921
The Great War
Published 8 Oct 2021Sign up for Curiosity Stream and get Nebula bundled in and SAVE 26%: https://curiositystream.com/thegreatwar
The German post-WW1 economy was under pressure: the loss of territory, the war bonds issued during the war and the reparations under the Treaty of Versailles. All this lead to a downward spiral of rising inflation and living costs for German citizens.
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Feldman, Gerald: Vom Weltkrieg zur Weltwirtschaftskrise. Studien zur deutschen Wirtschafts-und Sozialgeschichte 1914-1932. 1984.Fergusson, Adam: Das Ende des Geldes. Hyperinflation und ihre Folgen für die Menschen am Beispiel der Weimarer Republik, 1975.
Grosch, Waldemar: Deutsche und polnische Propaganda während der Volksabstimmung in Oberschlesien 1919-1921. 2002.
Lewek, Peter: Arbeitslosigkeit und Arbeitslosenversicherung in der Weimarer republik 1918-1927. 1989.
Michalczyk, Andrezej: Celebrating the nation: the case of Upper Silesia after the plebiscite in 1921.
Neubach, Helmut: Die Abstimmung in Oberschlesien am 20. März 1921. 2002.
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QotD: Titus Livius, better known as Livy
What little we know of the man himself suggests he was somehow financially well-off, independent, and reclusive. He was schooled in rhetoric, philosophy, and history. He never served in any public position, though apparently, he personally knew Augustus. Writing his massive history of Rome absorbed his adult life.
Though Romans at the time of his writing held his work in high regard, we know that some parts of Livy’s historical accounts were surely based on minimal records, old and dubious oral stories, and even legend. After all, he wrote 2,000 years ago about people and events of as much as eight centuries before his time. “I hope my passion for Rome’s past has not impaired my judgment,” he opined in his introduction to Ab Urbe Condita, “for I do honestly believe that no country has ever been greater or purer than ours or richer in good citizens and noble deeds.”
“The old Romans,” wrote Livy of his countrymen before the beginning of the Republic, “all wished to have a king over them because they had not yet tasted the sweetness of freedom.” But then in 508 BC, Romans mounted a truly historic revolution of both ideas and governance. They overthrew the monarchy and established a new order that ultimately included a Senate of nobles, popularly elected Assemblies, the dispersion of centralized power, term limits, a constitution, due process, habeas corpus, and the widest practice of individual liberty the world had yet seen. Before they lost it all less than five centuries later, they experienced a remarkable rise and fall. […]
From Livy, we learn about Rome’s pivotal wars against the Carthaginians, the Samnites, and other peoples of the Italian Peninsula. He also informs us of the rivalry between Sulla and Marius, the tumultuous last days of the Republic as strong men fought each other for power, the murder of Julius Caesar, and the self-serving machinations of Augustus. Livy celebrated the courage of his ancestors; in fact, he originated the phrase, “Fortune favors the brave,” which is still used commonly today as a maxim and a motto.
Lawrence W. Reed, “Lessons from Livy on How Great Civilizations Rise and Fall”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2021-06-28.
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October 11, 2021
The Darien Venture: The Colony that Bankrupted Scotland
Geographics
Published 14 Nov 2019If a Nation’s wealth and power were to be measured in stubbornness, resilience, and inventiveness, rather than GDP, Scotland would be a top-5 superpower. The people that brought to you televisions, refrigerators, penicillin, and gin & tonic have gone through many a rough patch throughout their history. Very often, hard times were related to their rocky relationship with their Southern neighbours, the English.
Credits:
Host – Simon Whistler
Author – Arnaldo Teodorani
Producer – Jennifer Da Silva
Executive Producer – Shell HarrisBusiness inquiries to admin@toptenz.net
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City Minutes: The Athenian Empire
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 25 Jun 2021Deja Vu? Only slightly! I’m re-imaging City Minutes, and this time the plan is to *Actually Make It Good*! With MULTIPLE CITIES per episode, and HORIZONTAL VIDEO!
I heard your feedback on the first run of the shorts loud and clear — City Minutes Good, Shorts Bad — so this will be the format going forward: networks of cities, with each getting a minute of spotlight.
We’re starting where I always start, in ancient Athens (I wanted to give you the proper version of the pilot), but we’ve got tons of other City Minutes planned!
SOURCES & Further Reading: Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, World History Encyclopedia (https://www.worldhistory.org/Athens): “Athens”, “Piraeus”, “Sounion”, “Delos”, “Corcyra”, “The Delian League” parts 3 & 4, and my degree in Classical Studies
Cities by timestamp:
00:00 — Athens
1:00 — Piraeus
2:01 — Sounion
3:03 — Delos
4:05 — Mytilene
5:03 — Korkyra
6:03 — ConclusionOur content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
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Overly Sarcastic Productions
43 minutes ago
Fun linguistic shenanigans: The island of Korkyra (commonly spelled Corcyra when referring to the ancient city) is known today as both Kerkyra and Corfu. The name Corfu comes from an Italianized version of the Byzantine name Korufo.I use the pronunciation of “Korkyra” with an O because it reflects the more common version of the name as listed in ancient accounts — adherence to the original ancient version is also why I’m using Ks in place of any Latinized Cs.
Essentially: I’m spelling everything the ancient way, but using modern Greek phonetics to sound out those words. It’s an uncommon way to go about, but it feels like the right balance of ancient authenticity and modern linguistic continuity.
-B
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QotD: Columbus Day
But when Columbus landed on the Caribbean Island of San Salvador in the Bahamas, he set off a wave of exploration and colonization which the previous discoveries had not. The Viking and Chinese settlements did not last, but the post-Columbian ones did. And that is an incredibly significant historical event, no matter how you view history.
In the 1970s it became popular on the left to consider Columbus a monster, a villain who gave the innocent and peaceful natives diseases, enslaved them, wiped out their culture, and destroyed all that was good. This theory teaches that the American natives were all good and peaceful and wonderful and just and true and righteous. They all ate free trade non-GMO gluten free food and were perfectly multicultural and non-judgmental, free of war and with perfect gender equality. Columbus, an evil white European showed up and ruined it all. In short, Columbus he infected the Eden-like paradise of the Americas with his Euro-masculinity.
And the origin of this theory is that of the Noble Savage. There were people living outside the evil corrupting influence of White European Males, and Columbus found them and ruined everything. That’s why when you hear someone talking about this, they never mention the nearly-constant wars, cannibalism, human sacrifice, rape, pillaging, genocide, disease, poverty, and incredible lack of technical and scientific, artistic, and literary knowledge of the native peoples of America.
Columbus was a man of his time, and a particularly greedy one at that. He ripped off his own people, acting as the King’s supreme representative and authority in the Americas (which at the time was not known to be as vast as it is). He took credit for what others did, he took over what they developed, he took the riches they found, and so on. And yes, he and his men enslaved the local natives, and because of their culture of “free love” spread European venereal diseases among the natives they were not exposed to before. Entire tribes were wiped out by the infections they had no resistances to.
Of course, the natives spread disease among the Europeans they hadn’t been exposed to, either, such as Typhus and Syphilis, and the natives were murderous and killed Europeans but those are details that modern revisionist historians either ignore, gloss over, or present as a rough sort of justice: they had it coming for daring to set foot in the Eden of the Americas.
Objectively, neither side was particularly admirable, as one would expect if you understand innate and original sin. If what’s bad comes from within us rather than outside influences, then its spread evenly throughout all humanity without regard to creed, culture, race, or location. The natives were bad because people are bad. The Spaniards and Columbus (who was Italian) was bad, because people are bad.
Christopher Taylor, “Eden Ruined By Italian”, Word Around the Net, 2018-10-09.
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