The Tank Museum
Published 19 Jun 2026Lacking firepower. Thin skinned. Many believe it was obsolete before it even went into combat.
Except … that isn’t all true.
Because the Cromwell didn’t just fight its way through Normandy, it was pivotal in the defeat of Nazi Germany.
After that, it held off Soviet expansion in Europe, held ground in Korea, and stayed in British service well into the 1950s.
So how did a tank everyone calls a failure end up doing all that?
In this video, we’re going to wade through the hate mail and see if we can convince you that actually the Cromwell did rather well.
00:00 | Introduction
00:52 | A Dysfunctional Start
04:42 | Built for Speed in a Slow War
09:48 | Failure in the Bocage, Victory in the Breakout
15:44 | The Tank That Wouldn’t Go AwayThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
In this video, join our historian James Donaldson in defence of the oft-maligned Cromwell. Emerging from troubled development, the Cromwell proved itself in the European theatre as an exceptional reconnaissance tank and continued to be used well beyond the end of the Second World War. It was fast and versatile, utterly devastating when used properly, and stayed in service longer than many of its critics would care to admit.
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October 17, 2026
Everyone is Wrong about the Cromwell Tank
QotD: The original purpose of the European project
Professor Bogdanor tells us that the European project was one of peace, and no doubt, after the second catastrophic war within the space of half a century, this is in part so, at least originally. No one could possibly have wanted yet another Franco-German conflict. But it does not in the least mean that the subsequent peace in Europe was caused by the European project. Other factors were surely far more important, indeed decisive.
First, of course, was the fact that Europe was in no condition to wage another war. The continent was in ruins, the Germans were disarmed, the Americans would not have stood for it, and in any case the Germans had genuinely changed. There was no revanchisme to speak of in Germany, as there had been after the first war. Moreover, to the east was the looming presence of what in the 19th century was called the Russian steamroller, only infinitely worse than that of the time of Alexander I and Nicholas I, with a barbaric ideology that at the time attracted the allegiance of a considerable proportion of the population, especially of that part of it — the intelligentsia — that ought to have known better. Only American power prevented the steamroller from rolling west, and thereby kept the peace in Europe.
Even if the maintenance of peace was one of the original aims of the European project, this is a very weaselly way of putting it. Even without the European Union, Estonia would not attack Portugal, nor would Belgium attack Slovakia. What is meant by keeping the peace is ensuring that Germany does not again attack France (no one thinks that France would attack Germany): in other words, and to put it crudely, without the European Union people thought — even Germans themselves — that Germany would be up to its old tricks again. I do not believe this.
Theodore Dalrymple, “European Empire, Fractured”, Law & Liberty, 2020-11-10.
October 16, 2026
Isotta Fraschini (Albertini) Bent & Riveted SMG (MP40 Mag Version)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Jun 2026Isotta Fraschini was an Italian firm in Cavaria best known for making luxury automobiles before World War Two. It entered the arms industry during the war. It made mostly heavy weapons like aircraft cannons, and not small arms, but the chief designer Albertini began working on a submachine gun in 1943. It eventually went into production in late 1944 and early 1945, but only in very small numbers — estimates are 250-500 guns total. These included two distinct models; one using MP40 magazines (as seen here) and one using Beretta 38 magazines.
The most distinctive and interesting element of the Albertini design is the extremely simple construction. It is not just a stamped sheet metal gun, but rather one that can be built almost entirely with a press break and basic punch instead of requiring stamping dies. The parts are riveted together instead of welded, further reducing already-simple production methods.
Thanks to Beretta for giving me access to this example from there reference museum to show to film for you!
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QotD: Niccolao Manucci as a “player character” in history
How do I know that? Well let’s return to the teenage Venetian, suddenly orphaned of his foster father: “I was left alone, sad and anxious, having nothing to console me, nor anywhere to turn in order to recover my things”. Then things go from bad to worse: two other Europeans show up and steal the rest of Manucci’s stuff and coerce him into traveling with them to Delhi. But then somehow the young man scores an interview with the king’s vizier and, using the bits of Persian he picked up along the journey, convinces him to arrest the men who’d tried to abduct him. He parlays the vizier’s friendship into a royal audience, and thence into an offer of employment from the crown prince. In a short while, Manucci is a courtier hanging around the palace in fine clothes paid for by the state, getting tutored in Indian languages and Mughal history and correct deportment. He tells us that the only difficulty in his life was the need to constantly scheme in order to avoid being forcibly converted to Islam, and then interrupts his own narration to give us a few hundred pages of ancient Mughal history.
Are you rolling your eyes yet? Every bit of this story so far, starting from the moment he snuck onto that ship, is literally unbelievable. Irvine certainly seemed to feel that way, if his footnotes and interjections are anything to go by. He evidently flung himself into a centuries-later posthumous cross-examination, looking for any detail in Manucci’s narrative that’s out of place. He doesn’t find any. Worse, he finds numerous corroborating accounts in other contemporaneous sources. But if this story actually happened, then we are left with a nasty trichotomy. One of three things must be true: (1) Manucci is the luckiest sonofabitch alive. (2) Manucci has superhuman powers of persuasion. (3) Manucci is leaving out something important. Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s a little bit of all three, because Manucci is a player character.
They walk among us. Lately the preferred jargon term has been “agency”. Before that people called them “live players”. In the old days they were referred to as “great men”, but that one’s my least favorite of the descriptors because it implies that they have to be like Cyrus the Great or Napoleon, when in reality they’re often much harder to spot. That’s because, as Samo Burja notes, player characters often deliberately cloak themselves in order to avoid detection by other player characters. These ones you may only notice by their aftereffects, like the lingering gravitational distortion after a singularity has whizzed by, reality warping as they knife through to their destination and then reconstituting itself behind them.
Humanity’s great sages have long known that every so often the planets are in a particular configuration, and a Child of Destiny is born. The real question is why. The fun-ruiners will note that in a world of billions of people, some of them are just going to be 6σ lucky. It is difficult for us even to conceive what it means to be 6σ lucky, and yet, like some bizarre object conjured by a non-constructive mathematical proof, we know such people are out there, somewhere in the wave function. But let’s not be fun-ruiners for a moment and consider the other possibilities. Maybe these individuals are chosen by God, or the gods. Or maybe they are the ones paying for the simulation, and therefore have access to the root login. Whatever their source, they exist. Often they spend part of their lives unaware of their true nature. And then … they awaken.
There was a little while when “NPC” was getting thrown around as a term of abuse, but as I have explained at some length,1 there’s nothing wrong with being an NPC. We come by it honestly. At some point, in the Springtime of your life, you bumped up against the universe, you pushed the boundaries, you pushed your limits. On that day, the universe pushed back. Hard. You learned your lesson, like a little kid who touched a hot stove. NPCs are formed from scar tissue, a fibrous mass of tough lessons about the nature of the world. But, as we have just deduced, there must exist people who, whether by divine ordinance or fluke of probability, had a very different experience on that fateful day. They pushed against the universe, and the universe gave in and gave them everything they wanted. And what lesson does that impart? Something like: “Rules are for the sheep, but you can hack the matrix and get what you want”. Now they are awakened. And the crazy thing is that if you keep getting lucky, not 6σ lucky, but just on-a-roll lucky, the awakened state can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some parts of the world really can be hacked with a little luck and a lot of determination. So there’s a feedback loop that can rapidly amplify mere one-in-a-billion luck into miraculous, reality-altering luck. That’s my attempt at a purely naturalistic explanation of player characters. Or maybe they’re just chosen by God.
Manucci is a slippery one. I only caught him because I read the first part of this book twice: once when I was reading it through casually, and then again as I sat down to write this review and tried to figure out how the hell to convey all this. Again, as with a Gene Wolfe novel, to understand the beginning you must have read the ending. In all the thousands of pages of narration, the one subject Manucci barely touches on is himself. That’s because Manucci is a player character practicing very high-level obfuscation techniques. This sort of misdirection is also the hallmark of a con-man, and what do you know: there is one brief, brief moment when Manucci gets a little too sure of himself and lets slip that he actually was functioning as a super-effective con-man back there in 17th century India. He wove his web of shadows around the Mughal aristocracy, and then he nearly got it around us the readers as well.
So we finally have Manucci pinned down: he is the subtype of player character known as a “guile hero“. You know them from stories: Odysseus, or Locke Lamora, or almost every character played by Kevin Spacey. Manucci is like them, his character class is either rogue or bard.2 At what age was he awakened? Was he already aware of his powers when he crept down that Venetian dock? And what really happened between him and Bellomont? Did he seduce the English gentleman? Or did he suss out his mission and blackmail him with a threat to make it public? Or did he just turn the full force of his personality on the hopeless cavalier and get 6σ lucky on his CHA roll? We shall never know. But if you are asking questions like these, then you now have the correct interpretive lens for what follows.3
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Storia do Mogor, by Niccolao Manucci”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-09-08.
- Twice!
- This is a totally OP and broken build, since as a Venetian he already gets a racial bonus to DEX and CHA.
- And you’re one step ahead of Irvine, who as far as I can tell never figured it out.
October 15, 2026
Why is it called Welsh Rabbit (Rarebit)?
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 21 Apr 2026Buttered toast with a rich cheese sauce made with mustard and ale
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1861Is it Welsh? Maybe. The Welsh certainly had a reputation for loving toasted cheese that precedes “Welsh rarebit” as a dish, so it’s possible, but we’ll likely never know if that’s where it originated. There were recipes for English rarebit and Scotch rarebit, the main difference between them and Welsh rarebit being the addition of mustard. It’s no wonder that the mustard-containing Welsh rarebit is the one that we see today, because it’s delicious.
This recipe is so simple, but so good. The combination of the crunchy toast and silky smooth cheese sauce is phenomenal, and the addition of the ale and mustard are just enough to bring out the flavor of the cheese. It’s one of the simplest and one of the best dishes I’ve made on the channel, and is one that I look forward to making again.
Toasted Cheese, Or Welsh Rarebit
Ingredients — 1/2 a lb. of Cheshire or Cheddar cheese, 1 oz. of butter, 2 tablespoonfuls of either milk or ale, 1 teaspoonful of made mustard, hot buttered toast.
Method — Melt the butter in a stewpan, add the cheese cut into small pieces, stir until melted, then add the milk or ale gradually, mustard and season to taste. Have ready some hot-buttered toast, pour the cheese preparation on to it, and serve as hot as possible.
— Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton, 1861Ingredients:
A loaf of bread, like French or Italian, enough for 6 slices
1/2 lb (225 g) good quality cheddar cheese*, or something similar
2 tablespoons (30 g) butter, plus some more for the toast
2 tablespoons milk or ale
1 teaspoon mustard
Seasonings**, to taste, optional*Don’t use pre-shredded cheese as they usually add starches to keep it from sticking that make it harder to melt.
**Seasonings they’d add to this dish at the time include salt, cayenne pepper, garlic, and horseradish. Feel free to use any that you like.Instructions:
- Slice 6 slices of bread. How thick and what size you cut the bread is up to you, just keep in mind you want about 2 slices per serving.
- Toast the bread either in a toaster or under the broiler. If you use the broiler, a couple of minutes on each side should do the trick. Spread a little butter on each slice.
- Chop the cheese into small pieces or grate it.
- Melt the 2 tablespoons (30 g) of butter in a saucepan over medium heat. When it’s melted, add the cheese and stir constantly as it melts.
- Once the cheese has melted, stir in the milk or ale a little bit at a time. You want to make sure that the cheese doesn’t get so hot that it starts to bubble or burn. Lower the heat if necessary. Stir in the mustard and any of the seasonings you like to taste.
- Dish the hot cheese sauce over the prepared toast and serve it forth right away for the best texture.
QotD: The “political object” in war
Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.
October 14, 2026
The Korean War Week 121 – America Has Had Enough! – October 13, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 13 Oct 2026The UN delegation walks out of the Panmunjom Peace Talks this week, after the Communist side refuses all of their proposals to solve the POW repatriation issue. A major naval training exercise off the coast comes to its end, with disappointing results, and in the field the Battle of White Horse Hill, the deadliest battle so far this year, rages all week long.
00:34 Recap
00:57 Naval Training Exercise
04:31 Harrison Walks Out
06:41 White Horse Hill
13:47 Operation Showdown
14:34 Summary
14:50 Conclusion
16:39 Memorial
QotD: The rise of the Reform Party of Canada
This small government conservatism wasn’t a homegrown ideology, it was adopted and imported from elsewhere. America especially. The dominant paradigm in postwar American conservatism became the fusionism that was associated with publications like National Review, and eventually became a dominant political force in Ronald Reagan. The success of this fusionism also made it appealing, and ready-made, to be imported to Canada and fused with this rejection of big government Liberal nationalism. In the process, Canadian conservatism begins to sound more American.
I’m not using this pejoratively and I don’t see this so much as a form of cultural imperialism. The adoption of this kind of conservatism made sense in response to the new Liberal nationalism. But it does present some serious problems for Canadian conservatism. This anti-nationalism and small government conservatism will appeal to some, especially in the West, but it’s not something that a national movement could be forged around.
This is what I mean when I say lots of conservatives don’t like Canada all that much. In adopting small government American conservatism, this kind of conservatism sounds like an American critique of Canada. Canadian healthcare looks “socialist” to American conservatives, and small government ideologues in America look at Canada and see big government “Soviet Canuckistan.” This is what Canadian conservatives adopting this kind of ideology sometimes sound like, and you can see why this has limited electoral appeal.
Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.
October 13, 2026
British beer vs. “modern audiences”
In The Critic, Henry Jeffreys sings the praises for some of the greatest names in British brewing … while waving goodbye as they disappear one after another into international beverage behemoths who care nothing at all for history and tradition if it doesn’t add value to the stock price:
Beer Street, from Beer Street and Gin Lane by William Hogarth. The picture is a counterpoint to the more powerful Gin Lane — Hogarth intended Beer Street to be viewed first to make Gin Lane more shocking — but it is also a celebration of Englishness and depicts of the benefits of being nourished by the native beer.
Wikimedia Commons.
Burton-on-Trent was once the brewing capital of the world, home to such famous names as Bass, Allsopp’s and the famous “Burton snatch”. Stop giggling at the back, Jenkins! I’m talking, of course, about the refreshing sulphurous tang imparted by the high levels of calcium sulphate in the town’s water. By the 1890s, it boasted thirty-one breweries producing over three million barrels a year, providing a quarter of Britain’s beer. Sadly, it has fallen a long way from there.
While Burton’s most famous beer, Bass, is enjoying a modest revival at the moment with increased distribution and marketing, things aren’t looking so rosy for the brewery that makes it, Marston’s. For those not familiar with the Byzantine ways of big beer, a little explainer. Bass the brand is owned by AB InBev, the corporate behemoth behind Budweiser. But the beer is brewed at Marston’s Brewery, owned by Carlsberg Britvic, which has now announced plans to close the historic site, with around 310 jobs at risk.
Carlsberg has a woeful record as a custodian of English beer. In 2024 it removed the traditional wooden Burton Union system from Marston’s, switching to stainless steel for fermentation. In the past 15 years, it has closed Tetley’s in Leeds, ending nearly 200 years of history, Jennings in the Lake District, Ringwood in Hampshire, Wychwood in Oxfordshire, and Banks’s in the West Midlands. A roll call of shame. But Carlsberg is no outlier. The British beer industry has been cannibalising itself for years. Regional breweries were gobbled up by national companies, which in turn were swallowed whole by multinationals. Great names either disappeared or were kept as brands, like Bass, to be shunted around, unloved, on the spreadsheets of companies headquartered in America or Belgium. In 2023 Molson Coors “paused” production of another Burton classic, Worthington’s White Shield, perhaps the greatest of all bottled beers. This year it announced that it will close Sharps and move production of Doom Bar Cornish ale to Hartlepool.
[…]
While we shouldn’t let Carlsberg, Molson Coors and others off the hook for their cavalier attitude to Britain’s great brewing heritage, we are to blame as well. We’re letting a unique beer style die out. Maybe it’s already too late and real ale is already a specialist drink. But there are still great brewers who care, from newer names like Gadds in Ramsgate to historic independents like Harvey’s of Lewes or Timothy Taylor of Keighley. Go to the pub and drink their beers regularly, because if you don’t they will go the way of Worthington’s White Shield and countless others.
MAC 34T Aviation: Interwar French Turret-Mount Aircraft Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Jun 2026During World War One France used the Lewis gun as a flexible aircraft armament, and it was replaced by the Darne in 1922. This was an adoption of convenience, and by 1926 the Chatellerault Arsenal was working on adapting the new Mle 1924 light machine gun for aircraft use. Initial efforts were directed at a wing-mounted model with a high rate of fire and a large (300 rounds) drum magazine. This led in turn to a “turret” model for use in manned flexible mounts.
This gun was designated the Mle 1934 T, and used in several different mounts. Today we are looking at one in the Type 29 mount. It is a sheet metal carriage to enclose the gun, providing a spring counterbalance system for easy maneuvering of the gun and a mount for an early collimator sight.
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QotD: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wokester avant la lettre
1. His foundational claim: man is naturally good and civilization corrupts. This sounds compassionate. It is the most dangerous idea in Western political thought. Because if man is naturally good, then every failure, every crime, every inequality is caused by the system – never by the individual. Responsibility evaporates. The oppressor is always external. The victim is always pure. This is the complete architecture of Woke in one sentence, written in 1755.
2. The “Noble Savage” is Rousseau’s Form – his version of Plato’s ideal. The uncorrupted man, untouched by property, competition, and civilization, living in natural harmony. Rousseau had never met one. He invented him from an armchair in Paris, extrapolating from travel accounts of peoples he had never visited. The Noble Savage is not an anthropological observation. He is a political weapon – a club to beat civilization with, wielded by someone living comfortably inside it.
3. The “General Will” is the most dangerous concept in modern political philosophy. Not the actual expressed will of actual people – but the deeper will, the will people would have if they were “properly enlightened”. Whoever claims to know it can do anything in its name. Robespierre knew it. Every revolutionary vanguard since has known it. Today’s progressive institutions know it – which is why they can override democratic majorities, suppress dissent, and compel speech, all while insisting they represent the people’s true interests. The General Will is the intellectual license for every tyranny that calls itself a liberation.
4. The chain from Rousseau to today is unbroken. Rousseau to Robespierre and the Terror. Robespierre to Marx, who secularized the General Will into historical necessity. Marx to every “liberation” movement that ended in a gulag. And today: replace civilization with white supremacy, replace the Noble Savage with the marginalized community, replace the General Will with lived experience – and you have the complete operating system of contemporary progressivism. The software is the same.
5. Voltaire, his contemporary and rival, saw him quite clearly: Rousseau made primitivism intellectually respectable. He gave the comfortable classes of every generation a way to signal virtue by denouncing the civilization that produced them, from inside it, without cost. The French Left Bank intellectual denouncing capitalism from a café. The Harvard professor deconstructing Western civilization from a tenured chair. The hedge fund billionaire funding the abolition of meritocracy. All of them are living in Rousseau’s armchair.
6. He sent all five of his illegitimate children to a Paris orphanage. Then wrote Émile – one of the most influential books on education in Western history, a detailed guide on how to raise a virtuous child in harmony with nature. He did not find this contradictory. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense – this is obłuda [hypocrisy] (remember the obłuda of communism👇🏻). The defining structural feature of the ideology he invented: the sermon is inversely proportional to the practice. The performance of virtue replaces the exercise of it. Naming the oppressor substitutes for personal accountability. Rousseau didn’t just invent Woke – he lived it, in every detail, before anyone had the word.
7. The original Woke was woke about a fiction he invented – and spent his life performing outrage about a civilization he depended on and never left. Two and a half centuries later, the performance is the same. The noble savages have been updated. The General Will has new names. The orphanages are metaphorical. But the man who sends his children away and then lectures everyone else on how to raise theirs – that man is everywhere.
Krzysztof Szczawinski, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-07-10. (Auto-translated from the original Polish by X)
October 12, 2026
A minor action for the Kriegsmarine in the Soviet Arctic
This is a minor enough action that I had never heard of it before, but as I’ve said in the past I haven’t studied the titanic struggle of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich in detail. Mapping History charts (see what I did there?) the Admiral Scheer‘s attempt to take the Soviet Union’s most northerly airstrip on Dickson/Dikson/Диксон island during Operation Wunderland [Wiki}:
“Chief Air Lines of the U.S.S.R.” created in 1939 by Alexander S. Grigorovich, Ivan V. Sautin, Ivan P. Ivanitsky, Valentina M. Podgornova, and Lazar M. Lissitzky.
There’s a tiny error on this map. Made around the time of the New York World’s Fair in 1939, it shows the airports and air routes of the Soviet Union at a time when the USSR was keen to show visitors a country stitched together by aeroplanes. Follow the lines north until they run out and you arrive at a dot near the mouth of the Yenisei, labelled Dickson. But in 1939, it should — of course — be marked “Dikson”.
Should be “Dikson”, of course.
Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld named the harbour in 1875 after Oscar Dickson, a merchant from Gothenburg who’d paid for his foray north. Russian usage dropped the “c” almost at once, and Dikson has been the official name since 1884 — which means on the day it was printed, this map was fifty-five years behind the curve.
You’ll have spotted this is an air map: Dikson is still the northernmost airstrip on any continental mainland, and from 8 December to 5 January it gets no daylight at all, not even twilight — but that’s almost a moot point.
I’m about to describe a fight between a cruiser, an icebreaker and two guns parked on a pier. The only aeroplane in what follows is a German floatplane, and even that gets wrecked before the shooting starts — but I liked the map, and I’ve been posting notes and tweets and whatever-it-is-bluesky does about Soviet mapping today, so this is the map you’re getting. It’s that little red dot, that deserves our attention.
In August 1942, Dikson was the scene of what is usually described as the only battle fought against German forces beyond the Urals. The Germans arrived by sea, certain they could take the land base without too much trouble, and they left, having been put firmly in their place – and without putting a man ashore.
Recognition diagram for the Admiral Scheer
BREAKING THE ICE
The German heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer left Narvik on 16 August 1942 for the Kara Sea. As one part of Unternehmen WUNDERLAND, her task was to find and sink the convoys using the Northern Sea Route along the Siberian coast.
Operation WONDERLAND was considered a first, key stage in establishing control over the western Arctic. As is often the way, Mother Nature didn’t attend the same briefings. Pack ice turned the Admiral Scheer back from the Vilkitsky Strait, fog hid the convoys her floatplane had found, and then the floatplane itself was lost in what might be called a “landing accident”. Her captain, Wilhelm Meendsen-Bohlken, also discovered his charts could not be trusted. Rocks stood where open water was marked, and shoals where the chart promised depth.
Maps, huh.
But then on 25 August, her lookouts sighted a single ship, the Alexander Sibiryakov, a Glasgow-built steamer of 1909 that had started life hunting seals off Newfoundland.
Soviet postage stamp of 4 kopecks from 1977, showing the Aleksandr Sibiriakov
In 1932 the Alexander Sibiryakov had made the first single-season passage of the Northern Sea Route, finishing it under improvised sails after losing her propeller. The Soviet Navy had requisitioned her in September 1941 and given her a handful of light guns – which is something of a coincidence.
Alexander Sibiryakov, the Siberian gold merchant she was named for, had been Oscar Dickson’s partner in funding Nordenskiöld. Sixty-odd years later, one patron’s ship was about to die warning the other patron’s island. She carried six 11-inch guns and a crew of 1,150 — it wasn’t enough.
Meendsen-Bohlken wanted the Alexander Sibiryakov intact. Her codebooks and ice reports would tell him where the convoys were. He ordered her – presumably in signals of one syllable — to strike her flag, and Captain Anatoli Kacharava gave his answer with a plain-speaking message from his deck guns. Not the best idea, when face to face with the Admiral Scheer, which promptly responded with the few salvoes needed to set the Alexander Sibiryakov on fire. Her crew opened the seacocks so that nothing useful could be salvaged, and most of the 104 people aboard died – but not before they had radioed the nearest military base, with a report on what was happening, and where. Within hours every Soviet ship and station in the Kara Sea knew that a German raider was loose, and the busiest transmitter of all was at Dikson.
The V2 Story: 1934-1940, A Pact with the Devil
HardThrasher
Published 11 Oct 2026Like many Nazi ideas, what looked good on paper was, in reality, somewhat different. The Rocket craze of the late 1920s led directly to the development of one of Nazi Germany’s most expensive weapon systems, which was technologically astounding, but militarily rubbish.
Today we’re going to look at how that all began, the race to develop the A-4 rocket, the building of a massive test site to create the weapons and talk about what the A-4/V-2 was, how it was supposed to work, how the technical challenges were over come, and ask the question no one did at the time — why bother?
00:00 Big Rockets, Bad Ideas: The V2 Story
00:55 The “So What” Question
03:04 Rocket Fever — the late 1920s
06:51 The Lads in Grey Step in
08:50 von Braun’s Faustian Pact
11:21 Peenemünde: Onwards and Sometimes Upwards
13:42 Size Matters: The A4 Concept
19:26 Getting the Gang Together: The V-2 Engineers Come Together
22:36 A Quick Tea Break and some Blatant Self Promotion
23:51 The A4 and Other Rockets: A Timeline
27:28 Anatomy of the A4
29:26 Guidance and Gyroscopes: Making It Go the Right Way
35:09 The Rocket Engine: Controlled Fire and Clever Plumbing
38:36 The V-2 Turbopump: The Wolverine
46:54 Survivor’s ClubNotes
[1] Guy Walters, Stealing Hitler’s Rocket, Head of Zeus, 2026 p.27 (Kindle ed)
[2] Tooze, Wages of Destruction p. 750 gives German GDP in 1937 as RM73.757bn, approximate cost of the V2 programme whilst Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p.273 gives the total cost of the A4/V2 project, excluding vehicles, warhead and guidance systems as RM900m
[3] Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (New York: Free Press, 1995), Kindle Edition pp. 122–124
[4] Stephen Ransom & Hans-Hermann Cammann, Me163 Rocket Interceptor, Crecy Publishing, 2021, pp.30–32
[5] Micheal Nuefled, Von Braun, 2007, Smithsonian (Kindel Ed), p.50
[6] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, pp. 19–21.
[7] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 23.
[8] Neufeld, Von Braun, p.55
[9] Neufeld, Von Braun, p.61
[10] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 32.
[11] Neufeld, Von Braun, pp.64–65
[12] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 50
[13] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 51
[14] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 52.
[15] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 179
[16] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 59.
[17] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 98 & 121 – A-9 development stopped in 1942, A-10 was never more than a paper study
[18] As above, worth picking out the A-10 proposals as theoretical
[19] A4/V2 Rocket in detail: Turbopump “V2 Turbo Pump Part 1”
[20] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p.65 and on
[21] For those who’re so minded there’s a complete explanation of the V2 engine systems here: John A. Halchak, James L. Cannon and Corey Brown, “Materials for Liquid Propulsion Systems,” in Aerospace Materials and Applications (AIAA, 2018), p.15 and onward
[22] “Analysis and Evaluation of German Attainments and Research in The Liquid Rocket Engine Field. Volume 4. Propellant Injectors”, which you can get in pdf form online has a really good description of how this works.
[23] Walters, Stealing Hitler’s Rocket, p.27
[24] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 80.
[25] A4 / V2 Rocket in detail: Turbopump – I make no apologies for referencing the same YT video here, it is art, go and watch it
[26] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 88
[27] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 85
The Great Game for Asia 1894-1905
Real Time History
Published 15 May 2026The 19th century is a time of violent global imperial competition. The Scramble for Africa and the Great Game between the Russian and British Empires over influence in Central Asia are among the best-known examples. But the 2nd half of the century also involved another Great Game – the Great Game for Asia.
00:00 Intro
05:35 1st Sino-Japanese War 1894-95
30:02 Boxer War 1900-01
55:40 Russo-Japanese War 1904-05
01:22:14 Conclusion
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QotD: Blame the “Silent generation” for The Sixties™, not the Boomers
Further, what could they really do? The voting age was 21 until 1971, and as hard as this is to hear, voting was just as pointless back then as it is now. St. Kennedy only won through massive voter fraud, and that was 1960. As John Derbyshire used to say, if the American People had been consulted on anything of importance since then, the USA would still be a White Christian nation … and yet, here we are.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee put on a better show back in the days, but the Uniparty was still the Uniparty. America’s ruling caste caught religion back in the 1920s, and on the long view, you could make a pretty robust argument that Mustache Guy and the Anime Club actually did us a huge fucking favor — left to his own devices, President-for-Life Roosevelt would’ve ushered in the USSA by the late 1930s, with the enthusiastic support of all the Beautiful People on both sides of the Uniparty.
… hats off to you [Isoroku Yamamoto] — you and your dipshit friends bought us a few decades. Decades we squandered, of course, but that’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault, unless you think the boys on the Higgins boats should’ve shot their officers, turned the ships around, and conducted a massive air, land, and sea invasion of every faculty lounge and radio station in America … and even if you do think that, what are you going to do about it?
As for Gen X, we were no better. I can’t blame the Boomers for running with it, any more than I can blame myself for running with our thing. I spent most of college, for instance, getting drunk and chasing tail. Chasing tail is bad, full stop — I should’ve been saving it for marriage, with all that implies — and while getting drunk isn’t bad every now and again, I didn’t do it every now and again. I lived a life as dissolute as any Boomer’s, and while I was equally powerless to change anything in the broader culture, I could’ve been a much better person … but I wasn’t.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-23.
