… let’s just look at the presidents of my lifetime: JFK: Adulterer, drug user, made his brother (!) Attorney General, shady mafia connections, stole election. LBJ: Adulterer, much cruder than Trump, started Vietnam War. Nixon: Honestly, better than LBJ but the source of the term “Nixonian.” Ford: Nice guy, failed president. Carter: Nice guy, failed president. Reagan: The GOP gold standard, but a multiply-divorced Hollywood actor whose administration was marked by nearly as much scandal-drama as Trump’s. (Just look up Justice Gorsuch’s mother). George HW: Nice guy, but longtime adulterer and failed president. Bill Clinton: I mean, come on. George W. Bush: Personal rectitude in office, though he’s been a bit of a dick since Trump beat his brother. Iraq War thing didn’t turn out too well. Mediocre judicial appointments and little attention to domestic reforms. Gave us TSA. Obama: Far more scandals, and far more abuse of power, than Trump. And does French forget that Trump was running against Hillary?
Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, “I LIKE DAVID FRENCH, BUT THIS IS AHISTORICAL BULLSHIT”, Instapundit, 2019-04-20.
May 21, 2019
May 20, 2019
The Evolution Of Knightly Armour – 1066 – 1485
Metatron
Published on 16 May 2017A video full of details which took over 30 hours in the making. I hope you like it and you find the info in it useful đ
Armour (spelled armor in the US) is a protective covering that is used to prevent damage from being inflicted to an object, individual, or vehicle by weapons or projectiles, usually during combat, or from damage caused by a potentially dangerous environment or action. The word “armour” began to appear in the Middle Ages as a derivative of Old French. It is dated from 1297 as a “mail, defensive covering worn in combat”. The word originates from the Old French armure, itself derived from the Latin armatura meaning “arms and/or equipment”, with the root armare meaning “arms or gear”.
Armour has been used throughout recorded history. It has been made from a variety of materials, beginning with rudimentary leather protection and evolving through mail and metal plate into today’s modern composites.
Significant factors in the development of armour include the economic and technological necessities of its production. For instance, plate armour first appeared in Medieval Europe when water-powered trip hammers made the formation of plates faster and cheaper.Well-known armour types in European history include the lorica hamata, lorica squamata, and lorica segmentata of the Roman legions, the mail hauberk of the early medieval age, and the full steel plate harness worn by later medieval and renaissance knights, and breast and back plates worn by heavy cavalry in several European countries until the first year of World War I (1914â15). The samurai warriors of feudal Japan utilised many types of armour for hundreds of years up to the 19th century.
Plate armour became cheaper than mail by the 15th century as it required less labour, labour that had become more expensive after the Black Death, though it did require larger furnaces to produce larger blooms. Mail continued to be used to protect those joints which could not be adequately protected by plate.
The small skull cap evolved into a bigger helmet, the bascinet. Several new forms of fully enclosed helmets were introduced in the late 14th century.By about 1400 the full plate armour had been developed in armouries of Lombardy. Heavy cavalry dominated the battlefield for centuries in part because of their armour.
Probably the most recognised style of armour in the World became the plate armour associated with the knights of the European Late Middle Ages.
A Guide to Dark Age British Politics
History With Hilbert
Published on 26 Sep 2017A beginner’s guide to the politics of Dark Age Britain, from the southern Celts to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the Pictish north.
QotD: Victoria Day
Happy Victoria Day, the day we honour an old queen by giving her not a moment’s thought. A year or two back, some professor thought we should change Victoria Day to Heritage Day to “strengthen our heritage.” We strengthen our heritage by obliterating it, apparently. … She was our first wholly constitutional monarch, and thus a critical figure at a critical time: She embodies the principle of peaceful evolution that distinguishes the Britannic world from … well, pretty much everywhere else, come to think of it.
Mark Steyn, “Victoria Day”, The National Post, 2002-05-20.
May 19, 2019
Siege of Vienna & Queen Nzinga – Lies – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 18 May 2019Writer Rob Rath talks about all the cool stories and facts we didn’t get to cover in our two special short series on the Siege of Vienna, and the life of Queen Nzinga.
Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
From the comments:
Extra Credits
Timestamps:
2:00 – Demonetization sucks. THANK YOU PATRONS!
7:15 – Istanbul was Constantinople now it’s Istanbul not Constantinople been a long time gone oh Constantinople
11:07 – the arrival of the Winged Hussars wasn’t exactly the same as Rohan answering Gondor’s call for aid
16:20 – Nzinga’s controversial role in slavery
19:25 – what’s next on Extra History?
21:02 – SIX DEGREES OF WALPOLERecommended reading:
The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe by Andrew Wheatcroft
The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent by John Stoye
Hispanics and the Civil War: From Battlefield to Homefront by the National Park ServiceMusic videos:
Queen Nzinga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N94H6F0WObcSiege of Vienna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ_HV57cgbgï»ż
The German Breakthrough in the West – WW2 – 038 – May 18 1940
World War Two
Published on 18 May 2019The German invasion of Western Europe has been going for over a week now, and the Neutral and Allied countries are in disarray. The Netherlands, despite putting up fierce resistance on some occasions, faces overwhelming powers while Belgium, France and the British feel the pressure from an organised and armoured assault from the Ardennes. And still, the German tanks, soldiers and aircraft are not all the Allies have to fear, as many of their losses are caused by their own command.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvChurchills ‘Blood, toil, tears and sweat’ speech: https://winstonchurchill.org/resource…
Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_t…
Join our Discord Server: https://discord.gg/D6D2aYN.
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesWritten and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Research by: Indy Neidell
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Map animations: EastoryColorisations by Norman Stewart and Julius JÀÀskelÀinen https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
Eastory’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.Sources:
– © IWM (C 1666)A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
This is the longest weekly episode of our World War Two series to this date, and boy are we proud. We made sure to make this the absolute best it could possibly be. After last week’s episode of WW2, it was hard to imagine that Eastory could surpass his efforts for that episode anytime soon, but it took him one week. Iryna, our editor in Warsaw, did an amazing job with putting together this episode. We hope you like it as much as we do. Thanks for your ongoing support and if you don’t already, please consider supporting us on Patreon.By the way, we have an Instagram feed where we dedicate one post per day of the war, which allows us to give some topics a little more attention, like the invasion of the Netherlands. You can check them out here:
11 May 1940 – Germans attack Dutch positions on the Grebbeberg and the Grebbeline: https://www.instagram.com/p/BxVBQcwnHAs/
12 May 1940 – Three German Panzer divisions approach Sedan to Force a breakthrough into France: https://www.instagram.com/p/BxYS8XqHdTh/
13 May 1940 – The Battle of the Grebbeberg ends in a German victory, allowing them to push into Holland: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxauq9HnqOW/
14 May 1940 – German bombers destroy the inner city of Rotterdam while peace talks are going on: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxc7zreiXo8/
15 May 1940 – The French fight a successful but practically meaningless battle at Gembloux: https://www.instagram.com/p/BxfGP1qCzV9/
16 May 1940 – Guderian rapidly moves westward, showing the full potential of tank-warfare: https://www.instagram.com/p/BxhxvyDClbY/ï»ż
Malcom McLean’s container shipping revolution
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Alexander Hammond recounts the tale of a former truck driver who was instrumental in revolutionizing the way we ship products around the world:
Deep-sea containers from China at Ely, Cambridgeshire
Via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1937, McLean made a routine delivery of cotton bales to a port in North Carolina for shipment to New Jersey. As McLean couldnât leave until his cargo had been loaded onto the ship, he sat for hours watching dozens of dockhands load thousands of small packages onto the ship. McLean realized that the current loading process wasted enormous amounts of time and money, and he began to wonder if there could be a more productive alternative.
In 1952, McLean thought of loading entire trucks onboard a ship to be transported along the American Atlantic coast (i.e., from North Carolina to New York). Although this idea would dramatically reduce loading times, he soon realized that these âtrailer shipsâ would not be very efficient due to the large amount of wasted cargo space.
Mclean modified his original design so that just the containersâand not the trucksâ chassisâwere loaded onto the ship. He also developed a way for the containers to be stacked on top of one another. That was the origin of the modern-day shipping container.
In 1956, McLean secured a bank loan for $22 million. He used the money to buy two World War II tanker ships and convert them to carry his containers. Later that year, one of his two ships, the SS Ideal-X, was loaded with 58 containers and sailed from New Jersey to Houston, Texas. At the time, McLeanâs shipping company offered transport prices that were 25 percent lower than those of his competitor as well as the ability to lock the containers in order to prevent cargo theft, which also appealed to many new customers.
By 1966, McLean launched his first transatlantic service and three years later, McLean had started a transpacific shipping line. As the advantages of McLeanâs container system became clear, bigger ships, more sophisticated containers, and larger cranes to load cargo were developed.
Update 21 May: Here’s a breathtaking example of just how much McLean’s containers changed the world:
In 1956, hand-loading cargo onto a ship in a U.S. port cost $5.86 per ton ($55.58 in todayâs money). By 2006, shipping containers reduced that price to just 16 cents per ton ($0.21 in todayâs money). https://t.co/zuMMqOuiAl #HumanProgressData
— Timothy Aeppel (@TimAeppel) May 20, 2019
Samuel Pauly Invents the Cartridge in 1812
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 4 May 2019(Video reuploaded to removed an allegedly copyrighted still image)
This Pauly shotgun (lot #1346) sold at Morphy’s April 2019 auction for $5,535.
Samuel Johannes Pauli was born outside Bern, Switzerland in 1766, and became an engineer of wide interests. Among them were bridge design, passenger-carrying balloons (he would work seriously on a 15-20 passenger balloon service between London and Paris later in life), and firearms. Only a few years after Forsythâs invention of fulminate priming, Pauly would become the first to use it in a fully self-contained cartridge. He patented this invention in Paris in 1812, having moved there in 1802 in pursuit of financing for his many grand projects (going then by the name Jean Samuel Pauly).
Paulyâs cartridge was a multi-part affair with a rimmed brass base containing a fulminate powder, connected to a paper or cardboard cartridge body which held a charge of regular gunpowder and the shot or ball to be fired. It was an expensive system, but contained all the necessary elements of a modern cartridge.
Pauly would move to England in 1814 (then taking the name Samuel John Pauly) in pursuit of aviation inventions, although he continued to tinker on his firearms design and filed two additional patent improvements. He died in London in 1821, and his name and work became rather obscure. His former apprentices would carry on his legacy in their own work – Nicolaus Dreyse would produce the needle fire system of Dreyse rifles used by the Prussian military, and Casimir Lefaucheux would create the pinfire system based on Paulyâs designs. Lefaucheux in fact became owner of the company in 1827, and with his son would provide the most direct link between Paulyâs design and the modern metallic cartridge.
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754
May 18, 2019
The Maginot Line – WW2 on Location – France 1940 – 01
World War Two
Published on 16 May 2019The Maginot Line was not the failure many think — in fact it was quite a remarkable feat — find out more in this video.
Guest Experts in order of appearance:
Mark Halter – Fortress Schoenenbourg http://www.lignemaginot.com/accueil/i…
Richard Tucker – Maginot Line Tours http://maginotlinetours.co.uk or https://www.tripadvisor.nl/Attraction…
Roland MĂŒller – L’Abri de Hatten http://www.abrihatten.fr/index-en.htmlJoin us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvFollow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_t…
Join our Discord Server: https://discord.gg/D6D2aYN.
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Wieke KapteijnsEastory’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
In April, with the help of many of you fantastic people we went to France to visit some of the sites of the German invasion in 1940. This is the first of a series of specials that we recorded there. More will follow in May and June as the war in France proceeds. On Saturday we will come out with a double length episode about the German breakthrough in the West — we are exceedingly proud of that episode and we hope that you will enjoy it as much as we do. This video gives you some great background to that event. For us it was a revelation to visit the sites and talk to the experts you will meet in the video. Mark Halter of the amazingly well preserved Schoenenburg Fortress, Richard Tucker who gives fantastic tours around the Sedan area, and Roland MĂŒller who has worked for decades to keep alive the memory of the men who served on the front. If you happen to be in the Alsace or Ardennes area, you need to go visit these places. Most of the Maginot museums are private initiatives that depend on their visitor income and financial contributions to continue existing — links are in the description.ï»ż
6 Wartime Foods | British Pathé
British Pathé
Published on 20 Sep 2016BON APPETIT – FOOD MONTH ON BRITISH PATHĂ (SEPTEMBER 2016): 6 Wartime Foods.
War and postwar changed the perception of foods that we now may consider as ordinary and basic. Here is a list of 6 Wartime Foods.
Check the newsreels used to make this video here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Music:
The Show Must Be Go (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…A NEW THEME EVERY MONTH!
Each month, a range of new uploads and playlists tell the story of a particular topic through archive footage. Let us know what themes you’d like to see by leaving us a comment or connecting with us on social media.BRITISH PATHĂ’S STORY
Before television, people came to movie theatres to watch the news. British Pathé was at the forefront of cinematic journalism, blending information with entertainment to popular effect. Over the course of a century, it documented everything from major armed conflicts and seismic political crises to the curious hobbies and eccentric lives of ordinary people. If it happened, British Pathé filmed it.Now considered to be the finest newsreel archive in the world, British Pathé is a treasure trove of 85,000 films unrivalled in their historical and cultural significance.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
A VIDEO FROM BRITISH PATHĂ. EXPLORE OUR ONLINE CHANNEL, BRITISH PATHĂ TV. IT’S FULL OF GREAT DOCUMENTARIES, FASCINATING INTERVIEWS, AND CLASSIC MOVIES. http://www.britishpathe.tv/
FOR LICENSING ENQUIRIES VISIT http://www.britishpathe.com/
British Pathé also represents the Reuters historical collection, which includes more than 120,000 items from the news agencies Gaumont Graphic (1910-1932), Empire News Bulletin (1926-1930), British Paramount (1931-1957), and Gaumont British (1934-1959), as well as Visnews content from 1957 to the end of 1979. All footage can be viewed on the British Pathé website.
May 17, 2019
The Three Kingdoms – The Battle of Guandu – Extra History – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 16 May 2019This series is brought to you by Total War: THREE KINGDOMS, a brand new strategy game set during this time period. https://store.steampowered.com/app/77…
Yuan Shao’s forces cross the Yellow River, assaulting Cao’s fortifications. Yuan has 110,000 soldiers â including the runaway warlord Liu Bei â while Cao Cao has only twenty thousand. But things are about to go in a very unexpected, brutal twist for the next eight years…
Three kings ruled in China. Three kings, each dreaming of ruling all under heaven. Three kings who rallied their armies for battle. The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.
Thanks to Jordan Martin for the guest art! https://www.jordanwmartin.com/
Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
The Red Baron â The Great War â Sabaton History 015
Sabaton History
Published on 16 May 2019The Red Baron is one of the, if not THE MOST iconic heroes of The Great War. He simultaneously embodies the mechanisation of modern war and a romanticised version of war with his individual skill and heroism. Indy goes beyond the legend to tell the history of Manfred von Richthofen, a.k.a The Red Baron, the latter of which also is the name of a Sabaton song that will feature on their upcoming album The Great War.
You can find the eight points of the Dicta Boelcke in the pinned comment.
Support Sabaton History on Patreon (and possibly get a History Channel special edition): https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory
Pre-order The Great War here: https://www.sabaton.net/pre-order-of-…
Check out the trailer for Sabaton’s new album ‘The Great War’ right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZP1…
Watch more videos on the Sabaton YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Sabaton?…
Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShopHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: PÀr Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: PÀr Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Maps by: Eastory
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek KaminskiEastory YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.Sources:
– © IWM: Q 66959, Q 105717, Q 73533, Q 67598, Q 50329, Q 50328, Q 42284, Q 111872, Q 54397, Q 63148, Q 63122, Q 3140, Q 57513 Q 58028, Q 52781, Q 63822, Q 50673, Q 72919, Q 12044, IWM 187, EPH 9001, Q 67832, IWM 1004, Q 63162, Q 67780, Q 58034, Q 63137, Q 63160
– © IWM Art: IWM ART 517, 1488, 517, 3071, 2659, 2660, 3199, 2754, 654
– Bendigo Soldiers Memorial Institute Military Museum: 2075P
– Klimbim Colorization
– James Miller ColorizationAn OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.
© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.
From the comments:
Sabaton History
This is the second episode of Sabaton History about one of the songs of the upcoming Sabaton album The Great War. By supporting us on Patreon, you can help us continue making these YouTube videos. You will also get some exclusive content â like a full version of Indy and Joakim talking about The Red Baron, which is live on our Patreon site right here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-length-red-26854763Indy mentions the Dicta Boelcke in the video. These are the eight points that Boelcke and von Richthofen used in the skies (source: Werner, Johannes von, 1932):
1. Try to secure advantages before attacking. If possible, keep the sun behind you.
2. Always carry through an attack when you have started it.
3. Fire only at close range, and only when your opponent is properly in your sights.
4. Always keep your eye on your opponent, and never let yourself be deceived by ruses.
5. In any form of attack it is essential to assail your enemy from behind.
6. If your opponent dives on you, do not try to evade his onslaught, but fly to meet it.
7. When over the enemy’s lines never forget your own line of retreat.
8. For the Staffel (squadron): Attack on principle in groups of four or six. When the fight breaks up into a series of single combats, take care that several do not go for the same opponent.ï»ż
Was Shakespeare really an illiterate illegal immigrant disabled asexual woman of colour?
Oliver Kamm discusses the most recent “Was Shakespeare really …?” article, this one published in The Atlantic by Elizabeth Winkler:
This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.
[Winkler] accuses what she calls orthodox Shakespeare scholars of “a dogmatism of their own” on the issue, whereby “even to dabble in authorship questions is considered a sign of bad faith, a blinkered failure to countenance genius in a glover’s son.” Armed with this tendentious premise, along with the less contentious one that Shakespeare depicts female characters with unrivalled sympathy and insight, Winkler spins a hypothesis that Emilia Bassano, born in London in 1569 to Venetian immigrants, is a viable candidate for the true author.
Even as I read Winkler’s piece, I expected a denouement that it was all a piece of fiction, analogous to the enjoyable 2009 caper St Trinian’s 2: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold, which ends with buried treasure under the Globe Theatre and the discovery of Shakespeare’s true identity. It never came. The article was presented as a serious contribution to a debate in which Winkler has made a potentially historic discovery.
In British newspapers, there is a longstanding technique of obscuring a paucity of evidence in support of a preposterous thesis by posing it as a question. It’s been dubbed by the political commentator John Rentoul “Questions to Which the Answer is No” (QTWAIN). Winkler’s article employs the stratagem liberally. “Was Shakespeare’s name useful camouflage, allowing [Bassano] to publish what she otherwise couldn’t?” “Could Bassano have contributed [to literature] even more widely and directly?” In a moment of self-knowledge, Winkler asks: “Was I getting carried away, reinventing Shakespeare in the image of our age?” Yet she immediately supplies not the correct answer but yet another QTWAIN: “Or was I seeing past gendered assumptions to the woman who â like Shakespeareâs heroines â had fashioned herself a clever disguise?”
Feminist readings of Shakespeare have enriched literary criticism and scholarship in, among other areas, reconsidering genre distinctions and examining the effects of patriarchal structures on relations between the sexes. There is no decorous way of saying that Winkler’s article, by contrast, is a farrago that should never have been conceived, pitched, commissioned or published. Winkler credulously retails a series of purported mysteries about Shakespeare’s authorship that are no mystery at all, and repeats claims derived from Shakespeare denialists that any capable scholar would have been able to correct. She places particular stress on the work of a “meticulous scholar” Diana Price, who claims: “Writers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England left behind records of their professional activities. Shakespeare left behind documentation of his professional activities, but none is literary⊠He is the only alleged [emphasis added] writer of any consequence from the time period who left behind no personal evidence of his career as a professional writer.”
Price is neither meticulous nor a scholar (she designates herself “an independent scholar,” which should have caused Winkler greater wariness). As Alan Nelson of Berkeley University has put it, Price knows how to put a sentence together but she doesnât know how to put an argument together.
We in fact have unimpeachable evidence of Shakespeare’s activities as a writer, far more than we do for, say, his fellow-dramatists John Webster or Cyril Tourneur, but by a series of rhetorical sleights-of-hand Price rules it all inadmissible. To give a single but weighty example: Shakespeare’s fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell assembled the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, published in 1623, with Shakespeareâs name on the title page and his engraved image in the frontispiece, and with a laudatory poem by Ben Jonson referring to the author as “Sweet Swan of Avon.” Price dismisses this as evidence of authorship because it’s posthumous, coming seven years after Shakespeare’s death, even though the planning and publishing of the book must have taken years, and Heminge, Condell and Jonson all knew Shakespeare personally. This isn’t scholarship but sophistry.
A noteworthy example of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. (As is, of course, the headline on this post.)
Convincing Children That Airfix Is Still Fun | James May’s Toy Stories | Spark
Spark
Published on 6 Apr 2019James May subjects traditional toys to spectacular, supersize challenges. Children have taken their attention by video games and mobile phones since they became heavily accesible, can they be convinced that outdated Airfix’s models are still fun?
Subscribe to Spark for more amazing science, tech and engineering videos – https://goo.gl/LIrlur
Content licensed from Plum Pictures to Little Dot Studios. Any queries, please contact us at: owned-enquiries@littledotstudios.com
#toys #Airfix #JamesMay #spark #sparkdocumentary #sciencedocumentary
May 16, 2019
Remembering Monte Cassino … and Wojtek the Bear, a Polish war hero
At the Daily Chrenk, Arthur Chrenkoff remembers the Polish soldiers who finally took Monte Cassino from the Germans in 1944, after earlier allied attempts by soldiers of many other nations (including Canada) had failed:
The ruins of the abbey at Monte Cassino after the 1944 battle.
Photograph credited to “Wittke” in the German Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv) via Wikimedia Commons.
On May 18, the day Australia goes to the polls, on the other side of the world we will be commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of the bloodiest and hardest fought battle of the Italian campaign if not the whole of the Western front of WW2. On that day, a patrol from the 12th Podolian Cavalry Regiment raised the Polish flag above the ruins of the Benedictine monastery on top of Monte Cassino, bringing to an end four months and four Allied offensives against the heavily fortified Gustav (or Winter) Line, manned by crack German divisions across the entire width of the Italian boot about 100 miles south of Rome. Some of the German troops, veterans of the Eastern front, thought the fighting was worse than at Stalingrad. Others, on the Allied side, compared the conditions to Verdun. Unlike Russian cities or French fields, most of the fighting around Monte Cassino took place over an unimaginably difficult terrain of steep mountain slopes, deep valleys, wild rivers and landscape stripped bare by the artillery. It was a truly world battle in a world war: pitted against the Wehrmacht were the units from Great Britain, including British India and Rhodesia, the United States, France and its north African colonies like Morocco, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, including Maori troops, South Africa, Italy and Poland. Since the start of the Allied offensive in January 1944, waves after waves of troops of the 5th US and the 8th British armies smashed themselves against the rocks, unable to dislodge the well dug-in Germans. Finally, the fourth battle code-named Operation Diadem, which commenced with a massive bombardment on May 16, threw the British 13th Army Corp and the 2nd Polish Corp against the very linchpin of the Gustav Line at Monte Cassino and its monastery. Two days later it was over.
[…]
Churchill, right from the time of the Gallipoli disaster, remained obsessed about the vulnerability of the continental powers â primarily Germany â through what he called “the soft underbelly of Europe”. The war records are full of his harebrained schemes to attack the Axis through Italy, the Balkans or Greece and knock them out of the fight by a sharp thrust into the Central Europe. This was to be a masterstroke in place of the Normandy invasion, which Churchill strenuously opposed, and later in addition to it, to draw some of the German troops away from the northern France and indeed to get to Austria and southern Germany before the Red Army.
The problem with the soft underbelly of Europe is that it’s anything but. In fact it’s the hardest part of Europe; all rock, no roll. It’s mountains and deep valleys, fast rivers and vast forests, rudimentary roads and virtually no useful infrastructure. Unlike the northern European plains, this is the defender’s country where the Allies lost all the advantage of their numbers, their maneuverability and their armour. The two years of arduous slogfest from the southern Sicily to the Emilia-Romagna in the north might have indeed drawn valuable German troops from the other theaters of war but it was a bloody dead end. Poles were still stuck taking Bologna in April 1945, while only days later the patrols from Patton’s 3rd US Army were reaching the outskirts of Prague.
And Wojtek?
Monte Cassino is on my mind today, because entirely coincidentally I’m reading a delightful war book (that’s an oxymoron if there is one) titled Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero. It tells the surreal but entirely true story of a bear cub adopted by the Polish troops in northern Iran in 1942, towards the start of their anabasis from Stalin’s Siberia all the way to Italy and eventually Scotland. Accompanying the Poles through all their service in the Middle East and then southern Europe, Wojtek grew up to be a 6-foot, 500-pound ursine, who always thought he was a human. Quintessentially Polish (if only by adoption), he loved beer and cigarettes (he also ate them, but only if lit), taking showers with the troops and riding shotgun in army trucks. Some of his war-time exploits included capturing an Arab spy in Iraq and stealing underwear from a female support unit. But Wojtek truly became a legend during the battle of Monte Cassino, when to his comrades’ amazement he volunteered to carry ammunition in his paws. He was eventually made a Private in the Polish Army, and lived until 1963, continuing to win hearts in Scotland, where the Polish troops were repatriated after the war.
