World War Two
Published on 20 Oct 2018For the men in the navies of the warring nations in Europe, there was nothing phony about WW2 in October 1939 – mortal danger was immediately under the cold surface at the receiving end of a torpedo or a depth charge…
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Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Research by: Indy Neidell
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A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
October 21, 2018
The Submarine War – WW2 – 008 October 20 1939
Tank Chats #36 Tiger 131 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 21 Apr 2017Tiger 131 is the most famous tank in The Tank Museum’s collection and arguably the most famous tank in the world.
Here curator David Willey discusses the history of Tiger 131, it’s current place and importance in the collection, and its future.
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QotD: Footnotes
The absence of footnote references from the pages of this book may aggrieve some readers but will, I hope, please a larger number, who do not care for the untidy and irritating modern fashion of treating any historical study as a card-index rather than a book to be read. Footnote references are an inevitable distraction to the reader’s eye and mind. The justification for omitting them is not, however, merely one of narrative smoothness and page cleanlinness. Such references are only of value to a small proportion of readers — as a means to personal research or composition. By direction the student’s attention to an isolated quotation or piece of evidence, such footnote references are apt to give this a flase value; and can also be the means of conveying a false impression. They may enable the student to find out whether the author’s use of a quotation is textually correct, but they do not enable him to find out whether it gives a correct impression. For the true worth of any quotation can only be told by comparison with the whole of the evidence on the subject. Further, the practice of littering the pages with references is not even a proof that the author has consulted the sources. It is easy to copy a quotation — complete with footnote references! — from some previous writer, and a study of books on the Civil War, especially, suggests that this labour-saving device is not uncommon.
B.H. Liddell Hart, Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American, 1928.
October 20, 2018
Cavalry was a stupid idea
Lindybeige
Published on 28 Aug 2016The Great Courses Plus free trial: http://ow.ly/fA12302OFSt
Riding a horse into battle is not a technique easy to adopt. The first man to suggest it may have been laughed at.
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A long ramble by me. Possibly I should have done one video about Celtic/Roman four-pommelled saddles, and a separate one about how cavalry took a long time to develop.
I wasn’t quite at my peak while making this one. I came back from abroad with a virus, and had spent the previous day coughing.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lindybeige I may have some drivel to contribute to the Twittersphere, plus you get notice of uploads.
website: www.LloydianAspects.co.uk
October 19, 2018
The Battle of the Selle – Ludendorff Resigns I THE GREAT WAR Week 221
The Great War
Published on 18 Oct 2018As the Germans are retreating further and further during the Battle of the Selle, Erich Ludendorff – the German Quartermaster General, one half of Germany’s military dictatorship and mastermind behind the last big German offensive in spring 1918 – resigns under pressure by the Kaiser and the Reichstag. The German upper class realizes that their days might be numbered if the war continues in the current form and Austria-Hungary’s Emperor Karl has the same epiphany.
Webley Model 1911 Stocked .22 Single-Shot Target Pistol
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 29 Sep 2018http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
The Webley Model 1911 is a single-shot, self-ejecting target pistol made only for a few years. It was fitted with a long barrel to increase sight radius and also a detachable shoulder stock for those who wanted a bit more stability when shooting. Mechanically, the piece must be loaded manually, and it will then open the slide and eject the empty case automatically when fired, leaving the slide open for the shooter to load the next round. These were manufactured until 1914, with the final batch of pistols sold in 1919 from remaining parts stocks.
I am at the range with this example on Malta, thanks to the Association of Maltese Arms Collectors and Shooters. I thought it would be interesting to compare shooting with and without the stock, although my biggest takeaway was that I need more practice time on the range!
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Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754
QotD: “None of us are standard issue”
Our own age, still, has the “image” of the mass-producing society that brought unparalleled prosperity and riches to the world in the last century (along with some truly horrible mass killings.)
The mass killings, Marxism (which people inhale without knowing, even in American Universities), behaviorism, and a passion for numbered, standardized everything are part of the ethos of the industrial age.
It is perhaps too much to ask people working on standard machines, to produce standard sizes, using standardized movements to conform to the machine’s mechanical exactness not to think in terms of “standard sizes” and “Models.”
You see this more strongly in the works of early science fiction writers, who expected psychology to to be standardized, numbered and filed and then all problems of mankind would be solved.
This stopped around the forties or fifties, when there was starting to be a suspicion that humans were not in fact standard issues, and that they had a disturbing tendency to be … human on an individual scale. I.e. “Nobody is normal” started penetrating the collective consciousness, but people STILL try to be normal. A part of the craze for transgenderism (other than that the progressives decided this was the next hill to die on) is this idea that there are standard models of people. Note I don’t say every transgender person is the result of that. There are cases of such profound mismatch between mind and body that even flawed and ultimately mutilating surgery (which is all we can do right now) is preferable to going on with the mismatch. These cases are, needless to say, very rare. But I swear at least half of the generation after my kids identifies as transgender, or gender queer, or gender fluid, or some other form of gender nonsense that has absolutely nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with the fact the poor dears have imbibed this flawed version of humanity as easily filable and definable. If you think that a girl who prefers trains and toy cars, a boy who prefers dolls […] a boy who is better at verbal than math, a girl who is the reverse, all of these are TOLD they are abnormal, if not in words, in the reaction of other people, until they feel they must have a problem.
In fact, none of us are standard issue. The very fact that, say, the medieval world, a communitarian world under stress (compared to us) of disease and famine, which needed to eliminate odds to operate, spent SO MUCH time decreeing what men and women COULD do meant that men and women kept blurring those lines, which for that time and place were FAR more clear than they are now. (I am an odd. In the world I grew up in, which retains a lot of medieval characteristics, I not only was pulled away from groups of boys I was playing with and told that girls play with girls and boys with boys (sounds like a motto for a gay bar) but I was also severely suppressed when I was about 8 and developed a fascination with whistling. I was told that women who whistle and men who spin (thread) are both going to hell. This must be a medieval thing, as I have clue zero why whistling should be masculine. In my family’s defense, this might have been an attempt at just getting the horrible noise to stop.
Sarah Hoyt, “Gears and Patterns”, According to Hoyt, 2016-12-16.
October 17, 2018
Quantum Computing – Decoherence – Extra History – #5
Extra Credits
Published on 14 Oct 2018Credit to Alisa Bishop for her art on this series: http://www.alisabishop.com/
Quantum computing isn’t a replacement for classical computing … yet. Quantum decoherence happens when anything gets in the way of a qubit’s job, so sterile low-temperature environments are an absolute necessity.
A tremendous thank-you to Alexander Tamas, the “mystery patron” who made this series possible. We finally found room in our busy production schedule to create and air this series alongside our regularly scheduled, patron-approved Extra History videos. A huge thank you to the multiple guest artists we got to work with, to Matt Krol for his skillful wrangling of the production schedule and keeping everyone happy, and to our Patreon supporters for your patience and support.
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How Toronto got its name
Colby Cosh on the origins of the name of Canada’s largest city (which, surprisingly, isn’t the Mississauga name for “big stink on the water”):
Detail from a 1688 map of western New France by Vincenzo Coronelli that locates “Lac Taronto” at Lake Simcoe.
City of Toronto Culture Division/Library and Archives Canada via the National Post
By the time of Franquelin, “Tkaronto” had already become “Taronto,” a generic name for the highway between Lake Simcoe and Lake Ontario. The Humber River was called the Toronto River by the French before Gen. John Graves Simcoe and the British got hold of everything. The word, in turn, became attached to a trading settlement at the southern end of the trail — a pretty crummy place, by all accounts, but one destined for bigger things as part of a global seafaring empire.
The miracle is that it held on to the name. Simcoe insisted that “Toronto,” on being anointed as the site of the new capital of Upper Canada in 1793, be dubbed “York” in honour of Prince Frederick (1763-1827), Duke of York and second son of George III. This Duke of York is the “Grand Old Duke of York” from the satirical verse about military futility. He was also commander-in-chief of the British armies that helped to chase Napoleon out of Europe twice, and is thought to deserve genuine credit for this, so be careful who you write insulting rhymes about.
Simcoe dubbed Toronto “York” just because he was sucking up to a very identifiable future boss, and for no other reason. The people of Toronto seem to have understood this and resented it. In the decades to come, it was occasionally observed that there were something like a dozen other places in Upper Canada called “York.” Moreover, Simcoe’s “Little York,” as it was often called, seems to have presented an increasingly embarrassing parallel with the Americans’ bustling New York.
In 1834, when the Legislative Council of Upper Canada decided that the capital needed to be formally incorporated as a city, the citizenry remembered that they belonged to “Toronto” and appealed to the council to have the more musical old name restored. Over four decades their annoyance had not receded. Diehards who wanted York to remain York for imperial-grandeur reasons were outvoted, and Toronto’s formal Act of Incorporation observes that “it is desirable, for avoiding inconvenience and confusion, to designate the Capital of the Province by a name which will better distinguish it.” The appellation “Toronto,” of course, had actually been nicked from a spot some way off, but the white settlers had mislaid that information, and didn’t check with anyone who would know better.
Bren vs Spandau part two
Lindybeige
Published on 31 May 2016The WW2 German fanboys didn’t like my first video on this topic, some were quite hostile. Here I explain myself even more fully.
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Many people didn’t read the description on my last video, and so missed my dealing with most of the objections. People don’t read descriptions, so here I come back at my critics in video form. So terrified were some people to think that someone out there might be suggesting that German WW2 equipment wasn’t superb in every way, or that British equipment might have been as good as adequate, that they were very quick to misinterpret me, and to jump to wild and erroneous conclusions. Most people were not like this, and I was blessed as ever by many pleasant comments, but when a YouTuber concludes that a piece of WW2 German or medieval Japanese kit was sub-perfect, then he will face the wrath and wails of the fan-boys.
Musical stings kindly contributed by David Bevan.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
Follow me…
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lindybeige I may have some drivel to contribute to the Twittersphere, plus you get notice of uploads.
website: www.LloydianAspects.co.uk
October 16, 2018
Crown Prince Rupprecht & Erich Ludendorff – Westerner vs. Easterner I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
The Great War
Published on 15 Oct 2018A Prussian Quartermaster General and a Bavarian Crown Prince. The tactician in the east and the strategist in the west. Two deeply different characters and approaches to warfare. Erich Ludendorff and Rupprecht of Bavaria.
Modernism and the “so-called international style … is the blight of Germany (and of almost everywhere else where it has been tried)”
Theodore Dalrymple on the awful concrete-and-glass monoliths of modern architecture, especially those designs by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Gropius:
The modernism and so-called international style that is the blight of Germany (and of almost everywhere else where it has been tried, which is almost everywhere in the world), and which the author of the article appears to think is apolitical, was hardly without its intellectual, ideological, and political foundations.
And what hideous intellectual, ideological, and political foundations they were! The great figures of modernism — great, that is, in the scope and degree of their baleful influence, not great in artistic or aesthetic merit — were from the first totalitarian in spirit. They were toadies to the rich and bullies to the poor; they were communists and fascists (not in the merely metaphorical sense, either), and by a mixture of ardent self-promotion, bureaucratic scheming, and intellectual terrorism managed to gain virtual control of the world’s schools of architecture. Just try saying in a French architectural school what is perfectly obvious, that Le Corbusier was not a genius except in self-advertisement, that his fascist ideas were repugnant, that he regarded humans in his cities much as we all regard bedbugs in beds, that during the Occupation he suggested deporting millions of people from Paris because he thought they had no business to be there, that his designs were incompetent, and that his constructions were instinct with and the very embodiment of his odious ideas, and see how far you get up the academic ladder! (How, incidentally, were the world’s most beautiful cities and buildings erected without the aid of architectural schools?) Anyone interested in the ideological foundations, as well as effects, of architectural modernism should read James Stevens Curl’s recently published Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism (Oxford), a magisterial and to me unanswerable account of one of the greatest aesthetic disasters to have befallen Europe in all its history. A single modernist building in a townscape is like a dead mouse in a bowl of soup, that is to say you cannot very well ignore it however splendid its surroundings may otherwise be.
Ah, you might protest, we have moved on from Mies van der Rohe et al., and so we have. (By the way, Professor Curl is very amusing on the opportunistic evolution of Mies van der Rohe’s name, as well as his equally opportunistic passage from being pro-Nazi to purely careerist refugee from Nazism.) Nonetheless two things need to be said about this supposed moving on from modernism to postmodernism and other isms: first that the damage, reparable only by demolition on a vast and inconceivable scale, has been done, and second that change is not by itself necessarily for the better. The capacity of eminent architects to spend vast sums of money to build aesthetic monstrosities fit to make Vitruvius weep is illustrated by the Whitney Museum in New York and the Philharmonie in Paris, the latter in particular of truly astonishing hideousness, that would have been almost comical had it not absorbed and wasted so much money, in the process becoming for many generations of the future as pleasing an aesthetic experience as a foreign body in the eye.
Philharmonie at the Parc de la Villette, Paris.
Photo by Zairon via Wikimedia Commons.
The mystery is how and why the patrons, those who choose the designs, stand for it. The key, I suppose, is to be found in Hans Christian Andersen — the Emperor’s New Clothes. The patrons are afraid to be thought by the architects not to understand: an accusation that Le Corbusier leveled decades ago at all those who did not approve of his plans to destroy old cities and cover the world with an ocean of raw concrete and a forest of almost identical towers. In other words, it is intellectual and moral cowardice that makes the world go round.
Julie d’Aubigny – Duelist, Singer, Radical – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 13 Oct 2018Julie d’Aubigny lived during an unusual time in 17th-century France when political and cultural norms were shifting. She was allowed to exist openly as a bisexual woman pursuing her swordsmanship and singing talents in the court of King Louis XIV.
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Bren vs Spandau – which was better?
Lindybeige
Published on 15 May 2016The Bren gun and the Spandau were rather different, and each the prime infantry weapon of its army. Was one better?
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After reading the comments, I shall respond with the following, because the same few points were coming up again and again:
1. The two weapons were both section MGs. This makes them comparable. The standard infantry section of a British Commonwealth infantry unit had one Bren per section, and the standard German equivalent had one Spandau. Yes, they were in other ways different weapons. That is largely my point. If they were almost identical in performance and use, then there would be no video to make. The comparison is only interesting because they were different.
2. Yes, I am well aware that there are descendants of the Spandau still around today, notably the MG 74 and MG 3. I never said otherwise. I was talking about the Bren and the Spandau in the context of WW2, when they went up against each other.
3. I say things in praise of both weapons in this video, and point out short-comings of both, and conclude that they were both fit for purpose. I reject, therefore, accusations of bias one way or the other. The usual thing one hears/reads is that the Bren was rubbish and the Spandau excellent, and the reality was more complicated than that.
4. I concede that when I mention some of the good things about one gun, it may imply to some that these things were lacking in the other. For example, I mention that it was easy to change the barrel on a Bren, which some people have mistakenly interpreted as my saying that it was awkward to change the barrel on an MG 42, which it wasn’t.
5. Yes, very obviously there were more factors than Bren guns that explain the advance of the Allies in in 1944/5 in the west. However, the point I make is that the front advanced towards Berlin every day, and this can only happen if infantry are moving forward, and taking and holding that ground. Artillery and air support cannot do this. It is also a way of countering the too-often-repeated notion that the Germans were better troops with better equipment. Yes, the best German troops were excellent, but let us not forget that they lost. If they were consistently better troops with better equipment, then they would not so consistently have lost.
6. Yes, there were differences between the MG34 and the MG42 more than simplicity of manufacture. The MG42 had a higher rate of fire, for example. I lumped them together at the start of the video for convenience. They served the same battlefield role, and were used with the same doctrine. After-action reports written at the time, and memoirs written afterwards almost never differentiate between them. Everything I say about the relative merits of Bren and Spandau are true for both MG34 and MG42, which both fired substantially faster than a Bren, and were both belt-fed.
7. The name ‘Spandau’ originally referred to the MG 08 used in World War One. It was made at the factory in Spandau, a borough of Berlin. The nick-name then got transferred to the machine guns used by the Germans in WW2. It was a misnomer in that the MG 34 and MG 42 were not made in Spandau, as I say in the video, but it is still a good word to refer to the two weapons since it is quick, clear, and was the term used at the time.
8. Yes, the MG 34 was accurate enough for purpose. Had it not been, I would have been sure to mention that. With a new and cool barrel, fired single shot, the MG34, with its double-crescent trigger, lacking in the MG42, could indeed be decently accurate. However, the barrel quickly got hot and worn, and more importantly, that was not the doctrine of use. The gun was designed to put plenty of rounds down against the enemy. Also — psychology. Give a man a gun that can spray bullets really effectively, suppressing his foes and thus keeping him safe, while making a really impressive noise, and he will use it this way, but accuracy will suffer. Give a man a slow-firing MG with a magazine of 28 rounds, and he will take careful aim and fire far fewer bullets, but with greater accuracy.
Musical stings kindly contributed by David Bevan.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
Follow me…
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lindybeige I may have some drivel to contribute to the Twittersphere, plus you get notice of uploads.
website: www.LloydianAspects.co.uk
QotD: I’m All Right Jack
I’m All Right Jack is a film delicately poised between two very different cultural moments. The opening scene looks back to the war, the heyday of collective endeavour and national solidarity, but the song — both in content and style — seems to look forward to a new era of aggressive hedonism and unashamed self-interest.
At the time, though, what attracted most attention was Peter Sellers’s hilarious performance as the obstreperous trade unionist Fred Kite (“We do not and cannot accept the principle that incompetence justifies dismissal”), which delighted many cinemagoers and won him a BAFTA. Not surprisingly, it went down very badly with union leaders and left-wing reviewers, but the Boultings were unrepentant. In an article for the Daily Express, they explained their reasoning:
As individuals we believe in Britain because Britain has always stood for the individual.
Nowadays there seem to be two sacred cows — Big Business and Organized Labour. Both are deep in a conspiracy against the individual — to force us to accept certain things for what in fact they are not. Both are busy feathering their nests most of the time. And to hell with the rest of us…
AFter all, who is King in the Welfare State? That humourless, faceless monster — the official, the bureaucrat, the combine executive.
Certainly a great deal has changed since we used to be Angry Men before the war … But at the end of this huge revolution we are not so sure that the losses have not been as great as the gains.
For example, the tendency to think of people not as human beings but as part of a group, a bloc, a class.
The Boultings knew, of course, that this would annoy some poeple. But the great strength of the “average Briton”, they insisted, lay in “laughing at his leaders and institutions. We believe our films reflect the popular attitude and mood. Their success seems to prove our point.”
Since I’m All Right Jack is in black and white, it is easy to forget how bracingly modern it must have seemed, not just to the Queen and Harold Macmillan, but to the large audiences who flocked to see it in the autumn of 1959. It was released only ten years after Passport to Pimlico, but the difference in mood and tone can hardly be exaggerated. It is not just a question of colletivism versus individualism, but the social context that those two ideas reflected. The Ealing film was made against a background of austerity; the Boultings’ film is drenched in consumerism. In the early scenes of Passport to Pimlico, we find ourselves in a world of rationing and restrictions, bomb damage and dereliction. What kicks off the action, in fact, is the accidental detonation of an unexploded German bomb. But I’m All Right Jack is set in the late 1950s, a world awash with appliances and advertising, in which wartime austerity is merely a fading memory. The narrator tells us that at long last “industry, spurred by the march of science in all directions, was working at high pressure to supply those viatl needs for which the people had hungered for so long”. But when Ian Carmichael’s blundering hero gets a job in industrial management, he soon finds out what these “vital needs” are: Num-Yum chocolate bars and Detto washing powder, each with its own irritatingly catchy jingle.
Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of our National Imagination, 2015.
