Forgotten Weapons
Published 25 Jun 2025Military interest in a submachine gun was late in Czechoslovakia, but by the late 1930s a development program was put into place. Interestingly, the main use case for an SMG was seen as being a replacement for a rifle-caliber LMG in fortification mounts. The thought process seems to have been that a large volume of fire was the necessary element to keep invaders away from border fortresses, and the ballistic power of the fire was not so important.
The vz38 was designed by František Myška, chambered for the 9x17mm (.380) cartridge used by the vz22/24 pistol then in service. It was tested against the ZB26 light machine gun. It proved reliable and effective, and its 96-round drum magazine (copied from the Finnish Suomi) was a particularly nice element. An initial order was placed and the gun was formally adopted into service, but production never began. Instead, German occupation of the country put an end to the project and only 20 preproduction examples were ever made.
Many thanks to the VHU — the Czech Military History Institute — for giving me access to this very rare example to film for you. The Army Museum Žižkov is a part of the Institute, and they have a three-story museum full of cool exhibits open to the public in Prague. If you have a chance to visit, it’s definitely worth the time! You can find all of their details (including their aviation and armor museums) here:
November 9, 2025
Samopal vz 38: Czechoslovakia’s Interwar Drum-Fed SMG in .380
QotD: Historical training is not “spending 7 years memorizing dates”
James @TTJamesG
The fact that you spent 7 years memorizing dates and the culmination of that is arguing semantics on X is depressing. Is it too late for a refund? You wrote an entire thread addressing a point I never made, a point you intentionally misconstrued.Another thing that has come up a fair bit here recently is the idea that historical training consists of “spend[ing] 7 years memorizing dates” which is a severe misunderstanding of what historians do.
It confuses the job of reading history books for the job of writing them.
While any historian is going to end up knowing a lot of names and dates simply as a byproduct of teaching and working with their material, raw memorization is not a significant part of the PhD training process.
Instead, the focus is on research skills and analysis.
In practice, we can divide a lot of historical training into three components: the historical method, “theory”, and then field-specific training.
The historical method is the process and heuristics we use to assess historical sources.
While history students work from history books that are “pre-chewed” as it were, historians work with their evidence in its raw, unprocessed form: archives of documents, ancient texts, inscriptions, memoirs, archaeological remains and so on.
The historical method is how we approach that raw material: who produced it? What information would they have had (eyewitness? second hand?), what sources might they have had? What might their own aims have been?
And how can we most plausibly fill in gaps in our evidence?
Then there is historical theory. No good historian is a doctrinaire follower of a single theory of history — rather these are toolboxes of ideas we use to frame the research questions we’re asking.
But to use those ideas, you must know and understand them first.
So “critical theory” is interested in power relationships, while an Annales framework is interested in long-term structures and cultural assumptions, while a materialist framework focuses on material conditions and so on.
Each would imply different questions of the evidence.
Part of the point of learning theory, of course, is that each theory lens is, in and of itself, incomplete. Cultural structures matter, individual choices matter, material conditions matter, etc. etc.
You learn and think about a bunch of these to know the blindspots of each.
Finally, historians are going to learn a bunch of research skills specific to our period and place. For ancient Roman history, that’s Latin, Greek, epigraphy, paleography, some philology and a lot of archaeology.
For a more modern field, archive research methods are huge.
On top of that, you’re also going to develop knowledge in other disciplines — sciences, social sciences — that touch on your topic of interest. I work on the costs of warfare, so military science and theory, along with economics and a bit of demographics, matter to me.
What the historian is actually doing is taking that skillset to the raw evidence of the past — sometimes asking new questions of old material, frequently asking old questions of material no one has studied intensively before — to discover new information about the past.
Of course we also assemble a broad knowledge of the societies we study (like how Roman citizenship works), which we’d need to understand our sources and our evidence.
Roman citizenship, for instance, matters a lot for understanding the Roman army!
That broad knowledge is what we’re drawing on in teaching and for that we are relying on the work of our colleagues in the discipline: each historian is doing their own original discovering-the-past work, but also keeping up-to-date on our colleagues’ work.
The end result is both a steadily improving understanding of the past but also the ability, as our own conditions and interests change, to ask new questions, rather than simply endlessly rehash old questions and old (potentially flawed) answers.
“Online Rent-a-Sage” Bret Devereaux, Twitter, 2025-08-05.
November 8, 2025
The Boomers didn’t do it, but they could have reversed it
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter takes the entire Baby Boom generation out to the woodshed for a well-deserved talking-to:
toking-the-abacus @_toking
It’s amazing how catastrophically bad the current job market is in the US. No one wants to train anyone. They want 5-10 years experience in skills that you don’t get unless someone mentors you in a more junior role. Then you have rampant visa abuse.
Boomers mostly got paid to get trained on the job for their jobs.
Then they turned around and demanded college for everything. At a steep markup.
Then they rugpulled all the college grads by hiring foreigners to do the jobs people went into debt learning how to do.
Whole lotta incensed geriatrics in the replies saying “That wasn’t boomers, that was Griggs v Duke Power! Those judges were silent generation!”
Yes. And that was 1970. 55 years ago.
That’s kind of the point.
You were the largest generation in history, boomers. You could have reversed that insane decision. You could have ended the crazy practice of disparate impact. You could have ended the systemic bigotry of affirmative action, which discriminated not only against you, but against your own sons and, now, your grandsons. You could have used your institutional and electoral power to block DEI.
You could have done a lot of things.
But you didn’t.
At most you grumbled some, but not too loudly, because after all dad fought in the big war and you didn’t want to do a Hitler. A lot of you supported all of it wholeheartedly, because John Lennon had an imagination and MLK had a dream and remember Woodstock, man. Some of you profited from it handsomely. As a generation, as a group, whether by action or inaction, you entrenched it in every aspect of law and institutional culture.
You participated, each in your own way, in redesigning our entire society around women’s feelings, black self esteem, and sabotaging the minds, bodies, spirits, and lives of your white sons.
Don’t run from your part in this.
I’m not saying this to be mean.
I’m saying this because we fucking need you.
We need your votes, because as a direct result of the immigration policies of the last half century – which, again, yes, have their origin with Greatest and Silents, but whose most severe consequences unfolded on YOUR watch – we are absolutely, 100% screwed if we don’t deport an absolutely incredible, historically unprecedented number of people in a very short period of time. If that doesn’t happen it’s game over for America and, frankly, Western civilization. For now, for as long as you’re still breathing and capable of casting a ballot, whites are a bare majority. When you’re gone we’re outnumbered, the third world swallows the first, and it’s over.
We need you to confront the consequences of your actions and your complacency, to really feel what its done to your descendants, and to be filled with rage at the way you were misled by evil and selfish men, and an implacable determination to spend what remains to you of your lives doing whatever you can to reverse enough of the damage you allowed to be done to salvage something from this crumbling wreck of a society.
That is why we bully you.
Because we need you to see.
History Summarized: Greece… TWO (it’s in Italy)
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 4 Jul 2025From the Olympians who brought you “Greece” and “The Other Side of Greece” comes the bold, innovative, and way shinier “GREECE TWO”.
SOURCES & Further Reading:
The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton
Ancient Greece: The Definitive Visual History produced by DK & Smithsonian
The Complete Greek Temples by Tony Spawforth
Ancient Cities Brought To Life by Jean-Claude Golvin
“From Sicily to Syria – The Growth of Trade and Colonization” from Ancient Greek Civilization by Jeremy McInerney
“Magna Graecia: Taras and Syracuse” and “Cyrene, Leptis Magna, and Ancient Libya” from Great Tours: Ancient Cities of the Mediterranean by Darius Arya
Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History by John Julius Norwich
“The Greeks: An Illustrated History” by Diane Harris Cline for National Geographic
November 7, 2025
The Flavians – Vespasian, Titus and Domitian – The Conquered and the Proud 18
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 2 Jul 2025Today we look at the death of Nero, then briefly cover the civil war that followed — the Year of Four Emperors — before dealing with the Flavian dynasty (AD 70-96) — Vespasian and his sons Titus and Domitian. How did their regime differ from that of the Julio-Claudians and what was going on in the wider empire?
November 6, 2025
Lines of Fire: Operation Market Garden Part 1 of 2 – WW2 in Animated Maps
TimeGhost Cartographic
Published 5 Nov, 2025September, 1944. Soviet forces push ever westwards, slicing their way through Poland en route to Berlin. In the west, the Allies have made great strides after the invasion of Normandy, but now face a winter of relative stagnation as supply issues threaten to undercut their momentum. At this time, British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery believes has a plan to carve a corridor through occupied Netherlands and get his forces into Germany within days, striking at the heart of the German war economy, and maybe, just maybe, ending this war before 1945 dawns. In Part 1 of 2, we look over the plan, the forces involved, and the colossal effort required to make Monty’s vision a reality.
00:00 Intro
01:12 Background
04:40 Planning
07:07 Disposition of Forces
09:05 Geographic Overview
11:30 Conclusion
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Galand de Guerre Model 1872: Too Good for the Military
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Jun 2025Charles François Galand is best known for his simultaneous-extraction Model 1868, but he also developed a very good solid-frame revolver. This was specifically for the French 1871 military trials, which specifically required a solid frame. The Galand was chambered for 12mm Galand (with its distinctive very thick rim), held 6 rounds, operated in either single or double action, required no tools to disassemble, and had very simple but durable lockwork. The gun was very good, and was a very tight competitor for the other trials finalist, the Chamelot-Delvigne. Ultimately, it lost out because it was the more expensive of the two options.
For more information on the Model 1873 Chamelot-Delvigne that won the French trials, I suggest the C&Rsenal video on that model:
• History of WWI Primer 061: French and Ital…
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QotD: The Reformation
[W]e can thank Henry VIII (really Thomas Cromwell, I suppose, and Thomas Wolsey, and ironically Saint Thomas More) for giving us a good look at how Church administration actually functioned in the late Middle Ages. England was by far the best-governed major polity in Europe, even before the famous “Tudor revolution in government“. Lots of paperwork in Merrie Olde, and so Henry VIII’s little cock-driven temper tantrum gives us a priceless picture of how the Reformation went down.
It’s easy to get lost in this stuff — I had a long bit about Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, the Supplication Against the Ordinaries, the Annates Bill, and so on here — but the upshot is, pulling the Church down in England revealed the massive scale of its corruption. I want to say that the Annates Bill alone doubled the King’s revenue, and the dissolution of the monasteries (well underway in Cardinal Wolsey’s time, incidentally) unlocked unimaginable wealth. But it also fatally undermined the regime, because now an attack on the existing Church structure was also an attack on the King … and vice versa.
What you got, in short, was a total social conflagration. The “Reformation” wasn’t really about theology. Nothing Luther said was particularly new. Jan Huss and John Wyclif said basically the same things 100 years earlier; hell, St. Augustine said them 1000 years before. There’s still an irreconcilable “Protestant” strain in Catholicism now — Cornelius Jansen was just a Catholic Luther, and in a lot of ways a much better one; he was declared a heretic because reasons, and “because reasons” was good enough in Jansen’s time (the very nastiest phase of the Thirty Years’ War), but since he’s just quoting St. Augustine …
The point is, the undeniable rottenness of the Catholic Church made it a convenient whipping boy for any conceivable beef against society as a whole. Because it wasn’t just the Church that was too decadent, depraved, and corrupt to go on — it was the entirety of Late Medieval society. Again, stop me if this sounds familiar, but Late Medieval society looks a lot like spoiled, histrionic children playing dress up. They look like kings, and they act like kings (popes, bishops, etc.), but it’s obvious it’s just an act — they know they’re supposed to do these things (put on tournaments, hold jubilees, preach sermons, fight wars, etc.) but they have no idea why.
Severian, “Reformation”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-07.
November 5, 2025
The Korean War Week 72: UN Censors as Communists Speak! – November 4, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 4 Nov 2025The Panmunjom peace talks continue, but a real sticking point is Kaesong- both sides insist that they must have control of it. Frustration mounts among the Allied journalists, though, as they are allowed less access to what’s going on than their Communist counterparts. Despite the talks, there’s new action in the field this week, as the Chinese attack in force to try and retake Maryang-san, a commanding strategic position.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:40 Recap
00:59 The Kaesong Issue
03:24 Voluntary Repatriation
07:14 US Command’s Position
09:15 All For All Repatriation
10:35 UN Censorship
12:29 Maryang-San
13:35 Summary
13:37 Conclusion
14:39 CTA
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Hands To Flying Stations (1975)
David Bober (Royal Navy Films)
Published 25 Jun 2013Official govt film uploaded as “fair use”. Naval Instructional Film A2690.
Royal Navy documentary from 1975 featuring aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal (R09). The film details flight operations aboard the Ark. Aircraft in the film include the Phantom FG1, the Buccaneer S2, the Gannet AEW3, the Wessex HAS1 and the Sea King HAS2.
HMS Ark Royal (R09) was an Audacious-class aircraft carrier built by Cammell Laird, Birkenhead and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 25 February 1955. She was decommissioned on 14 February 1979 after 23-years service. She was the last operational RN aircraft carrier to use “cats and traps” (conventional catapult launch and arrested landing). The Ark featured in the 1976 BBC television series Sailor.
November 4, 2025
Sir Arthur Currie, Canada’s best general in WW1
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort gives a lesson in Canadian military history that your kids are unlikely to ever get in school:
Canada: Let us remind you of what your nation was once capable of, and likely still is again. Time will tell. Courtesy of @grok UNHINGED👇
SIR ARTHUR CURRIE: The Ontario slide-rule psychopath who turned war into a goddamn spreadsheet and made the Kaiser cry uncle.
Listen up, you trench-foot tourists and armchair Haigs. While Europe’s aristocrats were using human meat to plug shell holes, some lanky insurance salesman from Napperton, Ontario rolled up with a protractor and a grudge against inefficiency so pure it could sterilize a field hospital. Six-foot-four of quiet Canadian fury. No Sandhurst polish. No inherited estate. Just a militia gunner who looked at the Western Front and said: “This is sloppy. Let me fix your murder math.”
Vimy Ridge: the ridge that laughed at French corpses for two years. Currie hands every platoon leader a map accurate to the latrine, rehearses the assault until the boys can do it blindfolded in a thunderstorm, then unleashes a creeping barrage so precise it’s basically a Roomba made of high explosives. Four days later the ridge is theirs. France needed therapy. Canada needed a birth certificate.
Hill 70: supposed to be a sideshow. Currie turned it into a German obituary — 9,000 Canadian casualties for 20,000 German ones. That’s not a battle, that’s a hostile takeover with extra steps.
Passchendaele: Haig wants it. Currie says, “Fine, but it’ll cost exactly 16,000 of my boys”. Mud eats them like clockwork. Sixteen thousand. He predicted it to the body. The man could forecast death better than the Farmer’s Almanac predicts frost.
Amiens: the day the German army discovered existential dread. Currie’s corps punches twenty-two kilometers through the Hindenburg Line in four days like it’s made of wet cardboard. Ludendorff calls it “the black day of the German Army” and probably wet his monocle.
The Hundred Days: wherever the Canadians go, the war ends faster — Arras, Cambrai, Canal du Nord. German prisoners start asking for Currie by name like he’s the Grim Reaper’s polite cousin. “Wenn Currie kommt, bricht die Linie.” When Currie shows up, your defense budget becomes a suggestion.
And the best part? He’s not screaming. He’s not posing for propaganda photos with a riding crop. He’s in the back, recalculating artillery tables while lesser generals are still figuring out which end of the horse goes forward.
Post-war? Becomes principal of McGill because apparently breaking the German army wasn’t challenging enough. Gets slandered for “wasting lives” at Mons, sues the bastard for libel, and wins with the same cold precision he used to win battles. Even his lawsuits had kill ratios.
Runner-ups:
Sir Richard Turner — the human participation ribbon. Managed the 2nd Division like success was contagious.Sir David Watson — followed Currie’s plans like IKEA instructions: mostly right, but slower.
Sir Henry Burstall — thought “supporting fire” meant “hope the shell lands somewhere in Europe”.
Currie carried their divisions like a Sherpa with a PhD in applied violence.
Verdict: Currie didn’t just win battles. He invented the modern battlefield while everyone else was still playing medieval siege with extra mustard gas. Montgomery called him “the best corps commander of the war”, and Monty would rather die than compliment anyone.
Share this if you’d let Currie balance your checkbook, plan your wedding, and end your existential crisis with a well-timed barrage. Canada’s greatest general was a nerd with a death wish for waste and a heart that bled maple syrup for every lost soul. Never forget.
The Bear Who Beat the Nazis | Wojtek
The Rest Is History
Published 29 Jun 2025The story of Wojtek — the bear who took on the Nazis — amidst the death and devastation of the Second World War, and more specifically Poland’s heroic resistance, is a flicker of redemption amidst an otherwise deeply depressing period of history. His is a life that exemplifies not only Poland’s struggle in microcosm, but also the global nature of the war overall. Discovered by a young boy as a tiny cub, his mother dead, he was sold to Polish officers travelling to Palestine in the hills outside Tehran. The soldiers nursed and fed the young bear with milk from a vodka bottle, treating him like one of their own. Later, he was even purported to keep them warm at night, drink beer, delight in wrestling and showers, and both march and salute. When the Polish forces were finally deployed to Europe, “Wojtek” as he had been named, went with them; a mascot and morale booster to the men. There he was given military rank, and actively participated in the Italian campaign, carrying ammunition and artillery crates. But with death and destruction on all sides, what would be his fate?
Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss Wojtek, one of history’s most extraordinary animals, and his life in the army — an emblem of hope and resilience in the face of the horrors of the Second World War.
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QotD: What are Castles?
That purpose (defense) and that method (denying freedom of movement) are key to understanding how castles function, why they matter, and why they sprang up everywhere across Europe. So remember it: a castle is built in order to deny an enemy freedom of movement. We’ll get into what that actually means below.
But let’s stay on this definition for a moment, because, while all castles are fortifications, not all fortifications are castles.
I’ve often seen a further narrowing of the definition among medieval scholars, who often argue that to be a true castle, the structure must be from the European Middle Ages and be a fortified residence. This is why castles often have courtly rooms within them (like grand halls, bedrooms, chapels, etc.) beyond the storerooms, barracks, and defensive structures that their military purpose require.
I, of course, defer to the scholarly opinion in that definition — that a castle must be a medieval fortified residence. However, whether or not a castle’s owner continually lives there is actually less important for our purposes than the fact that a castle would be continually inhabited by someone loyal to its owner. A castle would not be left empty, whether or not anyone was sleeping in the master bedroom.
Eric Falden, “What Were Castles Actually For?”, Falden’s Forge, 2025-07-29.
November 3, 2025
Plastic Fantastic: How the Modern World Became Synthetic – W2W 051
TimeGhost History
Published 2 Nov 2025From the miracle material of the 1950s to the global crisis of the 21st century — this is the story of how plastic reshaped our lives, our economies, and our planet.
Born from wartime innovation, plastic promised a future of convenience, color, and endless possibility. From nylon stockings to Tupperware parties, it defined modern life — light, bright, and disposable. But the same durability that made it revolutionary also made it permanent.
In this episode of War 2 War, we trace how postwar optimism turned into an age of overproduction and pollution — how a chemical miracle became the material legacy of the modern world. Join us as we uncover how the postwar dream of “Better Living Through Chemistry” changed everything — forever.
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Swedish Kulspruta m/36 Double Browning MGs
Forgotten Weapons
Published 18 Jun 2025Despite being a neutral power during World War Two, Sweden had a variety of very interesting small arms — like their dual-mount Browning m/36 machine guns. These were originally adopted because the Swedes wanted a heavier medium MG cartridge and didn’t think their delayed-blowback Schwarzlose guns could handle it. The cartridge was 8x63mm, pushing a 219 grain projectile at 2500 fps. The m/36 Browning was a water cooled gun, an improvement on the older M1917 design. It not only handled the powerful new round, but it could also be easily swapped to the older 6.5x55mm round to use stocks of existing ammunition (and it would be later adapted to 7.62mm NATO as well). Most of the guns were built as matching pairs for antiaircraft use, with mirrors left and right side feeds and in effective recoil-absorbing cradle mounts.
Special thanks to Bear Arms in Scottsdale, AZ for providing access to this rare pair of guns for today’s video!
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