Forgotten Weapons
Published on 7 Aug 2018http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
During World War Two, the Grand Harbor in Malta was the most-bombed place in the world, under aerial bombardment for two full years because of its position as a central Mediterranean base for British air and sea forces. While these attacks were focused on the harbor facilities, most of the island’s population lived right in the same area, and civilian casualties during the war were substantial. In an effort to safeguard the population, a vast number of underground bomb shelter tunnels were dug.
The island of Malta is mostly relatively soft limestone, and the Maltese are quite experienced in working it, after millenia of quarrying limestone to build structures and digging it out to make cisterns and wells. This allowed an otherwise enormous project to be successful – using mostly hand tools, enough shelters were dug to safely house the entire at-risk population. Many of these shelters and shelter complexes are open to the public today, including the system under the Malta At War Museum, which we are visiting today…
I am grateful for the Malta Tourism Authority’s assistance in helping to make this visit and video possible!
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
August 8, 2018
Malta’s Hand-Hewn Bomb Shelter Tunnels
August 7, 2018
The Tide Is Turning I THE GREAT WAR Summary Part 14
The Great War
Published on 6 Aug 2018After 4 years of global war, there are signs that the war of attrition is over and the situation is shifting in favor of the Allies.
Flying Tanks! Tetrarchs and Locusts
Lindybeige
Published on 31 May 2018Bovington Tank Museum, and The Chieftain again – ten minutes on the topic of air-portable tanks of World War Two.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LindybeigeIt is possible that (some?) Tetrarchs had holes in the sides of the turret for a drawstring that could pull the trigger of the smoke projector from inside the turret. However, you really wouldn’t want the rifle cocked and ready to fire unless you were just about to use it. White phosphorous is dangerous stuff and you would make no friends by setting it off by snagging your belt on the string as you climbed in the tank.
Hannibal graphic novel (in production): http://www.InSearchofHannibal.com
Many thanks to The Chieftain, my co-presenter, and to The Tank Museum at Bovington.
Two ideas have been posted in the comments for the name ‘Tetrarch’. One is that it has four equally-sized wheels on each side (which guide the tank, a bit like four rulers guide an empire). The other is that there was a very famous racehorse called ‘The Tetrarch’ that died in 1935. The tank was not designed originally for air-drops, but was presumably meant to be fast, so that makes sense.
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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QotD: Sailing past Byzantium
To those who know nothing about the mediaeval, “byzantine” East of Christendom (and what do I know about anything?) a book by the respectable Oxford scholar, Averil Cameron, is worth mentioning. It is a short survey of developments in her academic field, entitled, Byzantine Matters (2014). It poses five basic questions on which our common assumptions are mostly wrong, and provides succinct directions for thinking again.
Mediaeval Greece, the Byzantine dynasties, and Orthodox Christianity: these are far from interchangeable concepts. Moreover, “Byzantine art” — the focus of enthusiasm in the anglosphere through the last century or so — is misunderstood. The term “Byzantine” itself — conceived from late antiquity as a deprecation — persists in the academy as an intelligence neutralizer. The vanity of “the West” gets in the way of appreciating a parallel Christian realm, which flourished for more than a thousand years, and never succumbed to the Arabs. (It finally succumbed to the Turks.) We disdain what amounts to an alternative universe of Christian witness and high culture, of great variety and depth, even more obtusely than we disdain our own Middle Ages.
We are narrowed and prejudiced by the attitudinizing of Edward Gibbon, and the inheritance (or disinheritance) of our Western “Enlightenment,” to view as backward a civilization in most ways superior to our “modern” own, from pride in the tinsel of technology. From AD 330 (the founding of Constantine’s capital) to 1453 (when it fell into Ottoman hands), we see only a continuous story of “decline.” But there were many declines over this vast period, and in the intervals between them, many recoveries.
David Warren, “Sailing past Byzantium”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-11-07.
August 6, 2018
1918 Flu Pandemic – Leviathan – Extra History – #5
Extra Credits
Published on 4 Aug 2018This is a global pandemic. The flu jumps ship, literally, onto the docks of American Samoa, of South Africa, of Alaska, of India. The 1918 flu infects every human continent.
The Battle of Amiens
At Samizdata, Patrick Crozier explains why the Battle of Amiens should be far better known than it is:
On 8 August 1918 in Northern France, a mainly British force attacked on a 15 mile front and advanced to a depth of 7 miles.
In so doing it inflicted 70,000 casualties on the Germans capturing 500 guns while suffering 44,000 casualties of its own. The Battle of Amiens as it became known, was the first clearly-successful, large-scale, Allied offensive operation on the Western Front. Ludendorff, the German commander, famously called it the “Black day of the German army”. But then again he was always a bit of a flibbertygibbet.
Although no one knew it at the time the Battle of Amiens heralded the beginning of the Hundred Days Offensive in which Allied success followed Allied success. By November the Germans realised that the game was up and sued for peace.
Amiens did not take place in a vacuum. At the Second Battle of the Marne which took place a few weeks earlier the Germans had attacked and the French and Americans had successfully counter-attacked. This brought to an end German hopes of a quick victory.
[…]
So why have so few heard of Amiens? Why doesn’t it occupy a similar position to Agincourt, Waterloo and El Alamein? Quite simply because it doesn’t fit the narrative. The lazy story we’ve all heard a million times tells us that the Western Front was all about incompetent generals and stalemate. Amiens and the Hundred Days Offensive show this to be nonsense.
A more accurate narrative might be that winning on the Western Front was never going to be easy but they got there in the end.
The battle also saw the Australian Corps and the Canadian Corps reprising their roles as “shock troops” of the British army (including an elaborate scheme to hide the presence of the Canadians from the German commanders):
Purists will be offended by Terraine’s failure to explain the role of the French army at Amiens (which extended the attack to the south), but more intriguing is the sidelining of Sir Arthur Currie’s Canadian Corps. Indeed, Terraine’s focus on generals Rawlinson and Monash (although not incorrect in itself) seems to miss how important the Canadians were to the battle; it would be true to say that they made the Battle of Amiens. Their four divisions in line, deployed in the centre along the Amiens-Roye Road, formed the spearhead of the assault. At the end of the day they had driven eight miles into the position of the German Second Army.
Notwithstanding these quibbles, Terraine’s article, with its focus on training and planning and the coordination of firepower and manoeuvre, prefigures much of the debates that would take place in the 1990s and beyond about the nature of change and development in the British Expeditionary Force (the ‘learning curve’). While the military effort of the ‘white dominions’ – Australia, New Zealand and Canada – has been widely praised (with Canadians being justifiably proud of their tag as the ‘shock army of the British Empire’), the humble British Tommy has often been left behind. Since Terraine wrote his article, however, much work has been done to rectify this imbalance.
OSS “Stinger” Covert Cigarette Guns
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 16 Jul 2018http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
During World War Two, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) was the primary US clandestine operations organization. It was responsible for making all sorts of unique weapons, including these “Stinger” cigarette guns. They were single shot disposable .22 Short pistols.
The first pattern was contracted and manufactured entirely by the OSS, and 25,000 of them were manufactured early in the war. They proved to have a myriad of minor to moderate problems, though, including failures to fire and burst barrels. A second version was produced by the Ordnance Department in 1944, with a strengthened and improved design, and 25,500 of those were made.
I have not found any documentation of these being actually used, but then again not much documentation exists on the use of any OSS weapons. These sorts of things were often provided to infiltration agents who might never be heard from again, or dropped to partisan or resistance groups who weren’t exactly writing field reports on their gear.
Many thanks to the collector who provided me access to these!
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
August 5, 2018
Rockets – Blinded Soldiers I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 4 Aug 2018Chair of Wisdom Time! Indy talks about rocket usage in WW1 and how blinded soldiers were rehabilitated.
August 4, 2018
Forgotten History: Vercors – the Climactic Battle of the French Resistance
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 31 Jul 2018http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
The imposing heights of the Vercors Massif form a very impressive natural defensive position in the southeastern corner of France. It was here that the French Resistance had its largest set piece battle against German occupation forces, in the summer of 1944.
Plan Montagnards originally called for several thousand Allied paratroops to be dropped into Vercors when the landings in Normandy and Provence took place. The Provence landings were pushed back many weeks, however, and the Resistance forces streaming onto the plateau were left almost entirely on their own. One large airdrop of supplies and a single American OSS combat team were all the reinforcement they received.
French Maquisards repelled German probing attacks for about 6 weeks until in late July the final German offensive against the plateau came. It would see nearly 20,000 troops, units of tanks, glider-borne paratroops, and reserve mountain troops in a well coordinated assault that soundly defeated the lightly-armed resistance fighters.
Today we are on the plateau itself, and we will follow the battle across several specific sites, including the glider landings at Vassieux, the last stand of Section Chavant, the destroyed village of Valchevrière, and the hospital at Le Grotte de la Luire.
Want to see some original footage of these fighters taken in the weeks before the battle? It actually exists, and you can see it here: https://youtu.be/zoq7QREIgB8
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
August 3, 2018
Four Years of War I THE GREAT WAR Week 210
The Great War
Published on 2 Aug 2018As the war turns 4 years old, there is still no end in sight. From the Western Front to the Caucasus and the Middle East; in every theater the war is still raging on.
The obscure, almost-forgotten campaign that ended the First World War
It’s often called the “Hundred Days”, but even for people who stayed awake in their high school history classes, that’s often taken to refer to the last hurrah of Napoleon between his escape from Elba and his ultimate defeat at Waterloo. The WW1’s Hundred Days began with the Allied victory at the battle of Amiens and ended with the Armistice on 11 November, 1918. On Twitter, Engaging Strategy shared a series of tweets about this campaign and how little is generally remembered about it:
QotD: The lost kingdom of Pontus
Pontus is that country, within modern Turkey, that follows the south-east Black Sea shore, and inland is enclosed as by an amphitheatre of mountains. It is the more interesting, archaeologically, for having been often by-passed, in the movements of conquering nomads and armies, from Hittites and Hurrians to Arabs and Turks. The Greeks took it, because they came by sea. They kept it, till late in the day; so that even after Constantinople fell to our short-sighted Franks (in 1204), the Empire of Trebizond immediately formed, and Byzantium persisted in Pontus, as in Crimea and elsewhere, until it could be restored at its centre.
David Warren, “A wonderworker”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-11-17.
August 2, 2018
1918 Flu Pandemic – Fighting the Ghost – Extra History – #4
Extra Credits
Published on 28 Jul 2018Philadelphia gets hit the hardest. New York fares somewhat better, but everyone is trying to keep hush-hush about a pandemic that still found its way into a children’s rhyme: influenza.
August 1, 2018
Isaac Asimov – Foundation & Empire – Extra Sci Fi – #3
Extra Credits
Published on 31 Jul 2018Asimov’s Foundation stories were absolutely foundational for science fiction — they introduced the concept of a space empire, bringing along analogies from historical civilizations to the social issues of advanced technology and humanity’s future.
How did early Sailors navigate the Oceans? | The Curious Engineer
TheCuriousEngineer
Published on 5 Oct 2014Do you know how the early sailors navigate the oceans? The technology today makes it real easy to navigate the oceans. But it’s very interesting to know how the early sailors managed to navigate without it. There’s a lot of history on it. I tried my best to compile some important and interesting parts of it into this video. Hope you like it 🙂
