Published on 4 Jul 2016
Benito Mussolini was a well known Socialist before World War 1. But the lead up to Italy’s entry into the conflict caused a split between the Socialists and the pro-interventionist Fasci. During the war, Mussolini was sent to the Isonzo Front where he became even more popular. After being sent home, he continued his agitation with great financial support from France, Britain and Italian industrialists.
July 5, 2016
Some perspective on the British army in WW1
At Samizdata Patrick Crozier points out some things that are necessary to understand why it took so long (relatively speaking) for the “new army” (and the other freshly raised Dominion and Empire forces) to begin winning battles:
First of all, Britain was fighting a war in Western Europe against a large, well-equipped and tactically skillful enemy. That is a recipe for a bloodbath. Britain repeated the exercise twice in the Second World War (May 1940 and June 1944 onwards). They were bloodbaths too. We tend to forget that fact because overall the numbers killed in the Second World War were much lower than than the First and because they achieved a succession of clear victories.
Secondly, Britain began the war with a small army. To make a worthwhile contribution Britain was going to have to raise and train a large army. Soldiering, like any other job, is one where experience counts. Anyone who is familiar with the rapid expansion of an organisation will know that this is a recipe for confusion and chaos. In the case of the British army the inexperience existed at all levels. Corporals were doing the jobs of Sergeant Majors, Captains doing the jobs of Colonels and Colonels doing the jobs of Generals. Haig himself (according to Gary Sheffield) was doing jobs that would be carried out by three men in the Second World War. Talking of the Second World War, it is worth pointing out that it took three years for the British to achieve an offensive victory (Alamein) over the Germans which is much the same as the First (Vimy).
Thirdly, Britain began the war with a small arms industry. Expanding that involved all the problems mentioned above plus the difficulty in building and equipping the factories. It comes as no surprise that many of the shells fired at the Somme were duds and even if they were working they were often of the wrong type: too much shrapnel, not enough high explosive.
Canada’s army in both 1914 and 1939 was a tiny cadre of what the nation would eventually raise, train, equip, and send to foreign shores. The amazing thing is that they managed to become a valuable fighting force to the British army in particular and the allied cause in general from such a tiny, unmilitarized population. Britain’s highly competent regular army was effectively expended to gain enough time for the volunteer forces to train and organize, and even then the early going was far bloodier at least in part because the troops had still not been sufficiently trained and had to be lead in ways that exposed them to higher risks of casualties whenever they were on the attack.
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July 4, 2016
The History of Writing – Where the Story Begins – Extra History
Published on 4 Jun 2016
How did the ancient civilization of Sumer first develop the concept of the written word? It all began with simple warehouse tallies in the temples, but as the scribes sought more simple ways to record information, those tallies gradually evolved from pictograms into cuneiform text which could be used to convey complex, abstract, or even lyrical ideas.
____________Sumer was the land of the first real cities, and those cities required complex administration. The temples which kept people together were not only religious places, but also warehouses which stored the community’s collective wealth until it was needed to get through lean years. As the donations came in, scribes would count the items and draw pictures of them on clay tablets. The images quickly became abstract as the scribes needed to rush, and they also morphed to represent not just an image but the word itself – more specifically, the sound of the word, which meant that it could also be written to represent other words that sounded similar (homophones). Sumerian language often put words together to express new ideas, and the same concept applied to their writing. As people came to use this system more, the scribes began to write from left to right instead of top to bottom since they were less likely to mess up their clay tablets that way. Those who read the tablets didn’t appreciate this change, so the scribes rotated the words 90 degrees allowing tablets to be rotated if the reader preferred – but this made the images even more abstract, until eventually the pictograms vanished entirely to be replaced by wedge-shaped stylus marks: cuneiform. Many of Sumer’s neighbors adopted this invention and helped it spread throughout the region, though completely different writing systems developed independently in cultures situated in places like China and South America!
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July 3, 2016
Marines – Schutztruppe – Artillery Sound I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
Published on 2 Jul 2016
Indy sits in the chair of wisdom again to answer your questions about World War 1. This time we talk about the German Schutztruppe, the Marines and the sound of artillery shells.
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QotD: The decline of popular jazz
There is a moment at the end of Art of the Trio 4, a live album released last year by 28-year-old pianist Brad Mehldau, when the problem with contemporary jazz is crystallized. After a seemingly endless set displaying his pyrotechnic virtuosity, Mehldau slides into Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For a Film).” He plays the song straight, his suddenly spartan piano style capturing the rich, chilling vocal melody. There’s no endless jamming, no fearful retreat into what has become the classicism of legends like Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie — just a simple embrace of a brilliant pop song, like Sinatra doing Mercer or Ella singing Ellington.
It was a rare moment of clarity in jazz, and as such revealed a certain hollowness to the rest of the album. Jazz has become sadly irrelevant. A recent issue of Down Beat reported that jazz sales last year accounted for only 1.9 percent of record purchases, down from even a few years ago. That’s a striking figure, and points to a sad conclusion: the music, once the source of some of the most unassailable popular songs ever waxed, has become an esoteric specialty, like speaking Latin. Next year Ken Burns will unleash his ten-part magnum opus on jazz, which makes sense. Who better to eulogize something deader than the Confederacy?
But then I suppose I’m not fit to judge. I came to jazz only about five years ago, just before the erstwhile swing boom. I liked some of the new swing music, which makes me a pariah in the eyes of “real” jazz fans, many of whom hated it the way punks hate the Backstreet Boys. Legendary pianist Oscar Peterson told Down Beat that he was “quite fed up with guys putting on porkpie hats, tilting their saxes like Lester [Young, the great Kansas City player], and calling it swing even though they still sounded like rock groups. Obviously, they haven’t done their homework and wouldn’t know Lester’s sound if it rolled over them in a steam roller.” Well, sure, most of the stuff was crap — most of anything is crap — but a few genuinely great songs were recorded: “Love” by the Camaros, “Pink Elephant” by the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, and just about everything on All Aboard! and Red Light! by San Francisco’s Indigo Swing. If nothing else, these served as a reminder that jazz was once the catchiest music in America. In listening to the massive Duke Ellington box set The Centennial Edition, I am struck by not only the instrumental virtuosity of Duke’s bands but also the sheer stickiness of the songs: “Sophisticated Lady,” “Day Dream,” “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good),” “Perdido,” “In a Sentimental Mood,” “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” “Cotton Tail” — the list could go on for pages. Before jazz became fat with government grants and cozy in its mutual admiration society with academic audiences, it required hits to survive, and hits require great hooks. Unless jazz musicians learn how to write tunes again, it’s doubtful that in another hundred years we’ll be celebrating anything except the bicentennial of Ellington’s birth.
Mark Gauvreau Judge, “Out of Tunes”, Chicago Reader, 2000-08-31.
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July 1, 2016
British Artillery At The Somme – Brusilov Offensive Implodes I THE GREAT WAR Week 101
Published on 30 Jun 2016
This week 100 years ago, the British Army starts their preparations for the Battle of the Somme with a week long artillery bombardment which fails to weaken the German defenses considerably. At the same time the Brusilov Offensive in the East implodes as Russian General Evert fails with his offensive against the Germans even with superior numbers.
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QotD: The USA is finally over the War of 1812
On behalf of the United States of America and the Department of Defense, I wish our partners in North American defense a very Happy Canada Day.
We have long stood on the same team, as allies, except for the War of 1812, which was 200 years ago and no one really remembers that anymore. I certainly don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how insane it would be to ever trust a Canadian, and definitely never think about how fast and easy it would be to grow the United States from 50 states to 60.
This day celebrates over 148 years of a united Canada, one of the most peaceful, democratic and stable nations on Earth. You are an example to the world, and we as Americans celebrate alongside you, not to keep an eye on what you’re doing to make sure you don’t start building a coalition to say, bombard Baltimore Harbor again, but because the lessons of the past make us stronger together. And really, we should be even closer together.
Canada Day recognizes the day in which three independent colonies united as one Canada. America, too, is a nation of independent colonies, united under a shared vision of liberty and justice for all. If one were to really think about it, it would make a lot of sense to have a larger America, from sea to shining Arctic sea, and really it probably would have happened a century ago if some of the colonies wouldn’t have started backing the British, even after they interfered with Atlantic shipping.
We could have called it, I don’t know, “Amerida” for a while, but honestly United States of America is a great name so I think we’d just go for that. Occasionally I toy around with thinking about how we could have solved that bi-lingualism burden Canada has. Like Montreal, Atlanta was a beautiful, old world city too — until November 16, 1864. I think we’d get rid of that quirky metric system, too. If you ask me, freedom isn’t divisible by ten. But that’s certainly not the kind of thing that I’d think about on Canada Day. Canada Day is a joyful day for celebration.
“Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter”, “SECDEF: This Canada Day, We Are Totally Over War Of 1812”, Duffelblog, 2015-07-01.
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June 30, 2016
“The Last Day of June 1934”
The Last Day of June 1934
Al StewartThe morning is humming, it’s a quarter past nine
I should be working down in the vines
Yeah, but I’m lying here with a good friend of mine
Watching the sun in her hair
I pick the grapes from the hills to the sea
The fields of France are a home to me
Ah, but today lying here is such a good place to be
I can’t go anywhere
And as we slip in and out of embrace
Like some old and familiar place
Reflecting all of my dreams in her face like before
On the last day of June 1934Just out of Cambridge in a narrow country lane
A bottle-green Bentley in the driving rain
Slips and skids round a corner, then pulls straight again
Heads up the drive to the door
The lights of the party shine over the fields
Where lovers and dancers watch catherine wheels
And argue realities digging their heels
In a world that’s finished with war
And a lost wind of summer blows into the streets
Past the tramps in the alleyways, the rich in silk sheets
Europe lies sleeping,
you feel her heartbeats through the floor
On the last day of June 19…On the night that Ernst Roehm died voices rang out
In the rolling Bavarian hills
And swept through the cities and danced in the gutters
Grown strong like the joining of wills
Oh echoed away like a roar in the distance
In moonlight carved out of steel
Singing “All the lonely, so long and so long
You don’t know me how long, how I long
You can’t hold me, I’m strong now I’m strong
Stronger than your law”I sit here now by the banks of the Rhine
Dipping my feet in the cold stream of time
And I know I’m a dreamer, I know I’m out of line
With the people I see everywhere
The couples pass by me, they’re looking so good
Their arms round each other, they head for the woods
They don’t care who Ernst Roehm was, no reason they should
Just a shadow that hangs in the air
But I thought I saw him cross over the hill
With a whole ghostly army of men at his heel
And struck in the moment it seemed to be real like before
On the last day of June 1934
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June 29, 2016
Tankfest 2016 at the Bovington Tank Museum
Published on 28 Jun 2016
What I did on my holidays by The Mighty Jingles age 46 and a bit. TANKS!
The Tank Museum – http://www.tankmuseum.org/home
Upcoming Events at The Tank Museum:
Tanks in Action – 21 Jul – 02 Sep
Attack of the Daleks – 23/24 Jul
Warfare through the Ages – 06/07 Aug
Tank 100 – 17 Sep
Tank Experience Day – 30 Sep – 01 Oct
Access All Areas – 13 Oct
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June 28, 2016
Field Marshal Douglas Haig – Lion or Donkey? I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
Published on 27 Jun 2016
Douglas Haig is usually the centre of the Lions vs. Donkeys debate. Were the British soldiers “Lions led by Donkeys” during World War 1? Douglas Haig, the father of the Battle of the Somme, is often painted as the Butcher of the Somme but is that really the case? We took a closer look.
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June 26, 2016
Iron Harvest – Frontline Entertainment – Fighting Minorities I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
Published on 25 Jun 2016
A slightly hangover Indy is sitting in the chair of Wisdom to answer your questions about the First World War.
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June 24, 2016
“[W]hite activists [need to] stop casting Indigenous peoples as magical pixie enviro-pacifists”
Jonathan Kay on the problem with discussing First Nations people as if they are “Magical Aboriginals”:
… the path toward reconciliation doesn’t always run through Ottawa or Rome. Reconciliation also can take place at the level of friends, family members and neighbours. In a newly published collection of essays, In This Together, editor Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail brings together fifteen writers — some Indigenous, some not — who describe how this process has played out in their own lives. “[The authors] investigate their ancestors’ roles in creating the country we live in today,” Metcalfe-Chenail writes in her introduction. “They look at their own assumptions and experiences under a microscope in hopes that you will do the same.”
In This Together is a poignant and well-intentioned book, and one that deserves to be bought and read. It is also informative and unsettling — though not always in the way the authors intend. Taken as a whole, the stories betray the extent to which guilt, sentimentality and ideological dogma have compromised the debate about Indigenous issues in this country.
[…]
In describing the stock “Magical Negro” who often appears in popular books and movies, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu once noted that this type of character typically is shown to be “wise, patient, and spiritually in touch, [c]loser to the earth.” (Think of Morgan Freeman’s portrayal of Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding in The Shawshank Redemption.) In This Together contains a menagerie of similarly magical-seeming Aboriginals who are “soft-spoken” and “insightful.” A typical supporting character is the hard-luck Aboriginal child whose “entire face seemed to radiate a quiet knowing.” Older characters speak in Yoda-like snippets such as “There is much loss — but all is not lost.”
White characters in this book mostly are presented in the opposite way. They tend to be cruel, obese (“bulging,” “fat, red-faced,” “plump”), and soulless. Streetly goes even further, describing outsiders who come to Tofino as “faceless, meaningless” — as if they were robots. In a story about a First Nations woman with the dermatological condition vitiligo, Carol Shaben casts whiteness as an imperial disease — “an ever-expanding territory of white colonized the brown landscape of her skin.” In matters of economics, whites often are depicted as amoral capitalist marauders (“quick to brand and claim ownership”), while Indigenous peoples are presented as inveterate communitarians — gentle birds who “soar above the land, take stock, perch without harming, settle without ownership, and be grateful without exploitation.”
[…]
For decades, it has been a point of principle that Indigenous peoples in Canada must chart their own future without interference from outsiders. Our First Nations will have to make difficult decisions about what mix of traditional and modern elements they want in their society; and address wrenching questions about integration, relocation, language use, and education. Addressing these hard questions will be all the more difficult if Canada’s leading thinkers — even those with the best of intentions, such as the authors of In This Together — build the project of reconciliation on a foundation of attractive myths.
It is our moral duty as a Canadians to acknowledge the full horror of what was done to Indigenous peoples. But we must not respond to this horror by seeking to conjure an Indigenous Eden of postcolonial imagination — a society that never truly existed in the first place.
June 23, 2016
Cavalry in WW1 – Between Tradition and Machine Gun Fire I THE GREAT WAR Special
Published on 22 Jun 2016
This episode was supported by the Rock Island Auction Company: http://www.rockislandauction.com/
In their upcoming auction, you have the chance to acquire historic items from all ages including some of the cavalry gear seen in our video.
The break between tradition and modern warfare was probably most exemplified in the cavalry forces. Riding with shiny breastplates the sabre in hand, charging the enemy in brightly coloured uniforms. But the enemy now had machine guns, artillery and barbed wire and the cavalry role had to be redefined.
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June 21, 2016
World War 1 in Numbers I THE GREAT WAR Special
Published on 20 Jun 2016
Special thanks to Karim Theilgaard for composing the the new theme for our brand new intro!
We are approaching the 100th regular episode and decided to surprise you with an extra special episode about the staggering numbers of World War 1.
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June 20, 2016
Getting to L’Anse Aux Meadows
A few days back, “Weirddave” posted a little account of his recent visit to L’Anse Aux Meadows:
You can fly into Gander, but it’s expensive AF and you’ll have to make a jillion connections and live in airports for 2 days. Driving from the US means taking I-95 as far as it goes, then transiting New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to North Sydney. There you get on a ferry for an 8 hour trip to Port Aux Basque. Do it overnight and splurge for a cabin (trust me on this). Even then, you can’t get into Port Aux Basque if it’s too windy (a not uncommon occurrence in the North Atlantic). Our ferry sailed in a circle off Port Aux Basque for 12 hours until it was calm enough to go in, costing us a whole day (you don’t drive at night in Newfoundland because the island is infested with moose and you’ll hit one). There is no WiFi on the ferry.
From Port Aux Basque it’s 699 kilometers to L’Anse Aux Meadow, 699 kilometers of 2 lane highway with lots of potholes. If you love scrub pine and birch, you’ll be in heaven. It’s very pretty, and Gros Morne National Park, which you’ll go through about halfway, is gorgeous. The drive is miserable when it’s raining, and it’s always raining in Newfoundland. As a bonus it was 2 degrees C today. After you’ve seen L’Anse Aux Meadow ( a day at most ) you have to do it all over again going the other way. The local hootch is a rum called Screech that aspires to be Val-U-Rite. On the plus side, the locals are friendly, if occasionally unintelligible, and I ate 6 lobsters in four days, so yum.
If you find yourself in Newfoundland, you must go to L’Anse Aux Meadow. If you’re thinking of going, my advice would be to take an RV and make it a leisurely trip across the Maritimes. Take 2 weeks off and really enjoy yourself.
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