Quotulatiousness

October 2, 2022

“We are governed by a transnational criminal enterprise”

Elizabeth Nickson on the deliberately created web of disasters the entire western world faces thanks to our governments’ allegiance to philosophies promulgated by organizations like the WEF:

We are governed by a transnational criminal enterprise.

What are you doing about it?

One sentence caught my attention in Giorgia Meloni’s speeches this week. She said that most insulting thing for her and other Italians, was the EU’s order to erase all references to Christianity, Christmas and Christ from all government documents by Christmas (ironic) of 2022.

This is another of those blows from the One Worlders that feels like someone is stepping on your heart and pressing down. I may not be a church-going Christian, but it defines me like almost nothing else. It is my history, my literature, my culture, my ethical standards, my everything. Christianity defines the western world, it is an activist faith, it orders a congregant to spread goodness wherever he or she goes. Erasing it is a crime similar in effect as the death camps of which our leaders dream. It destroys the ground of our being.

And then I think of my father. Look at this photograph. As a teen, he was very much like the kids of today, self-involved, vain, a girl magnet like his great grandson, Bryson, who never sees a girl who doesn’t interest him. But he was one of the few fully adult men I have known. I want to say only, but I’ve met thousands of men and know few of them as well as I knew him.

It wasn’t until long after my father’s death that I discovered that he was at the tip of the spear of the British Army as they landed at D-Day, pressed forward into France and then into Germany. The Canadian Army, the fourth largest standing army in the world in 1945, had a reputation of brutalism like no other army, famous for it in WW1. This was in part because it was built – as was Canada – by some of the fiercest medieval clans in Europe. Just before James 1 murdered the British border clan heads, Elizabeth I said that with 10,000 such men, James could topple any throne in Europe. Canada attracted those clans, the climate, the terrain was the roughest in the world, and only they could conquer it. And in 1943, they formed an army like none other.

Being his child, I can grope myself into what he was feeling during those two years under remorseless fire, on the ground, buried into caves on the Rhine that last winter, responsible for hundreds of men. He woke up every day for two years, with death certain. I have his Book of Common Prayer. It is swollen with use, especially the prayers for the dead he read over the bodies of his friends. After the war he was put in charge of a Nazi camp and told to “sort those people out”. Kind of like a desert in hell, I would think.

His faith carried him through those years. He was welded to it by the time it was over, although he never proselytized, it was just part of him. Christianity acts, with good men, as spur and comfort. It informed every ethical decision he made. After the war, he came home and worked, fighting unions that destroyed the textile industry in Quebec, trying to keep his factory going in the face of actual bags of burning shit thrown at our house. He retired at 55 with a non-compete clause and spent the rest of his life in charity, working for free. He ran in succession one enterprise after another. His entire life, all of it, he used his spare time to work in the community. Three meetings a week, no matter what. He knew where every sparrow fell in the country village I grew up in, and in the city to which he retired. And if he missed one, his uncles, aunts or cousins picked them up and set them right. It was how they lived.

That used to be a requirement for adulthood. He learned it from his family who came to the New World in 1630, and who all, to a man or woman, worked for free in whatever village or county they found themselves in, making sure everyone was all right. In the towns and cities they settled, across the US and Canada from 1600 to 1945, you were only considered an adult if you rolled up your sleeves and worked for other people in the place that you lived, without being paid, and without expecting praise.

If you didn’t do that work, you were considered a baby that everyone else had to carry. You were made to feel that.

It was that above every single other thing, that made the US and Canada the magnet it is for every other race and country in the world. Self-government by adults. And by the way, for the race-hustlers, they were officers on the Underground Railroad, when it wasn’t popular to be on the side of people of color. They married into Indian bands when it was absolutely beyond the pale.

The boomer generation abandoned that task, and the devolution of the culture was swift. The left creates jobs by creating bureaucrats and the responsibilities that used to be held in common, solved in common, done for goodness alone, are now done for money and benefits by people who generally do not live in the regions they supervise. They have screwed up everything because they can’t make decisions because they have no courage. And they have no courage because they have no ethical standards. Their only standard is whether it increases their own comfort. And that of maybe two other people. To whom they are related.

The only thing they create is debt and obstacles to growth. Aside from technical/engineering standards, (which are being broken) everything they do, can be done by citizens acting in concert.

Our disengagement led to our current economic catastrophe, like nothing else. It is the reason the globalist criminals were able to take over. It is why we now sit in danger of nuclear war.

QotD: US intelligence failures in the Tet Offensive

Filed under: Asia, History, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[In The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War, James] Wirtz argues that Tet was not an intelligence failure in the sense that “the Allies” (his term) had no idea it was coming. US analysts had lots of information indicating a pending attack — indeed, sometimes too much information. Nor was it a complete failure to analyze the available information — lots of US analysts were in the ballpark about the size, direction, and even timing of the attack, and one analyst, Joseph Hovey, produced a report that predicted the whole thing with astonishing accuracy. Rather — and this is my term, not Wirtz’s — it was a failure of narrative.

By summer 1967, MACV (for convenience) had convinced itself that the North Vietnamese no longer had the resources to win the war militarily, and they knew it. This conclusion was based in large part on metrics coming in from field commanders. Specifically, MACV argued that by mid-1967, the Communists had passed what they, MACV, termed the “inflection point” — the North Vietnamese were losing more forces than they could replace, which led to a significant decrease in NVA / VC fighting capacity, plummeting morale, etc.

At no point, it seemed, did they question this assumption, or the bases of this assumption, the key to which was: Kill ratio. We all know how that goes, no need to get into the weeds, but note that everything hinges on the North Vietnamese not only losing the war, but knowing themselves to be losing.

[…]

So, too, with ever-increasing reports that the Viet Cong were going to launch major attacks on South Vietnamese cities. Since US analysts assumed the VC didn’t have the forces for that, these reports were dismissed as propaganda.

Finally, the assumption that the NVA knew themselves to be losing was seemingly confirmed with the siege of the big US firebase at Khe Sanh. It shared a similar geography with Dien Bien Phu, and when some of the same units that had participated in the original battle showed up to take on the Marines, US analysts concluded that the Communists, desperate for a psychological victory, were trying to make another Dien Bien Phu out of Khe Sanh.

At most, US analysts reasoned, Khe Sahn was another Battle of the Bulge — a last-ditch “saving throw”-type attack by an almost-beaten enemy. Much like German forces in the Ardennes, then, the North Vietnamese would attack the Americans, because they were the strongest part of the Allies, and therefore the most immediate military threat.

In fact, almost the exact opposite was true, pretty much all the way down the line. The NVA’s plan was to attack ARVN (the South Vietnamese Army) because they were the weakest, and would be even weaker during Tet, when half of them would be on furlough. But ARVN wasn’t out on the perimeter and along the DMZ. They were in the cities. The whole point of the attack on Khe Sanh (and of a whole series of skirmishes called “the border battles”) was to keep US forces out on the perimeter and away from the cities.

It worked spectacularly, too — even as Tet was unfolding, Gen. Westmoreland assumed it was a diversion, to draw American troops away from Khe Sanh. Half the country had been overrun before Westy began to think maybe Khe Sanh wasn’t the target after all; he only really believed it when the NVA broke off the siege and withdrew.

It was Narrative uber alles.

Severian, “Book Rec: Tet, Intelligence Failure”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-30.

October 1, 2022

“Father” – Fritz Haber – Sabaton History 113 [Official]

Filed under: Germany, History, Media, Military, Science, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 29 Sept 2022

Fritz Haber is a controversial historical figure. He was responsible for scientific advances that fed billions, yet he created weapons of mass destruction that filled millions with terror. This is his story.
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Tank Chat #154 | Valentine DD | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 27 May 2022

We’re back with another Tank Chat this week! Catch up with Historian David Fletcher as he chats in detail about the Valentine DD tank.
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September 30, 2022

History Re-Summarized: The Roman Empire

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 16 Sept 2022
The plot twist of Rome is that it was always a mess, now sit back and enjoy the marble-covered mayhem.

This video is a Remastered, Definitive Edition of three previous videos from this channel — “History Summarized: The Roman Empire”, “History Hijinks: Rome’s Crisis of the Third Century”, and “History Summarized: The Fall of Rome”. This video combines them all into one narrative, fully upgrading all of the visuals and audio, with a substantially re-written script in parts 1 and 3.
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M1C Sniper Garand

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 18 Sep 2016

The M1C was an M1 Garand with a telescopic sight, using a mounting system developed by the Griffin & Howe company of New York. It utilized a rail pinned and screwed to the left side of the receiver, coupled with a quick-release scope on top. The rails had to be installed prior to heat treating the receivers, which had the unfortunately consequence of preventing rifles form being chosen for sniper conversion based on their mechanical accuracy. Instead, accuracy would be tested only after rifles were complete, leading to a 60% rejection rate.

The scope was offset to the left of the receiver so as not to interfere with the Garand’s clip loading, and issued with a leather cheek pad to give the shooter’s cheek weld a matching offset to the left. The scope used with the M1C was the M73B1, later replaced with the M81 and M82 scopes — all military versions of the 2.5x Lyman Alaskan hunting scope (which was a very good piece of equipment despite its low magnification)

The M1C was adopted in 1944, but production and quality control delays would prevent it from seeing any action in WWII. It was in use during the Korean War, however, before being replaced by the M1D.
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September 29, 2022

Considering weird possible scenarios in Ukraine

Filed under: Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney walks through some until recently unimaginable outcomes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine:

It’s probably time for us to start thinking through some weird possible scenarios for what’s happening in Russia. Because the spectrum of what could happen is a lot broader than it seemed only six months ago.

But let’s start with an important exercise in accountability. In previous commentary, I predicted a lot of things well: that Ukrainian resistance would be very effective, that Russia would have major logistics problems, that the Russians would use mass artillery fire against civilians in place of military advances. I was quick to grasp that Ukraine was overperforming and that Russia was struggling early in the conflict.

But getting some details right didn’t help me avoid blowing the conclusion: I thought Russia would win. Not a total victory, but I thought Russia would seize a lot more of the country before its logistical problems and Ukrainian resistance brought their offensives to a halt, leaving Ukraine with some kind of rump state in the west. I certainly didn’t believe in February that Russia could lose, and I never would have believed that Ukraine could actually win on the battlefield, as it now seems more than capable of doing.

I don’t know if I underestimated Ukrainian capabilities, per se. I always expected them to fight bravely and well, and understood the lethality of modern man-portable weapons against tanks and armoured vehicles. It’s probably closer to the mark to say that I overestimated Russia’s capabilities — I was a cynic on their military and expected it to perform badly, but it’s somehow fallen well short of my already low expectations. It is absolutely delightful to be wrong on this one, but readers deserve the truth: I expected Russia’s military to perform better and grab a much bigger chunk of Ukraine before having to stop in the face of logistical dysfunction and Ukrainian resistance. Part of me wonders if the Russians themselves are surprised by how hollowed out their military had become.

With that on the record, let’s flash forward to the present. As noted above, Ukraine now seems fully able to win the war. As I write this, Ukrainian forces are on the move again in the northeast, and seem to be encircling Russian positions in occupied Lyman. If able to complete this latest manoeuvre, Ukrainian forces will cut off a large force of Russian troops and will also seize control of an important local rail junction, threatening Russian logistics (such as they are) in the surrounding area. Perhaps more importantly to the overall conduct of the war, Russia’s effort to mobilize 300,000 men for the war is running into obvious challenges. Men of military age are fleeing the country. Reports from Russia reveal that the army has little in the way of equipment and weapons for the new draftees, and no system in place to train them. There have been comically bizarre stories of infirm old men getting call-up notices, and of draftees being sent to the front after only a day or two of training … at best.

This isn’t a solution to Putin’s problems. It’s a new problem being created in real time. Even if Putin can find 300,000 men, it seems unlikely he can equip them, and even less likely that he can train them. Whether or not he can transport what men he does round up into the battle area is an open question, as is whether or not he can supply them once they get there.

This is the long way of saying something I’ll now just state bluntly: Russia is losing. Putin’s latest actions reveal that he knows he’s losing. If the mobilization flops, as seems likely, he’ll be losing even worse than he was losing before, and he’ll have damn few options to turn that around.

And this is why we need to start thinking through some weird scenarios.

The History of Cyprus Explained in 10 minutes

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Epimetheus
Published 24 May 2022

The history of Cyprus explained from ancient times to modern.
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September 28, 2022

Putin’s nuclear option may not be as decisive in Ukraine as many fear

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Like almost everyone else, I’m still hopeful that the Russians will not resort to nuclear weapons as their invasion of Ukraine drags on and on — especially as it’s expected that any first use of nuclear weapons will trigger a global crisis or even a new world war. At Quora, John Mark McDonald offers his take on the issue that certainly doesn’t match what most pundits appear to believe:

Atomic cloud over Hiroshima, taken from “Enola Gay” flying over Matsuyama, Shikoku, 6 August, 1945.
US Army Air Force photo via Wikimedia Commons.

As someone who has studied nuclear war for close to forty years now, I am going to give you an answer that will blow your mind. Even if the entire Russian nuclear arsenal were used against Ukraine, it wouldn’t substantially change the course of the war. How could I possibly say that? Because, the power of nuclear weapons has been used as a boogeyman for so long that the actual power of a nuclear detonation has almost no relation to their actual destructive power. No nuclear power can afford to actually use one in combat because it would expose the mythical nature of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are hyped to the point that no one contradicts it when a media outlet publishes a statement indicating that even a single nuclear device will destroy the world. This is a blatantly, stupidly, obviously untrue, but never corrected. After all, two were used in WWII. BUT that is just the tip of the iceburg. I thought there had been a couple of hundred nuclear test that prove this point. I was off by over an order of magnitude. There have been nearly THREE THOUSAND NUCLEAR DETONATIONS ALREADY, that are either known or suspected and this has not effected the survivability of life on Earth even slightly.

Well then, how dangerous are nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons, if they weren’t their own catagory, would be classified as incendiary weapons. They set stuff on fire. They set a lot of stuff on fire. In fact they can set things on fire as far as two miles away from the actual detonation. Besides this, nuclear detonation are very bright, capable of blinding people 20–30 miles away. This is only constrained by the curvature of the earth. They also create hurricane force winds as the air around the detonation expands and contracts. If you are outside and unshielded and within a mile of a nuclear detonation, you are going to die.

The problem here is that Ukraine is really big. I mean the size of Texas big. Cities there tend to be spread out in modern times and their larger ones cover over a hundred square miles. The average nuclear detonation are only burn 2–3 square miles of territory. A city the size of Kiev would take on the order of 200 warheads to cover the whole thing.

Which brings us to our next point. Modern cities are just not that vulnerable to incendiaries. Modern city centers and industrial areas are made of concrete and steel. Most of the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done because almost all the buildings were made of wood and paper. The initial blast set the city centers on fire which spread and ended up burning down most of the city. Modern cities are just not that vulnerable. In Ukraine, despite millions of rounds of being poured into their cities, not one of them caught fire and burned to the ground like the Great Chicago or Great London Fires in the 19th century or the fire storms of WWII. In the Japanese nuclear detonations, the brick buildings were still standing, despite being much less sturdy than modern buildings. This leads to the most surprising revelation about nuclear detonations: If you are not outside, you stand a good chance of surviving even within the blast zone. Nuclear blasts are mainly line of sight killers. The vast majority of “radiation” created by an nuclear detonation is infrared radiation, or heat the same as a gas stove or fireplace makes. Unless the building you are in is collapsed by the wind or you fail to leave if it catches on fire or you happen to be in front of a window with a direct line of sight to the detonation, you are probably going to be fine.

Thus we get to the real reason why Putin will not use nuclear weapons: they’re just not all that effective compared to the boogeyman that is in our collective imaginations. Were a nuclear missile to detonate over central Kiev, no one would believe that it was an actual nuclear blast because the city is still there and all the major buildings are still standing.

Secondly, he doesn’t have very many of them. The numbers given for the Russian nuclear arsenal are an outright farce. You get that number by taking of bombs that the USSR claimed to have built, and subtract the number used in their testing program. This leaves you with about 9,000 warheads. First of all, Russia doesn’t have nearly enough delivery systems to put those warheads on. The second problem here is that nuclear warheads have a very short shelf life. Nuclear warheads require a detonator made of conventional explosives. These detonators are some of the most precision pieces of engineering in the history of mankind. A series of explosives has to go off in such a way that the core is hit by the same amount of pressure from all directions simultaneously. If any of those explosives are even slightly off, the nuclear warhead will not go off. You now have an extremely precise machine sitting around a core of material emiting hard radiation. Hard radiation is not friendly to machines. Nuclear warheads need to be rebuilt a least every five years and maintained a lot more often than that. Even with that, a twenty year old warhead is a piece of junk. It’s been more than twenty years since the Putin kleptocracy came to power. I’m sure that Russia has a number of Potemkin warheads that are kept in top shape for inspectors, but given the current Russian system, the Russian nuclear arsenal most likely resembles the Russian tank reserves: the bare minimum kept in service while the rest is a scrap pile.

Currently, the spector of the vast Russian nuclear arsenal is the last card he has in his hand. If he were to actually use it, it would expose that he never had anything but a junk hand and bluffing to back it up.

H/T to Never Yet Melted for the link.

CDR Salamander also looks at the nuclear question:

Some are looking closer at the nuclear option that Russia has. I think they are looking too hard. A good example of this line of concern was in yesterday’s WaPo by Joseph Cirincione.

NB: Before the pull quotes, a fair warning – Cirincione is selling a book titled, Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before it is Too Late, so keep that in consideration;

    Russian President Vladimir Putin is losing his war. If the Ukrainians continue to liberate areas of their country from his invading army, would he actually use nuclear weapons as he has threatened? If so, how? And what would the U.S. response be?

    It is difficult to put percentages on risk. Nor does it really matter. Given the stakes, if the chances are 10 percent or 40 percent, the response would be the same: Minimize the possibility of nuclear use, and prepare responses in advance.

This is when I remind everyone that “we” are horrible at predicting the next war early enough to prevent them. The track record is simply not very good. However, Cirincione has invested a lot of time and effort in looking at this — so we should give his ideas some consideration;

The next quote reminded me of a little reminder a peer gave me back when I was a NATO staff weenie at the other end of the HQ p-way from him. As a JO, he was on the other side of the wire as an JO in the Warsaw Pact. “Americans may not follow their doctrine very well, but Russians do.”

    Russian military writings describe in detail how, if Russia is losing a conflict, it could use nuclear weapons to force its enemy to retreat. This “escalate to de-escalate” or “escalate to win” strategy is somewhat controversial, but it is not dissimilar to various U.S. plans for using nuclear weapons first.

Well, sometimes we follow our doctrine. Sometimes the Russians don’t … but if you are playing odds …

I still stand by my belief — and that is a weak thread, I know — that in the next war, nuclear weapons will be what chemical weapons were during WWII. Everyone had them; no one used them.

If nuclear weapons were to appear on the Ukrainian stage, Cirincione does not have this COA as his most likely … but it is my most likely if one must choose from the “Nuke” basket;

    Demonstration shot. One option is for Russia to fire a nuclear weapon over an uninhabited area — say, part of the Black Sea — as a demonstration of its seriousness in hopes that the West will back down. Some scientists involved in the Manhattan Project urged just such a demonstration shot as an alternative to bombing Japanese cities at the end of World War II. While no one would be killed and there would not be physical damage, the explosion would stop the world in its tracks. There has not been a nuclear weapon used in combat in 77 years. No one has even seen a nuclear explosion above ground since 1980.

This is their neighborhood and fallout will drift to their lands if nukes are used. Is anyone going to buy grain downwind? No. Next to underground explosions, explosions high over the water or in the atmosphere create the least secondary radiation effects. Don’t underestimate the lingering memory of Chernobyl. I see “Demonstration Shot” of the most likely COA of the least likely Nuke COAs.

    As shocking as this would be, Russia would likely reject this option for the same reason U.S. military leaders did in 1945: It is not shocking enough.

Don’t agree. Russia believes their own FITREPs, so to speak. The arrogance of their initial OPLAN speaks to this. They hold most of Central and especially Western Europe in contempt. I am sure a nuke over the Black Sea would be shocking enough (and they’re right).

September 27, 2022

The War That Made Germany Prussian – Austro-Prussian War 1866

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Italy, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 23 Sep 2022

After settling the Schleswig-Holstein question in 1864, Austria and Prussia are uneasy allies. Both are the biggest players in the German confederation. In Bismarck’s dream of a united Germany, he sees Prussia as the only leader and wants to force the so called “small German solution” without Austria. And so, in 1866 a war between Austria and Prussia (plus other German states like Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, Saxony, Hanover) breaks out to settle this question once and for all.
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September 26, 2022

Did D-Day win WW2? – a WW2 expert discussion

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Media, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 25 Sep 2022

WW2 historians Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, and Paul Woodadge moderated by Ryan Socash discuss the meaning and significance of D-Day from historical, current, and future perspectives. Recorded on the road while shooting in Normandy for TimeGhost’s 24-hour documentary on the events of June 6, 1944.
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September 25, 2022

Red Army Reaches the Dnieper – WW2 – 213 – September 24, 1943

World War Two
Published 24 Sep 2022

Benito Mussolini proclaims a new fascist republic in Italy, but this time it is a full puppet state to Germany. There is scattered fighting around Italy and the Dodecanese — including a massacre of Italian POWs, but the big Allied advances this week are the Australians in New Guinea and the Soviets retaking their own territory. They take ground, in fact, from near Smolensk all the way south to the Sea of Azov.
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200 Medals Won in an Hour – The Raid on Zeebrugge, 1918

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Historigraph
Published 11 May 2022
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QotD: Sparta’s military reputation as “the best warriors in all of Greece”

… the Spartans seemed to have leaned into Herodotus’ image of them as the best warriors in all of Greece and the eternal opponents of all kinds of tyranny. Spartan “messaging” in the war against Athens portrayed Athens itself as a “tyrant city” ruling over the rest of Greece (which was, to be fair, pretty accurate at the time). Likewise, the image of military excellence the Spartans put forward is picked up and represented clearly in the writings of Xenophon, Plato, Aristophanes and Thucydides (though he is, at least, more skeptical that the Spartans are supermen) and in turn picked up and magnified by later writers (Diodorus, Plutarch, etc) who rely on them. Other states sought out Spartan military advisors, famously Syracuse (advised by the mothax Gylippus) and Carthage (by Xanthippus, a Spartan mercenary).

That reputation could be a real military advantage. Greek hoplite armies arranged themselves right-to-left according to the status of each polis‘ army (poleis almost always fight in alliances). Since Sparta was always the leader of its alliance, the Spartan king and his force always took the right – opposite the weakest part of the enemy army. You may easily imagine the men facing the Spartans – they know the Spartan reputation for skill (and do not have the advantage of me telling them it is mostly hogwash) and by virtue of where they are standing know that they do not have the same reputation. Frequently, such match-ups resulted in the other side running away before the Spartans even got into spear’s reach (e.g. Thuc 5.72.4).

There’s a story in Xenophon, embedded in the larger Battle of Lechaeum, which I think illustrates the point well. Early on, the Argives (the men of Argos, always the enemy of Sparta) meet and rout a group of Sicyonians (who are allies of Sparta). A passing Spartan cavalry company under a Pasimachus sees this and rushes in; getting off their horses, they grab the Sicyon shields (marked with the city’s sigma) and advance against the Argives. But whereas later in the battle the arrival of the Spartans will trigger panic and retreat, here the Argives do not know they are fighting Spartans (because of the shields) – and so they advance with confidence; Pausimachus with his small force is crushed. As he attacks Pausimachus declared (according to Xenophon), “By the two gods, Argives, these Sigmas will deceive you” (Xen. Hell. 4.4.10; the “two gods” or “twin gods” here are Castor and Pollux).

I rather think that Pausimachus was deceived by the lambda his own shield may have carried (there is debate about if Spartan shields always had the lambda device, I tend to think they did not). Pausimachus expected to surprise the Argives with his Spartan skill. Instead, he found out – fatally – that the magic was never in the Spartan, it was in the image of Sparta that lived in the mind of his opponent.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VI: Spartan Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-20.

September 24, 2022

Life Inside a Panzer – Tank Life Part 1 – WW2 Special

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 23 Sep 2022

The German Panzers are high on the list of the most feared and respected weapon systems of the Second World War. Much of their effectiveness however did not simply stem from technical or tactical superiority, but was achieved through rigorous training and the tight camaraderie of their crews. Days, weeks, or even months on end, the men operating a Panzer would stay together, maintaining the tank, and training for the battle to come. Through summer and winter, heat and snow, mud and rain, the tank would become their home.
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