World War Two
Published 4 Jun 2022The Chinese defeat the Japanese at Shipai Fortress and the Americans maul the Japanese in the Aleutians. The Japanese are also worried about the possibility of the USSR joining the war against them. Meanwhile the Allies still plan to invade Sicily, but have no idea what they’ll do after that.
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June 5, 2022
Banzai Charges in Alaska – WW2 – 197 – June 4, 1943
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Winchester G30M
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Jul 2016http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
With the death of Jonathan “Ed” Browning in 1939, development of the Winchester G30 rifle was passed into the hands of a new employee at Winchester by the name of David Marshall Williams. Williams would become widely known as “Carbine” Williams in later years thanks to Jimmy Stewart and Hollywood, but we will get to that part of the story later.
What Williams did to the G30 was to replace Browning’s annular gas piston with his own short stroke tappet system (this being the first rifle to use that system of Williams’). This substantially improved the gun’s reliability, and Winchester was able to submit it to Marine Corps trials in 1940 alongside the Garand and Pedersen rifles under the designation G30M. The Marine Corps was legitimately interested in the G30M, as it was expected to be both faster and cheaper to manufacture than the Garand.
Ultimately the trials were won by the Garand, with the G30M placing third in total malfunctions and broken parts. This had involved 37 different tests and more than 12,000 rounds through each rifle. The Garand had 1,480 total malfunctions and 49 parts broken, replaced, or repaired. The Johnson had 1,547 and 72 respectively, and the G30M 2,864 and 97 (roughly double the number of problems as the Garand).
Despite this failure, Winchester was encouraged to continue working on the rifle, if for no other reason than the possibility of foreign purchasers. Williams’ next step would be to replace the Browning tilting bolt with a Garand-type rotating bolt, which would result in a rifle Winchester would call the M2, or “the seven and a half pound rifle”. We will examine that rifle in the next video …
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June 4, 2022
Falklands Conflict Aftermath | The global impact of a 74-day conflict
Imperial War Museums
Published 1 Jun 2022The Falklands Conflict of 1982 only lasted for 74 days, but it had lasting consequences which continue to be felt today. Prior to 1982, Margaret Thatcher’s government was planning major defence cuts including withdrawing the military from the South Atlantic. Instead, they spent nearly £3 billion defending British sovereignty of the Falkland Islands, and to this day maintain a garrison there. What was the effect of this short conflict for Argentina, Britain and the Falkland Islands, and what impact did it have around the world?
Correction: The video states that Port Stanley was granted city status in 2002, this should be 2022.
Thanks for watching IWM’s 5 part series on the Falklands Conflict. Please like and subscribe for more, and let us know in the comments below what you’d like to see next.
Explore and licence the archive films in this video: https://film.iwmcollections.org.uk/c/…
CREDITS
Mount Pleasant images, Crown copyright, April 2022
Margaret Thatcher images © University of Salford Press Office
Landmine clearance photos via Safe Lane Global
Sound effects via ZapSplat
June 3, 2022
The Crusades: Part 10 – The End of the Crusader Kingdoms
seangabb
Published 27 Mar 2021The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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Chat Tanks #148 M548 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 18 Feb 2022► JOIN OUR PATREON: Our Patreons have already enjoyed Early Access and AD free viewing of our weekly YouTube video! Consider becoming a Patreon Supporter today: https://www.patreon.com/tankmuseum
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June 2, 2022
For Queen and Country (2010)
emptyangel
Published 14 Jun 2011“Documentary following the Grenadier Guards as they prepare to lead the 2010 Trooping the Colour. But these men have had precious little time to prepare; as fighting soldiers, they have just spent six months on the front line in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. This is the story of how one and a half thousand men and women join together to create one of the greatest military ceremonies on earth. It is a ceremony with just one standard: Excellence.”
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M1915 Howell Automatic Rifle Enfield Conversion
Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Mar 2017The M1915 Howell Automatic Rifle is a conversion of a standard No1 MkIII Lee Enfield rifle into a semi-automatic, through the addition of a gas piston onto the right side of the barrel. Despite its very steampunk appearance, the Howell is actually a quite simple conversion mechanically. The rifle action had not been modified at all, and a curved plate on the end of the gas piston is used to cycle the bolt up, back, forward, and down just as it would be done manually.
The additional metal elements added to the gun are there to prevent the shooter from inadvertently getting their hand or face in the path of the bolt. The crude tubular pistol grip is necessary because the shooter’s hand on the wrist of the stock would normally be in the path of the bolt’s travel. Note that the Parker-Hale bipod on this example is a non-military addition from its time in private ownership.
In addition to these elements, the Howell has been fitted with a 20-round extended magazine to better exploit its rate of fire. However, the Howell was made as a semiautomatic rifle only, and not fully automatic. It was offered to the British military circa 1915, but never put into service. Instead, the British would significantly increase production and deployment of Lewis light machine guns. Howell would offer his conversion in basically the same form to the military again at the onset of World War 2, but was again turned down.
Shooting the Howell was remarkably successful — I had expected it to be very malfunction-prone, but in fact it ran almost completely without fault. In retrospect, I would attribute this to the simplicity of its conversion, which made no changes to the feeding and extraction/ejection elements of the SMLE. The gun was a bit awkward to hold, and the offset sights left one with really no cheek weld at all, but recoil was gentle thanks to the gas system’s function and added weight. Quite a remarkable gun, and one I am very glad to have been able to shoot.
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June 1, 2022
Vintage Russian T62 tanks reported in Ukraine
As with all discussions of the ongoing fighting between Russian and Ukrainian troops, it’s very difficult to be sure that what is being reported is in any way accurate — both sides pulled out all the stops on the PR/propaganda/disinformation machinery months ago. At Thin Pinstriped Line, Sir Humphrey seems to be convinced that the reports that the Russians have been dis-interring mothballed Soviet-era T62 tanks to send into combat in Ukrane are believable enough:
“Soviet T-62M MBT Standard Battle Tank” by Gary Lee Todd, Ph.D. is marked with CC0 1.0. To view the terms, visit https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/?ref=openverse.
The Russian Army has taken such significant losses of materiel that it has been forced to pull vintage T62 tanks from reserve, and commit them to front line operations. This statement makes plain just how costly the Russian advances have been in the Donbas area, and raises questions about what, if any, value, there is from retaining a war reserve of vehicles and equipment.
It is difficult to get an accurate picture on just how disastrous the Russian losses have been so far in the war, but most estimates suggest that at least 700 tanks have been destroyed, with many more damaged or captured. Each loss represents not only a small reduction in combat capability to Russia, but usually a far more valuable, and irreplaceable crew.
Russia is not a nation that likes to throw military equipment away, far from it. Their equipment is designed to be simple, reliable and last a very long time. As the outstandingly good website WW2 after WW2, which keeps track of what happened to military equipment after the war, lovingly documents, Soviet era equipment from WW2 just kept going (note, do not click on the link unless you wish to be sucked into a very big time sink!).
With huge reserves of people, no constraints on space or spending, and a mentality of “stores are for storing, not scrapping”, Russia has long kept ancient and utterly obsolete equipment in storage depots long past the point of being of any meaningful value. It is almost certain that there are still Russian Army depots out there with WW2 era equipment waiting for a recall to the colours if required.
The challenge facing Russia though is that due to the rampant corruption, the inability to hold units to account and ensure that readiness is tested, and just the sheer scale of the stockpile, most of the vehicles in their arsenal are probably not combat ready, and have probably been cannibalized beyond repair. Despite having thousands of T72 and T80 in service and storage, it seems that they are not deployable.
This poses a real challenge for Russia on two fronts – firstly, to bring the T62 out of retirement and into front line service as attrition reserves poses a significant support challenge. The vehicle is not compatible with later models of Russian tanks, so will require bespoke logistics support – placing further pressure on the already creaking supply chain.
Additionally, although simple to operate, it still requires crew to use it – with four, instead of three crew needed, this poses an additional headache for the Russian Army, which will have to find 25% uplift in tank crews to operate them properly. At a time when the Russians are low on people, and have churned through a significant proportion of their main army, it will require extraordinary efforts to find bodies to crew these tanks.
Bodies is perhaps the operative word here, for this is likely to be the fate of the crew in these vehicles. The T62 is utterly outclassed and completely obsolete for the environment in which it is operating. It may be good for gunning down demonstrators or strangling democratic protests in third world nations (the joy of socialist dictatorships), but against a highly experienced army, fighting with advanced equipment to defend its homeland, it is utterly hopeless. While it can still have some effect, the T62 units going into action are certain to be outclassed, outgunned and out of time when they face the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Update: After I scheduled this post for publication, I saw that Berhard Kast (Military History Visualized) had posted a video analyzing the evidence, which you can check out here.
Update, 1 June: Apparently it helps when you include the link to the original post. Who knew?
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How To Kill A U-Boat – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 31 May 2022How to kill a U-Boat? The threat of the illusive and nearly undetectable submarines had been on the mind of every Allied naval planner since the Great War. As the Kriegsmarine once more unleashed its wolfpacks to the high seas, it became a race against time to find a way to stop the deadly stalkers from beneath the surface.
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The Battle of The Glorious First of June 1794
MaritimeGB
Published 17 Feb 20131794 — After the failed harvest, France organises for a desperately needed grain convoy to cross the Atlantic. British Admiral Lord Howe is sent to intercept the French and although the British win the fight, the tactical victory goes to France.
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May 31, 2022
The Crusades: Part 9 – The Other Crusades
seangabb
Published 18 Mar 2021The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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A new history of the evil empire. No, not that one. Not that one either. The other evil empire!
In The Critic, Barnaby Crowcroft reviews Caroline Elkins’ new history of the British empire, Legacy of Violence:
Elkins is correct that British decolonisation after the end of the war — if not “white-washed” — has got off lightly among historians, often via a contrast with the dreadful behaviour of the French. We remain far too influenced by the impression that Britain willingly and amicably handed over power (as Harold Macmillan put it) to Asian and African representatives of “agreeable, educated, Liberal, North Oxford society”.
There is a single map in this book which should definitively dispose of such ideas, showing all the colonial conflicts and states of emergency Britain was engaged in around the world after 1945. There are the well-known counterinsurgencies in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden. Alongside other, less well-known ones, however — British Guiana, Malaysia, Belize, Oman and the New Hebrides — bring us pretty much into the 1980s without a single year of global colonial peace.
In Kenya and Malaya, the British carried out massive coercive interventions in the 1950s, including the forcible resettlement of over a million people into closely monitored “new villages”, which, if they cannot be likened to concentration camps, certainly resemble the kinds of things the French were doing in Algeria. Difficult though it is to believe today, until very recently the British were a “warlike” and patriotic people, and their agents could be ruthless in the pursuit of imperial interest overseas.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to take seriously the more grandiose claims of Legacy of Violence, including Elkins’ presumption to have uncovered the Key to All Mythologies of British imperial wickedness in the form of Liberalism and Racism. The prose is part of the problem. Her introductory statement of the book’s bombastic aims reads more like something written by a professional satirist, than a professional historian.
“To study the British empire,” she writes, “is to unlock memory’s gate using the key of historical enquiry. But once inside, history’s fortress is bewildering … Unlike mythical fire-breathing monsters, however, the creatures inhabiting the annals of Britain’s imperial past are not illusions [but] monstrosities [which] inflicted untold suffering …”
Much of the book is given over to a plodding chronicle of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British history, in which events are construed — and often misconstrued — to give the meanest possible interpretation. British “arch-imperialists” resemble cartoon villains, who wear “Hitleresque moustaches” and “racist coattails” and are awarded MBEs and OBEs according to how much harm they inflict upon colonial subjects. There is even an imaginative reconstruction of British pilots all but laughing as they machine-gun “defenceless women and children”; readers are invited to listen to their “screams of pain”.
To determine whether Britain’s empire was uniquely violent invites the question: compared to what? Niall Ferguson earned opprobrium for suggesting in 2003 that alongside the rival empires which arose to challenge it in the middle of the twentieth century, Britain’s looked pretty attractive.
To her credit, Elkins does not disagree with this. Her treatment of Malaya’s communist insurgency suggests that she is not particularly exercised by violence when it is committed by ideological confrères. The only thing we get in the way of any broader comparison, however, is the notably wishy-washy one implied between the “East and the West”, which she describes as the contrast between “humanity and inhumanity”.
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May 30, 2022
The Deadliest Job in World War Two – WAH 062 – May 29, 1943
World War Two
Published 29 May 2022Arthur Harris and the RAF set another record in bombing Germany, and the outnumbered Yugoslav Partisans show the Axis that numbers mean little when you’re clever.
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May 29, 2022
Black May, Nazi Subs Defeated – WW2 – 196 – May 28, 1943
World War Two
Published 28 May 2021German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz orders the U-Boats to leave the Atlantic this week; the losses lately have just been too great for their patrols to continue there. There is active fighting in China, the Aleutians, and the Kuban, and there are special weapons tests in the skies over Germany.
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The hoplite phalanx
HistoryMatters
Published 5 Jan 2016A short introductory video about on ancient Greek hoplite and phalanx.
Music: Wet by Michett
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