When we started this series, we had two myths, the myth of Spartan equality and the myth of Spartan military excellence. These two myths dominate the image of Sparta in the popular consciousness, permeating game, film and written representations and discussions of Sparta. These myths, more than any real society, is what companies like Spartan Race, games like Halo, and – yes – films like 300 are tapping into.
But Sparta was not equal, in fact it was the least equal Greek polis we know of. It was one of the least equal societies in the ancient Mediterranean, and one which treated its underclasses – who made up to within a rounding error of the entire society by the end – terribly. You will occasionally see pat replies that Sparta was no more dependent on slave labor than the rest of Greece, but even a basic demographic look makes it clear this is not true. Moreover our sources are clear that the helots were the worst treated slaves in Greece. Even among the Spartiates, Sparta was not equal and it never was.
And Sparta was not militarily excellent. Its military was profoundly mediocre, depressingly average. Even in battle, the one thing they were supposed to be good at, Sparta lost as much as it won. Judging Sparta as we should – by how well it achieved strategic objects – Sparta’s armies are a comprehensive failure. The Spartan was no super-soldier and Spartan training was not excellent. Indeed, far from making him a super-soldier, the agoge made the Spartans inflexible, arrogant and uncreative, and those flaws led directly to Sparta’s decline in power.
And I want to stress this one last time, because I know there are so many people who would pardon all of Sparta’s ills if it meant that it created superlative soldiers: it did not. Spartan soldiers were average. The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing. Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems. All of that supposedly cool stuff made Sparta weaker, not stronger.
This would be bad enough, but the case for Sparta is worse because it – as a point of pride – provided nothing else. No innovation in law or government came from Sparta (I hope I have shown, if nothing else, that the Spartan social system is unworthy of emulation). After 550[BC], Sparta produced no trade goods or material culture of note. It produced no great art to raise up the human condition, no great literature to inspire. Despite possessing fairly decent farmland, it was economically underdeveloped, underpopulated and unimportant.
Athens produced great literature and innovative political thinking. Corinth was economically essential – a crucial port in the heart of Greece. Thebes gave us Pindar and was in the early fourth century a hotbed of military innovation. All three cities were adorned by magnificent architecture and supplied great art by great artists. But Sparta, Sparta gives us almost nothing.
Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.
Sparta is not something to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
August 15, 2022
QotD: Sparta – the North Korea of the Classical era
August 13, 2022
The Great Escape from a Death Factory – WAH – August 7, 1943
World War Two
Published 12 Aug 2022While enslavement, and mass murder continues unabated in August 1943, at the Treblinka Death Factory the forced laborers decide that enough is enough, and bring battle to the SS in a daring escape attempt.
Huge thanks to Purple Purple, Steven Yarnell, Pieter Kleij and Ruben Alikhanyan for their support during the episode premiere.
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QotD: Erich von Manstein
In the Britain of the Sixties, a certain mystique still attached to the generals of the Third Reich. In their stylish uniforms and their gleaming jackboots, they had swaggered. Only two, Keitel and Jodl, were executed at Nuremberg; the rest got away with murder.
Even some of those who were convicted of war crimes had friends in high places. One of the most prominent was Erich von Manstein, the architect of many German victories both in the Battle of France and on the Eastern front. He was also complicit in the genocide of more than a million Jews and others by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine.
Yet Churchill was among those who successfully campaigned to have Manstein’s 18-year sentence reduced to 12, of which he served only four.
Manstein’s memoir Verlorene Siege (translated as Lost Victories) appeared in 1958, a key text in the mythology that depicted the Wehrmacht as “clean” and laid the blame for war crimes on Hitler. Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the postwar Federal Republic, also played his part in the rehabilitation of Manstein, on the grounds that West German rearmament required a sharp distinction between the Nazis and an untainted military tradition as the basis for the new Bundeswehr.
Daniel Johnson, “The moral blindness of Putin’s generals”, The Critic, 2022-05-10.
August 12, 2022
Canadian Army Newsreel – Allies take Sicily
canmildoc
Published 4 Sep 2011Canadian war news reel.
August 11, 2022
US Navy Fleet Problems – Now its time to play with carriers (VIII-XII)
Drachinifel
Published 10 Aug 2022Today we take a look at the background and thinking behind the inter-war USN Fleet Problems, with summaries of Fleet Problems 8 through 12
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“Carbine” Williams’ Battle Rifle: The Winchester G30R
Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Jan 2018The Winchester G30R is the final iteration of David Marshall Williams’ work on a full power .30 caliber military rifle. The project began with a design by Ed Browning (John Browning’s half brother) using a tilting bolt and annular gas piston, manufactured for US military trials by Colt. It moved to the Winchester company, which assigned Williams to the project when Browning died in 1939. Williams first replaced the annular gas piston with his gas tappet system, creating the G30M rifle. This performed poorly in trials, and the next iteration was the replacement of the tilting bolt with a Garand-type rotating bolt, creating the Winchester M2 rifle.
The US military was not interested in the M2 in .30-06, but thought the concept could be ideal for the Light Rifle trials then underway, and Winchester scaled it down to .30 carbine, and won the Light Rifle trials with it. That weapon would go on to become the M1 Carbine. Once it was in mass production, Winchester returned to the M2 design and improved it into this G30R. It was tested by the Marine Corps, but not adopted. The Canadian military also expressed an interest, but the US government opted to not allow any exports, and so Canada never tested it.
The US Army was quite satisfied with the M1 Garand, but suggested that this rifle might be made into a replacement for the BAR if it were redesigned a bit for greater sustained fire capacity. Winchester did so, creating the Winchester Automatic Rifle (WAR), which was on track for adoption until World War Two ended and immediate arms development became a much less important priority for the military.
Thanks to the Institute of Military Technology for allowing me to have access to this rifle so I can bring it to you! Check out the IMT at:
QotD: Logistical limits to Spartan military action against Athens
During the first phase of the Peloponnesian War, called the Archidamean war, after the Spartan king who conducted it, Sparta invaded Attica functionally every year in an effort to inflict enough agricultural devastation that the Athenians would be forced to come out and fight […] The core problem is that it just isn’t possible to do a meaningful amount of damage in the short campaigning season before the army has to go home.
And I want to be clear just how long they bang their head against this rock. The Spartans invade in 431, besiege a minor town, accomplish nothing and leave (Thuc. 2.18-20), and in 430 (Thuc. 2.47), in 429, because of a plague in Athens, they instead besiege tiny Plataea (Thuc. 2.71ff) and then leave, but in 428 they’re back at it in Attica (Thuc. 3.1), and in 427 (Thuc. 3.26), and in 426 but turn back early due to earthquakes (Thuc. 3.89). But they’re back again in 425 (Thuc. 4.2), leaving each time when supplies run out. Sparta mounts no attack in 424 because Athenian naval raiding forces them to keep the army at home (Thuc. 4.57); in 423 they have a year-long truce with Athens (Thuc. 4.117). They only finally suggest the creation of a permanent base in Attica in 422/1 (Thuc. 5.17) but the war ends first (they’ll actually fortify a small outpost, Decelea, only when the war renews in 413).
Thucydides is in several cases (e.g. Thuc. 3.1.3) explicit that what causes these armies to fail and disperse back home is that they run out of supplies. They are two days – on foot! – from a major friendly trade port (Corinth), and they run out of supplies. Their last invasion was six years after their first and they still had not resolved the logistics problem of long-term operations in what is effectively their own backyard.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
August 9, 2022
The Never Ending Failures in France – WW2 – Spies & Ties 21
World War Two
Published 8 Aug 2022The typical image of the French Resistance is of a man, beret at an angle, cigarette hanging from his bottom lip, captured MP40 across his chest. But one of the most successful resistance leaders is a woman – Marie-Madeline Fourcade. And right now, the Germans have her on the run!
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August 8, 2022
FN-DA1: The BAR for NATO
Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Apr 2022After World War Two, FN put the BAR back into production. This was initially the FN-D version with a quick-change barrel, but with NATO’s adoption of the 7.62mm cartridge, there was a demand for the BAR in that chambering. The Belgian Army adopted this new round, and plenty of other nations did as well. This prompted FN to release a new version of the FN-D for it, designated the FN-DA1.
In addition to the new chambering, the DA1 also had these three changes:
– Larger bipod feet and a wider bipod stance
– A rear aperture sight instead of an open notch
– A more protected barrel release latchThe FN-DA1 would remain in production until 1967, when it was finally discontinued.
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August 7, 2022
Allied Tidal Wave in Romania – WW2 – 206 – August 6, 1943
World War Two
Published 6 Aug 2022The Allies bomb the Romanian oil fields, a major Axis source of oil, but it does not go well for the attackers. They do advance in both Sicily and the Solomon Islands — where a future President has one heck of an adventure, and in the USSR a huge Soviet counteroffensive begins, taking Belgorod after just a few days and threatening Kharkov.
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QotD: The post-WW1 experiment in banning chemical weapons
Now, when I was in school – this was a topic I was taught about in high school – the narrative I got was fairly clear: we didn’t use chemical weapons because after World War I the nations of the world got together and decided that chemical weapons were just too horrible and banned them, and that this was a sign of something called “progress“. In essence, the narrative I got was, we had become too moral for chemical weapons and so the “civilized” nations (a term sometimes still used unironically in this context) got together and enforced a moral taboo against chemical (and biological) weapons. And, we were told (this was, I should note, the late 90s and early aughts, long before the Syrian Civil War) that this taboo had mostly held.
Which was important, because in this narrative as it was impressed upon that younger version of me, the ban on chemical weapons showed the path towards banning all sorts of other terrible weapons: landmines, cluster-munitions and of course most of all, nuclear weapons. All we would need to do is for the “civilized” nations of the world to summon the moral courage to abandon such brutal weapons of war. Man, the end of history was nice while it lasted! But the example of the “successful” ban on chemical and biological weapons was offered as proof that the dream of a world without nuclear weapons was possible, if only we showed the same will.
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things. But what was my teacher’s excuse? I guess the end of history was a hell of a drug.
[…] all three of these answers (including my high school answer) actually miss the point, because they all assume something fundamental: that chemical weapons are effective weapons, and so the decision not to use them is fundamentally moral, rather than practical.
Quite frankly, we don’t use chemical weapons for the same reason we don’t use war-zeppelin-bombers: they don’t work, at least within our modern tactical systems.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-03-20.
August 6, 2022
Canada’s New Warship
Frontline Pros
Published 12 Feb 2022The Type 26 Frigate will become the first dedicated warship Canada has built in decades. Soon the Royal Canadian Navy will take ownership of 15 of these vessels, making them the largest owner of the Type 26 in the world.
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August 5, 2022
ARNHEM – A Bridge Too Far – THE TRUE STORY (2001)
British Army Documentaries
Published 25 Jun 2022Please help us to keep bringing you great content! We are able to bring you these interesting documentaries, which would otherwise be held in a vault, or away from public view because we purchase commercial licenses often at considerable expense. Unfortunately, YouTube’s re-use policy now means we can’t monetise it. This means we can’t invest in new licenses for new documentaries. Please help us by subscribing to our Patreon page from just £2/month so we can keep bringing you great content, otherwise, this channel may need to close forever. Thank You
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At 3:00 a.m., the commanders of the 2nd South Staffordshire battalion and the 1st and 11th Parachute battalions met to plan their attack. At 4:30 a.m., before dawn, the 1st Parachute Brigade began its attack towards Arnhem bridge, with the 1st Battalion leading supported by remnants of the 3rd Battalion, with the 2nd South Staffordshires on the 1st Battalion’s left flank and the 11th Battalion following. As soon as it became light the 1st Battalion was spotted and halted by fire from the main German defensive line. Trapped in open ground and under heavy fire from three sides, the 1st Battalion disintegrated and what remained of the 3rd Battalion fell back. The 2nd South Staffordshires were similarly cut off and, save for about 150 men, overcome by midday. The 11th Battalion, (which had stayed out of much of the fighting) was then overwhelmed in exposed positions while attempting to capture high ground to the north. With no hope of breaking through, the 500 remaining men of these four battalions withdrew westwards in the direction of the main force, 5 km (3.1 mi) away in Oosterbeek.
The 2nd Battalion and attached units (approximately 600 men) were still in control of the northern approach ramp to the Arnhem bridge. They had been ceaselessly bombarded by enemy tanks and artillery from two battle groups led by SS-Sturmbannführer [Major] Brinkmann and one commanded by Major Hans-Peter Knaust. The Germans recognized that they would not be moved by infantry attacks such as those that had been bloodily repulsed on the previous day so instead, they heavily shelled the short British perimeter with mortars, artillery, and tanks; systematically demolishing each house to enable their infantry to exploit gaps and dislodge the defenders. Although in the battle against enormous odds, the British clung to their positions, and much of the perimeter was held.
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FN MAG: Best of the Western GPMGs
Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Apr 2022
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August 2, 2022
The Last Battle in the West – How The Allies Crossed The Rhine 1945
Real Time History
Published 30 Jul 2022Get CuriosityStream + Watch Rhineland 45 on Nebula: https://curiositystream.com/realtimeh…
The Rhine river was the last major natural obstacle on the Western Front of WW2 in early 1945. The Allied armies needed to cross the symbolic river to enter the heart of Nazi Germany. While General Patton’s 1st Army crossed the river at Remagen first, the actual set-piece battle of the Rhine took place further north and involved the biggest airborne operation in a single day in the entire war.
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