There was a brief firestorm in Britain when a photograph appeared in the press of Montgomery and Gen. Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, the commander of the Afrika Korps and the highest-ranking German captured at Alamein. After his capture Thoma was brought to the Eighth Army command post, where Montgomery accorded him the respect of one honorable professional soldier to another. The two dined that night, and the photograph of the two generals led Brendan Bracken to send Churchill a memo criticizing Montgomery’s naïveté and noting that it created a bad impression with the public. Churchill merely commented: “I sympathize with Gen. von Thoma. Defeated, humiliated, in captivity, and,” after pausing for effect, “dinner with General Montgomery.”
Carlo d’Este, Warlord: A life of Winston Churchill at war, 1874-1945, 2008.
June 15, 2018
QotD: Churchill on Montgomery
June 10, 2018
D-Day – Lies – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 1 Aug 2017D-Day is too vast and important a topic to be completely covered by four short videos, but we hope our series offered some new insights into the massive effort that went into the Normandy beach landings. James Portnow and Richard Cutland, Wargaming’s Head of Military Relations, take some time to chat about some more important D-Day stories.
June 9, 2018
D-Day – IV: The Atlantic Wall – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 29 Jun 2017The Germans had established a secure barrier against the Allied invasion of France – or so they believed, until the D-Day landings in Normandy caught them by surprise and the Atlantic Wall quickly fell apart.
June 8, 2018
D Day – III: La Résistance – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 20 Jun 2017Although the French government surrendered to the German invasion, French people rose up and formed resistance groups to take their country back. Charles de Gaulle and his Free French took advantage of these independent movements to help organize actions that would greatly aid the Allied landings at Normandy.
June 7, 2018
D-Day – II: The Secret War – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 13 Jun 2017The Germans expected the Allies to invade France to re-open the Western Front, but they did not know when or where the invasion would start – thanks largely to the operations of MI5, British intelligence services, who staged an elaborate deception called Operation Bodyguard designed to make the Germans think they would be invading Pas de Calais instead of their real target: Normandy.
June 6, 2018
D-Day: Canada at Juno Beach
Yesterday Today
Published on 3 Jun 2017D-Day: Canada at Juno Beach
6 June 1944
Of the nearly 150,000 Allied troops who landed or parachuted onto the Normandy coast, 14,000 were Canadians. They assaulted a beachfront code-named “Juno”.
The Royal Canadian Navy contributed 110 ships & 10,000 sailors in support of the landings while the RCAF had helped prepare the invasion by bombing targets inland. On D-Day & during the ensuing campaign, 15 RCAF fighter & fighter-bomber squadrons helped control the skies over Normandy and attacked enemy targets. On D-Day, Canadians suffered 1074 casualties, including 359 killed.
D-Day – I: The Great Crusade – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 6 Jun 2017D-Day: June 6, 1944, the day when Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy to retake France from the Germans. They hoped to take the Germans by surprise, and their decision to brave rough weather to make their landings certainly accomplished that, but despite these small advantages, the American forces at Utah and Omaha Beach had to overcome monumental challenges to establish a successful beachhead.
May 31, 2018
No5 MkI Enfield “Jungle Carbine”
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 18 Jan 2015http://www.forgottenweapons.com
The No.5 MkI Enfield, commonly called the “jungle carbine” is nearly the shortest-lived rifle in British military service. Introduced in 1944, they were declared obsolete in 1947 as the result of insoluble accuracy problems. The guns were originally developed from regular No4 Enfield rifles with the goal of producing a shorter and lighter variant for paratroops. This was done by shortening the barrel, adding a flash hider, and making lightening cuts in several places on the barrel and receiver (which were the cause of the problems that doomed the gun).
Not all No.5 rifles produced developed problems, and they were certainly handier than the regular Enfield rifles. They are noted for kicking harder, of course, and this is not really helped by the narrow rubber buttpad they came with (most of which are nice and hard today).
Theme music by Dylan Benson – http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com
May 30, 2018
Decisive Weapons S02E04 – U-Boat Killer: The Anti-Submarine Warship
erana19
Published on 25 Jan 20161996-1997 BBC documentary series. Series 2, Episode 4.
May 24, 2018
Tank Chats #30 M3 Grant | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 27 Jan 2017The thirtieth in a series of short films about some of the vehicles in our collection presented by The Tank Museum’s historian David Fletcher MBE.
Tanks of this type were first used in Western Desert in 1942. The M3’s were mechanically reliable, but soon superseded by Sherman.
May 16, 2018
Crusader Tank | Animated History
The Armchair Historian
Published on 25 Jun 2016
May 6, 2018
Tank Chats #29 Daimler Dingo Scout Car | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 21 Dec 2016The wheeled armoured scout car was the British Army’s principal reconnaissance vehicle from the beginning of World War II until the 1980s.
Scout cars were small and much quieter than a tracked vehicle; units equipped with scout cars relied on stealth to obtain information, rather than fighting for it. The Daimler Dingo entered service with the British Army in 1939 and served until the middle 1960s as a reconnaissance and liaison vehicle used by armoured and infantry divisions.
It was so versatile that a multitude of uses were found for it: medical officers used them to search for casualties in the battle field while one unit even issued a Dingo to its chaplain!
May 1, 2018
Shooting a Suppressed Sten Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 19 Mar 2018Sold for $7,475 (transferrable).
During World War Two, the British spent several years developing a silenced version of the Sten gun for special operations commandos and for dropping to mainland European resistance units. This is a recreation of one of the experimental types, based on a MkII Sten with the receiver lengthened into an integral suppressor. So – how does it shoot?
April 30, 2018
The Ferdinand: What Not To Do When Building a Tank
Potential History
Published on 11 Mar 2018A brief history of the VK 45.01 (P), or the Porsche Tiger, and the disaster it later became.
April 24, 2018
“Brilliant” plans to win WWII: How France planned to win the war?
Eastory
Published on 12 May 2017In these series we will examine several “brilliant” plans to win World War II and see why they failed. This video shows how France planned to win the upcoming confrontation with Germany and how it all went wrong.
