Published on 25 Apr 2007
Nazi Sketch
July 4, 2017
A Bit of Fry & Laurie – Nazi sketch
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July 1, 2017
Hunting the Bismarck – III: A Chance to Strike – Extra History
Published on May 25, 2017
Sponsored by Wargaming! New players: Download World of Warships and use the code EXTRA1 for free goodies! http://cpm.wargaming.net/i3v7c6uu/?pu…
The order went out: Sink the Bismarck. Ships converged from all over the Atlantic to hunt down the pride of the German navy, and Swordfish planes launched from the aircraft carrier Ark Royal raced to harry the great warship.
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June 29, 2017
Tank Chats #12 TOG II*
Published on 17 Dec 2015
This enormous tank was designed on the premise that World War II would evolve in the same way as the First World War. Some believed that existing tanks would not be able to deal with such conditions, and one of the most influential was Sir Albert Stern, who had been secretary to the Landships Committee in the First World War. In company with many others involved in tank design in 1916, including Sir William Tritton, Sir Eustace Tennyson D’Eyncourt, Sir Ernest Swinton and Walter Wilson, Stern was authorised by the War Office to design a heavy tank on First World War principles.
Two prototypes were built, both known as TOG for The Old Gang and they were even manufactured by the company that built Little Willie and the first tanks in 1916, William Foster & Co. of Lincoln.
http://tankmuseum.org/museum-online/vehicles/object-e1951-49
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[Winter War] Motti Tactics – How The Finns Destroyed Soviet Divisions
Published on 18 Nov 2016
» SOURCES & LINKS «
Mountain Operations FM 3 97.6
https://archive.org/details/Mountain_Operations_FM_3-97.6Chew, Allen F.: Fighting the Russians In Winter – Three Case Studies
https://archive.org/details/FightingTheRussiansInWinter-nsiahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Finland
» CREDITS & SPECIAL THX «
Song: Ethan Meixsell – Demilitarized Zone
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June 28, 2017
TANKFEST 2017 – At The Tank Museum, Bovington
Published on 27 Jun 2017
Tanks. They’re like big, angry houses.
The Tank Museum: http://www.tankmuseum.org/home
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June 26, 2017
Tank Chats #11 Valentine
Published on 24 Nov 2015
The eleventh in a series of short films about some of the vehicles in our collection presented by The Tank Museum’s historian David Fletcher MBE.
The Valentine – A popular and reliable British tank. It was designed and built by Vickers-Armstrongs Ltd., in 1938 and offered to the Army who accepted it for production shortly before the outbreak of war in 1939.
It made quite a name for itself in the North African campaign and also served with New Zealand forces in the Pacific and with Soviet troops on the Russian front.
http://tankmuseum.org/museum-online/vehicles/object-e1949-344
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June 25, 2017
Fort Drum – America’s concrete battleship
Published on 15 Sep 2016
After the United States acquired the Philippines from Spain, the U.S. Board of Fortifications recommended that important harbors be fortified. This led to the development of defenses on several islands at the mouth of Manila and Subic Bays. One of these was El Fraile Island which would later become Fort Drum, America’s concrete battleship.
Read more about America’s concrete battleship, Fort Drum, here: http://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/americas-concrete-battleship-defended-manila-bay-until-the-very-end
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June 22, 2017
Hunting the Bismarck – II: The Mighty HMS Hood – Extra History
Published on May 18, 2017
Sponsored by Wargaming! New players: Download World of Warships and use the code EXTRA1 for free goodies! http://cpm.wargaming.net/i3v7c6uu/?pub_id=2017_Video_2
The Bismarck had been sighted, and the British fleet raced to intercept it with their own flagship: the mighty HMS Hood. As Hood and her escort caught up, a harrowing battle between four giant ships ensued.
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June 21, 2017
Physical Capital and Diminishing Returns
Published on 29 Mar 2016
Do you recall our question about Germany and Japan from our previous video?
How did they achieve record economic growth following World War II?
Today’s video will help answer that question. We’ll be digging into the K variable of our simplified Solow model: physical capital.
To help with our discussion, we’ll be exploring two specific concepts. The first is the iron logic of diminishing returns which states that, for each new input of capital, there is less and less output produced. Your first input of capital will likely be the most productive, because you’ll allocate this first unit to the most important, value-adding tasks.
The second concept we’ll cover is the marginal product of capital. This concept describes the output created by each new unit of invested capital.
Can you already see how these two forces of capital help answer our question about Germany and Japan?
For these two war-torn countries, the first few units of invested capital had a lot of bang for their buck. The first roads between destroyed cities, the first new steel mills, the first new businesses — these helped boost their growth rate tremendously.
Even more so, remember that Germany and Japan were growing from a low economic base after the war. It’s easy to grow a lot when the base is small. But all else being equal, you’d rather have a larger base, and grow slower.
Capital has some more nuances worth thinking about, which we’ll show in the next video. So get to watching, and in our next macroeconomics video, we’ll show you yet another problem surrounding physical capital.
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June 17, 2017
Hunting the Bismarck – I: The Pride of Germany – Extra History
Published on May 11, 2017
Sponsored by Wargaming! New players: Download World of Warships and use the code EXTRA1 for free goodies! http://cpm.wargaming.net/i3v7c6uu/?pub_id=2017_Video_1
During World War II, the Bismarck was the pride of the German navy – and the nightmare of Great Britain. It was enormous, overpowered, and a constant threat to the seas. So when they got word that the Bismarck had mobilized, the British raced to stop it.
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June 15, 2017
Why is Rommel so complicated? – Erwin Rommel vs. Desert Fox
Published on 17 May 2017
This video takes a look at why Erwin Rommel often called the “Desert Fox” is so complicated due to the various interest groups and his complex situation in World War 2.
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June 6, 2017
Where was the Luftwaffe on D-Day? – German Response to Operation Overlord, Normandy
Published on 26 May 2017
The 73 Anniversary of D-Day is nearly upon us so let us talk about the Luftwaffe‘s involvement in the Battle of Normandy!
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June 4, 2017
The Battle of Midway, 4-7 June 1942
Last month, Victor Davis Hanson recounted the American side of the Battle of Midway, which many historians see as the turning point of the Pacific War:
Battle of Midway deployment map, according to Seeschlachten der Weltgeschichte by William Koenig (German version of Epic Sea Battles) via Wikimedia
Seventy-five years ago (June 4-7, 1942), the astonishing American victory at the Battle of Midway changed the course of the Pacific War.
Just six months after the catastrophic Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. crushed the Imperial Japanese Navy off Midway Island (about 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu), sinking four of its aircraft carriers.
“Midway” referred to the small atoll roughly halfway between North America and Asia. But to Americans, “Midway” became a barometer of military progress. Just half a year after being surprised at Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy had already destroyed almost half of Japan’s existing carrier strength (after achieving a standoff at the Battle of the Coral Sea a month earlier).
The odds at the June 1942 battle favored the Japanese. The imperial fleet had four carriers to the Americans’ three, backed up by scores of battleships, cruisers and light carriers as part of the largest armada that had ever steamed from Japan.
No military had ever won more territory in six months than had Japan. Its Pacific Empire ranged from the Indian Ocean to the coast of the Aleutian Islands, and from the Russian-Manchurian border to Wake Island in the Pacific.
Yet the Japanese Navy was roundly defeated by an outnumbered and inexperienced American fleet at Midway. Why and how?
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May 31, 2017
“JFK before the speechwriters got to him is far more interesting”
Mark Steyn celebrates what would have been JFK’s 100th birthday by looking at the pre-Camelot JFK’s life:
Jack’s early life was certainly privileged but not idyllic. The family patriarch, Joe, is an easy target: an enthusiastic adulterer at home, and abroad, as US Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, an equally enthusiastic appeaser. His wife, Rose, reacted to his infidelities by retreating into her social life. The distance she put between her and her husband also left her nine children (four of whom she would outlive) beached on the other side of the divide. She regarded them, as one biographer put it, as “a management exercise”, and she believed in mostly hands-off management. Jack was a sickly child who spent months in hospital, but his mother was too far away to visit. Maternal affection was confined to a postcard from Paris, a ship-to-shore telegram from the Queen Mary. For the rest of his life, Kennedy disliked being touched or hugged even in the course of his many fleeting, transient sexual encounters.
Sex was fine. Anything more he found awkward and difficult. He showered up to five times a day. You can do your own analysis; everybody else does. “If he were my son,” declared a master at Choate, “I should take him to a gland specialist.” “He has never eaten enough vegetables,” decided Rose.
Duty is more easily borne when the the world’s eminences are your dinner companions. You meet the seigneurs, and you get to enjoy a little of their droit de, too. A former lover of Prince George, Duke of Kent introduced herself to young Jack as “a member of the British Royal Family by injection”. The line seemed fresh to him, as it might not have a quarter-century later were random showgirls and mob molls running around Vegas and Malibu introducing themselves as members of the Kennedy family by injection. He signed his letters from Harvard, “Stout-hearted Kennedy, despoiler of women.”
On the other hand, not many 24-year-olds get to shoot the breeze with Lord Halifax, British Ambassador in Washington, at the height of the Second World War about where the man he served as prime minister had gone wrong. “Halifax believed,” wrote young Kennedy after their conversation, “that Chamberlain was misled and defeated by his phrases, which he did not really believe in, such as ‘Peace in our time’.” By the time Kennedy got into the phrase-making business, he left it to the professionals to craft all that sing-songy seesawing jingles people seem to think meets the definition of powerful rhetoric: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. Mankind must put an end to cheap applause lines, but let us never fear to invert them formulaically yet portentously.
The JFK before the speechwriters got to him is far more interesting. “We are at a great disadvantage,” Kennedy the gunboat skipper writes from the Pacific. “The Russians could see their country invaded, the Chinese the same. The British were bombed, but we are fighting on some islands belonging to the Lever Company, a British concern making soap… I suppose if we were stockholders we would perhaps be doing better, but to see that by dying at Munda you are helping to ensure peace in our time takes a larger imagination than most men possess.”
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May 18, 2017
World of Warships – HMS Hood
Published on 17 May 2017
Look up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No don’t be silly, it’s HMS Hood. Bugger off with your Superman jokes, Jingles.
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