World War Two
Published 21 Feb 2024Did the Western Allies commit war crimes? What did Latin American troops do during the war? And, how did the top-secret proximity fuze change the face of warfare? Find out in this episode of Out of the Foxholes.
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February 22, 2024
Allied War Crimes, Latin American Troops, and Top-Secret Proximity Fuzes – WW2 – OOTF 033
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February 21, 2024
Can you make a tank disappear? The Evolution of Tank Camouflage
The Tank Museum
Published Nov 17, 2023It’s not easy to hide a tank. But over the years, military commanders have developed ways to disguise, cover and conceal the presence of their tanks from the enemy. This video is about the “art of deception” – and how, since World War One, through World War Two and into the present day, the science of tank camouflage has evolved to meet the conditions and threats of the contemporary battlefield.
00:00 | Intro
01:38 | WWI
06:26 | WW2
13:42 | Post War
19:40 | Conclusion
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February 20, 2024
Belt-fed Madsen LMG: When the Weird Get Weirder
Forgotten Weapons
Published Nov 15, 2023First produced in 1902, the Madsen was one of the first practical light machine guns, and it remained in production for nearly 5 decades. The Madsen system is a rather unusual recoil-operated mechanism with a tilting bolt and a remarkably short receiver. The most unusual variation on the system was the belt-fed, high rate-of-fire pattern developed for aircraft use. This program was initiated by the Danish Air Force in the mid 1920s, and several different patterns were built by the time World War Two erupted.
The model here was actually a pattern that was under production for Hungary when German forces occupied Denmark. Taking over the factory, they continued the production and the guns went to the Luftwaffe for airfield defensive use.
In order to use disintegrating links instead of box magazines, some very odd modifications had to be made to the Madsen. One set of feed packs are actually built into the belt box itself, and the gun cannot function without the box attached. The only feasible path for empty link ejection is directly upwards, and so a horseshoe-shaped link chute was attached to the top cover, guiding links up over the gun and dropping them out the right side of the receiver. Very weird!
While several thousand of these were made under German occupation, very few survive today and they are extremely rare on the US registry.
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February 18, 2024
German Counterattack in Pomerania – WW2 – Week 286 – February 17, 1945
World War Two
Published 17 Feb 2024The Germans finally launch a counterattack into the Soviet flanks, but it does not go as well as was as hoped. The Siege of Budapest comes to an end, also not well for the Germans. The Soviets have now also surrounded Breslau. In Burma, the Allies cross the Irrawaddy River, in the Philippines the fight for Manila continues, and in the Pacific preparations are underway for an American invasion of Iwo Jima Island.
01:50 The fight for East Prussia
04:08 German counterattack in Poland
07:00 Breslau Surrounded
07:57 The Siege of Budapest
09:14 Operation 4th Term in Italy
10:07 Operation Veritable Continues
11:36 Allies cross the Irrawaddy
14:43 The Fight in the Philippines
17:52 Preparations for Iwo Jima
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QotD: British meals – sauces
Here also we may mention the special sauces which are so regularly served with each kind of roast meat as to be almost an integral part of the dish. Hot roast beef is almost invariably served with horseradish sauce, a very hot, rather sweet sauce made of grated horseradish, sugar, vinegar and cream. With roast pork goes apple sauce, which is made of apples stewed with sugar and beaten up into a froth. With mutton or lamb there usually goes mint sauce, which is made of chopped mint, sugar and vinegar. Mutton is frequently eaten with redcurrant jelly, which is also served with hare and with venison. A roast fowl is always accompanied by bread sauce, which is made of the crumb of white bread and milk flavoured with onions, and is always served hot. It will be seen that British sauces have the tendency to be sweet, and some of the pickles that are eaten with cold meat are almost as sweet as jam. The British are great eaters of pickles, partly because the predilection for large joints means that in a British household there is a good deal of cold meat to finish up. In using up scraps of food they are not so imaginative as the peoples of some other countries, and British stews and “made-up dishes” – rissoles and the like – are not particularly distinguished. There are, however, two or three kinds of pie or meat-pudding which are peculiar to Britain and are good enough to be worth mentioning. One is steak-and-kidney pudding, which is made of chopped beef-steak and sheep’s kidney, encased in suet crust and steamed in a basin. Another is toad-in-the-hole, which is made of sausage embedded in a batter of milk, flour and eggs basked in the oven. There is also the humble cottage pie, which is simply minced beef or mutton, flavoured with onions, covered with a layer of mashed potatoes and baked until the potatoes are a nice brown. And finally there is the famous Scottish haggis, in which liver, oatmeal, onions and other ingredients are minced up and cooked inside the stomach of a sheep.
George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)
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February 17, 2024
Hitler speaking – not the raging, raving maniac we all think he was
Colby Cosh on a major German academic effort to provide an authoritative digital record of Adolf Hitler’s actual speeches, rather than the highly selective snippets we in the English speaking world have seen or the “official” transcripts that were published in Nazi propaganda organs:
Adolf Hitler making a speech sometime between 1933 and 1940.
Library and Archives Canada item number 3191955.
You may have seen reports that a consortium of German research institutions has set out on a seven-year project to compile, annotate and digitize every speech Adolf Hitler gave as chancellor of Germany. The effort is being led by the Institute of Contemporary History (Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte, or IfZ), a Munich-based German government research consortium founded in 1947 to preserve the various records of Germany’s experience under National Socialism. Since that time, there has been a whole lot more zeitgeschichte in Germany, of course, so the IfZ also does a lot of work on communism, the Cold War and German reunification. It helps run important museums and historical sites, such as Hitler’s mountain retreat on the slopes of the Obersalzberg.
[…]
The co-head of the new project is Magnus Brechtken, deputy director of the IfZ and author of a landmark 2017 biography of Hitler’s pet architect and economic manager, Albert Speer. In January, Brechtken gave an absorbing German-language interview explaining the need for a contemporary, digital Hitler edition. Run that puppy through Google Translate and you’ll see that it commences amusingly with the question, “So do you have Adolf Hitler’s voice running through your head all the time?”
(This probably wouldn’t be as hellish as it sounds. Hitler didn’t really bellow like a rabid animal at his audiences for hours on end, contrary to the image of him that you and I have in our heads, and he spoke with a low, musical Austrian accent that German speakers like Brechtken seem to appreciate.)
Brechtken observes that in writing his Speer book, he spurned Domarus and went to the Sisyphean trouble of running down primary versions of relevant Hitler speeches himself. Hundreds of audio recordings of Hitler have survived in the German Broadcasting Archive in Frankfurt, and the project team has computer scientists and even linguists on board to help integrate text, sound and historians’ notes on persons, events and the context of the speeches.
No doubt the finished product will be consumed by the uglier parts of today’s German political right, and its reaction is fully predictable. Some will say, “At last, the real Hitler!”; and an equal number will say, “This whole project is a parcel of falsehoods — it’s fake Hitler!”
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Breda 37: Italy’s Forgotten Heavy Machine Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published Nov 11, 2023The Breda Model 37 was Italy’s standard heavy machine gun (which meant a rifle-caliber gun fired only from a tripod) during World War Two. It was chambered for the 8x59mm cartridge, as Italy used a two-cartridge system at the time, with 6.5mm for rifles and the heavier 8mm for machine guns to exploit their longer effective range. Production began in 1937 and continued until the end of the war, with a batch being made for German use after the Italian armistice in 1943. Pre-war it was also sold to Portugal as the m/938. It remained in Italian use after the war as well, eventually replaced by the MG42/59.
The Breda 37 is a durable, reliable, and overall very good design. It uses 20-round feed strips, with the quite unusual feature of placing fired cases back into the strips rather than ejecting them out of the gun. It is a relatively unknown gun today, but this is not because of any inferiority on its part.
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February 15, 2024
Artillery! A WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 14 Feb 2024The modern artillery of the Great War was responsible for the vast majority of military deaths in that conflict, but how has artillery developed from that war to this one? Today we take a look at some of the artillery of WW2.
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February 14, 2024
Soviet World War Two Swords? The M1927 Shashka
Cossack forces have long been a key cavalry element of the Russian military, and this did not change during the Soviet era. The Cossacks had their own rather distinctive style of sword, the shashka, and the Red Army maintained the tradition of issuing them to Cossack cavalry troopers. In 1927, a new pattern was adopted, and it was produced and issued from 1928 until 1946. The shashka has a slightly curved, single-edged blade and no handguard. The model 1927 military type was initially made with a rather decorative pommel, but this was simplified to just a plain 5-pointed star as German advances into Russia really stressed Soviet industrial production. However, production and issue of the shashka continued uninterrupted throughout the war.
Originally there were separate trooper and officer versions of the model 1927, with the trooper version including the ability to stow the trooper’s Mosin-Nagant rifle bayonet on the side of the shaskha scabbard. As cavalry, the Cossacks were not expected to carry their rifles with bayonets fixed, and this served in lieu of a bayonet sheath. By 1944 this feature was omitted, as the M91/30 was replaced by the M38 and M44 carbines and submachine guns, which did not use bayonets.
The decorations returned to the M1927 shashka in 1945, with a series made for the Victory Day parade celebrating the defeat of Germany. Today’s example is one of these, and in beautiful condition.
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February 12, 2024
Yalta, When Stalin Split the World – a WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 11 February 2024Indy and Sparty take you through the negotiations at Yalta as The Big Three thrash out the shape of the postwar world. As the splits between East and West continue to deepen, who will come out on top?
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Look at Life – Amphibian DUKW (1962)
Classic Vehicle Channel
Published Apr 23, 2020The military have finished with their amphibious truck know as the DUKW. They’re sold off to the general public for use in civilian life, including divers and even a group of monks.
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February 11, 2024
The Battle of Manila Begins – WW2 – Week 285 – February 10, 1945
World War Two
Published 10 Feb 2024The American advance on Luzon has reached the Philippine capital, and it looks like they have a real fight on their hands with the Japanese there. There are supposed to be two new Allied operations starting in Western Europe, but one is delayed by flooding. The Allies do manage to eliminate the Colmar Pocket in the west, though. On the Eastern Front, there are new Soviet attacks in Pomerania and East Prussia, as well as out of the Steinau Bridgehead to the south, and in Budapest, it looks like the Soviet siege might soon end in victory.
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February 10, 2024
The War Goals to End WW2 in 1945 – a WW2 Special
World War Two
Published Feb 8, 2024While World War Two looks like it is about to end, the belligerent powers have vastly different goals for that end. Differences that may or may not prolong the war, will decide the survival of tens of millions of people, and the future fate of all of Humanity.
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February 7, 2024
The Magician Who Fooled the Nazis (and all of us)
World War Two
Published 7 Nov 2023Military deception is tricky. Sometimes you need to destroy a crucial piece of war industry or make an entire harbour disappear. Who do you call for this sort of job? Well, someone who knows a thing or two about tricking the eye. You need a professional magician. You need Jasper Maskelyne. But is there more to this illusionist than meets the eye?
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February 5, 2024
Western Front Tank Warfare 1944
World War Two
Published Nov 8, 2023Indy takes a look at the armoured beasts battling it out on the Western Front. On the German side we have vehicles like the long-serving Panzer IV, the sleek and modern Panther, and the obnoxiously heavy King Tiger. These are arrayed against the American stalwart, the M4 Sherman, and British tanks like the up-gunned Firefly, Cromwell, and Churchill.
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