World War Two
Published 18 Mar 2023Operation U-Go, Renya Mutaguchi’s invasion of India, is in full swing this week, as his men aim at Imphal and Kohima; three Soviets Fronts batter their way through the Axis positions all over Ukraine; and there is a huge Allied bombing campaign at Cassino in Italy, which mistakenly kills a lot of Allied soldiers. That’s one busy week.
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March 19, 2023
The Japanese Invade India! – WW2 – Week 238 – March 18, 1944
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Inside An M4 Sherman Tank With Historian James Holland
History Hit
Published 21 Nov 2022‘Inside An M4 Sherman Tank With Historian James Holland’
In this video, military historian James Holland gets inside the most iconic tank of the Second World War — the ubiquitous US M4 Sherman Tank.
With over 50,000 having produced between 1942 and 1945, the Sherman was the most widely used medium tank by the United States and Western Allies in World War II.
Easily produced, maintained and equipped with a 75mm gun as well as a single hatch-mounted .50 caliber machine gun (plus two lighter .30 cals positioned in the turret and forward hull), the Sherman proved extremely effective against soft targets. It still lacked the range and firepower of the German Panther and Tiger tanks, but its speed, manoeuvrability and fast rate of fire made it ideal wartime workhorse.
More recently, the M4 Sherman has risen to stardom with the release of Hollywood blockbuster Fury (2014), starring Brad Pitt and Shia LaBeouf.
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March 17, 2023
Ukrainian, Yugoslav and Baltic Nazis? – ϟϟ Foreign Fighters Part 2
World War Two
Published 16 Mar 2023Across Europe, non-Germans are filling the ranks of Heinrich Himmler’s forces. These foreign fighters certainly don’t meet the racial standards of the SS but times are tough and the Reichsführer-SS needs warm bodies. So, does that mean Himmler’s given up on the idea of a Germanic master race? Not at all. And he uses all sorts of twisted esoteric logic to justify his latest moves.
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March 16, 2023
Field Marshal Slim’s one and only demotion … from lance-corporal back down to private
William Slim, arguably the best British general of the Second World War, didn’t have the fastest start to his military career, as recounted in an article by Frank Owen, the editor of the WW2 South East Asia theatre publication Phoenix. This and many others appear in Dr. Robert Lyman’s upcoming book Slim, Master of War:
The General stood on an ammunition box. Facing him in a green amphitheatre of the low hills that ring the Palel Plain, sat or squatted the British officers and sergeants of the 11th East African Division. They were then new to the Burma Front and were moving into the line the next day. The General removed his battered slouch hat, which the Gurkhas wear and which has become the headgear of the 14th Army. “Take a good look at my mug”, he advised. “Not that I consider it to be an oil painting. But I am the Army Commander and you had better be able to recognize me — if only to say “Look out, the old b…. is coming round”.
Lieutenant-General Sir William Slim, KCB, CB, DSO, MC (“Bill”) is 53, burly, grey and going a bit bald. His mug is large and weather beaten, with a broad nose, jutting jaw, and twinkling hazel eyes. He looks like a well-to-do West Country farmer, and could be one. For he has energy and patience and, above all, the man has common sense. However, so far Slim has not farmed. He started life as a junior clerk, once he was a school teacher, and then he became the foreman of a testing gang in a Midland engineering works. For the next 30 years Slim was a soldier.
He began at the bottom of the ladder as a Territorial private. August 4, 1914, found him at Summer camp with his regiment. The Territorials were at once embodied in the Regular Army, and Slim got his first stripe as lance-corporal. A few weeks later he was a private again, the only demotion that this Lieutenant-General has suffered.
It was a sweltering, dusty day and the regiment plodded on its twenty-mile route march down an endless Yorkshire lane. At that time British troops still marched in fours, so that Lance-Corporal Slim, as he swung along by the side of his men, made the fifth in the file, which brought him very close to the roadside. There were cottages there and an old lady stood at the garden gate.
“I can see her yet”, Slim reminisces. “she was a beautiful old lady with her hair neatly parted in the middle and wearing a black print dress. In her hand she held a beautiful jug, and on the top of that jug was a beautiful foam, indicating that it contained beer. She was offering it to the soldier boys.”
The Lance-Corporal took one pace to the side and grasped the jug. As he did, the column was halted with a roar. The Colonel, who rode a horse at its head, had glanced back. Slim was hailed before him and “busted” on the spot. The Colonel bellowed “Had we been in France you would have been shot.” Slim confides, “I thought he was a damned old fool – and he was. I lost my stripe, but he lost his army.” In truth he did, in France in March 1918. Bill soon got his stripe back.
Now in this corner of Palel Plain, one of India’s bloodiest battlefields and the scene of one of his greatest victories, Slim tells the officers and men of the 11th Division, “I have commanded every kind of formation from a section upwards to this army, which happens to be the largest single one in the world.” (At that time, Slim had under his command half a million troops.) “I tell you this simply that you shall realize I know what I am talking about. I understand the British soldier because I have been one, and I have learned about the Japanese soldier because I have been beaten by him. I have been kicked by this enemy in the place where it hurts, and all the way from Rangoon to India where I had to dust-off my pants. Now, gentlemen, we are kicking our Japanese neighbours back to Rangoon.”
Slim commanded the rear guard of the army that retreated from Burma in 1942. He is proud of that. His men marched and fought for a hundred days and nights and across a thousand miles. But this retreat was no Dunkirk. Says Slim “We brought our weapons out with us, and we carried our wounded, too. Dog-tired soldiers, hardly able to put one foot in front of another, would stagger along for hours carrying or holding up a wounded comrade. When at last they reached India over those terrible jungle mountains they did not go back to an island fortress and to their own people where they could rest and refit. The Army of Burma sank down on the frontier of India, dead beat and in rags. But, they fought here all through the downpour of the monsoon, and they saved India until a great new Army – which is this one – could be built up to take the offensive once again. In those days, if anyone had gone to me with a single piece of good news I would have burst out crying. Nobody ever did.”
He tells another story. One day he entered a jungle glade in a tank. In front of him stood a group of soldiers, in their midst the eternal Tommy. Assuming an optimism which he did not feel, Slim jumped out of the tank and approached them. “Gentlemen!” he said (which is the nice way that British generals sometimes address their troops) “Things might be worse!”
“‘Ow could they be worse?” inquired the Tommy.
“Well, it could rain” said Slim, lightly. He adds “And within quarter of an hour it did.”
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March 15, 2023
An Aircraft Carrier Without A Deck? | The Remarkable Brodie Landing System
Rex’s Hangar
Published 21 Sept 2022Today we’re taking a look at the remarkable Brodie Launch System. This device could be used on land or aboard ships, and it was designed to provide accessibility for light aircraft in extremely remote locations during WW2.
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March 14, 2023
German Troop Trials “Push-Button” Gewehr 41(W)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Nov 2022When the German army wanted a new semiauto service rifle in 1941, it received submissions from two companies; Walther and Mauser. Walther’s design didn’t strictly meet the criteria set forth, but it was clearly the better rifle and would eventually win the competition. This involved conducting troop trials, and Walther got an initial contract for 5,000 rifles for those trials. That first batch of rifles differed in several ways from the version that was ultimately put into mass production. Most substantially, the first version of the G41(W) had a push-button bolt release on the left side of the stock. After loading two stripper clips, one would push the button to close the bolt. Of course, one could also simply pull the bolt handle back slightly and release to do the same thing — and so the bolt release button was removed to simplify production. In addition, the bolt guide rail on the receiver would be lengthened on production, optics mounting rails were added (although never really used), and the serrations on the spring guide rod were dropped.
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March 13, 2023
Good “peacetime” generals versus good “wartime” generals
“Shady Maples“, a serving Canadian Army officer, explains why the skills and talents that allow an officer to rise to general rank in peacetime have no direct relationship with how that officer will perform in a shooting war:
Field Marshal Sir William Slim (1891-1970), during his time as GOC XIVth Army in Burma.
Portrait by No. 9 Army Film & Photographic Unit via Wikimedia Commons.
I am not the first person to make these kinds of observations. Jim Storr has written about peacetime promotion culture in the British Army and Thomas E. Ricks did the same with U.S. Army. Here is an excerpt from Storr:
It appears that many of those whom the British Army promoted in peacetime during the twentieth century were found wanting on the outbreak of war. Promotion to high command in peacetime very much reflects the values of existing senior commanders, themselves largely the products of a peacetime promotion system. To that extent it reflects deeply held values, and has an obvious impact on operational effectiveness in war.
Roughly two-thirds of those who commanded formations in the BEF [British Expeditionary Force] of 1940 were either sacked, retired immediately, or were never given another formation to command in the field.
Ricks describes a similar phenomenon occurring in the U.S. Army during the Second World War. Many senior leaders who had risen during peacetime couldn’t perform under real-world conditions. Under the stern hand of George C. Marshall, then Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, generals were removed from command at a rate that is unheard of today. Many of those who were fired had glowing records and some went on to redeem their reputations in later commands, which suggests that they had been promoted too soon or too high above their level of competence.
More recently, Russia has been churning through general officers in Ukraine, seemingly desperate to find someone who can achieve Putin’s war aims. If an army systematically promotes its officers above their level of competence in peacetime, then clearly their selection and assessment criteria are not aligned with the actual job requirements.
To illustrate the point, Storr compares careers of Second World War British Field Marshals. The first, Field Marshal John Verreker a.k.a. Lord Gort, was Commander-in-Chief (C.-in-C.) of the BEF during its disastrous efforts in France in 1940.
[Gort] was the epitome of the system: young, highly decorated, charismatic, promoted through and entirely within the system. He was only 51 when appointed CIGS [Chief of Imperial General Staff] … As C.-in-C. of the BEF, he “fussed over details and things of comparatively little consequence” and had a “constant preoccupation with things of small detail”.
After he oversaw the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk, Gort was removed from command and served out the rest of the war in non-combatant posts. It should be noted that Gort was not a bad soldier. During the First World War, he rose from the rank of captain to acting lieutenant-colonel and in the process earned the Distinguished Service Order (with bar) and the Victoria Cross. It was during the interwar years that Gort ascended from the substantive rank of Major to Field Marshal. Battles may be won with good-enough tactics and a lot of chutzpah, but Gort was unprepared for the complexities of wartime command at the strategic level. He did, however, excel at playing politics.
For contrast, here is Storr’s description of Field Marshal William “Bill” Slim:
[The] 47-year-old Bill Slim was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in 1938, perhaps at the last possible opportunity. Slim had not been to Sandhurst; he had gained his commission “through the back door” and had come from a modest background. The outbreak of the Second World War saw him commanding a brigade in East Africa. Within four years he was commanding the Fourteenth Army in Burma … Slim was obviously not the product of a stable heirarchy in peacetime. His rise to fame came entirely during wartime. He was arguably one of the greatest British generals of the twentieth century. The contrast with Gort could not be more marked.
For his part, Ricks has a takes a wider view of how the post-war U.S. Army made some officers too big to fail:
Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq were all small, ambiguous, increasingly unpopular wars, and in each, success was harder to define than it was in World War II. Firing generals seemed to send a signal to the public that the war was going poorly.
But that is only a partial explanation. Changes in our broader society are also to blame. During the 1950s, the military, like much of the nation, became more “corporate” — less tolerant of the maverick and more likely to favor conformist “organization men”. As a large, bureaucratized national-security establishment developed to wage the Cold War, the nation’s generals also began acting less like stewards of a profession, responsible to the public at large, and more like members of a guild, looking out primarily for their own interests.
It seems like loyalty up became more important than loyalty out.
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March 12, 2023
Zhukov hits the Ground Running – WW2 – Week 237 – March 11, 1944
World War Two
Published 11 Mar 2023The Soviets launch not one, not two, but three offensives in Ukraine this week, designed to destroy the entire southern wing of the German forces. The Japanese counterattack against the Americans on Bougainville finally begins after months of preparations, but there are more Japanese attacks elsewhere that get going: the operation to invade India.
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March 11, 2023
Why Japan Surrendered in WW2: Stalin or the Bomb?
Real Time History
Published 10 Mar 2023
It’s common wisdom that the nuclear bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused the Japanese surrender at the end of the 2nd World War. However, there has been a fierce historical debate if this narrative omits the role of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945 — or if this invasion was actually the main cause for the surrender.
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March 10, 2023
The evolution of a slur
Scott Alexander traces the reasons that we can comfortably call British people “Brits” but avoid using the similar contraction “Japs” for Japanese people:
Someone asks: why is “Jap” a slur? It’s the natural shortening of “Japanese person”, just as “Brit” is the natural shortening of “British person”. Nobody says “Brit” is a slur. Why should “Jap” be?
My understanding: originally it wasn’t a slur. Like any other word, you would use the long form (“Japanese person”) in dry formal language, and the short form (“Jap”) in informal or emotionally charged language. During World War II, there was a lot of informal emotionally charged language about Japanese people, mostly negative. The symmetry broke. Maybe “Japanese person” was used 60-40 positive vs. negative, and “Jap” was used 40-60. This isn’t enough to make a slur, but it’s enough to make a vague connotation. When people wanted to speak positively about the group, they used the slightly-more-positive-sounding “Japanese people”; when they wanted to speak negatively, they used the slightly-more-negative-sounding “Jap”.
At some point, someone must have commented on this explicitly: “Consider not using the word ‘Jap’, it makes you sound hostile”. Then anyone who didn’t want to sound hostile to the Japanese avoided it, and anyone who did want to sound hostile to the Japanese used it more. We started with perfect symmetry: both forms were 50-50 positive negative. Some chance events gave it slight asymmetry: maybe one form was 60-40 negative. Once someone said “That’s a slur, don’t use it”, the symmetry collapsed completely and it became 95-5 or something. Wikipedia gives the history of how the last few holdouts were mopped up. There was some road in Texas named “Jap Road” in 1905 after a beloved local Japanese community member: people protested that now the word was a slur, demanded it get changed, Texas resisted for a while, and eventually they gave in. Now it is surely 99-1, or 99.9-0.1, or something similar. Nobody ever uses the word “Jap” unless they are either extremely ignorant, or they are deliberately setting out to offend Japanese people.
This is a very stable situation. The original reason for concern — World War II — is long since over. Japanese people are well-represented in all areas of life. Perhaps if there were a Language Czar, he could declare that the reasons for forbidding the word “Jap” are long since over, and we can go back to having convenient short forms of things. But there is no such Czar. What actually happens is that three or four unrepentant racists still deliberately use the word “Jap” in their quest to offend people, and if anyone else uses it, everyone else takes it as a signal that they are an unrepentant racist. Any Japanese person who heard you say it would correctly feel unsafe. So nobody will say it, and they are correct not to do so. Like I said, a stable situation.
He also explains how and when (and how quickly) the use of the word “Negro” became extremely politically incorrect:
Slurs are like this too. Fifty years ago, “Negro” was the respectable, scholarly term for black people, used by everyone from white academics to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King. In 1966, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael said that white people had invented the term “Negro” as a descriptor, so people of African descent needed a new term they could be proud of, and he was choosing “black” because it sounded scary. All the pro-civil-rights white people loved this and used the new word to signal their support for civil rights, soon using “Negro” actively became a sign that you didn’t support civil rights, and now it’s a slur and society demands that politicians resign if they use it. Carmichael said — in a completely made up way that nobody had been thinking of before him — that “Negro” was a slur — and because people believed him it became true.
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March 8, 2023
First to the Fight: The Marines’ Reising M50 SMG
Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Nov 2022Eugene Reising developed a .45 ACP submachine gun in the late 1930s that was basically the opposite of the Thompson — it was light and handy, fired from a closed bolt with a delayed blowback action, and was inexpensive to produce. Reising contracted with Harrington & Richardson to produce the gun, and when it entered the market in early 1940 it found immediate interest from the USMC. Looking initially to equip the Marine Paratroop Regiment (Paramarines), the Corps wanted a gun that was light and compact. The Reising M55 with its folding stock was certainly those things and since the Thompson was essentially unavailable anyway (all production was going to the Army and foreign contracts), the Corps adopted the Reising with initial purchases of both the M50 and M55 in January and February of 1942.
What we are looking at today is an early production M50. It is blued with 29 barrel fins and the early style of sights, stock screw, trigger guard, magazine release, stock (the lacquer coating and sling swivels having been added by a previous owner), and firing pin. Later production guns would be improved and strengthened in various ways, but the Reising would never quite meet the needs of frontline combat troops, much to the displeasure of the Marines who first used them in the Pacific theater. Lacking interchangeable parts and susceptible to fouling and malfunctions, the Reisings were quickly replaced by other arms — some Johnson M1941 rifles, some M1 and M1A1 carbines, and various other guns. Rotated back to duties like ship boarding parties, guards, and military police, the Reising served very well. They were indeed handy and accurate guns, just not built for the extreme rigors of Pacific beach assaults and jungle foxholes.
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March 5, 2023
MacArthur and Nimitz Go Head-to-Head – Week 236 – March 4, 1944
World War Two
Published 4 Mar 2023The American attacks against the Admiralty Islands are successful, but this causes real tensions between commanders Douglas MacArthur and Chester Nimitz. Much of this week is taken up by planning and meetings on both sides — Adolf Hitler plans the occupation of Hungary, Josef Stalin plans new offensives in Ukraine, and the Allies plan to reconfigure their whole front in Italy. It’s all the prelude to an explosion of action.
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March 3, 2023
African Opinion in the War, Minor Axis Partners, and Foreign Ships in the British Navy – OOTF 30
World War Two
Published 2 Mar 2023How did the British manage their multinational Merchant Navy who are the non-American operators of Liberty ships? How did Kenyans, South Africans, and others from Britain’s Sub-Saharan empire view the war? And what is going on in Slovakia and Hungary right now? Find out in this episode of Out of the Foxholes.
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March 2, 2023
Anti-Tank Chats #6 | The Panzerfaust | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 4 Nov 2022Historian Stuart Wheeler is back with another anti-tank chat. In this episode, he is looking at the development and use of the legendary panzerfaust.
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February 27, 2023
Luftwaffe Defeated in One Week?! – War Against Humanity 099
World War Two
Published 26 Feb 2023Allied and German Air Forces fight fierce battles over Europe with civilians caught in the crossfire, while Joseph Stalin and Lavrenti Beria deport two entire ethnicities of half a million in just one week.
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