The Cold War
Published 1 Jun 2019Our series on the history of the Cold War period continues with a documentary on the creation of Israel, Zionist movement, reactions and diplomatic maneuvers of other states and the build-up to first Arab-Israeli war
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World War Two
Published 11 Nov 2021Chieftain returns to the North African theatre to talk us through the armored fighting vehicles in action around the time of Operation Torch. This episode is part one of two with Chieftain covering the German and Italian vehicles. Here, Chieftain looks at everything from the fearsome Tiger to the nemesis of LRDG: the Sahariana.
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A simple recognition of some of our family members who served in the First and Second World Wars:
Private William Penman, Scots Guards, died 16 May, 1915 at Le Touret, age 25 For the curious, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission the Royal British Legion, and the Library and Archives Canada WW1 and WW2 records site provide search engines you can use to look up your family name. The RBL’s Every One Remembered site shows you everyone who died in the Great War in British or Empire service (Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans and other Imperial countries). The CWGC site also includes those who died in the Second World War. Library and Archives Canada allows searches of the Canadian Expeditionary Force and the Royal Newfoundland Regiment for all who served during WW1, and including those who volunteered for the CEF but were not accepted.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD Canadian Army Medical Corps (1872-1918)
… perhaps there is a parallel between the state of human capital in the American elite [today] and the German elite during the war. The German soldiers were the best in the world, but the people further up the line were not the best tacticians. At the upper reaches, the strategists were terrible in all sorts of ways, starting with Hitler, who was laughably inept at running a war. Winning was never an option, but the Germans could have avoided total obliteration if they had better leaders.
The blame for this is always put on Hitler and that’s a good place to start, but the Germans had a brain power problem throughout the planning layer. This is obvious in how they went about making tanks. Instead of going for a tank that was cheap and easy to produce by a civilian workforce, they tried to build tanks that were complex and required specialists to produce. The effects of allied bombing raids were amplified by this strategic blunder in production planning. This is a very basic error in planning and execution.
One possible cause of this was that the middle-aged men who would have been sorting these production and design problems had died during the Great War. The German army tended to “use up” their units, rather than cycle them in and out of lines. That meant that a lot of experience with supply and logistics was lost in the trenches. The British and the Americans rotated units in and out of the lines, thus they came out of the war with a vast number of people with experience in the nuts and bolts of war fighting.
The current ruling class needs the Germans to be seen as the ultimate in super villains, but the truth is the Germans were dumb about a lot of important things. The Russians came up with sloped armor, for example, and the Germans never bothered to steal the idea, even after Kursk. The Germans got their hands on the Churchill tank, but never bothered to learn anything from it. They never learned from the Americans how to use communications to coordinate their artillery and their armor.
In many respects, the story of the tank in the war is a great proxy for the story of human capital and cultural intelligence. The Germans had the best trained military on earth, but they lacked human capital in the strategy and tactics layer. Either the culture was unable to produce it or there was simply not enough smart people to create the necessary smart fraction. That was ultimately why Germany was wiped from the map. It’s probably why no new culture has arisen from that place on the map either.
The Z Man, “Tanking It”, The Z Blog, 2019-03-01.
World War Two
Published 9 Nov 2021With men away at the front, couples have to separate and manage the struggle of war on their own. For women who stay at home, this is not any easier than for the man: worry, longing, loneliness, meaningless sex, the temptation of falling in love with others – it is an emotional rollercoaster.
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Forgotten Weapons
Published 22 Jul 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
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Having wrapped up our series on the major development of the Lee Enfield rifle in British service, I figured it would be a nice addendum to talk about the bayonets developed for the No4 rifle. These went through a substantial evolution, and are an interesting field for collectors all by themselves.
During World War One, the British used the Pattern 1907 bayonet, a long blade type essentially copied from the Japanese Type 30. By the 1920s, this was being reconsidered – the long blades were expensive, fragile, and perhaps not really necessary. When the No1 Mk VI rifle was put into trials, it was given a new bayonet style. This was inspired by the Swiss cyclists’ bayonet, with a cruciform spike instead of a true blade. It was only 8 inches long; this was determined to be long enough for virtually all use cases and being short minimized weight and bulk.
As World War Two progressed, the spike bayonet was simplified several times. Before the initial production of the first standard model (No4 MkI) was completed, the cruciform pattens had already been abandoned for a much simpler (and faster and cheaper) round body spike with a screwdriver-like point at the end. This was in turn simplified by separating the socket and spike into two parts for easier production, and then further simplified by casting the socket instead of forging it. After the war, the spike was replaced by a short blade-type socket bayonet (the No9), although this was rather short-lived because of the adoption of the SLR (FN FAL).
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
PauliosVids
Published 20 Nov 2018A look at the work of a bomb disposal squad.
World War Two
Published 6 Nov 2021After all these months of fighting, the British 8th Army breaks through Erwin Rommel’s Axis positions in North Africa, but the Allies have even bigger plans for that theater of war — a huge invasion of Vichy French North Africa to take place next week. The Soviets also have a plan for a huge invasion to take place very soon near Stalingrad, though the fighting in the city itself sees a lull the second half of this week.
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World War Two
Published 4 Nov 2021Georgy Zhukov told Josef Stain in September that if the Red Army could just hold out until November, he could put together a counteroffensive that would defeat the enemy. Well, November is here, and that counteroffensive is ready to kick off, but how was it put together? Let’s find out.
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World War Two
Published 4 Nov 2021As the war intensifies on all fronts, the occupied world is aflame with resistance and reprisals. From Paris to Papua New Guinea, Humanity is under attack — but it is also fighting back.
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The Tank Museum
Published 2 Jul 2021Welcome to Anti-Tank Chats, a brand-new series on the history of infantry weapons used in Anti-Tank warfare. In the second episode, Archive and Supporting Collections Manager, Stuart Wheeler explores the Panzerbüchse 39 Anti-Tank Rifle.
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And it’s not Captain Renault’s throwaway line about the Americans marching into Berlin (which, of course, did not happen in 1918). The error that Michael Curtis points out is very easy to miss:
Still from Casablanca (1942), with Captain Renault (Claude Rains) asking Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) why he came to Casablanca.
As time goes by, there is a consensus that Casablanca, the story of the cynical hard drinking American expatriate night club owner choosing between his love for a woman or helping her and her husband, a resistance hero escape from the town of Casablanca, a complex town controlled by the Vichy state under Nazi occupation, is one of the greatest films of all time. Its characters, dialogue, theme song, have become iconic. We’ll always have Casablanca. It is a film of moral ambiguity, that can be seen either as a theme of love and sacrifice, or as a political allegory about resistance against Nazism.
However, this brilliant film has a flaw. In one scene the camera focuses on the prefecture of the corrupt chief of police on the wall of which is the motto of the French Third Republic, “liberty, equality, fraternity”, inherited from the 1789 French revolution. But the Third Republic had been ended in May 1940, and its motto had been officially replaced by the slogan, “work, family, homeland”, of the new French State, popularly known as Vichy. The differences between the two mottos are still pertinent in French politics and culture today.
Some political and cultural problems are easy to solve, even if costly. Scotland recently spent seven months of research and $162,000 to create a new slogan that would increase tourism. It finally came up with a banal slogan, “Welcome to Scotland”. There is no easy solution for France which has been and remains a sharply divided society still confronting its history of the World War II years, the defeat of the French army by the Germans in June 1940, the end of the Third Republic and its replacement by the French State headed by 84 year old Marshall Philippe Petain, regarded as a hero of Verdun in World War I, located in Vichy, a spa in the Auvergne.
The Vichy régime participated in persecution and discrimination of the Jewish population, by aryanisation of property, propaganda, antisemitic ideology, anti-Jewish legislation, roundups, deportation to death and concentration camps. In view of this antisemitic attitude, it is a paradox that after the War, 75% of the Jewish population in France remained alive, the result of complex religious, cultural, and international factors. This can be compared to extermination of 80% of Jews in the Netherlands, and 45% in Belgium.
Nevertheless, 75,721 Jews were deported from France, and fewer than 2,000 survived. Persecution was extensive. Jews were banned from professions, civil service, journalism, business, entertainment, refugee Jews were held in concentration camps under French control, antisemitic legislation affected all Jews, and the tragedy of Vel d’Hiv occurred. French police carried out the first mass arrests of Jews in Paris in May 1941, and the first French deportation train left on March 12, 1942. The most infamous event, the roundup by French gendarmes, using batons and hoses, of 13,000 Jews took place on July 16-17, 1942 when the victims were taken to the Vel d’Hiv indoor bi-cycling stadium in Paris before being deported to Nazi camps. They included 7916 women, 1129 men and 4115 children.
By the so-called National Revolution, France would be rescued from the decadent Third Republic, and returned to purer values. The controversy continues. Was France guilty of contributing to the Holocaust, and who was responsible? First, were collaborators and sympathizers with the Nazis only a minority of the population and was Petain the “shield”, protecting France and the French people as much as it could within the country, while General de Gaulle abroad was the “sword”. A second defense was that Vichy could do little while the Germans occupiers were responsible. A third point is that Vichy tried to protect French national Jews by collaborating in the persecution, the deportation and ultimately extermination of foreign Jews in France.
Forgotten Weapons
Published 14 Jul 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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When we think of “last-ditch” rifles, we normally think of 1945 and the very end of World War Two. For the British, however, the lowest ebb of the war was in 1941 and 42, and it is during that period that the Lee Enfield was at its crudest. British ordnance instituted a number of simplifications to maximize weapons production. In particular:
– Walnut replaced with kiln-dried birch and beech for furniture
– Two-groove barrels replacing five-groove ones
– A vastly simplified 2-position flip sight in place of the original fine micrometer style
– Simplified bolt release, designated the No4 MkI* (which was only produced in the US and Canada)
– Aluminum buttplates
– Much reduced standards of fit and finish, leading to really ugly machine marks and haphazard markings.Most of these changes would be walked back later in the war as Britain’s footing became more solid, but they make a very interesting period of changes for the collector to study.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
World War Two
Published 30 Oct 2021The Allies may be on the verge of a breakthrough in North Africa, but they’re losing at sea to the Japanese this week, and the Axis are also advancing in the Caucasus, though the street by street struggle at Stalingrad continues as always.
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In The Critic, Phillips O’Brien has a historical hot take on the popular view of the Battle of Britain:
The Chain Home Tower in Great Baddow Chelmsford, a key part of Britain’s air defence network.
Photo by Stuart166axe via Wikimedia Commons.
The Battle of Britain was a lopsided affair. One side was much stronger and more modern, with advanced integrated detection technologies, superior logistics and intelligence, excellent fighter control, and much better production facilities churning out far more of the most important equipment.
The other side was plucky, flying from considerably less developed facilities, operating under severe handicaps in intelligence and flying time over the battle area, lacking the proper technology to achieve anything like what it wanted, and with a severely underutilized industrial base.
The stronger side was Great Britain and the plucky underdogs were the Germans.
The Battle of Britain was always one that the Germans were bound to lose quickly and disastrously. The key phase only lasted a few weeks during which German losses became unsustainably high and the Luftwaffe had to resort to the completely ineffective, if dramatic seeming, night time bombing of London and other British cities.
When the Battle of Britain entered this Blitz stage in early September, it was an admission by the Germans that they could not fly in the day over the UK and survive, and therefore they had no chance of actually damaging anything meaningfully in the UK.
Unfortunately this realistic vision of the Battle of Britain makes for both bad movies and bad politics, and for that reason a different vision has come down to us — that of plucky little Britain, relying on “the few” to defend itself against the mass power of the Luftwaffe and Nazi Germany.
This myth — partly witting, partly not — started to be created even before the Battle of Britain actually reached its climax, and it became such a useful one that it has persisted to today. Winston Churchill’s famous speech that “never has so much been owed by so many to so few” was given on August 20, 1940, though the Battle of Britain did not reach its highpoint until the two weeks between August 24 and September 6.
In that sense Churchill’s stirring phrase was a prophecy not a proper analysis — and it was a prophecy based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how strong the Luftwaffe and Germany were at the time. Churchill thought the Luftwaffe was twice as strong as it really was and that Germany was producing twice as many aircraft as it actually was. He believed that Britain had to rely on the few. It just wasn’t true.
Britain won the Battle of Britain because it was more powerful than Nazi Germany in the key areas the battle tested and because Britain was not standing alone, but fighting with a world-wide network of assets that meant it was never going to lose.
The Germans had one advantage going into the battle — the number of aircraft on hand (though the numbers of deployable German fighters was only a little higher than that of the RAF). However even this numerical advantage was partly irrelevant as German bombers, small, slow two-engine machines such as the HE-111 and DO-17, were inadequate to the task and the famous Stuka dive-bombers, even slower and more primitive, were more dangerous for their crews to fly than they ever were to the British being bombed by them.
In response the RAF had radar, which could see the Germans coming and give the RAF time to prepare, could fly for far longer over the Battle areas from its bases in southern England than the Germans could fly from their bases in France, and could rescue the majority of its pilots show down while the Germans lost theirs that survived to British prisoner of war camps.
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