World War Two
Published 29 Jul 2021The extermination camps of Operation Reinhard are ready to start killing hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto, starting the deadliest 100 days of the Holocaust.
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July 30, 2021
The 100 Deadliest Days of the Holocaust Begin… – WAH 039 – July 1942, Pt .2
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July 28, 2021
How Hitler Created the World’s Worst Traffic Jam – WW2 – 152B – July 27, 1942
World War Two
Published 27 Jul 2021“I said DAMN, this traffic jam … How I hate to be late, hurts my motor to go so slow. Time I get home my supper be cold. Damn, this traffic jam.” (James Taylor, the Eastern Front, 1942)
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July 26, 2021
Eastern Front Deployments, July 1942 – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 25 Jul 2021It is what it says it is, the front line deployments of the Axis and Soviet forces in the Southern Part of the Eastern Front in late July 1942. Hitler’s forces invading, and Josef Stalin’s on defense.
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QotD: British Expeditionary Force (BEF) leadership in France, 1940
The Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, Lord Gort, was widely acknowledged for his personal bravery (he was a VC holder) and fighting spirit. Contemporaries however were sceptical of his Conceptual Skill. Major General Sir Edward Spears described him as “a simple, straight-forward, but not very clever man.” General Brooke, the incisive and ruthless commander of II Corps during the campaign (later Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff), though an admirer of Gort’s inspirational fighting spirit, frequently lamented the C-in-C’s total lack of strategic ability. This frustration is mentioned several times in Alanbrooke’s war diary, well before the German offensive began.
Gort was not a lone offender in Alanbrooke’s opinion. The latter believed that most of his fellow senior officers lacked Conceptual Skill. He suggested that the lack of strategic ability amongst British senior commanders was due to the best thinkers of his generation being lost in the Great War. Alanbrooke’s theory is questionable, for the Germans also lost many talented officers in the Great War, yet between the wars, actively promoted intellectual stimulation amongst its officer corps. Amongst the leading thinkers were Heinz Guderian, often regarded as the father of Blitzkrieg, although in his own book, Panzer Leader, is the first to admit that he took British ideas and developed them into something that worked. The British, it seems, were less stimulated by their own initial thinking on modern war.
This does not imply the Germans were unequivocal masters of big thinking. Many German army commanders were as locked into traditional thinking as their Allied opposite numbers. Guderian asserts that the sole reason the BEF was allowed to escape from Dunkirk was because the German Army High Command issued repeated halt orders to Guderian’s panzer corps, allowing the British the breathing space needed to avoid total defeat.
Both sides suffered in this area [interpersonal skills], and the problems arose mainly at senior level. Despite many British commanders speaking good French, the respective commanders on each side of this coalition had radically different opinions of how operations should be conducted and coordinated. There was virtually no attempt to ensure interoperability before May 1940 and the Anglo-French coalition was, at best, a well-mannered but reluctant partnership which did not stand the test of high-tempo operations well.
The lack of trust between the Allies ultimately drove Gort to contradict direct orders and use his last reserves to shore up the BEFs northern flank, rather than fritter them away in a joint counter-attack with the French that was dead in the water before it was launched. By the 25th May, just two weeks after the opening of combat operations, the Anglo-French coalition was crumbling. Bizarrely, this decision by Gort to abandon the French actually testifies to his one great moment of Conceptual Skill. He realised he was essentially committing career suicide when he ordered his troops towards the coast, but he also had the foresight to realise that the battle for France was already lost and that his sole duty from then on was to save Britain’s army.
Andy Johnson, “Dunkirk: Leadership Lessons in a Hard School”, The Wavell Room, 2017-08-01.
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July 25, 2021
Wehrmacht Conquers 250 Miles of Nothing – WW2 – 152a – July 24, 1942
World War Two
Published 24 Jul 2021The Soviets keep withdrawing from the advancing Axis forces, and Hitler keeps issuing contrary orders to try and stop that, with the results that logistics are getting screwed up and the mobile units are bogged down in huge traffic jams. The Allies have decided not to open a second front in Europe in 1942, but do choose another spot to begin the long counter offensive.
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July 23, 2021
FDR Knew about Pearl Harbor?! – WW2 – Reading Comments
World War Two
Published 22 Jul 2021Here is another installment of Across the Airwaves where Indy and Sparty take the opportunity to directly address some of the comments left by our community. In this episode, we take a look at some of the more controversial comments left on our videos.
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‘Armoured’ and ‘Unarmoured’ Carriers – Survivability vs Strike Power
Drachinifel
Published 2 Jan 2019In which we try to unpick the somewhat thorny issue of armoured vs unarmoured flight decks in WW2 carrier design.
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July 21, 2021
Tank Chats #116 | Churchill III | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 15 Jan 2021The Tank Museum’s Historian David Fletcher discusses the Second World War British Churchill Mark III. The Mark III was the first Churchill to receive the upgraded and more powerful 6 pounder gun. The Museum’s Mark III* also mentioned, is now an incredibly rare variant, and was converted from an AVRE and given the even more powerful 75mm gun.
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July 18, 2021
Stalingrad Now a Primary Objective?! – Hitler’s Chaotic Directives – WW2 – 151 – July 17, 1942
World War Two
Published 17 Jul 2021The second phase of Fall Blau begins with second guessing by the Axis Powers and constant changes in directive. The Soviet Union’s response to the successes of the first phase of Fall Blau is equally chaotic. Over in North Africa there is the question of it maybe ending in stalemate.
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July 17, 2021
Mers-el-Kebir – Tragedy on a Grand Scale
Drachinifel
Published 30 Oct 2019Today we look at the facts and thinking behind the attack on Mers-el-Kebir, with my own take on roles and responsibilities.
Comments and Discussion welcome.
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July 16, 2021
Forced Sterilization Experiments Begin at Auschwitz – WAH 038 – July 1942, Pt. 1
World War Two
Published 15 Jul 2021Operation Millennium is discontinued, while in Poland the Auschwitz Birkenau camp starts to systematically gas thousands of people a week. Some who aren’t murdered on arrival are subjected to horrific medical and sterilization experiments.
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July 14, 2021
Jewish Luftwaffe Officers, Allied POW’s, and Vichy Islands near Canada – WW2 – OOTF 023
World War Two
Published 13 Jul 2021How did Germans with Jewish heritage still serve in the Luftwaffe? And what happened to the Allied POW’s from the German invasions of France and Belgium? And what the hell happened with those tiny Vichy islands near Canada? We answer all of this in today’s Out of the Foxholes.
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Tank Chats #115 | A34 Comet | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 8 Jan 2021Join The Tank Museum’s Historian David Fletcher has he discusses the A34 Comet, widely regarded as the best tank Britain produced during the Second World War.
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July 13, 2021
Japanese Armour Doctrine, 1918-1942
The_Chieftain
Published 11 Jul 2021Sources include:
Japanese tanks and armoured Warfare 1932-45, David McCormack
WW2 Japanese Tank Tactics, Gordon Rottmen, Akira Takizawa
Japanese Tanks, Tactics and anti-tank weapons, Donald McLean
Type 89 and Tankette books, Kazunori YoshikawaContinuing on this series of videos supporting the WW2 Channel, I look at what I can find about how the Japanese thought of tanks and their usage, tempered by quite a bit of combat experience.
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