Quotulatiousness

February 26, 2022

In The Highest Tradition — Episode 3

Filed under: Asia, Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

British Army Documentaries
Published 27 Oct 2021

This third episode in a six-part series delving into the world of regimental tradition looks Gurkhas’ history and commitment to the British Army. They swear their oath of allegiance directly to Her Majesty the Queen and continue to revere “The Queen’s Truncheon”, which was awarded to them by Queen Victoria in recognition of their service during the Indian Mutiny.

© 1989

This production is for viewing purposes only and should not be reproduced without prior consent.

This film is part of a comprehensive collection of contemporary Military Training programmes and supporting documentation including scripts, storyboards and cue sheets.

All material is stored and archived. World War II and post-war material along with all original film material are held by the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive.

February 23, 2022

QotD: Debunking the “Spartan one-man-army” myth

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the Spartans, like all hoplites, were oriented very strongly towards group combat. The one-man-army is simply not how they fought, nor how they ever intended to fight.

Well, ok, perhaps they fought in groups, but were individually better at it. There is something to this. Multiple sources – most notably Xenophon stresses the greater degree of physical fitness that the Spartiates display (Xen. Lac. 4.5, 5.9). The Spartiates were rich after all, so they were well fed and able to build muscle accordingly; they also had a pretty active life-style (mostly things like sport-hunting) and kept athletically active. Chances are the average Spartiate was thus larger and fitter than the average hoplite – although again, the other Lakedaemonians in the phalanx (perioikoi, hypomeiones, mothakes, neodamodes, even helots fighting as hoplites) would probably balance out this effect to at least some degree (more strongly as time went on and the number of Spartiates shrunk!)

But what about martial skills and combat expertise? The fact is, there isn’t much evidence for a Spartan military training regime – certainly nothing like what the Romans had, or even what later Hellenistic Greek poleis set up. We’ve already discussed the agoge and you will note that at no point did swordsmanship, spear use, shield use, or anything of the like come up. There is, to be fair, some mock battles with fennel stalks in place of spears and some war-dances which may have served to mimic combat, but the agoge isn’t a training program, it’s an indoctrination program. Plutarch and Xenophon – who describe it – are quite clear on this: the point is to produce men who are obedient to the laws and subservient to the community (Xen. Lac. 2.10-11; Plut. Lyc. 25.3). Any advantages to military quality are evidently secondary (e.g. Xen. Lac. 2.7).

Xenophon himself notes – in the words of Cyrus (who he presents as an ideal ruler) – that hoplite-style warfare in close-combat required little practice (Xen. Cyrop. 2.1.9-16). And I want to stress two things about this statement: first that Xenophon had seen a lot of hoplite battle when he knew this and was in a position to know and second that he had also seen a lot of Sparta. It is hard to imagine Xenophon – with his Laconophilia – saying that practice for hoplites was unimportant if the Spartans had relied on it heavily. Nevertheless, there he is, saying that all of the movements a hoplite actually needed to perform – blocking with the shield, striking with spear or sword – were instinctive and did not need to be taught or practiced.

Plato provides our first solid evidence for the hoplomachia – practice drills in hoplite warfare – but immediately suggests through the person of Laches that the Spartans, specifically do not practice it (Plat. Lach. 182d-183a), because they think it doesn’t work. There is clearly some practicing with arms in Sparta as elsewhere in Greece (see J. K. Anderson, Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon (1970), 84-93 for the best discussion of the evidence; note also Wheeler, “Hoplomachia and Greek Dances in Arms” (1982)), but it never approaches the formal weapons drills we see from the Romans, or the complex fighting systems of the late Middle Ages. Nor does Sparta appear to be meaningfully exceptional in this regard; they seem to be exactly as tutored – or untutored – as all the other Greeks.

Nor may we rely on the assumption that the Spartan has more battle experience than his foes. The fact is that Greek poleis went to war fairly regularly and that they tended to bring most of their hoplite class out to battle when they did and as such most Greeks of the hoplite class from anywhere will have likely experienced combat. The Spartans are not unique in this and it is not clear that Sparta fights more often – they murder helots more often, sure, but this is hardly effective preparation for open battle.

(The contrast with Rome is again instructive. Sparta is intermittently at war, but the Roman Republic is continuously at war for all but six years out of five centuries, with the average Roman citizen probably spending upwards of seven years under arms – and this is before the professionalization of the legion. The average Roman free-holding farmer (the technical term is assidui) of the Middle Republic might truthfully have considered Leonidas and his 300 as amateurish by comparison.)

So what can we conclude? Well, the Spartiates are probably, on the whole, better nourished and fitter than their average opponent. If they have an edge in weapons training, it is fairly small – some sort of martial arts experts or superlative weapon-masters they are not. Which, of course they aren’t; the way they fight doesn’t require them to be. Hoplite fighting was never about individual martial excellence or skill, but about holding a position in the formation, supporting and being supported in turn by the shields of the men around you. The hoplite didn’t need to be a spear-master and evidently – we must agree with Xenophon – gained little from becoming so.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VI: Spartan Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-20.

February 19, 2022

QotD: Army marching speed in the pre-industrial era

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The intuitive and a touch clever method is to take normal human walking speed – around 3mph – multiply it by walking hours per day (maybe 8) and go with that. This makes intuitive sense, but if large army logistics made intuitive sense, they wouldn’t be hard, and as Clausewitz says (drink!) “War is very simple, but the simplest thing is very hard.” Logistics is very hard. So why don’t armies move at c. 25 miles per day?

So let’s think about – in very general terms – what needs to happen and in what order for a large body of infantry to march. Everyone wakes up and starts to get moving (probably around 5am). Breakfast needs to happen, which may require making fires. Tents need to be struck and stowed along with all of the gear in the baggage train and individual soldiers need to stow their own equipment. All sorts of small tasks add up to eat away parts of the morning. Then everyone needs to get gathered and ready to march.

And now – because you are a large body of infantry, you wait. Let me explain – let’s take a nominally full strength (c. 3,000 men) American Civil War brigade, marching on a road 13ft or so wide. You can get five men (a little cramped) into a single row on that road, meaning that the infantry itself stretches 600 ranks deep. Unlike in the movies (which love ultra-compact marching formations because it looks cool) you need a few feet of separation between rows for best effect (WW2 US Army guidelines specified 2-5 yards), let’s assume each soldier occupies about 5 feet in the marching order. So the infantry is 3,000ft long (914m; nine football fields). We also need unit separation (between the regiments, it’s important to avoid “accordioning” on the march and facilitate control; WW2 army regs suggested 100 yards between companies, 50 yards between platoons, so these could be quite large), so let’s round up to 4,000 ft (1219m; 13 football fields).

But we also have tents, food supplies, spare ammunition and all sorts of other of what the Romans would have called impedimenta (sidenote: if you are thinking, “well, but a pre-gunpowder army doesn’t need this; 1) arrows take up space and 2) camp entrenching supplies – the Romans marched heavy). How many wagons, pack animals or porters you need varies – the Romans seem to have often moved with a mule for every six-to-eight men, plus the army’s siege train. A good rule-of-thumb I’ve seen for American Civil War estimates is around 20 wagons per thousand, so 60 wagons. Rule of thumb in the ACW is 80 wagons to a mile of road, so our wagon train ought to take up around another 4,000ft.

(Sidenote: you can see why logistics gets complicated fast. Even in explaining a rule of thumb, I have to resort to rules of thumb, or else we have to inventory all of the stuff an infantry brigade needs, and all of the food they need and then parcel it out by wagons (and then figure for the mule-or-horse teams for the wagons) and on and on. Fortunately for the historians, this sort of work was done by the armies at the time and written down, so we tend to use their staff-work.)

So the entire force is probably a bit more than 8,000 ft long – 1.5 miles. In practice, there’s actually a lot more space eaten up in separation (between wagons, between men) so it would be longer, but I don’t want to get lost in the details. And this is for just 3,000 infantry – we have no cavalry with their many spare horses (three per man as a typical minimum) or god forbid a siege train which might involve hundreds of wagons.

Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How Fast Do Armies Move?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-10-06.

February 14, 2022

In The Highest Tradition — Episode 2

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

British Army Documentaries
Published 22 Oct 2021

This episode includes the story of Millie the Mule and just why a rose is still eaten, raw, in one battalion’s mess. It also features the “White Helmets”, a team of motorcycle stunt riders. One team of retired soldiers has an average age of 74 years but they still meet up to perform stunts in front of their successors.

© 1989

This production is for viewing purposes only and should not be reproduced without prior consent.

This film is part of a comprehensive collection of contemporary Military Training programmes and supporting documentation including scripts, storyboards and cue sheets.

All material is stored and archived. World War II and post-war material along with all original film material are held by the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive.

I have to mention that the primrose hackle, once worn with great pride by the Lancashire Fusiliers is still worn by the Lorne Scots (Peel, Dufferin & Halton Regiment) of the Canadian Army Reserve.

February 9, 2022

In The Highest Tradition – Episode 1

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

British Army Documentaries
Published 18 Oct 2021

[From the episode transcript – “Apart from discipline what emerges when you delve into British military tradition is that there’s no such entity as a British army. What you find is a confederation of regiments hopefully fighting on the same side all fiercely preserving their individuality by being as different from one another as possible.”]

First transmitted in 1989, this is the first episode in a six-part series that delves into the world of regimental tradition. This programme includes looks at the origins of Emperor Joseph Bonaparte’s chamber pot, a druid oration, and the story of a goat who escaped being eaten to become a regimental mascot.

© 1989

This production is for viewing purposes only and should not be reproduced without prior consent.

This film is part of a comprehensive collection of contemporary Military Training programmes and supporting documentation including scripts, storyboards and cue sheets.

All material is stored and archived. World War II and post-war material along with all original film material are held by the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive.

February 8, 2022

QotD: The East India Company’s rise to power

Filed under: Britain, Business, History, India, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by an unstable sociopath – Clive.

In many ways the EIC was a model of corporate efficiency: 100 years into its history, it had only 35 permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history. For all the power wielded today by the world’s largest corporations – whether ExxonMobil, Walmart or Google – they are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company. Yet if history shows anything, it is that in the intimate dance between the power of the state and that of the corporation, while the latter can be regulated, it will use all the resources in its power to resist.

When it suited, the EIC made much of its legal separation from the government. It argued forcefully, and successfully, that the document signed by Shah Alam – known as the Diwani – was the legal property of the company, not the Crown, even though the government had spent a massive sum on naval and military operations protecting the EIC’s Indian acquisitions. But the MPs who voted to uphold this legal distinction were not exactly neutral: nearly a quarter of them held company stock, which would have plummeted in value had the Crown taken over. For the same reason, the need to protect the company from foreign competition became a major aim of British foreign policy.

The transaction depicted in the painting [Wiki] was to have catastrophic consequences. As with all such corporations, then as now, the EIC was answerable only to its shareholders. With no stake in the just governance of the region, or its long-term wellbeing, the company’s rule quickly turned into the straightforward pillage of Bengal, and the rapid transfer westwards of its wealth.

Before long the province, already devastated by war, was struck down by the famine of 1769, then further ruined by high taxation. Company tax collectors were guilty of what today would be described as human rights violations. A senior official of the old Mughal regime in Bengal wrote in his diaries: “Indians were tortured to disclose their treasure; cities, towns and villages ransacked; jaghires and provinces purloined: these were the ‘delights’ and ‘religions’ of the directors and their servants.”

Bengal’s wealth rapidly drained into Britain, while its prosperous weavers and artisans were coerced “like so many slaves” by their new masters, and its markets flooded with British products. A proportion of the loot of Bengal went directly into Clive’s pocket. He returned to Britain with a personal fortune – then valued at £234,000 – that made him the richest self-made man in Europe. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, a victory that owed more to treachery, forged contracts, bankers and bribes than military prowess, he transferred to the EIC treasury no less than £2.5m seized from the defeated rulers of Bengal – in today’s currency, around £23m for Clive and £250m for the company.

William Dalrymple, “The East India Company: The original corporate raiders”, Guardian, 2015-03-04.

February 4, 2022

How the French Army Crushed the Socialist Paris Commune 1871 I GLORY & DEFEAT

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Real Time History
Published 3 Feb 2022

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The siege of Paris and the end of the Franco-Prussian War had brought social unrest in Paris (and other French cities) to a boiling point. Radical citizens take up arms and proclaim La Commune, a self-organized alternative to the French Republic. But soon the French Army is cracking down and Paris experiences a Week of Blood.

» THANK YOU TO OUR CO-PRODUCERS
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» OUR PODCAST
https://realtimehistory.net/podcast – interviews with historians and background info for the show.

» LITERATURE
Arand, Tobias: 1870/71. Der Deutsch-Französische Krieg erzählt in Einzelschicksalen. Hamburg 2018

Bauer, Gerhard u.a. (Hrsg.): Ausst.-Kat. MHM Dresden‚ Krieg – Macht – Nation. Wie das deutsche Kaiserreich entstand. Dresden 2020

Buk-Swienty, Tom: Feuer und Blut. Hauptmann Dinesen. Hamburg 2014

Gouttman, Alain: La grande défaite. 1870-1871. Paris 2015

Horne, Alistair: Es zogen die Preußen wohl über den Rhein. Bern, München, Wien 1967

» SOURCES

Bernhardt, Sarah: Ma double vie. Memoires. Paris 1907

Déclaration de la Commune de Paris. (19 avril 1871) https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt…

Goncourt, Edmond de: Journal des Goncourts. II.1. 1870-1871. Paris 1890

Hérisson, Maurice d’: Nouveau Journal d’un officier d’ordonannce. Paris 1889

Hoppenstedt, Julius von: Ein neues Wörth. Ein Schlachtenbild der Zukunft. Berlin 1909

Hugo, Victor: Choses vues, 2e série. Ollendorf 1913.

Kühnhauser, Florian: Kriegs-Erinnerungen eines Soldaten des königlich-bayerischen Infanterie-Leib-Regiments. Partenkirchen 1898

Meisner, Heinrich Otto (Hrsg.). Kaiser Friedrich III. Kriegstagebuch 1870/71. Berlin, Leipzig 1926

Plitt, Franz: Rückerinnerungen eines Dreiundachtzigers. Kassel 1903

Zola, Émile: La Débâcle. Paris 1892

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Maps: Battlefield Design
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Contains licensed material by getty images
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Canada’s delusionary approach to the question of providing military support to Ukraine

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Government, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, “Tommy Conway” explains why it makes no sense to take Canadian government and military leaders’ talking points on the situation in Ukraine seriously:

Canada has not done these things. We say we’re not sending weapons because “diplomacy is the solution”, but the reality is we can’t send anything meaningful. Any small arms we send would likely be on a NATO standard, and thus not very useful for Ukrainian forces who use Soviet calibers. As for the stuff the Kyiv really needs — the anti-tank and anti-air systems that the Americans, British, and Balts are sending — we are not sending them because we barely have any. Our anti-tank capability is mostly theoretical. Because we have not replaced older, worn-out systems, we have less anti-tank capability now than we did during the “decade of darkness” in the 1990s. We’ve known for decades that we need to equip the infantry with highly-portable, effective guided missiles like the U.S. Javelin, but we haven’t bothered, save for a few Spike missile systems for our special forces. Maybe our regular ground forces will get something similar by 2033. We have literally no air defence capability besides shooting machine guns in the air and hoping for the best, so we have no air defence missiles to send. Besides the fact that we can’t support Ukraine with weapons, we can’t really support NATO allies with reinforcements either because our units, on a modern battlefield, would lack the ability to defend themselves. We might be welcome as a political gesture, but we might also just be in the way.

Our deficiencies go deeper than weapons. CAF is well below strength. But instead of doubling down on core capabilities, CAF leadership insists on putting more people and resources into newer, faddish capabilities like cyber and information warfare, when we already have an entire government agency that does cyber. Our brigades — the core of the Canadian Army’s fighting power, are under-strength, and the army’s recent “Force 2025” concept concedes that the army should hope to field small, combat team elements as the core of any near-future operational deployment. To put this in perspective, a combat team makes up part of a battlegroup, which makes up part of a brigade. The Russians have 50 battlegroup equivalents on the Ukrainian border, and roughly 16 in the Kaliningrad exclave bordering Poland and Lithuania.

A Canadian deployment of a few combat teams would be too small a force even to help manage a large number of refugees in an active combat zone. We might be able to scrape together a battlegroup, but it would be vulnerable to air and tanks — in other words, not very useful. Once it was destroyed, that would probably be the majority of the Canadian Army’s combat power gone, with no hope of reconstituting it.

It would be one thing if the army sold this reorganization as a necessary evil in lean times, but this sort of hollowing-out is instead presented as allowing the army to “remain[…] ready to operate not only in the land domain, but pan-domain in a joint environment beyond simply reinforcing its existing capabilities.” Strip away the jargon, and it should be obvious that this phrasing is the victim of too much powerpoint and too little thinking. Junior NCOs and junior officers alike are instructed to build a “priority of work” into their plans for even small, simple operations. Given that we don’t have realistic “current capabilities”, reinforcing our shell of an army should obviously be on the top of the list before we commit resources to new things. At the very least we should be open and honest about what we can and can’t do.

If you ask most talking heads in the Canadian “defence space”, battlegroups that can’t battle aren’t a big deal. The idea that modern war will be won on social media or through “integration” and digital technologies, thus making the old ground-pounders outdated, is a common staple among civilian defence academics. It’s also present in the government’s defence policy, which goes on at length about space and cyberwar and climate change and “ungoverned spaces”, but little about building a realistic fighting force. This hopeful language about an army that can operate in a chaotic world without much messy stuff like hurting people or breaking things is obviously nonsense, but novelty and wishful thinking are pretty standard fare for academics and politicians. It’s much more concerning to see supposedly practical military people hold reality in such low regard.

The officer class’ shoddy thinking comes from decades of misguided pseudo-intellectual development. After the Somalia Affair in the 1990s, the CAF turned to liberal arts education as a way to buy credibility. There was nothing wrong with the idea of intellectual broadening in theory — the officer corps obviously needed reform. But the reforms were rushed and packaged, so they replaced one set of intellectual deficiencies with another.

February 1, 2022

US Armored Doctrine 1919-1942, Part 2

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Chieftain
Published 29 Jan 2022

Continuing on this series of videos supporting the WW2 Channel, this is part one of a two-part look at how the US Army ended up with the armored force with which it entered combat in North Africa. https://www.youtube.com/c/WorldWarTwo

If you missed part 1… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLkJP…

Sources include:
Forging the Thunderbolt (Gillie)
Men on Iron Ponies (Morton)
Greasy Automatons and the Horsey Set (Tedesco)
A number of Center of Military History documents to include GHQ Maneuvers 1941 https://history.army.mil/catalog/pubs…
A few other things I’ve forgotten about, but the above will get you 90% of the way there.

Improved-Computer-And-Scout Car Fund:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/The_Chieftain
Direct Paypal https://paypal.me/thechieftainshat

1939 Cavalry Journal with Polish cavalry article.
https://mcoepublic.blob.core.usgovclo…

January 26, 2022

QotD: “Waltzing Matilda”

Filed under: Australia, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The poet Banjo Paterson is traditionally credited with the song in the version generally performed, though some scholars continue to question this. Still, the song we know today began life in January 1895, when Paterson was visiting the Macpherson property at Dagworth Station in Queensland, north-west of Winton. Also visiting, from Victoria, was Christina Macpherson, who’d come home to spend Christmas with her father and brothers after the death of their mother. One day Christina played Paterson a tune she’d heard at the races in western Victoria, and the poet said he thought he could put words to it. The tune is said to have been “Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielea”, but there was also an 18th century English marching song called “The Bold Fusilier”. Paterson claimed never to have heard the earlier lyric but its pattern is so similar it’s impossible to believe that “Matilda” wasn’t laid out to the scheme of the earlier number:

    A gay Fusilier was marching down through Rochester
    Bound for the war in the Low Country
    And he cried as he tramped through the dear streets of Rochester
    Who’ll be a sojer for Marlb’ro with me?
    Who’ll be a sojer? Who’ll be a sojer?

    Who’ll be a sojer for Marlb’ro with me?

Marlborough being the Duke thereof: Winston Churchill’s forebear. “Cried as he tramped”? “Sang as he watched”? Don’t tell me that’s not a conscious evocation. Nonetheless, “Waltzing Matilda” is a splendid improvement on the original. If you’re a non-Australian who learned the song as a child, chances are you loved singing it long before you had a clue what the hell was going on. What’s a swagman? What’s a billabong? Why’s it under a coolibah tree? Who cares? It’s one of the most euphonious songs ever written, and the fact that the euphonies are all explicitly Australian and the words recur in no other well known song is all the more reason why “Matilda” should have been upgraded to official anthem status.

And yes, a “swagman” is a hobo, and this one steals a “jumbuck” (sheep), but he ends up drowning, which gives the song a surer moral resolution than most similar material. Yet in a sense that’s over-thinking it. It’s not about the literal meaning of the words, but rather the bigger picture that opens up when they’re set to the notes of that great rollicking melody: the big sky and empty horizon and blessed climate, all the possibilities of an island continent, a literally boundless liberation from the Victorian tenements and laborers’ cottages of cramped little England. Few of us would wish to be an actual swagman with a tucker bag, but the song is itself a kind of musical swagman with a psychological tucker bag, a rowdy vignette that captures the size of the land. One early version of it went “Rovin’ Australia, rovin’ Australia, who’ll come a-rovin’ Australia with me” – which is a lousy lyric, but accurately describes what the song does.

One sign of the song’s muscular quality is the number of variations. Of the rock’n’roll crowd’s monkeying around with it, I think I’ll stick with Bill Haley and the Comets’ goofy “Rockin’ Matilda”. The Pogues-Tom Waits approach – “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”, “Tom Traubert’s Blues” – seems to me to glum up the works unnecessarily. To use it for the story of a soldier who loses his legs at Gallipoli is unduly reductive: It’s too good a real marching song to be recast as an ironic marching song. I don’t know whether today’s diggers marched to “Matilda” in Afghanistan and Iraq and East Timor and wherever’s next but it’s one of the greatest marching songs ever, and today as a century ago it remains the great Australian contribution to the global songbook:

    Waltzing Matilda
    Waltzing Matilda
    You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me
    And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong

    You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me

Mark Steyn, adapted from A Song for the Season, 2008.

January 25, 2022

US Armored Doctrine 1919-1942, Part 1

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Chieftain
Published 22 Jan 2022

Continuing on this series of videos supporting the WW2 Channel, this is part one of a two-part look at how the US Army ended up with the armored force with which it entered combat in North Africa.

Sources include:
Forging the Thunderbolt (Gillie)
Men on Iron Ponies (Morton)
Greasy Automatons and the Horsey Set (Tedesco)
A number of Center of Military History documents
A few other things I’ve forgotten about, but the above will get you 90% of the way there.

Improved-Computer-And-Scout Car Fund:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/The_Chieftain
Direct Paypal https://paypal.me/thechieftainshat

Christie Tank Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0APcE…
1930 Cavalry Journal.
https://mcoepublic.blob.core.usgovclo…
1939 Cavalry Journal
https://mcoepublic.blob.core.usgovclo…
Soviet doctrine video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7nr8…
Interview with Ken Estes on USMC tank history
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DBmN…
Assessment of USMC light tanks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy4dw…

January 22, 2022

World War Zero – The Russo Japanese War

Filed under: China, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published 21 Jan 2022

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The Russo-Japanese War is nicknamed World War Zero – it was a clash between two world powers that foreshadowed war on an industrial scale as seen just 10 years later again. Gigantic land battles like the Battle of Mukden showed the true cost in manpower and materiel when modern armies clashed and the naval side of the war showed the strategic importance of modern navies.

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» BIBLIOGRAPHY
Akiyama Saneyuki, Gundan (Tokyo: Jitsugyō no Nihonsha, 1917)

Atsuo Yokoyama; Toshikatsu Nishikawa & Ichō Konsōshiamu, Heishitachi ga mita Nichi-Ro sensō, (Tokyo: Yūzankaku, 2012)

Corbett, Julian S., Maritime Operations in the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905, Volume I, (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015)

Corbett, Julian S., Maritime Operations in the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905, Volume II, (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015)

Деникин А. И. Путь русского офицера. (Нью-Йорк: Изд. им. А. Чехова, 1953)

Forczyk, Robert, Russian Battleship vs Japanese Battleship: Yellow Sea 1904-05, (Oxford: Osprey Publishing Ltd, 2009)

Hamby, Joel E, “Striking the Balance: Strategy and Force in the Russo-Japanese War” Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2004)

Hosokawa Gentarō, Byōinsen Kōsai Maru kenbunroku (Tokyo: Hakubunkan Shinsha, 1993)

Ivanov, A & Jowett P, The Russo-Japanese War 1904-05, (Oxford: Osprey Publishing Ltd, 2004)

Jacob, Frank, The Russo-Japanese War and its Shaping of the Twentieth Century, (London: Routledge, 2017)

Jukes, Geoffrey, The Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905, (Oxford: Osprey Publishing Ltd, 2014)

Kowner, Rotem (ed), Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5, Volume 1: Centennial Perspectives, (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2007)

Lynch, George & Palmer, Frederick, In Many Wars By Many War Correspondnets, (Tokyo: Tokyo Printing Co. 1904)

Mozawa Yusaku, Aru hohei no Nichi-Ro Sensō jūgun nikki (Tokyo: Sōshisha, 2005)

Murakami Hyōe, Konoe Rentai ki (Tokyo: Akita Shoten, 1967)

Paine, S. C. M., The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Steinberg, John W; Meaning, Bruce W; Schimmelpennick van der Oye, David; Wolff, David & Yokote, Shinji (eds.), The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero, (Leiden: Brill, 2005)

Stille, Mark, The Imperial Japanese Navy of the Russo-Japanese War, (Oxford: Osprey Publishing Ltd, 2016)

Takagi Suiu, Jinsei hachimenkan (Tokyo: Teikoku Kyōiku Kenkyūkai, 1927)

van Dijk, Kees, Pacific Strife: The Great Powers and Their Political and Economic Rivalries in Asia and the Western Pacific, 1870-1914, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015)

Warner, Denis & Warner, Peggy, The Tide at Sunrise: A History of the Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905, (London: Angus & Robertson, 1974)

»CREDITS
Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Jesse Alexander
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
Sound: Toni Steller
Editing: Jose Gamez
Motion Design: Philipp Appelt
Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
Research by: Jesse Alexander
Fact checking: Florian Wittig
Channel Design: Yves Thimian

Contains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2022

1842 Retreat From Kabul

Filed under: Asia, Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 22 Sep 2021

On January 13, 1842, a single man on horseback approached the British garrison at Jalalabad, where soldiers were waiting for a retreating army of several thousand. Exhausted, the man had part of his skull shaved off by a sword and his horse was so exhausted that it would soon perish. As he was brought into the walls of the city the lone man was asked where the rest of the army was. “I am the army,” he replied. Thus ended a disastrous retreat from Kabul, where a British force of some 4,500 soldiers and thousands of civilians was almost entirely destroyed.

This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

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Script by JCG

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January 11, 2022

QotD: The decline of the “Blimp class” in the British empire

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years affected everyone in England, but it had an especially direct effect upon two important sub-sections of the middle class. One was the military and imperialist middle class, generally nicknamed the Blimps, and the other the left-wing intelligentsia. These two seemingly hostile types, symbolic opposites – the halfpay colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain, like a dinosaur, the highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck – are mentally linked together and constantly interact upon one another; in any case they are born to a considerable extent into the same families.

Thirty years ago the Blimp class was already losing its vitality. The middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph. In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every year less room for individual initiative. Men like Clive, Nelson, Nicholson, Gordon would find no place for themselves in the modern British Empire. By 1920 nearly every inch of the colonial empire was in the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay. The one-time empire builders were reduced to the status of clerks, buried deeper and deeper under mounds of paper and red tape. In the early ‘twenties one could see, all over the Empire, the older officials, who had known more spacious days, writhing impotently under the changes that were happening. From that time onwards it has been next door to impossible to induce young men of spirit to take any part in imperial administration. And what was true of the official world was true also of the commercial. The great monopoly companies swallowed up hosts of petty traders. Instead of going out to trade adventurously in the Indies one went to an office stool in Bombay or Singapore. And life in Bombay or Singapore was actually duller and safer than life in London. Imperialist sentiment remained strong in the middle class, chiefly owing to family tradition, but the job of administering the Empire had ceased to appeal. Few able men went east of Suez if there was any way of avoiding it.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

December 30, 2021

The Story Of Sir Arthur Currie: From Gunner To General | The Great War With Norm Christie | Timeline

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Timeline – World History Documentaries
Published 28 Dec 2021

Military historian Norm Christie presents a four-part series examining the First World War from a Canadian perspective. As he begins his journey through the historic battlefields of France and Belgium, Christie focuses on the career of General Sir Arthur Currie, a soldier who rose through the ranks from humble gunner in 1897 to lead the Canadian Corps to several victories during the conflict which began in 1914.

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Note: The original YouTube title said “from Gunman to General”. Perhaps in British usage, “gunman” is a variant of “gunner” (an artilleryman), but in Canadian usage the word “gunman” almost invariably means armed criminal or terrorist, and while Sir Arthur’s career had its difficulties, he was never a criminal.

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