Few things capture modern planning like a multibillion-dollar airport no one’s entirely sure will have any planes. Enter Western Sydney International Airport (WSI), Australia’s shiny $5 billion gamble at Badgerys Creek. It’s a development so hyped it already has merch, an anticipated metro line, and a better skincare routine than most of us, despite rumors it may spend its first year servicing only freight and the occasional confused ibis.
If history teaches us anything, it’s that airports, like wrinkle creams which cost the GDP of a small country but couldn’t iron out a bedsheet, can be wildly overpromised and underdelivered. Western Sydney’s runway might yet join the vainglorious global herd of White Elephant Airports: majestic, expensive, and standing alone in a field wondering where everyone went.
Let’s take a safari.
Mirabel: Montreal’s Monument to Inconvenience
Built in 1975, Mirabel International was meant to replace Montreal’s Dorval Airport and usher in a new aviation era. Instead, it became the architectural embodiment of “We should’ve checked the map”. Located more than 50 kilometers from the city, it was so unpopular that passengers would rather fling themselves onto dogsleds than make the commute.
Eventually, Mirabel stopped pretending to be an airport and transitioned into its second act: a car-racing track and film set. Somewhere in Quebec there’s probably still a baggage carousel being used as a wedding dance floor.
Ciudad Real: A Billion-Euro Garage Sale
Spain saw Mirabel and said, “Hold my sangria”. Ciudad Real International Airport opened in 2009 with a €1.1 billion price tag, dreams of high-speed rail links, and the confidence of a Bachelor contestant in week one. Within three years, it had no flights, no buyers, and no shame.
It was eventually auctioned for €10,000, less than a parking space in Bondi or a bottle of champagne at a Sydney rooftop bar. One imagines the bidding process was just two blokes shrugging in a room and someone whispering, “Ten grand and a paella voucher?”
Berlin Brandenburg: German Efficiency, But Make It Chaos
If you’ve ever wanted to see what happens when a nation famous for precision tries on farce, just pay a visit to Berlin Brandenburg Airport. Construction began in 2006, with an opening scheduled for 2011. By 2015, it was such a national embarrassment that Berliners stopped making jokes about British plumbing to recover emotionally.
In 2020, it finally launched amid the global COVID pandemic, after delays caused by faulty fire systems, suspicious cables, and the ghost of every German engineer pacing in dismay.
Nicole James, “Australia’s New Albino Elephant Sanctuary (Now with Parking)”, The Freeman, 2025-10-16.
January 21, 2026
QotD: White elephant airports
October 6, 2025
Fire and Fury – Bomber Command 1943 – The Ruhr, Hamburg, Berlin and Disaster
HardThrasher
Published 4 Oct 2025The Bomber War continues — In this second part of our deep dive into RAF Bomber Command, we explore the WW2 strategic bombing campaign that raged from the Spring of 1943 to the Spring of 1944.
This episode covers the Battle of the Ruhr, the Hamburg Firestorm, the raid on the V1 and V2 rocket research site at Peenemünde, and the disastrous attacks on Berlin and Nuremberg. We’ll look at how these missions affected the course of World War II, the Nazi war economy, and the future of the Royal Air Force itself.
00:00:00 – Introduction
00:00:23 – Quotation
00:00:57 – The Battle of the Ruhr and Context of the War
00:04:59 – Planning for Operation Gomorrah
00:06:29 – Window
00:07:42 – Gomorrah
00:10:00 – Firestorm
00:14:53 – An Old “Friend” Returns
00:16:00 – Germany Goes On The Defensive
00:18:59 – Assessing the Damage
00:19:54 – Killing the V1 & V2s at Peenemünde
00:22:51 – The Battle of Berlin
00:27:53 – Reality Check for Bomber Command
00:29:50 – Disaster over Nuremberg
00:31:23 – Summing Up
00:32:05 – Survivor’s ClubReferences –
xvi The Wages of Destruction, Tooze, Penguin, 2006 (from the 2007 reprint) p. 590 and on
xvii The Wages of Destruction, Tooze, Penguin, 2006 (from the 2007 reprint) p. 597
xviii Stalin’s War, McMeekin, Penguin, 2022 p.470 and on
ixx Ibid p.327
xx The Bombing War, Overy, Penguin, 2012, p.332
xxi The Bombing War, Overy, Penguin, 2012, p323
xxii Ibid p.334
xxiii The Bomber Command War Diaries, Middlebrook and Everitt, Penguin, 1990 (orig 1985) p.413
xxiv Ibid p.440
xxv Speer: Hitler’s Architect, Kitchen, Penguin, 2020 p.185
xxvi The Rise and Fall of the German Air Force, Arm & Armour Press, 1983, p.236
xxvii The Bomber War, Overy, Penguin, 2020, p.336
xxviii The Rise and Fall of the German Airforce, Arms and Armour Press, 1983, p.235
ixxx Flak, Westerman, University of Kansas Press, 2001 p.202 and on
xxx The Pathfinders, Iredale, Penguin, 2021, p.213
xxxi Bomber War, Hastings, Pan Military, 1977, p. 371 (2020 reprint)
xxxii Bomber Command’s War Against Germany, Frankland, Pen & Sword, 2020 (see also original AIR 41/57, 1951) p.89
xxxiii AIR 16/487 – Despatches on War Operations Feb 1942 – May 1945
xxxiv Bomber Command’s War Against Germany, Frankland, Pen & Sword, 2020 (see also original AIR 41/57, 1951) p.197
xxxv Bomber Command, Hastings, Pan, 2021 (orig. 1979) Pan, p.373
xxxvi Bomber Command, Hastings, Pan, 2021 (orig. 1979) Pan, p.376Get Your Merch Here – https://hardthrasher-shop.fourthwall….
Email me – lordhardthrasher@gmail.com
September 8, 2025
August 8, 2025
Germany’s Darkest Night Yet? – Rise of Hitler 21 – September 1931
World War Two
Published 7 Aug, 2025September 1931: Berlin descends into chaos as Nazis unleash a violent pogrom on Jewish New Year — while the police stand by. The scandal of the Kurfürstendamm riot rocks Germany, but the month’s headlines don’t stop there: Hitler’s niece is found dead under mysterious circumstances, France’s leaders visit Berlin to a frosty reception, and Japanese troops invade Manchuria. Extremists surge at the polls as democracy teeters — can the Republic survive?
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May 9, 2025
Nazi vs. Nazi – The Rebellion Within – Rise of Hitler 16, April 1931
World War Two
Published 8 May 2025April 1931 plunges Hitler’s Nazis into crisis as SA leader Walter Stennes leads a dramatic internal revolt, challenging Hitler’s oath to legality. Meanwhile the Nazis loose their only ministerial post and President Hindenburg’s emergency decree intensifies clashes with communists, leading to mass arrests during banned protests.
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May 8, 2025
Aftermath
I’ve read a few books on what happened in Europe after the surrender of Nazi Germany in May of 1945, but there is always more to learn about a continent-wide struggle to recover from a disaster of the magnitude of World War Two:
On a train journey earlier this year between Cologne and Berlin, I began to read Harald Jähner’s Aftermath, a fascinating account of the years when Germany emerged from the destruction and shame of the Third Reich.
The war ended 80 years ago today, and in the defeated nation the scenes were primeval and apocalyptic. In Berlin, journalist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, along with a doctor, actor and musical conductor, discovered a white ox wandering through the streets and, after finding a Russian soldier to shoot it, found themselves suddenly surrounded by a ravenous mob. She recalled: “Suddenly, as if the underworld had been spying on them, a noisy crowd gathered around the dead ox. They crept from a hundred basements. Women, men, children. Were they lured by the smell of blood? Within minutes they were scrambling for meat.” The bourgeois of Middle Europe reduced to an animal state.
Germany was a pile of rubble; the ruins in the Reich‘s capital amounted to 55 million cubic metres, enough for a wall 30 metres wide and 5 metres high stretching all the way to Cologne. In West Berlin, for the next 22 years, up to 800 lorries a day unloaded so much rubble on the former Factory of Armaments Technology that it became known as Teufelsberg, or Devil’s Mountain. The last “rubble brigade” in Dresden only finished work in 1977.
Although Nazi party members were made to clear rubble as a punishment, the Germans hardly needed encouragement; on 23 April, the war not yet over, the municipal building of Mannheim had already declared WE ARE REBUILDING.
The communal process of clearing away seemed to serve a psychological function for a hungry, defeated people, and was encouraged by the new authorities — all the “heroic cinematic rhetoric” employed by the UFA film company of the Nazi regime now used to get the country clearing up. There was even a cinema genre called Trümmerfilm, rubble films, one — And The Heavens Above Us — ending with the Lord’s Prayer being recited among the ruins of Germany.
German POWs, “dispirited, disciplined and dutiful to the point of submissiveness”, made life easy for occupying soldiers while their former victims were far more troublesome. (Russian POWs in France caused such anarchy that they called in a Soviet liaison officer who selected ten at random and shot them, bringing the mob under control.) This led to a bizarre alliance between Allied and German law enforcement working hand-in-hand from the early days of the occupation, with joint raids and weapons searches on displaced persons from Poland and the Soviet Union, which the Poles and Russians “of course saw as an intolerable provocation”.
London cheered on May 8, 1945. In Berlin they searched for food and cleared rubble
In a strange irony, there was now a large-scale migration of Jews from Poland to Germany, fleeing fresh persecution despite the horror they had endured. Even here in a camp system under Allied control, there were anti-Semitic attacks from other survivors, so that Jews were eventually separated altogether following the conclusions of the Harrison Report. The Americans, in a likely first in European history, now made Jews an explicitly privileged group, with superior camp conditions.
The Polish Jews set up their own camp in the Munich district of Bogenhausen where locals were confused and disorientated by the new arrivals. These eastern Jews actually looked like the alien caricatures Nazi propaganda had bombarded them with, dressed in oriental clothes from the shtetl, totally unlike the assimilated German Jews they had grown up with. One local complained that “the Jews from the old days were really, how can I put it, very intelligent, polite and unusually friendly and elegant people. And of course the ones who turned up after the war included all sorts.” The Jews “from the old days” were “the good Jews”, he lamented.
Holocaust guilt was in the distant future for most, and newly re-established newspapers weren’t remotely shy about publishing anti-Semitic content. One printed a resident’s complaint about Polish Jews that “these were not people who had been persecuted” but “the sputum, the yeast and the scum of elements who were never deported but, to avoid regular work, came here from the eastern states, in many cases completely illegally, and are now spreading themselves raggedly about the place.”
May 2, 2025
Monkey Rockets, beavers with Parachutes, and the Fall of Empires – 1948 Newscast – W2W 26
TimeGhost History
Published 1 May 2025In 1948, the Cold War intensifies as Stalin blockades Berlin, triggering a dramatic US-led Airlift to save West Berlin. Meanwhile, the British Empire continues to crumble as Burma, Ceylon, and Palestine gain independence — with Israel’s declaration igniting immediate war. America launches the Marshall Plan, the Soviets tighten their grip in Eastern Europe, and televised anticommunist hearings captivate the US public. The year ends with humanity pushing new frontiers — from launching monkeys into space to relocating beavers by parachute — showing just how rapidly the world is changing.
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April 24, 2025
Berlin Airlift: From Bombs to Candy – W2W 23 – 1948 Q3
TimeGhost History
Published 23 Apr 2025In 1948, Stalin blockades West Berlin, isolating over two million people without food, fuel, or supplies. Refusing to surrender the city, Western powers launch the Berlin Airlift, history’s largest aerial supply mission, to deliver food, coal, and even candy. As tensions soar, planes defy Soviet threats around the clock — can the Allies really sustain a city from the sky?
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April 19, 2025
Downfall: The Battle of Berlin 1945
Real Time History
Published 6 Dec 2024April 1945. After nearly six years of war, the Red Army stands massed on the banks of the Oder River in eastern Germany. The Nazi capital and Hitler’s bunker are just 60km away, but the Nazi Party and the Wehrmacht are preparing to fight to the bitter end in the final struggle of WW2 in Europe – the Battle for Berlin.
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March 27, 2025
Uncovered: The CIA’s Secret War That Shook Stalin! – W2W 16 – 1947 Q3
TimeGhost History
Published 26 Mar 2025In 1947, the Cold War intensifies as the Truman and Zhdanov Doctrines divide the world into opposing camps. The CIA is born to counter communist threats, while Stalin’s Cominform tightens its grip across Eastern Europe. From Berlin’s streets crawling with double agents, to covert American election meddling in Italy, espionage becomes the frontline of this global showdown. Welcome to a new age of spies, secret doctrines, and ruthless intelligence wars.
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February 25, 2025
German election results
Germany voted on Sunday (on paper, and the votes all got counted in less than 24 hours) and the most likely result will be a coalition between the centre-right CDU and the social democratic SPD, excluding the second-largest party, the extremely extreme extreme right-wing AfD:
The federal elections in Germany are over, and the preliminary count is in. The CDU/CSU have narrowly avoided the Kenyapocalypse, as the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht failed to meet the 5% hurdle for representation in the Bundestag by a mere 13,435 votes. In consequence, the Social Democrats and the Union parties together will command a thin but workable parliamentary majority of 328 seats. In all likelihood, we will have a black-red government under CDU Chancellor Friedrich Merz – a not-so-grand coalition of the kind we grew used to under Angela Merkel.
Here is a district-by-district map of the election results, with each district coloured according to the winning party. Black is CDU/CSU, blue is AfD, red is SPD and green is Green:
My district is the one all the way due south of Munich on the Austrian border. The CSU got 41.9% of the party vote here – one of their best showings in all of Bavaria.
The Losers
The preliminary results of each party compared to the last elections in 2021 reveal last night’s losers clearly enough:
This vote was as poignant a rejection of Olaf Scholz’s parodically bad traffic light coalition as anyone could imagine. Everybody has improved at the expense of red-green-yellow, but it is interesting to observe who has done the worst.
The Greens dominated the traffic light, and voters have dealt them the lightest punishment of all. Imagine how crazy you have to be ever to enter a government with this toxic party: They get their way on all major political issues and you get punished for it. Even so, the Greens did much worse than I thought they would. Almost everybody beyond their hardcore devotees has abandoned them, and Green Chancellor Candidate Robert Habeck (who also lost his direct mandate in Flensburg-Schleswig) has announced he will never again seek a leading role in the party. We have finally rid ourselves of his Majesty the Sun Chancellor, the champion of speech crime charges, and that alone is worth a stiff celebratory scotch.
The FDP lost far harder than the Greens. Last night was their worst showing of all time – worse even than the last time they were chased out of the Bundestag in 2013. Party chief Christian Lindner will resign and withdraw from politics, and he should. The FDP stood idly by and waved through ruinous Green policies like the building heating ordinances, all the time pleading that things would be even worse if the FDP weren’t in government. After the constitutional court in Karlsruhe killed the budgetary schemes of the traffic light, the FDP could have left the coalition, but they subjected all of us to another year of Scholzian incompetence and insanity. If there is any justice in the world the FDP will become a minor West German party that nobody thinks about anymore.
The next biggest loser of the night was the Social Democrats, who likewise booked their worst electoral result in history, and also achieved the worst-ever electoral collapse of a chancellor party in the 80-year history of the Federal Republic. Olaf Scholz has said he will not participate in any future government or coalition negotiations, and party co-chair Lars Klingbeil spoke last night of a “caesura” in the history of the SPD, promising substantial changes in party leadership. The first such change happened almost immediately, with the resignation of SPD faction leader Rolf Mützenich. Klingbeil will replace him. Many expect that Klingbeil’s co-chair, Saskia Esken, will also be forced out before long, although she is clinging to her job for the moment.
Looking from the US, CDR Salamander notes the very high turnout for a federal election with approval:
Sunday, Germany held national elections for the parliament, the Bundestag. Congrats to the German people and their ~83% turnout, the greatest I believe, since unification.
The previous government led by SPD and hobbled the the Greens was unstable at best, and was not doing great things for the German people. That would be why the SPD’s results were the worst since 1887.
Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has clear words for the performance of his SPD. “This is a devastating, catastrophic result,” he said. “There is no way to sugarcoat it.” He congratulated the Union on its election victory. “I hope that — especially in view of Friedrich Merz’s speech in Munich yesterday — they will now strike the right tone and understand that it is about keeping the democrats together and not playing them off against each other.” An AfD at 20 percent cannot leave the Social Democrats in particular at rest.
Nuff said.
The above numbers were from Sunday night and are not final, but we can safely assume that they are roughly where the final count will be.
You need 316 seats to control, and you need 5% to enter government. That last bit puts FDP and BSW out of the picture. I’ll chat a bit about that at the bottom of the post, but let’s focus on the big boys.
First things first, Germany voted for right-wing governance. CDU/CSU (Union), and AfD got 49.2% of the vote. However, no one will form a government with them, so the Germans will not be getting what they voted for.
[…]
AfD broke into the former West Germany. Both Kaiserslautern and Gelsenkirchen voted for AfD. I also find it interesting that in addition to the West Germany/East Germany divide, the East Berlin/West Berlin divide is still there.
History is sticky.
I lived with Germans for four years, yet I don’t fully grasp German politics. Still, some political constants hold true everywhere.
Again, the Germans voted for a right-wing government. With Union having to partner with SPD, that will pull the center of the government to the left, further away of the center of the electorate … again.
Were I a German, I would want a few things, in this order:
- Cheaper energy — lower monthly bills and prices across the board. It will also make German manufacturing more competitive. Yes, the only way to do that is to restart the nuclear power plants. With the Greens gone, no reason not to.
- Stop migration. Expel illegal migrants. If someone has vacationed in the nation they claimed to seek asylum from, deport them. Etc.
- Be a player in ending the war in Ukraine, if it can be ended. If Russia refuses to be reasonable at the table, then fully back the Ukrainian fight. As this is aligned with the general direction of the USA and other allies, it makes sense.
- Redouble spending on national defense. 2% will not do. 2.5% is the floor, and must be reached faster.
All the four above will be more difficult with SPD in government. Remember my long-held position that applies everywhere, not just in Germany:
When the center-right and center-left refuse to address the legitimate concerns of the people, especially in issues of migration and culture, then the people will look elsewhere for their concerns to be met.
If AfD were brought into government, they would be forced to moderate and to be held accountable for the action of government. With AfD in opposition — with a bone in their teeth — they will most likely, if they do not implode due to their well-known “personnel challenges”, they will increase their popularity with voters.
February 21, 2025
Berlin ’45: City of Spies
World War Two
Published 20 Feb 2025In 1945, Berlin is a city in ruins — but for the world’s spies, it’s a goldmine. As the Soviets, Americans, British, and French carve up the capital, they scramble to seize Nazi secrets, recruit informants, and outmaneuver each other in an intelligence war that will define the Cold War. From stolen blueprints to fabricated reports, Berlin becomes the world’s first battleground of espionage.
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December 10, 2024
QotD: Nuclear deterrence and the start of the Cold War
It’s important, I think, for us to be clear-eyed here about what the USSR was during the Cold War – while the USSR made opportunistic use of anti-imperialist rhetoric against western powers (which were, it must be noted, also imperial powers), the Soviet Union was also very clearly an empire. Indeed, it was an empire of a very traditional kind, in which a core demographic (ethnic Russians were substantially over-represented in central leadership) led by an imperial elite (Communist party members) extracted resources, labor and manpower from a politically subordinated periphery (both the other Soviet Socialist Republics that composed the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries) for the benefit of the imperial elite and the core. While the USSR presented itself as notionally federal in nature, it was in fact extremely centralized and dominated by a relatively small elite.
So when Western planners planned based on fears that the highly militarized expansionist territorial empire openly committed to an expansionist ideology and actively trying to lever out opposing governments from central (not eastern) Europe might try to expand further, they weren’t simply imagining things. This is not to say everything they did in response was wise, moral or legal; much of it wasn’t. There is a certain sort of childish error which assumes that because the “West” did some unsavory things during the Cold War, that means that the threat of the Soviet Union wasn’t real; we must put away such childish things. The fear had a very real basis.
Direct military action against the USSR with conventional forces was both politically unacceptable even before the USSR tested its first nuclear weapons – voters in Britain, France or the United States did not want another world war; two was quite enough – and also militarily impossible as Soviet forces in Europe substantially outnumbered their Western opponents. Soviet leaders, by contrast, were not nearly so constrained by public opinion (as shown by their strategic decision to limit demobilization, something the democracies simply couldn’t do).
This context – a west (soon to be NATO) that is working from the assumption that the USSR is expansionist (which it was) and that western forces would be weaker than Soviet forces in conventional warfare (which they were) – provides the foundation for how deterrence theory would develop.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-11.
November 15, 2024
The Final Solution to the German Question
World War Two
Published 14 Nov 2024Millions of Germans continue to be expelled from their homes in Central and Eastern Europe. They run a gauntlet of violence, robbery, and even murder before arriving in the shattered remains of Berlin. By the end of 1945, the Allied Powers have at least agreed that further expulsions must be “orderly and humane”. But isn’t that a contradiction in terms?
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October 13, 2024
Occupation of Germany, Plunder and Enslavement?
World War Two
Published 12 Oct 2024The Allies’ occupation of Germany was marked by competing visions for its future, ranging from France’s focus on security to the Soviet push for reparations. This episode dives into the complex negotiations that determined Germany’s borders, industrial disarmament, and economic management, all of which would shape Europe’s post-war order and fuel the East-West divide.
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