Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Jun 2022
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October 15, 2022
An Israeli LMG, Part I: The .303 Dror
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October 14, 2022
Nazis Suck at Sabotage – WW2 – Spies & Ties 23
World War Two
Published 13 Oct 2022They say every masterpiece has its cheap copy. Well, the German Sicherheitsdienst are trying to copy the success of the Soviet Partisans. With Walter Schellenberg, Heinrich Himmler, and Reinhard Heydrich in charge, you know it’s going to be a bloody affair.
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August 18, 2022
The Communist Spies in America’s Atomic Program – WW2 – Spies & Ties 22
World War Two
Published 15 Aug 2022The NKVD have wormed their way into British society. Across the pond, America is also teeming with communist spies. They’re in the government, military, even OSS, and the FBI. Now they’re going for the biggest secret of all – the atomic bomb.
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August 9, 2022
The Never Ending Failures in France – WW2 – Spies & Ties 21
World War Two
Published 8 Aug 2022The typical image of the French Resistance is of a man, beret at an angle, cigarette hanging from his bottom lip, captured MP40 across his chest. But one of the most successful resistance leaders is a woman – Marie-Madeline Fourcade. And right now, the Germans have her on the run!
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July 28, 2022
The Posh Brits Betraying Their Country – WW2 – Spies & Ties 20
World War Two
Published 27 Jul 2022Being allies does little to discourage Moscow from recruiting double agents in the British establishment. The most famous of them all, Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, penetrate deep into MI5, MI6, and Bletchley Park. With friends like the NKVD, who needs enemies?
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July 12, 2022
Killing the Resistance, and Rockets of Death – War Against Humanity 068 – July 10, 1943
World War Two
Published 10 Jul 2022The Polish and French resistance find themselves weakened by the lots of their leaders. Hitler decided to give Werner von Braun hundreds of thousands of slaves to launch the German rocket program.
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July 6, 2022
Decapitating the French Resistance – WAH 066 – June 26, 1943
World War Two
Published 5 Jul 2022The Gestapo deals a devastating blow to French Resistance, and in Bengal, British India the famine is only getting worse.
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July 5, 2022
How to Fool a Führer – Operation Mincemeat – WW2 – Spies & Ties 19
World War Two
Published 4 Jul 2022Glyndwr Michael, the dead secret agent, has deposited his deceptive letters in Spain. Now the next phase of Operation Mincemeat begins. If Charles Cholmondely of MI5 and Ewen Montagu of Naval Intelligence have done their job right, the letters should make their way into Hitler’s hands.
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June 21, 2022
“Schlimmbesserung is a lovely German word which means making something worse by trying to improve it”
In the New English Review, Armando Simón considers some of the oddities of American worldview that seem so often to make worse the very things they try to “fix”:
Americans’ ignorance of other countries, their cultures, their history and their geography is legendary and world renowned and the subject of countless anecdotes and jokes by foreigners. This ignorance is inexplicable, as it is not found in America’s northern or the southern neighbors, so it cannot be due to geographical isolation. It is also a fact that foreigners know more about America than Americans know of their countries. Or even their own.
It is also a paradox. One would expect logically that a country that is principally composed of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants would have an encyclopedic knowledge of other countries, as is the case with Britain, which had a world-wide empire. Not so.
And this may explain America’s unintentional policy of schlimbesserung, the worsening of something that it is trying to improve, or as Greene described it so aptly of an American character in one of his novels, “armored in his ignorance and good intentions”.
As an aside, let me also say that this naïve optimism — to put it charitably — has enabled foreign governments to easily steal diplomatic and military secrets with little trouble, according to Gordievsky’s KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev. John Walker, an American traitor who spied for the Russians for 17 years once said in a public interview that Walmart guards a tube of toothpaste better than the Navy guards its secrets. He should know.
Many individual American philanthropists and government bureaucrats go energetically out in the world upon hearing of some terrible condition in some part of the world through the television, convinced that they, yes they, can personally correct the situation when in reality they have no idea of what the hell they’re doing, who they are dealing with, or what is really going on in that part of the world, nor of the cultural, historical, and geographical circumstances. Nor can they even speak the local language! They are simply confident that they will solve the problem. And so they will feel good about themselves (for example, there is no question in my mind that some dirt-poor African doctors, upon learning that some idiot Americans, obsessed with AIDS, were going to send millions upon millions of dollars in their countries “to combat AIDS”, and having very few actual cases of infected patients, simply falsified the statistics. Or worse.). It is as if they were hopscotching across a cultural minefield with an idiotic grin.
The cultural values that one takes so much for granted that one is not conscious of may not be present elsewhere. For example, Americans do not understand that many countries e.g., Greece, Ireland, tend to explain their present problems by blaming other countries (Turkey, Germany, England) over what happened centuries ago instead of actually solving the problems. People in other countries are backward looking in that their sights are rigidly focused on their past, whereas Americans’ eyes are always on the future (and which might explain why Americans are addicted to science-fiction) while being generally ignorant about their past.
Also, it is a general truism that the majority of persons who run for office in North America and various European countries do so because they sincerely want to help and improve their communities/countries. However, in all of Africa and most of Asia, persons who seek public office do so for one purpose, and one purpose only: to steal everything that they can get away with. So when some ignorant, naïve, American shows up with buckets full of money, oblivious of the culture and the longstanding, entrenched, corruption, and with an announced intention to make the local community more like an American community, they are welcomed with open arms while suppressing their snickering. This also explains something where Americans exhibit willful blindness: other cultures don’t play fair. Honesty is seen as the trait of fools. Fools are to be taken advantage of. Especially in trade and diplomacy. Just look at China.
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June 15, 2022
Istanbul: City of Spies – WW2 – Spies & Ties 18
World War Two
Published 14 Jun 2022Neutral Turkey appears to be an island of peace in a sea of war. But if you look a little closer though and there’s another story. Assassins ply their deadly trade. Spies slip in and out of occupied Europe. The Allies and Axis battle for influence. The secret war is in full swing.
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June 3, 2022
QotD: Snobbery and spying
During the Cold War, it was accepted that we would recruit spies and so would they.
Oxford and Cambridge became notorious hunting grounds for the Soviet Union, as they sought out clever young lefties who they might convince to go full retard into communism and then spy for the Motherland.
They had some success with some dapper young gentlemen called Philby, Maclean, Burgess, Blunt and Cairncross – that’s a story for another day.
It was notable that during the whole affair, British intelligence simply refused to believe that one of their own had been corrupted. They could not entertain such a notion, and so the Cambridge Five remained able to betray their country over and over again.
Alex Noble, “Hero Of The European Union”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-04-15.
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May 25, 2022
The Spy Game That Killed Yamamoto – WW2 – Spies & Ties 17
World War Two
Published 24 May 2022We’ve already seen the power of signals intelligence. Churchill loves being fed information from MI6’s Ultra. Now it brings a vengeance for his American allies. They manage to bag the scourge of Pearl Harbor, C-in-C of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
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May 11, 2022
Operation Mincemeat – The True Story – WW2 – Spies & Ties 16
World War Two
Published 10 May 2022We’ve encountered plenty of different secret agents. Men, women, Allied, Axis, Partisans. They all fight for different reasons: patriotism, vengeance, or cold hard cash. But they’ve all had one thing in common. They’ve been alive. We’ve never had a dead secret agent. Yet …
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May 1, 2022
The race for Tunisia turns into a crawl – WW2 – 192 – April 30, 1943
World War Two
Published 30 Apr 2022The Allies launch a deception operation to hide their intent of soon attacking Sicily, but first, they’ll actually have to secure Tunisia, and it is slow going. A German offensive in the Caucasus grinds to a halt, and German U-boats are suddenly finding themselves unable to destroy Allied shipping in the Atlantic.
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April 30, 2022
God Help These British Agents – WW2 – Spies & Ties 16
World War Two
Published 28 Apr 2022We’ve seen it time and time again in this war. Supposed Allies arguing with each other instead of fighting the enemy. But when SOE and MI6 begin vying for leadership of Britain’s secret war, it’s more than cross words. Now there are lives at stake.
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