Tom Scott
Published 7 Nov 2016In a cemetery in Huelva, in Spain, is the grave of Major William Martin, of the British Royal Marines. Or rather, it’s the grave of a man called Glyndwr Michael, who served his country during World War 2 in a very unexpected way … after his death.
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July 30, 2023
The Grave of the Man Who Never Was: Operation Mincemeat
July 23, 2023
Sayonara Tojo – WW2 – Week 256 – July 22, 1944
World War Two
Published 22 Jul 2023This week, Adolf Hitler is blown up and Hideki Tojo steps down. In the Pacific, the Americans land on Guam and prepare for hard fighting. In France, the Americans take Saint-Lô and British and German armored forces clash around Caen. In the East, the Red Army enters Latvia, tears a gap in Army Group North, and reaches the gates of Lvov.
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July 21, 2023
The Führer Adolf Hitler is Dead!?
World War Two
Published 20 Jul 2023Stauffenberg, Olbricht and the plotters launch Operation Valkyrie. The army moves in to seize power, troops surround the government quarter in Berlin, and Joseph Goebbels is arrested. But things start going wrong pretty much immediately and far away in East Prussia the Nazi fightback begins.
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July 15, 2023
QotD: Historical figures didn’t think of themselves as doing evil
Back in my professing days, I used to try to “bring history alive”, as it were, by “humanizing” historical figures. Let’s stipulate that Adolf Hitler was evil, I’d tell my students. Still, he obviously didn’t think of himself that way. Like all of us, he thought well of himself. In his own mind, he was a good person doing good things (or, at worst, doing bad things for good ends). We won’t learn anything meaningful about Hitler’s policies, I told them, unless we try to understand how he saw himself, as an historical actor.
If I thought it would help, I’d quote Machiavelli at them, to the effect that it’s impossible for a person to be thoroughly, consistently evil, even when it’s obviously to his best advantage. If I thought they were capable of grasping it, I’d follow by observing that this quote is just Machiavelli restating – in his inimitable style – the thoroughly conventional, utterly uncontroversial, indeed banal, opinion that people like to think well of themselves, and balk at doing things which make them bad people in their own eyes.
By that point, I’d have lost all but the sharpest undergrads, so I’d spell out the lesson Machiavelli intended us to take from his observation: While no one wants to think of himself as doing evil, when it comes to something that’s obviously advantageous, pretty much any rationalization will do.
Severian, “Acid”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-17.
July 14, 2023
How Hitler Approved His Own Assassination – WW2 Documentary Special
World War Two
Published 13 Jul 2023So far, the German resistance haven’t had much luck with their attempts to kill the Führer, Adolf Hitler. But now, the German war hero Claus von Stauffenberg, together with Friedrich Olbricht and Henning von Tresckow, drives the resistance forward. It’s time to kill Hitler. It’s time for Operation Valkyrie.
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July 12, 2023
Nazi drone war begins – War Against Humanity 103
World War Two
Published 11 Jul 2023Bombing enemy civilians does nothing to advance a nation’s war effort. But now, Adolf Hitler believes that the V-1 flying bomb, the first of the Vengeance Weapons, will bring London to its knees and unite the German population behind the war effort as never before. The missiles are ready for launch and thousands more civilians will die to satisfy the Führer’s
delusions.
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June 2, 2023
April 30, 2023
Germany’s Existential Crisis – WW2 – Week 244 – April 29, 1944
World War Two
Published 29 Apr 2023The fighting at Kohima is up close, personal, and vicious, as it is at Imphal. The Allies consolidate their gains at Hollandia, the Japanese are advancing in Central China, and it seems like the Chinese Nationalist Army has lost the support of the civilian population. This might not surprise you when we take a closer look.
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March 29, 2023
Will Finland Leave the War? – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 28 Mar 2023The Finns have been fighting the Soviet Union since the Winter War. But now, Marshal Mannerheim and Prime Minister Risto Ryti look like they might pull out of the Eastern Front commitments they agreed upon with their Axis allies. German-Finnish relations seem to be at breaking point, and Red Army troops are threatening the borders. How long will Finland stay in this war?
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March 5, 2023
MacArthur and Nimitz Go Head-to-Head – Week 236 – March 4, 1944
World War Two
Published 4 Mar 2023The American attacks against the Admiralty Islands are successful, but this causes real tensions between commanders Douglas MacArthur and Chester Nimitz. Much of this week is taken up by planning and meetings on both sides — Adolf Hitler plans the occupation of Hungary, Josef Stalin plans new offensives in Ukraine, and the Allies plan to reconfigure their whole front in Italy. It’s all the prelude to an explosion of action.
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January 7, 2023
December 28, 2022
QotD: Collective guilt
As for the concept of collective guilt, I personally think that it is totally unjustified to hold one person responsible for the behaviour of another person or a collective of persons. Since the end of World War Two I have not become weary of publicly arguing against the collective guilt concept. Sometimes, however, it takes a lot of didactic tricks to detach people from their supersitions. An American woman once confronted me with the reporach, “How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler’s language?” In response, I asked her if she had knives in her kitchen, and when she answered that she did, I acted dismayed and shocked, exclaiming, “How can you still use knives after so many killers have used them to stab and murder their victims?” She stopped objecting to my writing books in German.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946.
December 8, 2022
Is the Luftwaffe Defeated in 1943? – WW2 Documentary Special
World War Two
Published 7 Dec 2022Outnumbered and outproduced, the once mighty Luftwaffe is battling to hold its own across three fronts. Every month brings new pain for the force. But the Luftwaffe still has a few tricks up its sleeves and can make the Allies bleed heavily. If only Hitler and the Nazi leadership weren’t sabotaging its chances …
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November 24, 2022
Pavlov’s House, codenamed “Lighthouse” in Stalingrad
In The Critic, Jonathan Boff reviews The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Centre of WWII’s Greatest Battle by Iain MacGregor:
In the summer of 1942, with the German army deep inside the Soviet Union, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Blue, an attack from around Kharkiv in south-east Ukraine across hundreds of miles of steppe towards the oil fields of the Caucasus. Part of the plan required the German Sixth Army under General Paulus to secure the flank by seizing the industrial city of Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga.
By the middle of September Paulus’s troops were fighting their way, street by street, building by building, and sometimes room by room, through a city reduced to ruins by artillery shelling and the bombs of the Luftwaffe. The fighting was ferocious. Although by November most of Stalingrad was in German hands, several pockets of resistance still held out. Meanwhile, the Red Army was secretly massing for a counter-attack in the open terrain on either side of the city.
On 19 November 1942, General Zhukov unleashed a giant pincer attack which quickly overran the Romanian, Hungarian and Italian forces protecting Paulus’s flanks. Within days the German Sixth Army found itself trapped in a giant pocket, cut off from the rest of the German army. Here, in the depths of a Russian winter, nearly 300,000 surrounded men tried to hold out as their supplies of food, fuel, ammunition and medicine dwindled away.
By the end of January 1943, all hope of relief was gone. To Hitler’s disgust, Paulus ordered the remnants of his army to lay down their weapons. Of the 91,000 German soldiers sent into captivity in Siberia, only 5,000 would survive to ever see their homes again. Immense and terrible as the battle was — we will never know exactly how many troops took part, nor how many died, but it is probable that the total of dead, wounded and captured on both sides reached two million — Stalingrad was not the biggest battle of the war, nor even the bloodiest. Nonetheless, it remains, alongside Dunkirk and D-Day, among the touchstones of the Second World War, largely because it encapsulates three linked but distinct stories. Iain MacGregor does a fine job of covering each in his rich study.
First, Stalingrad was one of the most important battles of the war. It marked the high-water mark of the Nazi invasion of the USSR and an end to Hitler’s genocidal dreams of destroying the Soviet Union. Before Stalingrad, and the other crushing defeats the Axis suffered at around the same time in Tunisia and the Solomon Islands, the initiative had always lain with Germany and Japan. Afterwards, the Allies decided where, when and how the war would be fought.
MacGregor establishes this context neatly. He explains with just the right amount of detail why Operation Blue was launched and what it hoped to achieve. He offers a clear discussion of the decisions taken, and mistakes made, on both sides; and he hints at the logistical weaknesses that probably damned the Germans to disappointment from the start.
The strongest point of this book, however, is its description of the street-fighting in the heart of the city around a building known as “Pavlov’s House” (codename Lighthouse: hence the title of the book). Here the German 71st and Soviet 13th Guards rifle divisions fought for months. By focusing on this small area and these two formations, MacGregor is able to dig deep enough into the tactical detail to give us a clear sense of the difficulty, violence and terror of urban warfare, without swamping us with repetitive detail. His descriptions of fighting have a cinematic quality, swooping smoothly from panoramic tracking shots of the initial German charge down towards the waters of the Volga into close-ups of bullet-riddled mannequins fought over in the ruins of a department store.
November 16, 2022
The Real Reason for Hitler’s War – WW2 Specials
World War Two
Published 15 Nov 2022The murder of the Jews of Europe is not simply conducted alongside the military and political war aims of the Third Reich. For Hitler and the Nazis, the murder of the Jews of Europe is the military-political aim of the war. It confounds all logic, but in the twisted worldview of Nazi ideology, it makes perfect sense. This is a war on the Jewry.
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