Real Time History
Published 5 Jun 2026The Italian Army in North Africa is in disarray after the British Operation Compass. Hitler reluctantly sends help in the form of the newly formed Afrika Corps under Erwin Rommel. Despite his orders, he immediately goes on the offensive and pushes back the British who are also reeling from the Axis invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia. But Rommel’s bold leadership style has drawbacks and in May 1941, the vital port town of Tobruk still holds out.
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October 28, 2026
Rommel’s Rampage – Battle for North Africa Spring 1941
October 24, 2026
The Winter War, 1939-40
After joining with Hitler’s Third Reich to dismember Poland, and occupying the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Stalin turned his attention to Finland. From the Soviet point of view, the Finnish border was uncomfortably close to Leningrad and the fortified defensive lines along the Karelian Isthmus were a reminder that the Finns could cause trouble if a war came. Stalin’s solution was to demand that the Finns give up the region northwest of Leningrad (including the defences), along with several islands in the Gulf of Finland and allow a Soviet naval base to be established on the Finnish coast near Helsinki. All this in exchange for a larger chunk of Soviet territory north of Lake Ladoga and the “firm friendship of the Soviet Union” for whatever that might be worth. The Soviets backed up their claim with an overwhelming military superiority in men, tanks, artillery and air power. The Finns declined the generous offer, which took Stalin aback:
Not actually much of an exaggeration: Finnish snipers were a constant threat to Soviet military operations in Finland during the Winter War and the Continuation War.
On 30 November 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland through an immensely samey, tree-covered morass. Across hundreds of miles of deep snow and borderland, the Red Army unleashed 450,000 men, roughly 1,100 tanks, and hundreds of combat aircraft, expecting to overwhelm its smaller neighbour through sheer weight of armour, heavy artillery, and manpower.
Joseph Stalin overturned the original campaign plan, discarding the slower but sounder 4-month plan for a lightning campaign in just two months. Beneath that rigid political deadline lay an atmosphere of terror. No senior Soviet commander dared challenge Stalin, correct his unrealistic timetables, or point out that the Red Army was unready for a winter invasion. Officers who raised logistical concerns risked being branded defeatists or traitors—a real possibility the purges proved.
This fear spread in the ranks.
Despite the low state of morale, the Red Army struck along three operational axes:
- The Southern Main Effort (Karelian Isthmus): The heavy Soviet 7th Army would drive toward Helsinki, intent on punching through the main Finnish defences: the Mannerheim Line.
- The High North (Lapland & Arctic Coast): The 14th Army would advance across the tundra to seize Finland’s ice-free Arctic port at Petsamo, to cut off fears of foreign supplies inbound to aid the Finns.
- The Central Thrust (the “Waist” of Finland): The Soviet 9th Army would strike west across the country’s narrowest stretch toward Oulu on the Gulf of Bothnia.
Soviet pressure in three main spots, excuse my art!
Image and caption from WW2 MattersIn the central sector, Soviet planners harboured an ambitious but possible objective: advance west toward Oulu, reach the Gulf of Bothnia, and slice Finland in two.
The plan looked reasonable on map overlays at Leningrad headquarters. The target was Suomussalmi — a quiet logging settlement enveloped by lakes, swamps, and primaeval pine. Its importance lay not in its economic value, but in its position on the regional dirt road network running west toward Oulu. A successful Soviet drive here would sever the rail network connecting northern and southern Finland, cutting the vital land artery to neutral Sweden through which western supplies flowed.
To execute this strategic cut, Soviet planners committed two heavily reinforced divisions under the 45th Rifle Corps — the 163rd Rifle Division and the 44th “Blue” Rifle Division. With their attached tank battalions, corps artillery, and massive logistical columns, this combined force brought nearly 50,000 men into the narrow forest corridors.
In the Suomussalmi sector, the Finns initially faced fewer than 1,000 local Civil Guardsmen, later reinforced into Colonel Hjalmar Siilasvuo’s 9th Division to total 11,000 to 17,000 men. Outnumbered more than four to one, the Finns had no tanks and only 11 outdated artillery pieces — some dating back to the 1904 Russo-Japanese War — and severely rationed shells.
The Soviet plan depended on numerical dominance. But in the dense taiga forests of northeastern Finland, it became a bloody lesson in the difference between possessing a large army and knowing how to use it.
October 22, 2026
QotD: The “numbers fallacy” in World War II
Some historians, and many politicians, have simplified World War Two into a few stupid statements. “The war in the west was won on the Russian steppes” is one that springs to mind. They usually base such statements on traditional political incompetence — bad use of statistics. The truth is that numbers have rarely overthrown a technological edge (though the Americans under Custer and the British at Isandhlwana might have reservations on this), and World War Two is certainly not the best sample case to argue such a thing.
During the war the smaller campaigns tended to get less credit — though it is sometimes suspicious that numbers are valued in some circumstances, and area in others. The Mediterranean Front against the Axis was an extraordinarily long campaign over an extremely large area, yet many – particularly Americans who often fail to understand the Mediterranean’s importance to intercontinental strategy – discount its scale and significance. (A British general visiting the Soviets responded to toasts about the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow by offering a toast to El Alamein. The bemused Soviets asked how big the battle was, and then commented “we would call that a skirmish” – a point which emphasises the fact that the hundreds of Soviet divisions embraced by historians of the Eastern Front were rarely as big as a British brigade or American Regimental Combat Team. To get a real comparison western divisions should be compared to Soviet corps.)
Similarly the Burmese and New Guinea theatres are incredibly undervalued in their role against Japan. There were more Japanese divisions fighting longer and harder in either place than everywhere that American troops fought the Japanese put together. (The fact that in New Guinea it was Australians rather than Americans who did most of the successful fighting – the American troops first assigned disappointed their vainglorious Füaut;hrer MacArthur enormously at first – might have had an influence on this ranking.)
By contrast the Western Front against Germany in 1944 to 45 is overstated both in the area it covered, and in the number of troops involved (almost half the US troops listed for that campaign did not arrive until it was already almost over. A dozen divisions had barely landed in France before the Germans surrendered.) Which puts it in the same category as the Pacific campaign, which, if the allied troops are discounted – as they so often were by the Americans – rarely saw more than a couple of American divisions at a time engaged anywhere.
The confusion is added to by the enigma that remains China, which is simultaneously undervalued and overvalued. It is undervalued in that China and Manchuria occupied the attention of 80% of the Japanese army throughout the war. Which means that by the standards applied by some historians, China was the Soviet Union of the East, and deserves all the glory that was lavished on communist Russia by the trendy historians of the last generation. On the other hand it was overvalued, in that China achieved virtually nothing in the war against the Japanese apart from occupying large numbers of very low-grade garrison troops. In fact when the US Air Force in one of its fits of vainglory, attempted to bomb Japan into submission from bases in China: the Japanese garrison troops stirred themselves enough to sweep forward and conquer – without any trouble at all – the provinces being used as bases (Operation Ichi-Go).
Nigel Davies, “Oversimplification: The Numbers Fallacy in WWII”, rethinking history, 2009-03-08.
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October 18, 2026
Tiger I: A Tank Too Heavy For Hitler’s War? – Nazi Rearmament 10
World War Two
Published 17 Oct 2026The Tiger I was one of World War II’s most feared tanks. But could its powerful 88 mm gun and thick armor compensate for the demands it placed on Germany’s factories, mechanics, and supply lines?
From competing Henschel and Porsche prototypes to combat at Leningrad, Kursk, Tunisia, and Normandy, we examine the Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger I beyond its legendary reputation. Its firepower and protection made it a formidable opponent, but manufacturing, transporting, maintaining, and recovering this 57-ton heavy tank required resources Nazi Germany could increasingly ill afford.
In this episode of Nazi Rearmament, we explore:
• The Tiger I’s armor, armament, engine, and suspension
• The development contest between Henschel and Porsche
• Production costs, industrial constraints, and forced labor
• Early mechanical failures and later battlefield performance
• Heavy tank battalions and the capture of Tiger 131
• Why tactical successes could not resolve Germany’s strategic failuresWas the Tiger the deadliest beast of WWII, or a tank too heavy for Hitler’s war? Its history reveals how an effective battlefield weapon could still fall short of the war effort that produced it.
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August 30, 2026
The Ancient Greeks 05 – The Greeks Fight Back 1 – The Way to Salamis
seangabb
Published 29 Mar 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
How did the Greeks recover from what looked like total defeat? In this lecture, we pick up the story at the darkest moment of the Persian invasion. Athens has fallen. The Acropolis has been burned. Xerxes appears on the verge of total victory. And yet, the Greek resistance does not collapse.
We examine the extraordinary political and strategic crisis of 480 BC, including:
– The evacuation of Athens and the transformation of the city into a “nation at sea”
– The internal divisions within the Greek alliance
– Spartan reluctance to defend central Greece
– The decisive leadership of Themistocles
– The strategic importance of naval powerAt the centre of this lecture is the question of strategy: should the Greeks abandon the north and defend the Peloponnese, or risk everything in a naval battle at Salamis?
This is the turning point of the war — not yet a victory, but the moment at which survival becomes possible.
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August 28, 2026
“The Maple Mujaheddin Insurgency is not going to happen”
Of all the potential military conflicts facing the west, a US invasion of Canada has to be among the least likely — not just because it’s been attempted more than once in the past. For one thing, I don’t think even the best social media posting is going to bring ordinary Americans around to getting boots on the ground across the 49th parallel … there’s remarkably little passion about seizing our maple syrup and confiscating our strategic reserves of poutine among voters. Unlike places that Americans have strong feelings about, Canada just doesn’t move the needle.
The Operational Art of War has the first of a promised three-part series on Operation Maple Stomp, the biggest and best invasion of Canada — everyone says so:
In the latest round of “let’s do everything the dumbest way possible” the two nations in the world sharing the most in common keep taking to social media to fantasize going to war with each other.
It is deeply annoying, brings out the worst tendencies on both sides, and (to my mind worst of all) illustrates no one understands the Operational Art of War!
Americans take to social media and claim Canada doesn’t have a military, the military wouldn’t fight and be so outnumbered that resistance would collapse within hours.
Canadians usually agree the conventional war would be over in an afternoon, but then America would face a long and bloody insurgency (just wait till Uncle Sam meets the Maple Mujahedeen!).
Google AI’s idea of what a Canadian Insurgent looks like.
You can definitely count me as a member of Team Mere-matter-of-marching, at least as far as the tactical operations necessary to occupy the most populous parts of Soviet Canuckistan. Here’s a sketch map that Big Serge updated for the 2020s, based on the mid-1930s details for an attack on southern Ontario from War Plan Red:
Manifest Destiny, 2025? Big Serge’s updated map for the old US War Plan Red for a military invasion of Canada.
The distances are short enough and the chances of significant military resistance low enough, that US Army vehicles would probably not need to refuel before reaching the initial stop-lines for their advance. Canadian infrastructure is not pre-wired for destruction, so unless local hotheads manage to temporarily block road bridges, volume of traffic will be a bigger friction factor than actual defensive fire.
Trump’s legions would reap the benefit of more than a century of demilitarized populations and the (small, but real) Canadian military being oriented to expeditionary operations rather than home defence. But taking the territory is only the first step. There are Canadians scattered throughout the continental United States, looking and sounding pretty much like any other American, and it wouldn’t take too many of them to decide that Trump’s fight was also their fight. Canada isn’t the only one enjoying the benefits of decades of lack-of-worry about homeland defence. Look how exposed the US has been to Islamic terrorists who, for the most part, don’t look or sound like Americans and still managed to pull off one of the greatest terror attacks of the modern age.
I mean, don’t misread what I’m saying here: the US would win. That’s not even remotely in doubt. There are at least ten of you for every one of us, and more of you have military training and access to personal weapons. (One wonders if the Canadian government’s fanatic devotion to civil disarmament is a kind of pre-surrender to this imagined US invasion we’re discussing …)
But the cost of winning might be more than even the most government-worshipping progressive might be willing to pay. We look like you. With a few exceptions (French-speaking Quebecers and Newfoundland-speaking Newfoundlanders, mostly), we fit in very well with you. We come from very, very similar cultures (some like Vancouver vlogger J.J. McCulloch argue it’s the same culture). Rather than a war of conquest, this would be much more like that “Second Civil War” that’s been so much a topic of conversation on far left and far right social media. The kind of civil war that takes far too long to settle back into peaceful co-existence.
You don’t like government surveillance? Too bad, bucky, because every level of government is going to be eager to ensure that you’re a good, loyal American … at all hours of the day and in everything you do. Cut down a Flock camera? That’s not going to be a mere vandalism issue … that’s tantamount to treason. What if that Flock camera was watching one of those undercover Canucki guerilla fighters?
Don’t like the feds watching every financial transaction? Too bad, bucky, ’cause you giving $5 to that sketchy Canuck for some bootleg maple syrup might be funding a terror attack on your nearest USAF base.
To fight the threat of Canuck infiltration, your every car trip will need to be logged, and your patterns of travel will need to be recorded and analyzed. Who you talk to will also need to be observed, in case one of your buddies is a covert maple-slurping spy!
Oh, wait, there’s more from the Operational Art of War:
There Won’t Be a Maple Mujahadeen
If the United States annexes Canada, there will not be a long-standing violent insurrection by a nation of hunters. The Maple Mujahadeen isn’t going to happen.
A successful insurgency has several requirements:
- A pre-existing structure to organize around;
- The structure having access to weapons;
- The insurgent group not having a future in the new regime; and
- The broader population being willing to shelter the insurgency.
Canada does have factions that meet all four of these factors, but spread across different factions. Like any complex modern society, Canada does have pre-existing structures of voluntary organizations. Virtually none of them are organized around any kind of collective defense or skills that easily translate to an insurgency.
For #2 (access to weapons) you either need armed citizens, government weapons cashes or weapons brought in by a rival power supporting the insurgency. In Canada’s case, the only viable supply of weapons for an insurgency is its armed citizens. As with most statistics, Canada only looks like a gun free country because it’s beside America.
The graph below shows the top 10 countries for estimated firearms per 100 people, plus the EU and global average for comparison (excluding countries with a population under one million). Countries that were recently warzones are in orange, as their rate of firearm ownership is something of a special case.
The number for Canada is likely too low. This is based on a 2017 data set, and firearm ownership is growing faster than the population. It also assumes there are five unregistered firearms to every registered firearm in Canada. The last time Canada had hard data on unregistered firearms (2003 to 2012) the ratio was 10:1. Assuming a similar ratio today, firearms per 100 jumps to 1/2 that of America and nearly 4x the European average.
August 26, 2026
Who Destroyed the Japanese Economy in WW2?
Real Time History
Published 20 Mar 2026As the war in the Pacific develops, the United States takes the fight to Japan itself – by crippling its economy, destroying its industry, and crushing civilian morale. To do this, American submarines and heavy bombers wage campaigns beneath the sea and above the clouds. And even 80 years later, there’s a fierce debate about which of these campaigns did more to bring Japan to its knees – perhaps even more than the atomic bombs.
(more…)
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August 25, 2026
The new missile gap – between manufacture and deployment
Edward Luttwak offers some suggestions to help explain why the vast and lavishly funded US Military-Industrial Complex seems incapable of manufacturing enough weapons to allow the US military to fight more than a brief demonstration war before running short of the things that go boom:
Royal Navy Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) in flight.
MOD photo via Wikimedia Commons.
It is a strange thing indeed that among the countless stories about America’s shortage of long-range weapons — a truly crippling scarcity that now both limits President Trump’s strike options against the Islamic Republic, and might weaken responses to other looming threats — I have not found one that raises the most elementary question of all: why?
Why was Iran attacked with scarce and expensive BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles — costing around $3 million each — rather than ordinary gravity bombs dropped by fighter-bombers? Accuracy cannot be the answer: with so-called “JDAM” guidance kits, regular bombs become very accurate indeed, and they are still simple enough to be mass-produced cheaply.
Nevertheless, US forces had launched 850 Tomahawk missiles against Iran by 27 March this year, amounting to almost half the country’s global stockpile, though the Pentagon has since announced a huge $22.9 billion contract for more Tomahawks. Air-launched AGM-158 missiles, some of whose models can fly up to 1,000 miles, and which cost as much as $1.6 million apiece, were also used, along with Army’s Precision Strike Missiles are yet more expensive.
What makes these missiles so costly is their great virtue: they are all so-called “stand-off” weapons, which can safely be launched hundreds of miles from their targets. This means an attacker’s aircraft can remain outside enemy air space, where they could be exposed to detection by radars, and then to interception by air-defence fighters and surface-to-air missiles. There is simply no way of producing such missiles cheaply. They need powerful rocket propulsion and complicated electronic guidance to fly such vast distances and hit their targets successfully.
[…]
Nor, of course, are the implications here limited to Iran and the Gulf. Having needlessly used so many stand-off missiles to target Iran, US inventories are worryingly low in the event of the “Chinese contingency”: the invasion of Taiwan that Xi Jinping, unlike his predecessors, refuses to rule out. Any Chinese assault might start with subversion, with the activation of Chinese agents in Taiwan’s armed forces, but amphibious landings would have to follow — against which Tomahawk missiles would be the prime US weapon, alongside local anti-ship missiles.
But having examined all these technical details, we nonetheless arrive at something else entirely, a much more intractable problem than any munitions shortage could ever be: a fundamental change in the entire American attitude to war, which I described as “post-heroic” as far back as the Nineties when its first signs emerged.
This amounts to a truly drastic shift. What started with a proper striving to limit the casualties of war by every means possible — starting with prudent statecraft to avoid war in the first place, and extending to prudent tactics — has now devolved into the current predicament: whereby the US must spend billions on extremely elaborate stand-off missiles so as to further reduce risks to its pilots, which were already very low to begin with, against the vainglorious and incompetent Iranian enemy.
Of course, it’s always a possible explanation that the big defence contractors felt the need for another boost in their income, so it wouldn’t take much to persuade friends in the War Department or in the US Navy to toss a few more TLAMs at Iranian positions …
The Halftrack That Made Blitzkrieg Possible
World War Two
Published 23 Aug, 2026The tanks get the glory. But Blitzkrieg could not work on tanks alone.
The Sd.Kfz. 251 was designed to solve one of the fundamental problems of armored warfare: how do you keep infantry moving fast enough to fight alongside the Panzers? Germany’s answer was an armored half-track that helped turn infantry from a slow-moving follow-up force into an integral part of the Panzer division’s combined-arms assault.
In this German Rearmament special, we trace the Sd.Kfz. 251 from clandestine development under the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles to its first production runs on the eve of World War Two. We examine its design, its role in the emerging doctrine of Bewegungskrieg, its deployment in Poland and France, and the extraordinary range of variants that turned it into one of the Wehrmacht’s most versatile vehicles.
But the 251 also exposes the limits behind the image of a fully mechanized German war machine. It was complicated and expensive to manufacture, there were never enough of them, and most German infantry continued to march or rely on horses and trucks. Even as production soared later in the war, Germany’s shortages of fuel, materials, manpower, and industrial capacity increasingly overwhelmed the advantages its engineers and tacticians had created.
The Sd.Kfz. 251 helped make the early German style of armored warfare possible. It also became another example of a sophisticated weapon system serving a war of aggression that Nazi Germany ultimately lacked the resources to sustain.
This is the story of the half-track that made Blitzkrieg possible.
Never Forget.
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August 24, 2026
The Ancient Greeks 04 – The Persian Invasion 4 – The Fall of Athens
seangabb
Published 26 Mar 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
What happens when resistance fails?
In this lecture, we examine the dramatic collapse of Greek resistance after Thermopylae and the advance of the Persian army into central Greece. With the Spartan force destroyed, the road to Athens lay open.
We explore:
– The consequences of Thermopylae
– The evacuation of Athens under Themistocles
– The Persian capture and destruction of the city
– The psychological and strategic impact on the Greek world
– Why, at this moment, Persian victory seemed inevitableThis is the darkest point of the war for the Greeks — a moment when everything appears lost, and yet the story is far from over.
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August 23, 2026
Why This “Foreign” Commonwealth Truck Was Built In 800,000 Units And Supplied Every Front
BritishWarLegends and BritishWarArmory
Published 31 Mar 2026The Canadian Military Pattern truck was built by two rival factories in Ontario for a nation of eleven million people. It ended up supplying the British Eighth Army across North Africa, Italy, Normandy, and Burma — and Canada built more of them than Germany, Italy, and Japan built trucks combined.
Almost nobody knows it existed.
When Rommel captured two thousand of them at Tobruk in 1942, he didn’t scrap them. The Afrika Korps pressed them straight into active German service. An enemy with his own purpose-built military trucks chose to keep using captured Canadian vehicles instead.
The full forgotten story.
Update: I generally try to avoid watching or re-posting clearly AI-generated slop, but this was the first video I’d encountered discussing the hundreds of thousands of CMP trucks that Canada built during WW2. At some point between me scheduling the video and today, the channel has been banned. You’ve undoubtedly seen CMP vehicles in WW2 stills or movie footage, as they’re pretty distinctive – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Military_Pattern_truck
From The British Army in North-west Europe 1944-45,
CMP lorries passing through Uedem, 2 March 1945.
Photo by Carpenter (Sgt), No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Photograph B 14966 from the Imperial War Museums via Wikimedia Commons.
August 20, 2026
The Ancient Greeks 04 – The Persian Invasion 3 – The Road to Thermopylae
seangabb
Published 25 Mar 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
Why did the Greeks resist — and how did they organise their defence?
In this lecture, we follow the formation of the Greek coalition against Persia and the strategic decisions that led to the famous stand at Thermopylae. Against overwhelming odds, a divided collection of city-states came together to resist the greatest power in the known world.
We examine:
– The creation of the Hellenic League
– Spartan leadership and Greek strategy
– The selection of Thermopylae as a defensive position
– The parallel naval strategy at Artemisium
– The events leading up to the battleThis lecture sets the stage for one of the most famous last stands in history, showing that Thermopylae was not an isolated act of heroism, but part of a carefully considered defensive strategy.
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August 16, 2026
The Ancient Greeks 04 – The Persian Invasion 2 – Logistics and Diplomacy
seangabb
Published 24 Mar 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
How do you move an empire to war? This lecture examines the extraordinary logistical and diplomatic preparations behind Xerxes’ invasion of Greece. We explore how the Persian Empire assembled one of the largest armies in ancient history and the immense challenges of supplying and coordinating such a force.
At the same time, we examine the diplomatic pressure placed on the Greek states, including demands for submission and the divisions this created within the Greek world.
– The scale and organisation of the Persian army and navy
– Supply lines, engineering, and preparation
– The bridging (and scourging) of the Hellespont
– Persian diplomacy and the demand for “earth and water”
– Greek responses: submission, neutrality, and resistanceThis lecture shows that the invasion was not simply a military campaign, but a vast imperial operation combining force, intimidation, and political calculation.
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August 12, 2026
The Korean War Week 112 – The Chinese Take Siberia – August 11, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 11 Aug 2026There’s heavy fighting in the field this week for a position the US Marines call Siberia. Behind the scenes there’s worry, though, as the US Army is more and more facing a manpower crisis. They are, however, training ever more South Korean troops to one day hopefully bring all their own troops home from the Korean peninsula, and leave it defended by the locals.
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August 10, 2026
Was Canada’s Victoria-class submarine deal a massive procurement failure?
Dominion Defence Review
Published 8 Aug 2026Plagued by chronic low availability while also being expensive to maintain, the purchase of used British submarines seems to be a good reminder that a low sticker price isn’t everything …
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