The Second World War witnessed two concurrent campaigns by which submarines were used in an attempt to economically isolate and degrade an island nation enemy. One of these attempts was remarkably successful. In the Pacific, US Submariners sunk millions of tons of Japanese shipping — more shipping, in fact, than Japan had possessed at the outbreak of war. A brutally effective submarine campaign against Japanese tankers affected a near perfect starvation of Japan’s war machine: after intaking 40% of East Indies crude production in 1942, only 5% would reach Japanese shores in 1944. This was a cataclysmic decline which Japan could not survive, owed largely to the 155 tankers sunk by American submarines in 1943 and 1944. In the final year of the war, American boats were able to undertake the ultimate dream of submarine theorists: a close blockade of the Japanese home islands, with American submariners prowling practically every inlet and bay.
The success of the American submarine campaign was genuinely astonishing, and created a near perfect asphyxiation of the Japanese war economy, with imports of virtually every vital industrial input plummeting to near zero by 1944. Admiral Charles Lockwood, who commanded the Submarine Force Pacific Fleet, was probably only slightly boasting when he later told an instructor at the Naval Academy:
Now don’t teach those midshipmen that the submariners won the war. We know there were other forces fighting there, too. But if they kept the surface forces and the flyboys out of our patrol areas we would have won the war six months earlier.
Despite the phenomenal success of America’s submarine operations against Japan, the American war on Japanese shipping generally receives scant attention. To take just one example, Francis Pike’s magisterial and colossal tome on the Pacific War relegates American submarine operations to an appendix. In contrast, there is an astonishing volume of literature devoted to the war’s other grand submarine campaign: the so-called Battle of the Atlantic. Germany’s famous U-boats attempted a similarly strategic interdiction war against shipping to the British home isles. Unlike the American submarine force in the Pacific, however, the U-boats failed.
Big Serge, “Wolf Packs: Battle of the Atlantic”, Big Serge Thought, 2025-12-12.
June 26, 2026
QotD: The submarine war against Japan
June 24, 2026
The Korean War Week 105 – Destroy Suiho Dam! – June 23, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 23 Jun 2026Since the beginning of the war UN air power has studiously avoided hitting North Korea’s hydro-electric complex, since the power the dams provide is mainly for civilian use, but that changes this week! Meanwhile on the ground, the focus has turned to capturing Communist POWs for information, but that task has suddenly proved impossible now that the UN POW camps are firmly back in UN control, and it seems the Communists now prefer even death to capture.
00:00 Intro
00:29 Recap
00:59 Taking Prisoners
03:18 The Shropshires
05:54 Ammunition Shortage
08:41 Targeting Power Plants
14:55 Summary
15:10 Conclusion
15:58 Call to Action
June 9, 2026
Road to Rangoon, Ep. 1 – Slim’s Hammer and Anvil
HardThrasher
Published 8 Jun 2026The Road to Rangoon Ep1: Hammer & A Hard Place — The Battle for Burma Begins By the start of the monsoon rains in 1944, British and Indian forces of General Sir William “Bill” Slim’s XIVth Army had been pegged back inside India. Five months later, after the battles of Imphal and Kohima, the Fourteenth Army had not only retaken the ground it had lost, but inflicted catastrophic losses on the Imperial Japanese Army.
The question was: what now? There would be no more forces coming from Europe, no additional fire power or support, and apparently no belief in the men by the Imperial General Staff in London or the US Army high command in Washington. Could the DUKE forces push into Burma through monsoon rains, jungle, mountains, disease, impossible supply lines and against an enemy willing to die for each yard of ground? Could Slim, Mountbatten, Oliver Leese, the US-led Northern Combat Area Command — NCAC — turn victory in India into the reconquest of Burma?
In this opening episode of “The Road to Rangoon”, we begin the story of the epic advance that would throw the Imperial Japanese Army out of Burma (modern day Myanmar) and become familiar with some of the places, names and concepts that will shape our story.
We look at the geography of Burma and eastern India, the aftermath of Imphal and Kohima, the state of the Japanese Burma Area Army under General Kimura Heitarō, the role of XIVth Army, XV Corps and NCAC, and the Allied plans that became Operation ROMULUS, Operation CAPITAL, Operation DRACULA and EXTENDED CAPITAL. This is the story of how the Burma Campaign moved from defence to attack — and how Slim planned one of the most ambitious offensives of the Second World War.
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May 20, 2026
The Korean War Week 100: Mark Clark in Command – May 19, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 19 May 2026Mark Clark is the new UN Commander and will run the war in Korea, replacing Matt Ridgway, who leaves for Europe to take over NATO Command. The Koje-Do POW camp situation is resolved, but is a black eye for the UN, as are the allegations that the US has been practicing germ warfare in Korea and Manchuria, backed up by “confessions” from captured American airmen.
00:00 Intro
01:13 Recap
01:29 Demand and Response
05:35 What Went Wrong at Koje-Do?
12:06 Germ Warfare?
13:55 Mark Clark
15:45 ROK and Ammunition
19:53 Philippine Raids
21:16 Summary
21:28 Conclusion
22:09 Call to Action
May 18, 2026
The American Civil War was “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned”
Ben Duval looks at the implications of the quote above (attributed to Moltke the Elder) and shows that there were indeed lessons to be learned from that conflict:
Chief of the Prussian General Staff Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (1800-1891).
Photo by Carl Günther via Wikimedia Commons.
A famous, if apocryphal, quote attributed to Moltke dismissed the American Civil War as “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned”. There were certainly lessons to be learned — it could hardly be otherwise in so long and intense a conflict. The war showcased many new technologies on a large scale, including rail and telegraph, while the growing accuracy of firearms showed the growing importance of field fortifications in pitched battle. It also gave witness to many expedients and innovations, including the first known employment of indirect fire (although that would take much longer to be appreciated).
Nevertheless, the readiness with which Moltke’s spurious quote was accepted is suggestive of fundamental differences between Europe’s large professional armies and the hastily-raised volunteers that fought for both North and South. The Civil War saw a mobilization of unprecedented scale, expanding from a pre-war regular army of 15,000 to a total of nearly 2 million at its peak.
At some critical battles, like Antietam, many regiments had mustered bare weeks before. At best, these soldiers could handle their weapons reasonably well; large-scale maneuvers in the heat of combat were out of the question. Even long-serving formations did not have much of a chance to redress these deficiencies, as demonstrated by the disjointed conduct of Pickett’s Charge. What immediate lessons could the Prussian and French, efficiently maneuvering under fire at Gravelotte or Mars-la-Tour, have learned from Civil War armies?
Prussian attack at Gravelotte on 18 August 1870.
Lessons at the Right Level
Perhaps not much at the tactical level, but there was plenty to be learned at the operational. Never before had railroads been employed at such scale to shift troops within and between theaters; nor the telegraph, which was used to coordinate such movements. Efficient logistical services allowed both sides to undertake bold maneuvers involving massive numbers of troops (it is noteworthy how many generals had previous experience working for railroad companies, and how many more went on to high management or board positions after the war).
Union supply wagons loading up at a railhead.
But the point also holds more broadly, beyond the particular technical specialties of 1860s America. Whenever tactics alone cannot suffice—either because both sides are extremely skilled, as in the First World War, or because organizational breakdowns rule out more complex maneuvers — decisive action can by default only occur at the operational level. This was an essential point in Saladin the Strategist. Muslim and Crusader armies, through long experience fighting each other, had developed unique fighting styles tailored to blunt each other’s edges: barring a fluke, decision could only be won through some higher-level maneuver.
In such cases, the fighting capabilities of an army matter less in any absolute sense than in their ability to effect a particular operational scheme. Tactical proficiency is but one variable among many, and not necessarily the most important. Whether a general is dealing with poorly-trained militia or long-serving professionals, it is above all their relative odds that factor into his calculations.
April 15, 2026
The Korean War Week 95: TWO THIRDS of POWs Refuse Repatriation – April 14, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 14 Apr 2026US Marines begin to make contact with their Communist Chinese adversaries in their new position in the west of Korea, but a more insidious issue is beginning to threaten the UN war effort: dwindling stockpiles of ammunition. In fact, two-thirds of the US army’s procurement budget is going exclusively to ammunition, but production lag — the time between paying for something and actually getting it — is putting Eighth Army operations at risk. Elsewhere, POW screening begins, with results that might throw a wrench into the painstakingly negotiated armistice terms back at Panmunjom.
00:00 Hook
00:59 Recap
01:51 POW Screening
05:49 Ammunition
10:46 Marine Operations
14:07 Summary
14:57 Conclusion
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March 25, 2026
The Korean War Week 92: Operation Mixmaster! – March 24, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 24 Mar 2026The UN forces begin a huge operation to move the US 1st Marine Division to new defensive positions far to the west of the former ones, but this involves moving some 200,000 men back and forth along the lines. Behind the lines, the ROK continues building up force trying to turn itself into a well equipped and trained modern army, and above the lines the tech war marches on as the UN premieres a new night fighter.
00:55 Recap
01:40 The ROK Economy
06:40 Operation Mixmaster
07:39 Rotation Settled
10:31 Ridgway’s Recommendations
14:01 Overt or Covert POW Screening
15:54 Notes
16:22 Summary
16:34 Conclusion
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March 18, 2026
QotD: Feeding a Roman Consular army
Let’s deal with animals next. Each contubernium (“tent group”) of six soldiers likely had its own mule, so that’s 3,200 mules for the army, plus some additional number for the siege train and any army supplies; perhaps around 5,000 total (see Roth, op. cit. on this). On top of this we have horses for the cavalry; this will be rather more than 2,400 since spare horses will have been a necessity on campaign. Judging by Roman barley rations for cavalrymen (presumably intended to feed the horse) it seems a good guess that each cavalryman had one spare; for later medieval armies the number of spares would be substantially higher (at least three per rider). But for our lean army of Romans, that’s just 4,800 horses. An early modern army might require quite a few less mules (replacing them with wagons), but at the same time it is also probably hauling both field artillery and siege guns which demand a tremendous number of draft animals (mostly horses). My sense is that in the end this tends to leave the early modern army needing more animals overall.
Next the non-combatants. The mules will need drivers and the cavalrymen likely also have grooms to handle their horses, which suggests something like 3,400 calones [slaves or servants] as an absolute minimum simply to handle the animals. Roth (op. cit., 114) figures one non-combatant per four combatants in a Roman army, while Erdkamp (op. cit. 42) figures 1:5. Those figures would include not merely enslaved calones but also sutlers, slave-dealers, and women in the “campaign community”. Taking the lower estimate we might then figure something like 4,000 non-combatants for a “lean” Roman army, with many armies being more loaded up on non-combatants than even this. And while estimating the number of non-combatants for Roman armies is tricky, we actually have some figures for pre-modern armies to give a reference. Parker (op. cit. 252) notes units of the Army of Flanders (between 1577 and 1620) as high as 53% non-combatants, including women in the campaign community; one Walloon tercio in 1629 was 28% camp women on the march. It is tempting to compare these but caution is necessary here – both Roth’s and Erdkamp’s estimates are heavily informed by more modern armies so the argument would be circular: the estimates for the Romans look like later armies because later armies were used to calibrate estimates for the Romans.
That gives us an army now of 19,200 soldiers, 4,000 non-combatants, 5,000 mules and 4,800 horses. Roman rations were pretty ample and it seems likely that many of the calones did not eat so well but the ranges are fairly narrow; we can work with an average 1.25kg daily ration per person normally, with the absolute minimum being the 0.83kg daily grain ration following Polybius (Plb. 6.39.12-14, on this note Erdkamp op. cit. 33-42) if the army was short on supplies or needed to move fast eating only those buccelatum [hardtack] biscuits. That’s a normal consumption of 29,000kg per day for the humans, with the minimum restricted diet of 19,256kg for short periods. Then we need about 2.25kg of feed for each mule and about 4.5kg of feed for each horse (we’re assuming grazing and water are easily available), which adds up to 11,250kg for the mules and 21,600kg for the horses.
And at last we now have the scale of our problem: our lean army of 19,200 fighting men consumes an astounding 61,850kg (68.18 US tons) of food daily. It also consumes staggering amounts of water and firewood. In order to move this army or sustain it in place it is thus necessary to ensure a massive and relatively continuous supply of food to the army. Failure to do that will result in the army falling apart long before it comes anywhere close to the enemy.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-07-15.
March 17, 2026
Will Canada Outpace the UK in Surface Fleet Numbers?
Warships & Warriors
Published 13 Mar 2026The Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) is facing a critical turning point in 2026. Caught between a massive 20% personnel shortfall and the urgent need to project power globally, Canada is being forced to make difficult decisions, including the early retirement of eight Kingston-class warships. However, despite these severe manning challenges and aging hardware, Canada is quietly executing one of the most ambitious naval modernisation programs in the Western world.
In this video, we break down the complete state of the Royal Canadian Navy’s surface and subsurface fleet in 2026. We explore the twilight years of the Victoria-class submarines, the heavy burden placed on the aging Halifax-class frigates, and the massive success of the new Harry DeWolf-class Arctic and Offshore Patrol Vessels.
Looking to the future, we analyse Canada’s generational leap in naval technology. With the highly advanced River-class Destroyers entering production, boasting AEGIS combat systems and Tomahawk missiles, and a new fleet of conventionally powered submarines on the horizon, the RCN is transforming into a Tier 1 maritime force. But with 15 new destroyers and up to 12 new corvettes planned, is Ottawa actually taking its future maritime defence more seriously than London?
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March 10, 2026
Rolling toward disaster – North America’s trucking industry
Donna Laframboise reviews a new memoir by Gord Magill, recounting his career in trucking in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand:
… Gord has written a splendid book that belongs on Economics 101 reading lists everywhere. End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers is chock-a-block with firsthand anecdotes. He tells us, for example, about traveling north into Canada from New York state during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest, and feeling “drunk with patriotism, in love with every person I met, and they were in love with me”. After returning to his wife and daughters south of the border, he says he’d “never seen so many Canadian flags flying in the United States. It was unbelievable.” For a short time, “I was a minor celebrity simply for being from Canada”.
But this book is more than a collection of quirky tales about life behind the wheel. It’s a deep dive into shark-infested waters. For decades, but especially in recent years, experienced truckers have been treated like disposable widgets rather than skilled professionals. An industry upon which much of the North American economy depends has been undermined and hollowed out by perverse economic incentives, widespread fraud, and foolish policy. All of this makes our highways dangerous.
Gord explains that members of the public are three times more likely to be killed in a truck crash in America than down under partly because Australia has a graduated, quasi-apprentice licensing system. After driving smaller trucks for a year, people apply for the next level of trucking license, and then the next level, and then the next.
In North America these days, licenses seem to be given out like breath mints. The driver who blew through a stop sign in rural Saskatchewan in 2018, killing sixteen people associated with the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team and injuring 13 others had less than one month of trucking experience. Yet he was behind the wheel of one of the largest configurations on the road (two interconnected trailers, known in the industry as a Super B-train). In Australia, that same driver would have needed a minimum of four years of experience and would have completed multiple courses and passed multiple tests before being entrusted with such a load.
Gord reminds us about the Ethiopian driver (on a work visa) who plowed into traffic that had slowed to a halt in a Texas construction zone last March. Five people — including a family of two parents and two young children — were killed, eleven others were sent to hospital, and seventeen vehicles were damaged. In that case, the driver reportedly had only four months of trucking experience.
Shortly afterward, in August 2025, three people died in Florida when, as Gord writes, “a tractor trailer attempted to pull an illegal U-turn through a small access point in the median … As the driver of the truck executed the turn, he pulled in front of a minivan, which ran into his trailer at high speed.”
The trucker in that case, an illegal immigrant from India, had somehow acquired commercial driver’s licenses in two US states. But when an English proficiency test was administered a few days after the accident, he answered only 2 of 12 verbal questions correctly and could identify only 1 of 4 traffic signs. It was later reported he’d failed his commercial trucking exam ten times during a two-month period.
Then there’s the trucker who drove an 18-wheeler weighing forty tons across a bridge with a clearly posted weight limit of six tons in rural Arkansas in 2018. The bridge collapsed and the truck sank into the river. It took seven months to extract it, while the bridge remained out-of-service for years.
January 23, 2026
WW1: 1 Million Vs 1 Million at the Marne | EP 3
The Rest Is History
Published 1 Sept 2025What extraordinary events saw the French — already on the brink of defeat — take on the formerly formidable German army in a remarkable counter-offensive on the 4th of September, in France, in a clash that would later become known as the Miracle on the Marne? Why was this such a decisive moment in the events of the First World War How did it relate to the famous Schlieffen plan? Did it really see the French charging into battle in Renault taxis? And, why did it become one of the most legendary moments in all of French history?
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January 14, 2026
The Korean War Week 82: Ridgway’s Nuclear Warning! – January 13, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published Jan 13, 2026Operation Strangle, to destroy enemy logistical capability with air power, has been in progress for months now, and yet the enemy is still able to bring up men and supplies, and even slowly stockpile them for possible future offensives. The UN position now is that should there be an armistice, and should the other side break its terms, retaliation would be broader and would include actions against Communist China, but will the UN have the force to do such retaliation? That is the question.
00:00 Intro
00:44 Recap
01:09 POW Issues
03:30 The Airfields
08:29 UN Declaration
10:15 Operation Strangle
14:13 Summary
14:35 Conclusion
15:25 Call To Action
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January 8, 2026
QotD: Canned food and the early days of the Raj
You might even miss something culturally. For instance, there’s an entire sub-subdiscipline called “Food and Foodways”, and it’s not as silly as it sounds. Canned food was an important part of British cultural life in the Raj, for instance. File it under “Women Ruin Everything” — once it got safe enough for ladies to have a reasonable chance of surviving East of Suez, the awesome freewheeling decadence of the “White Mughals” period was replaced by dour, dowdy Victorian bullshit. Every summer the “fishing fleet” pulled into Calcutta harbor, disembarking scads of ugly British girls with a Bible in one hand and a can of spotted dick in the other, determined to snag the highest-ranking ICS man they could and, in the process, turn India into another boring suburb of Edinburgh. Anglo-Indian cookbooks are full of recipes for horrid British glop straight out of cans, and if you routinely got really, really sick from eating spoiled stuff, well, hard cheese, old chap! Heaven forbid you eat the delicious, nutritious, climate-optimized cuisine that was literally right there …
If you want to argue that the Indian Army fought so many border wars just to get away from sour, hectoring memsahibs and their godawful tinned slop, I’m not going to stop you.
Anyway, the point is, IF you are conversant enough with the relevant technical stuff, it occurs to me that you can get a snapshot of embedded cultural assumptions by looking at a period’s characteristic or representative technology.
Severian, “Assumption Artifacts”, Founding Questions, 2024-04-30.
December 26, 2025
Allied Bombing 1944 – Distraction and Destruction before Dresden
HardThrasher
Published 25 Dec 2025Hello my little Christmas puddings; today’s film covers the strategic bombing forces in WW2, what they did to support Operation Overlord, the aerial war across France and into Germany during 1944, taking out enemy formations, V1 and V2 sites, and breaking up the Nazi oil fields in the process. But all did not go according to plan … this is the inbetweeny bit from June – December 1944 and the part everyone forgets before the Bulge, Dresden and all that …
00:00:00 – Introduction
00:01:12 – A Word From Our Sponsor
00:03:25 – A Few Notes For New Viewers
00:04:02 – How End A War
00:06:25 – A 90 second (well 6 minutes) Recap of the story so far
00:12:15 – On With The Show
00:18:40 – The Key Players
00:20:10 – Enter Trafford Leigh-Mallory
00:24:05 – Trafford in Charge At the AEAF
00:26:15 – The Strategic Bombers Role In D-Day
00:27:29 – The Bombers As Part Of The Deception Plans
00:28:18 – Cutting Off Normandy
00:29:41 – The V1s, Poison Gas and Biological Warfare
00:37:31 – The One True Raid To End The War
00:41:50 – Self Harm in Normandy (It’s Trafford Time Again)
00:52:04 – Focus On Oil – Why, How and What Happened in 1944
01:05:00 – And on to Dresden
01:05:25 – Survivor’s Club
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November 30, 2025
North Africa Ep. 10: Rommel’s Desert Cannae – The Trap at Mechili
World War Two
Published 29 Nov 2025This episode, Rommel sets up a “Cannae, modern style” at Mechili, a three-pronged encirclement with Wechmar pressing from the west, Schwerin/Ariete and MG 8 driving up from the south, and Olbrich’s panzers meant to close the center. A Ghibli, fuel chaos and delays upset the timing, but Ponath cuts the Derna road and captures Generals Neame and O’Connor. And after failed breakout attempts against Fabris, the Bersaglieri and Streich, Gambier-Parry surrenders about 1,700 men and Mechili falls, opening the road to Tobruk.
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