Quotulatiousness

March 10, 2022

“Putin’s War”

Filed under: Military, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In his latest post on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Stephen Green suggests we will end up calling it “Putin’s War”:

Putin apparently believed his top general — “who has never been a professional soldier” — that the Russian Army was up to the task of quickly defeating Ukraine.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was supposed to flee or be killed/captured — not lead a heroic resistance. Ukraine’s kleptocratic government was supposed to collapse. Putin seems not to have had a Plan B, aside from the old Russian habit of firing artillery and rockets at stuff until even the rubble stops bouncing.

Putin failed to heed the lesson of Grozny: That even a besieged city, cut off from all reinforcement, can hold out for weeks. Kyiv is neither completely under siege nor cut off from reinforcement.

Putin also seems to have badly underestimated the West’s willingness to put the screws to the Russian economy, even though we’re putting the screws to ourselves, too.

If the war continues going badly for Russia, it ought to be remembered not as the Ukraine War or even the Russo-Ukraine War.

It ought to be called Putin’s War.

But at the rate Joe Biden is going, the Ukraine War might end up being known as the Putin-Biden War, and we all get to pay for it.

I posted a couple of comments on MeWe about his article:

I was commenting on another thread a bit earlier about how the fall of the Soviet Union revealed just how much of their military power was smoke and mirrors … a whole country of military Potemkin Villages. From what we can tell is happening in Ukraine, things haven’t improved much for the successor Russian military. On the other hand, thanks to progressive control of pretty much everything in the west, we’re starting to realize a lot of western military strength is a bit Potemkin-y. And the progressive warhawks now want to start WWIII? Let’s all hope they don’t get their wish!

Near the end of the column, you suggest calling it “Putin’s War”, which I think is a good idea. I’m starting to see Putin and the apparent state of the Russian military as being quite analogous to Mussolini and the Italian military. Il Duce had carefully excluded from his advisors and military leadership anyone who might tell him the truth about the state of Italy’s war-making capabilities and was clearly drinking his own ink on the propaganda side. Italy was forced into a war they were not equipped to fight because Il Duce believed the newsreel and parade-ground might he saw was real. Sound like something Putin may have done as well?

In The Critic, Peter Caddick-Adams catches us up on the war news to date:

It was during the Winter War of 1939-40, when plucky little Finland stood up to the might of Soviet Russia, that the Finns prepared a nasty surprise for their attackers. They made millions of petrol bombs and named them after the Russian Foreign Minister, Mr Molotov. Today, it is Ukraine that has borrowed the Finnish recipe book to greet a new generation of Russian invaders with petrol and fire.

How has the current war against another Russian neighbour, Ukraine, progressed? After months of tensions and intense diplomacy, including assurances to the UK’s Defence Minister by his Russian counterpart that there were “no plans to invade”, Mr Putin’s forces crossed the threshold early on 24 February. This had been preceded by long-announced military “manoeuvres” in neighbouring Belarus, which saw the assembly of over 100,000 combat-ready troops with all their vehicles and equipment. We now know this was a long-planned distraction to cover the concentration and preparation of their forces for war.

They came from 4 directions: Belarus in the north, from out of the rebel-held Donbas in the east, from Crimea in the south, and via amphibious assaults around the port of Mariupol. This tactic was designed to distract and divide the defenders and cause them to dilute their numbers. However, defying a basic military principle of war, the plan also inflicted the same disadvantage on the Russians. None of the four attacking thrusts possessed sufficient force to defeat their opponents and knife their way through to their objectives.

The first strikes in the early hours were a surprise only in their time and location, for Ukraine’s President Zelensky had long feared the worst, and other nations had quietly assessed an invasion was likely, rather than probable. Accompanied by the air raid sirens of Ukraine’s civil protection service, explosions from Russian cruise missile strikes were heard across the country. Some 600 have been fired since. Their airborne forces landed at civilian airports and military airbases. These elite paratroops were deployed to enable endless planeloads of follow-on forces to drive on the principal cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv before Ukraine woke up to what was happening.

The Russian tactical goal remains to control Ukraine by separating its pro-Western government from the population, hence the importance of the cities. President Zelensky declared martial law, ordered mobilization of all men between 18 and 60 and appealed to the wider world for help. Thousands started making Molotov cocktails, so deadly to attacking tanks more than 80 years ago. In some ways this war is anachronistic, with a Russian armoured train being filmed moving supplies forward. Expect railway sabotage with shades of Lawrence of Arabia. On 1 March, Belarus predictably entered the war on Russia’s side with such timing, that it is assumed President Lukashenko was merely following a script Vladimir Putin had written months earlier.

In The Line, Matt Gurney wonders what will happen if Russia actually loses the war:

Military historians and security experts are going to be studying the first two weeks of this invasion for years. Entire careers will be made of this, whole PhD theses written. Armies have always marched on their stomachs, but a modern army also needs massive quantities of fuel and lubricants, ammunition for hungry weapons systems, spare parts for weapons and vehicles, medical supplies and, yes, food for the troops, and also the ability to move wounded troops and prisoners backward down the supply line. This all takes an enormous amount of planning and specialized equipment and knowledge. Sustaining an army on the move means having the necessary supplies and items in abundant supply, but also having a sophisticated enough logistics system to get them to where they’re needed in a timely way. This involves everything from having good warehouse inventory control systems to the vehicles required to ferry the supplies to where they’re needed, plus a trained pool of manpower to run the whole operation. And the logistics system itself needs to be sustained — what good is a fleet of trucks to deliver supplies to the front if you can’t fuel those trucks?

We knew Russian logistics were well below Western standards. Logistics units never get the attention they deserve compared to the more exciting frontline units, and in a cash-strapped, corruption-riddled military like Russia’s, that means major problems in times of war — in an already poorly off military, the units that get even less TLC than most are going to be in rough shape indeed. Still, the Russians are underperforming what many Western analysts expected. We knew they’d be bad at this, but this is really bad.

There are reports of Russian troops running out of fuel and food, and abandoning their vehicles in place. There are other reports of long-expired Russian combat rations. In what was perhaps the nerdiest but most fascinating Twitter analysis thread of the war thus far, a retired American Department of Defence employee looked closely at photos from the battlefields in Ukraine and concluded that the tires on Russian vehicles were failing prodigiously, suggesting that the vehicles were not properly cared for when in storage. Again, given the known funding and corruption problems in the Russian military, that’s extremely plausible.

I mentioned this in an earlier Ukraine post, that the Soviet doctrine was much more oriented to the attack, and units and formations that hit heavier resistance than they could overcome were to be left behind to struggle, rather than be reinforced as most western military doctrine would prefer. Units were expected to fight until they were no longer combat-effective (or longer) and “expended” more like ammunition, in ways no western army could possibly support. As a result, Soviet and Soviet-aligned armies tended to be proportionally much more heavily armed, but very modestly supplied and logistics was very much a backwater where unpopular or inefficient officers could be sent to rot, professionally. I think most western analysts had assumed the successor Russian forces had moved away from those ideas, but the fighting to date in Ukraine seems to show that to be mistaken.

February 19, 2022

QotD: Army marching speed in the pre-industrial era

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The intuitive and a touch clever method is to take normal human walking speed – around 3mph – multiply it by walking hours per day (maybe 8) and go with that. This makes intuitive sense, but if large army logistics made intuitive sense, they wouldn’t be hard, and as Clausewitz says (drink!) “War is very simple, but the simplest thing is very hard.” Logistics is very hard. So why don’t armies move at c. 25 miles per day?

So let’s think about – in very general terms – what needs to happen and in what order for a large body of infantry to march. Everyone wakes up and starts to get moving (probably around 5am). Breakfast needs to happen, which may require making fires. Tents need to be struck and stowed along with all of the gear in the baggage train and individual soldiers need to stow their own equipment. All sorts of small tasks add up to eat away parts of the morning. Then everyone needs to get gathered and ready to march.

And now – because you are a large body of infantry, you wait. Let me explain – let’s take a nominally full strength (c. 3,000 men) American Civil War brigade, marching on a road 13ft or so wide. You can get five men (a little cramped) into a single row on that road, meaning that the infantry itself stretches 600 ranks deep. Unlike in the movies (which love ultra-compact marching formations because it looks cool) you need a few feet of separation between rows for best effect (WW2 US Army guidelines specified 2-5 yards), let’s assume each soldier occupies about 5 feet in the marching order. So the infantry is 3,000ft long (914m; nine football fields). We also need unit separation (between the regiments, it’s important to avoid “accordioning” on the march and facilitate control; WW2 army regs suggested 100 yards between companies, 50 yards between platoons, so these could be quite large), so let’s round up to 4,000 ft (1219m; 13 football fields).

But we also have tents, food supplies, spare ammunition and all sorts of other of what the Romans would have called impedimenta (sidenote: if you are thinking, “well, but a pre-gunpowder army doesn’t need this; 1) arrows take up space and 2) camp entrenching supplies – the Romans marched heavy). How many wagons, pack animals or porters you need varies – the Romans seem to have often moved with a mule for every six-to-eight men, plus the army’s siege train. A good rule-of-thumb I’ve seen for American Civil War estimates is around 20 wagons per thousand, so 60 wagons. Rule of thumb in the ACW is 80 wagons to a mile of road, so our wagon train ought to take up around another 4,000ft.

(Sidenote: you can see why logistics gets complicated fast. Even in explaining a rule of thumb, I have to resort to rules of thumb, or else we have to inventory all of the stuff an infantry brigade needs, and all of the food they need and then parcel it out by wagons (and then figure for the mule-or-horse teams for the wagons) and on and on. Fortunately for the historians, this sort of work was done by the armies at the time and written down, so we tend to use their staff-work.)

So the entire force is probably a bit more than 8,000 ft long – 1.5 miles. In practice, there’s actually a lot more space eaten up in separation (between wagons, between men) so it would be longer, but I don’t want to get lost in the details. And this is for just 3,000 infantry – we have no cavalry with their many spare horses (three per man as a typical minimum) or god forbid a siege train which might involve hundreds of wagons.

Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How Fast Do Armies Move?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-10-06.

January 19, 2022

Triumph by Sea, Tragedy by Land – Supplying Guadalcanal – WW2 Special

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 18 Jan 2021

Tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers were fighting over the jungles and beaches of Guadalcanal. To supply them with food, ammunition and medicine, the Japanese Navy had to resort to a series of daring supply runs — nicknamed the “Tokyo Express”. In the face of overwhelming American air superiority, the Tokyo Express had to find a tactic to overcome their enemy’s advantage, or it would doom its soldiers stranded on the island.
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January 7, 2022

Desert War – Dysentery, Disease, and Dehydration – WW2 Special

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Environment, Germany, Health, History, Italy, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 6 Jan 2022

North Africa. The Axis and Allies are fighting each other but even more, they’re fighting the desert itself. The men of the desert burn during the day and freeze at night. They do most of their fighting on a litre of water and a packet of army biscuits. What is life in such a hostile environment?
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December 29, 2021

War in Numbers 1942 – WW2 Special

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 28 Dec 2021

Quantity had a quality of its own. 1942 was the year in which the dimensions of the Second World War became truly apparent. The US and its unmatched economic power began to outproduce any other warring nation, manufacturing a fleet of ships and aircraft in record time. In the east Soviet industry began recovering itself, producing tens of thousands of tanks despite tremendous losses. All the while the German logistic system got overwhelmed by the vastness of the occupied territory.
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December 15, 2021

Is the Wehrmacht Defeated in 1942? – WW2 Special

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 14 Dec 2021

It’s late 1942 and the German Army is close to ruin. The Ostheer alone has suffered more than a million casualties in its fight against the Red Army. If the Wehrmacht cannot find a way to return to its former strength or reap decisive strategic benefits in the near future, it will ultimately face destruction in a war of attrition.
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December 9, 2021

The sequel to the British disaster at the Battle of Coronel, the German disaster at the Battle of the Falkland Islands

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On December 8th, the people of the Falkland Islands observe “Battle Day” to commemorate the British naval victory off the islands in 1914. This is the bookend to the Battle of Coronel the previous month (described here and here), where a Royal Navy squadron was almost annihilated by Imperial Germany’s East Asia Squadron under Vice-Admiral Graf Maximilian von Spee. At the Battle of the Falkland Islands, an equally lop-sided victory eliminated von Spee’s ships with minimal damage to Rear Admiral Sir Frederick Doveton Sturdee’s squadron. In The Critic, A.S.H. Smyth outlines the events as shown in a British film released in 1927:

Battle of the Falkland Islands, 1914 by William Lionel Wyllie. SMS Scharnhorst rolls over and sinks while SMS Gneisenau continues to fight.
Originally published in 1918 by Cassel & Company. Retouched image via Wikimedia Commons

Rear Admiral Sir Frederick Doveton Sturdee (unimprovably British, isn’t it?), Chief of War Staff at the Admiralty, and at distinct risk of being scapegoated for the Coronel catastrophe, was summarily appointed Commander-in-Chief South Atlantic and Pacific(!) and despatched posthaste by [First Sea Lord John “Jackie”] Fisher (with whom he did not get on), on something of a do-or-die mission as the commander of new, eight-cruiser squadron.

The Admiral Superintendent of Devonport warns that Sturdee’s two battle cruisers, Invincible and Inflexible, cannot be ready before Friday the 13th November. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill balks at that ill-omened date, and orders that they sail on the 11th, ready or not. (Students of the 1982 conflict may see more than a couple of parallels here.) Cue: dockyard refitting montage.

Cut to the German colony at Valparaiso, where his countrymen fête von Spee’s glorious German victory in their first naval battle. “Damnation to the British Navy!” they want to toast. No, says, von Spee: “to a gallant enemy.” Handed a bouquet of flowers, he says he’ll keep them for his funeral “when my time comes.” For “when were the British ever content to leave an enemy to his triumph?”

Von Spee was well aware, it seems, that running the gauntlet up through the Atlantic was going to be a torrid prospect, even without a veangeful enemy on the look-out for him personally. But homeless (Tsingtau had fallen to the Japanese), in need of fuel, and down to half their ammunition, von Spee’s captains urged him now to head for Germany, and he agreed.

Von Spee’s ships were in need of dockyard maintenance and not steaming efficiently, but thanks to a captured British collier they were not in need of coal to be able to get home. Before setting off from where they’d been refuelling, Spee decided to strike another blow against the British and raid the Royal Navy’s supply base at Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands where only local militia were expected to be defending.

It was, among other things, sheer bad luck that von Spee came up to Stanley just a few hours after Sturdee had arrived with his group of cruisers — all newer, faster, and better-gunned than their fatigued German counterparts — and was busily refuelling. Likewise, that the sea was calm, there was little wind, and visibility was excellent. Too late, Gneisenau observes that there are British warships in the harbour! (The acting here is particularly terrible.)

It has been suggested that von Spee had not known that the British ships were “waiting” there (they hardly were); but it has also been alleged that he was misled by poor German intelligence, or even false British cryptography. [The Wikipedia article on the battle credits misinformation by British intelligence for leading von Spee into the trap.]

In Britain, meanwhile, the Admiralty is under the impression that Sturdee is the one who has been caught unawares in the Falkland Islands. Von Spee is a mere 12 miles away, and none of the British ships have their steam up. The FIVF [the Falklands Islands Volunteer Force] are called out, as the ships are ordered to go from zero to hero. One poor lad has to run up the Union Jack in local weather conditions (I’ve been that lad: he has my sympathies); another forgets his rifle, as emphasised by a heavily-asterisked title card.

As so often happens, Fate now played its hand, and Canopus, parked, with her fully-functioning 12-inch guns (so missed at Coronel) in Stanley Harbour, as the Islands’ main defensive battery, came into her own. As the Germans turn and run, Canopus opens fire, and soon enough the “grimly purposeful” cruiser group — “fittingly bearing names from the four corners of Britain … Kent, Cornwall, Glasgow and Carnarvon” — set off in pursuit.

The maths was simply not on the Germans’ side. Sturdee even sent his men below to eat. At midday, he called them back to Action Stations. Von Spee responded by ordering his light cruisers to scatter and make for neutral ports, while Scharnhorst and Gneisenau remained to “accept action to cover their escape”. Flashback to the presentation of those flowers.

December 7, 2021

Kokoda Trail: D-by-D Recap 01

Filed under: Australia, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 6 Dec 2021

For the past months, we have continuously mentioned the fighting on the Kokoda Track, but it was often a mere footnote next to the colossal battles happening throughout the world. Today, we give you a unique recap of all that’s been going on in this remote theater of war.
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November 24, 2021

Tank Chats #133 | Renault UE Chenillette | The Tank Museum

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Italy, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 6 Aug 2021

In this weeks Tank Chat, Curator David Willey talks about the Renault UE Chenillette. A light tracked armoured carrier produced by France between 1932 and 1940.
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November 11, 2021

QotD: War and human capital

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Quotations, Technology, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… perhaps there is a parallel between the state of human capital in the American elite [today] and the German elite during the war. The German soldiers were the best in the world, but the people further up the line were not the best tacticians. At the upper reaches, the strategists were terrible in all sorts of ways, starting with Hitler, who was laughably inept at running a war. Winning was never an option, but the Germans could have avoided total obliteration if they had better leaders.

The blame for this is always put on Hitler and that’s a good place to start, but the Germans had a brain power problem throughout the planning layer. This is obvious in how they went about making tanks. Instead of going for a tank that was cheap and easy to produce by a civilian workforce, they tried to build tanks that were complex and required specialists to produce. The effects of allied bombing raids were amplified by this strategic blunder in production planning. This is a very basic error in planning and execution.

One possible cause of this was that the middle-aged men who would have been sorting these production and design problems had died during the Great War. The German army tended to “use up” their units, rather than cycle them in and out of lines. That meant that a lot of experience with supply and logistics was lost in the trenches. The British and the Americans rotated units in and out of the lines, thus they came out of the war with a vast number of people with experience in the nuts and bolts of war fighting.

The current ruling class needs the Germans to be seen as the ultimate in super villains, but the truth is the Germans were dumb about a lot of important things. The Russians came up with sloped armor, for example, and the Germans never bothered to steal the idea, even after Kursk. The Germans got their hands on the Churchill tank, but never bothered to learn anything from it. They never learned from the Americans how to use communications to coordinate their artillery and their armor.

In many respects, the story of the tank in the war is a great proxy for the story of human capital and cultural intelligence. The Germans had the best trained military on earth, but they lacked human capital in the strategy and tactics layer. Either the culture was unable to produce it or there was simply not enough smart people to create the necessary smart fraction. That was ultimately why Germany was wiped from the map. It’s probably why no new culture has arisen from that place on the map either.

The Z Man, “Tanking It”, The Z Blog, 2019-03-01.

November 6, 2021

Is the Answer in Uranus? – The Soviet Plan to Win at Stalingrad – WW2 SPECIAL

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 4 Nov 2021

Georgy Zhukov told Josef Stain in September that if the Red Army could just hold out until November, he could put together a counteroffensive that would defeat the enemy. Well, November is here, and that counteroffensive is ready to kick off, but how was it put together? Let’s find out.
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November 1, 2021

Indochina and The Battle of Dien Bien Phu

Filed under: Asia, China, France, History, Japan, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 29 Sep 2017

The History Guy remembers how decolonization led to proxy war and the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in what is now known as Vietnam.

The episode discusses and presents historical photographs and film footage depicting events during a period of war, which some viewers may find disturbing. All events are described for educational purposes and are presented in historical context.

The History Guy uses images that are in the Public Domain. As photographs of actual events are often not available, I will sometimes use photographs of similar events or objects for illustration.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheHistoryGuy

The History Guy: Five Minutes of History is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.

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The episode is intended for educational purposes. All events are presented in historical context.

#DienBienPhu #militaryhistory #thehistoryguy

September 30, 2021

Petrol shortages in the UK

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’ve seen several reports on the somewhat sudden rash of petrol (gasoline to US/Canadian readers) shortages in Britain, and most of those reports airily pin the blame for the situation on Brexit. To the media, Brexit seems to be an all-purpose explanation for anything that goes wrong (in the same way that previous administrations get the blame for current problems even many years after they left power). Sean Gabb says that despite the frequent glib blaming of Brexit, in this case it is part of the reason:

There is in the United Kingdom a shortage of lorry drivers. This means a dislocation of much economic activity. Because it cannot be delivered, there is no petrol in the filling stations. Because there are not enough drivers, and a shortage of fuel, we may soon have shortages of food in the shops. Christmas this year may not involve its usual material abundance.

These difficulties are wholly an effect of the new political economy that has emerged in England and in many other Western countries since about 1980. An army of managers, of agents, of administrators, of consultants and advisers and trainers, and of other middle class parasites has appropriated a growing share of the national income. This has happened with at least the active connivance of the rich and the powerful. Since, in the short term, the distribution of the national income is a zero-sum game, the necessary result is low and falling real wages for those who actually produce. So long as the productive classes can be kept up by immigration from countries where even lower wages are on offer, the system will remain stable. Because leaving the European Union has reduced the supply of cheap labour, the system is no longer stable in England.

There are two obvious solutions. The first is to rearrange the distribution of income, to make the productive classes more able and more willing to produce. Since this would mean reducing the numbers or incomes or both of the parasite classes, the second is the solution we mostly read about in the newspapers. This is to restore the flow of cheap foreign labour.

In summary, that is my explanation of what is happening. For those who are interested, I will now explain at greater length. According to the mainstream theory of wages, labour is a commodity. Though workers are human beings, the labour they supply to employers is of the same general nature as machine tools and copper wire and cash registers and whatever else is bought and sold in the markets for producer goods. A wage therefore is a price, and we can illustrate the formation of wage rates with the same supply and demand diagrams as we use for illustrating the formation of prices:

The supply curve slopes upwards because most work is a nuisance. Every hour of labour supplied is an hour that cannot be spent doing something more enjoyable. Beyond a certain level, workers can only be persuaded to supply more labour if more money is offered for each additional hour of labour. As with other producer goods, the shape of the demand curve is determined both by the price of what labour can be used to produce and by the law of diminishing returns.

[…]

Our problem in England is that large areas of economic activity have been rigged. There is an immensely large state sector, paid for by taxes on the productive. Most formally private activity is engrossed by large organisations that are able to be so large either because of limited liability laws or by regulations that only large organisations can obey. The result is that wages are often determined less by market forces than by administrative choice. In this kind of rigged market, we cannot explain the distribution of income as a matter of continual choice between marginal increments of competing inputs until the whole has been distributed. It may be better to look at a modified wages fund theory. A large organisation has a pot of money left over from the sale of whatever its product may be, minus payments to outside suppliers, and minus whatever the directors choose to classify as profit. This is then distributed according to the free choice of the directors, or how hard they can be pushed. Or we can keep the mainstream cross-diagrams, but accept that the demand curve is determined less by marginal productivity than by the overall prejudices of those in charge.

Therefore the growth of a large and unproductive middle class, and the screwing down of all other wages to pay for this. This is not inevitable in rigged markets, but is possible. It has come about since the 1980s for three reasons:

First, the otherwise unemployable products of an expanded higher education sector have used all possible means to get nice jobs for themselves and their friends;

Second, the rich and the powerful have accommodated this because higher wages and greater security for the productive might encourage them to become as assertive as they were before the 1980s;

Third, that these rich and powerful see the parasite classes as a useful transmitter of their own political and moral prejudices.

August 4, 2021

Oil – Hitler’s Only Chance to Win the War? – WW2 Special

Filed under: Economics, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 3 Aug 2021

Well, we all know by know that the Wehrmacht is driving into the Caucasus to try and take the Soviet oilfields, but how bad is their oil situation, actually? And how will they get it out of the ground if the Soviets sabotage the fields and wells? What exactly is the plan? Let’s find out.
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July 28, 2021

How Hitler Created the World’s Worst Traffic Jam – WW2 – 152B – July 27, 1942

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 27 Jul 2021

“I said DAMN, this traffic jam … How I hate to be late, hurts my motor to go so slow. Time I get home my supper be cold. Damn, this traffic jam.” (James Taylor, the Eastern Front, 1942)
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