World War Two
Published 7 Nov 2023Military deception is tricky. Sometimes you need to destroy a crucial piece of war industry or make an entire harbour disappear. Who do you call for this sort of job? Well, someone who knows a thing or two about tricking the eye. You need a professional magician. You need Jasper Maskelyne. But is there more to this illusionist than meets the eye?
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February 7, 2024
The Magician Who Fooled the Nazis (and all of us)
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October 24, 2023
See Inside The M3 Grant | Tank Chats Reloaded
The Tank Museum
Published 30 Jun 2023With a crew of six and a chaotically crowded interior, the Grant was a US-produced WW II tank more used by the British and Indian Armies than anyone else. Join Chris Copson as he explores probably the best preserved example of this rare vehicle – and listen out for the cheese sandwich …
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September 30, 2023
Why did the North Africa Campaign Matter in WW2?
The Intel Report
Published 8 Jun 2023As Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps rolled into Egypt in 1942, the only thing standing between them and Cairo and the Suez Canal was the British 8th Army. In this video we look at what was at stake for both sides, and why the North African campaign made a crucial impact on the outcome of the Second World War.
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June 17, 2023
Why Rommel Lost the Battle for North Africa
Real Time History
Published 16 Jun 2023The North African campaign of WW2 is one of the most famous ones. The almost mythical story of the British “Desert Rats” defeating Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. But why did Rommel lose in North Africa?
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June 7, 2023
QotD: A “second front” in 1943
Which brings us to the debate about the possibility of an invasion in 1943 – Roundup. Something that a surprising number of historians, and even a few not entirely incompetent generals, have suggested might have been possible, and should have been tried.
There are some points in their favour. The invasions of North Africa definitely took resources that could have been built up in Britain, and therefore slowed things down. (And the withdrawal of the new escort carriers, escort groups, and shipping from the Battle of the Atlantic for the North African adventure, definitely did huge damage in the loss of shipping and supplies, slowing things down further.) As a result the huge buildup in North Africa was much easier to use against Italy before moving on to France. Certainly another distraction or delay … but only if you don’t think that knocking Italy out of the war would make Germany weaker!
But once Sledgehammer [the plan to invade France in 1942] was abandoned, this operation was the only possible way to get US troops into combat in Europe, short of shipping some to Russia. It was also the only possible way of coming close to keeping Roosevelt’s ridiculous promise to the Russians.
[…]
Nonetheless it is wrong to think that the British never had any intention of [mounting Operation] Roundup. Despite what Roosevelt and many other Americans convinced themselves, the British were, at the start of 1942, far more optimistic about the possibility of invading Europe through France in 1943 than they had been about Sledgehammer. Their studies seemed to show that Germany would only have to be weaker, not suddenly collapse, to make invasion in 1943 a realistic possibility. Realistic that is as long as the rest of the plans for training and shipping troops, building and concentrating invasion craft, and moving enough supplies to make it sustainable, all came together.
They didn’t.
For the British, the middle of 1942 revealed how little would be available in time for the middle of 1943. Even on the best assumptions of American training and preparation, there was no chance that the majority of forces for Roundup would not be British … assuming they could supply them either. In practice mid-1942 saw the Axis continue to advance on every front. Burma collapsed; the Allied position in New Guinea was under threat; the Japanese were still expanding to places like Guadalcanal; Rommel was advancing in Egypt; the Germans were advancing on the Caucasian oil fields and towards the Middle East; and more and more was needed just to keep Russia in the war. As a result British troops, shipping and supplies were continuing to flow away from Britain, not towards it.
Much of the Royal Navy was trying to save the dangerous losses caused by [US Chief of Naval Operations Admiral] King’s refusal to have convoys in American waters (too “defensive-minded” he thought.) These alone, the worst eight months of the war, were threatening to scupper Roundup. The rest was so busily deployed in the Indian and Pacific Oceans against the Japanese, or North Atlantic trying to fight supplies through to Russia (a high proportion of tanks and planes defending Moscow were British-supplied), that there was virtually nothing left in the Med to slow Rommel’s advance. The merchant ships surviving the fight across the oceans were actually more vitally needed to take men and equipment from the UK to other places than to bring in a buildup for the UK.
Nor was the American buildup going to plan. Less well-trained troops were becoming available too slowly, could not be shipped in adequate numbers anyway, and were in no condition to face German veterans. (The very best US units to go into action in 1942 – the Marines in Guadalcanal – and 1943 – the 1st Infantry and 1st Armored divisions which were actually professional troops not conscripts in North Africa – had very steep learning curves. Particularly at Kasserine. They were clearly not fit to face German veterans yet.
And American resource buildup was also not up to promises. King and MacArthur were milking supplies far beyond what had originally been agreed under “Germany first”. In practical terms they were doing so for the same reasons the British were: an immediate desperate situation had to be saved before a future ideal one could be pursued.
Nonetheless I have read all sorts of apparently serious suggestions that after North Africa was cleared, or at the very least after Sicily was cleared, an invasion of France should have happened.
Delusional.
Nigel Davies, “The ‘Invasion of France in 1943’ lunacy”, rethinking history, 2021-06-21.
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April 28, 2023
QotD: The high-water mark of the Panzerarmee Afrika
Even here, however, let us be honest. Smashing 8th Army at Gazala and taking tens of thousands of prisoners at Tobruk did little to solve the strategic problem. Unless the British were destroyed altogether, they would reinforce to a level the Axis could not match. Many later analysts argue that the Panzerarmee should have paused now, waited until some sort of combined airborne-naval operation had been launched against Malta to improve the logistics, and only then acted. Such arguments ignore the dynamic of the desert battle, however; they ignore the morale imperative of keeping a victorious army in motion; above all they ignore the personality of Rommel himself.
Pause? Halt? Wait? Anyone who expected Rommel to ease up on the throttle clearly hadn’t been paying attention. Instead, the Panzerarmee vaulted across the border into Egypt with virtually no preparation. To Rommel, to his men, and even to Hitler and Mussolini, it must have looked like a great victory lay just over the next horizon: Cairo, Alexandria, the Suez Canal, the British Empire itself.
In reality, it is possible today to see what the great Prussian philosopher of war Karl von Clausewitz once called the “culmination point” — that moment in every campaign when the offensive begins to lose steam, run down, and eventually stop altogether. The Panzerarmee was exhausted, its equipment was worn out and in desperate need of repair. Captured British stores and vehicles had become its life-blood, Canadian Ford trucks in particular. The manpower was breaking down. A chronic shortage of potable water had put thousands of soldiers on the sick rolls. Colonel Siegfried Westphal, the Panzerarmee‘s operations chief (the “Ia”, in German parlance), was yellow with jaundice. The army’s intelligence chief (the “Ic”), Colonel Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin, was wasting away with amoebic dysentery. Rommel had a little of both, as well as a serious blood-pressure problem (no doubt stress-induced) and a chronic and bothersome sinusitis condition. While it would be easy to view all these illnesses as simple bad luck, they were, in fact, the price Rommel and all the rest of them were paying for fighting an overseas expeditionary campaign with inadequate resources.
The same might be said for the rest of the campaign. The Panzerarmee made an ad hoc attempt to break thought the British bottleneck at El Alamein in July. It failed, coming to grief against British defenses on the Ruweisat ridge. There was a second, more deliberate, attempt in August. After an initial breakthrough, it crashed into strong British defenses at Alam Halfa ridge and it, too, failed. After yet another long pause, a “third battle of El Alamein” began in late October. This time, it was the well supplied British on the attack, however, and they managed to smash through the Panzerarmee and drive Rommel and company back, not hundreds of miles, but more than a thousand, out of the desert altogether and into Tunisia. There was still fighting to be done in Africa, but the “desert war” was over.
Robert Citino, “Drive to Nowhere: The Myth of the Afrika Korps, 1941-43″, The National WWII Museum, 2012. (Originally published in MHQ, Summer 2012).
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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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December 2, 2022
QotD: Rome’s legions settle down to permanent fortresses
What absolutely does begin happening during the reign of Augustus and subsequently is that the Roman legions, which had spent the previous three centuries on the move outside of Italy, begin to settle down more permanently on Rome’s new frontiers, particularly along the Rhine/Danube frontier facing Central and Eastern Europe and the Syrian frontier facing the Parthian Empire. That in turn meant that Roman legions (and their supporting auxiliary cohorts) now settled into permanent forts.
The forts themselves, at least in the first two centuries, provide a fairly remarkably example of institutional inertia. While legionary forts of this early period typically replaced the earthwork-and-stakes wall (the agger and vallum) with stone walls and towers and the tents of the camp with permanent barracks, the basic form of the fort: its playing-card shape, encircling defensive ditches (now very often two or three ditches in sequence) remain. Of particular note, these early imperial legionary forts generally still feature towers which do not project outward from the wall, a stone version of the observation towers of the old Roman marching camp. Precisely because these fortifications are in stone they are often very archaeologically visible and so we have a fairly good sense of Roman forts in this period. In short then, put in permanent positions, Roman armies first constructed permanent versions of their temporary marching camps.
And that broadly seems to fit with how the Romans expected to fight their wars on these frontiers. The general superiority of Roman arms in pitched battle (the fancy term here is “escalation dominance” – that escalating to large scale warfare favored the heavier Roman armies) meant that the Romans typically planned to meet enemy armies in battle, not sit back to withstand sieges (this was less true on Rome’s eastern frontier since the Parthians were peer competitors who could rumble with the Romans on more-or-less even terms; it is striking that the major centers in the East like Jerusalem or Antioch did not get rid of their city walls, whereas by contrast the breakdown of Roman order in the third century AD and subsequently leads to a flurry of wall-building in the west where it is clear many cities had neglected their defensive walls for quite a long time). Consequently, the legionary forts are more bases than fortresses and so their fortifications are still designed to resist sudden raids, not large-scale sieges.
They were also now designed to support much larger fortification systems, which now gives us a chance to talk about a different kind of fortification network: border walls. The most famous of these Roman walls of course is Hadrian’s Wall, a mostly (but not entirely) stone wall which cuts across northern England, built starting in 122. Hadrian’s Wall is unusual in being substantially made out of stone, but it was of-a-piece with various Roman frontier fortification systems. Crucially, the purpose of this wall (and this is a trait it shares with China’s Great Wall) was never to actually prevent movement over the border or to block large-scale assaults. Taking Hadrian’s wall, it was generally manned by something around three legions (notionally; often at least one of the legions in Britain was deployed further south); even with auxiliary troops nowhere near enough to actually manage a thick defense along the entire wall. Instead, the wall’s purpose is slowing down hostile groups and channeling non-hostile groups (merchants, migrants, traders, travelers) towards controlled points of entry (valuable especially because import/export taxes were a key source of state revenue), while also allowing the soldiers on the wall good observation positions to see these moving groups. You can tell the defense here wasn’t prohibitive in part because the main legionary fortresses aren’t generally on the wall, but rather further south, often substantially further south, which makes a lot of sense if the plan is to have enemies slowed (but not stopped) by the wall, while news of their approach outraces them to those legionary forts so that the legions can form up and meet those incursions in an open battle after they have breached the wall itself. Remember: the Romans expect (and get) a very, very high success rate in open battles, so it makes sense to try to force that kind of confrontation.
This emphasis on controlling and channeling, rather than prohibiting, entry is even more visible in the Roman frontier defenses in North Africa and on the Rhine/Danube frontier. In North Africa, the frontier defense system was structured around watch-posts and the fossatum Africae, a network of ditches (fossa) separating the province of Africa (mostly modern day Tunisia) from non-Roman territory to its south. It isn’t a single ditch, but rather a system of at least four major segments (and possibly more), with watch-towers and smaller forts in a line-of-sight network (so they can communicate); the ditch itself varies in width and depth but typically not much more than 6m wide and 3m deep. Such an obstruction is obviously not an prohibitive defense but the difficulty of crossing is going to tend to channel travelers and raids to the intentional crossings or alternately slow them down as they have to navigate the trench (a real problem here where raiders are likely to be mounted and so need to get their horses and/or camels across).
On the Rhine and the Danube, the defense of the limes, the Roman frontier, included a border wall (earthwork and wood, rather than stone like Hadrian’s wall), similarly supported by legions stationed to the rear, with road networks positioned; once again, the focus is on observing threats, slowing them down and channeling them so that the legions can engage them in the field. This is a system based around observe-channel-respond, rather than an effort to block advances completely.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part II: Romans Playing Cards”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-11-12.
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November 30, 2022
Victorious Italians, Swedish Turnips, and Battlefield Songs – OOTF 29
World War Two
Published 29 Nov 2022Rommel disliked Italian officers, but how bad were the troops during the North Africa Campaign? DID German pilots use skip-bombing in the Atlantic? AND what kind of wartime songs did soldiers sing? Find out in this episode of Out of the Foxholes!
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September 20, 2022
The Byzantine Empire: Part 4 – Justinian, The Hand of God
seangabb
Published 1 Jan 2022Between 330 AD and 1453, Constantinople (modern Istanbul) was the capital of the Roman Empire, otherwise known as the Later Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Mediaeval Roman Empire, or The Byzantine Empire. For most of this time, it was the largest and richest city in Christendom. The territories of which it was the central capital enjoyed better protections of life, liberty and property, and a higher standard of living, than any other Christian territory, and usually compared favourably with the neighbouring and rival Islamic empires.
The purpose of this course is to give an overview of Byzantine history, from the refoundation of the City by Constantine the Great to its final capture by the Turks.
Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the history of Byzantium. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.
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July 27, 2022
When the founder of the SAS was captured by Italian troops in 1943
In The Critic, Saul David describes what happened when Lieutenant Colonel David Stirling was captured during his “most hare-brained scheme” to link up the troops of Britain’s First and Eighth armies in Tunisia:
In January 1943 Lieutenant Colonel David Stirling, founder of the SAS, was flown to Rome for interrogation. He had been captured by the Italians on his “most hare-brained scheme yet” — leading a small raiding party deep into enemy territory in Tunisia to attack lines of communication, reconnoitre the terrain and become the first Eighth Army unit to link up with the First Army advancing from the west.
Cautious when speaking to the Italians, he was “vain and voluble” in conversation with a fellow “captive”, Captain John Richards. Unbeknown to Stirling, Richards was an Anglo-Swiss stool pigeon, Theodore Schurch, who had deserted from the British army and was working for fascist intelligence.
Prior to Schurch’s court-martial for treachery in late 1945, Stirling denied he had revealed any sensitive information. If he had, it was inaccurate and “designed to deceive”. This was a lie, told to protect Stirling’s reputation. In fact, as the British authorities knew all too well from intercepted signals, Stirling had told Richards vital details about current SAS operations, including the location of patrols and their orders. He had even given them the name of his probable replacement as SAS commander: Paddy Mayne.
The story of Stirling’s unfortunate encounter with Schurch has been told before, notably by Ben Macintyre in his bestselling SAS: Rogue Heroes. But Macintyre underplays Stirling’s indiscretion and fails to link it to the many other examples of the SAS commander’s recklessness and poor judgement of character. For Gavin Mortimer, on the other hand, both the capture and loose talk were typical of a man who was “imaginative, immature, immoderate and ill-disciplined”. Small wonder that even his own brother Bill thought he would be better off in a prisoner-of-war camp.
The subtitle of Mortimer’s book — a carefully researched and impeccably sourced take-down of the legendary special forces pioneer — is a corrective to the flattering but inaccurate nickname that was first coined for Stirling by British tabloids during the Second World War. “When word reached Cairo of the Phantom Major moniker,” writes Mortimer, “it must have sparked a mix of hilarity and indignation. All the falsehoods and fabrications would have been harmless enough had Stirling not stolen the valour of his comrades.”
Thread by thread, Mortimer unpicks the myth of Stirling’s life and war service that the subject and his fawning admirers had so carefully constructed, both during and after the war. Stirling was not training in North America for an attempt on Mount Everest’s summit when war broke out in 1939, as he later claimed, but rather working as a ranch hand because his exasperated family hoped it might give the feckless youth some focus and direction.
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Italy’s Worst Machine Gun: The Breda Modello 30
Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Jul 2017http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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The Breda Model 30 was the standard Italian light machine gun of World War II, and is a serious contender for “worst machine gun ever”. Yes, given the choice we would prefer to have a Chauchat (which really wasn’t as bad as people today generally think).
The Breda 30 suffered from all manner of problems. To begin with, it was far more complicated than necessary. The amount of machining needed to build one is mind boggling compared to contemporary guns like the ZB26/Bren or BAR. And for all that work, it just didn’t work well in combat conditions.
Mechanically, the Breda used a short recoil action with a rotating bolt. The recoil action meant that the barrel moved with each shot, so the sights were mounted on the receiver to keep them fixed. This seems like a good idea, but it meant that the sights would need to be re-zeroed each time the barrel was changed. To compound this, the gun fired from a closed bolt which made it more susceptible to overheating and it was recommended to change barrels every 200 rounds or so. An oiling mechanism was built in to lightly oil each cartridge on feeding. This allowed the gun to extract without ripping rims off the cases, but was a disaster waiting to happen on the battlefield. In places like North Africa, the oil acted as a magnet for sand and dust, leading to quick jamming if the gun were not kept scrupulously clean.
The next huge judgment error on Breda’s part was the magazine. The thought behind it was that magazine feed lips are easily damaged in the field, and they can be protected by building them into the gun receiver rather than in each cheap disposable box magazine (the Johnson LMG and Madsen LMG recognized this issue as well). However, Breda’s solution was to make the 20-round magazine a permanent part of the gun. The magazine was attached to the receiver by a hinge pin, and was reloaded by special 20-round stripper clips. This meant that reloading took significantly longer than changing magazines, and any damage to the one attached magazine would render the gun inoperable. As if anything else were needed, the magazine was made with a big opening on top to allow the gunner to see how many rounds remained – and to let more of that North African sand into the action.
Most of the Breda Model 30s were made in 6.5 Carcano, but a small number were made in 7.35 Carcano when that cartridge was adopted. The rate of fire was about 500 rounds per minute, which was a bit slower than most other machineguns of the day.
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May 15, 2022
Tank Chat #147 M14/41 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
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March 27, 2022
American Army Finally Does Something Right – WW2 – 187 – March 26, 1943
World War Two
Published 26 Mar 2021The British are attacking the Mareth Line in North Africa while the Americans hit the Axis flank, but the Allies are withdrawing in Burma. It’s the Germans who are pulling back in the USSR, though, and there is another attempt from within German Command to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
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March 21, 2022
Republic to Empire: Sulla A Failed Reaction
seangabb
Published 10 Feb 2021In 120 BC, Rome was a republic with touches of democracy. A century later, it was a divine right military dictatorship. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this transformation with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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