Published on 23 Jul 2015
This week Russia premieres her tactics of “Scorched Earth”. A new strategy of burning their own land is to avoid enemies profiting from their conquests. Russia had been retreating from the German and Austro-Hungarian armies for nearly three months now. Continuously losing huge areas of land and hundreds of thousands of men on the Eastern Front. As a consequence, millions of civilians had to flee their homes. At the same time allied troops at Gallipoli are weakened by infections and disease due to lack of hygiene and heat while Italy repeatedly failed to take out Austrian strongpoints.
July 24, 2015
Scorched Earth – Russia’s retreat goes up in flames! l THE GREAT WAR Week 52
Comments Off on Scorched Earth – Russia’s retreat goes up in flames! l THE GREAT WAR Week 52
May 22, 2015
The trains of war – the military application of steam power
James Simpson on the revolution in military affairs triggered by the development of the steam engine and the railways:
Navvies working on the Grand Crimean Central Railway, 1854. Charles Walker: Thomas Brassey, Railway Builder, 1969. (via Wikipedia)
Trains were cutting-edge weapons of war in the 19th century — and all the major powers were figuring out how to deploy them. The Europeans learned how to move troops by train. The Americans — how to fight on rail cars. The British, meanwhile, found they could dominate an empire from the tracks.
In today’s world of tanks, bombers and submarines, it’s perhaps hard to believe that the train was once an amazingly mobile weapons platform. They might be locked to their rails, but for over a century trains were the fastest means of hauling troops and artillery to front lines across the world.
The invention of the railway shaped warfare for a century. Rails allowed force projection across immense distances — and at speeds which were impossible on foot or by horse.
[…]
The first demonstration of the military efficacy of the railroads was the 1846 Polish Uprising. Prussia rushed 12,000 troops of the Sixth Army Corps, with guns and horses, to the Free City of Krakow to help put down the Polish rebellion. In this period of nationalist uprisings, Russia and Austria also used their railroads against similar uprisings from 1848 to 1850.
A lack of infrastructure and experience stifled the success of these early endeavors. Due to a lack of rolling stock, suitable platforms and double-track stretches, the trains sometimes operated far slower than a man could march on foot.
Austria was first to get it right. In 1851, the Austrian Empire shuttled 145,000 men, nearly 2,000 horses, 48 artillery pieces and 464 vehicles over 187 miles.
Comments Off on The trains of war – the military application of steam power
March 3, 2015
Poland’s Struggle for Independence During WW1 I THE GREAT WAR
Published on 2 Mar 2015
World War 1 was a a fight of nationalism and self determination for many countries which did not yet exist then. One of those countries was Poland – its territory split between Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany. In our first of multiple special episodes, Indy tells you everything about Poland and it’s fight for independence.
Comments Off on Poland’s Struggle for Independence During WW1 I THE GREAT WAR
March 25, 2014
NATO’s existential moment
In the Telegraph, Con Coughlin says that if NATO doesn’t stand up to Vladimir Putin’s aggressions, it’s done for:
For anyone who still takes the security of the West seriously — and I fear I am in a distinct minority — the manner in which Russian President Vladimir Putin has effortlessly achieved his audacious land grab in the Crimea should serve as a dramatic wake-up call for Nato.
And yet, to judge by the mood music coming from the meeting of Western leaders in The Hague this week, the likelihood of Nato doing anything to dissuade Moscow’s macho man from undertaking any further acts of military adventurism in central Europe or the Baltic states does not seem at all encouraging.
[…]
When faced with a crisis, the default position of Nato member states, as we have seen recently over Libya and Syria, is to bicker amongst themselves over how to respond, rather than coming up with an effective programme that safeguards its interests.
But if Nato leaders fail to come up with an adequate response to Putin’s new mood of military aggression, they might as well dissolve the alliance and start negotiating peace terms with Moscow.
NATO member states in blue, Ukraine in yellow (including Crimea), Russia in red (for tradition’s sake)
Update: Poland is recalling reservists for military refresher training.
Next time you take a tray of tea and custard creams to the nice gang of Polish builders renovating your semi, they may seem a little distracted and anxious. Ask them why, and they will answer that some of them have in the last few weeks received call-up papers as army reservists.
This happened to a friend of mine in London at the end of last week. At least 7,000 reservists have been recalled to the colours for immediate exercises lasting between 10 and 30 days.
They’re told by the Polish authorities that the call-ups are “routine”: but the men say they haven’t been asked before and they’re well aware of the growing alarm in Warsaw at President Putin’s aggression. Three weeks ago, their Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, called a press conference to warn that “the world stands on the brink of conflict, the consequences of which are not foreseen… Not everyone in Europe is aware of this situation.”
My own view is that Putin was initially more concerned with righting a specific historical wrong in Crimea than starting a new Cold War. This is still probably the case despite the dawning truth that the EU/Nato Emperor really has no clothes at all.
But in the worst case scenario of a truly revanchist Russia, Poland certainly has the borders from hell. Starting from the top, it abuts Kaliningrad (the Russian exclave on the Baltic carved at the end of the war from East Prussia), Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.
Comments Off on NATO’s existential moment
February 17, 2014
The dirty not-so-secret about Olympic venues
Every time somebody suggests that Toronto be seriously involved in an Olympic bid, I become a big supporter of the other competing cities. Toronto is dysfunctional enough without adding the cost, disruption, and anti-democratic central planning aspects of hosting the Olympic games. In Samizdata, Michael Jennings looks at the shenanigans going on both in Sochi with the current Winter Games and in future venues:
The 2018 Winter Olympics are in Pyeongchang county in South Korea. Assuming that North Korea does not collapse or try to start a war between now and then, this will be straightforward, as these things go. A vast amount of money has been spent building new world class ski resorts at Alpensia and Yongpyong. These have largely been built already. They were built in anticipation of Pyeongchang winning the Winter Olympics. Pyeongchang also made unsuccessful bids for the games of 2006 and 2010, and has therefore been building for some time. There are already large financial black holes from the construction of these venues, but one cost overruns will be anywhere near as bad as have come from the highly corrupt race to get things built on time that took place prior to Sochi. Plus there have been and will be time for lots of test events to get the venues right. Of course, there are still highly expensive new highways and railways to be built, and a lot of indoor venues to be built for the ice events in the coastal city of Gangneung. As national pride is at stake, South Korean taxpayers will undoubtedly suffer painfully, but South Korea is a rich industrial democracy with competent people in charge. These games will likely go smoothly, but they will cost a lot — just not as much as Sochi.
The venue for the 2022 Winter Olympics has not yet been decided, but the IOC announced last year there were six final bidders: Stockholm (Åre), Sweden; Oslo, Norway; Krakow, Poland (Zakopane, Poland and Jasná, Slovakia); Almaty, Kazakhstan; Lviv, Ukraine; and Beijing (Zhangjiakou), China. [It has always been the case that the indoor ice events would be held in a city and the outdoor snow events in a mountain resort. In recent times the need for the city to be close to the resort has been relaxed somewhat, and I have listed the mountain resort(s) in brackets if it is a long way away from the official host city].
Sweden has already withdrawn their bid, and Norway appears to be close to doing so. The reason: they are seeing the immense expense and horrible shenanigans going on in Sochi. A little secret of the Olympics is that many of the the same people run it every time — the host city largely just picks up the bill. Once the event has ridiculous expenses and large amounts of outright corruption attached to it, this all comes with it to the next venue. Receiving kickbacks on construction projects becomes what it is all about.
Relatively uncorrupt places like Norway and Sweden look at this, and find that they want nothing to do with it. As great centres of winter sport, they have many of the right facilities already, meaning less scope for construction industry kickbacks. This means that for some of the IOC the fact that a country is already prepared for the Games is actually a negative rather than a positive.
Anyway, though, the point is that the two countries best able to host the games end up not being serious candidates.
As for the others: Poland and Slovakia would run the games just fine, but a fair bit of infrastructure and facilities would need to be built. Krakow is a lovely city. Zakopane is a lovely resort, and the Tata mountains are a suitable place for the games, even if the best downhill resorts are on the Slovakian side rather than the Polish side. (Some of the infrastructure construction would not be too counterproductive: Poland built lots of new roads, railways stations and airport terminals before the Euro 2012 soccer tournament, most of which were needed anyway and were part of Poland’s long term post-communist infrastructure modernisation). The Olympic games are not what money should be spent on in the present economic circumstances, though, and one also hopes that the richer countries of the EU are past paying for the Olympics to be held in the poorer countries of the EU (see Athens 2004). But with the EU, who knows?
Comments Off on The dirty not-so-secret about Olympic venues
June 26, 2012
Poland’s uneasy WW2 history
Poles are being told unwelcome things about the country’s experiences under Nazi rule. The most recent upheavals have been triggered by the publication of a new book by Jan T. Gross:
Its title, Golden Harvest, stems from a cover photograph that purportedly shows Polish peasants who have been digging through remains of victims killed at Treblinka, where 800,000 Jews were gassed and cremated, to find gold or valuable stones neglected by the Nazis.
From there, Mr. Gross narrates events beyond the barbed wire of Nazi death camps. He describes Poles hunting Jews down, extorting money from them, massacring them, and profiting by taking over their jobs and property. Some 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland before the war began, and about 90 percent had perished by its end.
“There was a sense of satisfaction that was quite widespread that they are being eliminated from Polish economic and social life,” Mr. Gross says in a phone interview from Kraków, where he is teaching a summer course for Princeton students. “When given the opportunity, a large number of Poles participated in victimization of Jews.”
[. . .]
The white-haired, New York-based writer, 64, enjoys a level of notoriety in his native country that lacks any analogue among American historians. When word gets out that he is publishing a new book, anxiety spreads about what dirty laundry he will expose this time. His writing gets discussed on prime-time TV.
Mr. Gross “polarizes public opinion probably more than anyone else outside of the political world,” says Jan Grabowski, a Holocaust historian who splits his time between the University of Ottawa and Poland.
His books have struck such a nerve because they cut against the national narrative that Poland is exclusively a victim of history, not a victimizer.
June 11, 2012
QotD: Modern day racism’s cosmopolitan disguise
In the run-up to the Euro 2012 football championships, which are taking place in Ukraine and Poland this month, we Western Europeans have been bombarded with media stories about how uncultured and uncouth Ukrainians in particular are. In that strange Eastern land, ‘notorious for its extremist yobs’, stupid racial thinking is ‘socially endemic’, we are told, which isn’t surprising considering that, in the words of one British academic, Ukraine lacks the ‘cosmopolitan atmospheres’ of Western Europe. Something fantastically ironic is taking place here: under the banner of ‘anti-racism’, the presumed cultural superiority of Western Europe over backward, brutal Slavs is being loudly asserted, just as the racial superiority of Western Europe was asserted over the Slavs in the past.
Brendan O’Neill, “Euro 2012: are Ukrainians still Untermenschen?”, sp!ked, 2012-06-11
Comments Off on QotD: Modern day racism’s cosmopolitan disguise
May 7, 2012
“Welcome to the foreign policy Theater of the Absurd”
Justin Raimondo on the recent spat between Russia and NATO:
A Russian general has threatened military action if the US and its NATO allies go ahead and build a “missile shield” in Eastern Europe: “A decision to use destructive force preemptively will be taken if the situation worsens,” say Russian chief of staff Nikolai Makarov. That the “shield” is of dubious effectiveness, and is mainly a cash cow for US defense companies, are not factors the Russkies are willing to take into consideration: their main beef seems to be the implied insult of Washington claiming the shield isn’t designed to protect against future aggression emanating from Moscow, but against an alleged Iranian missile threat to Europe. Hey, they seem to be saying: what about us? Aren’t we a threat, too?
Well, no — they aren’t. Russia’s population is falling rapidly, and their economy isn’t doing too hot, either. What the oligarchs didn’t loot and spirit out of the country has been either seized and mismanaged by the state, or else is part of the burgeoning black market. The last thing Moscow needs is an empire: they can barely manage what they already have. That hasn’t stopped Washington from manufacturing a phony narrative that imagines a “resurgent Russia” motivated by revanchism and a desire to refight the cold war.
So here we have the spectacle of a phony threat being uttered as a response to yet another phony threat: the Russians aren’t going to preemptively attack Poland, and neither they nor the Iranians represent a real danger to the West. Yet the actors in this little drama are intent on playing out their roles to the end, no matter how disconnected from reality their actions and pronouncements may seem.
Welcome to the foreign policy Theater of the Absurd.
Comments Off on “Welcome to the foreign policy Theater of the Absurd”
August 7, 2011
“When I used to do this I broke my hand 14 times, and I’m a banjo player”
Poland’s answer to the Society for Creative Anachronism, Knights’ Brotherhoods stage their own form of medieval recreation:
Compering and judging the hand-to-hand combat is Krzysztof Ptasinski, the son of a Polish diplomat who learnt English from an American teacher in Addis Ababa and insists I call him “Redneck Chris”.
His hooded robe and summer gear make him look like a monk in flip-flops.
“Whoa dude! Ouch! In your face!” he hollers as two knights wearing full body-plate armour weighing 35kg (77lb) lay into each other with double-handed swords.
To progress, a knight has to reach five points, each earned by laying a clean blow on an opponent above the knee.
The swords are blunt, of course, but that does not mean it is completely harmless.
“When I used to do this I broke my hand 14 times, and I’m a banjo player,” he says.
“I’ve got two screws in this finger. I had a cracked skull.
“When we were fighting the Belarusian guys, I had my kidney displaced.”
I ask him what the appeal is.
“Whenever you get hit in the helmet you almost lose consciousness because it’s so loud. It’s a thrill,” he says.
I used to work with a guy from St. Petersburg who told me all about the replica medieval armour and weapons he had to leave behind when he came to Canada. It sounds like this is a similar group.
From this description, the group doesn’t have quite the same concerns about participant safety that the SCA and other North American re-creationist/re-enactor groups have generally adopted.
Comments Off on “When I used to do this I broke my hand 14 times, and I’m a banjo player”
February 26, 2011
Spammers getting more clever
I’ve noticed a significant shift in the spam comments being posted to Quotulatiousness lately: they’re less likely to be link-stuffed pharmaceutical spam and more likely to resemble real comments. I also notice that lots of the spam showing up now comes from .pl domains.
Just over the last 24 hours, there have been more than a dozen spam comments that almost qualified as real: they’re actually related to the blog post, they’re relatively well written, and they aren’t studded with links. If they’d arrived one at a time, I might well have approved them, but because they arrive in batches the pattern becomes too obvious to ignore:
- They all have real-sounding user names, but the email addresses are all to the same domain.
- They’re all from the same IP address.
- They all have a link to something that looks remarkably like a commercial site, rather than a personal one.
Comments Off on Spammers getting more clever
September 25, 2010
Irony, Polish style
By way of Jon Henke’s twitter feed, the most ironic story so far this year:
Two Polish neo-Nazis who were childhood sweethearts and later became skinheads have discovered what for them is a shocking family secret: They’re actually Jewish.
Pawel and Ola, identified only by their first names, are the subject of a CNN documentary about Poles rediscovering their Jewish roots generations after their ancestors hid their religious identities to escape persecution during World War II.
A few years ago, Ola found out from Warsaw’s Jewish Historical Institute that both she and her husband are technically Jews. “It was unbelievable — it turned out that we had Jewish roots. It was a shock,” she said.
Comments Off on Irony, Polish style
April 30, 2010
European map, rationalized
The Economist would like to redraw the map of Europe:
People who find their neighbours tiresome can move to another neighbourhood, whereas countries can’t. But suppose they could. Rejigging the map of Europe would make life more logical and friendlier.
Britain, which after its general election will have to confront its dire public finances, should move closer to the southern-European countries that find themselves in a similar position. It could be towed to a new position near the Azores. (If the journey proves a bumpy one, it might be a good opportunity to make Wales and Scotland into separate islands).
In Britain’s place should come Poland, which has suffered quite enough in its location between Russia and Germany and deserves a chance to enjoy the bracing winds of the North Atlantic and the security of sea water between it and any potential invaders.
September 2, 2009
Speaking of historical revisionism, here’s Pat Buchanan!
Pat Buchanan recently published a book called Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War. From the title, you can probably pick up the notion that he feels that Hitler was misunderstood and didn’t really want to go to war. If you aren’t busy retching already, try this on for size:
Did Hitler Want War?
Well, from the title alone, we’re off into cloud-cookoo land already. Yes, Hitler did want war. He was pretty emphatic about it too, and not just in 1939. His written-in-prison Mein Kampf was not a particularly pacific and conciliatory little homily.
The German-Polish war had come out of a quarrel over a town the size of Ocean City, Md., in summer. Danzig, 95 percent German, had been severed from Germany at Versailles in violation of Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination. Even British leaders thought Danzig should be returned.
Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia? Because the Poles had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britain and her empire would come to Poland’s rescue.
Danzig was an excuse, not a reason. The plebiscite had shown that the inhabitants wanted to be part of Germany again, which is probably not surprising as the pre-war Polish government was anti-German and were actively trying to suppress the German language and culture in former German areas of Poland. The Polish government was authoritarian, not democratic, and were not the innocents that some later portrayals might try to indicate. Few of the governments of central or eastern Europe would pass muster as democracies in the 1930s.
Poland did not trust the German government to negotiate in good faith, with plenty of reason, so trying to blame them for the outbreak of the war is ludicrous.
But where is the evidence that Adolf Hitler, whose victims as of March 1939 were a fraction of Gen. Pinochet’s, or Fidel Castro’s, was out to conquer the world?
Um. There’s a tiny little bit of evidence. His book. His speeches. The war plans he had his military leaders draw up. The re-armament program, far in excess of what a peaceful nation with nearby enemies might need as a deterrent.
But yeah, aside from that, he didn’t — so far as we know — conduct a secret pinky-swear session with Mussolini and Hirohito at midnight in the Chancellery basement to conquer the world or else. I mean that’d be the smoking gun, wouldn’t it?
But if Hitler was out to conquer the world — Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia — why did he spend three years building that hugely expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France? Why did he start the war with no surface fleet, no troop transports and only 29 oceangoing submarines? How do you conquer the world with a navy that can’t get out of the Baltic Sea?
Why did he build the Westwall (aka “Siegfried Line“)? Well, perhaps it was because the French had already constructed large sections of the Maginot Line? This — at least as far as generals on both sides thought — provided a dual purpose: to prevent a German attack into France, and to provide a safe starting point for a French attack into Germany. The fact that the line failed to prevent an attack which came from beyond the flank of the line is hindsight. The Westwall was also multi-purpose, in this case it had three goals: prevent the French attacking, provide a base for an attack on France, and (borrowing the modern term) infrastructure. The Nazi party came to power partly because of the unemployment situation in Germany in the early 1930s. A vast construction project like the Westwall offered chances to soak up lots of “excess” labour . . . and to provide money to the “right” kind of private firms (those who supported the Nazis or those which the Nazis needed to curry favour with).
Go read the whole thing if you’re interested, but I’m feeling that there’s little point in going on . . . I’m certainly not going to persuade Mr. Buchanan or his followers of anything.
September 1, 2009
70 years on, Poland remembers
Seventy years ago today, German troops crossed the Polish frontier, starting the Second World War in Europe. Poland held a memorial to that event this morning:
The first ceremony took place at dawn on Westerplatte peninsula near Gdansk, where a German battleship fired the first shots on a Polish fort in 1939.
Poland’s president and prime minister led a sombre ceremony at the fort.
President Lech Kaczynski added to a row with Russia over responsibility for the war, saying his country had received a “stab in the back”.
Foreign leaders from 20 countries including Germany and Russia are expected in Gdansk during the day as ceremonies continue.
Comments Off on 70 years on, Poland remembers
