Like many monsters — for he could be a monster to those who defied him, and was often cruel and unfair to his most devoted supporters — he had enormous charm when he chose to turn it on. He was deeply mischievous and enjoyed puzzling and wrong-footing others. When he did not wish to give ground, he could be obtuse, an experience described by one victim as like “being confined … with a cormorant who spoke only cormorant.”
The evidence suggests that he was one of those dangerous people who simply do not know what fear is, and that he discovered this quite early in his long life. If a sergeant had not fallen dead on top of the young Lieutenant de Gaulle when he first went into battle at Dinant in August 1914, he would probably have died in some useless, gallant sacrifice and never have been heard of again. If he had not been knocked unconscious by the blast of a grenade at Verdun in March 1916, it is hard to believe that he would have allowed himself to be taken prisoner by the Germans. In that case he would almost certainly have died in that frightful battle, or not long afterward, another silent shade in that huge legion of shades who marched off into the dark during that appalling war.
Only his wife Yvonne was unimpressed by his grandeur, more than once urging him to retire, or puncturing his ambition. During the long, frustrating wilderness years between his wartime glory and his final presidential triumph, he mused to her that he might one day repeat his great rallying call of 1940. Using the rather patronizing endearment “Pauvre Ami,” she declared flatly, “Nobody will follow you.” He snapped back, “Shut up, Yvonne! I am old enough to know what I want to do!” In fact, on that occasion he was wrong and she was right. She even mocked his soldierly abilities. When the general’s aides suggested that they might install a machine gun at their remote, forbidding country home in Colombey, in case of an attack by communists, Yvonne scoffed that her husband would have no idea how to use it. Perhaps she would have.
Peter Hitchens, “A Certain Idea of France”, First Things, 2019-04.
April 8, 2022
QotD: The fearlessness of De Gaulle
April 1, 2022
Denazify the World. Resist Now. – WAH 055 – March 1943, Pt. 2
World War Two
Published 31 Mar 2022The Nazis and the Soviets discover each other’s atrocities, while resistance is on the rise, and a half-dormant conspiracy against Hitler comes back to life to take his life.
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February 11, 2022
Eat the Nazis, There’s Nothing Else – WAH 052 – February 1943, Pt. 1
World War Two
Published 10 Feb 2022As the United Nations alliance, and the Resistance in occupied Europe increase their pressure on Nazi Germany, they continue to escalate their war on humanity. Meanwhile, in more and more parts of the world there is little to eat.
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January 31, 2022
Stalingrad: Endgame – WW2 – 179b – January 31, 1943
World War Two
Published 30 Jan 2022The Battle of Stalingrad is nearing its end. Strong contingents of the 21st and 62nd Soviet Armies broke through the German defensive lines west of Stalingrad and were now pushing deep into the city. Despite the “Kessel” being split into several parts, the Axis soldiers are still resisting fiercely, fighting street by street, house by house. Yet it is a desperate last stand. Overwhelmed and undersupplied, many Generals push for surrender. But only their commander, the freshly promoted “Field-Marshal” Paulus, has the authority to do so.
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November 26, 2021
The Germans Learn to Love Their Slaves – WAH 047 – November 1942, Pt. 2
World War Two
Published 25 Nov 2021In November 1942 the resistance fight in many parts of Europe becomes a part of the regular military war. In Germany, the Germans discover humanity while the German mass murders see no end.
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November 17, 2021
Child Soldier Camps, Captured Crewmen, and Chaotic Air Forces – WW2 – OOTF 025
World War Two
Published 16 Nov 2021How did the “Nazi pirates” treat their captured crewmen? Why didn’t the Soviets just bomb the motionless German armies stuck in a traffic jam? And how did the Nazi government convince parents to allow their children to go to “evacuation” camps? Find out the answers in this latest edition of Out of the Foxholes!
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November 15, 2021
Fighting Nazis with Radios and Funerals – WAH 046 – November 1942, Pt. 1
World War Two
Published 14 Nov 2021As the Winter of 1942/43 is beginning, the German Nazis are under more and more pressure, both on the frontlines and in the occupation zones.
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November 12, 2021
The Weird And Only Naval Battle of The Franco-Prussian War
Real Time History
Published 11 Nov 2021Support Glory & Defeat on Patreon: https://patreon.com/realtimehistory
While the fighting on land continued during the Franco-Prussian War in November 1870, the bizarre and only naval battle of the war took place off the coast of Cuba when the German Meteor and the French Bouvet met in the port of Havana.
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https://realtimehistory.net/podcast – interviews with historians and background info for the show.» LITERATURE
Arand, Tobias: 1870/71. Die Geschichte des Deutsch-Französischen Krieges erzählt in Einzelschicksalen. Hamburg 2018Arand, Tobias: “Rogerowski oder Rasumofsky? Überlegungen zur nationalen ‘Meistererzählung’ in Fontanes Kriegsgefangen”, in: Fontane-Blätter 105 (2018), p. 61-86
Bauer, Gerhard u.a. (Hrsg.): Krieg – Macht – Nation. Wie das deutsche Kaiserreich entstand. Ausstellungskatalog Dresden Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr. Dresden 2020
Bigelow, John: France and the Confederate Navy 1862-1868. New York, 1888
Farret, “Étude sur les combats livrés sur mer de 1860 à 1880”, Revue Maritime et Coloniale, t. 70, no d’édition, 1881, p. 519-522
Gouttman, Alain: La grande défaite 1870-1871. Paris 2015
Pölking, Hermann and Linn Sackarnd: Der Bruderkrieg. Deutsche und Franzosen 1870/71. Freiburg 2020
Radecke, Gabriele/Rauh, Robert: Fontanes Kriegsgefangenschaft. Wie der Dichter in Frankreich dem Tod entging. Berlin 2020
Tümmler, Holger: Großer Atlas des Deutsch-Französischen Krieges 1870/71. Wolfenbüttel 2010
» SOURCES
Fontane, Theodor: Kriegsgefangen. Erlebtes 1870. Neuausgabe Berlin 2020Kriegsgeschichtliche Abtheilung des Großen Generalstabs (Hrsg.): Der deutsch-französische Krieg 1870-71. II.1. Berlin 1878
Kürschner, Joseph (Hrsg.). Der große Krieg in Zeitberichten. Leipzig 1895
Meisner, Heinrich Otto (Hrsg.): Kaiser Friedrich III. Das Kriegstagebuch von 1870/71. Berlin, Leipzig 1926
Roux, Georges: La Guerre de 1870. Paris 1966
Stenzel, Alfred: “Flotte und Küste”, in: Krieg und Sieg 1870-71. Ein Gedenkbuch, hrsg. v. Julius von Plugk-Harttung. Berlin 1895. S. 584-611
“The Naval Duel Near Havana,” Otago Witness, Issue 996, 31 December 1870, p. 11.
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Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Cathérine Pfauth, Prof. Dr. Tobias Arand, Jesse Alexander
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
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Editing: Toni Steller
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Maps: Battlefield Design
Research by: Cathérine Pfauth, Prof. Dr. Tobias Arand
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Contains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2021
November 10, 2021
Wives – What Soldiers Left Behind – WW2 – On the Homefront 012
World War Two
Published 9 Nov 2021With men away at the front, couples have to separate and manage the struggle of war on their own. For women who stay at home, this is not any easier than for the man: worry, longing, loneliness, meaningless sex, the temptation of falling in love with others – it is an emotional rollercoaster.
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October 15, 2021
Nazis “Restore” Law and Order – WAH 044 – October 1942, Pt. 1
World War Two
Published 14 Oct 2021Resistance against occupation starts rising in the Autumn of 1942. It faces opposition not only from the occupiers, but also from collaborators killing their own countrymen.
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October 13, 2021
QotD: The POW/MIA theories from the post-Vietnam War era
It routinely showed up on the “news magazine” shows, and of course there were whole series of movies about it: The Missing in Action flicks with Chuck Norris, Rambo II, I’m sure I’m forgetting a few. And though the “firsthand testimony” for this thesis was always of the “somebody knew somebody who heard from somebody that Lt. Smith suddenly disappeared from a POW camp back in 1968,” there was one seemingly strong piece of archival evidence: The seemingly disproportionate number of soldiers and airmen officially listed as “missing in action”.
And yet … c’mon, man, as a guy who dodged that war probably said back when he could still remember what century he’s living in. Why would the Vietnamese do that? All the mooted explanations — slave labor, selling captured pilots to the Russians for training purposes — didn’t pass the smell test. So a historian started digging into it, and while I read MIA: Mythmaking in America 30 years ago in college, I remember the crux of his argument:
In the war’s early days, the military used a statistic called KIA/BNR — killed in action / body not recovered. Everyone knows Lt. Smith is dead, but since his aircraft was vaporized by a SAM over Haiphong, his remains can’t be returned to his people. As Al notes, though, when a pilot was killed in action, his wife and kids got a puny condolence check from the government and kicked out of base housing. Thus the surviving pilots, acting from noble motives, started fudging. “Well … maybe Lt. Smith’s plane wasn’t vaporized. I might’ve seen a chute. It’s all very confusing; remember I was going Mach 1 at the time, dodging flak …” Mrs. Smith and the little Smiths get to keep drawing a paycheck, keep living on base housing, etc. So the official MIA list grew.
Enter Richard Nixon and that sneaky rat fuck Kissinger. Needing a way to prolong the war while concluding “peace with honor” — that is, to weasel out without seeming too weaselly — they needed a sticking point at the treaty table. The MIA issue was perfect for that. What about Lt. Smith? Of course the Vietnamese government can’t account for him; he was blown to atoms over Haiphong; but there’s his name on the missing list. Perhaps he’s in double secret prison!
And thus “the narrative” — the perfectly understandable-in-context lie that changed KIA/BNR to MIA — became “The Narrative”, that the Vietnamese were, for some unfathomable reason, still hanging on to captured American servicemen. Who knows why those inscrutable Orientals do anything, and what kind of America-hating hippie scum are you to ask questions? Don’t you want to bring our boys back home?
Severian, “Kayfabe”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.
September 14, 2021
QotD: “In 1918 it was statistically safer for a British soldier to fight in the trenches of the Western Front than be a prisoner in Germany”
On and on the German outrages went: the sinking of the Lusitania, the execution of Nurse Cavell. Of course, the Allies were not saints, but the fashionable fallacy of moral equivalence — that all sides in the Great War were as bad as each other — founders on the rocks of Germany’s treatment of prisoners of war, who became slave labourers.
This was the main substance of the British agenda at Leipzig. Almost 165,000 British soldiers were taken prisoner on the Western Front between 1914-18; by the end of 1916, almost 80% were forced into labour for the Second Reich. Prisoners were literally worked to death in salt mines. And conditions in many camps were inhuman: in Wittenberg, two water taps served 17,000 Allied PoWs. When typhus struck the camp, the German staff abandoned it and left the prisoners to die. Some 13,000 Brits perished in the Kaiser’s camps — the vast majority because of brutality, disease, malnutrition or exhaustion. But 500 British soldiers were summarily shot or beaten to death at the Kaiser’s pleasure during their detention.
Of all the German PoWs held in Britain during the Great War, 3% died; of the British PoWs held in Germany, more than 10% perished. In 1918 it was statistically safer for a British soldier to fight in the trenches of the Western Front than be a prisoner in Germany. That year, 5.8% of British PoWs in Germany died, compared to 4% of British soldiers on the battlefield.
John Lewis Stempel, “Germany’s First World War Guilt”, UnHerd, 2021-05-25.
September 10, 2021
The German Slave Economy – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 9 Sep 2021To fuel the German war economy, the Nazis force millions of Prisoners of War, Concentration Camp inmates and civilians from all over Europe to work for in their factories and on their farms as slave laborers under harsh circumstances.
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July 14, 2021
Jewish Luftwaffe Officers, Allied POW’s, and Vichy Islands near Canada – WW2 – OOTF 023
World War Two
Published 13 Jul 2021How did Germans with Jewish heritage still serve in the Luftwaffe? And what happened to the Allied POW’s from the German invasions of France and Belgium? And what the hell happened with those tiny Vichy islands near Canada? We answer all of this in today’s Out of the Foxholes.
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June 6, 2021
Turning Point of History: D-Day Juno Beach
ch1201
Published 8 Nov 2014Examines Canada’s role on June 6th, 1944 and the advance through Normandy, France.
