World War Two
Published 24 Oct 2026How did the Panzer I and Panzer II help Germany defeat armies equipped with more powerful tanks? Armed with machine guns or a 20mm cannon, these little panzers helped spearhead a very big, very ugly war.
In this episode of Nazi Rearmament, Spartacus Olsson follows Germany’s early light tanks from their interwar development and the Spanish Civil War to the invasions of Poland, France, and the Soviet Union. We examine their design, armament, armor, production, and battlefield performance, and how they helped build the Panzerwaffe before more capable tanks were available in sufficient numbers.
Against opponents such as the French Char B1 bis and British Matilda II, their limitations were severe. But tank battles alone did not decide campaigns. Training, communications, concentrated mobile formations, and cooperation with infantry, engineers, artillery, and aircraft helped turn these modest vehicles into effective instruments of conquest. In France in 1940, those advantages combined with a risky German operational plan and Allied command failures to produce a devastating victory.
Their story also exposes the growing gap between Hitler’s ambitions and Germany’s industrial resources. Early victories encouraged further aggression, bringing occupation, exploitation, and mass murder to millions while drawing Germany into a war against an increasingly powerful coalition.
October 25, 2026
The Little Panzers That Said I Think I Can – Panzer I & II – Rearmament 11
October 24, 2026
The Winter War, 1939-40
After joining with Hitler’s Third Reich to dismember Poland, and occupying the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Stalin turned his attention to Finland. From the Soviet point of view, the Finnish border was uncomfortably close to Leningrad and the fortified defensive lines along the Karelian Isthmus were a reminder that the Finns could cause trouble if a war came. Stalin’s solution was to demand that the Finns give up the region northwest of Leningrad (including the defences), along with several islands in the Gulf of Finland and allow a Soviet naval base to be established on the Finnish coast near Helsinki. All this in exchange for a larger chunk of Soviet territory north of Lake Ladoga and the “firm friendship of the Soviet Union” for whatever that might be worth. The Soviets backed up their claim with an overwhelming military superiority in men, tanks, artillery and air power. The Finns declined the generous offer, which took Stalin aback:
Not actually much of an exaggeration: Finnish snipers were a constant threat to Soviet military operations in Finland during the Winter War and the Continuation War.
On 30 November 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland through an immensely samey, tree-covered morass. Across hundreds of miles of deep snow and borderland, the Red Army unleashed 450,000 men, roughly 1,100 tanks, and hundreds of combat aircraft, expecting to overwhelm its smaller neighbour through sheer weight of armour, heavy artillery, and manpower.
Joseph Stalin overturned the original campaign plan, discarding the slower but sounder 4-month plan for a lightning campaign in just two months. Beneath that rigid political deadline lay an atmosphere of terror. No senior Soviet commander dared challenge Stalin, correct his unrealistic timetables, or point out that the Red Army was unready for a winter invasion. Officers who raised logistical concerns risked being branded defeatists or traitors—a real possibility the purges proved.
This fear spread in the ranks.
Despite the low state of morale, the Red Army struck along three operational axes:
- The Southern Main Effort (Karelian Isthmus): The heavy Soviet 7th Army would drive toward Helsinki, intent on punching through the main Finnish defences: the Mannerheim Line.
- The High North (Lapland & Arctic Coast): The 14th Army would advance across the tundra to seize Finland’s ice-free Arctic port at Petsamo, to cut off fears of foreign supplies inbound to aid the Finns.
- The Central Thrust (the “Waist” of Finland): The Soviet 9th Army would strike west across the country’s narrowest stretch toward Oulu on the Gulf of Bothnia.
Soviet pressure in three main spots, excuse my art!
Image and caption from WW2 MattersIn the central sector, Soviet planners harboured an ambitious but possible objective: advance west toward Oulu, reach the Gulf of Bothnia, and slice Finland in two.
The plan looked reasonable on map overlays at Leningrad headquarters. The target was Suomussalmi — a quiet logging settlement enveloped by lakes, swamps, and primaeval pine. Its importance lay not in its economic value, but in its position on the regional dirt road network running west toward Oulu. A successful Soviet drive here would sever the rail network connecting northern and southern Finland, cutting the vital land artery to neutral Sweden through which western supplies flowed.
To execute this strategic cut, Soviet planners committed two heavily reinforced divisions under the 45th Rifle Corps — the 163rd Rifle Division and the 44th “Blue” Rifle Division. With their attached tank battalions, corps artillery, and massive logistical columns, this combined force brought nearly 50,000 men into the narrow forest corridors.
In the Suomussalmi sector, the Finns initially faced fewer than 1,000 local Civil Guardsmen, later reinforced into Colonel Hjalmar Siilasvuo’s 9th Division to total 11,000 to 17,000 men. Outnumbered more than four to one, the Finns had no tanks and only 11 outdated artillery pieces — some dating back to the 1904 Russo-Japanese War — and severely rationed shells.
The Soviet plan depended on numerical dominance. But in the dense taiga forests of northeastern Finland, it became a bloody lesson in the difference between possessing a large army and knowing how to use it.
The classic communist mistake: measuring quantity instead of value
Denmark invested heavily in wind power, on the assumption that they could generate enough electricity from their vast wind farms on the North Sea coast to replace other forms of generation. As Bjorn Lomborg points out, it’s not adding up the way the Danes hoped it would:
Denmark spent decades building nearly 5,000 wind turbines
Together, they produced 21.6 TWh in the last 12 months
One nuclear plant in Sweden made 23.3 TWh
Oh, and nuclear runs 24/7 — wind doesn’t
There’s one big reason Denmark has some of the most expensive electricity in the world
https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/actual/perUnit
https://api.energidataservice.dk/dataset/ProductionConsumptionSettlement
https://eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_1_01
Krzysztof Szczawinski explains the mistake is the same one that Soviet bureaucrats made repeatedly:
Counting terawatt-hours is the classic communist mistake: measuring quantity instead of value.
The Soviet Union produced record tonnes of steel nobody needed and millions of left shoes. There’s an old Soviet joke: when the nail factory’s quota was set by weight, it produced one giant nail. When it was set by number, it produced millions of tiny useless ones.
What matters in electricity is not how much – it is when. Electricity when it is needed has value. Electricity when nobody needs it has none. Wind turbines often produce exactly then – on a windy night, when demand is low. The price turns negative: the system is literally paying someone to take it, and the surplus only strains the grid. And when the wind stops, someone else has to keep the lights on.
A price is a message: this is needed, now. A negative price says: please, stop. A system that keeps producing anyway isn’t green. It’s deaf.
That’s mental communism applied to energy: the wish before reality.
Regimes that entertain such delusions end up going broke – and then they collapse.
October 22, 2026
QotD: The “numbers fallacy” in World War II
Some historians, and many politicians, have simplified World War Two into a few stupid statements. “The war in the west was won on the Russian steppes” is one that springs to mind. They usually base such statements on traditional political incompetence — bad use of statistics. The truth is that numbers have rarely overthrown a technological edge (though the Americans under Custer and the British at Isandhlwana might have reservations on this), and World War Two is certainly not the best sample case to argue such a thing.
During the war the smaller campaigns tended to get less credit — though it is sometimes suspicious that numbers are valued in some circumstances, and area in others. The Mediterranean Front against the Axis was an extraordinarily long campaign over an extremely large area, yet many – particularly Americans who often fail to understand the Mediterranean’s importance to intercontinental strategy – discount its scale and significance. (A British general visiting the Soviets responded to toasts about the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow by offering a toast to El Alamein. The bemused Soviets asked how big the battle was, and then commented “we would call that a skirmish” – a point which emphasises the fact that the hundreds of Soviet divisions embraced by historians of the Eastern Front were rarely as big as a British brigade or American Regimental Combat Team. To get a real comparison western divisions should be compared to Soviet corps.)
Similarly the Burmese and New Guinea theatres are incredibly undervalued in their role against Japan. There were more Japanese divisions fighting longer and harder in either place than everywhere that American troops fought the Japanese put together. (The fact that in New Guinea it was Australians rather than Americans who did most of the successful fighting – the American troops first assigned disappointed their vainglorious Füaut;hrer MacArthur enormously at first – might have had an influence on this ranking.)
By contrast the Western Front against Germany in 1944 to 45 is overstated both in the area it covered, and in the number of troops involved (almost half the US troops listed for that campaign did not arrive until it was already almost over. A dozen divisions had barely landed in France before the Germans surrendered.) Which puts it in the same category as the Pacific campaign, which, if the allied troops are discounted – as they so often were by the Americans – rarely saw more than a couple of American divisions at a time engaged anywhere.
The confusion is added to by the enigma that remains China, which is simultaneously undervalued and overvalued. It is undervalued in that China and Manchuria occupied the attention of 80% of the Japanese army throughout the war. Which means that by the standards applied by some historians, China was the Soviet Union of the East, and deserves all the glory that was lavished on communist Russia by the trendy historians of the last generation. On the other hand it was overvalued, in that China achieved virtually nothing in the war against the Japanese apart from occupying large numbers of very low-grade garrison troops. In fact when the US Air Force in one of its fits of vainglory, attempted to bomb Japan into submission from bases in China: the Japanese garrison troops stirred themselves enough to sweep forward and conquer – without any trouble at all – the provinces being used as bases (Operation Ichi-Go).
Nigel Davies, “Oversimplification: The Numbers Fallacy in WWII”, rethinking history, 2009-03-08.
October 17, 2026
QotD: The original purpose of the European project
First, of course, was the fact that Europe was in no condition to wage another war. The continent was in ruins, the Germans were disarmed, the Americans would not have stood for it, and in any case the Germans had genuinely changed. There was no revanchisme to speak of in Germany, as there had been after the first war. Moreover, to the east was the looming presence of what in the 19th century was called the Russian steamroller, only infinitely worse than that of the time of Alexander I and Nicholas I, with a barbaric ideology that at the time attracted the allegiance of a considerable proportion of the population, especially of that part of it — the intelligentsia — that ought to have known better. Only American power prevented the steamroller from rolling west, and thereby kept the peace in Europe.
Even if the maintenance of peace was one of the original aims of the European project, this is a very weaselly way of putting it. Even without the European Union, Estonia would not attack Portugal, nor would Belgium attack Slovakia. What is meant by keeping the peace is ensuring that Germany does not again attack France (no one thinks that France would attack Germany): in other words, and to put it crudely, without the European Union people thought — even Germans themselves — that Germany would be up to its old tricks again. I do not believe this.
Theodore Dalrymple, “European Empire, Fractured”, Law & Liberty, 2020-11-10.
October 12, 2026
A minor action for the Kriegsmarine in the Soviet Arctic
This is a minor enough action that I had never heard of it before, but as I’ve said in the past I haven’t studied the titanic struggle of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich in detail. Mapping History charts (see what I did there?) the Admiral Scheer‘s attempt to take the Soviet Union’s most northerly airstrip on Dickson/Dikson/Диксон island during Operation Wunderland [Wiki}:
“Chief Air Lines of the U.S.S.R.” created in 1939 by Alexander S. Grigorovich, Ivan V. Sautin, Ivan P. Ivanitsky, Valentina M. Podgornova, and Lazar M. Lissitzky.
There’s a tiny error on this map. Made around the time of the New York World’s Fair in 1939, it shows the airports and air routes of the Soviet Union at a time when the USSR was keen to show visitors a country stitched together by aeroplanes. Follow the lines north until they run out and you arrive at a dot near the mouth of the Yenisei, labelled Dickson. But in 1939, it should — of course — be marked “Dikson”.
Should be “Dikson”, of course.
Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld named the harbour in 1875 after Oscar Dickson, a merchant from Gothenburg who’d paid for his foray north. Russian usage dropped the “c” almost at once, and Dikson has been the official name since 1884 — which means on the day it was printed, this map was fifty-five years behind the curve.
You’ll have spotted this is an air map: Dikson is still the northernmost airstrip on any continental mainland, and from 8 December to 5 January it gets no daylight at all, not even twilight — but that’s almost a moot point.
I’m about to describe a fight between a cruiser, an icebreaker and two guns parked on a pier. The only aeroplane in what follows is a German floatplane, and even that gets wrecked before the shooting starts — but I liked the map, and I’ve been posting notes and tweets and whatever-it-is-bluesky does about Soviet mapping today, so this is the map you’re getting. It’s that little red dot, that deserves our attention.
In August 1942, Dikson was the scene of what is usually described as the only battle fought against German forces beyond the Urals. The Germans arrived by sea, certain they could take the land base without too much trouble, and they left, having been put firmly in their place – and without putting a man ashore.
Recognition diagram for the Admiral Scheer
BREAKING THE ICE
The German heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer left Narvik on 16 August 1942 for the Kara Sea. As one part of Unternehmen WUNDERLAND, her task was to find and sink the convoys using the Northern Sea Route along the Siberian coast.
Operation WONDERLAND was considered a first, key stage in establishing control over the western Arctic. As is often the way, Mother Nature didn’t attend the same briefings. Pack ice turned the Admiral Scheer back from the Vilkitsky Strait, fog hid the convoys her floatplane had found, and then the floatplane itself was lost in what might be called a “landing accident”. Her captain, Wilhelm Meendsen-Bohlken, also discovered his charts could not be trusted. Rocks stood where open water was marked, and shoals where the chart promised depth.
Maps, huh.
But then on 25 August, her lookouts sighted a single ship, the Alexander Sibiryakov, a Glasgow-built steamer of 1909 that had started life hunting seals off Newfoundland.
Soviet postage stamp of 4 kopecks from 1977, showing the Aleksandr Sibiriakov
In 1932 the Alexander Sibiryakov had made the first single-season passage of the Northern Sea Route, finishing it under improvised sails after losing her propeller. The Soviet Navy had requisitioned her in September 1941 and given her a handful of light guns – which is something of a coincidence.
Alexander Sibiryakov, the Siberian gold merchant she was named for, had been Oscar Dickson’s partner in funding Nordenskiöld. Sixty-odd years later, one patron’s ship was about to die warning the other patron’s island. She carried six 11-inch guns and a crew of 1,150 — it wasn’t enough.
Meendsen-Bohlken wanted the Alexander Sibiryakov intact. Her codebooks and ice reports would tell him where the convoys were. He ordered her – presumably in signals of one syllable — to strike her flag, and Captain Anatoli Kacharava gave his answer with a plain-speaking message from his deck guns. Not the best idea, when face to face with the Admiral Scheer, which promptly responded with the few salvoes needed to set the Alexander Sibiryakov on fire. Her crew opened the seacocks so that nothing useful could be salvaged, and most of the 104 people aboard died – but not before they had radioed the nearest military base, with a report on what was happening, and where. Within hours every Soviet ship and station in the Kara Sea knew that a German raider was loose, and the busiest transmitter of all was at Dikson.
October 5, 2026
QotD: Socialism and the world wars
The tragedy was that those who promised utopia generally delivered hell on earth. According to the estimates in the Black Book of Communism, the “grand total of victims of Communism was between 85 and 100 million” for the twentieth century as a whole. The lowest estimate for the total number of Soviet citizens who lost their lives as a direct result of Stalin’s policies was more than 20 million, a quarter of them in the years after World War II. Mao alone, as Frank Dikötter has shown, accounted for tens of millions: two million between 1949 and 1951, another three million by the end of the 1950s, a staggering 45 million in the man-made famine known as the Great Leap Forward, yet more in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution. Even the less bloodthirsty regimes of Eastern Europe killed and imprisoned their citizens on a shocking scale. In the Soviet Union, 2.75 million people were in the Gulag at Stalin’s death. The numbers were greatly reduced thereafter, but until the very end of the Soviet system its inhabitants lived in the knowledge that there was nothing but their own guile to protect them from an arbitrary and corrupt state. Other communist regimes around the world, including the very durable dictatorships in North Korea and Cuba, were strikingly similar in the miseries they inflicted on their own citizens.
The various socialist regimes could not even justify their murderous behavior by providing those they spared with higher living standards than their counterparts living under capitalism. On the contrary, they were economically disastrous. The collectivization of agriculture invariably reduced farming productivity. A substantial proportion of the victims of communism lost their lives because of the famines that resulted from collectivization in the Soviet Union and China. North Korea had a similarly disastrous experience. Central planning was a miserable failure for reasons long ago identified by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Janos Kornai, amongst others. Indeed, the economic performance of strictly socialist countries got worse over time because of rigidities and perverse incentives institutionalized by planning.
Moreover, the evidence is clear that, as countries moved away from socialist policies of state ownership and toward a greater reliance on market forces, they did better economically. The most striking example — but one of many — is that of China, which achieved a true great leap forward in economic output after beginning to dismantle restrictions on private initiative in 1978. After the collapse of “real existing socialism” in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was widespread recognition (the “Washington consensus”) that all countries would benefit from reducing state ownership of the economy through privatization and from lowering marginal tax rates. […] the highest marginal personal income tax rate was reduced in nearly all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries between the mid-1970s and mid-2000s.
Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.
September 27, 2026
Harsher than Versailles: The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk 1918
The Great War
Published 24 Apr 2026On March 3, 1918 the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire) and Bolshevik Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending the First World War on the Eastern Front. The terms were harsher than those the Germans offered in December, and much harsher than the later Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was only in force until November 1918, when the Central Powers’ defeat nullified it. But it had a major impact inside and outside Russia.
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September 25, 2026
How True was Lord of War? Surplus from the Warsaw Pact (w/ Val Forgett)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 May 2026When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a gold rush for the surplus guns held by all the various newly independent republics, as well as the Warsaw Pact nations. Lord of War is not far off … and Val Forgett was there, bringing guns into the US for Navy Arms.
September 20, 2026
September 17, 2026
You don’t hate the relic media nearly as much as they deserve
The relic media in Canada has — thanks to generous government subsidies — become a maple-flavoured version of the North Korean news media, but even in the United States where there’s still a somewhat competitive market, most media outlets are delighted to act as unpaid propagandists … and have been that way for generations:
Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for lying about Stalin’s Ukraine famine while millions starved. His employer, the New York Times, never returned that prize. The institutional rot ran deeper than one reporter.
In 1936, Times Moscow correspondent Harold Denny watched the first of Stalin’s Great Purge trials and reported the proceedings as credible. The defendants, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev among them, confessed to plotting murder and sabotage. Denny saw no obvious coercion and wrote accordingly. The NKVD had spent weeks breaking these men through sleep deprivation, threats against their families, and relentless psychological torture until they would say anything in open court.
Every confession was fabricated. Every defendant was executed anyway. Stalin murdered roughly 750,000 people during the Great Purge between 1936 and 1938, and the Times gave the operation a veneer of legitimacy at its most critical moment.
Central planners require a monopoly on information to survive. When the newspaper of record in the most powerful capitalist country on earth launders your show trials as fair proceedings, you buy yourself years of Western political goodwill. Stalin purchased that goodwill with useful idiots who confused proximity to power with insight.
You pay for this dynamic today every time an institution that failed catastrophically keeps its credentials, its prizes, and its authority to declare what counts as credible journalism.
Duranty would have been proud of Time magazine had he been alive today.
September 14, 2026
QotD: “We have Homo Sovieticus in America”
The last numbers from Los Angeles County as a whole were for 2024, when 2,208 homeless people died on the streets. County officials celebrated, because that number was a sharp reduction, and a reflection of the success of programs like overdose intervention teams stationed around public parks.
Remember those numbers, and let’s talk about something else for a moment before we come back to them.
The Soviet writer Aleksandr Zinoviev told a joke that speaks fluent Californian: “In some institution a routine meeting was in progress. There were two points on the agenda: 1) the construction of a barn; 2) the creation of an abundance of consumer goods under communism. As they didn’t have enough planks to build the barn, they moved on at once to the second question.”
Maybe that joke doesn’t land if you don’t live in Los Angeles or Seattle, but from here it’s flawless. Take a quick look at the campaign page for María Elena Durazo, a state senator who just won a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Infrastructure and fire departments are in bad shape in the place where elected officials think that government exists to provide “economic justice” that restructures communities. When government exists to pay your rent, 911 response times soar.
They can’t fix a street, so they move on at once to managing all of society.
Here’s what Senator Durazo boasts about on her “Meet Maria” page: “Arrested over 13 times for leading non-violent Civil Rights and Worker Rights protests”. It’s the line that appears below “State Senator” on her list of accomplishments. Gentry socialists have high-status-marker arrest credentials, without the burden of low-status prosecution and jail terms.
Zinoviev gave us the term “Homo Sovieticus”, describing the human creature that shaped itself around the postures and predilections of Soviet culture. Humorless, a sanctimonious scold, a deeply selfish schemer while professing adoration for collectivism, comfortable reciting official slogans without feeling the need to believe them or examine them, reflexively conformist, not worried about truth. (X) has been advanced as party doctrine, so (X) is correct, and anyone suggesting (Not-X) is highly suspect. The official account is always correct.
We live among these people. We have Homo Sovieticus in America.
Chris Bray, “Homo Cosmopolitus Won’t Count the Costs”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2026-06-10.
September 13, 2026
Velvet Glove and Sparrow II missiles: A Guide To Early Cold War Bomber Interception Tactics
Polyus
Published 6 Apr 2026The Velvet Glove was a semi-active guided missile system developed by the Canadian Armament Research and Development Establishment. Its successor, the Sparrow II was developed by Canadair in association with the US Air Force. This is the story of the development of the missiles in the context of their contemporary weapons systems.
0:00 Introduction
1:00 NORAD and continental defense
3:21 Gun approach
5:32 Rocket pod approach
7:54 Nuclear option
8:35 Interception Tactics
11:56 Guided missile approach
14:38 Velvet Glove missile development
19:30 Sparrow missile development
22:03 Arming Canada’s future fighters
25:08 Conclusion
September 8, 2026
Why The Soviet Union Lost In Afghanistan
Real Time History
Published 3 Apr 2026In February 1989, the last Soviet combat troops leave Afghanistan after almost a decade of war. Despite military superiority, the superpower was not able to establish a stable Moscow-friendly regime in the country. Yet, the mujahedeen are also deeply divided and influenced by outside forces such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Osama Bin Laden.
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September 7, 2026
The Backbone of the Nazi Panzer War – Panzer III
World War Two
Published 5 Sep 2026The Panzer III was intended to become the backbone of Nazi Germany’s panzer divisions. Emerging from clandestine Weimar-era experimentation and formally developed from 1934, it combined mobility, a five-man crew, a three-man turret, and comprehensive radio communication in one highly effective prewar design.
In this episode, Spartacus follows the Panzerkampfwagen III from secret German-Soviet tank trials at Kama through its production and deployment in Poland, France, North Africa, and Operation Barbarossa. We examine its evolution from the 3.7 cm gun to increasingly powerful 5 cm weapons, the advantages provided by crew specialization and radio-coordinated warfare, and why the Soviet T-34 and KV-1 exposed its diminishing margins in armor and firepower.
By 1943, the Panzer III had been displaced as Germany’s principal gun tank by the more adaptable Panzer IV. Its chassis, however, found an extraordinarily productive second life beneath the Sturmgeschütz III. The Panzer III was not a failed tank. It was an effective prewar design overtaken by an armored arms race it lacked the capacity to survive. Its fate also reflected Nazi Germany’s wider strategic failure: it had built weapons for short campaigns, then unleashed a coalition war whose demands exceeded Germany’s resources.
Watch our episode on the Sd.Kfz. 251: • The Halftrack That Made Blitzkrieg Possibl…
Watch Ten Days in Sedan: • Ten Days in Sedan
