World War Two
Published 23 Apr 2022The mastermind of Pearl Harbor meets his fate this week in the Solomons, as do a great many Italian airmen and sailors in the Mediterranean in the Palm Sunday Massacre trying to supply the desperate Axis forces in Tunisia.
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April 24, 2022
Ladies and Gentlemen, We Got Him – Yamamoto – WW2 – 191 – April 23, 1943
April 20, 2022
Khrushchev – Stalin’s Loyal Enforcer?
World War Two
Published 19 Apr 2022Nikita Khrushchev has served Joseph Stalin faithfully for the past decade. He’s a career commissar and party man. So, when war breaks out, are commissars like Khrushchev little more than Stalinist enforcers? Or is there more to the institution than that?
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April 19, 2022
When the Germans had to surrender twice
The end of the war in Europe is usually noted as being the 8th of May, 1945, when General Eisenhower received the surrender of German forces, but the Soviets (and now the Russians) mark the anniversary on the 9th:
It was at three in the morning on Tuesday, 8 May 1945, that Generaloberst Alfred Jodl of the German High Command, signed a surrender document at General Dwight Eisenhower’s headquarters in Rheims, France. The European war was over. It was VE-Day. Stalin’s representative, General Ivan Susloparov, cabled his chief the great news.
However, the Russian leader flew into a rage. He wanted his own observance and insisted on a further ceremony at the Soviet military HQ in Karlshorst, a former Wehrmacht officers’ mess, six miles south-east of central Berlin. Chosen simply because it was one of the few buildings in the capital left with windows and a roof, the formalities were presided over by the captor of the city, Marshal Georgy Zhukov.
This time, it was Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, Jodl’s superior, who read over a near-identical document. Susloparov was again present, along with Carl Spaatz for the Americans and Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, representing France. Newsmen were unaware of the diplomatic spat that delayed proceedings.
De Lattre refused to sign unless the French tricolore was in evidence among the standards and pennants decorating the surrender room. The first Soviet solution hilariously produced a Dutch flag. To pacify an even-more outraged de Lattre, a Red Army seamstress was summoned to run up the appropriate banner. More delays ensued while the Allies bickered over the order of signatures and witnesses, only agreed after the mollifying effects of vodka and some food.
This is why the final ceremony began shortly after midnight. Cameras captured Keitel in full dress uniform, arriving in pompous mood. Flashlights caught the glint of his many medals, and the arrogant flourish of his marshal’s baton, held with gloved hands. He gazed around the room, haughty contempt written across his face. The field marshal removed only his right glove, screwed his monocle into his left eye and applied a fountain pen to the two-page, typewritten document. It was 00:16 local time on Wednesday, 9 May, which became Soviet Victory Day and remains so in Eastern Europe.
Each subsequent year on Victory Day, Red Square has echoed to the “Hurrahs” of vast numbers of Russian soldiers, sailors, marines and paratroopers, national guardsmen and airmen. They are drawn up to listen to their commander-in-chief and inspected by generals. Banners are saluted; swords flash through the air. Serenaded by massed bands playing stirring tunes, they march past the top brass, assembled on the roof of Lenin’s Mausoleum.
April 17, 2022
Kursk – The Next Great Battle? – WW2 – 190 – April 16, 1943
World War Two
Published 16 Apr 2022The Allies have one chance left to catch the Axis forces in Tunisia before they can reach the Tunis defences; in the USSR both the Axis and Soviets are making plans for a fight near Kursk; and in the skies, in the South Pacific a Japanese aerial offensive ends and Yamamoto himself flies off to congratulate his pilots.
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April 15, 2022
The West Sacrifices Poland to the Soviets – WAH 056 – April 1943, Pt.1
World War Two
Published 14 Apr 2022There are cracks in the alliances on both sides. Hitler’s allies are refusing to do his every bidding, and the revelations about the Soviet massacre of Poles in Katyn has set a wedge between Poland and the USSR.
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April 10, 2022
Mussolini is Tired of War – WW2 – 189 – April 9th , 1943
World War Two
Published 9 Apr 2022Adolf Hitler meets with Benito Mussolini to hopefully restore his flagging morale and convince him that the Axis can hold out in North Africa, but the situation there grows more precarious and this week there the Allies advancing from the west and the east link up for the first time. The Axis are also holding out in the Caucasus, as new Soviet attacks to take Krymskaya begin.
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April 3, 2022
Patton Has a Plan, and it’s Bad – WW2 – 188 – April 2, 1943
World War Two
Published 2 Apr 2022American attacks in Tunisia meet with local disaster, but in general the Axis forces are withdrawing there. The Allies learn about the German rocketry plans this week, and both sides are making plans for action in the Pacific.
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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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March 30, 2022
Combat Boots Save Lives – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 29 Mar 2022Boots on the ground! Despite all the mobility provided by tanks, trucks and planes, the infantryman had to rely on his own two feet above all else. To march, run and fight, soldiers needed sturdy and comfortable footwear. Choosing between ankle-boots, service-shoes and jackboots, the warring nations were looking for the perfect combat-boot for their soldiers.
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March 28, 2022
QotD: The evolution of tanks through World War 2
One interesting thing about tank evolution that never gets mentioned in America is just how good the Soviets were at making tanks. The Germans are always assumed to have been the great tank builders, followed by the Americans, but it was the Russians who dominated the field in the tank game. Russian tanks were fast, powerful and easy to operate by their crews. Most important, they were reliable in all weather. The Russians assumed they would be fighting in horrible conditions and built a tank for it.
The Germans, in contrast, made one error after another when it came to tank design and tank building. They were obsessed with coming up with the biggest, most powerful tank, rather than making lots of good enough tanks. The result was lots of innovative designs, but most were failures and there was never enough of them. The Panzer IV was a very good tank with a platform that was flexible, but the Germans kept trying to come up with a super tank, rather than make lots of these. That was a costly error.
The American tank, which was used by the British, was not a great tank, but they were cheap and reliable, which meant there were loads of them. It was also a flexible platform for all sorts of other uses. The Sherman tank was about using the two advantages the Americans had over the Germans. One was more industry and the other was more soldiers. The plan was to beat the Germans with volume. While it would take five Sherman tanks to take out a German tank, that was math that worked in favor of the Americans.
This conflict between the perfect and the good enough showed up in many places during the war. The Germans seemed to look at the whole thing as an engineering project. The first step was to accept the restraints and then solve for the variables. The Russian and American view was always to limit the constraints and thereby increase the number of possible right answers. The Germans had much better human capital, but their opponents always had many more choices. They also had numbers, which counts for a lot.
The Z Man, “Tanking It”, The Z Blog, 2019-03-01.
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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The zombie Russian empire under Tsar Vladimir I
In the most recent Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan looks at the quasi-Imperial goals of Vladimir Putin:
“The huge iceberg Russia, frozen by the Putin regime, cracked after the events in Crimea; it has split from the European world, and sailed off into the unknown,” – Vladimir Sorokin, New York Review of Books, 2017.
The greatest mistake liberals make when assessing reactionaryism is to underestimate it. There is a profound, mesmerizing allure — intensified by disillusion with the shallows of modernity — to the idea of recovering some great meaning from decades or centuries gone by, to resurrect and resuscitate it, to blast away all the incoherence and instability of post-modern life into a new collective, ancient meaning.
Even when it’s based on bullshit. You’d be amazed how vacuous slogans about returning to a mythical past — “Make America Great Again!”, “Take Back Control!” — can move public opinion dramatically in even the most successful modern democracies. That’s one reason it’s self-defeating for liberals to press for maximal change in as many things as possible. National identity, fused often with ethnic heritage, has not disappeared in the human psyche — as so many hoped or predicted. It has been reborn in new and strange forms. Now is the time of monsters, so to speak. Best not to summon up too many.
This, it seems to me, is what many of us have missed about the newly visible monster of post-Communist Russia. It would be hard to conjure up a period of post-modern bewilderment more vividly than Russia in the post-Soviet 1990s. A vast empire collapsed overnight; an entire totalitarian system, long since discredited but still acting as some kind of social glue and cultural meaning, unraveled in chaos and confusion.
Take away a totalitarian ideology in an instant, and a huge vacuum of meaning will open up, to be filled by something else. We once understood this. When Nazi Germany collapsed in total military defeat, the West immediately arrived to reconstruct the society from the bottom up. We de-Nazified West Germany; we created a new constitution; we invested massively with the Marshall Plan, doing more for our previous foe than we did for a devastated ally like Britain. We filled the gap. Ditto post-1945 Japan.
But we left post-1991 Russia flailing, offering it shock therapy for freer markets, insisting that a democratic nation-state could be built — tada! — on the ruins of the Evil Empire. We expected it to be reconstructed even as many of its Soviet functionaries remained in place, and without the searing experience of consciousness-changing national defeat. What followed in Russia was a grasping for coherence, in the midst of national humiliation. It was more like Germany after 1918 than 1945. It is no surprise that this was a near-perfect moment for reactionism to stake its claim.
It came, like all reactionary movements, not from some continuous, existing tradition waiting to be tweaked or deepened, but from intellectuals, making shit up. They created a near-absurd mythology they rescued from the 19th and early 20th centuries — packed with pseudo-science and pseudo-history. Russia was not just a nation-state, they argued; it was a “civilization-state”, a whole way of being, straddling half the globe and wrapping countless other nations and cultures into Mother Russia’s spiritual bosom. Russians were genetically different — infused with what the reactionary theorist Lev Gumilev called “passionarity” — a kind of preternatural energy or will to power. They belonged to a new order — “Eurasia” — which would balance the Atlantic powers of the US and the UK, and help govern the rest of the world.
March 25, 2022
Jordan Peterson — noted collector of early Soviet art
Jordan Peterson is probably the second-most polarizing living Canadian — after Justin the Lesser, of course — but his collection of early Soviet art and propaganda posters is perhaps one of the more surprising things about him:
I’ve been in homes that have displayed unusual artwork, including one house decorated in African-themed pieces that many would consider pornographic. But I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything quite as unusual and unique as the art in Jordan Peterson’s home.
To be clear, I’ve never actually visited Peterson’s house. But his home and its artwork are described in some detail by Norman Doidge, who wrote the foreword to Peterson’s best-selling book 12 Rules for Life.
Doidge met Peterson in 2004 at a gathering hosted by mutual friends, a pair of Polish emigres who came of age during the days of the Soviet empire. At the time, Peterson was a professor at the University of Toronto, and he and Doidge — a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst — soon became friends. (Apart from their scientific interests, it seems the men shared a passion for the great books, particularly “soulful Russian novels”.)
Doidge visited Peterson on more than one occasion, and he describes the Peterson house as “the most fascinating and shocking middle-class home I had seen.” Among the fascinations was an impressive collection of unusual artwork.
“They had art, some carved masks, and abstract portraits, but they were overwhelmed by a huge collection of original Socialist Realist paintings of Lenin and the early Communists commissioned by the USSR,” writes Doidge. “Paintings lionizing the Soviet revolutionary spirit completely filled every single wall, the ceilings, even the bathrooms.”
Books and art can tell you a great deal about people, as I said, but one must be careful to not draw the wrong conclusions. Which invites an important question: Why was Peterson’s home covered in Soviet era artwork?
One might assume that Peterson was a socialist. Yet, this is not the case. Or maybe, one might guess, Peterson began gobbling up Soviet propaganda pieces following the fall of the Soviet Union simply as investment. (I wish I had possessed the foresight to buy up a bunch of vintage Soviet art following the fall of the Soviet empire; alas, I was only 12.) Perhaps, but this wouldn’t explain why it’s displayed throughout his home.
Fortunately, Doidge offers us an answer.
“The paintings were not there because Jordan had any totalitarian sympathies, but because he wanted to remind himself of something he knew he and everyone else would rather forget: that over a hundred million people were murdered in the name of utopia,” Doidge writes.
March 22, 2022
Russia’s historical expansionism
Arthur Chrenkoff notes some plot points from his second novel, written in 2010, and the headlines from Ukraine over the last few weeks:
Twelve years ago I wrote my second novel. The action took place in an Eastern European magic kingdom, superimposed in another dimension over what is, in this world, western Ukraine, south-east Poland, eastern Slovakia, and reaching down perhaps as far as the north-eastern corner of Hungary and the northern border of Romania. I named the kingdom after two historical regions, partly overlapping, by which this borderland of ethnicities and states had once been known. Last together as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, five independent nations now share the tectonic fault zone between Russia and the Orthodox Slavdom in the east and the Catholic Central Europe to the west.
One of the plots of the novel – titled Ruthenia & Galicia – revolved around the attempts by Russia to blackmail sections of the kingdom’s political establishment and destroy the country if unsuccessful.
If the plot sounds vaguely familiar today, I hasten to add I’m not claiming any prophetic abilities. While in 2010 Ukraine was largely at peace, two years prior Vladimir Putin briefly invaded Georgia in order to detach from it two separatist regions. In any case, the main point is that over the past five centuries, ever since overthrowing the Tartar yoke and consolidating under Ivan the Terrible, Russia has been an imperialist and expansionist power, which has repeatedly and consistently invaded, absorbed and dominated its many neighbours. Sadly, there is not much that is unusual about the current conflict in Ukraine; mid-17th century Poles, Ukrainians (to the extent there existed then any ethnic consciousness among the region’s peasantry), Cossacks and Muscovites would have been intimately familiar with the issues at stake.
Forget for a moment the Bidens, “globalists”, NATO, the “decadent West” and all other attempts to blame one’s own side first for, in effect, “provoking” Russia, and ask yourself why all of Russia’s regional neighbours, from Finland, through the Baltic states, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Rumania and beyond (Hungry and Serbia being two exceptions, the former contemporary political, the latter historical) are so fiercely opposed to Russia’s military actions and so supportive of Ukraine’s resistance against Putin’s aggression. Most of the historical Poland (which prior to WW2 included western Belarus and western Ukraine) had been, with small breaks, dominated, occupied and colonised by Russia (either as the centre of the empire or of the Soviet Union) for well over three centuries. Ditto for the Baltic states. Finland used to be a Russian vassal before WW1, fought Russia twice (in 1939-40 and 1941-44) and after the war had lent its very name to the concept of forced pro-Russian neutrality. Other parts of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe had only experienced Russian domination post-1945, as member states of the Warsaw Pact. Hungary and Czechoslovakia were at the receiving end of military interventions directed by Moscow; Poland almost was. Foreign policy realists like John Mearsheimer might argue for the unchanging reality of power politics in human history – from which point of view, a great power like Russia needs and will get a friendly or neutral buffer zone – but the states, which have the geographical and historical misfortune to exist within such buffer zone are by now well and truly over having to live in perpetual shadow and/or under the jackboot of an imperial power with delusions about its civilisational mission.
From that point of view, the challenge is not “de-Nazification” of Ukraine, whatever that means apart from being another example of Russia’s historical tendency, now also assumed by the Western left, of smearing everyone and everything it doesn’t like as Nazi (the Azov Battalion, whose heritage harks back to the Ukrainian collaboration with Hitler against Stalin, is a real problem – in an ideal world the Azov men and the pro-Russian Chechens would all kill each other – but as propagandictically exaggerated as attempts to portray the American right as a whole as white supremacists, bigots, extremists and terrorists). The true challenge is de-imperialising Russia.
This is perhaps a Sisyphean task. Former imperialist powers like Germany and Japan are now normal countries, liberal democracies, successful and prosperous economies and generally good international citizens. Arguably the reason for that can be traced to their unequivocal military defeat in WW2, large scale devastation and subsequent occupation, which forced a traumatic psychological reset. After “year zero”, the past was consigned to history and new society were born.
This has not happened in Russia. In fact, Russia today is much more reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s than Germany in the 1960s. Like the Imperial Wilhelmine Germany, Russia had lost the war – the cold one – without suffering a crushing military defeat or the indignity of foreign occupation. What the Versailles Peace was for the inter-war Germany, the dissolution of the Soviet Union has been for Russia – a disadvantageous and humiliating settlement, which resulted in imperial dissolution and has left millions of Russian speakers scattered beyond the borders of the Fatherland/Motherland. The newly independent states are illegitimate – both the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union considered Poland a “bastard creation of Versailles”, just as Russian nationalists nowadays see the former Soviet republics and satellites as artificial entities that are rightfully Russia’s. If there are temperamental similarities between the Weimer Germany and Yeltsin’s Russia, Putin himself resembles Hitler circa 1938. Let us hope and pray he never graduates to 1939 and beyond (though some would argue that the invasion of Ukraine is worryingly analogous to the invasion of Poland at the start of WW2). For the international community, Russia of the past two and a bit decades represents the worst of all worlds: humiliated enough to be resentful but undefeated enough to remain unrepentant. Hence Putin can claim the fall of the Soviet Union to be the greatest tragedy of the 20th century (as opposed to both world wars or communism) and agitate for the de facto recreation of the Russian, if not the Soviet, empire.
Imperial Germany’s crushing military defeat (from the “Black Day of the German Army” through the Hundred Days to the Armistice) at the hands of the British, French, American, Canadian, and Australian forces on the western front … but stopped near the German border. The provisional government after the fall of the monarchy signed the armistice because the German army had been decisively defeated and was dissolving in the face of Allied pressure. Because the fighting didn’t penetrate into Germany proper — as it did in 1944-45 — this significantly helped solidify the myth that the Germany army had been “stabbed in the back” by the civilian government, which was so helpful to the Nazis during their rise to power.
March 21, 2022
M44 Submachine Gun: Finland Copies the Soviet PPS-43
Forgotten Weapons
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The kp/31 Suomi submachine gun in Finnish service was an outstanding weapon, but it was slow and expensive to manufacture. When Finnish forces began capturing Soviet PPS-42 and PPS-43 submachine guns from the Soviets in the Continuation War, it was very quickly decided that Finland should copy the design. This was a far simpler, far cheaper stamped sheet-metal design that was not as refined as the Suomi, but much more efficient to make.
The Sudayev design was changed only minimally; primarily to fit the Finnish cartridge (9x19mm Parabellum) and magazines. The guns were originally designed to use the 50-round quad-stack boxes and 71/72 round drums of the Suomi, but also used the Swedish Carl Gustaf m/45 magazine that was adopted by Finland after WW2.
Two companies were approached to produce the M44; Tikkakoski and Ammus Oy. Ammus was unable to source raw materials for the project, and only Tikka put the guns into production. Marshal Mannerheim initially wanted 50,000, but the order was reduced to 20,000 — of which only 10,000 were actually made, due to limited material availability before the end of the war led to production ending. Another 400 were assembled from remaining parts after the war.
In the 1950s, a plan was begun to resume M44 production in order to completely replace the Suomi in Finnish inventory. However, this plan was interrupted when Sam Cummings of InterArms made a deal to trade Finland about 75,000 surplus Sten guns for Finland’s supply of 7.35mm Carcano rifle (received as aid from Italy during the war) along with a melange of old machine guns. This was a sufficient quantity of Stens to handle the duties of the Suomi, and so the Sten went into Finnish service and M44 production was never resumed.
Those Carcano rifles were in turn imported into the United States, and this is why the majority of 7.35mm Carcano here bear Finnish “SA” property stamps. The same is true for the significant number of Chauchat automatic rifles in the US with Finnish property marks, which were also part of the deal.
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