Mosquito vs B-17

There's a story going around that the Mosquito could carry the same bomb load from England to Berlin as a B-17, and on long nights make two trips. It turns out the story is misleading: Could the Mosquito Really Replace the B-17?

 

 

Saint-Cyr class of 1914

In his lecture The Fall of France, Mark Gerges cites the Saint-Cyr and a plaque with a year and the list of graduates who died defending France. The exception is the class of 1914, which reads the "Class of  1914". This is because 100% of the graduates of that class died defending France.

Red Army concentration of force

In a lecture to The Dole Institute of Politics, Dr. Jonathon House explains How the Red Army Defeated Germany: The Three Alibis.

In the lecture he talks about Red Army doctrine that used deception and concentration of force to achieve localised overwhelming force of numbers.

In Operation Bagration

185 Red Army divisions comprising 2.3 million soldiers and 4,000 tanks and assault guns smashed into the German positions on a front of 200 km. The 800,000-strong Army Group Centre was crushed.

House explains that on a five mile wide front, the Red Army concentrated five divisions and a separate tank brigade against one German division. There were four other places along the front with similar force ratios.

This came after the Red Army had fooled the Germans into believing an attack would come further south, causing the Germans to  move forces south.

Rear Admiral Chris Parry with some lessons on preparing for war, and risk

In Warfighting at Sea: What Has Changed Since the Falklands War of 1982 Rear Admiral Chris Parry and Arthur Herman discuss the Falklands War and modern conflicts.

A couple of things to note from this video.

Parry basically states, to paraphrase, that you shouldn't buy equipment that's only suitable for peacetime because you won't get the chance to change it if you go to war.

At 19:10 in the video Parry states:

We accept things in peace time which we would never go to war with.

At 19:56:

And I'm afraid to say that there is a consipiracy of silence in peacetime about whether you would take stuff to war or not. Now if you won't take stuff to war you shouldn't be fitting it, you shouldn't be putting up with it and you shouldn't be reporting to Congress that you know what it's alright for current level of provision and the technical specification is ok. If it isn't you should say so because you'll kill your young people.

At 21:10:

And so we put up with a lot of things in peacetime, you do in the United States Navy as well, which you would never dream of going to war with. It's all in the shop window but should not be with you in wartime.

Later Parry, in answer to a question, makes some points about risk. I think these hold true for many other areas and not just the military.

At 1:06:44:

Strategy is always a tricornered fight between policy, what you thing you want ..., resources, what you can afford and  miltary practicality. But I'm afraid those decisions are made on the basis of what you would do today, not in any future war. So you take risk in peace time which you pay for with your sailors lives and your ship's hulls in wartime, and you get it right and you may not.

At 1:05:09:

We have to anticipate, we have to incorporate technology, we have to have contingency plans for saying this is where our risk is, we need to know about that between friends, and we need to have that for a contingency both technologically and resource terms against the day that risk gets its bluff called.

In another presentation 8 Bells Lecture | Rear Adm. Chris Parry: Falklands War and the Importance of Naval Corporate Memory Parry states at 55:15:

You plan for war and you adapt for peace, not the other way around.

Kings Park Honour Avenues Plaques

Kings Park in Perth has plaques dedicated to Western Australians who died in service and who are either buried overseas or have no known grave.

Honour Avenue plaques sit poignantly against a backdrop of eucalypt trees. Each bears details of service personnel who died during war service and were either buried overseas or have no known graves.

I have often wondered if there is a database of these plaques and it turns out there is.

H. R. McMaster on lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan

In The Pipe Dream of Easy War H. R. McMaster looks at lessons to be learned from Iraq and Afghanistan. I especially liked this:

We must not equate military capabilities with strategy.

Trump and Patton

Arthur Allen looks at The Problem With Trump’s Admiration of General Patton.

World War II and the danger of being liberated

The George C Marshall Foundation hosted three eminent historians, Gerhard Weinberg, William Hitchcock and Mark Stoler to discuss World War II Myths, Misconceptions and Surprises. Each gave a presentation and then they answered questions at the end. William Hitchcock's presentation was interesting because he talked about how the Allies were not always greeted with joy when liberating parts of France and Belgium. This was basically because many civilians in those places were killed in the fighting to liberate them. I think he mentioned the number of French civilian casualties on D-Day, mostly from Allied bombing, were similar to Allied causalities.

The Yom Kippur War on US military doctrine

In Yom Kippur War & The Development of U.S. Military Doctrine John Suprin explains how lessons from the Yom Kippur War changed American Army doctrine and weapons.

The Americans were able to inspect captured Russian built equipment after the war and were surprised to discover that the tanks were built for a NBC battlefield. He later relates a conversation he had with a Ukrainian General (formerly of the Red Army before the fall of the wall and the break up of the USSR) where the Ukrainian explained the Red Army's plan to user nuclear weapons right from the beginning of any land war in the Europe.

The 1917 French Army mutinies

An interesting article on the mutiny by the French Army in 1917: A History of the First World War in 100 Moments: The Nivelle offensive - when the lambs refused to march to the slaughter.

Nationalism, militarism and the hatred of difference

Adam Gopnik has written an interesting article A Point of View: Don’t mention the war?

It's time to stop invoking Hitler and the Nazis in arguments about everything from censorship to birth control - but we should never stop heeding the lessons of World War II

He has several things to say, but one I want to highlight is his attempt to explain how nationalism (and it's different from patriotism), militarism and the hatred of difference was behind the evil acts of the Nazis.

But I'm always haunted by the simple words of the historian Richard Evans towards the end of his good book, The Third Reich at War, where he said that we should always remember that what happened was not some act of Satan - though Satanic acts took place - but the result of the unleashed power of long latent traditions of militarism, nationalism and the hatred of difference. It was the force of three ever-living things, braided together like hissing, poisonous snakes around a healthy tree.

The danger is that each of these things is not necessarily evil on first appearance, and each seeks a new name in new times.

The old distinction between patriotism and nationalism, made many times by many people, has never been more vital to our mental health than it is now - as vital for the health of the country as the distinction between sexual fantasy and pornography is for the health of a marriage. Patriotism, like fantasy, is a kind of sauce, a pleasing irrationalism that is part of what makes us human - and saucy. Nationalism, like pornography, is a kind of narcissistic addiction that devours our humanity.

Patriotism is a love of a place and of the people in a place. As GK Chesterton understood, it becomes more intense the smaller the unit gets, so that it was possible for him to feel more patriotism for Notting Hill than for Britain.

Nationalism is the opposite belief; that your place is better than everyone else's and that people who don't feel this way about it are somehow victimising you.

He goes on to write:

Just as nationalism is the opposite of patriotism, not its extension, so militarism is an emotion opposed to the universal urge to honour soldiers for their courage. Militarism is the belief that the military's mission is moral, or moralistic. That the army can be used to restore the honour of the nation, or to improve our morals, and that a failure to use it to right every imagined affront is a failure of nerve, rather than a counsel of good sense.

After 9/11, in the US we suffered from a plague of militarism of this kind, again mostly from sagging middle-aged writers who wanted to send someone else's kids to war so that the middle-aged men could feel more manly in the face of a national insult. Militarism is not the soldiers' faith that war can be conducted honourably, but the polemicist's belief that war confers honour.

Hatred of difference - notice I carefully did not say racial hatred, or religious hatred. Hitler hated Jews because of their religion, and because of their race, but he hated them above all because of their otherness.

He uses as a modern example of this hatred of difference the argument of someof "the impossibility of assimilating Muslims in my adopted country of France" and compares that to similar arguments against Jews in France over a century ago.


In the article Gopnik also discusses Godwin's Law and the Fawlty Towers "The Germans" episode with Basil Fawlty telling people not to "mention the war" when they had German guests. The relevance of this discussion can be seen in his concluding remarks, remarks that I think are worth reproducing:

This is a question in which after a half-millennium of religious warfare, the results are really all in. If we accept the Enlightenment values of tolerance, coexistence and mutual pursuit of material happiness, things in the long run work out. If we don't, they won't.

So, from now, when we evoke Godwin's Law, as we ought to, I would like to propose Gopnik's Amendment to it. We should never believe that people who differ from us about how we ought to spend public money want to commit genocide or end democracy, and we should stop ourselves from saying so, even in the pixelled heat of internet argument.

But when we see the three serpents of militarism, nationalism and hatred of difference we should never be afraid to call them out, loudly, by name, and remind ourselves and other people, even more loudly still, of exactly what they have made happen in the past.

We should never, in this sense, be afraid to mention the war. We should say, listen: you've heard all this before - but let me tell you again just what happened in the garden the last time someone let the snakes out. It is exactly the kind of lesson that history is supposed to be there to teach us.

Read the article.

The mythology around Anzac

Paul Daly wrote a very interesting essay Anzac: Endurance, Truth, Courage and Mythology. It looks at the mythology around Anzac day and those Australians that served in war. Well worth reading.