Panjandrum: The ‘giant firework’ built to break Hitler's Atlantic Wall
bbc.com
bbc.com
I think the notion of odd, but brilliant, boffin is deeply embedded in British culture. Or was, until at least the 2000s. The Great Egg Race on TV being a fine example.
On the other hand i knew an old scientist who had quite a few interesting and amusing stories to share about his efforts in WW2. One of them was about his attempts to perfect a formala. Several factories exploded before they succeeded.
Churchill stands virtually alone as one with moral clarity on the Nazis.
USSR allied with them. France was fine seeing everyone else get rolled. Poland signed a nonaggression pact. The British parliament were generally happy to let Hitler have his way.
How about instead, you tell me who you think went out of their way to combat Nazism?
Apart from many of the Commonwealth countries?
A technical satisfaction of their obligations to Poland and no more.
The UK and France both declared war at the same time after Germany invaded Poland.
I think the UK fired the first bullets -- or rather depth charges, on Sep 3rd. That resulted in damage and no deaths. A few hours later Germany attacked a UK passenger liner and killed over 100 civilians - not just Brits but also Canadians and Americans.
The day later the RAF bombed a German naval port, causing little damage, but again attacks.
France had the Saar offensive within days, so France fired the first shots between France and Germany. Nazi invasion of the Benelux and France was inevitable, but technically France attacked Germany before Germany attacked France.
> The British parliament were generally happy to let Hitler have his way.
Britain was mobilising throughout the late 30s. Declaring war at Munich could well have resulted in a British loss - the RAF wasn't really capable of running the Battle of Britain, it barely survived even with the extra year of preparation. On the other hand Nazis were less prepared too. Who knows what that would have done - perhaps a coup against Hitler would have succeeded. On the other hand perhaps there would have been no support for war - leading to a resignation of Chamberlain, Halifax becoming PM who was even more stronger into appeasement, and a swift truce hammered out, with no the UK abandoning Poland.
Churchill was of course more wary of Hitler, but Chamberlain is the one who declared war.
Not that I think any of this is indefensible, to be clear, but it is obvious in the moral clarity of today that offensive action against Nazi Germany would have been justified. The reason no one engaged in it was because it wasn't morally clear at the time.
Even if you ignore early engagements in September 1939, from April the UK was involved in fighting in Norway - losing over 4000 troops in the process.
The war wasn't waged particularly well by France or the UK in 39/40, being too late to be involved in Finland and failing to successfully defend Norway, but it was certainly waged in Norway. The failures led to the fall of both Daladier and Chamberlain, but thousands of British troops had been killed before Churchill became Prime Minister.
It seems like you believe I'm arguing that no military action was underway prior to Churchill. I'm not. I'm arguing that (effectively) no one had "moral clarity" about the Third Reich other than Churchill.
They did not do that and instead were spurred into action only when they themselves were attacked, ergo obviously it was not morally clear at the time.
The extent of the German and Japanese atrocities only became clear after the war and they were so great that even the Soviet Union were on the side of the angels.
I wouldn't say they were perfectly content. It was more that they were cowardly and apathetic.
On the other hand in the countries i mentioned above many locals participated in a genocide and murdered their neighbors with their bare hands.
Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_declaration_of_war_on_.... Both Britain and France declared war on Germany because they made guarantees to Poland about it.
> ... in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence, and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty's Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power.
That is unambiguous and clear. They kept their word.
It is tragic in the end that after the war they handed Poland over to Stalin. Poland still had its independence threatened but after having supplied and helped Stalin all that time, it was awkward having to declare war against him as well.
Great Britain should have made a pact with the Soviet Union against Hitler much earlier.
Poland was in an extremely difficult situation. But the decision to invade Czechoslovakia with the Germans was certainly not a good idea.
They had an absolute lack of appetite for fighting since the WWI was not long ago. I don't know if the Germans were smart enough to understand that and fully took advantage of it or were just lucky. For the Germans it worked with Czechoslovakia so they figured it would work with Poland as well.
Stalin I think is more interesting. He was prepared to "defend" the Czechs as well. He just needed permission to take his armies across Poland and Romania. He quickly switched sides after the agreement and signed the Soviet-German agreement.
Not too long ago I also learned about the secret military cooperation between the Soviets and the Germans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany%E2%80%93Soviet_Union_r.... The German air force was training its pilots in the Soviet Union:
> In 1925, a flying school was established near Lipetsk (Lipetsk fighter-pilot school) to train the first pilots for the future Luftwaffe
Reading that it's like reading some alternative universe fan-fiction. So that makes Stalin's position interesting. He was supposed to be allied with the French and the British officially but non-officially was assisting the Germans.
"The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War" Russo-German Relations and the Road to War, 1933-1941
Geoffrey Roberts
https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781349241248_A35684...
After not upholding the 1924 pact (France) with Czechoslovakia
WWII in Eastern Europe was a war for the survival of the Slavic peoples whom the Nazis declared to be the Untermensch[0] (Belorussians, Czechs, Poles, Russians, Serbs, Ukrainians – all of them) and were determined to fully exterminate them all following the extermination of the Jews and the Roma people.
The scale of extermination of the Slavs went far beyond the mass murdering of them in concentration camps, and included rounding up villages and burning them along with the villagers down with the use of flamethrowers, with no remorse because the Nazis considered the Slavs sub-humans[1][2][3][4].
Neither Czechoslovakia, nor Poland, nor the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had communism of any shape or flavour.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khatyn_massacre
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michni%C3%B3w_massacre
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Centre_Lipa_Remembers...
WW2 was a complex war. The big picture for the European part was that the two main powers divided Europe in their spheres of influence, fully intending to fight each other for overall supremacy after a while. Some countries joined their designated side voluntarily, some joined under a threat of invasion, and most of the rest were invaded. The ones I listed were the ones where the USSR was the initial aggressor.
One joins an alliance of convenience, sometimes in very unfavourable circumstances, to avoid the worst – the demise of one's own people and to guarantee their survival. Making a deal with the devil is a well-known adage that aptly describes such an unfortunate event.
Nazis considered the Finns (and the Estonians by extension) to be racially pure, with Latvians and Lithuanians being somewhere in between either redeemable or tolerable (frankly, I can't recall the exact details).
> WW2 was a complex war.
WWII was no more complex than the WWI, and it had a single, overarching objective – the repartitioning of the world. The main difference between the two was that the WWII was infused with a vile racial ideology, used to justify the pursuit of Lebensraum and the total annihilation of peoples whom the Nazi Party targeted with hatred, based on their crackpot so-called racial studies.
That was the actual Nazi plan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan
The differentiation between Ukraine and Russia is interesting.
Ukrainian nationalists had also joined the Nazis.
This occurred in all occupied territories didn’t it? France, Holland, Belgium etc.
It also occurred in some that weren’t occupied. Spain for example, and don’t look too hard at the British Royal Family (for this reason and various others).
As with Ukraine a few Nazi's didn't represent the country nor even come close to a majority.
I once read this from Alain Badiou:
"This separatism at certain moments reached extremes that no one could forget, particularly not the Russian people, knowing that the vast mass of the Nazi-armed and organised armies coming from Russian territory were Ukrainian. The Vlasov army was a Ukrainian army. Today we can even read the history of Ukrainians turning entire villages to blood and fire, including French ones. A good part of the repression of the maquis in central France was carried out by Ukrainians. "
Wikimedia presents Vaslov's army as Russian:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Liberation_Army
But Wikipedia about Vlasov (SS Division here):
"He (Himmler) oversaw the creation of the SS-Volunteer Division "Galicia" in October 1943 from Ukrainian volunteers, but that same month he said that Vlasov made him "genuinely anxious."
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/1569-a-present-default... https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/1569-a-present-default...
--- Badiou is a strange guy but I trust him.
In general, I have the impression that the historiography of the Nazi collobaration in Central Europe has been politically influenced in recent years.
That simplifies the situation a bit too much. When Soviet Union conquered half of Poland, which side were the Slavs, and which side were the Slavs?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_fougasse
They speak to the particular combination of desperation, urgency, and ingenuity found in the UK at that time.
I was at a picnic recently that happened to be on VE day, it really struck me that now London is only about 35% or so English as the ww2 generation would've known it, almost no one has a particularly good reason to bother paying attention. I'm sure I was the only person there who knows who Barnes Wallis was.
And yes I miss the boffins. They do still sort of exist but that type of mind has been strangled by the last few decades drive towards left-brained processes where everything basically has to be nailed down before the work actually starts.
That latter point is one reason why we're struggling so much - we owe a great debt to the generations who built all the infrastructure and housing. We didn't pay it off, we now can't really do anything at scale other than extract rent. The victorians were building a HS2 every few years.
It also generates a quarter of the UK's GDP, so there's that.
Or even just the bizarre notion of having best part of half of zone 1 be social in the first place.
Yes the US fought in WWII with a lot of human investment, the amount of direct threats to American soil was much smaller than the UK and the memories of the war are those of the fights in the jungles and not of American children fleeing bombs in major cities
The more interesting question is always why America suddenly forgot all its usual rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and liberating random countries (sometimes against their will) in this particular case, and whether it has anything to do with propaganda and bribery operations.
You do not get a blank check to engage in nation building boondoggles until a "good one" comes along.
That doesn't explain the victim blaming though.
Zelenski is depicted as a war criminal because he refused to capitulate to a stronger enemy.
War is crazy and brutal and engaging in one is going to get people killed. But I don't understand how we can expect some other country to just give up and yet we don't expect ourselves to do the same when somebody attacks us.
Hence my only explanation is that no living person in America truly knows how it feels to be invaded.
That some other country gets over 55% of its budget from the West and almost all its materiel. Total direct “aid” over 320 billion so far. Total costs to the West much higher still.
And the result for Ukraine is more territory lost, more destruction, and hundreds of thousands of casualties. No one would and could stop them from continuing the war on their own but imagine what that would look like.
And the result for the West is a stronger, hostile Russia with deepening ties to China, North Korea etc. Strategic failure.
>Zelenski is depicted as a war criminal
No. What we saw was a noisy attempt by the US to salvage its strategic failure in Ukraine/Russia. Russians weren’t fooled. It failed.
PS russia isn’t stronger lol.
But it's totally normal for a country to try to defend itself.
I honestly don't understand why people seem to ignore this angle and just keep talking about budget and money and foreign interests and nato and what not.
Ok, you don't want to give Ukraine money for their defence, FINE, do not give them money!
But why do you have to frame it as zelenski is corrupt, traitor, murderer, boogyman or whatever.
No normal leader of a country being invaded would be expected to surrender their country. They would have been hanged by their own people.
What I find infuriating about this discourse is the double standard. At the same time the american right is absolutely going bezerk over "immigrant invasion" and when some other people suffer an invasion "nah, I don't see the problem, they will just get along fine if they surrender".
You're free to spend your money as you wish, but it's the total lack of empathy (about this and other causes) that rubs me the wrong way.
Ukraine as client police state is not a casualty free environment either. Really the war started when pro-Russian security services killed over a hundred protesters at Euromaidan, back in 2014.
Someone who genuinely cared about Russian lives, rather than just the regime or contrarianism, would want the Russians to pull out immediately like the Americans out of Afghanistan.
We don’t have to speculate. They’ve just presented to Ukraine and published their conditions for ceasefire or settlement.
The reaction suggests Ukraine/the West would rather continue. Of course, demands will only increase.
> Really the war started with Euromaidan
Sure it wasn’t when Ukrainian nationalists burned 42 people to death in Odessa?
>regime, pull out
Ah, but Ukraine/the West were given so many opportunities to settle this peacefully. Even the March 2023 settlement (which has been published) was dangerously generous, for said regime. But peace was not on Western leaders’ mind. They wanted something else.
(Preposterous to compare Ukraine/Russia with Afghanistan/US.)
They are also tee-ing us up to attack Iran, and have provably spent money attacking Houthis despite knowing that Europe would take care of themselves.
They are full of shit and they know it. They do not care.
The Taliban didn't return to power in Afghanistan, because the war was unjust according to international law, or morally repugnant or any of that. That has never mattered. And it won't ever matter.
The Taliban won because American strategy was defective from the start. While great victories with thousands of Taliban getting massacred were common, none of those contributed the destruction of the Taliban or any other strategic objective. There had been minimal effort to learn from the failures of Vietnam and the idea of learning from British victories against the insurgents in Malaya and South Africa was unthinkable.
And the situation in Ukraine gives every indication of being similar. The Ukrainian side conducts ambitious operations, some of them impressive successes, but ever since the summer of 2023, victory only seems to be getting more distant as time goes by.
And the collapse of the Russian economy will happen any day now for the past 3 years.
After 20 years of being told the military leadership of the western world had COIN all figured out, you're going to have to give people something more than a prayer that the enemy's economy will collapse all of a sudden. Proud ignorance of the basic facts of the field or of the enemy won't procure much public support any more.
It's not at all unreasonable to think that Ukraine can continue ceding ground and shredding Ladas full of mobiks until Putin kicks the bucket, or the Russian economy collapses. A healthy economy doesn't have a 20% key interest rate for 8 months straight, you know. We've already seen one large-scale mutiny in the Russian armed forces, too, so who knows what else might happen?
You haven't proposed any sort of alternative to continuing to arm and fund Ukraine. What's your idea, cut them off and say "good luck?" How does that benefit anyone besides Russia and the minority of Ukrainians who don't want to fight?
edit: if you're thinking that I care about the financial cost of arming Ukraine, I don't. This is the best money we've ever spent and the only time I've respected our MIC, and I wish we were sending more weapons and more financial support. Every time Ukraine spends $100,000 of aid destroying a piece of Russian armor, that's saving us god knows how much in money spent on deterrence.
This situation is not present in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
But his actions with Ukraine were unimpeachable. As a populist leader throwing immediate public support (I think he was the first foreign leader to go to Kyiv, certainly one of the first) it kneecapped the Useful Idiots like Farage.
It is fair to say that Boris did end up forming a particularly strong bond with Zelenskyy, though if you wanted to be cynical you might perhaps point out that two of his three subsequent visits to Kyiv coincided with some of the trickiest moments in the Partygate scandal, and allowed him to get out of events that would likely have proven embarrassing for him.
People have this thinking nations have these widely shared opinions when they don't, the politics and visible leaders are the ones shaping public opinion.
Nations don't have a single shared opinion even if they have a single shared action.
It frusrates me that the people of Russia allow their country to continue its aggression even in the face of such staggering losses. I can't understand their thinking. Then I remind myself that there is not just a single brain called Russia. There is not even just a single brain in the leadership of Russia.
I suspect that the percentage of US voters that support Ukraine is pretty high. A quick internet seach tells me that Pres. Trump's current approval rating is well below 50%. But I suspect support for impeachment is very much lower than that and support for a coup is practically non-existent.
It makes sense to me that the same holds in Russia. Tens of thousands of Russians each month lose a husband/son/father/brother in this war. Some may blame Ukraine and want revenge. Some may feel some patriotic or nationalistic justification for their loss. Others may hate Putin for it. Still others may convert to pacifism. But there seems little evidence that there is any will to do what it takes to challenge the power that keeps sending thousands more to their death. A very small percent of the population can continue to inflict this horror on all of Russia.
I would love to believe that there are voices even within Putin's hearing that quietly but consistently advocate for peace and somehow don't get removed. Imagine that there are people who make a point of never publicly falling out, but once a week hand deliver a note about improved GDP if Russia ended the invasion. Or they verbally suggest seaside resorts that could host old-fashioned vacations if they weren't in a war zone. Or they ponder out loud how much better the domestic auto industry could be if some of the military spending were diverted. Imagine the combined efforts of a few people to make sure Putin gets one subtle peacemaker message each day.
Please don't condemn all Russians. And please don't condemn all USians. And certainly please don't condemn all Americans. I don't know how much the average American cares, but I for one hope it is more than zero.
Fancy having a statue of yourself and never bother going to see it!
An invasion of the Netherlands was never likely considering it is a swamp in which tanks cannot operate with rivers and canals every few kilometers. Ironically the very last place in Europe that was liberated because the Allies bypassed it in their drive to the Ruhr.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJCF-Ufapu8&t=8883s
The whole series is worth a watch, including episodes on radio location finding, radar and radar jamming, Jet engines, the V1/V2 rockets, and Ultra/Enigma etc. Many of the participants (both British and German) are interviewed - including Albert Speer.
https://historictech.com/a-secret-ww2-american-hi-fi-tape-re...
Of course, Germany booted out loads of Jewish scientists. Many of whom ended up doing important work for the Allies - not least on the atom bomb.
A Town Like Alice is probably the most popular in Australia, where he resided after the war. Also made into a good movie.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_and_Round_Went_the_Great...
Also by the way the Normandy beaches were NOT fortified with bunkers very much at all (unlike what you might have seen in Saving Private Ryan), just trenches and sandbags. A large portion of Omaha beach casualties were inflicted by a single machine gun nest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Severloh
I'm not sure if you mean there were not many bunkers or they weren't very good fortifications, but there are quite a few bunkers, for example: https://www.normandybunkers.com/bunker-sites
The flaws in the design seem reasonably obvious - any imbalance in the thrust of the multiple rockets on each wheel causing an unwanted steering effect. Also the high centre of gravity and narrow track width seem poorly chosen when stability would surely be desirable.
A mobile Catherine Wheel seems more designed to attract as much attention as possible...
from Greenberg's Troubling the Waters about Black-Jewish relations.