Reading Eisenhower's Lieutenants again. Great book, but Weigley, a proponent of the New Military History, was wrong to emphasize the frontier heritage of mobility and the power drive of Grant. For one thing, Weigley seems to have been misled by Lost Cause enthusiasts who (1)
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Reading DGFP, Series D, Vol VII, Doc 134, p. 151-152. Even the Estonian Vice FM on 20 Aug. 1939 was telling the Germans that UK would intervene to defend Poland . If Hitler was stunned by UK declaring war that's just a sign he wasn't the genius his current admirers think he was.
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It's surprising how little the huge British efforts to get Turkey into WWII have gotten into the history books. Reading the primary docs like the Allied conference records show how much the British really wanted Turkey to come in and how little the Americans did.
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I think this is another example of IT pros who don't understand what their systems are used for and they just move on to the next new thing just because it's the next new thing. #dontfixwhatsnotbroken
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Other than it providing links occasionally to better sources there almost no reason to use Wikipedia. The propaganda on many articles is just getting out of control. #wikipediasucks
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Who Carried the Burden in the Second World War? | Hoover Institution Who Carried the Burden in the Second World War? hoover.org/research/who-carr…
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I've been looking through what was sent to Allied nations through Lend-Lease. It's crazy. Just to the British Commonwealth excluding Canada 38 CVEs, 78 DEs, 9 subs, 26,136 aircraft, 1,196,706 Lee-Enfield rifles, 27,751 tanks among other things. Just amazing. #Lendlease
Your grandfather's cousin's neighbor having served in WWII does not make you an authority on what others can believe and say.
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I read a lot of military history. 1 thing that always bugs me is when someone writes "casualties were light. Only X number of men were killed". On this Memorial Day let's remember all those who gave the last great measure of devotion. They all mattered.
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I'm finally reading A.J.P. Taylor's The Origins of the 2nd World War. How did this book not end his career in ignominy? It's logic is dubious, it's historical method is bad The only upside of the book is it provided fodder for other historians to write better books refuting it.
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I'm reading Stahel's "Hitler's Panzer Generals" and find it frankly bizarre that generals like Guderian kept stacks of cards they would autograph and send to fans.
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Those lamenting the fall of Maduro are giving off strong Irish government expressing sympathy for the death of Hitler vibes.
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Pinker apparently doesn't know about the endless complaints about crappy or non-existent maps in military history books.
One of the biggest chasms between the Two Cultures of the humanities & sciences is the former's disdain for anything but text. For decades I've seen humanities scholars aim to bridge the gap by inviting a scientist to speak but not thinking to arrange for a projector. When my first popular book, The Language Instinct, went out to reviewers, my editor thought the diagrams (syntactic trees, brains, language families) were ornamental and left them out of the proofs, rendering the discussions incomprehensible, and was genuinely surprised when I hit the ceiling. And when I was invited to edit Best Science and Nature Writing one year, the editor simply omitted all the diagrams from the essays I chose, saying that was the policy of the series, not realizing there might be a difference between, say Best Poetry or Short Stories and Best Science Writing.
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There's been a lot of Battle of the Bulge posts, but most concentrate on the drama in the 5th Armee sector. This emphasis misses the equally dramatic American successes in defending the Elsenborn ridge in the north.
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I've been seeing a lot of posts about the anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge. Most link to propaganda films taken by the Germans. While those films add some interest to the posts they also obscure important events that weren't filmed like the defense on Elsenborn Ridge.
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Just finished Eichelberger's "Our Jungle Road to Tokyo" and started on Barbey's "MacArthur Amphibious Navy". I guess it's a SWPA kind of month.
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Eichelberger was told by Adm. Leary in Aug '42 of the Savo Island defeat and the loss of the 5 CA's. "Our Jungle Road to Tokyo" p. 18
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Table 22 of the RAF's statistics volume of the maritime war frankly surprised me. According to it the USAAF sank more than twice the enemy warships by tonnage than the RAF and FAA combined in the Med in WWII. raf.mod.uk/what-we-do/our-hi… #theswordfishdidnotsinkmoretonnage
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