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Nenonen posted:I wish I'd been a girlie, just like my dear ftfy
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Feb 8, 2016 12:28
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HEY GAL posted:sometimes englishmen on boats suck too Ah, the Road Trip of the Royal Navy.
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Feb 8, 2016 13:38
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100 Years Ago For a war where the uselessness of forts was supposed to have been established back in 1914, we sure are spending a lot of time today talking about forts. How about that? First it's to Erzurum, where the Russians are going to make their move in three days' time; and then to Fort Douaumont at Verdun, which is now surplus to requirements and the home of fifty very bored old gits, who are just waiting for the Engineers to demolish the whole useless excrescence. There's also a moment for an interesting little meeting where the French decide not to send Salonika any reinforcements to focus on the Western Front again, and then it's on to a healthy helping of personal accounts. We start with the introduction of Malcolm White (yet another British subaltern, alas), a good friend of the already-introduced Evelyn Southwell (and the kind of "good friend" who makes me want to use inverted commas and say "nudge nudge, wink wink"; more about that to come), who's just about to leave for France and will hopefully have a few insights into life in the rear before he gets to the front. At Mbyuni, E.S. Thompson of the 7th South Africans is warned to move; back in Blighty, both our pet Canadians are writing to their parents; and it's Herbert Sulzbach's birthday, so his entire battery gets together for the German equivalent of what the East End in London would have called a right good knees-up. my dad posted:a surprising amount of immigration for a poor as gently caress country in the Balkans and as weird as it sounds for something in the era of nationalism, an acceptaince of these people as long as they were seen as trying hard enough to fit in (I've read about people coming in from places like Slovenia, Greece, Poland, even Germany, adopting Serbian names, and becoming intensely patriotic citizens. Serbia's first bankers and brewers were German, some of the greatest writers and comedians Greek(ish), the dude who interviewed Stojan Komita and wrote that trench magazine had Polish origins, etc), and a general impression that the country had a greater destiny of sorts. In a bizzare way, it reminds me of US is some regards, in ways both good and bad. With all those factors combining with nationalism serving as a binding force, it's not hard to imagine women being swept away by the tide of patriotism just as much as men were. This is the era when there's a lot of people who are seriously enthused by the idea of creating the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, right? At the risk of sounding like a pub bore, it does stand to reason that you can't really make that idea work without having a very flexible concept of what a common identity is or could be...
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Feb 8, 2016 13:45
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There was very nearly a rerun of Cadiz in the first Anglo-Burmese war, when the British troops landed in Rangoon to find the city abandoned. Everyone got legless on looted spirits and set the entire city on fire, with themselves inside. Unfortunately the Burmese hadn't left any scouts behind to see what was happening, or they could have moved back in and destroyed the expeditionary force.
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Feb 8, 2016 13:54
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Mr Enderby posted:There was very nearly a rerun of Cadiz in the first Anglo-Burmese war, when the British troops landed in Rangoon to find the city abandoned. Everyone got legless on looted spirits and set the entire city on fire, with themselves inside. There is a goddamn reason why drink had to be hunted down and smashed in advance to any British military action through modern history. And even then, I still bet some fools tried to soak the stuff up from the cobbles.
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Feb 8, 2016 14:01
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Hey Trin, if you're looking for more diaries, have you encountered the ludicrously bloodthirsty Ernst Junger? I presume so, but I haven't had a chance to go back through your posts yet. There's a nice penguin translation out.
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Feb 8, 2016 14:51
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Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago Somehow it seems entirely appropriate that Sulzbach's reemergence in the narrative is occasioned by him having a pretty nice birthday.
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Feb 8, 2016 14:56
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There's also The Private War of Seaman Stumpf, the diary of a German sailor that became famous in Postwar Germany. There's an English translation out there.
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Feb 8, 2016 14:58
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Trin Tragula posted:This is the era when there's a lot of people who are seriously enthused by the idea of creating the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, right? At the risk of sounding like a pub bore, it does stand to reason that you can't really make that idea work without having a very flexible concept of what a common identity is or could be... And yet, in some ways, too rigid. Just ask the people who lived in Macedonia at the time. You don't really need all that much flexibility to see speakers of Serbo-Croatian as one nation. I mean, Germany was formed on the same principle, and from people who have a lot more differences between each-other than, say, Serbs and Croats do. Slovenians speak a language of their own, and are fairly distinct from, say, Serbs, but they were heavily culturally and politically involved with stuff going on in Serbo-Croatian speaking areas, and if I recall correctly, were the first who came up with the whole Yugoslav idea (under a different name). It's worth pointing out that people's identities were a lot more, erm, blobby, at that time and place. The national identities, as defined today as "Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks", weren't nearly as crystalized (or at all crystalized in some cases) at the time of WW1, and overlapped in many ways. Hell, in some cases, the modern terms were completely nonsensical and not really applicable. Some big names of science and literature are now a free-for-all grab between nationalists due to being relatively undefined nationally, mostly because they'd reply to such questions with some variation of "gently caress off". Also, Croats and different Croats and groups that we'd call a subset of Croats today (and Serbs and different Serbs and groups we'd call a subset of Serbs today, etc) didn't get along nearly as well among themselves at the time as nationalists like to present it today. There was no such thing as an eternal unchangeable Serbian nation, or an eternal unchangeable Croatian nation, or an eternal unchangeable unity of all Serbo-Croatian speaking Muslims. It took the combined effort of fascists, communists, and religious fundamentalists over the course of almost a century to make a clean divide something that in any way resembles reality. One of the big draws of the Yugoslav idea was that it let A1, A2, and A3 share an identity through a wider issue B without having to decide which A is the standard A (or even having to see issue A as something important enough to form a coherent identity around).
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Feb 8, 2016 15:02
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There's two problems I've got with using Junger. The first is the bugger didn't die, so is still in copyright for the next 50-odd years. The second is that his actual contemporary diary has as far as I know never made it into English; there's been a whole different bunch of versions of the Storm of Steel book (and IIRC there's been a "Just Junger's Actual Contemporary Diary Without Any Post-War Cobblers" release in German a couple of years ago), but the ones that made it to English all have a greater or lesser amount of editorialising and ruminating and bloviating and soldier's exaggeration and after-the-fact stuff that he saw fit to shove in anyway. edit: Stumph is great but rare enough that I've only been able to flick through a library copy. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Feb 8, 2016 |
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Feb 8, 2016 15:13
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WW2 Data Cluster Bomb Containers! Before reading the book this data comes from, I'd never heard of Japan having/using cluster munitions during World War 2. How many different containers did the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force have? Which cluster munitions did they carry? What aircraft missile was used as an air-to-air weapon, and how was it used? What bombs were mentioned in documents but never recovered? That and more in the blog!
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Feb 8, 2016 15:16
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lenoon posted:Hey Trin, if you're looking for more diaries, have you encountered the ludicrously bloodthirsty Ernst Junger? I presume so, but I haven't had a chance to go back through your posts yet. There's a nice penguin translation out. It's been some years since I read Jünger's Storm of Steel, so I might misremember, but I don't recall him coming across as "ludicrously bloodthirsty". I even googled it and found only a Daily Mail article that described him as such. What I remember is that he seemed to be one of those people whose brains seemed to function differently than other people's and he didn't seem to affected by the horrors of war like others were. But I don't remember him reveling in slaughtering enemy soldiers. edit: Trin Tragula posted:The second is that his actual contemporary diary has as far as I know never made it into English; there's been a whole different bunch of versions of the Storm of Steel book (and IIRC there's been a "Just Junger's Actual Contemporary Diary Without Any Post-War Cobblers" release in German a couple of years ago), but the ones that made it to English all have a greater or lesser amount of editorialising and ruminating and bloviating and soldier's exaggeration and after-the-fact stuff that he saw fit to shove in anyway. Yeah, there's that too. I read the Finnish translation, I have no idea how much it differs from the original. And of course no one can anymore say what Jünger really felt and what was exaggerated. Hogge Wild fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Feb 8, 2016 |
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Feb 8, 2016 15:34
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Hogge Wild posted:It's been some years since I read Jünger's Storm of Steel, so I might misremember, but I don't recall him coming across as "ludicrously bloodthirsty". I even googled it and found only a Daily Mail article that described him as such. What I remember is that he seemed to be one of those people whose brains seemed to function differently than other people's and he didn't seem to affected by the horrors of war like others were. But I don't remember him reveling in slaughtering enemy soldiers. It might be the idea that someone who doesn't get all hosed up from extended combat service was a little off before going in. Like people who sign up to "kill <ethnic slur>s" these days.
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Feb 8, 2016 15:37
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lenoon posted:Hey Trin, if you're looking for more diaries, have you encountered the ludicrously bloodthirsty Ernst Junger? I presume so, but I haven't had a chance to go back through your posts yet. There's a nice penguin translation out. Can you cite the ludicrously bloodthirsty parts for us?
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Feb 8, 2016 15:37
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Trin Tragula posted:edit: Stumph is great but rare enough that I've only been able to flick through a library copy. There's a half-dozen copies on AbeBooks. The cheapest is $15 US. That's like, what, only 10 Half-Cormorants or whatever the gently caress you people use for money over there, right? Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Feb 8, 2016 |
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Feb 8, 2016 15:44
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I'm sure I've encountered jungers diaries in translation on some military history forum - maybe GWF - out in the wild as it were. I'll scout around and see if I can find the link again. Edit: It's the contrast between the (extensive) reading of the myriad junior officer diaries I've read on the British side, and the phrasing of the same spirit of triumphalism from Junger, which tends more towards the feeling of invincibility and enjoyment of combat in a more.... Confrontational way than the vast majority of other memoirs I've read. He enjoys it, becomes alive in it, triumphs in it. Oddly enough, the closest other writers and diarists I've read have been D'Annunzio and Lawrence. Now, that's either a translation issue, as I've only read storm of steel in English, or its Junger expressing the will to power in a manner that lusts after battle. Of course, there's the legendary (from a translation given in Der Spiegel): "I found two fingers still attached to the metacarpal bone near the latrine of the Altenburg fortress, I picked them up and had the tasteful idea of having them worked into a cigarette holder" Of course from the same article we have his own words on his bloodthirstyness: "In a mixture of feelings brought on by excitement, bloodthirstyness, anger and alcohol consumption, we advanced towards enemy lines" I am not saying Junger was any more or less bloodthirsty than most combatants (equally "ludicrously bloodthirsty", Lawrence's seeming obsession with the dichotomy of clean and dirty death, for example) mainly that he wrote in a less restrained way about his experiences than others. That "it was a jolly good scrap" on the other side of the trenches was another way of expressing bloodlust, passed through a different cultural filter. Edit 2: Hogge Wild posted:It's been some years since I read Jünger's Storm of Steel, so I might misremember, but I don't recall him coming across as "ludicrously bloodthirsty". I even googled it and found only a Daily Mail article that described him as such. What I remember is that he seemed to be one of those people whose brains seemed to function differently than other people's and he didn't seem to affected by the horrors of war like others were. This is a good point - I treat the detachment which he exhibits pretty much from the word go a symptom of what I'd describe as bloodthirst. It's not the enjoying the act of killing, so much as the enjoyment of the process that war created, industrialising this very Nietzschean philosophy of individualism and nihilism into a wholesale Europe-wide experience which Junger revelled in. Another excellent quote: "It is he, the most dangerous, bloodthirsty and purposeful being that the Earth has to carry" lenoon fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Feb 8, 2016 |
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Feb 8, 2016 16:18
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From a few pages back but I was out over the weekend:MrMojok posted:This is for Cyrano or JaucheCharly or anyone who cares to answer. The best thread I found on Nazi Germany has fallen into archives, so I thought I would ask here, and I hope this is an appropriate place. The thing to remember about Shirer is that it is the first pass at getting all that poo poo down in one place and drawing any kind of conclusions about it. Most of the things that he latches onto were pretty accepted thought in the late 50s and early 60s . The Sonderweg, for example, was an accepted explanation for quite a while (I can't remember exactly when it blew up - 70s? 80s? god I'm a bad historian). I forget the details, but I also seem to remember a lot of what he wrote about Hitler's early life being a bit more controversial these days. That said, it's a good entry point for nailing down the basic political history. It's been something like 15 years since I last read it so I can't recall any of the exact themes that have been superseded, sorry about not being much help there. That said, it's still necessary if you have any interest in learning how the scholarship has advanced and, like I said, it's still a readable introduction to the subject as long as you understand you're reading something that was published practically while the rubble was still warm. edit: Just thinking about the era here are some things I'm almost certain he's got wrong: Anything to do with the Eastern Front probably gives Ensign Expendable an aneurysm. From what I recall he based the whole book off of a combination of his own experiences as a reporter in Berlin during the 30s and German documents captured by the US and British. The usual arguments about how basing the view of the war with the USSR on Nazi documents leads to the Wehrmacht looking way more effective than it was stand. I also seem to recall that the bits on the Holocaust were fairly thin compared to the rest of the book, but frankly I'm impressed that it recognized the crimes against the Jews as a separate category. Again, this is a hallmark of the time. The book came out the same year as the Eichmann trial. The fact that what was done to the Jews was a unique crime apart from the general grab bag of horrible poo poo the Nazis did to everyone was really emerging in a strong way at this time. chitoryu12 posted:What's up with the guy on the left getting his drink on mid-war crime? I know this was a bit of a joke, but there was a TON of rampant alcohol consumption at just about every level of the Holocaust, and doubly so when you're talking about the earlier mass shootings. The shooters would drink before, drink during, and drink even more afterwards. It was pretty well understood that after a big event they had to give the shooters a few days to just drink themselves into a stupor. It turns out that even if you think they're sub-humans shooting a few hundred women and children in the back of the head takes a toll. poo poo, one of the expressed reasons for moving to the gas chambers was to lessen the psychological toll on men who they wanted to be productive citizens after the war.
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Feb 8, 2016 16:22
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lenoon posted:I'm sure I've encountered jungers diaries in translation on some military history forum - maybe GWF - out in the wild as it were. I'll scout around and see if I can find the link again. They reissued the diary recently but only in German. I haven't seen an English translation available. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kriegstagebuch-1914-1918-Ernst-J%C3%BCnger/dp/3608938435 Its a shame the original diaries haven't been translated, I loved Storm of Steel and it would be interesting to see how much he embellished from the diary.
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Feb 8, 2016 16:36
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Cyrano4747 posted:From what I recall he based the whole book off of a combination of his own experiences as a reporter in Berlin during the 30s and German documents captured by the US and British Talking of which, his edited diaries were also published at the time and are quite an interesting read: http://www.amazon.com/Berlin-Diary-Journal-Correspondent-1934-1941-ebook/dp/B005Z553RA/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= Do bear in mind they are edited excerpts and he published them literally in the middle of the war, though. (Do the unedited diaries exist anywhere?)
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Feb 8, 2016 16:40
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Hogge Wild posted:It's been some years since I read Jünger's Storm of Steel, so I might misremember, but I don't recall him coming across as "ludicrously bloodthirsty". I even googled it and found only a Daily Mail article that described him as such. What I remember is that he seemed to be one of those people whose brains seemed to function differently than other people's and he didn't seem to affected by the horrors of war like others were. But I don't remember him reveling in slaughtering enemy soldiers. It's been a while, but I distinctly remember there being a shitton of talk about how good and right it is to fight this war for Germany and how eager he was to go over the top and have at them and some of his buddies died so that sucked a little but they died for Germany so it was all good and then he has to lead his guys into an artillery barrage and some of them are afraid which is, like, soooooo dumb lol yeah maybe you die but you die for Germany so what's the big deal right? And there is a part where he goes up against some Indians and is pretty pissed off. The version I read was almost sympathetic, talking about how this really isn't the right climate for them and stuff, but you could read between the lines that he was pretty angry that these savages had been brought in to fight what was supposed to be a good and proper war between civilized men. So maybe bloodthirsty is the wrong word. Very, very eager to fight in the war definitely fits though.
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Feb 8, 2016 17:00
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If you wanted to contrast Junger with some British officerly gung-ho, you might try Fraser-Tytler's Field-Guns in France (and then write 3,000 words on whether it matters that he was in the artillery). There's some embarrassed opening flannel about "oh no I wasn't really delighting in killing them, I was just taking pride in doing a really good job of work and that job of work just so happened to involve killing lots of Germans", but don't believe it any further than you could kick a shell.
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Feb 8, 2016 17:41
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Julian Grenfell is the same, enjoying the whole experience and unabashedly writing endlessly about how it spoke to his "barbaric disposition". Goes well with Junger's embrace of the savagery encouraged by the war. There's a pretty good book by Alfredo Bonadeo called "mark of the beast" that goes into detail about the difference between the gradual emergence of bloodlust and nihilism that is a common theme of diaries and war literature and those that went into war already pretty much cognisant of, and celebratory in, the brutality of it. So Junger has his Nietzsche, Grenfell has his vengeance, Lawrence submits himself willingly to the surrender of the "over mastering greed of victory", where the "selves converse in the void, and madness is very near". It's a good, though unrelentingly harsh book which draws hugely on the Italian front and experiences there, and is generally a great read.
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Feb 8, 2016 18:00
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in re the Juenger discussion, one of the reasons i find my subjects refreshing is that they can have an emotion without telling us about it for a thousand pagesKemper Boyd posted:The Swedish General Staff released sometime in the early 20th century a series of huge volumes on the Swedish early 17th century wars, and these mention in considerable detail how Oxenstierna set up an intelligence service. Mostly he did this by paying for young men's education in various places around Europe, in exchange for them sending him letters back so he'd know what's going on. Of course, doesn't help much with the whole military intelligence thing since letters travel slow. you know who was really good at spies? the papal states. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Feb 8, 2016 |
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Feb 8, 2016 19:06
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lenoon posted:I am not saying Junger was any more or less bloodthirsty than most combatants (equally "ludicrously bloodthirsty", Lawrence's seeming obsession with the dichotomy of clean and dirty death, for example) mainly that he wrote in a less restrained way about his experiences than others. That "it was a jolly good scrap" on the other side of the trenches was another way of expressing bloodlust, passed through a different cultural filter. I suppose I'm annoyed your hyperbole, in that case. "Enjoying" the war, such as it was, or enjoying the sensations of combat does not equate to "ludicrous bloodlust". It really hasn't been culturally acceptable (in the west, at least) for someone to say that they enjoyed participating in a given war or other such violence, which is unfortunately a very intellectually dishonest and historically inaccurate thing. Characterizing honest memoirs as "ludicrously bloodthirsty" isn't a particularly worthwhile position to take if you're wanting an honest depiction of history vice a clumsy modern political statement.
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Feb 8, 2016 19:16
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feedmegin posted:It's not something I've heard of either, and neither have the grognards in the Sealed Knot as far as I can tell; they would probably know.
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Feb 8, 2016 19:41
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Reading this thread discussing bloodlust, while in a Russian pub that is playing Rammenstien over the speakers is quite the experience.
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Feb 8, 2016 20:23
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HEY GAL posted:you know who was really good at spies? the papal states. So wait, when did this end? Because in everything I read from later on, the Papal States seem uniformly poo poo at basically everything, from warfighting to spying to running a drat country competently, and it doesn't vary with the Pope.
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Feb 8, 2016 21:01
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Spacewolf posted:So wait, when did this end? Because in everything I read from later on, the Papal States seem uniformly poo poo at basically everything, from warfighting to spying to running a drat country competently, and it doesn't vary with the Pope. paranoid about having spain/spain's italian satellites on one side of them and france/france's italian satellites on the other though, although who in their place wouldn't be it might be a thing for medium-sized and kind of paranoid states to be good at spies, wasn't interwar Poland's intelligence pretty good? Like they were involved in breaking Enigma. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Feb 8, 2016 |
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Feb 8, 2016 21:20
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Spacewolf posted:So wait, when did this end? Because in everything I read from later on, the Papal States seem uniformly poo poo at basically everything, from warfighting to spying to running a drat country competently, and it doesn't vary with the Pope. They had a very extensive net of Bishops and Cardinals that had to regularly sent letters back to Rome, so the Pope was probably amongst the people best informed about the state of the world. It's not always tactical/operational level espionage.
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Feb 8, 2016 21:28
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So I'm nearing the end of Tank Men by Robert Kershaw, after a forced week-long hiatus due to accidentally leaving it in a friend's house, and Belton Cooper is now relevant because the book turns out to be roughly chronological in presentation. Apparently as a Lieutenant he: Was a combat commander of a unit implied to be battalion sized. Was personally required to hose dead people out of tanks. Was responsible for organising work crews to go and recover knocked out tanks. Was responsible for repairing said recovered tanks. Was responsible for allocating repaired tanks to new crews as he saw fit. So while this might possibly be plausible, I guess, as a result of rapid promotions etc, there's a direct quote in the book from him about having seventeen previously loved Shermans and having thirty four men to put into them, resulting in a crew of only three per tank against the German five per tank. Now the observant of you may notice that thirty four divided by seventeen is exactly two and not three at all, but he goes on to state that he followed these seventeen under-crewed Shermans up the road they departed on, the implication being this happened almost immediately, only to find no less than fifteen of them re-knocked out for him. Is Kershaw misrepresenting Cooper here or is Cooper just that full of poo poo? ArchangeI posted:They had a very extensive net of Bishops and Cardinals that had to regularly sent letters back to Rome, so the Pope was probably amongst the people best informed about the state of the world. It's not always tactical/operational level espionage. They're also really good at getting their field agents out of harm's way when they misbehave in foreign lands. If every other government conducted extractions with such success we'd never even know spies existed. VVVV Arquinsiel fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Feb 8, 2016 |
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Feb 8, 2016 21:31
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Spacewolf posted:So wait, when did this end? Because in everything I read from later on, the Papal States seem uniformly poo poo at basically everything, from warfighting to spying to running a drat country competently, and it doesn't vary with the Pope. Note that the Papal States managed to stay a major force in European politics from about the 8th Century through the 18th, and in a diminished form for the first half of the 19th. In fact, they were at their largest just before the French Revolution. As part of that they helped keep the Italian peninsula more or less destabilized while engaging in some really intricate politics between all the various nations, kingdoms, free cities, etc. that made up Europe over a millennium. Napoleon's reforms hosed them up pretty good, but they didn't finally succumb until Italian nationalism became a big thing in the 1860s. You don't hang around as a territorial power in Europe for a thousand years if you are uniformly poo poo at everything you do. I suspect that there are two major factors that contribute to that perception: 1) lots of people enjoy pointing out the dumb, corrupt aspects of it both because of religious objection to Catholicism and the fact that pointing out the flaws of the powerful is really damned fun. 2) Major fuckups that lead to big, destabilizing changes are a lot more interesting to write about than 1000 years of competent management and diplomacy. It also helps that the period that led to the final collapse also tends to have much less adequate leadership and administration. The Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire both have similar reputations for incompetency that largely stem from their actions in the early 20th century, and which aren't really deserved if you look at them across the previous 500 years. Hell, they still play an important political role today. I can't think of any city-states that size that have quite that kind of diplomatic footprint.
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Feb 8, 2016 21:32
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Arquinsiel posted:So I'm nearing the end of Tank Men by Robert Kershaw, after a forced week-long hiatus due to accidentally leaving it in a friend's house, and Belton Cooper is now relevant because the book turns out to be roughly chronological in presentation. Apparently as a Lieutenant he: Also worth pointing out that 15 tanks in a go would be real notable loss that should be able to be confirmed elsewhere.
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Feb 8, 2016 21:38
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Arquinsiel posted:Is Kershaw misrepresenting Cooper here or is Cooper just that full of poo poo? While I haven't read all of Deathtraps, I have read parts of it, and don't underestimate how full of poo poo Cooper and/or his ghostwriter are.
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Feb 8, 2016 21:38
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bewbies posted:I suppose I'm annoyed your hyperbole, in that case. "Enjoying" the war, such as it was, or enjoying the sensations of combat does not equate to "ludicrous bloodlust". So there's an aggressive tone here that I don't really think is justified, especially seeing as I then explained the position further. Junger doesn't write about drinking from the skulls of his enemies, but Storm of Steel is an (editorialised) account of him willingly subsuming his ego into the Nietzschean ideal of the perfect nihilist. He doesn't take joy and pride in torturing his enemies, but he does celebrate the philosophical and psychological freedom that war affords him through the enjoyment of killing. Now, ludicrous is a subjective term, yes, but to someone who has read a lot of diaries of war, and accepts that men and women have, do and will enjoy both the physical and psychological experience of armed conflict, Junger stands out as ludicrously bloodthirsty because he not only enjoys the experience, but believes that he is right to do so. His experience of war is transformative, the bloodthirst allows him to be the person he wants to be. Probably should have started off by saying "these memoirs that are evidenced by their belief that the war was a spiritually and philosophically positive process that transformed man into something bigger and better than himself, to be "ludicrously" bloodthirsty". But, sadly, I didn't. If anything, guilty of posting all too rapidly - mistaking the penguin reissue of storm of steel for a reissued set of diaries, sorry. Jungers writing is about as "honest" as anyone who by all accounts systematically went through his own experiences to rework them into the ideal of the nihilist ubermensch. If I'm accused of politicising an honest memoir, probably best not to start off with that one. A clumsy modern political statement vs a clumsy post-war political statement, I suppose.
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Feb 8, 2016 21:58
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Cyrano4747 posted:2) Major fuckups that lead to big, destabilizing changes are a lot more interesting to write about than 1000 years of competent management and diplomacy. It also helps that the period that led to the final collapse also tends to have much less adequate leadership and administration. The Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire both have similar reputations for incompetency that largely stem from their actions in the early 20th century, and which aren't really deserved if you look at them across the previous 500 years. See also those dumb corrupt Byzantines, with their 900 years of history. Cyrano4747 posted:Hell, they still play an important political role today. I can't think of any city-states that size that have quite that kind of diplomatic footprint. To be anal, the diplomacy is carried out by the Holy See, not the city state of the Vatican.
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Feb 8, 2016 22:01
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Arquinsiel posted:So I'm nearing the end of Tank Men by Robert Kershaw, after a forced week-long hiatus due to accidentally leaving it in a friend's house, and Belton Cooper is now relevant because the book turns out to be roughly chronological in presentation. Apparently as a Lieutenant he: I have no knowledge or opinions otherwise about the book you're referring to, but these are all at least plausible if he was commanding the armor component of a regimental combat team or other similar sort of task organized thing.
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Feb 8, 2016 22:06
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HEY GAL posted:it might be a thing for medium-sized and kind of paranoid states to be good at spies, wasn't interwar Poland's intelligence pretty good? Like they were involved in breaking Enigma. See also: Serbian military intelligence pre-WWI.
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Feb 8, 2016 22:12
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MikeCrotch posted:See also: Serbian military intelligence pre-WWI. I don't know if I'd consider them successful, considering how that one op in Sarajevo ended up going.
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Feb 8, 2016 22:19
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Apis was certainly a dodgy mother fucker now either way.
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Feb 8, 2016 22:25
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SeanBeansShako posted:Apis was certainly a dodgy mother fucker now either way. Oh man, his wikipedia has the single best "shifty military dudes" photo I've ever seen:  Also, this might be of interest to the Vietnam nerds here: Vietnam photos from the Winning Side
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Feb 8, 2016 22:43
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