Comments by "Nicholas Conder" (@nicholasconder4703) on "TIKhistory" channel.

  1. 6:45 Minor correction. There was a copper age in central Europe, at least, as demonstrated by "Ötzi, the Iceman", the mummified man found in the Alps in 1991. Ötzi was carrying a copper axe.
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  2. I saw a really good video just recently about Lend-Lease. The person being interviewed was talking about a T-34 that he saw being refurbished, and discovered that most of the steel, all the aluminum, many of the tools used to make it and a lot of the parts in this signature Soviet tank were made in the US! He also commented on the bulk of aviation fuel used by the Red Air Force was made in the US as well. And mentioned how troops that could have fought in Russia were siphoned off to face the Allies elsewhere during the war. He didn't add that almost all the trucks and radios used by the Red Army, as well as one-sixth of the Red Air Force, were all manufactured in the US. Nor did he mention the large numbers of British and American tanks that were used on the Eastern Front either. Plus all the food that was given to the USSR by the Allies. So no, the Soviet Union did NOT win WW2 alone.
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  3. I have no problem believing the legitimacy of the Hossbach Memorandum for two reasons not stated in the video. First, the Germans had a mania for writing everything down, which is why there was so much evidence that could be presented during the Nuremburg trials. The fact that even the Wannsee Protocol (notes on the infamous meeting about the Final Solution) was recorded and kept illustrates this. Second, the small number of individuals present during the meeting that Hossbach attended supports the validity of the memorandum. Hitler is discussing invading other countries, so he would want the fewest possible number of people to know about his future plans. More attendees would mean more possibilities of a leak of the meeting's purpose. After all, forewarned is forearmed.
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  4. TIK, I remember my mother telling me about this horrendous episode some 40+ years ago. How Russian and Polish ex-soldiers were sent back to the USSR and Communist Poland. How Russian emigres who had been living in France since the 1920s were shipped back to Russia. The men and women crying as they were loaded or sat on the trains. I am not sure if she saw this first-hand after the war while she was stationed with the British Army in Germany, or if she heard about it indirectly. I never asked (but I should have), but from her descriptions I suspect she must have witnessed some of this happening in person. I also remember her saying it was one of the greatest criminal acts that she knew of, and how upset she was about it. And this from someone who had visited Bergen-Belsen two weeks after the camp had been liberated.
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  5. Considering the things that the German troops under "Smiling Al's" command did in Italy later in the war, it doesn't surprise me that he allowed it to happen. Nor does it surprise me that when called to task about it, he started looking around for someone else to take the fall, or for him to say, "Oops, fog of war".
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  6. 2:59 I think the elimination of the trade unions was more about the Nazis not liking organizations they could not control. But you are right, they created their own trade union (that they had complete control over) and crushed all the others.
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  7. One of the biggest problems I can see with this battle was the lack of aggressive action by the German destroyers. They were also equipped with torpedoes, so they could have made runs at the convoy, which would have created a major dilemma for Sherbrooke and the convoy commander. Instead they just tagged along with Hipper and Lutzow, contributing little to the battle. To me the lack of action by the German destroyers was crucial.
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  8. Stalingrad was bad, but so was Leningrad. It is estimated that one-third of the population of Leningrad, around one million people, starved to death during the winter of 1941-1942. They too had to live under continual bombardment until the siege was finally fully broken in early 1944. How they survived I'll never know.
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  9. Your video neatly compliments what I heard on the "Revolutions" podcast just a couple of days ago about Marx's anti-Semitism, so it didn't surprise me. After all, anti-Semitism did run rampant in the 1800's. It is interesting, though, how you point out that he covered his anti-Semitism with other terms, rather like the bigots nowadays who use terms like "juice", etc. to avoid the anti-racist filters on the internet.
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  10. I agree. The background dealing with Mussolini and the Italians' political situation throughout this period helps explain a lot of what happened at Munich.
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  11. 10:20 Considering Wavell had to administer forces from Syria to Kenya, Libya to Iraq, it is hardly surprising that someone who started with about 30,000 troops to cover such a vast area would need more administrative staff. After all, he is not just in charge of the British Army in the Middle East, he is also in charge of governing and administering all the countries/regions located in this area as well.
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  12. Well, Hitler started out as an early age as a Catholic (due to his mother's influence), but by the time he was a teenager he dropped it, following his father's beliefs that it was a weakening force in one's life. So, was he a Christian? No. The direction he took in life and his contempt for Christianity shows that he was not a Christian. He neither talked the talk nor walked the walk.
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  13.  @meanbeats  Boy, talk about revisionist history. Churchill was an almost completely ignored Conservative backbencher until AFTER war was declared by Chamberlain on September 3, 1939. Even then, Churchill was only First Lord of the Admiralty until Parliament got fed up with all the bumbling that was going on under Chamberlain. One of the primary reasons that Churchill was chosen as Prime Minister was the fact he had seen Hitler for what he was, a murderous fanatic bent on world domination, and kept telling everyone even though they would not listen. And it was the Labor Party's support that put him in the position of Prime Minister. Please stop rewriting history to suit delusional bigoted conspiracy theories. It is hatred and bigotry like this that causes wars, so please stop promulgating it.
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  14. Having worked on graphics in Photoshop, I can truly appreciate the huge amount of effort that Teri put in to make such a detailed and error-free map. Hats off to you Teri.
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  15. Regarding the institutionalized "ladies of the night". I remember reading one account written by a survivor of the sinking of the Prince of Wales. During his time working as forced labor for the Japanese, he met a young Japanese college or university student who had volunteered to help at the front. Little did she know that it was more or less a scam, and she would be a "pleasure lady" for the Japanese soldiers. Yep, the Japanese even used their own women to "service" the front-line soldiers.
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  16. 9:50 This is ignoring the fact that at the same time the Red Army would have attacked all around the perimeter to try and break the now-depleted defense lines. This might have meant that if the breakout failed, 6th Army might not have had a defensible position to retreat to.
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  17. 23:16. It even says this in the BBC Series "The World At War", that German industrialists were encouraged to eat the same food alongside their workers. If this is not egalitarianism, I don't know what is. Oh, and the whole concept that everyone "belonged", as long as you were considered German or Aryan and kowtowed to the Nazis. Sounds like a socialist/communist state to me.
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  18.  @EdiTheDon  As I recall, it was even worse than that. I remember reading somewhere that even if you brought your own sacrifice (many people were herders at the time), the priest examining the sacrifice would find some form of blemish on it, making it unfit to sacrifice, then offer you a "temple certified" animal instead. This explains why Christ also drove out the ritual animals as well.
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  19. Agreed. And it is always how "historians" sneer at Montgomery's "set piece battles". Really, all he was doing was making sure he had sufficient supplies and equipment to get the job done. His few failures stem primarily from trying to get the jump on the Germans and not having everything in place beforehand.
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  20. I hate to disagree with you TIK, but your example with the dominoes was completely erroneous. Minimum Wage is NOT, I repeat NOT, responsible for University students being unable to find jobs. The real reason is that there is a glut of university educated people in the market. So, according to the rules of supply and demand, if there is an over-supply of a commodity in your warehouse, you don't buy that commodity because you have nowhere to put it. Since we are looking at the NUMBER of job openings in the market, the graduates don't get employed. Simple as that. Wages have NOTHING to do with it. Rather like filling a crate with bricks to capacity. Doesn't matter what you do, you cannot put more in the crate until a gap appears, or a new crate is built. This whole business started back in the 1940s, and I agree that government is in part to blame, but so are the Universities. The issue is that at the start of the Cold War, the collective West realized that research and technology were going to be what would win the next war. So they started supporting the Universities in a major way to get more scientists and technicians for the military-industrial complex. The Universities made sure that they could teach all the new students, but then the Deans realized they were onto something, so they expanded the Universities. One need only look at the explosion of Universities and Colleges after WW2 to see this. However, the Deans also realized that they needed to make Universities even more attractive so they could gain more revenue, so they started creating degree programs like "Creative Writing" and "Business Administration" and "Librarian training" (yes, stupid as it seems, you need a Librarian degree to work in a Library or some bookstores nowadays). Simultaneously, there was a push in high schools to promote University as a place where you needed to go to get high-end employment. This was helped by businesses who started hiring people based on them having a University education (usually MBAs) rather than having the actual knowledge and expertise to do the job. By the 1960s the bitter fruits from this approach began to ripen and infect the modern economy. I have seen the results of this in action firsthand, by the way. So, Universities kept multiplying in number, expanding and graduating students irrespective of demand, to the point that by the late 1970s many jobs that really required University degrees were taken. What has happened is that we now have University factories churning out graduates, and at some point, like a jogger on a motorized treadmill. The Universities expand, so they need to attract more students to pay for the new facilities, and they create new degree programs. They then expand again, wash, rinse, repeat. I suspect this education bubble will burst when the population of students who can enter University declines below a certain threshold. At that point the Universities will find themselves having to cut back, use the buildings on campus for other activities, or fold. Again because of the law of supply and demand, but this time because there will be a lack of new students. I would also add that during this process Trade Schools and apprentice programs for the trades (carpentry, electrician, plumbing, etc.) were either underfunded or muscled aside. This has lead to the issue of many western economies having too many University graduates, who cannot find jobs, and a lack of tradesmen to work in construction. Employers are currently screaming for tradesmen.
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  21. Yes, it was a good bit of comic relief, like many of his speech balloons, to help one get through listening to what was horrible carnage. Keep up the good work TIK.
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  22. In a sense it was a bit of a "Catch 22" situation of his own, and the Yugoslavian government-in-exile's making. Mihailovic and the Yugoslavian government wanted to protect the civilians, so didn't fight. But to get arms, he needed to have active resistance, which would have resulted in civilian casualties. Had Mihailovic chosen to "bite the bullet" and accepted the civilian losses, he might have garnered the Allied support and weapons he needed, garnered civilian support (as happened in France) and may even have been able to build a stronger position with the other forces. Of course, this is all speculation, and as we saw when Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1991-1992 (as well as watching the TimeGhost episodes on Yugoslavia during the 1920s and 1930s), there are a lot of very strong ethnic feelings in the area. And very long memories. So, it is also possible that anything Mihailovic tried would have been doomed from the very start as, unlike the Communists under Tito, they didn't have a philosophical or ideological "glue" to get them all fighting for a common cause against a common enemy.
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  23. I must say your grandfather must have had a lot of really trustworthy friends not to have been turned over to the Gestapo for anti-Nazi sentiment. It is good to hear of people who endeavoured to resist the Nazi regime, even if it was in a small way.
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  24. Nice response. I think the issue with Germany in WW2 is that they acted too much like a feudal system, and did not have a properly centralized and controlled manufacturing and supply system. The US and USSR both had these, which is why they could out-produce their opponent and keep their forces, on average, better supplied than their German counterparts.
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  25. Of all the powers that fought in WW2, I think Japan had the worst interservice rivalry. What other Army would actually gloat if their Navy suffered a major defeat like Midway?
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  26. The possibility that Stalin would sign a separate peace might also explain Roosevelt's "Unconditional Surrender" statement at the Casablanca conference in January 1943.
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  27.  @FelixBat  The real issue wasn't logistics. The Americans had logistics galore. The issues lay in 1) not studying what the political situation was before getting involved (including learning from that nation's history, 2) knowing how to fight their opponents and 3) not thinking about what they would do to win over the populace and win the peace after their opponents had been pushed back.
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  28.  @shad0w1599  Considering 1) how they facilitated the war by siding with Austria instead of trying to broker a peace, 2), ravaged the French countryside to the point of cutting down all the fruit trees, killing all the livestock they couldn't take with them and flooding coal mines out of spite in 1918, and 3) continued to make a vital condition of peace that Germany annex Belgium right up to a couple of weeks before the Armistice, I can see why. Bulgaria, Austria and the Ottomans all recognized the inevitable and didn't set out to punish their opponents in the last weeks of the war. The Germans continued their destructive policies right up to November 11.
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  29. Someone once described the difference between the economies in Communist Russia and Nazi Germany as follows: In the Soviet Union, the cow on the farm is owned by the state, not the farmer. In Nazi Germany, the farmer owns the cow, but the milk and meat belongs to the state. Wish I could remember who said this.
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  30.  Alien Alien  Fakes incident to start a war. Shoots film using same actors who complained about mistreatment in Sudetenland talking about Polish atrocities at Danzig. Has his air force ruthlessly shoot up unarmed civilians fleeing the fighting. Ignores repeated requests by Britain and France to cease his attack on Poland.Then complains when Britain and France abide by their treaty obligations. Yep, sounds like Britain and France declared war first!
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  31. One somewhat amusing incident is when Chuikov inadvertently called down enemy fire on his own position. It'll be interesting to see if it gets mentioned in a future episode of BattleStorm.
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  32. Probably for two reasons. First, Paulus eventually lost the battle for Stalingrad, so this history was glossed over. Secondly, he was not a boastful man and lived more or less in obscurity after the war, unlike Manstein, Guderian and Co., who trumpeted they great battles in self-adulatory memoirs.
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  33.  @keithsledger6282  Um, didn't France declare war 3 days AFTER Poland was invaded, in response to TREATY OBLIGATIONS that Hitler knew about?
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  34. Funnily enough, the crude from Balikpapan was so good they could actually fill their warships directly from the oil fields - no major refining required. Which is why in 1944 the Japanese fleet was stationed at Tawi Tawi in the southern Philippines rather than at the Home Islands.
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  35. Reading accounts of the British Army in 1944-1945 shows why the British used set piece battles and overwhelming artillery support. They were running out of troops. By early 1945 the British Army was so pressed for manpower that they actually disbanded divisions to bring other frontline units up to strength. Essentially Montgomery had the last field army Britain could muster, so he had to husband his strength and avoid needless casualties as much as possible.
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  36. I think the halt order probably needs Occam's Razor taken to it. I think it most likely that the halt order was given, like the halt order for Army Group Centre at Smolensk, because the panzers had outrun the infantry. Apart from Guderian and the other panzer enthusiasts, the bulk of the German commanders were concerned about Allied counterattacks (such as at Arras). They also needed to rest the troops and perform maintenance on the tanks after something like 8 days of intense fighting and charging over 200 km across the countryside. The German commanders were already looking at finishing off France, so they needed to get their units back into shape (rested, rearmed and resupplied) for the offensive towards Paris and all points south. Also, if the (possibly unsubstantiated) stories that some German soldiers had been given a mild form of methamphetamine, they would be coming off their "high" right around this point (since this would have been the first time the Wehrmacht tried it, they would only now be finding out the down side of combat drugs). Lastly, the German generals figured, much as the British High Command and Admiralty, that only around 30,000 troops could be evacuated out of Dunkirk, not the 338,000 that were eventually taken off the beaches. It is likely they considered this just a "mopping up operation", only to discover a couple of days later that they still had a major fight on their hands. In other words, they forgot the old adage that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Even so, the overall thesis that Hitler wanted to continue fighting Britain is not bad, but he could have done this even after annihilating the British Army at Dunkirk. As long as the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force existed, forcing a crossing of the Channel would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible. The Wehrmacht would not have put so much effort into waterproofing tanks and collecting barges for the invasion had they not been seriously planning to attack England (even though some of the planning was carried out in a sort of malaise). Even if it was a smokescreen, leaving the British with sizeable forces at their disposal would be asking for trouble. Would you really want someone snapping around your heels while you are planning an invasion the size and scope of Barbarossa? Lastly, I think the thesis makes it seem like Hitler was trying to play chess 3-4 moves ahead of his opponents. Given the number of major blunders he made during the war, I find this quite unlikely. If he was that smart, why didn't he ensure his army has enough spares for all their equipment? Why did it take until 1943 for the Germans to start increasing production of tanks, aircraft and artillery? Why was there a chronic shortage of replacements at the front? Surely if you were gearing up for an attack on the Soviet Union you would have included this in your planning. So, in summary, although it is an interesting thesis, I think the idea comes up a bit short. I do agree that there are dots here that should and do need to be connected, but I will have to disagree with how you have connected them.
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  37. Dare I say it was a war of the Reds, Reich and Blues?
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  38. Reading Nigel Hamilton's biography of Montgomery illustrates, time and again, that Monty had a nasty tendency to re-write history and treat fellow officers poorly after the war. It is sad, because his re-envisioning of history actually detracts from his ability to improvise and adjust to changes on the battlefield (Alamein and the Battle of the Bulge are two examples of this). His treatment of Eisenhower during the war, and post-war treatment of de Guigand and Horrocks after the war, all point to Monty having major psychological issues.
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  39. About your comment that people in Britain were enthused with Chamberlain's signing of the Munich Accord is not entirely accurate. My parents, who were British, both said that many people in Britain were upset and concerned, and felt it had only postponed war. I suspect that it is rather like a political rally - you get all the party supporters out to show how much the people are behind you even when you have support of perhaps 40% of the population.
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  40. You should also watch the TIK History program "Why no German reinforcements at Stalingrad". It is a real eye opener on why the 6th Army was basically bleeding to death on the steppes outside the city. Also makes you wonder what the OKH was thinking, or not in this case.
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  41.  @tunisiandom9318  How many divisions did Germany keep in Norway to counter Allied invasions? 12. How many divisions did they commit to Italy? At least a dozen. How many troops did the Axis lose in North Africa? Lots. The final surrender involved over 250,000 German and Italian troops. Think what those troops could have accomplished on the Eastern Front. Your response also ignores the fact that the Allies supplied the Soviet Union with sufficient material to stay in the fight and not collapse. It was a combined effort. Yes, the Soviets did engage the vast majority of German land forces throughout the war, but the point being made here is that the Allied contribution to the USSR's war effort is very frequently ignored. And that is skewing the narrative.
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  42.  @jamestheotherone742  I don't know. They may have done what they did in Normandy and the Ardennes, continue to pour troops into a losing proposition. In this they would not be alone. The Red Army did this several times (the May Kharkov offensive being one), as did the American Army in the Hurtgen Forest and the French Army in WWI in 1914. The issue is tunnel vision, and it has ruined many armies.
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  43. And another reason why Churchill once said that the greatest cross he had to bear during the war was the Cross of Lorraine.
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  44. Yes, but they're a bunch of stoners.
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  45. The lack of heavy weapons does go a long way to explaining why the Indian divisions had issues fighting the Japanese in 1941-1942. If you lack tanks, AT guns, and heavy artillery, you will have issues fighting a force that has all three and knows how to use them.
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  46.  @AlexanderXVIIII  Britain could have held out, as both the Germans and Japanese had over-extended themselves. If TIK is right, the German economy would have eventually collapsed. They didn't have the oil to sustain their war effort. Japan would have taken longer, but they were more or less in the same boat. The war would have lasted another decade, in all likelihood, but both nations would have imploded in the end.
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  47. Wasn't Hyperborea where Conan the Barbarian lived?
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  48. You also never hear from the Germans about how 300 sappers and AT gunners at Position Snipe completely upset Rommel's counterattack, damaging or destroying over 50 German and Italian tanks from both the 15th Panzer Division and Littorio Division. The Germans seldom seemed to give credit to their opponents. This arrogance definitely played a large part in their defeat.
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  49. The famous trio of Gloster Gladiators biplanes: Faith, Hope and Charity.
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  50.  @davidburroughs2244  I think you missed my line, "So, was he a Christian? No." Would you call Josef Stalin a member of the Orthodox Church because he studied in a seminary to become a priest? Again, no. Just because they may have received varying degrees of Christian teaching and doctrine does not automatically make either of them Christian. As Christ said, "It is by their acts shall ye know them". I do agree with your statement that Hitler did what he thought was best for Germany/Germanic peoples. After all, he wouldn't have gone to the lengths of creating Nazi versions of the wedding ceremony if he didn't.
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