Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "Timeline - World History Documentaries" channel.

You get the impressions that tanks alone did the fighting in this video, but truth be told, tanks are part of combined arms warfare than include infantry (no dedicated mechanized infrantry units in any army until after WW2), and artillery. Infantry are vital in providing flanking protection for tanks, against other infanty using Panzerfaust or Panzerschreck anti-armour rockets or anti-tank guns. Artillery provides fire support and fire supression (of enemy guns and tanks and infantry), for your tanks. Tank columns operating alone are particularly vulnerable to flanking infantry and anti-tank gunnery attacks.
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Mary is an engaging scholar of ancient Rome. Her concluding remarks make sense. It was more the power structure that made Caligua, rather than the other way around. The power structure remained in place after Caligua's assassination, leading to futher power abuses under future compromised and corrupt Roman emperors (Nero, Commodus, and so on). Many of those were also assassinated.
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Child sacrifice, while rare, is not unknown within other cultures. For example, Incas sacrificed teenagers by exposing them on high mountain peaks, or strangling them with a cord, where their mummified bodies were later found with the bodies covered by amulets. Human sacrifice was generally rare in Mediterranean peoples, since at least the iron age, if you ignore gladiators, often slaves, thrown into the arena as a form of sacrifice.
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Fragments of a comet, for example, which had split into hundreds or thousands of fragments when entering the atmosphere would have, most likely caused superheating of the atmosphere via air friction and violent ablation possibly to a few hundred degrees in a few hours or even minutes, which probably would have also caused widespread forest fires. No such event was reported.
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Well, Greeks naturally have a Mediterranean-centric veiw of themselves, and (combined with the Romans who conquered the Greeks in 148 BC) naturally dismiss from their narrow minds the Celts who were the dominant people north of the Alps from Britain to the West through central and Eastern Europe to Anatolia to the East (until Caesar's greedy conquest of Gaul). Although illiterate, the warlike Celts were not some poor naked savages covered in woad (which is a blue dye used by warriors to paint their faces on the battlefield, the Romans also sometimes used a red dye called minum to paint their faces), but had a sopisticated culture including intricate metalwork (a testimony to the skills of Celtic gold and silver smiths), an abstract style called curvilinear art in the La Tene style which adorned their sword scabbards and shields, but also theur iron smiths produced sophisticated weapons and armour, including long swords (the Roman gladius sword was short) and helms with metal figurine crests of animals, such as eagles with flapping wings. It's not well known but the Celts invented chain mail, long before the Roman legions adopted this body armour. Not the miserly cultural product of some poor backward rural people without cities, skilled artisans and wide trading networks including minted coins.
6
Hannibal was a military genius, probably greater than Julius Caesar. He won battle after battle in Italy, particularly with a coaliation of non-Punic enemy tribes hostile to Rome, but willing to join his army. Cannae was a devestating Roman defeat. This is a remarkable achievement.
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I've seen ethnic Thai villages (in Vietnam) waterwheels to lift water to the mountain rice terraces from the streams. Ingenious wheels made from bamboo.
4
Mismanagement by the government. How often does that cause trouble? A century later than the Peasant's Revolt, Cornish miners revolted over a steep increase in Stannary taxes (tin taxes). Tin revenues formed a significant contribution to government treasury from the realm, and the king probably wanted to fund another foreign war. The miners managed to make it as far as Kent before the army quelled the rebellion. Try walking from Cornwall to Kent by foot ;-)
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By scuttling the Grand Fleet of the Kaisherlich Marine, the Germans harmed least their principal opponent; the British Royal Navy. As the ownership of the vessels of the Grand Fleet were being squabbled over in Versailles, giving several German dreadnoughts to the French, Italians or Americans was not in the interest of the Royal Navy. So by scuttling their ships, the German sailors got the Royal Navy, more or less, off the hook.
3
Rome was never a "global superpower" but a Mediterranean empire (inclusive of parts of Western Europe and Western Asia). It had influence outside the empire (trading links to India for example), but it was not global. We have to wait for the 16th century for global navigation and global superpowers (e.g. Spain).
3
Germany was not in a good geostratigic position in WW1, after the British Empire declared war on her as a result of the invasion of neutral Belgium (this was tactically to fulfill the Schlieffen Plan; an attempt to knock France out of the war early). As we know the Schlieffen Plan failed and then trench warfare ensued on land. At sea, Germany's geostrategic position was even worse as she was bottled up in the Baltic Sea and could not freely sail the North Sea because Britain was there. At that time, Britain was the largest sea power in the world. Somehow the Kaiser's political think tanks missed this geostrategic impasse risk by firstly building up a modern dreadnought navy (clearly to challenge the British and in the "prestige" of being a growing colonial power, particularly in Africa and in East Asia) and by declaring war against Russia and France in support of the ailing Austria-Hungarian Empire. The British may have remained usefully neutral in a general European war, had the Kaiser's powerful navy had not been there.
3
The opening statement by the narrator as he stands outside the famous mosque in Mali, is typical of religion. Capable of great works of art (and even charity) on one hand and taken to the horribly lawless depths of fanaticism and genocide on the other, IS religion.
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Is there an echo of the Carthage-Rome conflict in the modern day contest between the United States and China? Not so brutal, yet. China is the new agressive Roman upstart perhaps to the American Carthage?
2
Syphilis closely resembles an old world disease called yaws. The Treponema bacterium causing the disease is very similar, but syphilis is more pathologically deadly and disfiguring. Yaws may have originated from warm tropical and subtropical Africa and spread by travellers to the Mediterreanean and Europe, where it mutated into syphilis. Hence it was Columbus' sailors who spread it to native Americans (not the other way around), along with the more deadly (and just as disfiguring) smallpox, measles and Christianity. Ah sorry, the last is not a microbial disease ;-)
2
It's a horrible time in history. Thousands of people murdered brutally and savagely with forced confessions to satisfy the evil brutish power of their paranoid inquisitors. A travesty of justice.
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If only we know Xi's weaknesses and then work on them
2
The potato blight was particularly awful for the irish population where hundreds of thousands miserably starved to death. But in Scotland, which similarily relied on potatoes for staple foods and whose population were similarly affected by potato blight, there were only a few hundred deaths. I think in Scotland, there was a better program of famine relief than in Ireland.
2
Human sacrifice in the Carthaginian religion, has no evidence and is a myth. Perpetrated by Romans who wished to blacken Carthage's name.
1
Vietnam War was not a "proxy war". It was a real, bloody war in which over 1.2 million people died in the American occupation era (not counting the French occupation era), and not counting deaths caused by the illegal bombing of Laos and Cambodia by the USAF, ineffectually aimed at the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
1
Goering was very corpulent. Definitely shows a love of gluttony and some lack of self restraint and self-discipline.
1
Invading mainland Italy was a Churchillian act of stupidity and brute obstinacy, equalling his disaster in the Dardanelles in 1915 and Greece and Crete in 1941. Fortunately for Australians (but less fortunately for the Americans who fought and died there), he could not push them into Italy in 1943, like the way he wasted young Australian lives in 1915 and 1941.
1
War is calculated risk taking using extreme lethality to compose a political outcome through conflict. It was put more succinctly by the soldier-philosopher, Carl Von Clausewitz (On War); war is an extension of politics by other means. War is only loved by the business of professional warriors, to everyone else it is hated and reviled. War and dystopia is the opposite of peace and order.
1
The British and Americans should have stopped at Sicily. When it was clear the Germans occupied the Italian peninsular, then a statemale there should have been maintained (bombing them there and destroying German aircraft and vessels, but NOT engaging them there in land battles under the skillful Kesselring) instead of attempting near disasterous landings in Anzio for example. Land battles in mainland Italy was a waste of men and resources (Switzerland was between Italy and Germany) and may have delayed the Normandy landings until summer 1944.
1
There is no narrative on the politics in Argentina and Britain before the Argentinean armed forces invaded the Falkland Islands. Maybe some of the bad blood from this war still plays out even now.
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Some of the "enslavement" of Jews was a historical fabrication, written as a political aggrevement process as exaggerations or propaganda in the Old Testament (there was no known propaganda process back then, this was systemized and defined in the 20th century). There was no.known captivity of Jews by any Egyptian pharaoh, or any decree published by Egyptian scribes as such (and we can read ancient Egyptian thanks to the Rosetta stone). Babylonian enslavement may well be similar to Egypt; a fabrication. As for the 40 year wandering in the desert with Moses, well probably pure fiction. The Bible or any religious book (Deuteronomy excetera) is best veiwed as parables; stories written to convey a moral message. To try to.connect purported events in any religious book to literate societies, kings and empires and events at the time is historically futile.
1
Possibly a supervolcano eruption caused decades of ash cloudiness in the stratesphere, interfering with the monsoonal weather system which brought regular summer rains to the ethopian highlands, and thus floods to the Nile. A similar, but shorter-lived volcanic ash event brought a hiatus in AD 530s and 540s.
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Well, that would make you over 1600 years old. Congratulations, only Bristlecone pine trees can verifably live to that great age. Are you a pine tree?
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Ikea for ships. Let's hope it wasn't as flimsy.
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Hominini (humans), probably did not evolve from Australopithecines, but some older ancestor.
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The marvellous stelae at the temple, probably surpasses that of Egypt, Greece and Rome.
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A bit tough on Haig. Everyone hates Haig, because it was his war strategy that condemned millions to death in 1916 and 1917, but Haig was an introverted conservative who appeared to be cold and calculating. In reality, Haig had allies in the highest echolons of the British Army, could recognize and support tactical innovators like John Monash, and did care about the sacrifice of the men under his command, but could find no way to express it fully. World War One was a new version of total war fought with a host of new types of weapons, that were not tactically understood and used appropriately until late in the war. Many generals failed at the task of preparing effective tactics for utelizing them in 1916 and 1917, as well as preparing reserves soldiers which had to slowly traverse no-mans land to a new front line under counter-attacking shellfire. Haig also did not get on with the British PM, David Lloyd George, who conveniently promoted a bit of anti-Haig sentiment after the war himself.
1
The Inuit, part of the many nations of Native Americans, were able to navigate their way across largely frozen ice sheets from Alaska to the West to Greenland to the East, which is an enormous distance. Although the Inuit were Ice Age specialists, far more capable than the Norse colony in Greenland than went extinct around the 15th century, some of these capabilities and technologies of the Inuit may have been available to the Paeleo-Siberian peoples who first colonised the Americas tens of thousands of years ago.
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The mobile warfare on the Western Front in 1918 by the Entente allies, was pioneered by a relatively little known Australian general (at the time) Lt-Gen. John Monash. Ironically, a man with German-Jewish heritage.
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It is not quite that simple. World War One brought a new political age; Totalitarianism, first in Russia in 1917, Italy in 1922 and Germany in 1933. We still live in the political age of Totalitarianism (China). The previous political age was revolutionary nationalism, exemplified by the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte. World War 1 (starting as a nationalistic Napoleonic style war) was a classic German geostrategic effort as a contested central European state bordered by two powerful traditionally hostile states; France and Russia, West and East. The German strategy was go for broke; grab enemy territory and settle for a humiliating peace and adding buffer territory (Alsace-Lorraine). This was still exemplified by the Kaiserschlacht (German offensive in 1918), was a typical "go for broke" geostrategical German tactic after the two front war was settled by the collapse of Russia (becoming the Soviet Union). This is further verified by the Blitzkrieg tactics in 1939 and 1940 (and the Franco-Prussian War), but that time under Totalitarianism (Nazism). Germany has always suffered this two fronts war thing. Can win a one front war (in 1939 and 1940), but not a two front land war that World War 1 began with and World War 2 ended with In 1918, Ludendorff's one front attack was too late. The Germans underestimated the attritional 3rd front forced on them in 3.5 years by the British; naval blockade.
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Haven't you heard? War is politics with using guns and bombs
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It a saltatory lesson for those who treat despotic dictatorships lightly. A corrupt and paranoid lunatic (Caligua) at the head of a powerful imperial government echoes to our time (Jinping).
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Number of casulties from the ARA General Belgrano cruiser sinking and HMS Sheffield missile hit was not reported, not really pleased about that. Other than the land engagements, the Falklands War was a naval war, similar to the Battle of the Falkland Islands from fighting the Imperial German Navy, 70 years earlier. So these small South Atlantic islands have been historically heavily contested space.
1