Comments by "Alan Pennie" (@alanpennie8013) on "TIKhistory" channel.

  1.  @Juspa  A package deal possibly. The Finns get the Karelian SSR as long as they agree to take Leningrad (or its ruins) too.
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  2. They were correct imo. It looks like the decisive month was October 1941.
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  3.  @day2148  Agreed. In practice capitalism can only be state capitalism since capitalism needs a strong state to reproduce. But it won't be very successful if the state tries to micro - manage everything, to that extent the Austrian critique is valid.
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  4. They didn't control Libya after 1940.
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  5. Definitely. Given how bad German rail transport was to start with the partisans could really do damage
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  6. This is an ex post facto rationalisation. The Anglo - Americans were incapable of advancing any further (until Antwerp was cleared) whatever their "intentions" may or may not have been.
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  7. It actually happened in Italy in the 1970s, and people created their own money for small day to day transactions.
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  8. It was the story of The Caroleans repeated.
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  9. I think you are too negative in your comments about Nilsson, who seems to me to have performed a valuable service in drawing attention to the unwise behaviour of Anglophone historians in relying on so dubious a source as The Table Talk. Citing the "translation" of 1953 looks particularly inexcusable. He reminds me of Fritz Tobias, who made himself unpopular in the late 1950s and early 1960s by rebuking historians of that time for recycling nonsense about The Reichstag Fire
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  10.  @michanerwinski6394  You have to understand Hitler's temperament too. Being an Austrian he had no particular hostility to the Poles and he hoped Poland would be an ally in his war for Lebensraum. When the Poles turned him down he became very angry and wanted to punish them. Similarly he ordered his air force to destroy Belgrade when Yugoslavia sided with The Brits.
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  11.  @michanerwinski6394  The Chad Chamberlain, as the younger folk would say.
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  12.  @ars_gravitatis5858  It's a most dubious source and Anglophone historians have been much too ready to use it. I fear Trevor Roper led a great many people down the garden path after The Last Days established him as a Hitler expert. Have you read Ved Mehta, Fly and Fly Bottle? Very illuminating on this horrible man's role as an intellectual bully in the 1950s and 1960s.
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  13.  @MrKakibuy  The debate first arose out of the idea of a blitzkrieg strategy back in the 1960s and continued certainly until the late 1980s. After that there was an "ideological turn" in Third Reich studies. Tim Mason (an unorthodox Marxist) did very interesting work which would be worth re-examination. He may have been the first Anglophone to pay any attention to Victor Klemperer
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  14. They had mastered the schwerpunckt.
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  15. There was also the infamous Amerikabomber. ME 264 and JU 390 prototypes ordered in 1942.
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  16. It's a interesting question. I think the answer is the German industrial capitalism was exceptionally organised (kartellized) from its inception. You have to remember that Germany was economically unified before it was politically unified so that German industrialists saw themselves as national leaders. Which may help to explain why Schacht despite being a liberal banker, was prepared to accept a much more controlled economy than a British or American banker would have.
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  17.  @TheImperatorKnight  This is a long and exhausting battle and it's not surprising both you and the viewers got jaded. Come back to it when you can rekindle your enthusiasm.
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  18. Later promoted to general, despite Gavin's best efforts to sabotage him.
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  19. Check out The BBC radio adaptation. It's absolutely great, an impressive tribute to Bomber Command.
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  20. Nope. Hitler was not a Christian because he was an extreme social darwinist. Positive Christianity was a thing, but not a thing which interested Hitler. It was extremely appealing to German Protestants though.
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  21.  @thearisen7301  You're correct. The law of double effect excuses civilian casualties if these were unintended and incidental to some operation deemed necessary.
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  22. Inhumane punishment in their home country. Whether this applies to The Soviet Union is debatable. The days of mass executions had ended. However The Gulag was still a very brutal place, largely run by The Russian mafia.
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  23. The British view was that the more Polish territory Stalin conquered the better. That was the only effective way of denying it to Hitler.
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  24. Yes. I'm afraid he's a bit inclined to parrot Austrian nonsense. But apart from that his videos are pretty good.
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  25. He hoped to avoid war, but if it was inevitable it needed to be delayed until the British air - defence system was completed in 1940.
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  26.  @mustardjar3216  This is true. The Brits didn't really trust any other European country to oppose Germany.
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  27. I also thought of Marius. His military reform was made necessary by the failure of land reform under the Gracchi (arguably).
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  28. I don't think aerial reconnaissance could conclusively prove that there were no panzers in The Reichswald, only that they hadn't spotted any in a very large forest.
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  29.  @fiatlux4058  It was perfectly rational. The Whites were Russian imperialists. The Bolsheviks were preferable since they weren't. Mensheviks or SRs would have been even better but you have to play the hand you're dealt.
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  30.  @fiatlux4058  I'm exactly bright enough.
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  31. That's reasonable. Chamberlain hoped to prevent a world war by sacrificing The Czechs. It was reasonable (from his pov) but definitely ruthless.
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  32. robynn Yes. I think there was a lot of demand to make some use of the airborne forces before the war ended and so a plan was cobbled together. The whole botch seems to have been force led rather than strategy led.
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  33. You could ask exactly the same questions about Tunis a few months later.
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  34.  @johnnydavis5896  He did think about it, but decided that shooting his commander in chief would look bad.
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  35. Sweden adopted a position of neutrality in 1812 (The Policy of 1812) then immediately broke it to attack Napoleon in 1813. However since 1815 Sweden has not made war on anyone but has sent " voluntary" military assistance to other Scandinavians on occasion (Denmark in 1848, The Finnish Whites in 1918).
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  36. The Hapsburg Monarchy was the creature of the Catholic Counter Reformation. It may be that it was what historians call, "the secularisation of The European Mind" in the second half of The Nineteenth Century which debilitated it to the point that it could not survive a major crisis.
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  37. Perhaps he means in September 1944.
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  38.  @ee9117  The French really did consider Poland to be an ally, but at the same time wouldn't go to war to defend it. True in 1772, also true in 1939.
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  39.  @Cheka__  You're wrong, at least up to the point The Americans first exploded an atomic bomb.
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  40.  @TheImperatorKnight  Did it go on beyond 1945? The allies reversed course very quickly, permitting many thousands of former Ukrainian collaborators to remain in The West
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  41.  @SpiritBaker  Questioning whether Sholokhov wrote his own books was quite widespread in the 1960s after the author became a detestable toady who said that Daniel and Sinyavsky had been treated too leniently.
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  42.  @nobody227  Anne Applebaum's book about The Gulag is much more reliable than Solzhenitsyn's because she was able to use the Soviet Archives.
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  43. That is so. Suvorov's nonsense should be seen in the context both of US Cold War propaganda and Soviet ignorance about the outside world.
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  44.  @meeeka  Drunkenness might explain the gratuitous cruelty of the men Browning calls "the eager killers".
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  45. POW Gulag memoirs make interesting reading. I remember reading one by an Austrian POW who was relentlessly scathing about Russian work habits. He thought the Russians never finished a job properly.
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  46. The USA would not permit Germany to buy any oil on The American Continent. The Russians were delivering oil but expected to be paid for it, either in cash or in political concessions. Hitler thought it was easier to steal the oil than buy it.
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  47. I don't think there's much doubt that he did. But 1. It appears that the order was in accordance with Gavin's own assessment . 2. It's quite possible that had he given a positive order to concentrate on the bridge(s) and ignore everything else Gavin would have ignored it because he was the man on the ground and because he despised Browning.
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  48.  @samkaplun  I would say the problem was not reparations specifically but losing a world war.
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  49. Sure. But the Soviets didn't know what Japanese intentions were except for what they could learn from Sorge and other agents. I don't think the Japanese themselves decided to "strike south" until the summer of 1941.
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  50.  @legbreaker2762  14.38
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