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

  1. Cool maps! I think you meant March 1939.
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  2.  @jussim.konttinen4981  It probably was from a pure cost/ benefit pov. Though The Ardennes offensive allowed The Russians to get to Berlin a good deal earlier than they otherwise would have.
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  3. Just so. It seems odd to us because we know how this story ends, but Stalingrad wasn't really very important.
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  4. Definitely. It may be that they made up for their losses to some extent by the new citizens they gained via their annexations in Eastern Europe.
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  5. @I swear to god I'm white Which is not strictly true either. Ricardian socialism was a thing before Marx.
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  6.  @jimtaylor294  Indeed. The Hapsburg Monarchy was both resentful (at having to ask for Russian assistance) and anxious (that the Russians would now permanently occupy The Danubian Principalities.) In the aftermath the two powers became permanently hostile to each other.
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  7.  @haroldfiedler6549  They actually were emancipated in the sense that they were released from the camps, in the hope they might be able to feed themselves outside.
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  8. Exactly. The Western Desert was a desert (shock!). Everything had to be shipped by the Italian marine and to make things worse there were no railways.
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  9.  @TheImperatorKnight  Part of the reason was that the various nationalist movements inside The Empire had branches in The USA because there had been a great deal of recent emigration across The Atlantic. This gave the movements some currency inside The USA while at the same time the American branches educated the folk still in The Monarchy on how to structure themselves for maximum appeal to US opinion. I don't think the British and French had any particular desire to break up The Empire but their dependence on The USA was by now so great that they could not effectively oppose American wishes.
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  10. That's a good question. I believe The Luftwaffe had some early success with intruder operations. It might be the oil shortage again.
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  11.  @sean640307  Nonsense.
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  12. Pretty much. Italian partisans appear in WestWorld season 3.
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  13.  @charlietipton8502  This is a good post. I don't think Gavin is to be blamed for his decisions at the time, only for his later weaseling that the bridge might have been captured if Lindquist had acted more decisively.
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  14. I wondered about that too Armies are generally careful to tell their soldiers as little as possible about operations. I was always amused that in the world wars The British Army never told their soldiers the names of hills. They were always referred to as "Hill, X" (the X representing the height of the hill in metres).
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  15.  @igory3789  I agree.
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  16. It's interesting how some episodes of WW2 have simply been forgotten. Without "The Guns of Navarone" no one at all would remember The Dodecanese Campaign.
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  17.  @electronworld4996  AF Guides is a Nazi but a well - informed one. He's not altogether wrong. You have to remember that what Hitler was interested in was his Lebensraum war. If Poland could be recruited as an ally for that war (like Romania later was) there would be no need to conquer it
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  18.  @lesliefranklin1870  Not that it would have achieved much if it had "worked".
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  19. As far as I know the US was the only country which took rape seriously as a war crime.
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  20.  @caryblack5985  There is the problem of "lightly wounded", who were often kept with their units in the expectation that they would be fit for service in a few days.
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  21.  @0utc4st1985  I certainly wouldn't say that it was a good idea. Just that it might plausibly seem like one then.
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  22. Unfortunately we don't have reliable English language accounts of this battle. Things may improve as the Soviet accounts are translated.
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  23. Yes is the short answer (if you accept Hitler's own testimony).
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  24.  @davidtakacs7549  The evidence is assembled by Alice Miller, For Your Own Good (1983). I've not read anything by Hitler himself for a long time.
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  25. He's a fascinatingly ambiguous figure. He first enabled the catastrophe ( by inventing instruments like the MEFO Bill to finance rearmament) then tried to avert it.
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  26. Good summary of the video. I think the bad effect of the dual command system should be investigated more though.
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  27.  @impalabeeper  It was best practice at the time. The British also preferred bayonet charges to protracted firefights.
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  28.  @Edax_Royeaux  He was unlucky, and TIK isn't really fair to him in this video. Arguably he rather successfully dug a heffalump.trap for Hitler at Munich.
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  29. I quite like him, but you don't really intersect except over Gnosticism.
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  30.  @HallBr3gg  Quite. Whether you want to call The Third Reich capitalist is entirely a matter of personal preference.
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  31. He'd really love Milo.
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  32.  @ns7023  Yep. These people had put on Nazi uniform. Any Allied obligation to them was limited.
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  33.  @johnbeal6758  There are some hilarious comments on this thread
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  34. The US executed around 100 of their soldiers for rape. I don't think any other Allied army executed anyone for this offense.
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  35.  @roberthansen5727  You wouldn't go far wrong if you believed the opposite of what they said.
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  36.  @MidKnightblue0013  Spam, spam, spam, spam. I suppose if you would starve otherwise even spam becomes palatable.
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  37. That's the way to do it. Break compound nouns onto their components.
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  38.  @zxbzxbzxb1  It was a simple recognition of reality. You couldn't hit the arms factories, but if you burnt down the cities you might, with luck, kill a lot of workers.
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  39. Certainly. That's why Schacht wanted the bills to be saved and not redeemed.
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  40.  @herbwag6456  Coal gas was fairly widely used in both world wars but the gas bag made the vehicle cumbersome to drive.
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  41. ​ @juanpaz5124  I don't believe it either. I think we're in the domain of rumour and suspicion rather than fact.
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  42. This is all what Clausewitz called the friction of war, which makes it much more difficult to conduct than appears at first sight. His solution, military genius, reads oddly now, but I think he was trying to explain the success of Napoleon rather than making practical proposals for the future.
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  43. A good example of military (or rather airforce) Darwinism.
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  44. That was the British assessment. They were very doubtful that the Red Army could give Poland effective assistance.
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  45.  @dennisweidner288  That's it. He had his name on obviously criminal orders. The guilt of other generals was murkier.
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  46. Soviet citizens who had defected and joined the German Army. It's generally estimated that 25% of Sixth Army strength were Hiwis. Since they were equipped exactly like German soldiers they were effectively the same except (presumably) for language of command.
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  47. There was that newspaper article. It appears that the brutal treatment of The Cossacks by Allied soldiers was known and deplored in The USSR. It was probably easier to sympathise with them if they had never worn Nazi uniform.
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  48. Workaholic. He made himself dictator by sheer diligence and he kept it up for over two decades until the immense strain of the war forced him to take things a bit more easily afterwards.
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  49. Brazil, the nightmare of their expeditionary force.
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  50. A famous factory indeed.
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