The Raid On Scarborough – A Failed Attempt at Intimidation I THE GREAT WAR...
Published on 18 Dec 2014 German admiral Franz von Hipper reluctantly carries out his orders to bomb British coastal towns. And indeed, this attempt to intimidate British civilians only makes them more...
View ArticleA Sign Of Friendship In The Midst Of War I THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE 1914
Published on 24 Dec 2014 Initially, everyone believed that this war would be over by Christmas, but on Christmas Eve 1914, soldiers were still facing each other in France, Belgium, throughout Eastern...
View ArticleOnwards! – The Western Front Of Early 1915 – THE GREAT WAR Week 25
Published on 15 Jan 2015 French general Joseph Joffre is stuck in a dilemma: the Champagne offensive has been going on for weeks now — without any expected results. Should he dig in and tolerate the...
View ArticleJewish life in Europe
Back in 2012, Mark Steyn wrote about the plight of individual Jews in Europe, as the various national governments seemed unable to prevent violent attacks on Jewish businesses, schools, synagogues and...
View ArticleZeppelins Over England – New Inventions For The Modern War I THE GREAT WAR...
Published on 22 Jan 2015 For a decisive advantage on the Western Front, the military commanders of both sides are trying to use technological advances. And so this week, German Zeppelins are flying...
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They call it “Great” Britain, after all
H/T to Think Defence for the image. Let’s make no mistake, Great Britain is great, the clue is in the name after all. Anyone who thinks otherwise is obviously uneducated, or French. And not only that...
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A tour of the French ballistic missile submarine Le Redoutable
Gerard Vanderleun posted a link to this set of photos of the retired French submarine Le Redoutable: Fascinating and worthwhile for the blend of megadeath and French lifestyles: A tour of the ballistic...
View ArticleQotD: Why did people join the First Crusade?
Q: Why did people join the First Crusade? A: The most common answer in Crusade scholarship — and you can tell I’m not going to accept it — is that the goal was penance and the opportunity to have sins...
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Getting to know the “the cocaine of Chardonnay”
At Wine Folly, Morgan Harris talks about the original home of Chardonnay: For winemakers, white Burgundy may just be the Helen of Troy of Chardonnay because nearly everyone who’s ever made Chardonnay...
View ArticleQotD: Blaming France for causing the First World War
To begin with, any attempt to shift blame for World War I from Germany onto the French-Russian alliance has to deal with Germany’s responsibility for creating that alliance in the first place. If...
View ArticleQotD: Learning languages
… they have a way of teaching languages in Germany that is not our way, and the consequence is that when the German youth or maiden leaves the gymnasium or high school at fifteen, “it” (as in Germany...
View ArticleQotD: Teaching French in school
Lest, in spite of all, the British schoolboy should obtain, even from the like of Ahn, some glimmering of French, the British educational method further handicaps him by bestowing upon him the...
View ArticleMore on the Mistral class
Last month, Strategy Page looked at the Mistral class ships, both the original French Navy ships and the two that have been built for — but not delivered to — the Russian navy: Russia has not bought...
View ArticleJeffrey Taylor says the left has Islam all wrong
An interesting article in Salon: Whatever her views on other matters are, Pamela Geller is right about one thing: last week’s Islamist assault on the “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest she hosted in Texas...
View ArticleArtillery Crisis on the Western Front – The Fall of Windhoek I THE GREAT WAR...
Published on 14 May 2015 The 2nd Battle of Ypres is still going but no side can gain a decisive advantage. The main reason on the British side is a lack of artillery ammunition. Even the delivered...
View ArticlePrzemyśl Falls Again – Winston Churchill Gets Fired I THE GREAT WAR Week 43
Published on 21 May 2015 The big success of the Gallipoli Campaign never came, thousands of soldiers died and so Winston Churchill is forced to resign. At the same time August von Mackensen is pushing...
View ArticleCanada at War – Normandy, June 1944
Uploaded on 10 Jan 2012 Part 1 of 3 June – September 1944. D-Day, June 6, 1944. In the early morning hours, infantry carriers, including 110 ships of the Royal Canadian Navy, cross a seething,...
View ArticleQotD: Air power on D-Day
Allied fighter-bombers continued to attack not only front-line positions, but also any supply trucks coming up behind with food, ammunition and fuel. The almost total absence of the Luftwaffe to...
View ArticleQotD: German troops on the Atlantic Wall
Formations transferred from the eastern front, especially Waffen-SS divisions, believed that the soldiers garrisoned in France had become soft. “They had done nothing but live well and send things...
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Belgium’s new Waterloo coin “is not designed to annoy the French”
It is, as the Reg‘s Jennifer Baker puts it, “just a happy side effect”: Belgium has taken international trolling to the next level by minting a €2.50 coin to celebrate the Battle of Waterloo. France...
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Bernard Cornwell talks about his recent book on Waterloo
Novelist Bernard Cornwell wrote a history of the battle of Waterloo and talks to John J. Miller about the book and the battle it describes here. Related posts: Antony Beevor’s latest book Is this the...
View ArticleCavalry, Spies and Cossacks I THE GREAT WAR Week 47
Published on 18 Jun 2015 The war seems like a romantic novel this week: In the East the Russians are saved by Cossack Cavalry while August von Mackensen’s artillery is plowing through Galicia. In the...
View Article“Individualism” as an epithet
Frank Furedi explains the odd origins of the word “individualism”: One reason why the idea of individualism generates so much confusion is because, throughout its history, it has been defined by...
View ArticleQotD: “US tankers were notorious for identifying everything as a Tiger tank”
When you read unit accounts, whether it’s the actual unit after action reports or the published books, everyone talks about Tiger tanks. But in looking at it in both German records and US records, I’ve...
View ArticleSocialist and Front Soldier – Louis Barthas I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
Published on 6 Jul 2015 Louis Barthas was a French soldier who served on the Western Front for 54 months. He served in the Battle of Verdun and other major battles of World War 1. His War Diary gave a...
View ArticleQotD: Paul Cambon, French ambassador in London
The senior ambassadors developed an extraordinarily elevated sense of their own importance, especially if we measure it against the professional ethos of today’s ambassadors. Paul Cambon is a...
View ArticleRising tides of anti-German feeling … in France
Theodore Dalrymple discusses the changing opinions about Germany within the European Union, but especially in France: There seems to be growing anti-German feeling in France, at least if what I read is...
View ArticleFrédéric Bastiat
Lawrence W. Reed makes the case for Frédéric Bastiat to be awarded a Nobel Prize … if they awarded them posthumously, anyway: If a posthumous Nobel Prize was awarded for crystal-clear writing and...
View ArticleAllocating the blame for “Operation Jubilee”
In a BBC post from a few years back, Julian Thompson looks at the Dieppe raid: On 19 August 1942, a disastrous seaborne raid was launched by Allied forces on the German-occupied French port of Dieppe....
View ArticleThe French Rifles of World War 1 featuring Othais from C&RSENAL I THE GREAT...
Published on 24 Aug 2015 Check out C&Rsenal for more background information on historic firearms: http://bit.ly/HistoricGuns In the very first edition of our livestream with Othais from...
View ArticleThe plight of the Calais migrants
At sp!ked, Brendan O’Neill talks about the situation in Calais between the migrants who want to enter the UK and the government that very much wants them to stay on the other side of the Channel:...
View ArticleQotD: The debatable Vosges
Having completed to our satisfaction the Black Forest, we journeyed on our wheels through Alt Breisach and Colmar to Münster; whence we started a short exploration of the Vosges range, where, according...
View ArticleFrench Pistols of World War 1 featuring Othais from C&RSENAL I THE GREAT WAR...
Published on 31 Aug 2015 The next live event will be on September 3 6pm CET. Othais will introduce us to German rifles and pistols. You can already find a few episodes about them online on his...
View ArticleCash is still king … and we’d be insane to abolish it
In the Telegraph last month, Matthew Lynn made the case against eliminating cash: Trying to get a plumber in France? In the rather unlikely event that you can actually find one who isn’t still on his...
View ArticleQotD: Self-government and the scale problem
The pioneering political thinkers of the West — Greeks, mostly Athenian, including the sublime Aristotle — devoted much thought to this question of scale. Their consensus was that a state of more than...
View ArticleQotD: Small bits of French revenge
But [the German] is no gourmet. French cooks and French prices are not the rule at his restaurant. His beer or his inexpensive native white wine he prefers to the most costly clarets or champagnes....
View ArticleShocking cheese-related crime in France
Ace of Spades H.Q. has the details: Sacre Vache! Thieves Steal 4 Tonnes of Comte Cheese, In What Police Are Calling “A Crime That Happened This Century” Four tonnes of comte. Street value: almost one...
View ArticleAccepting the truth in the wake of the Paris attacks
Douglas Murray on the slow, unwilling movement toward accepting the true reasons for anti-Western violence like the Paris terror attacks: The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We...
View ArticleQotD: Absinthe
True absinthe (the name is from a Greek word meaning “undrinkable”) has been illegal in most places for a long time. It is, or was, flavoured with the herb wormwood, which, as the French authorities...
View ArticleChurchill on the news from the Battle of Mons, August 1914
History Today are nearly done digitizing their back-catalogue of articles, including this 1964 article by John Terraine on how the news got back to Britain after the Battle of Mons: At seven o’clock in...
View ArticleThe Prime Minister’s statement on the 72nd anniversary of Operation Jubilee
It was a bloody shambles, but we still remember the bravery and sacrifice of the troops who went ashore at Dieppe in 1942: On August 19, 1942, nearly 5,000 Canadian troops, along with British and...
View ArticleRuining royal reputations – it didn’t start on Fleet Street
In Maclean’s, Patricia Treble reviews a new book by Jonathan Beckman, called How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair: Three years before revolutionaries toppled Louis XVI...
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A Canadian Mistral? What’s the maritime equivalent of “pie in the sky”?
A few months back, the French amphibious assault ship Mistral took part in joint exercises with Canadian troops from the Royal 22e Régiment (the “Van Doos”). I wondered at the time if it might be an...
View ArticleFrench restaurant food quality is declining – send in the regulators!
Tim Harford on the recent French government attempt to “fix” the declining quality of food served in restaurants: “Each time I visit the city the food gets worse and worse.” Tyler Cowen, economics...
View ArticleQotD: “What happened to France?”
Here we should pause and ask an important question: What happened to France? To that savoir faire? And to French culture? To the country that we all loved enough to make allowances to put up with the...
View ArticleThe lightbulb cartel of 1924 and the birth of “planned obsolescence”
Markus Krajewski writes about the formation of a multinational industrial cartel shortly after the First World War that helped create the very concept of “planned obsolescence” for (no) fun and (their)...
View ArticleRussian Mistral-class ships still on schedule for delivery from French shipyard
In the Guardian, Ariane Chemin reports from the Saint Nazaire dockyard where the Mistral-class helicopter assault ships Vladivostok and Sebastopol are still being readied for transfer to Russian...
View Article“[French] society is corrupted and doesn’t have any moral principles”
The Guardian‘s Catherine Shoard on the reception Gérard Depardieu received from a “conservative” Russian politician: Gérard Depardieu’s move to Russia had the effect of making the actor repent sexual...
View ArticleWW1 US Military Railroads in Europe
H/T to Roger Henry for the link. Related posts: Railroads see traffic boom as pipelines are delayed Europe according to . . . FIFA and the World Cup
View ArticleQotD: Sex on the western front, 1914-1918
… while the soldiers on other fronts had to make do with the usual assortment of camp followers, local girls and any brothels which survived the operations that brought the lines to that spot, both...
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