Dimitri > Recent Status Updates

Interesting how the ancients saw only real beauty in the divine & the medieval mind a beauty in everything, even devils. you'd expect the other way around.

July '4: Richard Sorge & Magic confirm the incumbent Strike South option. Which measure can the US take, short of war? Hawks reinforced an absolute embargo behind FDR's back, but only pushed Japan's paranoids over the brink. Their strategic commodities - oil and metals - were projected as exhausted or below 50% of required levels by 1942, counting the meagre resources of Manchuria. The 3-month window was open.

There are 3 kinds of ugliness: in se (a rotting corpse) in art (a kind of beauty) and the common variety based on assimetry or incompleteness (missing teeth)...often in the eye of the beholder.

It is little-known that Stalin armed not just Mao but also the Chinese Nationalists. He used the Chinese front to keep Japan off his back, but Washington would use him in turn to keep Germany off their back. Their defeat at Zhukov's hands at Nomogan (1939) and the subsequent political erosion of the 'northern' faction cured the Japanese Army of a taste for vodka. The Navy's 'southern' strike became the better option.

Ultranationalism with its reverence to Emperor and Divine Race was as old as the Meji Restauration middle-class intellectuals. Now they added Pan-Asianism as a Monroe Doctrine & dabbled with German-style eugenics. Luckily the Kenpeitai had little suppression to do in a fiercely loyal uniracial country, which had not enough Jews to practice anti-Semitism; even the pre-war communists gradually moved to nationalism.

The Great Depression affected Japan in familiar ways: indentured serfs were laid off and moved from the countryside to the cities, where small business owners faced closure. The economic malaise bred a spiritual exhaustion marked by a declined interest in multicultural activities such as jazz music & Hollywood cinema. Militarists filled this void with the hopeful prospect of an empire autarkic in minerals and oil.

The bay was a model amphibious site except for the mountains around it & a river through the middle, within air cover range from Sicily. Commandos & Rangers would secure the passes against German reinforcement while a British & American corps (from Oran) would land on either river bank, hoping to link up in time...but the Germans weren't slow enough to lit all these "maybe's" materialize after the Italian surrender.

In 2011, Geoffrey Malins' film showed a great-granddaughter a man she'd never met. His face, his smile, his walk, his words (based on professional lip-reading & dialect reconstruction) ... he could've indeed been her own father or brother, all captured an hour before he went to his death.

By the end of september autumn weather and a more elastic German defence slowed the Somme to a stop. Tactical lessons were learned and strategic attrition replaced "taking the field" ... but it was not easy to convince the politicians of Philpotts favorite definition of Western Front combat

By mid-september, things were looking up after 2,5 months of attrition. Sophisticated French barrages permitted bite-and-hold jabs by each of their armies in turn, tough German 210 guns held Mont St. Quentin & Péronne. While the British artillery lagged behind & only 3 out of 50 tanks survived their battle test, their combined arms & infantry tactics improved enough to capture Thiepval at last. The Germans crumbled.

You read the entire 1940 campaign, seasoned with front line accounts ... and then you go watch the movie before the book makes it to boats on the beach.

The 36st Ulster Division had breached the German triple line to their forward artillery positions in unexpectedly short time. But this head, at the cost of 4000 dead, was not followed by the shoulders.

"the show must go on, even if the size of the audience was unknown"

6 months of planning. 6 operational attack plans. 2 armies with their own ideas about infantry tactics and artillery barrages. no agreement over "attrition" vs "breakthrough" as a goal. Only the mantra "methodical" was agreed upon... the Somme plan had more loose hinges than just ye ol' "Haig vs Rawlingson" debate!

So far it's been flat writing that only breathes when you keep the TV series in mind but once they're in their Bastogne foxholes... the cold atmosphere seeps from the pages into your fingertips.

About as many civilian stragglers as booty-loaded soldiers and assorted vehicles left Moscow with a shortage of horses in what Napoleon stubbornly refered to as a 'tactical retreat to winter quarters'. The Russians for their part sought to bring the Grande Armée to battle, but after a first encounter they drifted apart. Near Vaszia, they missed a second opportunity to destroy the corps piecemeal.

The fire of Moscow left Napoleon without a base but Alexander with a rallying symbol for the serfs, whose sympathies during the 'Patriotic War' were unpredictable: they might as soon pillage a manor & trade with the French as ambush and torture a forage party.

If the French had defeated Tuchkovv's roadblock outside the burnt city of Smolensk, they could've sliced their largest opponent (1st Army under Barclay) on the march like the Romans at Lake Trasimene. But they didn't, in part because Junot strangely refused to attack and outflank their left.

Napoleon has nothing to show for, so far. Moscow beckons only 8 forced marches away, with 2 months of campaign season left...

The logistical wasteland that was Russian Poland permitted him 3 weeks to live and fight. the Russians would have to make a stand at Smolensk, on their border proper.

All quiet on the Finnish front after spring '42, except light pushes to Leningrad. Bagration shook Finland awake from entrenched slumber into a tightrope game: trick Germany into taking over the front, while opening peace talks with the USSR. The most incredible thing is Mannerheim pulled it off with an armistice on 19 September 1944. Germany was too weak to retaliate & barely strong enough to plug the hole.

You can lead a horse to water, but not a Finnish corps to Murmansk.

Suffice it to say Finland got back what it wanted by autumn '41, more or less poised along its 1939 borders and on a line between the Gulf and the White Sea, far enough from Leningrad not to piss off the Russians even more.

I don't recall anything from yesterday's pages 60-90... damn you, medieval mead and a purse full of fake gold coins.

It's no use denying: slogging your way up to the Po valley - with some glances at the partisans on the Balkan - isn't as interesting to read as North Africa or the amphibious invasions. French operations from the Midi to Alsace provide fresh air.

Joffre knew he had a siege on his hands as early as october 1914, but he was too anxious to restore battlefield mobility to await the arrival of a siege train.

In the traditional lull of British historiography between First Ypres and Neuve Chapelle, 268.000 poilus were hurled against the entrenched enemy all along the line, from Artois to St. Michiel, before the New Armies and the Doughboys took the field.

As August gave way to September, the German right wing meandered away from its planned axis of advance and the whole army was advancing into a virtual salient between Paris and Verdun, with the Seine & Aube rivers shaping the bottom. The seed of a flanking counterattack riped in Joffre's mind...

Monte Cassino, a Passchendaele in the mountains.
Caparetto would also make a suitable metaphor. WWI Barrages and WWII Brute Force by air come to naught. Nimbly skirting the ridges by mule logistics, a bit like the young Rommel did, works.

"If the British continued withdrawing, a huge gap would open between the 5th and 6th armies and Joffre couldn't hold the Amiens-Reims line, or counterattack from it"

Dieppe & St. Nazaire: bloody training ground for Overlord in EVERY book on Normandy.
Torch and Husky: Algeria and Sicily is were the Allies learned how to put 100.000 men ashore for real.
The Mediterranean drained all resources from everywhere else on both sides. It also offered Rommel past his prime as and a dodgy Kesselring Boss levels for a U.S. Army in training.
"Pivotal" Path to victory? Much to say in favour!

Overall the battle [of El Alamein] was shaping up to be a reenactment of the Somme in the sand.