Posts by Rich Lock
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I might also recommend 'This is England' as a DVD hire for a slow night.
The film is centred on young skinheads, and is set in England in July 1983. The film illustrates that the skinhead subculture, whose roots are associated with Jamaican culture (especially ska, rocksteady, and reggae music), eventually became adopted by white nationalist groups such as the NF.
More focussed on the ska side of things, but well worth a look. Highly depressing, though.
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Looks like Russell beat me to it with the Don Letts reference, but if the white punks were supposed to be on-message about not hanging out with the non-whites, it's a pity they were always going off uptown to hang out with them....
UK release compiled by DJ Don Letts offers up the soundtrack to London's legendary Roxy Club - December '76 to April '77, where the Pistols, Clash & Banshees would chill out while Letts played a selection of tunes from his vast collection of reggae & dub 7 inches.
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A sharp, but possibly not-so-short antidote to 'the good fight' would be Studs Terkel's 'the good war'.
Enough racism, anti-semitism, racketeering, profiteering, service-dodging to knock the shine off more than a few halos.
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when you deal with enough dead babies and pregnant women in severe physical and emotional truma you reach for whatever coping mechanism that doesn't leave you in your own version of Nurse Jackie. But black humour in the break room is one thing; in front of patients and families. Hell no.
I used to work for an inner London social services office in a support capacity. Which was quite enough involvement with the more unpleasant side of human nature for me to cope with without having to do home visits as well.
Took me a while to work out why people outside the office didn't appreciate me passing on the hilarious 'dead baby' jokes I heard at work.
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Perhaps yes, but his D-Day book was an abomination and was only one step away from some Hollywood 'how we won the war' epic. I know he's harsh on the US military at times but he virtually ignores everyone else or is very token in his tribute.
Simon, have you read his Pegasus Bridge book?
This covers the (purely) British airborne action at the far eastern flank of the D-Day landings. No yanks involved at all. His opinion is that if this had failed, the Germans would have been able to quite easily 'roll up' the beaches one by one from the side, so it was imperative that this suceeded.
Worth a read.
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Band of Brothers
Well, I wasn't relying on it as my primary source, just using it to illustrate a point.
Antony Beevor, among others, is quite clear that in the Russian campaign, for example, the vast majority of the infantry were on foot, and a large proportion of the necessary supplies were transported by horse-drawn carts.
All the footage we tend to see from that period is of tanks, because it tends to be captured propaganda footage. It's far more photogenic to show tanks dramatically charging through fields than it is to take footage of a quartermaster sitting on a cart. This does tend to skew our perception.
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Typical loud-mouthed ignorant c*cks*cker.
I love you, too, Joe.
But my point was that while Germany may have had the trucks, they didn't deploy them effectively.
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the American troops on the Western front relied on massive firepower but were stymied by an ongoing unwillingness to physically confront the enemy closer than that (Stephen Ambrose's jingo-istic re-writings aside)
A little harsh on Stephen Ambrose. He's written several other excellent texts apart from 'band of brothers'. If I recall his general 'US troops in western Europe' book correctly, it was very far from hero-ising the average GI.
an ongoing unwillingness to physically confront the enemy closer than that
Max Hastings wrote a mini-autobiography of Audie Murphy in which he addressed this point. I'm not disagreeing.
But you haven't directly addressed my logisitics/trucks argument.
Certainly the Germans had the better designed combat equipment, and arguably they had more of it than they could use, as you've pointed out.
But my point is that they ignored or underestimated the need to have enough logistical resource to put their men and machines where they were needed quickly enough. Logistics is boring, but from all my reading about various armies and campaigns through history, it seems to be what wins or loses wars more than any other factor. Boots, food, fuel, ammo, etc. If you ain't got 'em where you need 'em when you need 'em, you lose the war....
The German infantry couldn't keep up with the tanks in Russia, so their summer campaign gains were limited to what they could capture at a walking pace, not at truck or half-track speed.
The Nazi party overlooked the necessity to equip the army troops with winter uniforms and piddling trifles like winter gun oil that would allow rifles and machine guns to work in sub-zero temperatures.
Also, the dear old fatherland couldn't breed soldiers fast enough, putting it crudely. Even when the Germans started the Russian campaign they were heavily reliant on allied troops of dubious quality. It was their undoing at Stalingrad, where the Romanians on the flanks broke under the Russian pincers, and allowed the native Germans in the city to be surrounded.
And Goering was so out of touch logistics-wise he thought the besieged troops at Stalingrad could be completely resupplied by air drops.
So. Building the neccesary logistics network takes time. Lots of it. Because the Nazi party machine relied on constant conflict as a core tenant of their philosophy, they couldn't allow themselves the necessary time or opportunity to consolidate their gains, fully subdue captured countries, breed and train more men, and basically have the breather they needed to build the necessary logisitics network.
By applying their own philosophy, they had to keep fighting, moving from one opponent to the next. It was therefore inevitable that sooner or later they would come up against one that they couldn't KO in the first round. Inevitably they overextended their logistical reach, and were blugeoned to death by America's industrial muscle, ruthlessly wielded by Uncle Joe.
We h rmacht.
(Sorry. But pedantry is fun for all the family.)
Yes indeed. I'll blame a lazy cut'n'paste from google for that one.
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Perhaps a distinction could be made between the state and the military.
Perhaps. I think the answer is both yes and no.
I read somewhere recently (can't remember reference) that one of the core principles of Nazism as applied in practice was that there should always be some internal conflict within the various departments and apparatuses of the state.
The idea was a sort of 'survival of the fittest' type of thing. If two different arms of the state were in conflict, then the stronger one - the one that was more 'fit for purpose' - would eventually triumph. An example would be the conflict between the SA and the SS which ultimately resulted in the SA being wiped out in the 'night of the long knives'.
So on this reading, it was quite consistent with Nazi philosophy for the Whermacht to be in constant low-level conflict with the other arms of the state - for example the SS. In fact, throughout the Nazi regime there was conflict to a greater or lesser extent between various arms of the party and the Whermacht.
However, having said that, the Whermacht hitched their wagon for better or worse to the Nazis, and had no choice but to go along with what the politicians wanted. Invade Russia? Sure thing, Mr Bossman.
And this is where I find myself agreeing more with Tom's view that the Nazi's couldn't survive long term. They needed conflict internally and externally at all times. It was part of their core philosophy. It was how they managed to exist. Craig's 'Fatherland' reference is reasonably on point. What if the UK had been defeated and Germany and the US hadn't ended up at war? There's a pretty good chance that Germany would have ended up bogged down in an unwinnable war in the east, with an increasingly restless population growing more and more disillusioned with having an economy on a semi-permanent war footing, and more and more fathers and sons failing to come home.
But because the Whermacht were subjugate to the Nazi party (of their own volition) they had no choice but to follow it's whims.
The generals may have been inspired military geniuses on the tactical and semi-strategic level (pure military), but without the economic muscle to back it up, they were bound to fail. And that was a party decision.
For example, during the Russian campaign, the tanks would drive forward almost unopposed for miles. And would then have to sit and wait. And wait. And wait, for the footsloggers to catch up. There simply weren't enough trucks to transport the bulk of the infantry. And the army relied mainly on horse-drawn carts (!) for supplies, including petrol for the tanks. Because of this, they advanced, literally, at a walking pace.
The economy simply wasn't set up for sustained conflict. Germany and the Nazi party controlling it and the occupied territories simply couldn't supply enough logistical material to sustain the fighting in the way necessary to win.
There's a scene at the end of 'band of brothers' where the US troops are driving in their truck past endless columns of German prisoners, all on foot, and one of the Americans starts yelling 'how could you expect to win? You're walking! Look at us! Say hello to Studebaker! Say hello to General Motors!' etc.
I don't think in the long term it really mattered how many ball-bearing factories were bombed or not. Even at their best, the Germans couldn't punch hard enough, in an industrial sense, to win the war that their own philosophy dictated they had to start.
Rommell was vastly superior in Africa than anyone on either side from a purely military angle. His loss there wasn't due to not being very effective, he was just out-resourced and his allies were awful. The Nazi state didn't greatly affect the equation.
Possibly worth noting that as early as 1942 Rommel was making noises about the war being lost. And also that Rommel was implicated in one of the plots to kill Hitler. He was very much part of the Whermacht, and not the Nazi party.
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That fourth season was the most devestating, but it was also the most moving. It really was a leap in the dark for Ed Burns and David Simon to think its audience would go with it.
Probably because by that stage there was enough other stuff going on in parallel with the schools storyline to keep dragging the viewers along.
Barksdale-Stanfield-Omar-Police interactions, basically.