#4th Armored Division

[walkingthroughthisworld]

23-year-old John Parks from Mill Town, Indiana was in the 4th Armored Division and was voted "Man of the Year" by his fellow soldiers. This picture appeared in the Dec. 22, 1944, issue of Stars and Stripes, a daily newspaper published for the U.S. military. The next day Sgt. Parks was killed by an explosion in Luxembourg.

[carbone14]

Une patrouille de la 4e Division blindée américaine (4th Armored Division) en repérage à Avranches – Opération Cobra – Bataille de Normandie – 30 juillet 1944

©National Archives and Records Administration

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“U.S. Armored Cars On Kingston Streets,” Kingston Whig-Standard. 1942-07-07. Page 1  ----- Pictured above are vehicles of the 4th US Armored Division shown passing the saluting base on King Street, Saturday afternoon, during the United Nations Day parade in which over 5000 Canadian soldiers also participated.  (Additional pictures will be found on Page 2)

[citizenscreen]

80 years ago today, after more than four years of Nazi occupation, PARIS IS LIBERATED by the French 2nd Armored Division and the U.S. 4th Infantry Division. #OnThisDay #WWII

[captain-price-unofficially]

Private Kenneth Boyer, gunner of Company 'B', 37th Tank Battalion, 4th Armored Division, sits in his M4 tank near Arracourt, France, 26 Sept 1944.

[qsycomplainsalot]

Lindybeige is Either an Idiot or an Asshole

Most Likely Both

--There could be more flattering ways to put it, but he's never once given us that favor so why should I. His videos are wildly speculative and often based in cherry-picked British sources, when they come with any sources at all - see his masturbatory piece about the Bren vs the “Spandau”.

--There are two videos that I absolutely loathe at the edges of my youtube recommendations, both just filled to the brim with misinformation and logical contrivances. Videos that neckbeards will endlessly quote at me without question, taking a frustratingly long amount of time to untangle by which point they'd have usually lost interest already. The first one is Shadiversity's video about boob armor, the other is Lindybeige's video about the French Resistance.

--This video will have you believe that the French Resistance on its own did nothing of worth, based in great part on the fact that De Gaulle glamorized its contribution to the war for political status. I cannot stress this enough, just because De Gaulle used the general idea of the Resistance to smooth over a lot of Vichy war crimes and restore national unity does not mean the Resistance did not exist as a capable fighting force. --The very first more specific argument he offers to support his view -if you ignore “ME AND ME PA FOUND THAT VERY FONNY”- is that most of the French armor was American-made and provided through the lend-lease policy, making French people less deserving of credit in winning World War 2. I assume that in his mind that would diminish the contribution of the French Resistance to war efforts, even though these tanks and armored fighting vehicles were used by the Free French Army, not the Resistance at any point of its existence, making the point moot while also conveniently ignoring that the United Kingdom received ten times the aid France did through that same program.

--The image is from War Thunder because it makes for a better glamor shot than having it stand behind a museum fence or in black and white.

--His next argument implies that De Gaulle was "allowed" to walk in the liberated Paris ahead of Allied troops to give a speech that solidified the myth of the Resistance I mentioned. Again, in this passing, deceptive comment, Lindybeige implies that De Gaulle walked in after the fact and that Allied forces did the heavy lifting, only allowing him to do his speech a their convenience. Even a cursory amount of research will tell you that Paris was in fact liberated by the FFI, the Parisian people themselves and Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division composed of Metropolitan and Colonial French with Spanish elements, supported only on the very last day by the US 4th Infantry Division and a special British unit sent to gather intelligence. --Following this, he quotes the speech De Gaulle delivered in front of the town hall the day the German garrison surrendered, but cuts it short of the part in said speech mentioning “the help of our dear and admirable Allies” to then call De Gaulle ungrateful, which I have a hard time believing could be anything but intentionally deceptive. He then goes on to claim that the French Resistance was not organized by De Gaulle but by the British, justifying the ludicrous claim with 'they didn’t tell him because French intelligence services were bad and would have leaked all of it’. This is of course ignoring the fact that De Gaulle had personally sent Jean Moulin back to France for the exact purpose of organizing the five big Resistance movements into one organization, which he did, creating the Council for National Resistance that played a major role in the liberation of Paris. How the British would have any hand in this may be explained by his further comments, where he goes on to say that agents of the organization preceding the MI6 had been infiltrated in the Resistance to organize it, which begs the question of who's responsible for it being a non-effective combat force if it had been the case. He then gives us a voice in a sarcastic tone by saying, “of course you and your British bias would say that !” but does not really address it. Because honestly yeah, you and your British bias would say that.

--After quickly rambling that there were too many people in France and not enough bushes for all people to join the Resistance, which I have to admit is an extremely pointed and pertinent thing to say in a video downplaying the efforts and suffering of thousands of people fighting back against Nazi occupation under constant threat of torture and execution if caught, he mentions that the German forced labor system had severely depleted France’s manpower of fighting age. He says that by 1944, only teenagers and decrepit middle aged men were left to fight in the Resistance, to the great disappointment of the British agents he mentioned earlier. According to him, this meant France lacked the manpower and the communication capability required to pull the Resistance off, which is again contradicted by the actions of Jean Moulin, who had seemingly managed to access both before his death.

--There are a few problems with that argument. The Service de Travail Obligatoire, STO for short, was a system put in place by Vichy France to supply Germany with civilian manpower to make up for their own shortfalls due to the Eastern front. Because Vichy had negotiated a relative independence compared to other occupied country, its own government was responsible for the order, although it was in almost every point similar to forced labor orders in Denmark or the Netherlands. Now the STO did deprive France of over six hundred thousand young men, many of them skilled workers. However as an incentive given by the Nazis, every three forced laborer sent to Germany would lead to the release of one French POW, meaning that as far as manpower was concerned, France pretty much lost only four hundred thousand men and received qualified military personnel for its trouble. Not only is it hardly the manpower drain pictured by Lindybeige, it also ignores that many of these forced laborers, my grandfather included, immediately skipped work and joined either the Resistance or Allied military regulars after operation Overlord, as they were not as tightly surveilled as POWs and minorities in concentration/death camps. It also bears mentioning that it was teenagers, dismissed by Lindybeige as a negligible quantity, that acted as reconnaissance troops for the Free French using their motorbikes to scout and guide the way to the German Kommandantur. In any case, most members of the FFI integrated the regular French army after the liberation of Paris, meaning they were definitely of fighting age. Of course that whole argument is dropped as soon as he brings in British involvement, at which point he finally points out how the Resistance disabled most of the railway network and stopped the famously lightning-fast German army from facing the Allied invasion properly. For their role in this sabotage, a hundred fifty Resistance members working for the French national railway company were shot and another five hundred deported.

--To put it simply, Lindybeige dismisses the Resistance as a useless, wasteful and infighting group of functional morons, while every successful operation they carried out, every display of good mobility and coordination is attributed to British uniformed soldiers overseeing it. In reality most of that effort was done by either agents of the French government in exile or the Allied command under Eisenhower, with no account mentioning any significant autonomous British involvement which stands to reason as De Gaulle and Churchill could not stand one another. In fact Lindybeige tries to pass off operation Jedburgh as a purely British operation while it was specifically a joint one with American, British, French, Belgian and Dutch operatives all along the Atlantic coast.

--The next part is baffling. Lindybeige points at the Allies stopping their shipments of weapons to the French Resistance after July 44 and justifies it by saying the various cells were fighting each other and were uncoordinated. Thank god the Brits stopped sending arms or there would have been a civil war between these silly French Resistance members. Of course what happened in August was the liberation of Paris followed by the integration of the FFI into the new French army, which would go on to liberate the rest of the country. But Lindybeige pushes this civil war angle pretty hard, calling at this point of the video both Vichy France and the Resistance to be pro French in a way and underlining the conflicts between the two as a reason why the weapon shipments stopped coming, with examples such as Resistance members exacting reprisals against Nazi collaborators, which is a completely moot point because Vichy France and collaborators had nothing to do with the Resistance and were in fact, at this point of time, recognized as the enemy by all Allied forces, meaning acts of resistance against them would in no way prompt Allied command to stop supporting the French Resistance. Lindybeige goes so far as to say that the OSS and British secret service stopping the weapon shipments in August 1944 legitimately prevented an outright civil war between the different cells of the French Resistance, which was in actuality pretty unified in its support to De Gaulle at this point thanks to the efforts of Jean Moulin as discussed previously. This hardly gels with the events following August 1944, where the members of the Resistance and FFI were enlisted in the Free French Army and were therefore issued American military equipment and training to function as regular troops. Now stop me if I'm wrong but it appears that in Lindybeige's mind all French people were ready to tear each other apart until the British stopped sending them pipe guns, after which the Americans sent them tanks which obviously disabled their ability to start a civil war.

--Two French colonial soldiers using a blend of Allied gear during the winter of 1944-45. They are presumably thinking of killing each other.

--Much like the Phantom Menace review this is addressing a piece of media were essentially everything is wrong, hence the length of this post. Lindybeige has obviously researched the topic to great length, then ignored half of it to record 17mn of vague, dismissive and unsubstantiated claim that each take an equal amount of time to debunk. He present the facts as if everything that happened on British soil was under British orders so as to make the French Resistance only effective on their accord, all the while disregarding the French government in exile and slandering the efforts of French people but also inadvertently of the Americans. It is my honest belief that this sad excuse of an historian is either profoundly lacking in literacy or actively trying to justify his xenophobia by bending WW2 historiography around his bias, and whatever it may be he should be deplatformed to avoid spreading more harmful and disrespectful lies about a group of brave men and women who fought to liberate their country from fascism.

[fluffer5]

Humans are mini-universal beings

I think this is my 4th entry to Humans Are Space Orcs. And gets sorta terrifying with this recent realization plus the small clip I saw on TikTok.

I've previously stated that writers are creators of worlds, right? Meanwhile, visual artists take de-structured ideas from the writers to create drawings, buildings, sceneries, or moments to give us an image of the world that the writers are giving life.

Now, color me surprise when I got to see this random video on TikTok which depicted how we ourselves are small walking universe. Check the following pictures and compare them, yes?

Placenta after birth = the tree of life depicted in mythology (and seeing as giving birth literally means growing a fetus (later on into an infant) inside of you, it doesn't seem so far off now. Turn that placenta around and you're faced with the cotyledons. These things look like bunched up leaves on top of trees.

Human lungs and alveoli = if you skip the gory look of the actual organ and just see it in a picture, you'd find that it seems like bunched up flower buds.

Human arteries, veins, and capillaries = now, Earth has its river network and streams, yes? Places with high salt content and none at all? That's the same way with our arteries if you replace the salt analogy with non-oxygenated blood and oxygenated blood flowing in and out of the heart to cycle back... like how evaporated water turns to rain lol...

Human eyes = they look like some galaxy formations. One eye holds different flecks or palette of color, almost like how colorful galaxies could get.

Human mitosis = a human's cell creation is a galaxies' version of collapse. They usually go backwards to our own version to crash into each other. Ours are more of a cell division. But if we think of it's creation where electrons supposedly combine with each other to create another galaxy, then perhaps the idea isn't that farfetched.

And have you seen mountain structures that look like giants? What do we have as explanation for those?

Imagine the conversation after an alien reads through our anatomy books. One of them looks at you, face either drained of blood, deadpan, or panicking (again... at this point the United Intergalactic Council is on speed dial).

Alien: You're telling me that you are miniscule galaxies... like YOU are a microscopic galaxy that's being kept in form and human shaped by bones and fragile skin?

Human: I won't say that it's fragile. Some of us develop calluses on some of our skin which means they can thicken (forgetting to mention they only happen on specific areas).

Alien: You thicken your skin?!

Human: *snickers* Some have even thick faces (this alien doesn't know our numerous metaphors).

Alien: You can develop armor on your head?!!

Human: I think we got lost track with the anatomy book... what did you mean when you said we were walking galaxies?

Alien: You are! You have depicted everything in this book!

Human: That's just my book for beginners though...

Alien: You have more evidence that you host life inside of you and are capable of producing more?!

Human: ...yes? (thinking of babies, intestinal parasites, bacteria, and lice)

Alien: OH GREAT MOTHER OF STARS!!!! WHAT IS WITH YOU TERRANS AND BEING SO FRUSTRATINGLY DIFFERENT?!? What are you going to show me next?! That you eat Chlcusgyt for food?!

Human: *whispers to self* Those are like... our version of octopus and squids, right? We're not allowed to eat those? They're so tasty though?

Alien: *hears the whisper due to their biologically natural hearing to get away from predators* Oh, stars you are NOT joking with that!

The terrified alien calls the UIC to tell them how Terrans apparently eat one of Space's greatest hunters for dinner. That day, we earned another reason why other intergalactic sentient species should not mess with the Deathworld of Terran.

[rockyp77mk3]

In March of 1945, soldiers of the 4th Armored Division transport two German POWs in the town of Hersfeld, Germany. Photo colorized.

[princevontwix]

(warning, LOONGG late night rambling post)

ok, so you know about Yume Nikki Online? that really good online multiplayer hub hosting both the original game and a collection of fangames? i feel like that idea could apply really well to OFF and its fangames too! and i got the perfect name for it, OFFline.

i imagine it can go with a similar premise of YNO but just allow people to talk and gather around in OFF-related games. but i see a lot of potential for OFFline to include some kind of PvP-dedicated fangame, which I'll call Engage. which, with how many ideas i have for it, might be best to not make in EasyRPG.

the basic idea i have in mind is that there's a central hub where people can just chat and hang out which has three divisions:

Versus

Team Battle

Arcade, subdivided into Campaign and Endless.

what all of these modes have in common is a shopkeeper. it'll probably be better to make them an original character, but basically, for Versus and Team Battle, at the beginning of a match, you're given a set amount of credits to purchase from a list of items, weapons, and armor. for consistency's sake, i think its best that certain items are locked for certain characters only (say, no one else can use weapons and armor for Home characters), but healing and damage items are fair play for all.

whoever hosts a room will be able to dictate which select fangame they'd wish to fight in (as in, which cast of characters both users must use), OR decide that anything goes and both users are free to make the party of their dreams (its also here that they'd be free to select which battle theme plays).

Versus mode is between two players, who have full control of their own parties. while Team Battle is a 4v4, where each player will have control over their selected party member.

as for Arcade, its basically just singleplayer fun; the intent is that with the large amount of enemies and bosses from the multitude of fangames present, it will bring something different each time via randomizer. Campaign i would describe as being similar to Smash 3DS's Classic Mode, where you're given 3 branching paths with varying difficulties. the more difficult ones you beat, the more credits you earn, where you can make a pitstop before each boss to stack up (with zodiac orbs being pricier). referring to the sketch above, yellow cubes are enemy encounters, red cubes are bosses, and purple is for the end-game boss (the final boss from the og game/fangame, if applicable). i figured that every 3rd or 4th encounter being a boss will help prevent the gameplay from being monotonous beatdowns of regular enemies. you'll get choices for enemies and bosses, but there's only one endgame boss and that's random each time.

and lastly, Endless mode is just that. this time, you're given a larger supply of credits to use and once you enter the first round, there's no going back. each round will supply a minute amount of health or energy items to use, but will progressively get more difficult. my hope here is that it isn't just more enemies each round, but for it to sometimes bring fewer but beefier enemies, and maybe even a miniboss. you progress through each round by clicking on the individual cube labeled with the appropriate number. i figured like this it'd be more reasonable to fit within RPG2k3's limits but at this point it would be bloated so oh well. and of course, once you die, it ends. a public leaderboard will be on display to show the top 10 players and their scores.

now to get the obvious out of the way, online functionality with this many features would be difficult, if not impossible, to implement. as such, i would not be opposed to taking an approach similar to the UT fangame Don't Forget, where OFFline will be developed on an engine like Gamemaker and attempt to re-create RPG2k3's vibe and the individual games being hosted, along with Engage. the problem with the latter is that i think its more realistic to just let EasyRPG do all the work in porting the fangames like YNO, rather than recreate each one in a more modern engine. but at the same time, that would be the only feasible way of having any of these planned features to work without any fuckups. of course, i suppose a workaround to having multiplayer work in RPG2k3 would be to have a Parsec session or something similar, but that'd only be a solution for Versus mode at best. it would definitely not work for Team mode and might conflict with general offline.

in fact, the idea of OFFline might take some mad wizardry to even make it work, and i wouldn't be surprised if it barely works. making it in EasyRPG and using 2k3 as the basis vs. making it in a modern engine is the double-edged sword of this whole hypothetical. i'd love for something like this to happen, but i imagine it would be too much work to not only develop, but to keep the servers online for an otherwise niche fanbase. still, i cant shake away how much potential and fun this could be.

with that said, rambling is now over!

[hongduongn120]

So, Flynn's lore dump time

The 4th generation of his family trade, Flynn James Luton was born in 1893 in Dublin, Ireland to Cathal Luton, a weaponsmith, and Martha Cassidy-Luton along with his younger brother, Thomas. He enjoyed a relatively quiet childhood with his father teaching him about the art of gunsmithing, hoping for him to follow in his forefather's footsteps. However, he was distant to Flynn otherwise due to the nature of his work. But his mother's death from pneumonia when he was 17 drove him into a deep depression and that led him to join the British Army in the hopes of getting a purpose in life. He would be trained as an armorer and ascend to the rank of Corporal before the outbreak of the Great War. He would then be transferred to the Royal Dublin Fusiliers regiment, 16th (Irish) Division, and be shipped to France.

He would be fortunate to survive the war, although he would not speak much about his experiences. The nature of the 16th Division, mostly comprised of Irish Volunteers, would mean that Flynn would begin having nationalistic thoughts and wishing for Irish independence in his time with the unit. During the Battle of Passchendaele, a German artillery shell landed near his position, the resulting shrapnel cutting off half of his jaw and taking away his nose, hospitalizing him for 3 months and requiring him to wear a prosthetic mask from there on. After the Armistice, Flynn would be discharged with the rank of Sergeant Major, disfigured, suffering from shellshock, and returned to an Ireland teetering on the brink of war. War did break out, the Irish War of Independence, and Flynn would fight in it on the side of the Volunteers, renamed the Irish Republican Army. With the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the war's end, Flynn is one of many who thought the treaty went against what they had fought for. But rather than fighting in the upcoming Irish Civil War, Flynn was just tired of war, and therefore in late 1921, he boarded a ship headed for America, determined to start again. 

When he disembarked in Boston in January 1922, he initially wanted to settle down, but after a week's stay, he realized that the city wasn't for him. With little other choice, Flynn decided to take to the roads and wander through the Continental United States, trading his skills for a living, hoping to find a suitable place to settle down and to find himself and his purpose again. The journey would take him 3 years, going through 25 major cities and countless small towns from the East Coast to the Pacific Northwest. His drifting days would be filled with lessons, memories, experiences, and a few bodies, from a bar crawl in San Francisco, a duel leading to a carjacking in El Paso, an encounter with a death cult in rural Montana, and the most notable, a hit job in New Orleans that spiraled into a massive assault on a mansion compound, where he would first meet the siblings Nicodeme and Serafine Savoy. The assault by the three would be the start of a deep friendship that would continue to the present day.

Arriving at St. Louis in early 1925, the atmosphere convinced him that this was the place, and using the funds he had saved throughout the years, he bought a building in the city's downtown and founded Luton's Gunsmithing and Sporting Goods. In this gun store, he would sell both legal firearms, and later in his basement, illegal weapons. Through his customers, he heard of the main criminal organizations in the city, Lackadaisy and Marigold. His first time in the Lackadaisy Speakeasy doesn't go well, with a drunk patron mocking his appearance, eventually leading to a brawl. When the dusk settles, the patron is thrown out and Flynn is cared for by the staff, who introduces him to the proprietor, Atlas May. Atlas has known of Flynn since he opened his shop, and offers a partnership in which Flynn would become the gang's unofficial main armorer, while Atlas would use his contacts to connect Flynn to more products and customers. This partnership would continue after Atlas's death, although Flynn then decided to stay neutral in the rivalry between Lackadaisy and the new kingfish of the city, the Marigold gang. His reunion with the Savoys does come as a surprise, but a welcoming one nonetheless, with the siblings inviting him to their jobs, explaining the matter to their boss, Asa Sweet, as an old freelance partner. He has been offered to join the Marigold gang, a decision he still hasn’t fully made. Nevertheless, his business is still running smoothly, though, with the simmering situation in the city's underground, he's preparing himself for the next big thing that will be happening...

[taraross-1787]

This Day in History: Bazooka Charlie

On this day in 1944, the Battle of Arracourt is waged in France.  During the course of that battle, Charles “Bazooka Charlie” Carpenter would knock out two German tanks—but the way in which he did it might surprise you.

“‘Bazooka Charlie’ used to teach history,” a newspaper back home soon reported. “Now he is making it on the western front.”

Carpenter wasn’t supposed to be blowing up German tanks. He was supposed to be a simple artillery spotter, flying overhead in his Piper L-4 Grasshopper. His technical job was reconnaissance for the 4th Armored Division of General George Patton’s 3rd Army.

But “Bazooka Charlie” had other ideas.

At first, he attached two bazookas to the wing struts of his little plane. The story continues here: https://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-bazooka-charlie

[walkingthroughthisworld]

U.S. Soldiers assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 70th Armor Regiment, 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division supporting the 4th Infantry Division, participate in a live fire demonstration and static display for the Minister of National Defense of the Republic of Poland, Mariusz Blaszczak at Nowa Deba, Poland, April 12, 2023. The 4th Infantry Division's mission in Europe is to engage in multinational training and exercises across the continent in order to build readiness, increase our operability, and reinforce our steadfast and loyal commitment to our Allies and partners, which make up an integral part of the Ivy Team. (Staff Sgt. Agustín Montañez, U.S. Army)

[uss-edsall]

While doing my research on General Bruce Cooper Clarke I found this particular moment very funny

Transcript -

Interviewer: On research for [Major General John Shirley] Wood, I didn't have time to do anything too deep, but what I did discover was that there was no special levee put out for the cream of the crop anywhere. Most of your GI's came from New York and Southeastern New York and Eastern Pennsylvania.

GEN Clarke: and Irish and Jew.

INTERVIEWER: And they were just kids...

GEN Clarke: After the war the B'nai B'rith in Boston decided they would honor the great Jewish soldiers of [World War II]. They all came from the 4th Armored Division. So they had a big party up there and called me up, and wanted to know if I would come up as a special guest, and introduce these three people. I said, "Yes, I'd come up." They paid my fare and organized for a hotel to stay in. You know the three people that they had come up, Bond, Cone, and [Creighton] Abrams. I got up there and it finally came the time. "General Clarke here under which these three great soldiers have fought knows more about them than anybody else and he'll introduce them." I got up and I started out with Bond.

GEN Clarke: But I said, "Abrams doesn't happen to be Jewish. He's an Episcopalian." Well, they said, "General, it makes no difference. We're going to honor these three people. They've got Jewish names and we don't give a damn what they are. We're going to have a party." You know they went out all night long. I never saw such an affair.

INTERVIEWER: You know it's too bad that Marise Rose didn't live, of course.

GEN Clarke: Yes. But they thought Abrams was a Jew. By the way, Abrams has just turned Catholic.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Parade Marks Observation of United Nations Day,” Kingston Whig-Standard. July 7, 1942. Page 2. ---- Along streets lined with enthusiastic spectators more than 5,000 Canadian and United States soldiers marched Saturday as Kingston marked United Nations Day of Army Week. For the first time in this war, U.S. servicemen in uniform paraded with Dominion forces in the city.

At the top, the United States unit from the Fourth Armored Division, Pine Camp. N.Y., are shown as they marched past Lt.-Col. L. F. Grant, who took the salute following the Cricket Field ceremony.

On the right, Lt-Col. Grant is shown saluting as the Canadian and US troops filed past. Behind him in Lt. Col. M. Isbester, in uniform, and Mayor H. A. Stewart, who extended a greeting to the military visitors for their participation in Army Week.

Behind the U.S. unit at the top may be seen one of the armored vehicles which took part in a demonstration at the Cricket Field.

[pinturas-sgm-tanques]

1944 12 Bastogne 37th Tank Bn, 4th Armored Division -Peter Dennis

repost corrected colors

[captain-price-unofficially]

An M4A3 from the 4th Armored Division in a position near a road in Bastogne, 8 Jan 1945