#However bad you've imagined war to be it is much much worse

[redeyedroid]

Donald Trump has a thing. He has lots of things, being a creature made of personality defects, narcissism and high-tensile racism, and who looks like a semi-sentient block of cheese that has somehow gained a rudimentary understanding of fascism, but in this case I’m talking about his thing is to attack the US military of today by valourising two of its past leaders: Douglas MacArthur and George Patton.  

"Remember the old days of General MacArthur and General Patton, and these great generals," Trump told CPAC in 2015. "General MacArthur is spinning in his grave when he sees what we do." 

He’s also used them to attack his opponents: “[Hillary Clinton] tells you how to fight ISIS on her website… I don't think Gen. Douglas MacArthur would like that very much."  

These are two examples among many of something as close to admiration a man like Trump can ever display and it’s easy to see why he picks these men to elevate. Trump is a man given over to the projection of an image, a man who, like many authoritarians, impersonates the man he says he is, not unlike those fraudsters you see in the news from time to time. Tricksters convicted of conning millions out of dumb rich people while pretending to be German nobility. Impression and publicity are the thing, so naturally, not being a well-read man, or one prone to anything but superficiality, Trump would gravitate to the most self-aggrandising, most flawed of America’s military leaders. 

Some of Patton’s tough talking character was bluster. Delivered in a characteristically high-pitched voice, his bloodthirsty quotes were often intended to inspire in his men confidence in his leadership and in themselves. But sometimes it was not. In Sicily, he was fired when he slapped men suffering from PTSD, and then again soon after the end of the war in Europe, because he wanted to go to war with the USSR and his absence of political nous meant his superiors had little use for him in peacetime. He never rose to the highest rank. Eisenhower, the great coalition builder and politician, favoured Omar Bradley. 

Like many of their ilk, image was key to both – Patton’s cavalry boots and trousers were topped with a ridiculous shiny, polished helmet; MacArthur habitually wore aviator glasses, pipe and leather jacket.  

A man of gargantuan ego, MacArthur was obsessed with liberating the Philippines from the Japanese after being defeated there in the early part of the war. He threatened to run against Roosevelt for President in order to get his way and ensure he was given command of vast forces for the task, his famous 1942 declaration of “…I shall return” was followed up with “…I have returned” after landings on Leyte in October 1944 (Never a man who used ‘we’ where ‘I’ could fit, he earned the enmity of men under his command in the first Philippine campaign who nicknamed him Dugout Doug, noting in disgust his insistence in lauding himself in dispatches to the USA and the exclusion of their own sacrifices). 

It’s not hard to see why Trump, a man who has a child’s understanding of strength and a perpetual, diseased need to take credit would be attracted to a man who took backhanders from the Philippine government and had a friendly press baron amplifying his voice at home. 

(There’s also the less well-known pre-war part of MacArthur’s biography where he, a man in his fifties, took a sixteen-year-old Filipina as his mistress, which Trump, a rapist, would surely see as unproblematic if he ever learned of it). 

To be clear, both Patton and MacArthur were highly competent, knowledgeable and precise, and responsible for extraordinary victories in Europe and Pacific, but both were massively flawed characters, and neither were in the top tier of American commanders. It’s emblematic of Trump’s character that he would gravitate to the egotistic, meddling MacArthur ahead of Chester Nimitz, architect of the Navy’s drive through the Central Pacific, which got underway in earnest on the 20th of November 1943 with landings on Betio and Makin Atolls, Tarawa. 

The land campaigns of the Pacific all have their own unique, awful characteristics. There are the battles over the Kokoda Trail, fought in the mountain forests of New Guinea. The jungles and rain of the Solomons campaign. The heat of Peleliu, where bad Marine leadership threw men uselessly against Japanese fortifications dug into the rock caves in the centre of the island. The massive numbers of civilian dead of Saipan and Okinawa, often victims of murder-suicides – Japanese, taught to fear the American and to never be taken captive killed themselves and/or their families in terrible numbers. (There is colour film of people throwing themselves to their deaths from the cliffs of northern Saipan.) And the sulphuric rock of the volcanic Iwo Jima, the only battle where US casualties outnumbered Japanese. 

On Tarawa, a stereotypical Pacific Island of sand and palm trees, there was a beautiful tropical lagoon. 

Betio Atoll, lying 2,400 miles southwest of Hawai’i is a tiny island that today is part of Kiribati, but it was not quite small enough for war to pass it by, for it was the right shape and just big enough for the Japanese to build an airfield on it. And so, to protect their supply lines from interdiction during the campaign westward, the Americans decided it must be seized and assembled a fleet of 191 ships to transport and support a force of 35,000 troops to attack it.  

GALVANIC, as the operation was designated, was unknown territory. Amphibious landings had been done at Guadalcanal and throughout the Solomons, for Operation TORCH in North Africa, and recently HUSKY, BAYTOWN and AVALANCHE in Sicily and Italy. But none of these had been against heavily fortified defences of the type the Japanese, well aware of their vulnerability, had built. Tarawa had a garrison of about 5,000 men, half of whom were Rikusentai – the Special Naval Landing Forces that were the Imperial Japanese Navy’s equivalent of Marines. The rest were construction crews and engineers, and they made a complex of bunkers, pillboxes and trenches, reinforced with concrete, timber and coral that proved enormously difficult to reduce. 

While the Americans had studied and planned for the kind of opposed landings they would now attempt, there was no proof of concept and, worse, they were short of vital resources. 

A year previously, the US Navy had contested control of the Pacific with two operational aircraft carriers. Now, in the autumn of 1943, its industry had built a fleet of Essex- and Independence-class carriers that came to dominate the rest of the war. One day, during the two-week voyage from New Zealand to Tarawa, a crewman on the USS Saratoga counted 13 different carriers among the fleet. But they were sorely lacking in landing craft.  

The landings in Italy had already suffered from this shortage – both BAYTOWN and AVALANCHE had been allocated far fewer landing craft than they needed and now GALVANIC would. They were desperately short of the LVTs – amphibious tractors – which would carry the first wave of Marines onto the invasion beaches. They had cannibalised older vehicles that had been used on Guadalcanal and welded makeshift armour to others they acquired. But the following waves rode in Higgins boats – the classic, familiar-looking assault craft from movies like Saving Private Ryan. These craft would never reach shore. 

The invasion coincided with Tarawa’s neap tide and while many of the people the Navy consulted about the depth of water in the lagoon opposite the invasion beaches were confident about the depth of water they would find, there was no consensus. One man, a New Zealander named Major F L G Holland warned that there would be less than 3 feet of water over the coral reef that bordered the lagoon. He was right. The tracked amtracs of the first wave could grind their way over the reef and into the lagoon, but the Higgins boats following hit it and the invasion stalled. 

Men were disgorged into the water at the reef and had to wade through chest and neck-deep water to get to shore. Some transferred to amtracs that took them halfway before being told that it was too dangerous for the amtrac to go further, that the diminshing number of amtracs were too valuable to risk and that they would have to trek through the maelstrom of fire that the lagoon had become. Men struggled past the dismembered and mutilated bodies of their comrades, the burning disabled wrecks of craft that had made it into the lagoon, through water turned crimson with blood, alongside the floating corpses of thousands of tropical fish killed by the concussion of hundreds of explosions to reach a beach where the tempest of the lagoon was replaced by a world of sand, blood and slaughter.  

On land, the marines found themselves against a sea wall made of timber and beneath this were able to regroup. Communications were difficult. The few senior officers on the scene found that many radios were lost, or so waterlogged as to be ineffective. The battle had little direction, devolving into small groups of marines led by lieutenants, NCOs and privates slowing creeping inland, clearing bunkers as they went. Sometimes they were forced back, sometimes they held on to the territory they took. Always they took grievous losses. 

Things were no better on the Japanese side, for early on the first day, the garrison commander, Rear Admiral Shibasaki Keiji was killed. 

Artillery fire is a terrible thing to be under, naval gunfire orders of magnitude worse. The standard 105mm M2 howitzer used by the US army fired a 40lb shell. The battleships USS Maryland and Colorado which bombarded Betio fired 16-inch shells that weighed 2,100lbs. A broadside from either sent more than seven and a half tons of high explosive at a target up to 14 miles away. Combined with fire from cruisers and destroyers the pre-invasion bombardment killed perhaps 40% of the island’s defenders, wrecked much of its defences, and - because wires could not be buried deeply enough in the sand of Betio - destroyed its telephone network. Shibasaki, frustrated at his inability to communicate with his men decided to move his command post and, out in the open, was killed along with his entire staff when a 5-inch shell from an American destroyer landed in the middle of them. Whatever was left of his body was never recovered. 

In this, the Americans were lucky. Their position on the first day was precarious and Shibasaki’s death meant the Japanese defence became uncoordinated and prevented them from mounting a counterattack on the first night. They did sneak men onto the wreck of a freighter in the lagoon, from where they continued to rake it with fire. Strikes by aircraft on the freighter were inaccurate and often hit US troops. Friendly fire from both air and sea would be a problem throughout the battle for American forces.  

The Marines, with few of the flamethrowers and bazookas they would have in later battles, reduced the island pillbox by pillbox, often having to silence them multiple times as Rikusentai reoccupied firing positions thought eliminated by means of hidden trenches. The long wooden pier leading out into the lagoon would be the source of constant fire throughout the battle. 

It took 76 hours to take Tarawa. Slightly over three days of small unit fighting, men rushing firing positions and pouring grenades and bullets through openings. Frontal attacks against pillboxes, or flanking attacks that exposed men to fire from another position in overlapping network of defence. Tanks, immobilised by mine or Japanese fire would provide support, but mostly this was a battle fought by the infantry at short range with rifle, sub-machine gun and grenade. At the end of it, 1,009 Marines of the 2nd Division had been killed and another 2,101 wounded - roughly 25% of the men landed on the island. 

687 more men were killed when the relatively small escort carrier USS Liscome Bay was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine off Makin. The torpedo detonated her magazine, and the resulting explosion blew her in half. The fireball rose a thousand feet in the air and debris fell on ships miles away.  

Of the Japanese garrison of nearly 5,000, 146 survived, 129 of whom were Korean construction labourers. The rest fought to the death, or were simply denied the opportunity to surrender, the Americans having learned on Guadalcanal that Japanese would often feign surrender in order to lull their enemies and kill them with bayonet or grenade. 

Life Magazine published photos of American dead floating in the surf of Tarawa, washed up on the beaches of Betio. The journalist Robert Sherrod, who had been on a Higgins boat and waded through the lagoon on the first morning wrote detailed dispatches for Time. The American public were shocked by the bloodbath on the atolls of Tarawa. One New York paper declared that the US should have used poison gas. Nimitz received letters from bereaved families. “You killed my son on Tarawa,” a mother wrote. Nimitz read each of them and answered them personally, considering it his responsibility. The burden of command. 

The Japanese were told the defenders had been overwhelmed, but at such a cost to the Americans that it was to all intents a victory for the Japanese Empire, a lie habitually told after defeats. Midway had been a great victory in their press. 

Lessons were learned. Coordination between US land, sea and air forces improved. Invasion troops carried less unessential equipment and more ammunition and explosives. They learned to rely on supply from the sea. Future invasions had more amtracs available, of improved design, with more armour and more firepower. Napalm was introduced and used in staggering amounts, dropped from plane and shot from tanks to incinerate bunker and cave and kill the defenders within.

Japanese strategy leaned on the assumption that the Americans would not have the stomach for the fight. That the American public would not support the casualties needed to defeat them. They were wrong. Before long, papers in the US were warning of the need for America to steel itself, for Tarawa was a foreshadowing of future battles, on larger islands closer to the Japanese homeland. That the tiny, blood-soaked atolls of Tarawa heralded unprecedented carnage and butchery.  

In this, they were right. 

[strawberry-nugget]

𝙃𝙖𝙡𝙛 𝘼𝙡𝙞𝙫𝙚

𝘼/𝙉: This is my piece for my very own collab 'Ice Cold Heart' and also my excuse to delve into some more canon rather than fanon Hawks, because canon Hawks has been clouding my mind lately and I needed to get this out

𝙋𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜: Hawks/fem!Reader

𝙒𝙖𝙧𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙨: Angst, mentions of sexual themes

𝙒𝙤𝙧𝙙 𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩: 2k

"I'm in love with you"

The precious meaning of a phrase is only defined by the weight you decide to put on it. And today you have decided that with your words you'd give birth to what's only going to give you and him pure, undefined pain. An elephant in the room if you may, an ogre of emotions that otherwise would be unwanted to stand between the two of you.

You think 'otherwise' as if it's not unwanted already. The unrequited nature of your sentence will linger in your heart more than you'd like to admit, but you're ready to lift your eyes and meet his golden ones, ready to be judged with the coldness of his gaze, ready to be treated like you've expected you will when coming into his office.

You still have that hidden truth to spill to him, and it surpasses the one you spilt already, but you hold your dry tongue in your mouth for now.

What could possibly only hurt like a kitten's scratch -his mute, his echoing silence- is rather twisting numerous sharp daggers in your chest, twirling over the wound of your feelings, ravaging any hope for salvation you had been left with. You wonder how your friends ever managed to convince you that the hardest thing about confessing was the part where you had to build up your courage.

Your courage never suffered from a hit as you walked to his office, despite being terrified for what you had to say to him. Paperwork in your hands and none of a nervous trembling in your lips, iron clad feet clashing with the tiles of the building. You've made your decision to get rid of all those feelings, not wanting to spend another night bent on his desk or sprawled under him, only for him to act like he barely knows you in the office and then to be all greedy and sweet in public events.

His games, that god awful behavior of his, the way he chooses to use you -even if you feel like you use him to, to turn him into something that he's not with your imagination- you're tired of everything. And then there's also the fact that he's a traito-

"Aha"

The answer to your confession wasn't supposed to affect you either for better or for worse, rather this confession was an egotistical act, Mirko, or any of your friends previously said, that one had to endure in order to take the next big step. Whether that was a step accompanied by your desired person, or a step to redeeming the anathema a rejection could have caused.

Frankly it wasn't that the golden orbs staring back at you were rejecting. If anything, they didn't bore into yours in a way that left you hollow, but they didn't fill your heart with dreams either. And what your original intentions begged to stand up for was that you didn't care of any significant reciprocation.

You wish you didn't care where those words you had uttered had left Hawks, or in what inner conflict they had found him in. But you know, he won't be in any conflict about what you have to say, what you've kept inside for too long, what has bled onto your morals like a run over animal on the street, left to rot and seep into the road as it disintegrates under the sun or the cold.

Unbeknownst to you, deep down in his head, Hawks doesn't know how to feel, or how to react; its all too sudden for him to process. The way you spoke of it so casually yet, so lightheartedly, your tone suggesting that you let your most vulnerable object of thought slip through your fingertips, like you let it fall out of your head and shutter on the ground.

"I-"

It isn't much, just the start of a sentence that he hopes he could compose, but the way your brows furrow at the sound of his voice does nothing other than startle him.

You should have known, he's not going to give in to such demands. Love, relationships, he doesn't have time, space, a mindset, doesn't need you to be that one for him, he wants all the stability he can get when he wants it, however he wants it and he's gone when he gets it, swift as a bird, cold as stone. That doesn't necessarily tickle a nerve inside of him, you know the rules, even if he feels bad about you suffering like this there's nothing he can do -he doesn't even know how- and he chooses to let you speak, get it out, before he has to go and be a hero for the day.

"No, no save it," You wave him off "here's my resignation"

The authority in your voice isn't the one he was used to. As his eyes blink, honey colored orbs taking in the un-glory of your posture, he's met with the sight of your hands hugging around your own form; the ultimate sign of vulnerability, uncertainty.

"You don't have to quit because you fell in love with me"

'You fell in love with me' he speaks of the words so little, as if they're dirty, as if you're in this with yourself and they're so suffocating that he can't stand them, only to softly graze your ear with vore intentions, to tell you that you don't have to quit, to urge you to not take this too serious.

Your feelings aren't serious.

"I do" You speak, trying to jab him back with some crafted poison in your tone. But you know what you're going to say next will definitely do it for him, it'll poison him we'll, whether it makes you endangered or not. "I was on patrol when I saw you doing business with Dabi, so save it."

The weight of those words is what finally serves as a huge hit to your courage. You've outed yourself greatly and now the chewing on your bottom lip is profound and painful to a great amount. Hawks' face is contorted in a terrifying darkness, thick brows clenched above his eyes and lips pushed into a thin line, nose scrunched.

"Listen-"

"I just don't want to be a part of this"

That's when he knows he has to be forgiving.

Hawks isn't used to you, a fierce warrior of a hero, clenching your jaw tensely or furrowing your brows in sorrows. He isn't used to you being so upfront with your emotions either; whatever the two of you have shared in the past has been in words of reluctance and mind states of regret, each one desperate to prevent your hearts from getting hurt.

He knows his heart won't get hurt though, it's shielded way too well inside his chest, in such way he feels hollow, driven by anything other than the stupid organ. You should have known, he tells himself, before you got involved so deeply, but he left you with no time for thoughts like these, wiggling you under his wing while biting your skin instead of pecking it.

Just as Hawks has always known that he's going to hurt you no matter you rejecting labels or bottling feelings up and absolutely forbidding the mention of them, it's obvious that things can't go his way. He isn't used to you eyeing him with pain gathering in the corners of your eyes, but he's willing to play the part you're setting up for him right on the spot. Even if he has to admit, the thought of being painted in this color jabs him just like knowing things won't go back to the way they were between the two of you.

He doesn't mind. He had to let it go because by the time you know about the truth you won't even remember his face, or the way his voice sounds, and he shouldn't think about this but he does, in a way, in the very back of his head.

His mission, he thinks, is far more important than his personal life -it's a top priority for greater good.

Once greater good is achieved he's going to be able to invest in a personal life that involves feelings and excitement and even the noble pleasure of being able to choose between priorities. Right?

So, whatever he's feeling now -the tight knot in his throat, the painful lack of oxygen in his throat, his gut twisting and churning and his limbs alternating from spasming to going numb- he has to ignore.

But for the worse part he doesn't really know how to act. The confession that has startled him is still lingering on repeat in the back of his head, fueling the small ignition of a flame that begs to put you on a pedestal, or rather, it began to make his mouth move on it own, to tell how that he too wishes he could be with you as more than this secretly exclusive arrangement you've set.

Maybe, his heart pleads, maybe he can tell you about his mission and clear up the confusion.

He wonders if that would be a part you'd want him to play for you.

"I won't give you away. So long as you don't involve me in this, I don't have ulterior motives for protecting civilians."

"I-" He starts, darkness bottling up in his gut, stomach falling after going utterly numb. Somehow he knows he's not going to utter a word if he keeps acting like that.

"Hawks-"

"You'll get over it."

It's sharp and it's short and it sends heavy, lethal daggers to your chest, so much that you can feel your heart beginning to slip from in between your ribs, out of chest and onto the floor of his office. It'd be a mess to clean, the blood if your agony and your heartache rightfully on his floor. For him to look down on, this time, physically.

"I will"

He knows his words hurt, just by the mere look your face contorts and he won't utter a word about what you just said, he'll link you to Endeavor and when the time comes you'll know. His cause is greater than your heart breaking, greater than chasing after that small arrangement he's made so he can get physical release from time to time.

It's better not to react. Not to terrorize you into anything for if you're afraid you might out the wrong truth to the heroes in your circle and his plan -the commission's plan- will fail and the heroes will lose this war. And he can't lose.

You want to look at him with menace and disgrace, not to atone him for the way he's making you feel; crashing your dreams, poisoning your morals and your thoughts, living down to your expectations so much that you don't know what to think of him.

Like he did when you saw him after closed doors, cold and unapproachable, to the point he's scary. Manipulative so much that you found your way under him without even realizing how fast it happened, what impact it had to you to get involved with him. You just want to be out, unwielded from his spider's web and latch yourself into something real and kind, to serve your purpose as a hero. As a human.

When he opens his mouth again you're not scared anymore, of what he may do to you, of what will happen next.

"Hand me your papers so I can sign them"

Thanks for reading! Comments and reblogs are always appreciated <3

[habeascorpseus]

Hell is Empty, and all the Devils are in the London Underground

(aka, i wrote a little thing about c!wilbur.)

-------------------

see, the thing about hell, is that contrary to popular belief, it's not about repentance. you don't go to heaven when you finally roll the boulder up the hill. you don't get to feel full again once you finally drink the water and grab the fruit. a thousand and one whip lashes are not what redeems you in the eyes of whatever power deemed you fit for damnation.

hell is about punishment.

hell is telling someone that they did bad, and now they have to suffer for it forever. hell, for the people that knew them, is peace, knowing that they can't hurt anyone again. hell is definitely, at least for some, deserved. for others? the true hell isn't in the punishment, but in it's stasis.

"alright," you might say, defiant, tired, eyes dull and face sallow. "you've burned me, drowned me, run me over, bled me dry, made me know just how much I fucked up. isn't this enough? have I suffered enough cuts to know the hurt I caused a thousand times over? have I not learned?"

to which the devil will laugh, his breath reeking of alcohol and cold tobacco, smile wide and filled with decaying teeth. and he will look at the inmate- because that's really what you are, in the end- and say, voice friendly and as deceitful as a politician's:

"no, idiot. this isn't about learning. didn't you know? the real hell is never getting better."

and he will laugh once more, menacing and gleeful, and once again, the torture will continue after the temporary reprieve, back to the monotonous pain and rumination on your sins. for the next 10 years, all you can do is stew. for a while, you try, out of spite, to become a better person.

"maybe I wasn't trying hard enough," you think, your skin being pricked by a thousand needles.

"maybe I need to show just how much I've changed," you think, walking barefoot on hot coals.

but no matter how hard you try, hell stubbornly refuses to acknowledge you. after that, you turn to crying. you scream till your lungs are hoarse, shout expletives at your torturers and the living who damned you here. the nightmare never changes. in the end, you realize that learning is futile. and with every new punishment you can feel yourself becoming resigned to your villainy. after an eon of suffering, when you find yourself back at the pool of water, your reflection is unrecognizable.

in hell, there is no rest for the wicked. there's no repentance, either.

somehow, limbo is worse.

when he died, wilbur hadn't prepared himself for anything. he'd never imagined a life after death, only a blissful nothing, far from war, politics, masks, and stories. the only thing he could hope for was peace.

what he got instead he wouldn't wish on anyone.

because not only was it not the peaceful dark that he had been dreaming of for weeks on end, but it also was occupied by one very drunk and very pissed formerly-president jschlatt. and soon enough, they were joined by a man calling himself "mexican dream."

wilbur doesn't know how long he waited for that accursed train to arrive.

limbo was noisy. simultaneously, and almost paradoxically, it was dull. there was nothing to do except play various card games with the deck he found under a bench one... day? week..? year....? time was difficult, there. when he got bored of the others, he taught himself solitaire, stewing in silence over his cards. when he got bored of that, he found the script. he doesn't know how many years it took to get through the damned thing (it always seemed to grow right when he finally thought it was over), but he doesn't like some of the new writing. it's too melodramatic, too scattered and un-cohesive. if there's one comfort, though, he doesn't see his name in any of the new script. the beginning of the script, however, is another story.

in the end, he reads his story nearly a thousand times over. and every time, he finds himself hating it.

because, contrary to popular belief, he didn't want this for himself. if anyone were to assume that he had wanted to die at the hands of his father, and then spend an eternity in a stupid fucking train station, he would have called them an idiot!

in truth, all he wanted was to live. now, he can't even have that. and what's worse?

he doesn't regret it.

because that's the thing about the afterlife. it's not living. there are no birthdays, no deaths, no wars or betrayals, no sons to raise or countries to protect. it's static and painful in all the worst ways. there's no character development, no arcs, no chapters, no closed book. just a dingy train station with cold concrete stretching infinitely in every direction. in the end, all you have is your mistakes to ruminate on. and with no one to tell you otherwise, who's to say you weren't correct?

13 years is an awfully long time to think that you're the bad guy.

wilbur would have rather gone to hell and known for sure.

[creedslove]

Basement

SABRETOOTH X READER

Summary: You've been living with Victor after he kidnapped you from a mission that went wrong with the X-Men. You've had a civil agreement so far, even though you still don't know what he wants from you. However one day you just panic and after trying to escape him, he loses his temper and locks you in his basement.

Warnings: This is Sabretooth so it is a little bit darker than usual but with a little bit of fluff too (well, Victor kind of fluff)

You heart was beating so fast and loud you thought you couldn't listen to your own thoughts for a moment. 'What does he want from me?' Two weeks. Two weeks and nothing. You still didn't know what was going to happen to you. Was he going to rape you? Was he going to kill you? You had no idea, the man never promised you anything. Two fucking weeks, no worried Scott came for you, no infuriated Logan showed up to rescue. If their beloved Jean Grey had had a broken nail, both men would likely start a new mutant war, however when Y/N is kidnapped by SABRETOOTH everything seems to be fine. For the first few days you were sure the X-Men would burst into the cabin and take you home after kicking the feral man's ass, but as the days started to pass by no one came. Maybe they thought you were dead? That would make sense, especially according to the defense classes you took throughout your life, confrontation with Sabretooth equals death. Even if it was the case, shouldn't they even look for your body? How considerate.

You were pretty much alive, but not for long though. Victor wasn't such a bad roommate at all, maybe due to his feline nature, the man was actually calm and silent, and very organized, unless he lost his temper, then... Well, prepare yourself to meet the beast. When his bloodlust was too much, it was common for him to disappear for hours and return covered in blood. You once asked him whose blood was it, he coldly looked at you and said:

"Don't ask what you don't wanna know, frail."

You never questioned him again.

He didn't leave chained to the wall or gagged, but you weren't allowed to go outside unless he told you so and you wouldn't dare go into those dark woods by yourself anyway, it freaked you out the idea of being lost in such a place. Until now.

Your routine was quite easy actually, a lot less busy than at the Institute. It would almost feel like you were on vacation, if you didn't have a huge man towering you all the time with long sharp claws ready to cut your throat open that was not ashamed of threatening you to do so. He didn't demand you to do much other than cook for him and clean up a little. In fact, he even allowed you to read some of his books. Sometimes he'd talk to you, tell you many stories from the wars he's been to or the battles with X-Men way before you joined the team. You managed to be at least polite to him, and sometimes he even made you laugh with his sharp tongue and bluntness, but still he was your captor and you didn't know what he wanted. You knew he was attracted to you, even before you were abducted, he made it pretty clear by saying dirty things to you as some kind of tease. During the days you spent together it wasn't uncommon for him to make sexual remarks about your looks and even try to kiss you a couple of times. But he never went further and you always wondered why, since you knew he had no regret in forcing his way with a girl - or as you were taught.

His cabin was comfortable, in fact it was amazing, making you completely shocked realizing Victor had a lot more money than everybody imagined. Apart from some mood swings it wasn't that scary being around him, sometimes you thought you were already used to it, but you knew once he snapped (and he would) you'd be screwed.

Things went from bad to worse once Victor came back from a hunt, he was covered in blood and carried another dead deer, you were already used to seeing him carry animals, he'd eventually kill some so you'd both have fresh meat, he'd store it and then you'd cook it. However there was something different about that one, it made you uneasy. The way Creed was covered in blood, the huge slice on the animal's throat that was still dripping fresh blood. Its fur red-stained and the eyes. Two black empty eyes. Staring at those eyes made you feel a shiver run through your spine. Suddenly you felt everything was too much. It was too much being alone in a cabin god knows where with Sabretooth. It was too much the fact your friends, the ones you grew up with and considered family abandoned you to die. It was too much looking at that dead deer and know you were going to be the next deer, sooner or later, Victor would get tired of you, he'd take everything he wanted, maybe you would be too broken for him to have his share of fun and then he would carry your dead body just like he did with his prey. Your dead eyes would stare at him and have no effect on the merciless man while he disposed you to rot somewhere.

You tried your best to look calm around him, knowing his enhanced senses would make your intentions pretty obvious. When he was done with the meat, Victor went to take a shower, he didn't mind the blood most of the time but it didn't mean he enjoy being dirty. You waited carefully until you heard the bathroom's lock and the shower running. That was it, your only chance.

※※※

"Fuck, fuck, fuck." You told yourself nervously looking around and not being able to distinguish anything. You went over you last steps. First you waited for Victor to busy himself in the shower, then you just opened the front door and started run for your life - literally - until you got completely lost. You didn't even pay attention to the fact it was dawn when you escaped. Now the sun was down and you had no idea where you were. You finally stopped running, trying to find something, anything that you could use to help you solve the problem. There was nothing.

In the shadows, only a few feet from his little stubborn Y/N, Victor stalked you, amused by your fear. When the man found out you were gone he felt anger within him, but instead of running after you, he decided to follow you cautiously, knowing how afraid you were of being out in the woods alone, he would enjoy every single minute of you realizing how stupid your idea was, and he didn't regret so far. He was getting tired though, the girl was supposed to have finished cooking by now instead of trying to run. Victor was hungry and his patience was fading, so he approached his little deer, inhaling the mix of fear and anxiety in the air before saying:

"Tired of running, frail?"

You felt your heart skip a beat and your first impulse was to run. You were already tired and your energy was very low, however the fear of being caught made you obey your instincts so you tried escaping again. You heard some growling and looking back Sabretooth seemed to be running on all fours, the image made you terrified. You wanted to speed up but when a sharp pain hit you ankle you let yourself fall on the ground. Victor had clawed your skin and made you lose balance, the man pinned you against the ground with a feline grace, his hand cupping one side of your head holding it down, while you had sharp claws dangerously close to your eyes. Strangely he didn't seem as angry as you thought he would be, well, not that he wasn't mad at all, but since he didn't kill you right away it was a fair assumption he thought the hunt was exciting, especially judging by his hard on poking your back. Your squirmed under his body, which made him laugh.

"You afraid of the dark?" He asked you in a mocking tone. "You were about to cry, weren't you frail?"

You couldn't take it anymore.

"I HATE YOU VICTOR, I FUCKING HATE YOU" You screamed at man who now had a deadly serious expression.

"LET GO OF ME YOU DUMB ANIMAL, YOU ARE A MINDLESS MONSTER, A PSYCHO MURDERER!"

Victor had no idea why, but your words stung him. They made something in his chest sink, even if he didn't know what. He's been called that many times before, in fact, he's been called a lot worse, but for some reason those words coming from Y/N made him feel different, not a good different like when the girl smiled at him without realizing it, or when she shyly call him by his name instead of calling him Sabretooth like everybody else. That was a bad different, it was something that made rage build up inside of him and an urge of hurt another appear. He roughly grabbed her by her arm and made her face him.

"Mindless monster Y/N? I'll show you the mindless monster."

"No... I'm sorry, I mean..."

"Shut up, you stupid frail. You wanna know why they call me a monster?" The man was practically snarling as he dragged the girl to the nearest tree and forcefully opened her legs. He obviously wouldn't rape her, in fact he hated when he was called a rapist, he could be rough yes, but he had his ways of having frails willingly to be with him even if he had to pay for that. Sabretooth could be many things, but he wasn't a sex offender like the ones you see on those crime TV shows, or whatever people from that goddamned school told the new students and members of the team. Victor would rather cut off his balls than fuck one of those stuck up frail sluts from X-Men. Until he met Y/N. Victor wanted her, he craved that body every single day. She was the reason he would go to sleep with a hard on and wake up with another one. Because of that little bitch Victor's gotten into the habit of stroking himself in the shower just like a pathetic horny 15 year old. Creed wouldn't just force her, he was better than that, he would make her beg him to be fucked, he'd drive her insane to the point she'd crave his touch in the same intensity he craves her body. They would fuck like animals all day, but until then, he'd have to be a patient man.

"I was being nice to you frail, believe me. Grown men have died for a lot less than that, but since you wanted the beast here is the beast." Victor said with a roar as his claws sliced through her jeans making the clothing turn into pieces. He wasn't going to abuse her, but he wanted her to be terrified, he wanted her humiliated. Deep inside Creed had a secret desire of not to be seen as monster by the girl, he thought that if maybe someone, if maybe Y/N could see some humanity in him, then he would be able to see it as well. When the smell of her fear was all over the place Victor had a better idea. He quickly grabbed the girl and put her over his shoulder, using his feral speed to head back to the cabin.

※※※

Once inside, Y/N let out a relieved sigh, being there with him was better than being alone in the dark. You couldn't see his face but you were sure the man was on the verge of losing his temper. Outside was just an appetizer of what he could to you, and just because he did no harm to you yet, it didn't mean you were safe. He carelessly placed you in front of him, his eyes usually from a quite beautiful blue were dark with anger. He was panting as if he was trying to control himself.

"Victor, listen... I - I am sorry, I didn't mean to..."

You felt his burning gaze run from your face to you thighs. You realized you were only in a T-shirt and panties since he destroyed your jeans. Another spike of fear washed over you and the man seemed to soften up a little when he inhaled.

"Let's see the dumb animal now frail." He said in a low tone which was a lot scarier than if he had yelled at her. It wasn't the lone tone he used to talk dirty in an attempt to seduce Y/N, it was a cold tone, one that lacked emotions. Grabbing her arm, the feral man dragged her around the house until he stopped before a door. She gasped when she saw where he was taking her to his delight. He opened the door slowly, allowing it to make a creepy sound, similar to the ones we hear in cheesy horror movies.

You knew exactly what he was about to do and you already felt hot tears burning your eyes, you didn't want to cry, you didn't want to show him any weakness but it was too late. He made you go down the stairs and when you hit the lower floor he pushed you onto on of the columns, he quickly found a rope and used it to wrap around you. Tying you up there. He knelt in front of you so you could be face to face.

"So you are a little afraid of the dark, right princess? Well, then this mindless monster here, will give you a good reason to cry." He said with a bitter laugh.

"Night frail."

"No, no, no, Victor no. Please Victor don't leave me here, please." You pleaded him while he calmly went upstairs and turned off the lights, slamming the door shut.

※※※

Victor was already in bed, after emptying a couple of bottles of whisky he decided he'd go to sleep, but his slumber never came. Still in the kitchen his sensitive hearing could hear you begging and sobbing from the basement. Usually when people begged him or cried for mercy made him annoyed, disgusted even. But hearing his frail doing that brought an ache to his heart which made him drink even more. Once in his room, he shifted from one side of the bed to the other, unable to rest. When he closed his eyes he could only see one thing: A small too-skinny-to-be-healthy Victor chained inside of a basement waiting for his daily punishment. When his mutation kicked in he wasn't much older than a cub but still his "father" - if you can call a piece of shit like him that - thought it would be reasonable enough to keep him inside of that dark hideous place like a dog. That was what Victor knew as a good day, because on his bad days his father would show up drunk and pull out his claws and fangs, mumbling something about Victor being a demon or a monster. His healing factor has always worked fast which meant the next when his father showed up to visit, his claws and fangs would be there again, continuing the torture suffered from such a young age. Creed tried to convince himself he wasn't acting like his father and spending the night there was a far punishment for the frail. Besides, why would he care about a frail anyway? She was nothing to him, just a new toy that would be disposed the moment it got broken. His heart seemed to disagree though. Flashes of the frail crying and scared in the dark made his chest tightened and before he could stop himself, he was already crossing the cabin heading to the lower level.

He went down stairs and turned on the lights, for the first time taking a look at the girl since morning. She was sitting on the floor, curled up and looking down. She was full of dirt, some drops of blood and a few scratches. The girl had a healing factor too, not as powerful and fast as Victor's or the runt's but enough to keep her alive. However it would always take care of life threatening injuries or diseases first leaving minor problems such as scratches for a while before fading. She was shivering due to the low temperature in the room as well as her obvious lack of clothes.

"Victor?" She whispered, looking at him, her eyes red full of tears.

"Come on frail, stand up. It is time to go to bed."

You didn't even notice where he was taking you, you focused only on his hand holding your arm and the warmth irradiating from it. He didn't say a word, but the moment he touched you cold skin you thought something had crossed his eyes, a glimpse of regret maybe, but it didn't last long. His grip was tight on you, not enough to hurt, but you couldn't get away from it either and you wouldn't try it anyway, you figured flinching away from him would only make things worse. As you entered another room, you realized it was his room. You've been there briefly, only he demanded you to clean it up a couple of days after your abduction. It was very organized just like the rest of the cabin, it wasn't decorated at all, but Victor seemed to have a fine taste for colors, because it still looked great. The bed was huge, so the big feral man could sleep comfortably. He made you walk towards the bathroom finally letting go of your arm.

"You look like mess, frail, you'd better shower"

You just nodded, not daring say a word. He walked his way towards the shower setting things up for you. He looked at you again as if he was expecting something. You didn't move and the man sighed annoyed.

"Strip your clothes."

"But Victor.. I- I don't wan -"

"Strip. Your. Clothes. Frail."

He said towering you inches away from your body. You turned your back to him and took off the dirty shirt leaving it on the floor. When he dragged you to the basement you thought you couldn't feel more humiliated, but you were wrong. You slowly pulled down your panties as a single tear ran down your cheek. Before stepping in the shower, you looked back being sure you would see him watching your naked body, with a dirty smirk on his face, but to your surprise, he was already gone.

Once you had cleaned yourself up, you noticed Creed had left one of his shirts hung on the doorknob, you wanted to protest, you weren't just going to start wearing his clothes as if you were his girlfriend sleeping over. However, you were drained, physically and mentally and arguing with him would do no good. You put it on and watched yourself in the mirror. It didn't look that bad, since Victor was very tall, the shirt fitted you almost like a dress, the hem of it hanging around your mid thighs. You couldn't not notice the piece of cloth smelled good, it wasn't a cologne though, he didn't wear any of those since their scents were too strong for his sensitive senses. It smelled like earth and nature... it smelled like him.

Victor waited patiently outside of the door, as soon as you stepped out he looked you from head to toes, nodding to himself, approving what he saw. You tried to ignore it but he placed his hand on your shoulder and ran it down your back, stopping dangerously close to your ass. The man chuckled at the response your body gave to him and then ran his hand up your back again, this time placing it on the back of your neck, directing you to his bed.

"Time to sleep frail."

"Wha-What? In your bed?"

"Yeah, unless you wanna go back to the basement." He smirked seeing the horrid expression on your face. You shook your head right away, allowing him to lead you to the soft mattress.

You lay down next to each other, still feeling a bit uneasy to be so close to him, but not able to deny it felt good being in a warm comfortable bed. Not to mention Victor wasn't bad looking himself, in fact if he wasn't absolutely terrifying, he would be quite a catch. All the girls from school seemed to fangirl over Logan, but honestly, even before being taken by the man and seeing him so... 'close' you always secretly thought Victor was the hot brother and not the other way around. His arms suddenly wrapped around your waist and pulled you close to him. You gasped at the unexpected touch, his body was strong and dwarfed yours, you were so close you could feel his abs every time he took a breath, his face was next to your neck as you could feel his breathing tingling.

"Relax frail, I'm not gonna hurt ya"

He said in a soothing tone, and you felt yourself drifting off as his claws scraped your scalp in a relaxing motion. Victor waited until you fell asleep to unwrap his arms around of you. He took his time watching you peacefully sleep beside him. His eyes wondered through your body, with not only lust, but also admiration, you were such a beautiful deer after all. Unable to resist, he removed your hair from your neck exposing your tender soft skin, and he took his lips onto you, spreading ghostly kisses all over it.

Victor saw Y/N squirm and roll over, her head to his chest, thinking he had woken heru up, but she was still fast asleep, unconsciously her arms wrapped around his waist and she came closer, seeking his warmth. Creed had honestly to hold back a moan when he felt her arms around him. It was so different from what he usually felt with frails. He didn't make a move, too concerned she would wake up and reject him again. He allowed himself to relax and as he started to drift off himself.

Earlier that day, she made him feel like a beast but now the beast was gone and he felt just like a man, only because of her again.

[katiehavok]

Newtina headcannons: what kinds of disagreements pop up throughout their marriage? (I saw a post by Megan the other day about them arguing over cosleeping- N in favor and T against- and this is totally my new headcannon now) but interested to hear your thoughts. Also, you've talked about WWI, what about WWII? Especially given a) Grindelwald still happening and b) Tina being Jewish

The first obstacle they have to overcome is Leta. I don’t mean that Leta comes between them because it’s made pretty clear at the end of the movie that Newt is...if not over her, then well on the way to being over her. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, after all, and being away from Tina is only going to push him closer to Tina. The issue is going to be Tina’s insecurities--which only she can address and do something about. So that will be their first challenge.

Their second challenge will be where to live. Tina will most likely not want to be far away from her sister, but Newt can’t legally have his creatures in America. So, they’ll have to work out the particulars of that. My thinking is that they have a fairly long engagement (we're talking years,) carried on through regular letters and quick visits whenever one or the other has time. 

When they do finally wed, it is only after Jacob and Queenie have moved to Europe to elope, therefore taking the “big sister burden” off of Tina.

The children issue is a little tricky because I can see it going in so many possible directions. However, my strongest head-canon/hunch is that they will have amazingly few childcare-related disagreements. 

Neither Newt or Tina are very heavy sleepers: Newt because he has to be on high-alert for his creatures, Tina by dint of what she does for a living. So while I doubt either one of them would be comfortable with directly co-sleeping (i.e. the baby in the bed with them), having the bassinet, cradle or Moses Basket directly beside the bed is a very viable compromise. This allows them both to keep an eye and ear on the baby, as well as allow Tina easy access for nighttime nursing (I don’t see Newt or Tina as using formula, or at least not very often, if only because of costs concerns. While pumping technology was in its very infancy, I imagine there’s a spell Tina can use to extract a certain quantity of breastmilk and keep in stasis so Newt can take a nighttime feeding or two.)

Newt’s the “earthier” of the two parents. While Tina prefers the pram, Newt’s all about carrying that kid around on his chest. While Tina wants to stay indoors on a warm day, Newt’s all “Ricketts, Tina!” and takes the baby for a walk around the block to soak up the sun, or down into the case to meet the (gentlest) creatures. While Tina burns through every parenting advice book on the market (historical note: these books were...incredibly bad) Newt is all about listening to the child and following its lead to determine how best to parent. 

(Also, Newt absolutely used a rudimentary baby carrier of some sort. Someone, PLEASE draw this!)

Tina eventually comes over to this way of thinking, though it takes a long while, many sleepless nights, and an enduring bout of post-partum depression to get her there... (before anyone accuses me of misogyny or anything like that, please remember that Tina being high-strung is canon, and that new mother’s face a variety of crushing pressures: from society, from their family, but most of all, from themselves. Newt’s job is going to be to hold her together while she adjusts, but once she’s where she needs to be, she’s going to be the best damn mother their little Scamanderling could ever hope to have!)

When WWII breaks out, Newt and Tina decide at first to remain in America. This is for the most prosaic of reasons: there are no concentration camps in the US (at least, not for Jewish people...the Japanese had a bad time of it, though) and very little chance of either of them being called to serve. 

However, this doesn’t stop Tina (who’s done with having children--they have the one, and she has no wish to endure all that again) from itching to go off and join the fight against both Grindelwald and Hitler. 

This is the only true argument Newt and Tina have over the entire course of their marriage, one that ends with a long and enduring bout of stony silence from Tina, and many, many tears from Newt. 

Eventually, Newt recognizes that his Tina is a warrior and that he had agreed to accept her entirely when he asked for her hand in marriage. So, with heavy reluctance, he doesn’t give her permission to go so much as he realizes that she needs to go, and no longer puts up a fight about it. His only stipulation is that he and their son move to Hogwarts in the interim so they can be closer to the fight should she ever need them (read: should she be injured or placed in danger of death.)

Tina agrees, and Newt sends off a letter to Professor Dumbledore to see if his old school happens to need a Care of Magical Creatures professor. As luck would it have, they do, and the family leaves for England two weeks later.

We know that Tina survives the war, though I don’t imagine she survived it entirely intact. She came home with a heavy burden of battle fatigue and was prone to long fugues of depression, bouts often punctuated by either fitful sobbing (which was bad) or catatonic silence (which was much, much worse.) Newt does what he can to help her through it, and during one particularly bad episode, he sends their son off to Aunt Queenie’s for a few weeks so he and Tina can spend some intense one-on-one time together, during which time he encourages her to remove the worst of her memories from her mind if only to bring her some measure of relief.

She does eventually take his advice, and it brings about marked improvement...but his Tina is never quite the same after WWII, and from what he’d seen of her thoughts, Newt can’t find it in himself to hold it against her.

During this jaunt of healing, on a particularly good day when Tina was able to smile at him, Newt takes her for a walk along the beach in Dorset. There, they find a little stone cottage, long-neglected but with an air of familiarity about it that they both immediately attach to; Tina finds herself picturing rose bushes and a vegetable garden. Newt imagines a small shed magically expanded to hold his menagerie, what little of it is left.

Together, they contact the owner by tacit, unspoken agreement. They purchase the cottage and the little plot of land it comes with for a very reasonable price, hardly putting a dent in their savings. Moving there proves to be a boon: their son thrives on the English sun, the sand, and the crash of the waves. Tina finds some measure of peace in their little home, and long walks on the beach calm her when she finds herself feeling especially claustrophobic. 

Tina secures employment with the MoM after officially immigrating and rockets through the chain-of-command in a short time. Newt remains with the beast division nominally, though, in reality, he’s too independent for that, and churns out a new edition of his book, on average, every 18 months--a task made much easier once their son is off at Hogwarts. 

They retire within a year of each other, and spend the remainder of their days in their little cottage, raising their Kneazles and grandchildren (and later, great-grandchildren) and simply loving each other.

[redeyedroid]

CW for war.

How Do You Hunt a U-Boat, or: How a Scottish Lesbian Became a Leading Expert on Anti-Submarine Warfare.

The Allies - and here, I'm mostly talking about the Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy. More Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea than Tom Hanks in Greyhound. Because it was the British and Canadians that did the bulk of fighting in the Atlantic - had a lot of problems when it came to sinking U-Boats, even when they roughly knew where one was. For one, the primitive and less sophisticated forms of sonar (asdic, in the parlance of the day) the ships of the time were equipped with had blind spots. The sonar pointed forward and the depth charges were pushed off the back of a ship. A clever U-boat commander, and many of them were, would move away and make the destroyer or corvette miss.

One way they solved this was by developing a system called hedgehog. A spigot mortar, firing a pattern of bombs ahead of the attacking ship while the U-Boat was still in sonar contact. The bombs exploded on contact with a submarine, cracking it open and allowing immense water pressure to crush the hull and kill the crew. (Just over 40,000 Germans went to sea in U-Boats in the Second World War. About 75% were killed. It was, by far, the most dangerous service to be a part of in the Second World War.)

That's just one of the issues - and there were many - the men at sea had when it came to hunting U-Boats, in this case a technical one. Solved with engineering in a very typically British way (a part of British wartime R&D decided spigot mortars were the solution to every explodable problem), but there were others that could not be fixed by a man in a white coat.

Questions about U-boat tactics. Questions about how to predict where the Germans would be. Human questions that required human answers to be found.

Militaries love to play games as much as they love bombing around fields in tanks. You can predict a lot from a game, if the game is played honestly. Very famously, the Japanese wargames before Midway were not played honestly. And, well...

Enter Western Approaches Tactical Unit. Based in Liverpool, Western Approaches was where the Battle of the Atlantic was co-ordinated. And on the top floor, Captain Gilbert Roberts played games to try to divine German tactics. And he did so with a staff made up of young women in the Women's Royal Naval Service. Wrens. One who joined in 1942 was a 19-year-old called Janet Okell, another a chartered accountant in her twenties by the name of Jean Laidlaw.

Roberts and the Wrens played games. Working collaboratively, they refought battles, plotting out the courses and fates of convoys and ships to work out the tactics used by U-Boats, and when they had, they played more to develop countermeasures, trying and rejecting existing tactics and replacing them with ones of their own design. Ones that worked. Then they taught those new tactics to the men who commanded the ships and escort groups that sailed the Atlantic, running courses that lasted 6 days, Monday to Saturday, for over 3 years through the worst, most critical phases of the Battle of the Atlantic. Roberts the ringmaster as the Wrens made it work for the thousands of men who went through the course. Men with years of seagoing experience from all the Allied navies. Canadians, Americans, Australians, British, South Africans, Poles, French. Up to 50 at a time. All receiving instruction and training from Wrens, playing games against them on the floor of WATU, courses plotted in chalk, with cotton wool representing burning ships, deferring to the tactical knowledge of women in their teens and early twenties who never commanded at sea. One of those officers, Nicholas Monsarrat, later wrote the novel of The Cruel Sea.

On one occasion, Okell and Laidlaw played against Max Horton, the admiral commanding Western Approaches, himself a distinguished submarine commander from the Great War.

Playing from behind a screen as escort commanders, with Horton the U-Boat, they sank him 5 times in a row. As they stood there sheepishly, having humiliated their commander, Horton accused them of cheating. They had not. They had not needed to.

The existence of the unit was well known. A picture of Roberts hung in U-Boat HQ with the words "this is your enemy" on it. But WATU's success was as much down to the Wrens and their - sometimes instinctive, sometimes learned, most often both - tactical expertise.

The courses ran until July 1945, long after the U-Boat threat had been crushed. Many of the Wrens who served in the unit transferred out after a short or even a long time, but Okell and Laidlaw remained part of WATU until the end.

We don't know much about Jean Laidlaw. The memoir she left was unthinkingly thrown away by her nephew after her death. Few of the Wrens left any record of their time at WATU. She went back to work as a chartered accountant after the war and lived with her partner, Beryl, then alone, quietly, until she passed in 2008. I hope she continued to play games and I really hope she continued schooling men on how to win.

[redeyedroid]

CW for war

In the face of the specatular success of the German offensive that would culminate in cacophonous horror in the ruins of Stalingrad and the defeat of the Wehrmacht's 6th Army, on July 28th 1942 Stalin issued Order 227. Similar in many ways to the previous year's Order 270, it exhorted the men of the Red Army to stop retreating. It is also known by it's most famous sentence: "Not one step back!"

But tactical withdrawls are sometimes necessary. Could be to straighten the line and free up troops. Could be that there's a honking great mountain or river that's a much better position to defend. And it could be that soldiers, too long in action, too outmatched, break because their morale and will to fight is gone. So, being Stalin and neither well disposed to the wellbeing of his soldiers, or the idea that his commanders should have independence of action, he made sure that there was a mailed fist and a kick in the nuts for people who did not take on board his patriotic urges.

Order 227 directed that commanders of units that made unauthorised withdrawls be court-martialled. That penal battalions be established where the unexecuted guilty could be sent to atone for their crimes with blood by doing things like attack across minefields.

And that blocking detachments be formed so that troops could be prevented from retreating, arrested and court-martialled if they did, or summarily shot if they couldn't be bothered with the paperwork.

We know Putin - as far as he has any ideology - admires the most successful Russian leaders. Greats Peter and Catherine, and Stalin. He despises Lenin, who he perceives as having created the conditions for the break-up of the Russian Empire, but sees Stalin as the man who took it to it's greatest extent.

This is one report, but it seems like Putin has taken a lot more from Stalin than authoritarianism, the ruthless destruction of political rivals, and expansionist leanings.

[redeyedroid]

CW: War.

Edinburgh, my home town, has been around for a long, long time. There's traces of Mesolithic, Bronze and Iron Age settlements and a Roman Fort in the area.  The Votadini of Roman times became the Gododdin of the early medieval and gave their name to an epic poem in old Welsh of an army journeying from here to do battle with the Angles at a place called Catraeth. In the manner of such tales, they were resoundingly defeated and much of the poem reads as sad epitaphs memorialising the martial prowess of their slain warriors.

The castle sits on a plug of rock millions of years old, the only part left of an extinct volcano whose slopes long ago eroded to nothing, while the part of the city known as The New Town dates from the late 18th century and was planned before the 13 colonies declared independence from the crown.

Which is to say that there's a lot of history bound up in the buildings and places here. A lot of it should remind us of the worst parts of our story - street names and statues of people and places associated with the triangle trade abound. Two slave owners have lived in Bute House, now the official residence of the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon. Oddly, there's a plaque in memorium to a man from Edinburgh killed with Custer at Greasy Grass in a church at the west end of Princes Street.

At the other end of Princes Street, there is a graveyard which has the only US Civil War memorial outside the USA. Built to honour abolitionists from the city who fought for the Union, it was also the first statue of a US president erected outside the USA. Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, sits above a shoeless black man who gazes up at him in supplication. Very much Of It's Time, it is nonetheless interesting, and is sited near a monument to radicals transported to Australia at the end of the 18th century for sedition, being found to be in favour of the French Revolution a little too much.

There are lots of memorials to war dead in the city, for we have fought too many wars. One isn't even to men killed in war, but to soldiers from the city who died in the worst rail disaster in British history at Gretna in 1915. That one has the name of a distant relative of mine on it.

The most famous statue in the city is of Greyfriers Bobby, a dog mythologised many times, notably in a syrupy movie by Disney, as guarding the grave of it's owner for over a decade in the 19th century. No one knows the truth of the dog's story, but the legend has become fact and there are almost always tourists taking pictures at the bronze statue of the terrier, it's nose polished by countless hands.

One of the most recent - only having been in place since 2017 - is of a bear. It too is made of bronze, it's friendly nose and ears now as shiny as Bobby's. Children climb on it. It sits in the public gardens below the castle, on a plinth of Polish granite, because Wojtek the Bear was Polish, by way of Iran and this is a memorial, not just to him, but to the Poles who served and settled in Scotland.

The beginning of the Second World War in Europe is well known. Germany invaded Poland on the 1st September 1939 and Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. The Soviet invasion of Poland two weeks later, a cynicism born of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, gets less attention.

Neither tyranny had any desire to see a flourishing Poland and did their best to eliminate Polish leadership and intelligensia. SS Einsatzgruppen murdered people en masse, and the Soviet NKVD did similar - 30,000 Polish officers were murdered at Katyn on Stalin's orders. Many more Poles were deported into the vast spaces of the USSR to labour in camps or farms or factories until they became politically inconvenient after Germany invaded in June 1941 and the Soviets found themselves on the same side as the Poles.

Stalin eventually ceded to pressure from London and allowed the deported Poles to leave the USSR to British controlled Persia. Many failed to make it before he closed the border again. Many died on the way. Of those that made it, lots would join the army and be organised into the Polish II Corps under General Władysław Anders, and it was some of these men who would encounter a bear cub for sale. They traded for it and took it back to their unit, an artillery supply company, where they tried to keep it's existence secret - unsuccessfully of course, because how do you keep a bear secret? Bears are not famous for being inconspicuous.

A Syrian brown bear, the cub was weak and malnourished, the men fed it milk from empty vodka bottles, because Poles are nothing if not cliched that way, and it quickly became something more than a mascot for them. They named it Wojtek - Joyful Warrior - and there are stories of him using up all the water when he figured out how showers work; of foiling a robbery when an Arab snuck into an armoury to steal guns, only to find a bear looking for a cool place to nap; and of falling deathly sick for 3 days after being stung by a scorpion. They played with him and wrestled with him and fed him beer and cigarettes and did their best to look after him until the unit was scheduled to deploy to Italy and they hit a problem.

No pets or mascots were allowed to travel.

So they enlisted him.

He became Private Wojtek (later promoted to lance-corporal) and made his way to Italy with the rest of the unit.

Polish II Corps was heavily involved in the Italian campaign, most notably around Cassino, where they took the ruined monastery and cracked the Gustav Line. Wojtek was part of the long logistical tail of the Allied forces, his unit taking supplies up to artillery batteries near the front. He would help unload the trucks, a 300lb bear being of great use in carrying cases of 25lb shells and such; and he would look for food and attention by wandering into areas occupied by other units where he would make friends with soldiers there.

After the war, the Poles came to Scotland to demob. Poland had fallen under Stalin's control and they had no home to return to. The USSR annexed the part of Poland it conquered in 1939. Very few of the men who served under Anders went back. The unit disbanded and some of the men stayed in Scotland, as did Wojtek. The communist regime in Poland wanted him, but he was given a home instead in Edinburgh Zoo, and this is how I know the story. My dad, a wee boy at the time, saw him during visits to the zoo and told me about him. Wojtek spent the rest of his life delighting in the attention he received, never more so than when exiled Poles came and spoke to him in Polish, the language he knew best.

There are awkward parts to the story. It raises questions about animal welfare. Wojtek was a wild animal, conditioned to human contact, taken into a war zone. Not brilliant when considered today. But what was the alternative? The men looked after him as best they could and - by their own account - saw similarities in the bear orphaned by hunters and themselves, made stateless by war. They considered him more than a mascot and much more than a pet. Wojtek lived into his twenties and died in 1963. He was cared for. In captivity, yes, but cared for nonetheless. That wouldn't have happened if that small group of Poles hadn't bought him from a from a shepherd boy in Persia who had been keeping him in a sack.

[redeyedroid]

CW for war, bombing, and descriptions of horror.

Valentine's night is the anniversary of one of the most controversial events of the Second World War, the bombing of Dresden. The Combined Bombing Offensive itself is profoundly controversial, the morality of it debated and questioned for nearly 80 years now.

Dresden is a lightning rod to both the far left and right, though for different reasons. The left use it to accuse the arch imperialist, Winston Churchill of being a war criminal. Neo-Nazis use it to say that Germany was innocent and German civilians were the real victims of genocide. And there are others beyond these people, who remember because they either know the full story, or don't, because they know something awful happened that should be commemorated and we should do everything we can to prevent anything like it happening again.

This is footage of a raid on Pforzheim that took place shortly after the attack on Dresden. A small town in southwest Germany, very little of pre-war Pforzheim remains, because the RAF destroyed 83% of the town that night, and killed a quarter of it's population in ways identical to what happened in Dresden. The tactics and manner of the raid were the same. But Dresden is widely remembered and Pforzheim is not.

And this is because Josef Goebbels intended for Dresden to be.

The Nazi propaganda apparatus made Dresden world famous, inflating the death toll and it's effects, to portray Germany as the victim of Allied aggression. Holocaust denier, anti-semite and goat-fucking piece of shit, David Irving repeated Nazi lies (and added a few of his own) when he wrote about the raid in the 60s. Kurt Vonnegut, who was in the city that night and survived the raid, used Irving's account as source material when writing Slaughterhouse Five.

The myths have taken root while the truth is as horrific, if not worse.

Dresden and Pforzheim were stops on a long line that began with Zeppelins in 1915 and went through towns and cities including Guernica, Rotterdam, Coventry, Hamburg and Tokyo before ending at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Airpower was a novel concept in The Great War, the technology undeveloped. The Germans bombed the UK, killing 1,414 civilians, and - less well known - the British dropped 660 tons of bombs on Germany. Bombing was largely ineffective, in strategic terms, achieving little, but heralded an era where the aeroplane would dominate.

Between the wars, influential theorists like Giulio Douhet predict the destruction of civilisations, entire wars decided by countries being bombed into dust, their populations giving up en masse under a rain of bombs. These ideas are very seductive to interwar generals and air marshals, starved for funding and relevance, and give rise to a generation of proponents eager, when they get the chance, to win a war with air power alone.

The Germans try and, their air force not designed, equipped or led for the task, fail. The Blitz will kill thousands of British civilians and cause great suffering, but does not bring about the collapse of the UK's economy, nor break the morale and will to resist of it's people.

(This gives rise to a strange and awful exceptionalism. When it is pointed out that bombing had not broken Britain's population, and expecting it to do so to Germany's was a shaky idea, this will be dismissed. The British are made of sterner stuff than the German, you see; and, if it hasn't worked so far, this is merely a case of not enough bombs having been dropped and shows the need for vast numbers more to be dropped.)

It will be the British and Americans that truly attempt to bomb their enemies into submission.

The strategies differ. The Americans prefer to fight in daylight, concentrating attacks against industrial and transportation targets, claiming a precision to their attacks that doesn't exist in practice. They use close formation as defence, their bombers equipped with large numbers of machine guns to fight back against German interceptors. Later, they use escort fighters to engage the Germans and, in huge air battles in late 1943 and early 1944, they break the Luftwaffe's ability to contest the air.

The RAF operates differently. Bomber Command flies by night, and targets population centres. Navigating to target is a problem. They struggle to drop bombs within 5 miles of the target and it is only with the coming of large, four-engined bombers and a new leader in Arthur Harris that the campaign coheres in 1942 and 1943.

Harris is a demagogue, steadfastly refusing to allocate his aircraft to tasks he sees as distractions from the main effort of destroying German cities. He will fight the navy, who want him to bomb German U-Boat bases and who need long-range aircraft to patrol the Atlantic. He will argue against bombing the U-Boat's bases in France. His crews will call him 'Butch'. Not out of affection, but for his seeming indifference to the appalling losses they suffer. It is short for 'Butcher'. But he is a very effective administrator and moulds a new, highly destructive force that will lay waste to Germany.

They study the construction of German buildings, calculate the correct mix of high explosive and incendiary bombs and determine how best to make cities burn. Their bombers carry 4,000lb blast bombs nicknamed cookies and small incendiary bombs. The cookies devastate buildings and roads, creating craters, rubble and huge obstacles that hinder rescue and fire-fighting. But that is not their main purpose. The shock wave from their explosions blow out doors and windows in a large area, creating airflow for fires. The RAF drop 68,000 cookies on Germany and 3 million phosphorous incendiaries, because phosphorous cannot be extinguished by water. Bullet-shaped, they punch through roofs, into attics, offices, shops and homes, setting fire to whatever they can, wherever they land.

In the footage of the Pforzheim raid, you can see the flashes of high explosive bombs detonating, the fires caused by incendiaries, and 55 seconds in you can see clusters of target indicators falling slowly into the inferno.

The British employ fireworks companies to develop slow-burning flares of different colours and intensities. They use these target indicators to mark where bombers are to drop bombs. They identify a phenomenon known as creepback - the natural tendancy of bomber crews to drop bombs slightly short so they can get the hell out and go home - and factor it into their planning, setting aiming points beyond the part of a city they want bombed, allowing creepback to sweep the whole city instead. Mass destruction becomes a scientific pursuit.

Master Bombers are introduced, senior airmen who orbit cities at altitudes above the bomber stream and direct the bombing. At Dresden, the Master Bomber will see the primary target overwhelmed with flame and direct bombers onto new parts of the city to burn as much of the city as possible.

The RAF fly diversions, spoofing attacks against cities far away from the real targets. They fly nuisance raids on nights when the main force is resting. They fly precision attacks against specific targets - famously on a night in May 1943 two dams in the Ruhr valley are breached by bouncing bombs. Harris does not like such missions and lends them little support, though he will take credit.

It is euphemistically called area bombing, the attacks against cities a campaign of 'dehousing' when what it is is an attempt to kill German civilians, the workers that keep the economy functioning and their families.

A thousand bombers are sent to Cologne in May 1942, but it is Operation Gomorrah, a week-long campaign against Hamburg a year later that realises the potential of area bombing.

Atmospheric conditions are good, the deployment of a new invention called window - strips of aluminium foil that disrupts radar - renders German defences ineffective, and the introduction of H2S - the world's first ground-mapping radar, and which picks up Hamburg's geography very well - means that bombing is very accurate. Gomorrah is a great success for Bomber Command.

The fourth raid of the week, on 27th July 1943, will see fires combine and burn so intensely a column of superheated air will rush skywards. This sucks in air at ground level, feeding the flames. Winds reach 150mph. Fires burn at 800 degrees celsius and reach 300m into the heavens. 8 square miles of Hamburg is devastated in one of the first documented firestorms of the war. It will become the aim of the RAF to do this on every raid to every city they attack. What happens to Dresden and Pforzheim will not be accidental.

40,000 people die in Hamburg that week. Most are buried in mass graves, their bodies unidentified, testament to the horrific ways they are killed.

Some will die in explosions, their bodies torn to pieces, or are left seemingly untouched, their internal organs pulverised. Others are trapped or crushed under collapsing buildings. They are gassed by the fumes caused by detonations, or suffocated as fires suck the air from their shelters. They burn alive, their bodies reduced to ash. They boil and roast as the firestorm takes hold. Oil and fuel from storage tanks spreads across the harbour and waterways and ignites, preventing escape. The charred corpses of adults shrink to the size of small children. The tar on the streets melts, trapping fleeing civilians who then die, stuck to roads as the city burns around them.

Later in the year, the Allies, thinking forward to the invasion of Normandy and seeing air supremacy as a prerequisite to success, will issue the POINTBLANK directive, aiming their airforces at German aircraft manufacture and industry. The USAAF lose 585 men in a single raid on the ball bearing plants at Schweinfurt and Regensburg in August 1943.

Harris pays lip service to POINTBLANK, continuing to bomb German cities. He embarks on a long campaign against Berlin that winter, deviating occasionally to attack other targets. Berlin, modern, with wide streets, massive ferroconcrete flak towers and sophisticated air defences, resists the assault and doesn't burn. On 31st March 1944, the RAF suffers it's worst day of the war, losing 96 bombers and 691 men on a raid against Nuremberg.

Bombing switches to targets in support of the invasion, both before and after D-Day. Harris will be brought in line and reluctantly sends Bomber Command against targets throughout France. Thousands of French civilians perish under American and British bombs.

Later, as the war in Europe enters it's final phases, the bombers switch back to attacking targets in Germany. They destroy what remains of the German oil industry, and then do the same to it's transport network, crippling it's economy beyond salvage. The intensity and scale of the attacks defy imagination. The Allies drop more bombs on German-occupied Europe in 1945 than they do from 1939 to 1943.

And they attack Dresden.

The Red Army is closing in on Germany's borders and Dresden is a transport hub, shuttling troops and supplies from west to east. It's industries are critical. And it is untouched. It has not been bombed. The rumour is that Winston Churchill has family living there and has ordered the RAF to leave it alone. It's leadership is incompetent and has not prepared for a raid or built large public shelters. It's defences have been stripped, anti-aircraft guns sent to the front or other cities. The RAF only lose 6 bombers, 3 of which are hit by bombs from other aircraft.

The RAF hit neither Dresden's rail yards, nor it's industries, which are concentrated in the suburbs. It targets the old town, densely packed with narrow streets, and it burns. A firestorm rapidly overwhelms it's emergency services and consumes the city. Maybe 25,000 die. Maybe more. USAAF bombers attack the city the following day, hampering rescue efforts. Some of the Americans get lost and bomb Prague instead.

10 days later, the RAF bomb Pforzheim, killing 17,600 people.

In March, the USAAF creates a firestorm in Tokyo. At least 90,000 Japanese die. High-level attacks over Japan are ineffective because the jetstream prevents accurate formation bombing. So the Americans use low-level attacks using napalm incendiary bombs. Bombers return from Tokyo with their aluminium fuselages blackened by smoke. Some bombers, caught in turbulence created by the firestorm, crash.

Japanese cities, their housing traditionally made of wood, are turned to ash and cinder. US bombers drop so many incendiaries on Japan that operations are temporarily suspended because they run out of supplies. Then, in August, they drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Later, one of the justifications offered for the nuclear strikes - and one that dismisses the long-term effects of radiation - will be that they were much less bad than what was already being done to Japan's cities.

55,573 Bomber Command aircrew and around 600,000 German civilians were killed in the campaign to destroy Germany from the air. It was undoubtedly effective. The German economy was dealt massive, decisive blows from which it could not survive and prosper. The lost production, the resources devoted to repairing and restructuring industry, and to defending Germany from the bombers marked a definitive success for the Allies. 30% of German artillery production was devoted to anti-aircraft weaponry. It's aircraft production became so decentralised that the wings, fuselages and cockpits of aircraft would be constructed in different locations and brought to another to be assembled. Complexes were built into tunnels under mountains to protect from attack. Large detachments of workers were organised to repair factories and help industry recover from raids.

But while the bomber's contribution went a long way to winning the war, it remains a war-winning failure. Just like the British before them, German morale did not break. Armies had to conquer the Nazi realm. The navy had to maintain control of the oceans. Air power did not win the war alone.

The bombing campaign can be argued from a position of necessity. Britain had no other way of engaging with Nazi Germany on mainland Europe from May 1940 until mid-1943. This was intolerable to those running the war, both in Britain and abroad. For political, military and economic reasons, Germany had to be bombed.

The morality and ethics of it is a much harder thing grapple with. Wars escalate and radicalise and warp the worldviews of those involved. They are snowglobes of horror and atrocity. Choices that seemed unthinkable at the beginning became obvious and logical the longer the war went on. The lives of enemy civilians mattered far less than the lives of Allied servicemen and women, and amid the escalating evils and devastation perpetrated by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan the arguments of ruthless men like Harris and the USAAF's Curtis LeMay appeared reasonable. The scale of death and destruction got exponentially larger as technology developed and militaries learnt and became more efficient. Pre-war moralities were abandoned in favour of a victory that had to be total. Bombing shortened the war. It is unknowable if that led to fewer people dying. Or, even if it did, whether that made it the right thing to do in the circumstances.

It is a terrible and grotesque thing to deliberately go out night after night to kill as many civilians as possible in the unproven belief that it will bring about victory. Had the RAF concentrated against industrial and transportation targets, it would likely have had a greater effect on the course of the war and killed far fewer civilians. What was done sits very uneasily with me.

To my mind any moral justification rests on one thing. When, twelve weeks after Dresden, Germany surrendered, the bombing stopped. If the Allies had lost, the killing would have only just started.

Further reading:

[redeyedroid]

CW for war, disease and mass death.

What's the worst time and place to be a human in history? Julius Caesar's armies killed maybe a million people and enslaved a million others in the conquest of Gaul. Genghis Khan's slaughtered so many people that 700 million tons of CO2 were supposedly scrubbed from the atmosphere. Cromwell's New Model Army followed the laws of war as they were understood in the mid-17th century far better than most of their contemporaries and still embarked on near-genocidal campaigns in Ireland.

Then there are the pandemics. The Plague of Justinian and the Black Death, both caused by a simple bacteria, yersinia pestis. The apocalypse brought to the indigenous peoples of the Americas by European invaders killed 90% of the population of North America and led to a besieged, disease-ridden populace wiped out as Cortes's conquistadors brought down the Aztecs in their capital of Tenochtitlan.

On and on it goes and there is no sign of it ever stopping.

The Second World War gave so many more names to add to the list. Factories of death forever associated with mass murder. Fewer than 10 people are known to have survived Belzec. 67 survived Treblinka. A couple of hundred broke out of Sobibor and made it to the end of the war. Auschwitz was the pinnacle of the Nazi extermination machine and a place of unimaginable horror, but it is known because people survived.

There was brutal combat on numerous small Pacific islands and over jungle-covered mountains where Japanese forces had to be wiped out because they would not surrender and where to be taken prisoner by them was to be tortured to death. After 8 years of war against China, the Japanese repatriated 57 POWs.

There was death in the Atlantic where merchant sailors - civilians, technically - died in oil-covered, burning seas, or froze in arctic wastes, or drowned, or simply vanished, their fates unknown.

And there are so many towns and cities to remember. 350,000 dead before the war is traditionally held to have begun, chronicled in Iris Chang's book, The Rape of Nanking. The freezing, starving siege of Leningrad where maybe a million died and some capitulated to the temptation of cannibalism and survived, or were caught and executed, or starved anyway. The Götterdämmerung of the Nazi state when the Red Army took a devastated Berlin and indulged in mass rape. Dresden. Hiroshima. Nagasaki.

Thousands of places where noone tells the story of the murders that took place, because only the murderers survived. Thousands more where soldiers fought and died over a cluster of buildings, large and small.

Among these, there is the greatest symbol of the struggle of annihilation between Nazi Germany and the USSR. Among these there is Stalingrad.

Today, Feb 2nd 2023 is the 80th anniversary of the end of what is held to be the largest battle in human history. For a war where books have endlessly proclaimed the events the describe to be turning points or decisive, Stalingrad is as close to that actually being true as you find. It was the high water mark of Nazi conquest. After it, they never held the strategic initiative again. 1943 would be a year where it's defeat, inevitable before, would be made clear.

For 6 months the Red Army and German 6th Army fought over a ribbon of urban landscape 10 miles long on the river Volga, named after a tyrant maybe responsible for more dead than his opponent (though not for want of trying on Hitler's part. Had the Germans won, tens of millions more would have died. This is not supposition. This is explicitly what the Generalplan Ost laid out for the conquered east.) until the broken remnants of German forces finally surrendered, weeks after the outcome had been decided.

Maybe a million soldiers were killed in the campaign, either on the steppe outside the city in summer, autumn and winter of 1942, or in the city itself, where they fought over the ruins, men taking and holding buildings with grenade and submachine gun. Bayonet and club. Sharpened shovels wielded like hatchets were preferred weapons in the close, hand-to-hand combat that took place. The Rattenkrieg - rat's war - as the Germans referred to the subterranean, hidden war where to reveal yourself risked dying to a sniper's bullet. The Soviets positioned themselves as close to the Germans as possible, to limit the effectiveness of German firepower. Thousands of civilians were killed in bombing before the 6th Army reached Stalingrad. Thousands would be evacuated across the Volga by the Soviets or deported by the Germans to the living hell of slave labour in Germany. Some, against all odds, survived in the smoke-filled, cacophonous hell the city became.

The Soviets held on, somehow, to tiny areas of the city. They had no choice. To retreat was to die. Stalin made that very clear. He issued orders declaring that to retreat, to surrender, was to commit treason. The NKVD put in blocking detachments to prevent withdrawal. Red Army soldiers arrested by them were executed or sent to penal battalions. Rarely, they might be released. Many more were summarily shot by their officers.

Replacements and supplies were ferried across the Volga, under fire from the Germans on the heights above the western bank. Anthony Beevor says that of the original 10,000 men of the 13th Guards Rifle Division which went into the city in September 1942 only 300 were still alive in February. (I'm not sure I believe that. 300 is a mythic number evoking heroic Spartans at Thermopylae. It's a little convenient for me.) They reorganised and employed small storm groups of infantry to engage the Germans at close quarters. They fought at night, because the impression was that the Germans feared the hours of darkness. They took terrible losses holding on to their tiny enclaves.

The Germans struggled with logistics and replacements. The combat units, ground down by the Soviets were strengthened by rear echelon troops - cooks, supply clerks, maintenance men and engineers. Men who were barely trained in infantry tactics, let alone in the intense urban combat skills needed in the rubble of Stalingrad. And slowly and surely, the combat strength of 6th Army was sucked into the hell of Stalingrad and fell victim to a Soviet strategic masterstroke.

On the 19th November, the Soviets launched a massive counteroffensive to the north of the city. Another attack began to the south a day later. The Soviet armour and artillery cut through weakly defended lines held by Romanian and Italian troops, because the German focus was on the blasted ruins of Stalingrad. On the 23rd, the two prongs of the Red Army met at a village called Kalach, encircling a quarter of a million men.

6th Army requested permission to break out. Hitler, grasping for symbolic victory denied them (though there were strategic reasons, too. 6th Army encircled pinned down Soviet forces and allowed German armies in the Caucasus to withdraw). Göring, hubristic, playing for Hitler's favour promised to supply 6th Army by air. A divisional commander initiated a break out on his own, hoping the rest of 6th Army would follow, but they didn't and his men were cut to pieces. A German operation to relieve the encircled men ground to a halt less than 15 miles from their positions. The Soviets set up loudspeakers opposite the Germans and played the sound of a clock on loop with the message, read by German communists in exile that every 7 seconds a German died in Russia.

Resupply by air failed.

In the New Year the Soviets attacked the pocket and destroyed the 6th Army. It took them weeks of bitter fighting in the cold, snow-covered battlefield. Eventually, what was left was pinned against the Volga, a strange inverse of the position Stalingrad's defenders had found themselves in September. Units collapsed and melded together, but discipline held in most cases. 6th Army's commander, Friedrich Paulus, was promoted to Field Marshal - a poison apple. The unspoken order from Hitler that accompanied it was for Paulus to shoot himself. He refused and surrendered himself on the 31st, leaving a more junior officer to officially surrender the 6th Army two days later.

90,000 men were taken into captivity. half-starved, ill, wounded, exhausted, they were thrown into a prison system that valued human life very little and where they were exposed to not only the vengeance of the authorities, but also of the zeks already there. Only around 6,000 survived to return to Germany. The last German POWs were released from Soviet captivity in the mid-1950s, several years after Stalin's death.

There are far too many places and events to consider, but for a little while at least, Stalingrad was probably the worst place in the world to be.

[redeyedroid]

I often think that the creation myth of modern Britain is the summer of 1940. France has fallen. We stand alone against Nazi Germany. Invasion is imminent. Only the RAF stands between the free world and darkness. Back to the wall, massively outnumbered, with luck and fortitude Fighter Command fights off the overwhelming might of the Luftwaffe.

Their finest hour.

It is, of course, nonsense.

Britain had the world’s largest empire to call on. It’s war effort was supported by it’s status as the greatest maritime power in history. It had access to the world’s trade. It was never alone.

The RAF, locally outnumbered in the way all defending forces might be, given that the Luftwaffe could pick and choose their points of attack, overall had rough parity with the Germans (especially in the most important category: single-engined fighters. The Spitfires, Hurricanes and Messerschmitts). The British bomber force, normally left off the order of battle for the Battle of Britain, was active all summer long in 1940, attacking airfields and ports in Northern France. The Germans had poor intelligence, no clear strategy and an air force designed to support an army’s operations, not subjugate a country on it’s own. The RAF had the only specialised air defence system in the world and fought a battle for which it had trained and practiced for years.

In the end, the Battle of Britain was over quickly and decisively. It was not the close run thing of popular imagination, and even if it had been, invasion was a near impossibility. The Germans had precisely none of the specialised equipment or logistics the Allies would haul across the Channel 4 years later and they had no way of protecting a naval invasion force from the wrath of what would have been a seriously upset Royal Navy.

It should not be particularly controversial to say this – a German invasion was wargamed in the 70s and, even though conditions were weighted towards them, the German side was comprehensively defeated – and no serious writing in the past 20 years suggests otherwise.

The myths persist and it’s understandable why. Everyone loves an underdog triumphing against all odds. No one wants the story where the RAF are never seriously threatened while they give the Germans a kicking.

More than that the myths simplify some of the most complicated set of events in human history and make them comprehendible; they set Winston Churchill up as the indefatigable wartime leader, the Greatest Briton, while ignoring the darker and less competent parts of his career and personality; and they let us view ourselves in ways where we don’t have to engage with parts of our history that might make us uncomfortable. We were the only ones fighting Nazi tyranny. We stood alone. We were unquestionably the good guys then, so we must always be the good guys. We must always have been the good guys.

Mix this with the overriding opinion that the empire was mostly a force for good (the white man’s burden is an idea that has never fully died) and that it was the British that ended the Transatlantic Slave Trade (while omitting that we profited from it for centuries) and you get a decent idea of the populist portrayal of Britain today. Nigel Farage holding a pint while he pays tribute to The Few, when in reality, he’d’ve been making friends with the Nazis pre-war and talking about how he stood ready to work with Mr Hitler in forging a new Europe should the SS have somehow found itself marching down Whitehall.

Today’s the anniversary of one of Russia’s myths.

The last great German offensive on the Eastern Front began in early July 1943. After the disaster of Stalingrad the southern front had destabilised and this led to months of fluid fighting as the Red Army pushed forward, overextended and was then mauled by a German counterstroke. Kharkov changed hands twice and at the end, when the spring came and the roads turned to mud, there was a large salient nearly twice the size of Wales around the city of Kursk.

The salient was an obvious vulnerability, an attack so predictable it hardly needed the confirmation provided by intelligence. Hitler delayed the attack repeatedly. Often this is credited to his desire to see more and more of Germany’s new tanks, the Panther and Tiger, reach service, their capabilities predicted to be decisive. But there are other, more prosaic reasons that contributed to the delays. Ones of weather and logistics. Either way, the Soviets were given more than enough time to prepare defences or the battle became something unusual in Europe, bearing more resemblance to the Western Front of the First World War than the Eastern Front of the Second. Massed attacks trying to hammer through a defensive system of trenches and strongpoints 20 miles deep.

The photos of the battle and the accounts describe Operation Citadel, the battle of Kursk, as the great tank battle of the war, but it isn’t. The Germans used mass firepower and tanks to break into the complex defensive systems the Soviets had used hundreds of thousands of civilians to build. The Soviets employed mass firepower to resist the attack. Artillery, the God of War, dominated.

The Germans made slow progress, the lightning advances of previous years absent. Their ability to break into Soviet defences was undimmed, but their ability to break out was blunted. The Soviets took horrendous casualties in slowing the advance. Hundreds of thousands were killed and wounded in the fortnight the offensive lasted.

The culmination came on the 12th, near the small town of Prokhorovka where the myth tells us that the greatest tank battle in history was fought, where thousands of vehicles were engaged in a maelstrom of violence where tanks rammed each other amidst explosions, fire and death. The Soviets lost hundreds of tanks, but so did the Germans, their losses so grievous that the offensive was stopped and the Germans never recovered.

The research does not back this up.

The Germans engaged round Prokhorovka were the most powerful units they had available, II SS Panzer Corps, comprising the 1st, 2nd and 3rd SS Panzer Divisions, some of the most notorious and infamous units of the war. Completely reliable politically, the Waffen SS were favoured in equipment and manpower and these divisions were formidable and experienced formations, made up of the fanatical true believers of the Nazi regime, many of whom were responsible for numerous war crimes . What appears to have happened is that many tanks of the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army that confronted them drove into a Soviet ditch, dug to limit the movement of armour. When they realised what was happening and moved to cross the ditch by way of a bridge, they bottlenecked and made easy targets. The latest German AFVs outranged the T-34/43s of the 5GTA and the Germans were able to pick off the Russians at range. Prokhorovka was a one-sided tactical victory for the Germans.

Establishing tank losses after an engagement is difficult. Tanks that are abandoned can be recovered, damage repaired and the vehicle returned to combat. But it seems likely that the Soviets lost upwards of 240 tanks on the 12th July 1943. The Germans, a handful, maybe as few as four.

Two days earlier, on the 10th, the British and Americans had launched Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. This led to landings on the Italian mainland at the beginning of September.

With progress stalling and alarmed at developments in the Mediterranean, Hitler cancelled Citadel shortly after Prokhorovka so he could transfer forces to Italy. By early August, the 1st SS Panzer Division was in Italy, ready to seize control when the Italians made peace on the 8th of September.

That doesn’t make the myth. Nor does the huge role lend lease played in Soviet victory. By 1943, the Red Army was clothed, fed and transported by American and British industry. Entire oil refineries were transported across the world. Millions of tons of raw materials were exported. Spam was hugely popular. There were butter shortages in the USA because so much was given to the USSR. Soviet delegations were allowed to commit industrial espionage on an epic scale, all done openly as they took blueprints, plans and photos of whatever marvel of manufacturing they liked. American ships sailed across the Pacific under Soviet flags and were studiously ignored by the Japanese.

The Russian myth today, which you can find on most social media sites, is that Russian blood and only Russian blood won the war. When the latest research on Prokhorovka was published in a German magazine, the Russian Ambassador was quoted as saying, "Attempts to rewrite immutable historical facts, falsify the events of those years, play down the decisive role of the Soviet people in defeating Nazism and freeing Europe from the 'brown plague', look unworthy and insulting."

A Russian MP said the article, "obliterated the German nation's penance for what was done by Nazi Germany."

Putin has visited the site many times. In 2000 he was there with the Presidents of Belarus and Ukraine and quoted as saying “the greatest contribution to the victory over Nazism belonged to the nations of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, and ever closer friendship of those fraternal countries would be the best monument to the dead.”

"The outcome of World War II is sacred." is another thing Putin has said and so what happened must be warped and falsified to protect the purity of the Russian war. The subjugation of Eastern Europe under Stalinist tyranny is replaced by tales of liberation by the Red Army. The cynicism of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact where the Nazis and Soviets split between them the lands of Central and Eastern Europe is now a necessity, the Soviets protecting themselves from the Nazis after being sold out by the western powers.

Putin is the heir, the descendant of the men who liberated Europe from the Nazis. They were liberators then, they are liberators now. The myth offers justification and legitimacy. That the Liberator is emulating Stalin in making millions of people unwilling subjects of a Russian empire and shooting those who resist is not something that fits the image. But themes of national unity, the defence of the Motherland from the fascist hordes, and ones of heroism and sacrifice do, and they feed a narrative, one that a Russia in decline needed in the 2000s for it’s own self-worth, and one the regime fighting a war of aggression needs today to manufacture consent among it's citizens.

People talk about history being rewritten, but they don’t mean that. History was already written to exclude the things that challenge our view of ourselves. We’ve been given edited and abridged versions of our histories for all our lives. What people mean is that they don’t want challenged. They want the myths. The comfort. They like when history is their own monologue of what’s good and just. They don’t want a dialogue with the people ethnically cleansed as part of empire’s civilising mission, or the truth about the slavery and theft that built our cities, or to think that the Germans cut a Soviet tank force to pieces one summer’s day in 1943.

Russia’s myths are not so different from our own. Ours are as vulnerable to manipulation, to being twisted and used to justify appalling acts. This is why it’s important for us to interrogate them and try to find the truth of them instead of continuing to take them at face value.

[redeyedroid]

Off the east coast of Scotland on the 14th of April 1945, the U-boat U-1206 was scuttled. It came under attack by Allied forces after being forced to surface with mechanical problems it encountered while cruising 60m below the waves of the North Sea. 4 of it's crew were killed. 46 taken prisoner.

The mechanical problem that caused all this was the U-boat's toilet.

By this stage, some U-boats had been equipped with toilets that could be flushed while at depth underwater. This was a nice, hygienic, quality of life improvement for the crews. But the plumbing involved in being able to do this was complex and required many valves to be opened and closed in the correct order for it to work properly without flooding the submarine.

In this case, someone messed up the order. Sea water poured into the boat and into the batteries for it's electric motors. This produced chlorine gas and gave the captain no alternative but to surface the boat and face Royals Navy and Air Force.

And so, 8 days into it's first war patrol, without firing a torpedo, U-1206 was lost.

I mention this, because until yesterday, it was the dumbest tale of toilet-related self-sabotage I was aware of, but it has now been superseded by the one about a former president stealing top secret documents about his country's nuclear deterrent and keeping them in a bathroom at the golf club he now lives at.

[redeyedroid]

This week saw the 80th anniversary of one of the most famous and heroic deeds of the Second World War – 617 Squadron’s attack on the hydroelectric dams of the Ruhr.

Flying at extremely low level in 4-engined Lancaster heavy bombers, the men of 617 Squadron displayed extraordinary skill and courage in the attack, using specially designed bombs, codenamed UPKEEP to strike at the dams. The bombs were large, drum-like in construction and spun up before being dropped. The spin caused them to skip like a stone across the waters of the reservoirs and hold close to the walls of the dam before exploding. Because they had to be at an altitude more precise than the instruments of the day could measure, the Lancasters were equipped with spotlights that intersected at the correct height, a weaponisation of maths as old as war itself.

The stone walls of the Möhne and Eder dams were breached that night, though the earthen construction of the Sorpe resisted.

617’s commander, Guy Gibson won a Victoria Cross on the mission, repeatedly circling round to make dummy attacks on the Möhne and trying to draw flak away from other planes as they made their runs, then flying to the Eder and doing the same. Gibson would be die in 1944. Having finished his tour and been removed from operations and used as a popular hero for propaganda purposes, he would return to ops and be killed when the Mosquito he was in was crashed in the Netherlands.

Leonard Cheshire – also a holder of the VC - became commander of 617 Squadron and led it through the rest of the war and it’s later successes such as the Limoges raid, where he flew over a factory at 20 feet to give the French workers inside warning before the bombs fell; and the sinking of the German battleship, Tirpitz, capsized by 12,000lb Tallboy earthquake bombs. After the war, Cheshire would found a charity that helps disabled people live independently and which still bears his name.

The dams raid itself was a propaganda and political success. The dams were repaired in short order – the RAF did not follow up the raid and refused the opportunity to harass the repair work, but the work cost a huge amount - billions in today's money. The Upkeep bomb was never used again. A smaller version, intended to be used against ships like the Tirpitz and which was codenamed HIGHBALL was never employed, either.

8 aircraft were shot down on the raid. Only 3 of the 56 aircrew on these machines were lucky enough to survive the high speed, low-level crashes. Around 1,600 people were killed in the floods caused by the breached dams. Over 1,000 of them were POWs and slave labourers, mostly Ukrainian and Russian women from the Nazi-occupied USSR.

A lot of resources were expended on a mission that probably had a noticeable impact on the German war effort. The price paid in lives was low, considering the slaughter in Russia, China and the Pacific. It was the very essence of the Allies philosophy of using technology in place of humans. Steel not flesh.

But if we're being honest, the raid’s fame today derives mostly from the film.

There are many British movies about the Second World War. We’ll probably never stop making them. But those made in the 1950s and early 60s often shaped the consciousness and understanding of the war in the public’s imagination. They often star men who had served, and fall into two groups: stories written and made by people who were there that are entirely fictional; and fictionalised accounts of real events.

The best of them is The Cruel Sea which was based on a novel by Nicholas Monsarrat, who served in the Royal Navy during the Battle of the Atlantic. Anchored by a magnificent Jack Hawkins, it tells of the men and service of the fictional HMS Compass Rose, a Flower-class corvette on convoy duty, played in the film by the actual Flower-class HMS Coreopsis on which much of the film was shot.

The most famous, though, is The Dambusters, which is a remarkably accurate representation of the attack, has an all-time great theme tune and a strong central performance by Richard Todd as Gibson (Todd, a paratrooper during the war, was among the first men to drop on D-Day as part of the amazingly named Geoffrey Pine-Coffin’s 7th Parachute Battalion. He found Gibson’s closing line in the film of “I have to write some letters [to the families of the dead] first” very hard to deliver, having done it himself, for real).

Yet the film, in it’s original cut, is today unwatchable.

The problem is the dog.

Like many squadron commanders, Guy Gibson had a pet dog. And like many of these, the black labrador became a mascot for the whole squadron and was spoiled rotten. It was knocked down and killed by a car the morning of the raid, and it’s name was used as a codeword for the successful strike on the Möhne, ringing out across Europe that night and making the dog and it’s profoundly offensive name a part of the story.

Because the name of the dog was the n-word. It’s use peppers the original cut of the film, because the dog is in many scenes (equally horrifically, the dog that appeared in the film had the same name. You wonder how many homes in 1950s Britain had pets with astonishingly offensive names) and this means that multiple edits and overdubs have been shown down the years (I recently discovered the one on Amazon Video in the UK is the original, which is how I know it’s unwatchable). Peter Jackson floated the idea of a remake after making The Lord of the Rings. The project never went anywhere and I have to think that the problem of the dog was part of why (also, it’s a struggle to make American money men cut loose for movies that don’t tell stories of American heroism, but that’s another thing entirely).

James Holland and Max Hastings – white Englishmen both - have written books about the raid in recent and both have wrestled with the dog devoting pages to the issue and pointing out that, yes it’s very offensive, but it was a long time ago and it’s part of the story. Then they use the name repeatedly throughout their books.

(To be clear, I like both historians and they have done very good work, but, to me, it’s very unconvincing to write about how bad the name was without then making any effort to avoid using the word. Though I don’t think I do much better when all is said and done).

Today, because everything is terrible, it has become a front in the culture war. A few years ago, during the BLM protests of 2020, the RAF changed the dog’s gravestone (because yes, they buried it at 617’s wartime base of RAF Scampton and gave it a gravestone) so that it no longer features the name. They were immediately accused of rewriting history and how dare they bow to the woke BLM snowflakes it’s part of the story it’s just a name and how offensive can a dog be anyway. Someone started a petition trying to get Parliament to debate it and have the original headstone put back.

History is messy and many, if not most, of our nation’s heroes do not stand up to scrutiny, but the feelings of people complaining about a headstone that should never have been put up in the first place can get in the fucking sea. Like statues, it’s not rewriting history to say that something or someone does not deserve that place in society today. The feelings of RAF servicepeople of colour over the 75 years the original headstone was in place were never considered, but that doesn’t matter to these people. Nor that people knew it was horrible and offensive at the fucking time, but didn’t care, because it was a word and attitude that was socially acceptable. Hammering on about it does distract from the story of the heroism of 133 men, 53 of whom never came home that night in 1943. But there's no way round it. The heroism and racism go hand in hand.

(As an illustration, I’ve written more here about the fucking dog than I did about the actual raid).

Most recently the raid has been back in the news, because our authoritarian, fascist-leaning Conservative government have decided to dump shipping containers all over RAF Scampton and use it as housing for asylum seekers. The worst people in the world are crawling out from whatever fetid sewer they exist in to complain. Housing these people at Scampton would be a disgrace to the memory of the raid, they say, trying to turn it and the raid into a symbol of xenophobic nationalism, no matter that the RAF had men and women from all over the world in it during the Second World War. Adding to it, there’s a proposal to move the dog’s grave to 617 Squadron’s current base at RAF Marham so it is not damaged by the inmates of our new concentration camp.

Opposition to this plan mostly hinges on there being an existing plan to use the airfield as part of a regeneration scheme, bringing jobs and money to an area that desperately needs it. Left out of the argument is that people will be housed there is abominable conditions, dehumanised and misrepresented, their very existence treated as criminal. And this will happen because the government’s asylum policy is a fucking obscenity, in flagrant opposition to international law, and – much like the attacks on the rights of trans people – a crisis artificially created by the Tories so they can distract us from how fucking terrible they are at running the country, the continuing destruction of public services, and the enrichment of their friends.

People use the Second World War to make political points. They always have. History is written and then rewritten again and again. Myths die hard – even today the idea the German Army was supreme and only lost because it sabotaged by Hitler’s incompetence is still taken at face value; while the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, separate from the crimes of the Nazi regime and SS, persists. Both come from the self-serving memoirs and testimonies of German generals. History is always rewritten and the people who oppose the changes are the same who complain about statues being removed or talk about Britain's role in the slave trade. They want history to be a monologue of the bits that make them feel good. They don't want to engage with the uncomfortable and and bad things that were done by this country, or it's racist heroes. They don't want history to be a dialogue where they have to listen to the people on the other end of the discrimination, or the imperial repression. Or the bombs.

And it is hardly new for dickheads to repurpose it for their own ends. In a couple of weeks politicians with fake tans and faker teeth will task their interns with posting social media tributes to the D-Day landings. A few will use images of German soldiers, betraying the performative hollowness of the public face. Other, less famous blue tick accounts run by truly fucking awful human beings, will make shit jokes about there being no safe spaces on the beaches, or drag BLM. Transphobia will run rife in the hashtags, possibly alongside the odd WWG1WGA. Tankies will make fanposts about the war’s other great mass murderer, Joseph Stalin and assert that it was the USSR which really won the war and diminish the contributions of the USA and Britain.

And I will look at it all, and think about it all, and be angered and saddened. When I can find something worth fact-checking, or think of a funny and/or interesting dunk to make, I’ll probably post about it. Because what else is there when the most complex events in human history are distilled down to the worst people in the world standing up for a dog’s hideously offensive name?

[redeyedroid]

CW: War, racism, and racism in war

A lot of words have been written about him, even here, where baseball is the most minor of sports, often derided as being basically rounders, a functionally identical game you play in school when the teacher can't be bothered to think of anything better to do. Or, at best, it's thought of as cricket minus the eccentricity and propensity to carry on for days at a time.

We know of Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play in Major League Baseball. Not so much, Lieutenant Jack Roosevelt Robinson, among the first black officers in the US Army, court martialled after refusing to move to the back of a desegregated military bus. Referred to as "the n---- lieutenant" by an enlisted man and told he was “uppity and out to make trouble” by the investigating officer, Robinson's commanding officer recognised the malevolence behind the charges and refused to sign the court martial papers. So the army transferred Robinson to a unit where the CO was more amenable to the idea of putting a black man in his place.

Charged with 6 offences, he was tried on two counts and, the racism of the witnesses against him exposed and documented, acquitted on both.

The court martial kept Robinson Stateside. He never made it into combat (you can debate amongst yourselves whether that was a good or bad thing).

The unit he had been moved out of, however, did. His case was neither the first or the last experience of racism the men of the 761st Tank Battalion would suffer. Among many other incidents, they were attacked by MPs and other soldiers in a race riot in Louisiana in 1942 - something not uncommon in the US Army of the Second World War.

There were multiple race riots among US troops stationed in the UK. US Army Air Force General Ira Eaker opined that "90% of the trouble with negro troops was the fault of the whites." White men, enraged by the - still limited - freedom black troops found in a country where discrimination wasn't enshrined in law, or seeing white women dating black men, would provoke fights, or simply abuse and assault black men. The US military responded by importing segregation to the UK. Black servicemen would be given different days for leave and prohibited from going to the same towns and areas as white soldiers. In his history of the USAAF's bombing war, Masters of the Air, Donald Miller describes the practice as "de facto Jim Crow."

(And the British weren't much - if at all - better. The highest rank an Indian could reach in the Indian Army of the time was Subedar Major - roughly equivalent to Major, but one whose authority came from long service and reputation because they were still technically junior to the greenest white officers.)

Hell, they didn't allow African Americans to actually fight in Northwest Europe until the Army started suffering manpower shortages in 1944. Then Eisenhower decided that they could be allowed the privilege of being maimed and killed for a country where they were considered second class citizens. In Stephen Ambrose's summation, "The world’s greatest democracy fought the world’s greatest racist with a segregated army.”

And in units like the 761st Tank Battalion - among the first armoured units with a complement of black men in the US Army - they went into combat. Before Huey P Newton or Marvel, the unit was nicknamed the Black Panthers. Years later, Chadwick Boseman portrayed Jackie Robinson on screen in the movie 42. One Black Panther played by another.

The 761st fought as an independent unit, attached to divisions and battlegroups where and when needed, in Patton's 3rd Army, whose endlessly complicated mind proclaimed that he didn't care about their race as long as they killed Germans, yet also said that he did not believe black men could think fast and clearly enough to fight in tanks.

And even when they did make it into combat, their country refused to honour them.

472 men were awarded the Medal of Honor for actions in the Second World War. Of the seven given to black men, none were conferred until the 1990s, by which time most of the recipients were dead, their inconvenient heroism having been pushed to the side for more than half a century.

The heroism of men like Ruben Rivers, a sergeant in the Black Panthers.

Rivers won the 761st's first of eleven Silver Stars in an action in early November 1944 and was seriously wounded in the leg a week later when his tank hit a mine. Rivers refused evacuation and treatment. He disobeyed orders to leave his unit and led his platoon until he was killed when his tank was destroyed while covering a withdrawal when they were ambushed two days later. His CO - a white man - recommended Rivers for the Medal of Honor, uniquely, as far as I know, as black men were normally nominated for the Distinguished Service Cross in such circumstances, their commanding officers either too racist to recommend them for the highest award, or too realistic in understanding the racism of those in charge of handing out medals. No black man could or would be given such a medal in that era. And so Rivers received nothing, until the Shaw Review 50 years later found that his bravery and death had been overlooked due to structural racism and gave him recognition he deserved in 1944. His sister, Grace, received the medal from Bill Clinton in January 1997.

For the most part, when compared to the USSR, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the US and UK tried to preserve the lives of their men and limit casualties, to use technology and firepower in place of lives, to use steel in place of flesh wherever possible, but it's clear that the lives of their black soldiers mattered far less to them than those of their white ones, and did so for far longer than they'd like to pretend.

Robinson's story is one of the struggle for dignity and equality. "Fair play and justice" in his own words. Rivers' is one of extraordinary bravery and gallanty. Both came in the face of profound and enduring injustice perpetrated by their own side. Rivers' Medal of Honor citation says that he exemplified the highest traditions of military service, yet that military preferred to ignore that service until long after his death, just as it saw Robinson's colour and tried to deny him the status and respect he was due.  And there is a sea of forgotten and undocumented stories just like theirs.

[redeyedroid]

I honestly think that one of the reasons why there's been a massive rise in nationalism, the far right, and war-mongering is that the last of the people who saw where it leads are leaving us.

[redeyedroid]

Read a soldier's account of war and fear is an ever present. Be it Peter White's With The Jocks, where his almost every move is preceded by the fear of the unknown German, and where an unnamed Scottish infantryman compares the night before an attack to that of a condemned man - the difference being that a condemned man lives the experience but once. Or in George MacDonald Fraser's Quartered Safe Out Here where the author describes standing alone in front of three bunkers, his sweat turning to ice.

These are obvious examples of fear in war, but it manifests in different ways. One is obsession with the enemy's equipment. In With The Jocks, every German artillery piece, every shell, is automatically referred to as an '88' after the famous anti-aircraft gun that the Germans also used as an anti-tank gun. It had been used to devastating effect against British tanks in the deserts of North Africa and entered into the obsessions and fears of the British. And so, White calls everything an 88, no matter that they had been far less effective in Normandy than Libya.

Or there's the famous Tiger tank. Every German tank was a Tiger to the men on the other side. It's gun could destroy the Allied tanks it opposed at 3 or 4 times the distance the guns of Allied tanks could penetrate it's armour. It didn't matter that in Normandy in 1944 there were never more than 80 or 90 Tigers in service at any given moment, or that tank-versus-tank combat accounted for approximately 6% of the shells fired by British tanks. The fear of being trapped in a burning tank, at the mercy of a big cat was there. And it has remained ever since.

Wars are won by stuff. Having more guns and tanks and planes, in the right place, and keeping them supplied and operational. If you want to go really wild, you can say that there were no decisive battles in the Second World War - that is to say no engagements that fundamentally changed the outcome. It's why there's a famous maxim that amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics. It's why Eisenhower listed the Jeep and the Dakota in his list of things that won the war.

To digress, this has been in evidence for nearly a year in Ukraine, where an ostensibly much more powerful Russian military has struggled to keep it's forces supplied and reinforced in the face of a smartly organised and led Ukrainian defence. For politicians in general, and autocrats in particular, military spending is best used on big, prestige projects like aircraft carriers, or tanks, or fighter jets. Not much in the way of cool photo ops to be had beside cargo planes, no matter how essential they are.

The Allies understood. Their tanks were reliable, easily fixed and maintained. They were transportable. Sherman tanks, made in Michigan had to be moved by rail, loaded into ships and moved thousands of miles. They could drive over a Bailey Bridge (secretly one of the greatest innovations and solutions of the war).  In the final months of the war,  the US introduced the Pershing and the British the Centurion, the first battle tanks of the Cold War, modern, balanced, powerful tanks, but with earlier designs the Allies prioritised the logistical, operational aspects of their tank designs at the expense of protection and weaponry.

The Germans did not make such compromises. The Tiger was a massively inefficient, fuel-hungry beast built by a nation that was chronically short of oil. It was heavy - too heavy for most bridges and roads - and so it had to be transported by rail. Only it was too wide for rolling stock, so the tracks had to be taken off and replaced with narrower ones for travel. The later model Koenigstiger used the same engine, but were tons heavier and thus much, much slower. Many examples of the preposterous Jagdtiger self-propelled gun were destroyed by their own crews after they broke down or ran out of petrol.

A fearsome weapon on the battlefield, but expensive and unreliable off it, the Tiger was a massive headache and there were never enough of them available. Of all it's variants, the Germans made about two thousand vehicles. The Americans made forty thousand Shermans. The Soviets another forty thousand T-34s. The Wehrmacht remained largely horse-drawn in the final year of the war, while Allied forces were fully motorised, long convoys of truck and planes keeping their forces supplied and organised when and where the Germans could not.

But the Tiger lives on in the imagination, because of the fear it generated among Allied soldiers. Because logistics and reliability and big-picture thinking mean fuck all to a man in a tank about to break cover and who knows that if he's in the wrong place at the wrong time, the 88mm shell from a Tiger will kill him long before he gets any opportunity to return fire.