#WWII ammunition

[midcenturyblog]

Screenshot 2022-10-11 at 05-22-00 Vintage 1940s World War II [r[ by James Vaughan

Victor Tchetchet, Salute to Victory

[losemybuttons]

Berlin really has the dumbest forest fire of all time right now.

[magz]

Palestine related news summary from LetsTalkPalestine, May 1 to May 4, 2024.

[Ways to help, sources, and more: LetsTalkPalestine Linktree]

May 1.

(Instagram reel of UCLA protest. Includes footage of treating n washing a pro-palestine protestors' bloody head)

Day 208

🇨🇴 Colombia to cut diplomatic ties w/ Israel

•⁠ ⁠33 killed, 57 injured in the last 24 hours. Real number likely higher

⚖️ US lobbying ICC not to issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials, after Israel's threat to respond by retaliating against Palestinian Authority for sparking ICC investigation

🇫🇷 France denies selling weapons to Israel used in Gaza, claiming what's sold will be re-exported to 3rd countries via Israel, but did supply Israeli Iron Dome defense system

🇹🇷 Turkey set to follow Columbia & Nicaragua by joining South Africa's ICJ case against Israel

🎓 Zionist mob attacked Palestine protestors at UCLA w/ fireworks & pepper spray for 3 hours, police didn’t intervene (📹👆). Columbia & CUNY asked NYPD to raid & arrest 280+ student protestors. New encampments across UK, Tunisia & Canada

🚚 First aid trucks enter through Beit Hanoon crossing to north Gaza despite Israel's promise to open 1 month ago. Nearly half of aid convoys to north Gaza denied by Israel.

May 2.

(Instagram post, news update. The Israeli occupation has killed Palestinian Dr. Adnan Al-Barash.)

Day 209

• 28 Palestinians killed, 51 injured in last 24 hours. Note that the toll is underreported.

🏥 Dr. Adnan al Barash killed in captivity after IOF abducted him in Dec (📷👆)— 496 medical personnel killed in Gaza + 309 in captivity

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia arrests many for anti-Israel online posts, incl. an executive & media figure. Timing suspicious w/ reports of renewed normalization talks

• IOF attacks aid convoy, killing 1

🇹🇷 Turkey stops all trade w/ Israel after banning 54 exports to Israel

🇺🇸 US House pass “antisemitism awareness” bill using repressive IHRA definition of antisemitism despite antisemitism covered in anti-discrimination law. Why is IHRA definition problematic? See tinyurl.com/ynsfy8sx

• IOF airstrike in central Gaza killed 5, incl. a child

🪨 37m tons of rubble in Gaza, heavy contamination w/ unexploded ammunition & 800,000 tons of asbestos

🎓 Columbia & Emory University face federal investigation for anti-Muslim discrimination, reports of doxing & harassment

May 3.

Day 210

• World Press Freedom Day: Israel killed 100+ journalists since Oct 7 + holding 53 captive

• 26 killed, 51 injured in the last 24 hours. Note the toll is underreported.

• Israel attack on Rafah killed 7, incl. a mother & her children — the children’s bodies were shredded by the airstrikes

🇹🇹 Trinidad & Tobago recognizes the State of Palestine as West Bank & Gaza

🇬🇧 UK sanctions 2 Israeli groups + 4 settlers for violence in West Bank, warns of more sanctions if no Israeli action against settler attacks

• Israeli strike on Bureij camp killed 5, incl. a child

💰 UN estimates cost to rebuild Gaza at $40bn; more than post-WWII reconstruction

🎓 Goldsmiths University students in London win & obtain demands after occupying library — @ goldsmithsforpalestine on instagram for details

🎓 University encampments for Gaza go global spreading to 🇨🇦 🇮🇳 🇳🇿 🇪🇸 🇦🇷 🇯🇵 🇰🇼 🇱🇧 🇹🇳 🇯🇴. US crackdown w/ 2,200 students arrested

• Iran-backed Bahraini militia launches attack at southern Israeli port Eilat

May 4.

Day 211

✝️ Israel blocks entry of many Palestinian Christians to Jerusalem for Holy Saturday celebrations

•⁠ 32 Palestinians killed, 41 injured in Gaza in last 24 hours. Toll underreported

•⁠ ⁠IOF killed 5+ in 15-hour siege on Tulkarem (West Bank) & clashes with Hamas resistance fighters. IOF targeted fighters’ homes w/ women & kids inside, demolished homes trapping many under rubble

•⁠ ⁠Israeli strikes on Gaza kill 11 incl. 3 in bombings of tents in Rafah

•⁠ Head of UN WFP says north Gaza experiencing “full-blown famine” and it’s only a matter of time before south Gaza faces same level of starvation

🇫🇷 British-Palestinian @ dr.ghassan.as denied entry to France for Senate address as witness of Gaza Genocide as Germany put year-long ban on his entry to Europe (Schengen)

🇺🇸 88 US lawmakers warn Biden that Israeli aid blockade violates US ‘foreign assistance’ law

•⁠ IOF abducts 5 overnight in West Bank

🎓 Uni encampments spread to Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, Cuba & Costa Rica

[matan4il]

To the Nonnie who asked me about the Druze and Bedouins in Israel, here's a recounting of the history of these two communities here.

The Druze in Israel

The Druze are members of an ethno-religion that split from Shiite-Isma'ili Islam in the 11th century in Egypt. For a while, people could join the Druze faith, but then that period was over, and since then, you can't convert to become a Druze. In order to maintain their ethno-religious group, they're not supposed to marry non-Druze. Most of the Druze originate and live in Syria, with small numbers in southern Lebanon and in northern Israel.

Most of the Druze who came to live in Israel, did so in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Ma'an Druze rulers of Lebanon rebelled against the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, and occupied northern Israel. Along the years, the Druze repeatedly attacked and stole from Israel's Jews. In the northern city of Safed, for example (one of the four holy Jewish cities, considered holy for ALWAYS having had Jewish presence, no matter what happened to Jews in Israel), notable Druze attacks against Jews happened in 1567, 1604, 1628, 1656 and 1838.

When did this change, and the relationship between the Jewish and Druze residents of the Land of Israel become better? Well, in 1936-1939, as Muslim Arabs in Israel (inspired by their antisemitic leader Haj Amin al-Husseini) attacked the Jews and the British in what came to be known as "The Arab Revolt," they also attacked the Druze, who intended to remain neutral in the fight between the Arabs and Jews. There were some Druze who did join Arab forces attacking Jews. Probably the most prominent Arab militia the Druze joined was the one led by Yussuf Abu Durra. This man used the opportunity of the revolt to attack Arab and Druze villages, and the latter target made his Druze fighters abandon him, and even start fighting against his militia.

These Arab attacks on the Druze pushed both them and the Jews to forge an actual alliance. Here's the example of the Druze village of Isfiya. It's built on the ruins of an ancient Jewish village, and the name Isfiya is a mispronunciation of the village's original Hebrew name, Husifa. How do we know this original name? Archeological digs in there revealed an ancient Jewish synagogue, with this mosaic, which includes the Hebrew words "Shalom al Yisrael" (peace upon Israel), as well as the name "Husifa":

During The Arab Revolt, the village's leaders turned to the adjacent kibbutz Yagur. A Jewish underground movement called Hagana (Hebrew for 'defense,' because it was established 1920 to defend Israel's Jews from Arab attacks) had a group of fighters there, to defend the kibbutz. The Druze asked for the help of the Jews in defending their village from Arab attacks, and the Jews of Yagur agreed. They started collaborating, among other things the Druze provided the Jews with intel, and the Jews provided the Druze with weapons and ammunition. Isfiya's village council ended up incorporating the Jewish synagogue's mosaic into their emblem (this pic is from their Facebook page):

By the end of the revolt in 1939, most of the Druze were on the Jewish side, even if they weren't actively fighting. This opened the path for the same alliance to play a significant role in Israel's War of Independence from Nov 1947 to Jul 1949. There was one Druze unit that fought under Fawzi al-Qawuqji, an Arab commander from Lebanon, who led a militia in Israel during The Arab Revolt, collaborated with the Nazis during WWII, and then led the Arab Liberation Army during Israel's War of Independence War. BTW, this was the antisemitic emblem of the ALA:

Fawzi al-Qawuqji sent his Druze unit to attack the Jews at the Ramat Yochanan battle, on Apr 16, 1948 (meaning, this is during the first stage of the war, when most Arab armies had not yet invaded the Land of Israel. That starts in May 1948). The Druze were defeated, and after that, all of the Druze in Israel were on the Jewish side.

So the answer to what forged the alliance between the Jewish and Druze residents of Israel, is a combination of the Muslim Arabs' violence at the time, and the fact that Jews were no longer a defenseless minority, but got to defend themselves by fighting back. NEVER underestimate the importance of the right to self defense, and the truth is that the only place in the world where Jewish people have this right as Jews is the State of Israel.

When the State of Israel was established, there were 14,500 Druze living here. Today, they number about 150,000 and make up roughly 1.5% of the Israeli population. Back in 1949, Druze service in the Israeli army was strictly voluntary. At the request of Druze leaders in Israel, this was changed in 1956, but the service is mandatory for just the men (while for Israeli Jews, it's mandatory for both men and woman, and for Arabs and Bedouins, it's still voluntary). They're recognized as the most loyal and contributing non-Jewish minority in Israel, and many Druze have reached some of the highest positions of power here.

The Bedouins in Israel

The Bedouins are nomadic tribes, originally native to Arabia (and in fact, while non-nomadic Arabs refer to them as Bedouins, from the Arabic word for 'desert,' they refer to themselves as Arabs, sometimes even as the "real Arabs"). Over the centuries, their routes have continuously expanded, taking them from the deserts of Arabia, through Israel, Jordan and Syria, to northern Africa. A part of what they would often do for a living is connected with herding and commerce, another part is attacking local communities along their wandering routes for loot. Most Bedouins had converted to Islam, and the Islamic conquests coming out of Arabia in the 7th century, taking over the rest of the Middle East, have helped in that expansion of their wandering routes.

In the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire (the Turks) wanted the Bedouins to be more settled, so they would be easier to govern. At the same time, the Ottomans wanted to artificially increase the Muslim population in Israel. So under them, in addition to European converts to Islam (mostly Bosnians and Albanians) settling in Israel, the Ottomans also forced many Bedouins to abandon their nomadic lifestyle and settle in Israel, mostly in the south, in the Negev desert. Some Bedouins completely settled, while some opted for a semi-nomadic life (meaning they still move from where they're staying at least twice a year, but it's not constant wandering, and they move between designated spots, over a relatively small distance).

The exact number of Bedouins in Israel before the establishment of the state is unknown due to the semi-nomadic lifestyle some of them still went by, but estimates are around 110,000 people. During the Independence War, most of the Negev Bedouins fled to Gaza (which came to be occupied by Egypt until 1967). After the state was founded, some returned to Israel. The state established seven villages and a city for them, the only Bedouin city in the world, Rahat (and the biggest Arab city in Israel). Today, the Bedouins in Israel number over 300,000 people in the Negev, about 110,000 people in towns and villages in northern Israel, and over 32,000 living in other cities across the country. They are about 3.5% of Israel's population.

The Bedouins have a more complex relationship with the State of Israel, due to several issues. The state has been seeking solutions for these problems, with varying degrees of success.

One issue is land ownership. You'd think it wouldn't be, with many still being semi-nomadic, but a part of the problem is that more than once, they will simply decide that if they've wandered to a certain spot enough times, it's theirs. In certain cases, these spots are in military zones, which means they're endangering themselves and soldiers by settling there even part time, and the state repeatedly has to evacuate them from those places, including for their own safety. More than once, anti-Israelis will talk about Israel destroying an ancient Palestinian village, and in reality it's a recent Bedouin settlement, where there's no proper infrastructure for them, including for their kids (no water lines, no electricity), and it's in the middle of a dangerous fire zone.

Another issue is polygamy, which is customary among Bedouins, but legally forbidden in the State of Israel. So again, it creates friction between men who want to marry multiple wives, and the authorities.

One more thing is that the traditionally nomadic lifestyle of the Bedouins means they've never really had a history of belonging to specific states, and feeling it's a part of their identity. So they don't feel too obligated to the state and its rule. One example is that they run their own courts. The Ottomans tried to dismantle those, and force the Bedouins to adhere to a Sharia court that they opened in 1906, but when the British took over Israel in 1917 they dismantled it, and allowed the Bedouins to have their courts, out of a colonialist perception that they're too savage to be able to accept western laws. So the Bedouins to this day have issues accepting the authority of the state's courts.

Having said all this, there are also Bedouins who are very loyal to Israel, feeling like the state has drastically improved their life in comparison with how they were treated before (under the British, and before them the Ottomans), or that they have better living conditions than they would have had without the state. Here's one Israeli Bedouin woman, Sophia Khalifa Shramko, speaking about how Israel has bettered their lives:

Also, while most of the Negev Bedouins fled during Israel's War of Independence, there were a few Bedouins from the northern part that fought for the state, and to this day, the northern Bedouins are known as the more loyal faction from among Israeli Bedouins. The state built several permanent settlements for the northern Bedouins, and today they live across 24 communities.

As I mentioned, army service is voluntary for the Bedouins. Over time, it went from a very small number who did serve in Israel's War of Independence, through a big decline in the 1980's, but then since 2002 there's been a small, but steady rise in the number of Bedouins choosing to enlist. In 2003, the first Bedouin woman insisted on serving (she had to fight many in her own society who objected to this, mostly for religious reasons), she succeeded, and opened the path for other Bedouin women to serve as well. There's no official or expert explanation offered for this, but you want my guess? In 2001, Hamas started firing rockets at Israel, and the most targeted are was the Negev, so as Palestinian terrorists made it clear they have no qualms about killing Bedouins simply for being citizens of the Jewish state, my guess is more Bedouins who didn't identify with the state protecting them from Hamas, started to. I think following the Oct 7 massacre, in which at least 19 Bedouins were murdered by Hamas, at least 6 were kidnapped, and dozens are still considered missing, the Bedouins' identification with Israel is at an all time high. We've seen collaborations of Jews helping Bedouins, and Bedouins helping Jews, reaching an unprecedented peak.

Before the Oct 7 attack, the overall number of Bedouins serving was still rather low. In 2021, it was a total of 1,500 people. All the same, Israel has built a special commemoration site for the Bedouin soldiers, including several monuments. Here's one (you can see the Arabic writing at the top if you click the pic):

Israel as the Jewish nation state

The State of Israel is the Jewish nation state. That's not different to other nation states. But I want to emphasize, being a Jewish state, doesn't mean it's a Jew only state. It never was, it was never meant to be, it never will be.

Yes, on the national level, it has Jewish characteristics. The official language is Hebrew, the state calendar follows the Hebrew one, it has Jewish symbols in the flag and state emblem. And Israel also has a law of return for Jews, so they would never have to fear persecution elsewhere ever again. It allowed the saving of Jews from Syria when the civil war started there in 2011, or more recently the war in Ukraine, it allowed Israel to support Jews fleeing rising antisemitism in places like France in the last few decades, and it allows Jews one place where they don't have to constantly adjust themselves to the dominant non-Jewish culture, where they don't have to live by a Christian or Muslim or Buddhist calendar, where they can speak, and consume culture, and create it in their own native language, where they don't have to consider whether they can find a synagogue or kosher food before they move to a certain town, where they get to walk down the same paths their ancestors did thousands of years ago, where they will never be told that Jewish boys wearing a kippah to school is prohibited, and so on.

Every single one of these elements can be found in at least one other country out there, and very much so in nation states. Britain is quite clearly a Christian country when the head of the state is also the head of the church, so is the US when Christmas is a national holiday, but Yom Kippur isn't. Germany is the nation state of the Germans, its language is German (not Turkish, as much as there is a big Turkish community there), the Bundestag, the German parliament building, has a writing dedicating it to "Dem Deutsche Volk" (the German people), and it has a law of return for people of German descent, returning from eastern European countries. In this sense, nothing about Israel as the Jewish nation state is out of the ordinary.

Israel can and should do everything in its power to make life here good for the non-Jewish communities. By law, they have the same civil rights as the Jews. At the same time, these communities actually have less obligations when it comes to army service. Are things perfect? No, and Israel should continue to work on it, always. Just like every country should continuously strive to be better for its minorities. But if the Jewish character of the State of Israel troubles you, ask yourself why are the Jews the only ones not allowed to have a nation state of their own? One place upon the earth, where they're not the minority, in case being a minority elsewhere is something that's become too difficult or too dangerous? Or if they simply want to go back to their roots, to their people and to their ancestral land?

Am Yisrael Chai!

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[notaplaceofhonour]

An Open Letter Regarding the Holocaust Inversion & Blood Libel of the “Average Pace” Meme:

The person who shared the screenshotted post deleted it after I sent the following message. I truly believe they shared it out of ignorance & not malice; I cannot say the same of OP who created the graphic. I am sharing my deconstruction of its rhetoric & imagery here as a learning opportunity:

Nothing justifies the injustices Palestinians have faced, and what Netanyahu is doing is vile. No country should be above criticism, nor its leaders above condemnation, but this is not that.

What people like OP are doing is weaponizing legitimate atrocities to spread the antisemitic narratives of Holocaust Inversion (an offshoot of Holocaust Revision & Denial that claims “The new Nazis are Jews”) and Blood Libel.

And no, the fact that these libels are made in criticism of Israel does not absolve them of being antisemitic narratives that predate the existence of the State of Israel. As if to hammer in that point, that is not the flag of Israel that the creator of this agitprop decided to equate to the Swastika—that is the Magen David. That’s just the symbol for Judaism.

Worse, to impose the Magen David over images of blood (especially what is implicitly the blood of children) is a direct invocation of Blood Libel, the antisemitic accusation that Jewish leaders thirst for the blood of children. This libel has incited the mass slaughter of Jews since long before the Shoah, and is still being used to this day to incite violence against Jews through Qanon & accusations that Israelis drink & bathe in Palestinian blood.

And if it truly weren’t about the Jewishness of Israel, why would OP pick the Shoah specifically? There have been countless other mass killings in the world, many with much greater resemblance to Israel/Palestine than Jews in Nazi Germany (see: ethnic cleansings in Liberia & India/Pakistan for instance). Meanwhile, the only things The Shoah/WWII and Israel-Palestine have in common is people dying and Jews being present. So why specifically invoke the slaughter of Jews to criticize Israel if it is not about invoking the Jewishness of Israel?

That doesn’t even get into how cherrypicked those numbers are to the point the exact same “average pace” metric could easily be used (and in fact is, by the German far-right) to present the Bombing of Dresden by the Allies—a campaign that killed more than 25,000 German civilians in 72 hours in an area much bigger & less densely populated than Gaza with a fraction of the bombs that Israel has used—as comparable to the death camps.

This rhetoric does not aid Palestinians in any way. In fact it drags the movement down by providing ammunition that can be used to paint all criticism of Israel as antisemitic & give people who just hate Palestinians the casus belli they need to shut it down. The only thing it accomplishes is hurting Jews; it twists the knife in the wounds left in our community, it trivializes the Shoah by universalizing it or presenting it as “the lesser of two evils”, and it incites violence by equating Jews to Nazis.

[skippyv20]

The ‘Flying Nightingales’ were a group of nurses who were flown into battle sites in Europe during WWII to evacuate severely injured men by air.  They brought back over 100,000 wounded soldiers after the D Day landings in 1944.  All they had to keep the men alive were morphine, butter to put on burns victims, and a British essential 'an industrial sized urn of tea’.  Their flights were hazardous as they flew in planes which had the doors removed, often sitting on crates of ammunition.  On the return journeys from the battlefields their parachutes were locked away as they were not allowed to evacuate if the plane was shot down, they had to stay with the injured men if the plane crashed.  There is an exhibition of their work at the Florence Nightingale Museum in London until December.

Photo, The Telegraph

Thank you!  Wonderful❤️

[usafphantom2]

Did you know that a fully loaded B-17G’s turrets, machineguns, and ammunition weighed 5,700 lb? This was often more than the aircraft’s payload. A combat box of just 16 B-17s had 208 .50-cal MGs with nearly a quarter of a million rounds of ammo b/w them 😜#avgeeks #aviation #WWII

@RealAirPower1 via X

[manchineel-bean]

California headcanons please?

California girls, we’re- dies Sorry this took so long. Cal loves to be complicated. Birthday: November 9, 1822. (Alta California legislature formed) 

Parent: First Mexican Empire

Human name: Andrés Castros

Human age: approx 23 yrs old

Sexuality: Panromantic

Gender: Agender (no pronouns)

Description: 5’9. Blue eyes with gold speckles. Curly medium length hair. Hair is light brown with hints of dirty blonde. Light brown (almond) skin. Freckles shaped like mini stars all over face.

Languages: English, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalong, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Semi fluent in Armenian and Persian. Slight understanding of Russian and French. Learning Hindi and Arabic Scars/deformities/disorders: ADHD. Scar on stomach (civil war). Large burn scars (from wildfires) and trouble breathing (wildfires). Permanent limp and left leg extremely scarred (San Francisco Earthquake). Permanent shaking right hand (St. Francis Dam flood). Large scar on collarbone (explosion of WWII ammunition at Port Chicago). Deaf in right ear (multiple plane crashes). Other minor injuries

Animal/Unusual attributes: California grizzly ears, teeth, and tail. Star-like freckles that glow due to the flag having a star on it.

Silly facts: A very big nerd. Has probably watched Avatar 12 times. Loves to farm and garden but can't cook for shit. Burned the kitchen once. Is a very good baker though. Loves to write as well. Pretty good at logistics. Knows the best restaurants in the state. Has a pet pallid bat named Melody. Owns some salamanders too (Norton and Cheese). Plays the keyboard, piano, and guitar.

You guys should look up Emperor Norton I of America. Yeah Buh bye

[todaysdocument]

The Coast Guard celebrated its 153rd anniversary during WWII with this poster, August 2, 1943. 

Record Group 26: Records of the U.S. Coast Guard

Series: Photographs of Activities, Facilities, and Personalities

File Unit: Port Security; Photographs of Posters

Image description: Poster reading “The Coast Guard at WAR! / United States Coast Guard 1790 / 1790 / 153 Years of Service / 1943” Photos and illustrations show: A man on horseback, holding a sword; a group of men in uniform, wearing helmets; the American flag flying from a ship; a smiling woman in uniform; modern Coast Guardsmen under the flag of the Revenue Cutter Service; men jumping from a landing craft and running up a beach; a lighthouse; a man standing guard, holding a rifle; a Coast Guard aircraft; a man in black cap with a snarling dog; a man loading ammunition into a ship’s gun; a Coast Guard ship; in the center is the Coast Guard logo with illustrations of a 1799 battle against a French privateer, and a Coast Guard cutter sinking a U-boat. 

[howtofightwrite]

*slams face onto table* flamethrower or whips in terms of coolness and practicality?

If your flamethrower's cool, it's not doing its job.

I'm pretty sure we've covered these before, so this will be a short one.

Whips have applications, but it really is more about the aesthetic. It's not even that whips are particularly cool on their own, it's more that the person tricking with the whip that makes it look cool.

Outside of stunts and theater, whips are a safe, portable way to get large animals moving without actually injuring them. Against a human, the biggest problem is you're talking about a weapon that can be completely defeated by wearing a leather jacket.

Flamethrowers have some serious applications. So, first, flamethrowers are more often used as an agricultural tool. They're very useful for burning away brush and other plant matter.

As weapons, flamethrowers do have some serious drawbacks. The first is ammunition; you can't carry much. Flamethrower fuel is bulky and heavy. And what you do carry won't last long. A WWII era M1A1 flamethrower weighed about 65lbs and carried five gallons of fuel. That was enough fuel for ten seconds of continuous use. (A little less than that in practice.) You can get a lot of value out of those ten seconds, but it that's still a lot of work for very little fire.

The second is range, depending on the flamethrower, their maximum range will be somewhere between 15 and 45 meters. That's requires being unpleasantly close on the battlefield. Their preferred use was for clearing enemy pillboxes (concrete bunkers that allow those inside to fire on enemy forces), and in situations like that the flamethrower does shine.

So, flamethrowers are a tool for a very specific problem. Outside of that, they're really not something you want to carry into battle.

-Starke

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[apollosdrunkenmixup]

Please drop more Old Man lore I gotta know what else he's been up to

lol. Ok I’ll go over the stuff I’ve mentioned before as well.

This man is 83 years old (I got it wrong last time) and gives me a lift to bookbinding every other week or so. It’s an hour both ways and so lots of time for chatting. He is called Dave. 30% of old men are called Dave. I have zero fear of him ever seeing this bc I don’t think he even owns a mobile phone.

1) the first time he drove me he informed me he doesn’t like ‘this woke brigade nonsense’. He is completely unaware that I am trans and thinks I am just a cis boy who failed at puberty. I am looking forward to seeing his face when I drop that I have a boyfriend.

2) He has several hobbies including ballroom dancing, gliding, and writing poetry. He regularly tries to persuade me to take up gliding. I do not have the money to take up gliding.

3) He met his wife when they were teens and they’re still together.

4) He drives like he’s gliding. It really strange and apparently his wife hates it. As he’s approaching a roundabout he will take his foot of the accelerator several hundred meters in advance so the friction of the car on the road will do most of the deceleration for him. He has so far explained this to me 3 times.

5) He’s lived in our county (in England) his entire life.

6) We have an army firing range where he lived as a child. When the soldiers had finished shooting him and his mates would go down and collect the cases and spent bullets. They then melted them down in an old saucepan. The indents in the tops of bricks were used to pour the molten lead into to make solid blocks. These blocks were then sold to the greengrocer for a few pence. This they used to buy sweets. He described doing this at age 6.

7) He used 6 as an example of what kids should be doing instead of playing on their phones all day.

8) ‘Before phones, we were kicked out onto the street in the morning and played with whoever was about until supper’. Sir you were unsupervised children playing with lead and ammunition.

9) In the same conversation as 6 he talked about how there ‘too much health and safety nowadays’. He did not seem to see the irony.

10) Last time I saw he I mentioned I had to do some research about Americans in my county during WWII. He then proceeded to talk about his few memories of WWII (he was a toddler during it). He told me about ‘siren suits’. After much questioned he basically said it was a onesie that mothers found easily dress their toddlers in if there was an air raid. Bc you do not have time to put socks on a child during an air raid so they get dumped in the human shaped sack.

11) He also talked about how he got stuck in a blizzard one time for two days. In England. I can’t remember what year. I don’t know why he was trying to walk anywhere in the middle of a blizzard. But the first night he slept inside a snow covered haystack. The second night it was so cold that he would have probably died of frostbite/hypothermia if he did that so he walked all night instead. He dropped this casually in conversation like it was nbd.

I may update this if I remember other stuff or find out more.

[tentacion3099]

Weapons cache and commo gear for stay-behind forces in Norway in case of WWIII

This cache of arms, ammunition, and communications gear was concealed in a hidden bunker on the property of Norwegian shipping magnate Hans Otto Meyer before it was discovered by police in 1978. Meyer had taken part in covert operations during WWII and the weapons were likely supplied by the CIA during the post-WWII period, when caches were being set up all across Europe as the Iron Curtain slammed down. As Meyer's empire grew, he also allowed his ships to be used for surveillance operations against harbors and coastlines in Warsaw Pact countries.

[toaster-boi]

being knowledgeable about firearms/vehicle weapons and how they work has been an unexpectedly useful skill in terms of thinking up dope weapon designs for mecha because i can take mechanisms that work in real life, but haven't been combined because of things like ergonomics, recoil management and the strength of one person limiting how much ammo you can carry, and then slam them together into something mechanically plausible.

ADEN-style revolver autocannons mounted to a mech's forearm as an auxiliary weapon system shredding targets with 30mm fire.

hipfire automatic shotgun with a 75-round belt-feeding drum mag that loads like a Thompson/RPD hybrid, with a 45° canted foregrip and LMG-level fire rate (think 500rpm minimum) churning out a continuous stream of several depleted-uranium darts per shotshell.

120mm smoothbore anti-materiel rifle with a stock that splits to center the weapon between both shoulders, like the 20mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns on WWII-era warships, paired with recoil shovels that drop down either from the mech's back or its legs so that the firing stance is basically leaning back with both arms forwards while retaining the ability to fire from a more conventional stance.

taking inspiration from ammunition feed systems alone gives you so many stylistic and mechanical options that just aren't available for anything smaller-scale than an armored vehicle. chain-drive automatic cycling, Gatling-style rotating breech/barrel assemblies, mechanical autoloaders for high-caliber single-shot cannons, ammo chutes instead of continuous belt-feed, i could go on for hours. it only gets more customizable if you adapt vehicular ammo systems to gigantic mechanical hands and electronically-actuated moving parts on the guns themselves, or hand-based reloading systems to more complex hardware.

if you can't tell i really like guns that are really fucking big but not quite ship-scale.

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

seriously, there are so many instances in which the current Israeli invasion of Gaza reminds me of the JNA/VRS invasion of Bosnia.

The siege of Sarajevo and the blockade around Gaza both causing starvation. The cruelty of Israeli and VRS snipers both targeting civilians. The arms embargo against both Bosniaks and Palestinians, forcing both resistance movements to arm themselves with whatever equipment they can smuggle in or scrape together.

The VRS and Israeli bombing of civilian buildings.

Early in the Bosnian homeland war, the major global powers turned a blind eye to the whole thing. UN “safe areas” got overrun and refugees were slaughtered. Now the major global powers are turning a blind eye to the Palestinians, with the US even supplying the genocidal occupation forces with ammunition. Again the UN’s schools and hospitals get bombed, UNRWA gets slandered, and the UN doesn’t defend itself, doesn’t defend Palestinians.

So much for a “rules-based international order.”

In Bosnia, NATO arguably only intervened because it served their interests. And to this day there is NATO and US military presence and a Western-instituted ethnicity-based form of government in Bosnia reminiscent of the governments that European countries set up in their foreign colonies in past centuries. Furthermore, the Western powers tacitly accepted the ethnic cleansing of Eastern Bosnia in the formation of the borders of the statelet of Republika Srpska laid out in the Dayton Accords.

(Imagine if ethnic Germans were allowed to set up some sort of Deutsche Republic in Western Poland after WWII?)

But who will intervene on behalf of Palestine? Whose geopolitical interests are served by helping them?

Western media reports that Iran sends weapons to Palestinian resistance fighters, but it seems that at this point Palestinian arms are mostly sourced from local manufacturing.

“We have local factories for everything, for rockets with ranges of 250 km, for 160 km, 80km, and 10 km. We have factories for mortars and their shells. … We have factories for Kalashnikovs (rifles) and their bullets. We’re manufacturing the bullets with permission from the Russians. We’re building it in Gaza,” Ali Baraka, head of Hamas National Relations Abroad, is quoted as saying.

But even with a resourceful and determined group of Palestinian resistance organizations, the huge power imbalance between the Palestinian resistance fighters and the IOF means that Palestinian casualties are mounting at a rapid pace.

If the IOF keeps killing at the same rate they have, their kill count is “on track” to outnumber the total number of civilians of all ethnicities killed in the Bosnian War, which is truly horrifying.

Remember, fellow Americans: Your tax dollars are helping fund an historic genocide of Palestinians. President Biden sent ammunition to Israel, to ensure that Israel is not even at risk of running out of ammunition for their assassination factory.

[alex99achapterthree]

Phantom Friday...

Gets the gun.

In the early sixties, conventional wisdom was that air battles would be fought at long range with missiles. Planners seemed to still be fighting WWII, envisioning fleets of enemy bombers coming over the pole from Russia.

Except for the F-100 and F-105, most of the Century series and the Phantom lacked guns. Early losses in Vietnam at the hands of nimble cannon-armed NVA Migs convinced planners that a gun was absolutely required. Revamping existing designs to accept a gun would take time, so as a stopgap the SUU-16/23 gun pod was created.

An external store mounted on one of the hard points contained a GE Vulcan 20MM rotary cannon and ammunition giving the aircraft a fighting chance against a gun-armed adversary.

It wasn't perfect. Besides not being terribly accurate it was big, heavy, prone to jamming and took up a hard point better used for drop tanks or other weapons.

Here, a gun pod mounted on a well-tied-down Phantom fires into the butt on the range.

That stop-gap gun pod served until the F-4E...

...with a 20MM cannon in a re-designed nose could be rushed into service.

Since then, all fighter designs have included internal guns.

[overland-defender]

05/06/2022 - Day 2

We wake pretty early after the Château was beaten within an inch of its life after a heavy rain storm which passed in the middle of the night.

Meeting the team and the rest of the tour guests at the front of Château, Keith briefed each vehicle individually on today’s agenda and the importance of these locations.

The Longues-sur-Mer battery

Omaha Beach

Pointe du Hoc

Maisy Battery

La Cambe German War Cemetery

The Longues-sur-Mer battery We use mostly paved roads until we reach Manvieux, here we traverse unpaved roads parrallel to the coast overlooking the British channel and arrive at our first point of interest Longues-sur-Mer battery. The battery is a Huge, preserved WWII gun installations, built by the Germans to defend France from sea invasion. It was part of Hitlers Atlantic Wall defences consisting of four rapid firing 152mm navy guns, each housed in large concrete enclosures. The site also includes a fire control post, ammunition stores, defensive machine gun posts and accommodation for the soldiers. The battery is actually located between Omaha and Gold beach which made it a massive threat to the Allied landings. Because of this, the area was heavily bombed on the night before D-Day. This was followed by a naval bombardment in the morning. Although the bombing did not cause much damage to the guns it did destroy the phone line linking the fire control bunker to the guns which severely disrupted the batteries ability to engage with the Allied ships that eventually knocked the guns out of action during a duel in which no Allied ship was damaged despite the battery firing around 170 rounds. On the 7th of June the major responsible for the battery surrendered to the British with 184 men. Gravel paths make access easy from the gun enclosures all the way to the coast line vantage points. Omaha Beach 18.5km west is the infamous Omaha Beach which was part of the D-Day Operation 'Overlord'. I could bang about this place for ages as it's such an important piece of the D-day puzzle. But i'm sure readers are already familiar of what happened here, so i will talk about what is here now... and you wouldn't think it was a place of a blood bath where Americans (1st Army, 5th Corps) suffered roughly 2,400 casualties. White sandy beaches and apart from the traffic noise the sound of waves crashing on the break on the beach was tranquil.We get chance to have a quick bite to eat before we head over to another location made famous by the Americans. One last thing to note is a white house nessled under the cliff, this house managed to survive the naval bombardment and Ally landings, it can be easily found as the owners have a picture of the house on D-day next to there letter box. Pointe du Hoc Not what i expected and though i went with zero expectation it is how i can describe as suprising. Prior to this trip inpreparation i had watched a documentary / read some articles of what is described as the most dangerous mission of D-Day and where the first American Forces on D-Day accomplished their mission objectives. The 2nd Ranger Battalion led by Lieutenant Colonel James E. Ruddler were tasked with assaulting the battery on D-Day to silence the guns, protecting Allied ships and soldiers on the beaches below from artillery fire.

Today the site remains cratered from the aerial and naval bombardment prior to the Rangers assault and features a memorial and museum dedicated to the battle. Many of the original fortifications and bunkers remain which you can access as well as the edge of part of the cliff. Given we are attending a around the anniversary of D-Day, an American ceremony was taking place attended by the new generation of US service men and women, as well as some vet's which was awesome to see.

Maisy Battery

The BF4x4 team always have something up there sleeves and it was the Maisy Battery and this was annouced over CB radio whilst driving through rural normandy. I would be very suprised if many people would know about Normandy's best kept secret where you can walk through 2km of original German trenches and explore their WWII bunkers. The Maisy Battery is a group of World War II artillery batteries that was constructed in secret by the German Wehrmacht near the French village of Grandcamp-Maisy in Normandy. British military historian Gary Sterne rediscovered Maisy Battery in 2004, after he had found a hand-drawn map in the pocket of a US Army veteran's uniform he had bought. The battery was about 1.6 km inland marked on the map as an "Area of high resistance".

The battery had been recorded as the second highest D-Day target in the Omaha Sector group of fortifications, but the exact location had been lost from later records. Using the old map, Sterne was able to locate a bunker entrance amongst the undergrowth. He (Sterne) then investigated further and found additional fortified buildings, gun platforms, and a hospital. Over 3 kilometres of trenches were uncovered and apparently there's still more to discover with time and permissions. Making this a little Land Rover related after enjoying the site i saw another defender parked up, a swiss TD5 110 Hicap which would be the definition of 'overlander spec' unfortunately i didn't get the oppurtunity to meet the owner(s) but had a good nose around. Make this location one to visit if you are in area as it’s really interesting and there are also a collection of WW2 guns and vehicles to view.

La Cambe German War Cemetery

I wouldn't say saving the best till last in this situation and like i had mentioned on our first BF4x4 trip (WW1) you don't see too many German cemeteries. Whether it be Allie or German, cemeteries are a place of reflect and appreciation. Though the enemy, these boys and men lives were needlessly cut short, what makes it worse is the value of these individuals post death.... forgotten and it took the families of the fallen to get this site erected. La Cambe was inaugurated in September 1961. Spread out over 7 hectares and located close to the American landing beach of Omaha, 25.5 km north west of Bayeux. It is the largest German war cemetery in Normandy where 21,222 German soldiers are buried. In fact, the mass burial mound holds the remains of 207 soldiers whose names were never discovered.

This ends Day 2 of our D-Day tour, we retreat back to the Château where we join the BF4x4 team to take advange of the fine dining offered as well as on the house calvados... which i still don't like.

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of D-Day and we don’t have a clue what is installed for us.