Today in History, (21 February 1915)… The Battle of Verdun… Tuesday, Feb 21 2012 

History and Military and Military History , , , 1IDVET 08:47

Today, the longest battle in World War I would commence.
The battle of Verdun…

The Battle of Verdun 1916 - the greatest battle ever

The Battle of Verdun is considered the greatest and lengthiest in world history. Never before or since has there been such a lengthy battle, involving so many men, situated on such a tiny piece of land.

The battle, which lasted from 21 February 1916 until 19 December 1916 caused over an estimated 700,000 casualties (dead, wounded and missing). The battlefield was not even a square ten kilometres. From a strategic point of view there can be no justification for these atrocious losses. The battle degenerated into a matter of prestige of two nations literally for the sake of fighting……

The attack started on 21 February on the right bank of the Meuse with the heaviest bombing that had ever taken place in a war. It lasted over 9 hours and was the most horrible that man had ever seen.

In the following days the Germans did not progress as much as they had expected, but on 25 February the unbelievable happened: the Germans occupied the most important fortress on the defence line. This fort Douaumont had been considered impregnable. Verdun lay within reach.

Plenty more here to explore on this great battle.

 

31 January 1968: Tet Offensive began in South Vietnam Tuesday, Jan 31 2012 

Hero and History and Military and Military History and Truth and US Air Force and US Army and US Marines and US Navy and Veterans , , , 1IDVET 14:34

Let’s not forget our brothers-in-arms from Vietnam. To those that served thank you. To those that died, rest in peace. All gave some, some gave all.

This day in history:

On January 31, 1968, some 70,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched the Tet Offensive (named for the lunar new year holiday called Tet), a coordinated series of fierce attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam. General Vo Nguyen Giap, leader of the Communist People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), planned the offensive in an attempt both to foment rebellion among the South Vietnamese population and encourage the United States to scale back its support of the Saigon regime. Though U.S. and South Vietnamese forces managed to hold off the Communist attacks, news coverage of the offensive (including the lengthy Battle of Hue) shocked and dismayed the American public and further eroded support for the war effort. Despite heavy casualties, North Vietnam achieved a strategic victory with the Tet Offensive, as the attacks marked a turning point in the Vietnam War and the beginning of the slow, painful American withdrawal from the region.

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Frank W. Buckles, The Last American Veteran Of WWI Dies At Age 110 Monday, Feb 28 2011 

Military and US Army and Veterans , , , , 1IDVET 08:57

The last American World War I Veteran has died.
He was 110.
Rest in peace.

This chapter ends…

Mr. Buckles, who was born by lantern light in a Missouri farmhouse, quit school at 16 and bluffed his way into the Army. As the nation flexed its full military might overseas for the first time, he joined 4.7 million Americans in uniform and was among 2 million U.S. troops shipped to France to vanquish the German kaiser.Ninety years later, with available records showing that former corporal Buckles, serial No. 15577, had outlived all of his compatriots from World War I, the Department of Veterans Affairs declared him the last doughboy standing. He was soon answering fan mail and welcoming a multitude of inquisitive visitors to his rural home.

“I feel like an endangered species,” he joked, well into his 11th decade. As a rear-echelon ambulance driver behind the trenches of the Western Front in 1918, he had been safe from the worst of the fighting. But “I saw the results,” he would say.

With his death, researchers said, only two of the approximately 65 million people mobilized by the world’s militaries during the Great War are known to be alive: an Australian man, 109, and a British woman, 110 .

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Tom Hanks is an Idiot! Friday, Mar 19 2010 

Axis of Idiots and History and Hollywood and Lies and Media and Military and Stupid People , , , , , , , 1IDVET 15:05

Tom Hanks is a moron. I can’t believe this idiot even went there. He is no student of history if he thinks this shit…

Is Tom Hanks Unhinged?

By Victor Davis Hanson

Much has been written of the recent Tom Hanks remarks to Douglas Brinkley in a Time magazine interview about his upcoming HBO series on World War II in the Pacific. Here is the explosive excerpt that is making the rounds today.

“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

Hanks may not have been quoted correctly; and his remarks may have been impromptu and poorly expressed; and we should give due consideration to the tremendous support Hanks has given in the past both to veterans and to commemoration of World War II; and his new HBO series could well be a fine bookend to Band of Brothers.  All that said, Hanks’ comments were sadly infantile pop philosophizing offered by, well,  an ignoramus.

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Women’s History Wednesday, Mar 4 2009 

Economics and History and Politics , , , 1IDVET 17:24

I am not a fan of the insert race/gender flavor of the month history, but I suppose it does have some benefit, after all, it is history.

The CATO institute has a good take on three women that have had a huge impact on capitalism, and libertarianism.

Three Women Who Launched a Movement

Sixty-six years ago, thoughtful, well-intentioned, educated people in the United States all understood that socialism was the future. The average citizen might have retained a quaint belief in the American system of free enterprise, limited government, and individual rights, but among the cognoscenti — academics, artists, newspaper and radio pundits — it was widely recognized that the capitalist experiment had run its course. The overwhelming consensus was that the coming century would see economies managed by benevolent experts: the chaotic, dog-eat-dog competition of the market would give way to rational central planning.

History has been unkind to the old conventional wisdom. But the intellectual sea change preceded the visible collapse of socialist economies. The first real sign of the resurrection of the classical liberal idea came with the publication in 1943 of three groundbreaking books unabashedly defending individualism and free-market capitalism. Almost as unorthodox as the books’ contents, in the climate of the 1940s, were their authors — three remarkable women described by libertarian journalist John Chamberlain in his memoir:

If it had been left to pusillanimous males probably nothing much would have happened…. Indeed, it was three women — [Isabel] Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand — who, with scornful side glances at the male business community, had decided to rekindle a faith in an older American philosophy. There wasn’t an economist among them. And none of them was a Ph.D.

I had already absorbed the message of Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy the State and Hillaire Belloc’s The Servile State, but it was Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine, Rose Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom, and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and (later) Atlas Shrugged that turned Nock’s conception of social power into detailed reality. These books made it plain that if life was to be something more than a naked scramble for government favors, a new attitude toward the producer must be created.

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