Comments for Historicity

Comment on The short but glorious reign of the schnellbomber by Pic

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:11:21 +0000

I would have to say that the Dehavlin Mosquito bomber out classed any airplane that Germany ever built during WWII(apart from the ME262 which arrived to late to make a difference). It could fly from England to Berlin drop its bombs and nothing could touch it. Out of thousand of sorties during that war only a handfull of casualties occured among its crews.

Comment on Cold War, we miss you by Topher

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 15:38:59 +0000

I’ve often thought in the last several years what a wonderfully peaceful time the Cold War was. We knew exactly who the “enemy” was, where he was, and pretty much what he was doing. It pushed the development of wonderful technologies, forced global thinking, and kept nations from doing anything TOO stupid.

Was the world a better place when two world super powers were always at odds?

Comment on Found: one (1) Nazi aircraft carrier, slightly waterworn by MM

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 18:08:31 +0000

I imagine the only thing a German carrier would have been useful for is to support a naval blockade off the coast of England. Once you destroy the British Battleship and transport in the first round of the war, a good naval blockade might buy you an extra round or two of not having to worry about a British amphibious invasion or even reinforcement of Russian land forces in Finland or Karelia. Of course, the correct British response is simply to build fighters and either fly them over to Russia or blow the German blockade out of the water. So in the end, I agree that te Graf Zeppelin was a mistake.

Comment on History of the Middle East (the two-minute version) by alan

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 19:43:37 +0000

I was struck, not only by how many times the Middle East has changed hands, but how many of those empires I know next to nothing about. Roman? Ottoman? Mongols? Sure, but I know essentially nothing about Caliphate and Saladin despite the fact that they pwn’d large swaths of the region.

Comment on Uncovering the (very) early Christian church by topher

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 20:07:22 +0000

That’s good stuff right there, I don’t care who ya are.

Comment on A historicity city: Berlin by kim

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 21:09:09 +0000

I know that church! I’ve always thought that it was one of the most profound war monuments I’ve ever seen.

Comment on Damn the torpedoes! Farragut, Louisiana, and the Civil War by topher

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 17:13:51 +0000

Ironically, a fun source of Civil War history is Clive Cussler. His Sea Hunters books aren’t his usual fare of crazy (but kinda fun) stuff, but rather fairly detailed descriptions of the sinking of various ships (not just CW, but primarily), and then details the hunting for that ship. Good stuff.

Comment on The way the world ends by Andy

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 12:48:44 +0000

I realize you’re being semi-facetious, but if you don’t mind I’ll answer anyway Patton is getting a fair amount of discussion in this book, Bill, and much of it mirrors what you and Ambrose feel on the subject. Hastings credits Patton with having a fair bolder and more imaginative grasp of the strategic situation than Eisenhower or Montgomery and at one point muses about what might have gone differently had Patton been given a bigger role in the post-Normandy campaign.

Unfortunately (if that’s the right word), according to Hastings, Eisenhower was one of the only American leaders with the patient (if over-conservative) personality needed to keep all of the various British and American generals and forces cooperating nicely. Also, the Allied supply system, which was suffering from borderline incompetent direction, probably could not have kept up with the blitzkrieg-style advances for which Patton was known. There was also a sense among many of the other Allied commanders that Patton promised more than he could sometimes deliver, although this doesn’t seem terribly fair given the snail’s pace at which the rest of the Allied forces were moving through Europe.

I’ll let you know if anything else about Patton crops up in the book–I’m fairly certain it will.

Comment on The way the world ends by Bill

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 21:59:10 +0000

You don’t know the answer to this? It’s simple. They should have given Patton all the fuel and supplies he wanted. I like Stephen Ambrose’s opinion that if that had been done it would have been likely that Patton would have been able to cut off the German army’s retreat back to Germany and forced them into the body of the Allied invasion force.

Of course, the answer to almost any WW2 question in hindsight is: “They should have let Patton do it.”

Comment on lazy, hazy, crazy history by Michele

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 18:21:47 +0000

Good job! The pictures threw me off on a couple, too. I’m glad someone else acknowledged the problem with the pictures, as I have a Lucy Van Pelt-worthy lineup of excuses for doing poorly on quizzes by this time, and can no longer tell whether any of them actually hold water or not in any given circumstance.