Dimitri > Recent Status Updates

"Indeed I used to feel as if I wandered, like a child just able to walk, between the thighs of the multitude of Great Gods. There is no sound I have known like the rustling of that Great Hall at night. In my second life as High Priest I used to wander by myself through the ailes and hear the stones communicating with each other before dawn."

Echoes of the Greek myth of the Collosses of Memnon!

Clearly, since the Roman Army was no longer an undifferentiated force apt to fight anywhere, regional patterns of deployment had become useful: dromedary troops for the desert, mounted archers for open frontiers such as those of Dacia & above all the Euphrates, light spearmen for mountain country [with echoes of Velites & Macedonian peltasts?] and so on.

THE ROMAN EMPIRE HAD NO REAL INNER LINES.
The "donut" shame around the Mediterranean in an age were sea travel was unpredictably slow rendered the concept of a strategic reserve useless, compared to what Luttwak calls a "regional defence policy" : hold with local forces until relieved by Legions X day marches away.

In Derna the Australians found streets of well-designed, single-storey houses standing in shady gardens, well watered from the wadi behind & planted with cauliflowers, radishes and onions.. This could indeed be a pleasant place, warm enough in summer to remind the inhabitants that they were in Africa, but with Mediterranean breezes, winter rains to swell their produce & a red soil rich enough to bear it.

The army under Tiberius served as a mobile striking force estimated at 150.000 legionaries plus an equal number of auxiliaries. For practical purposes their deployment was that of a field army on potential hot spots between recently pacified & unconquered lands.

Whenever a government feels the need to promise peace and prosperity to its citizens by means of a proclamation, it is time to be on guard and expect the opposite.

The "five-day raid" began at camp Nibeiwa. Shards of 25 lbs H.E. steel and stone screamed across the wastes or sliced horribly into yielding flesh. Ponderous and irresistible, the lines of Matildas appeared. Brave Italian gun crews often met fearful deaths in that first charge, for as their shells bounced harmlessly off the armour the tanks came on and on to crush both gun and crew beneath the afwul weight of steel.

The problem of mechanisation of more appropriately non mechanisation of our army represented one of the largest gaps in our organisation, a cancer which excluded any capacity for large manoeuvres, especially in North Africa. The Italian "Binary" Infantry division disposed of 135 vehicles; the German "Ternary" equivalent had over a thousand.

Armoured Division general Guiseppe Mancinelli, GHQ.

Philip & Alexander had been the first to found cities in their own names, or in those of family. Philip had reduced Potidea & Olynthus; Alexander had razed Thebes to the ground.

Cassander now dared to undo these acts of his Argead predecessors by founding Cassandreia on the ruins & refounding Thebes. Whether Alexander had been right to judge that Antipater had regal pretensions, Antipater's son certainly did.

the German breackthrough to the south-east in july '42 brought an eruption in the Soviet command. While there must be no more stand-fast disasters, there was every reason to hang on grimly at Voronezh, not merely to hold German forces which might otherwise turn south, but also to cover the Tambov-Saratov area ... throuch which ran MOSCOW's COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE EAST and alternative oil supplies.

17/05/42 operation Fredericus with one prong only aimed straight for the south of the Izyum bulge, where Kleist's First Panzer & the Seventeenth Army would dig into Timoshenko's open flank, threatening the rear of the Soviet shock group (9th & 57th armies) battering its way north-west from the bulge.

Towards the end of March, on the eve of Stalin's last lunge at his strategic objectives, the multiple Soviet penetrations were deep enough to trouble most ofthe German command [YET]not one of the Armeegruppen had been ripped to pieces, tough the ragged edges of their lines & the deep penetrations into their flanks attested to the enormity of the crisis through which they were slowly but now more surely passing.

For the penetration into Armygroup South (the Donbas & Charkiv area), the Russians fought from their snow forts, the Germans huddled in the warmth of hurs and houses, so that while the high command fought for strategic objectives, the infantrymen grappled with each other in a hunt for simple but essential warmth, with merciless persistence.

"Not that the formal Front command organisation was sacred to Stalin. When he required, he merely connected himself by direct wire or telephone to the formation commander he wished to advise or chastise, directing the hunting of the Germans westward himself... but on the battlefronts it needed more than this verbal grapeshot to sweep away the great iron rocks of German resistance which stood out in a Soviet sea.

Barely had Zhukov & Timoshenko "saved Moscow" by pushing Army Group Center back to the Volga, than Stalin envisioned a final push against Army Group Center to Smolensk via the junction with North, even while Guderian's 3rd Panzer Group was still at large.

Legends offer a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories. They attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.

National institutions resisted the megalomania of imperialist aspirations & bourgeois attempts to ùse the state for its own economic purposes were always only half succesful. This changed when the German bourgeoisie staked everything on Hitler & aspired to rule through the mob instead. After destroying the nation state, the mob proved quite capable of taking care of politics by itself & liquidated the bourgeoisie.
??

The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced a complete whitewash of one's own people & a sweeping condemnation of all others, as everywhere nothing but termites in an otherwise healthy body of state; it did not matter that the corruption of the body politic had started without the help of such outsiders.

[By Disraeli's time] Secularisation & assimilation of the Jewish intelligentsia had changed self-consciousness & self-interpretation in such a way that nothing was left of the old memories and hopes [of belonging to a specific religion or nationality] but the awareness of belonging to a chosen people.

"Society, confronted with political, economic and legal equality for X, made it quite clear that none of its classes was prepared to grant them social equality and that only exceptions from the X people would be received"

X is Jews, but you can substitute any minority.

As in the case of the Norwegians, who were distracted by the crisis of British mine-laying & saw all German preparations for a DUTCH invasion, the British government didn't properly piece together the various items of information arriving at the Foreign office & the three armed services.

Whatever the legal pros and cons of the Altmark incident (16.02.40) , they mattered little to Hitler. As Churchill & his supporters may have hoped, it was the event that energised him into action, convinced that the British government would no longer respect Norwegian neutrality (.. no matter if they defended it strongly or not. My precious bodily ores!)

"Bases in Norway would not enhance Germany's strategic position. The fact that Germany was negotiating with the USSR for the lease of a base near Polarnoje might have influenced the Seekriegsleitung's conclusion. The lease took effect in november 1939 and German submarines used it frequently."

Random: how many, which routes, why, until when? That bay borders the Artic sea, you have to go around Scandinavia!

Operations in Scandinavia & assistance to Finland would probably have resulted in war with the USSR while Sweden & Norway might have become Germany's reluctant allies.

A steep prospect for control over Sweden's iron ore mines via a winter wilderness beyond the capabilities of even British & French mountain troops, no matter how hard Churchill pushed the plan until the end of the Winter War.

"The mask was dropped"

It's all about spot the lost cause sentences

If Ben Wallace had ignored Grant's urgings & continued his division along his original line of march, he'd have struck the Confederate army on its left flank. At the very least, Johnston would've been forced to divert Breckinridge toward Shiloh Church.

"It's even possible that Wallace might've routed the Southern Army." - one phrase. Full stop. No long editor footnote. Elaborate, my good sirs!

Grant's steamer reached the landing with an additional passenger on board, Ohio war correspondent Whitelaw Reid who quietly slipped in while it was tied up. For years thereafter Grant probably regretted neither he nor his staff had tossed the pushy reporter into the Tennessee river.

The fall of Fort Henry punctured a deep hole in the entire Confederate defensive arrangement in the West, which was straddling Kentucky & Tennessee with only 45.000 effectives between these two states.

The battle of Mill Springs "or whatever it might be called" was the first step in the conquest of the Confederate heartland, significant because of the complete collapse of the right wing on the Cumberland. Hence the way was open for an invasion of East Tennessee (to aid Unionist sympathisers, as Lincoln saw it) or thrust further against the flank of Albert Johnston's line of communications, the line to Bowling Green

If the best of intentions were to be assigned to him, the Shah demanded obedience & gratitude in exhange for an imagined fairy-tale land that he believed was within his grasp.. rather than a complex society deprived of a voice and often skeptical of his enterprise.