Loving Mars

Ha!  Do You See What I Did There?
What do you mean, "No"?  You have read today's earlier post, haven't you?  Haven't you!  Look, having read BOOJUM! on a regular basis is the only thing that's going to prevent your descendants from assignment to the uranium mines or the organ banks when my invasion fleet arrives.  I can't stress that enough*.
     <sighs wearily, shakes head, carries on with shoulders held manfully high>
     Okay, this is going to take a while.  Plus, I hope you are up on your Greek and Roman mythology.  

This sort of stuff

     Earlier today we evoked Hermes, the God of Transport, and tonight we evoke Mars, the God of War, and definitely one of Gustav Holst's better tunes.  Which, if you care to know, Conrad first encountered as the soundtrack to an episode of "Space 1999" (could we really have had a giant base on the Moon twenty years ago?  Enquiring minds want to know!).
     For Lo!  we shall be banging on about military stuff in this post, which you might call Matters Martial, "Martial" being a verb derived from "Mars".
      Here an aside.  Please do not allude, mention, ascribe, denote, assert or in any other way refer to the Mars Bar.  This delicious sweet toffee and chocolate treat is UTTERLY FORBIDDEN to Your Humble Scribe thanks to diabetes <hacks and spits at the mention of the Big D>.

DO NOT TAUNT ME WITH WHAT I CANNOT HAVE!

     Anyway, back to guns and explosions and invisible Id Monsters**.  For Lo! we are back to Jim Holland's "Nazi War Machines - Secrets Uncovered" and the very end of the program, where Ol' Jim was examining Teuton anti-tank guns, which we could use as a topic for half a dozen BOOJUM!s as it is a field with much to it.
     Anyway, Ol' Jim deals with an assertion that the Teuton's Pak 40 anti-tank gun was awkward and unwieldy and difficult to deploy.  Art?

     It really wasn't.  Jim and compatriots unhitch and deploy the weapon in less than a minute; they generously acknowledge that they are considerably older and less fit than the nineteen or twenty-year olds who would have been using these things in real life.  
     What is the issue?  Welllllllll you know the Teutons of the Second Unpleasantness, they could not resist making things more complicated than they really needed to be.  So -

The Pak 43

      This was an anti-tank version of the 88, designed to be low-slung and with protection for the crew, whilst firing a large high-velocity round.  The thing is, as Jim points out, it was frickin' enormous.  Art?

Compare to Pak 40

     There may have been some rationality for using this thing on the Eastern Front, where land was flat, ranges were long and the Sinisters were numerous, but as Jim's flabbergasted expression denotes, absolutely not in either Italy or France.  Overweight, over-engineered and Richard Overy***.
      Motley!  Get your galoshes on and we shall shortly take the Snark for a walk.

A Bit Of Fluff
This will only make sense if You, The Reader, are of a certain age.  Or, in other words, are middle-aged and listened to radio programs back in the Seventies, as did Your Humble Scribe, and most especially Saturday afternoon, which was the eminent domain of Alan Freeman, who, for some reason absolutely unknown to Western civilisation, was known as "Fluff".  Art?

Fluff, bless him

     As has been said before, as a DJ Fluff loved the sound of music, rather than the sound of his own voice - for which see Sir John Peel.
     Anyway, this has nothing to do with what I wanted to bring forward.  Art?

See it as I did

     There's a note in there about how "Freeman" is being allowed to decide which are the best albums of the past 60 years. NO! Not a zombie aberration drooling over the decks, this is - MARTIN FREEMAN.  Thank you BBC.  Could you not have led with that fact?  It would have meant a lot less angst and anomie at this end, thank you very much.
     Sheesh.  If I paid a licence fee rather than hacking and cheating on the dark web, I'd probably be a bit cross.

Some Salient Statistics
I have been reading and, on occasion, annotating "Monty's Men" by Professor John Buckley, which is a work that attempts to reclaim military history about the British Liberation Army of 1944.  As John makes clear, the armies of Perfidious Albion and their British American allies malletted the Teutons into a pink froth.  At the time and afterwards you would hear Teuton commanders complaining about this -
     Anyway, thanks to statistics and Operational Research,it was discovered that what mattered most when dumping hundreds of thousand of artillery shells on the enemy was - simple numbers.  It mattered most when you blammed them with sheer numbers of shells, rather than the literal weight of a barrage.  

Spike Milligan shoots you

     So the hapless Teutons were showered with everything from machine-guns upward, dating late 1944 onwards.  This led to them getting hit with batteries of rockets as well as more conventional artillery rounds, the effect of which caused not just abject surrender but a tendency to walk into walls if surviving.

Finally -
Here be SPOILERS.  SPOILERS as regards "Black Summer".  SPOILERS ahoy!

Did I get across the concept of SPOILERS?  Hopefully so.
     I think I've already mentioned about how the protagonists of BS are spectacularly dim.  And that, in their reality, zombies have never existed in fiction or real life, because otherwise they'd learn to Shoot Them In The Head. 
 Otherwise, why would Son, seeing her compatriot getting shot dead, linger around and wait to make sure that, Yes! not only is he dead, but he's dead, reanimated as a zombie and is going to come after her to gnaw on her bones?
     Somewhere, James Blish is a-rotating in his grave.

Yes, madam: you!

*  Though the lazy pikers seem to have been stuck at Theta Reticuli for a couple of years.
**  If you are not good, then you'll get Conrad's monograph about "Forbidden Planet" which is now at 7,000 words long.
***  Military historian joke