Nothing About Malicious Compliance, Pro-Revenge Or Charley
To set the scene: imagine a chilly November morning in the Allotment Of Eden, overcast yet without the prospect of a snowy transformation. 'Tis the day before payday, so funds are short. Conrad is on the Extra-Specially Stupid Schedule, having an 11:00 start and a 17:00 finish both this Thursday and Friday tomorrow. I don't get a lunch break as the hours don't qualify, so I have a remaindered cheese and ham baguette waiting in the kitchen for my first break. Perhaps the only benefit of this ESSS is a lie-in until 08:30 and a decent amount of forward-planning time for Saturday's blog. I like to be prepared. Art!
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| Spiky! |
That, gentle reader, is a bunch of Italian soldiers getting ready to scrag another lot of Italian soldiers, early Renaissance timeframe, which is really a couple of centuries before Italy as we know it came into being. Humour me.
You see, I have just finished 'The Savage Storm', which is James Holland's take on the Allied invasion of Italy in September 1943 and progress up to 31st December 1943. Art!
Normally I give you a blow-by-blow account of what I've perused, which didn't happen in this case, for no good reason. SO! you are going to get what might be dubbed a 'stragegic overview' of the whole tome at once. I bet you can hardly wait. No, I have not the foggiest how much of the Intro this will take up. James makes a point in the text, which I cannot of course find any longer, that the geography of the Italian peninsula tends to favour the defence. Art!
From this terrain map you can very obviously see that one of the distinguishing characteristics of Italy is how mountainous it is. This is terrain that favours the defender, most especially if the fighting is taking place from south to north. The Allies would be at a disadvantage because all their logistics had to come in by sea, whereas the Teutons got theirs by road and rail - much easier. Not only that, the Allied planning for their landing and afterwards did not have enough shipping to mount any further large-scale amphibious operations, especially as a lot of marine freight capacity was destined for D-Day. Art!
Another thing that slowed the Allies down tremendously was the innumerable rivers running from the spinal mountain ranges to the coast, which make excellent defensive lines, thanks to the Teutons destroying all the bridges, the cads.
By the time the Allies had cracked one line, the Teutons had with fallen back to the next one. I cannot find any photo illustrations of these Teuton defensive lines, not even trawling through Volume Six of 'The War Illustrated', so a couple of before-and-after needs must. Art!
Here the Teutons and Italian forced labour are constructing a defence line on the Ligurian coast. This kind of slave labour is why young - and old - Italian men fled and hid in the mountains to avoid either this or being deported to Germany. Art!
You may be a little confused here, wondering how deeply dug-in this tank was. Surprise! It's not a tank, just the turret, as the Teutons were in the habit of making a bunker with a cherry on top, that being a ten-ton tank turret. Art!
They were hard to hit and difficult to knock out. The illo above shows one after capture, and doubtless a load of vehicles it had knocked out cleared away from the road it dominated.
Evidence of the bounders being modern-day Vandals with bridges. Art!
Weather is another factor utterly out of anyone's control, and it suddenly changed in late September from bright and sunny to miserable, incessant downpours only changing for snow. One of the British and American primary strategic aims was gaining possession of the airfield complex at Foggia, which was on the east coast. Art!
The map above gives an idea of how freaking large this airfield area was, taking advantage of the wide plains on the easter side of the peninsula. Art!
You can tell by the state of this illo that it was taken much later in 1944, as the original grass airstrips and Pressed Steel Planking interim ones have been replaced by all-weather concrete runways and dispersal aprons. The principle of gaining Foggia as an operational area was that it allowed fleets of bombers to be established much closer to the Third Reich, as up to this point they were operating from North Africa. Art!
Once again, the dreadful Italian winter put paid to a lot of planned operations. Ol' Jim has a lot to say about the enormous logistical effort put in to transfer the South Canadian bombers to Italy from Tunisia. Art!
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| The 429th Bomb Squadron on their way to deliver the good news |
The 429th was just one squadron of the 2nd Bomb Group, which contained 3 other squadrons for a total of 48 aircraft. Initially, 4 Bomb Groups would be sent to Foggia, accompanied by 2 Fighter Groups, thus around 200 bombers and 100 fighters, which constituted an immense logistical effort. For every 10 bomber crew, 50 ground staff were required to keep the aircraft flying, and the original plan for 4 Bomb Groups soon expanded to 21, alongside 7 Fighter Groups and a Reconnaissance Group. Before this force could begin to be operational the damage caused to Foggia's airfields had to be remedied, the runways improved, tented accommodation erected, POL stocked, aerial ordnance brought in by the hundreds of tons, as well as bringing in administrative, catering and transport staff to underpin this enormous organisation.
Ol' Jim points out the equally enormous demands on shipping that Bomber City created, a logistical bottleneck where they were always vying with other branches of the services for limited resources. Art!
And yet - Whilst the above may sound like a litany of woeful misfortune, the Allied invasion of Italy had caused the Teutons utter conniptions. For one thing, they had to send twenty-three divisions to defend it against invasion, as the Regio Esercito, the Italian army, evapourated. They had to garrison the Balkans, previously an Italian fiefdom, with another twenty-five divisions. None of these formations were able to contest the Sinister's post-Kursk advances, nor the D-Day landings. Which is a definite strategic win.
So much for not knowing how much content TSS would generate. Almost the whole of the blog. Okay, we need short, sharp pictorial content!
The Levée En Masse Is Back In Class
You may not be aware, but the dawn of modern conscription came in 1793, when Revolutionary France mass-mobilised all adult males between 18 and 25. Instead of a small, professional army, the state now had an enormous citizen militia, allowing it to punch well above it's weight. Art!
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| Make a French army joke, I dare you. |
Thus you get the huge conscript armies of the late Nineteenth and uo-to-mid Twentieth Century, before they rather fell out of favour. The French Army is now a long-service volunteer professional force, with it's core value of ruthlessness still intact.
Except -
Ooo-err Matron! Looks as if Midget Bunker Gargoyle has shot himself in his elevator shoes. O dearie me.
From Unsatisfying To Lying
Yes, Number 5 is unalive. The fifth supposed ''apocalypse' from a list of six, and even less factual than all the previous ones. Art!
A black hole, if it develops, does not go swanning across the galaxy devouring all in it's path. It remains a homebody, eating up the home and house until nothing else remains within it's gravitational field. Sagittarius A is not 'dormant'; if it isn't consuming anything that's because there's nothing left to consume. Art!
Right. It's NOT dormant. The image above shows the 'accretion disk' of matter falling into Sag A, and being heated to an enormous degree, possibly millions of degrees. The black hole itself isn't visible but can be conjectured to be at the exact dead centre of that black hole-y region. Bah!
Ex-Treem
Another one of the shredding videos, this one more of a rotary buzz-saw than anything else. Art!
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| Clip from UTECH Maszyny i Urzadenia Techniczne Opole |
Conrad thought that looked Polish, so I did a translation and it means 'Machines and Technical Equipment', and 'Opole' is a town in Poland. You're welcome. Art!
For when you absolutely have to have tree begone.
What's the Word Count so far? Ooops, 1,406. Time to post and prevent phurther prevarication. Chin chin chop chop, off we go the body shop!
