Someone 74 years ago didn't fight a war for you to tell me I can't mention the war in topics that have nothing to do with it.
Current Affairs Don't mention the War !
- Thread starter summerisle
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Someone 74 years ago didn't fight a war for you to tell me I can't mention the war in topics that have nothing to do with it.
summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or not.
We didn't fight a war 74 years ago for me to tell you if I agree with you or not.I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or not.
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
I would love to learn about these comically useless and incompetent British performances.....
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
Surely he’s not, I mean we were given the Empire, and lost both World Wars, without even mentioning every other engagement our forces have undertaken. You must have it wrong.....
gonetomorrow
Player Valuation: £80m
That Hitler's never off the telly.
Who won the flipping war?
Who won the flipping war?
abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
Ratioed! Ha! 
To be clear, I was referring to leadership and strategic command - NOT the performance of rank-and-file soldiers, or individual field commanders.
And I am not impugning the honour of anybody's grandfather (least of all my own, who was injured near Anzio representing the Commonwealth in one of Churchill's strategically pointless and wasteful adventures).
Hence my "forest for the trees" comment in response to choice examples in North Africa, or Kohima (although I don't expect people who don't like me because of the Brexit thread to take my word for it...). Criticism for not having been more clear about this is entirely fair.
Obviously, everyday British soldiers showed great courage and determination during the war. And examples of this also apply, even more obviously, to every single military force in the history of the species, dating back to the days of bashing each others' brains in with stones.
Merely standing one's ground whilst thousands of bullets, exploding projectiles, flammable jelly, bits of stray metal, arrows, spears and other assorted pointy things, elephants, horses, and men with swords are hurtling towards you is an act of inherent bravery, which we thankfully no longer have to expect to endure - notwithstanding the gin-fuelled chest-beating tin-soldier revelries of the children of the last men to have suffered it.
In terms of strategy and decision-making, however, the British record is dismal, and it would help us considerably in sorting out our current standing in the world if we better understood this.
North Africa is a perfect example. The British were twice on the verge of knocking the Axis out of the field altogether. But Churchill first diverted troops to Greece (without securing Tripoli), though it was immediately recognised, at the time, that this was dooomed, and would merely trade victory in Africa for defeat and stalemate in both. Rommel was duly dispatched, whereupon he immediately, before all his troops and supplies had even landed, pushed the British back over 500 miles, capturing thousands including O'Connor himself. Churchill in turn appointed Cunningham, who had no idea how to deploy or sustain tanks, and who in five days managed to loose 2/3rds of them, mostly through easily avoidable mechanical failures. Finally, through the impressive performance of the rank-and-file troops (despite their commanders' litany of blunders) - and more than anything else because Rommel ran out of fuel - the British relieved Tobruk, forcing Rommel to retreat. Britain once again stumbled into a position to knock Germany out of Africa for good, wherupon the high command once again gutted the North African front in an even more preposterous and delusional attempt to relieve Singapore, which effectively collapsed within hours while the reinforcements were still sat on ships thousands of miles of away. Meanwhile, after Rommel was allowed to restore his supply chain, he again immediately smashed Britain all the way back to Egypt.
And to be clear, none of these are judgements in hindsight - that they were doomed to fail was apparent to everyone involved at the time, save of course for the high command.
Then, of course, there is Singapore itself, where hundreds of years of British authority in the Far East evaporated within days, in an absolutely stupefying confluence of arrogance, laziness, racism, and ineptitude. A substantially outnumbered Japanese force landed in Malaya, evading the British main force with ease while trouncing every pocket of resistance it encountered. All the while, the Brits in Singapore, protecting by little more than a garrison, sat about complacently boozing, assuring themselves that no non-white army was intellectually capable of managing in a straight line south. They didn't even bother turning the guns around from the harbour, such that Japan took the city not so much by combat, but by (in some cases literally!) turning up at British bases and knocking politely.
From there, the biggest threat to Japan in the East was not British resistance, but over-extension prompted by the British collapsing so readily each time they were tested. In Burma, Japan initially sought only to hold Yangon, thus cutting supplies to western China. But the British disintegrated at the daintiest pinprick, panicking and literally fleeing for the hills, whereupon Sato foolishly ignored orders pursuing them toward Kohima (a sackable offence, it turned out). True, British soldiers performed well to hold off his very small and hopelessly overextended force. But given that spectacular catastrophic world-historical British arrogance and incompetence was the only reason Japan found itself within a thousand miles of Kohima in the first place - and given that Japan was blunted far more by American pressure on their supply lines than by British grit - trying to derive anything at all edifying from this really is missing the forest for the trees. Moreover, with Japan welcomed by most of colonial Asia, and with Churchill enthusiastically starving the territory Kohima protected, to the tune of some 3 million dead ("the starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks”), who knows what might have happened had Sato's small force somehow broken through.
In Europe, the record is likewise unedifying - Dieppe, Market Garden, the entire Italian campaign: all conceived more from arrogance and wounded personal pride than from strategy; all reluctantly approved to indulge Britain, despite the better judgement of the other allies; and all strategically pointless at best and disastrous at worst. And through it all, the decision-makers, the fruits of a lavished, lazy and inept aristocracy, were rewarded by failing their way up the ranks, arguably culminating in Mountbatten's utter debacle partitioning India far sooner than anybody in the subcontinent wanted, along a hopelessly ill-conceived line drawn up by ignorant men in London. In the big picture, Britain's contribution was by and large to run and hide behind its moat (where it'd have starved within six months absent America coming to the rescue), while either humiliatingly defeating itself or contriving to postpone Nazi defeat at every other instance.
At the time, the British people had a much clearer understanding of this, and they rightly threw the ruling class out on its ass at the first point of asking. This should have been the end then and there, the point of no return for arrogant laziness backed by the proper education and accent taking precedence over intelligence, skill, and determination. But memory and nostalgia have since seeped back in, compounded by the fact that schoolchildren are instructed far more in nationalism than in history. On this forum, we are still routinely treated to the ludicrous claim that "Britain won two world wars" etc etc. And we still see the people who believe it falling time and again for the same half-assed condescending gestures toward patriotism by the same class of cynical and vapid bluffing oxbridge chancers who once again rule us: Cameron, Osborne, Gove, Johnson, Davis and so many more.
While it may not in and of itself prove sufficient, one nonetheless cannot understand the mess we're now in without recognising how this country has utterly failed to acknowledge and absorb its own history.
To be clear, I was referring to leadership and strategic command - NOT the performance of rank-and-file soldiers, or individual field commanders.
And I am not impugning the honour of anybody's grandfather (least of all my own, who was injured near Anzio representing the Commonwealth in one of Churchill's strategically pointless and wasteful adventures).
Hence my "forest for the trees" comment in response to choice examples in North Africa, or Kohima (although I don't expect people who don't like me because of the Brexit thread to take my word for it...). Criticism for not having been more clear about this is entirely fair.
Obviously, everyday British soldiers showed great courage and determination during the war. And examples of this also apply, even more obviously, to every single military force in the history of the species, dating back to the days of bashing each others' brains in with stones.
Merely standing one's ground whilst thousands of bullets, exploding projectiles, flammable jelly, bits of stray metal, arrows, spears and other assorted pointy things, elephants, horses, and men with swords are hurtling towards you is an act of inherent bravery, which we thankfully no longer have to expect to endure - notwithstanding the gin-fuelled chest-beating tin-soldier revelries of the children of the last men to have suffered it.
In terms of strategy and decision-making, however, the British record is dismal, and it would help us considerably in sorting out our current standing in the world if we better understood this.
North Africa is a perfect example. The British were twice on the verge of knocking the Axis out of the field altogether. But Churchill first diverted troops to Greece (without securing Tripoli), though it was immediately recognised, at the time, that this was dooomed, and would merely trade victory in Africa for defeat and stalemate in both. Rommel was duly dispatched, whereupon he immediately, before all his troops and supplies had even landed, pushed the British back over 500 miles, capturing thousands including O'Connor himself. Churchill in turn appointed Cunningham, who had no idea how to deploy or sustain tanks, and who in five days managed to loose 2/3rds of them, mostly through easily avoidable mechanical failures. Finally, through the impressive performance of the rank-and-file troops (despite their commanders' litany of blunders) - and more than anything else because Rommel ran out of fuel - the British relieved Tobruk, forcing Rommel to retreat. Britain once again stumbled into a position to knock Germany out of Africa for good, wherupon the high command once again gutted the North African front in an even more preposterous and delusional attempt to relieve Singapore, which effectively collapsed within hours while the reinforcements were still sat on ships thousands of miles of away. Meanwhile, after Rommel was allowed to restore his supply chain, he again immediately smashed Britain all the way back to Egypt.
And to be clear, none of these are judgements in hindsight - that they were doomed to fail was apparent to everyone involved at the time, save of course for the high command.
Then, of course, there is Singapore itself, where hundreds of years of British authority in the Far East evaporated within days, in an absolutely stupefying confluence of arrogance, laziness, racism, and ineptitude. A substantially outnumbered Japanese force landed in Malaya, evading the British main force with ease while trouncing every pocket of resistance it encountered. All the while, the Brits in Singapore, protecting by little more than a garrison, sat about complacently boozing, assuring themselves that no non-white army was intellectually capable of managing in a straight line south. They didn't even bother turning the guns around from the harbour, such that Japan took the city not so much by combat, but by (in some cases literally!) turning up at British bases and knocking politely.
From there, the biggest threat to Japan in the East was not British resistance, but over-extension prompted by the British collapsing so readily each time they were tested. In Burma, Japan initially sought only to hold Yangon, thus cutting supplies to western China. But the British disintegrated at the daintiest pinprick, panicking and literally fleeing for the hills, whereupon Sato foolishly ignored orders pursuing them toward Kohima (a sackable offence, it turned out). True, British soldiers performed well to hold off his very small and hopelessly overextended force. But given that spectacular catastrophic world-historical British arrogance and incompetence was the only reason Japan found itself within a thousand miles of Kohima in the first place - and given that Japan was blunted far more by American pressure on their supply lines than by British grit - trying to derive anything at all edifying from this really is missing the forest for the trees. Moreover, with Japan welcomed by most of colonial Asia, and with Churchill enthusiastically starving the territory Kohima protected, to the tune of some 3 million dead ("the starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks”), who knows what might have happened had Sato's small force somehow broken through.
In Europe, the record is likewise unedifying - Dieppe, Market Garden, the entire Italian campaign: all conceived more from arrogance and wounded personal pride than from strategy; all reluctantly approved to indulge Britain, despite the better judgement of the other allies; and all strategically pointless at best and disastrous at worst. And through it all, the decision-makers, the fruits of a lavished, lazy and inept aristocracy, were rewarded by failing their way up the ranks, arguably culminating in Mountbatten's utter debacle partitioning India far sooner than anybody in the subcontinent wanted, along a hopelessly ill-conceived line drawn up by ignorant men in London. In the big picture, Britain's contribution was by and large to run and hide behind its moat (where it'd have starved within six months absent America coming to the rescue), while either humiliatingly defeating itself or contriving to postpone Nazi defeat at every other instance.
At the time, the British people had a much clearer understanding of this, and they rightly threw the ruling class out on its ass at the first point of asking. This should have been the end then and there, the point of no return for arrogant laziness backed by the proper education and accent taking precedence over intelligence, skill, and determination. But memory and nostalgia have since seeped back in, compounded by the fact that schoolchildren are instructed far more in nationalism than in history. On this forum, we are still routinely treated to the ludicrous claim that "Britain won two world wars" etc etc. And we still see the people who believe it falling time and again for the same half-assed condescending gestures toward patriotism by the same class of cynical and vapid bluffing oxbridge chancers who once again rule us: Cameron, Osborne, Gove, Johnson, Davis and so many more.
While it may not in and of itself prove sufficient, one nonetheless cannot understand the mess we're now in without recognising how this country has utterly failed to acknowledge and absorb its own history.
Last edited by a moderator:
zzr45
#MURDERINGSCUM
PARKLIFE!Ratioed! Ha!
To be clear, I was referring to leadership and strategic command - NOT the performance of rank-and-file soldiers, or individual field commanders.
And I am not impugning the honour of anybody's grandfather (least of all my own, who was injured near Anzio representing the Commonwealth in one of Churchill's strategically pointless and wasteful adventures).
Hence my "forest for the trees" comment in response to choice examples in North Africa, or Kohima (although I don't expect people who don't like me because of the Brexit thread to take my word for it...). Criticism for not having been more clear about this is entirely fair.
Obviously, everyday British soldiers showed great courage and determination during the war. And examples of this also apply, even more obviously, to every single military force in the history of the species, dating back to the days of bashing each others' brains in with stones.
Merely standing one's ground whilst thousands of bullets, exploding projectiles, flammable jelly, bits of stray metal, arrows, spears and other assorted pointy things, elephants, horses, and men with swords are hurtling towards you is an act of inherent bravery, which we thankfully no longer have to expect to endure - notwithstanding the gin-fuelled chest-beating tin-soldier revelries of the children of the last men to have suffered it.
In terms of strategy and decision-making, however, the British record is dismal, and it would help us considerably in sorting out our current standing in the world if we better understood this.
North Africa is a perfect example. The British were twice on the verge of knocking the Axis out of the field altogether. But Churchill first diverted troops to Greece (without securing Tripoli), though it was immediately recognised, at the time, that this was dooomed, and would merely trade victory in Africa for defeat and stalemate in both. Rommel was duly dispatched, whereupon he immediately, before all his troops and supplies had even landed, pushed the British back over 500 miles, capturing thousands including O'Connor himself. Churchill in turn appointed Cunningham, who had no idea how to deploy or sustain tanks, and who in five days managed to loose 2/3rds of them, mostly through easily avoidable mechanical failures. Finally, through the impressive performance of the rank-and-file troops (despite their commanders' litany of blunders) - and more than anything else because Rommel ran out of fuel - the British relieved Tobruk, forcing Rommel to retreat. Britain once again stumbled into a position to knock Germany out of Africa for good, wherupon the high command once again gutted the North African front in an even more preposterous and delusional attempt to relieve Singapore, which effectively collapsed within hours while the reinforcements were still sat on ships thousands of miles of away. Meanwhile, after Rommel was allowed to restore his supply chain, he again immediately smashed Britain all the way back to Egypt.
And to be clear, none of these are judgements in hindsight - that they were doomed to fail was apparent to everyone involved at the time, save of course for the high command.
Then, of course, there is Singapore itself, where hundreds of years of British authority in the Far East evaporated within days, in an absolutely stupefying confluence of arrogance, laziness, racism, and ineptitude. A substantially outnumbered Japanese force landed in Malaya, evading the British main force with ease while trouncing every pocket of resistance it encountered. All the while, the Brits in Singapore, protecting by little more than a garrison, sat about complacently boozing, assuring themselves that no non-white army was intellectually capable of managing in a straight line south. They didn't even bother turning the guns around from the harbour, such that Japan took the city not so much by combat, but by (in some cases literally!) turning up at British bases and knocking politely.
From there, the biggest threat to Japan in the East was not British resistance, but over-extension prompted by the British collapsing so readily each time they were tested. In Burma, Japan initially sought only to hold Yangon, thus cutting supplies to western China. But the British disintegrated at the daintiest pinprick, panicking and literally fleeing for the hills, whereupon Sato foolishly ignored orders pursuing them toward Kohima (a sackable offence, it turned out). True, British soldiers performed well to hold off his very small and hopelessly overextended force. But given that spectacular catastrophic world-historical British arrogance and incompetence was the only reason Japan found itself within a thousand miles of Kohima in the first place - and given that Japan was blunted far more by American pressure on their supply lines than by British grit - trying to derive anything at all edifying from this really is missing the forest for the trees. Moreover, with Japan welcomed by most of colonial Asia, and with Churchill enthusiastically starving the territory Kohima protected, to the tune of some 3 million dead ("the starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks”), who knows what might have happened had Sato's small force somehow broken through.
In Europe, the record is likewise unedifying - Dieppe, Market Garden, the entire Italian campaign: all conceived more from arrogance and wounded personal pride than from strategy; all reluctantly approved to indulge Britain, despite the better judgement of the other allies; and all strategically pointless at best and disastrous at worst. And through it all, the decision-makers, the fruits of a lavished, lazy and inept aristocracy, were rewarded by failing their way up the ranks, arguably culminating in Mountbatten's utter debacle partitioning India far sooner than anybody in the subcontinent wanted, along a hopelessly ill-conceived line drawn up by ignorant men in London. In the big picture, Britain's contribution was by and large to run and hide behind its moat (where it'd have starved within six months absent America coming to the rescue), while either humiliatingly defeating itself or contriving to postpone Nazi defeat at every other instance.
At the time, the British people had a much clearer understanding of this, and they rightly threw the ruling class out on its ass at the first point of asking. This should have been the end then and there, the point of no return for arrogant laziness backed by the proper education and accent taking precedence over intelligence, skill, and determination. But memory and nostalgia have since seeped back in, compounded by the fact that schoolchildren are instructed far more in nationalism than in history. On this forum, we are still routinely treated to the ludicrous claim that "Britain won two world wars" etc etc. And we still see the people who believe it falling time and again for the same half-assed condescending gestures toward patriotism by the same class of cynical and vapid bluffing oxbridge chancers who once again rule us: Cameron, Osborne, Gove, Johnson, Davis and so many more.
While it may not in and of itself prove sufficient, one nonetheless cannot understand the mess we're now in without recognising how this country has utterly failed to acknowledge and absorb its own history.
I enjoyed that read.
Brexit is driven by rich interests, utilising nationalist right wing pensioners with a rose-tinted view of an age long gone, as well as manipulating the desperate lower class traditionally left wing voters who have been conned into a position of basically being turkeys voting for Christmas with myths such as immigration lowering wages.
Such language is not a surprise as such.
Such language is not a surprise as such.
Last edited:
Ratioed! Ha!
To be clear, I was referring to leadership and strategic command - NOT the performance of rank-and-file soldiers, or individual field commanders.
No you weren't...all that stuff below is just baffle them with copious plausible wham backtracking
And I am not impugning the honour of anybody's grandfather (least of all my own, who was injured near Anzio representing the Commonwealth in one of Churchill's strategically pointless and wasteful adventures).
Hence my "forest for the trees" comment in response to choice examples in North Africa, or Kohima (although I don't expect people who don't like me because of the Brexit thread to take my word for it...). Criticism for not having been more clear about this is entirely fair.
Obviously, everyday British soldiers showed great courage and determination during the war. And examples of this also apply, even more obviously, to every single military force in the history of the species, dating back to the days of bashing each others' brains in with stones.
Merely standing one's ground whilst thousands of bullets, exploding projectiles, flammable jelly, bits of stray metal, arrows, spears and other assorted pointy things, elephants, horses, and men with swords are hurtling towards you is an act of inherent bravery, which we thankfully no longer have to expect to endure - notwithstanding the gin-fuelled chest-beating tin-soldier revelries of the children of the last men to have suffered it.
In terms of strategy and decision-making, however, the British record is dismal, and it would help us considerably in sorting out our current standing in the world if we better understood this.
North Africa is a perfect example. The British were twice on the verge of knocking the Axis out of the field altogether. But Churchill first diverted troops to Greece (without securing Tripoli), though it was immediately recognised, at the time, that this was dooomed, and would merely trade victory in Africa for defeat and stalemate in both. Rommel was duly dispatched, whereupon he immediately, before all his troops and supplies had even landed, pushed the British back over 500 miles, capturing thousands including O'Connor himself. Churchill in turn appointed Cunningham, who had no idea how to deploy or sustain tanks, and who in five days managed to loose 2/3rds of them, mostly through easily avoidable mechanical failures. Finally, through the impressive performance of the rank-and-file troops (despite their commanders' litany of blunders) - and more than anything else because Rommel ran out of fuel - the British relieved Tobruk, forcing Rommel to retreat. Britain once again stumbled into a position to knock Germany out of Africa for good, wherupon the high command once again gutted the North African front in an even more preposterous and delusional attempt to relieve Singapore, which effectively collapsed within hours while the reinforcements were still sat on ships thousands of miles of away. Meanwhile, after Rommel was allowed to restore his supply chain, he again immediately smashed Britain all the way back to Egypt.
And to be clear, none of these are judgements in hindsight - that they were doomed to fail was apparent to everyone involved at the time, save of course for the high command.
Then, of course, there is Singapore itself, where hundreds of years of British authority in the Far East evaporated within days, in an absolutely stupefying confluence of arrogance, laziness, racism, and ineptitude. A substantially outnumbered Japanese force landed in Malaya, evading the British main force with ease while trouncing every pocket of resistance it encountered. All the while, the Brits in Singapore, protecting by little more than a garrison, sat about complacently boozing, assuring themselves that no non-white army was intellectually capable of managing in a straight line south. They didn't even bother turning the guns around from the harbour, such that Japan took the city not so much by combat, but by (in some cases literally!) turning up at British bases and knocking politely.
From there, the biggest threat to Japan in the East was not British resistance, but over-extension prompted by the British collapsing so readily each time they were tested. In Burma, Japan initially sought only to hold Yangon, thus cutting supplies to western China. But the British disintegrated at the daintiest pinprick, panicking and literally fleeing for the hills, whereupon Sato foolishly ignored orders pursuing them toward Kohima (a sackable offence, it turned out). True, British soldiers performed well to hold off his very small and hopelessly overextended force. But given that spectacular catastrophic world-historical British arrogance and incompetence was the only reason Japan found itself within a thousand miles of Kohima in the first place - and given that Japan was blunted far more by American pressure on their supply lines than by British grit - trying to derive anything at all edifying from this really is missing the forest for the trees. Moreover, with Japan welcomed by most of colonial Asia, and with Churchill enthusiastically starving the territory Kohima protected, to the tune of some 3 million dead ("the starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks”), who knows what might have happened had Sato's small force somehow broken through.
In Europe, the record is likewise unedifying - Dieppe, Market Garden, the entire Italian campaign: all conceived more from arrogance and wounded personal pride than from strategy; all reluctantly approved to indulge Britain, despite the better judgement of the other allies; and all strategically pointless at best and disastrous at worst. And through it all, the decision-makers, the fruits of a lavished, lazy and inept aristocracy, were rewarded by failing their way up the ranks, arguably culminating in Mountbatten's utter debacle partitioning India far sooner than anybody in the subcontinent wanted, along a hopelessly ill-conceived line drawn up by ignorant men in London. In the big picture, Britain's contribution was by and large to run and hide behind its moat (where it'd have starved within six months absent America coming to the rescue), while either humiliatingly defeating itself or contriving to postpone Nazi defeat at every other instance.
At the time, the British people had a much clearer understanding of this, and they rightly threw the ruling class out on its ass at the first point of asking. This should have been the end then and there, the point of no return for arrogant laziness backed by the proper education and accent taking precedence over intelligence, skill, and determination. But memory and nostalgia have since seeped back in, compounded by the fact that schoolchildren are instructed far more in nationalism than in history. On this forum, we are still routinely treated to the ludicrous claim that "Britain won two world wars" etc etc. And we still see the people who believe it falling time and again for the same half-assed condescending gestures toward patriotism by the same class of cynical and vapid bluffing oxbridge chancers who once again rule us: Cameron, Osborne, Gove, Johnson, Davis and so many more.
While it may not in and of itself prove sufficient, one nonetheless cannot understand the mess we're now in without recognising how this country has utterly failed to acknowledge and absorb its own history.
abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
Aw.... it's your only joke.
Again.
I expect the drunken PMed death threats to follow some time later this evening then?
NilSatisOptimum
Player Valuation: £70m
You may have read it. But is always worth mentioning for others
Bluffocracy
www.bitebackpublishing.com
zzr45
#MURDERINGSCUM
Nah it’s the perfect riposte for the pseudo intellectual garbage you frequently vomit over this forum.
And I’ve never PMed you either, so nice try with that little lie hun.
abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
"I think he'd like to have been Ronnie Kray
But then nature didn't make him that waaaaaaay!"
xoxo
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