I get it, I really do, but there is just something about this one that leaves an ugly taste in the mouth.

Must be the history buff in me. LOL

That's hilarious!

Still, it'd be funnier if it hadn't got my granddad all smashed up in his youth.

A much funnier scenario can be painted for the current Middle East prelude to war idiocy going on right now.

If one wasn't PC about it.

I laughed my *ss of, but was a little disappointed that there was absolutely no mention of Canada knocking Germany off it's Vimy Barstool.

I thought it was a bit unfair to Japan. They were both a loyal and a valuable ally. But given the length, it's not just funny but remarkably accurate.

well that's a keeper.

p.s. if you're trying to do a copy&paste but you keep getting every letter on the page, go at it from the back end with the mouse pointer to narrow things down better. werks fer me.

Some what on topic WII joins facebook.

speaking of things military, I see the steve-o harpoon gov't just shot another messenger:

http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/08/17/veterans-ombudsman-stogran.html

and the messenger's clients are none too happy:
http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/08/16/veterans-ombudsman-protest.html

but that's the canadian way, right? do your job a little TOO well and you get sacked.

beagle, y'old Harper-hater you, the CBC article says 'Stogran said that as ombudsman, he was "impeded by a bureacracy that was deliberately obstructive and deceptive," and that information given to bureaucrats isn't reaching the minister of veterans affairs.' which I think is the meat of the story.

You seem to think the Prime Minister took a direct hand in the ending of Stogran's tenure. I would tend to think that, due his lack of pur laine ethnic heritage, the federal civil service froggy mafia was probably on his case and out to get him from day one.

Perhaps a bar fight is as good a way as any to describe WWI.
It certainly didn't progress as anyone had imagined it would.
The popular involvement was striking, and it did change the societies involved radically.
Robert Graves is a good authority on that point.

The damage it did to Europe and Britain has never been repaired.

That war had causality lists of 4 figures a day on both sides. If you can point to a the causality of the Wests demise. It would be the fact this war was a two parter that denuded Western populations, & instilled moral relativism from the loss of a vast mass of Young men that where killed or maimed.
As Mark Steyn calls it. Civilizational malaise set in.
There was a re-surge of a spark after the war &from the boomer's bring about the total secularization of our institutions under a form of Socialism.
The renunciation of Christianity has eroded our founding principles. We instead adopted the French revolutions hostility towards morality or Religion.
No Ethics or morality makes for a Lawless community.
JMO

clever

That is an interesting website.

Who knew a woman could get ready to go out so fast.

http://www.theospark.net/2010/08/quick-change.html

The VA needs to be gutted, and the staff replaced by injured vets. If the Feds can hire people based on whom they have sex with and their skin color then by gawd they can give vets first kick at the can for Federal Jobs.

What's next, the Second World War as a hockey game?

"Hitler, ten minute misconduct and a game misconduct for killing the Jews. Mussolini, five minutes for fighting and two minutes for not fighting. Stalin, two minutes for Baltic repression. Churchill, two minutes for smoking."

Achtung, time to pull the goalie.

ebt

Japan was indeed a valuable ally but while on one hand they participated in neutralizing/evicting Von Spree's Far East Squadron, they then ably occupied and assumed Germany's Pacific territories.....
However the Imperial Japanese Navy did do yeoman service in the Mediteranean doing convey escort with their potent and efficient destroyers.....to the point that France used them as a pattern for a class of destroyers.

Revnant Dream @ 4:53 - so true, sadly, so true. And it only gets worse. It is said that Hildegard, Abbess of Bingen came to the forefront because her times (the 1200's) were a time of effeminacy, and that "because of their shame, God has transformed the frail "virgo" into the thundering "virago" - like the ancient anchoress Deborah who filled a similar vacuum thousands of years before, becoming "the Mother of Israel". We are presently living in an effeminate age. Men are standing back and letting women take control of practically everything, and unlike Hildegard or Clare or Deborah, as stop-gaps, this will lead to tragedy. The time has come to pay the piper. This not about either homosexuality or misogyny, but the failure to play the natural roles we were given.

I'm presently reading Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War.

Blurb on back cover of paperback:

The Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument. The human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. According to Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German aims, thereby transforming a continental conflict into a world war, which it then badly mishandled, necessitating American involvement. The war was not inevitable, Ferguson argues, but rather was the result of the mistaken decisions of individuals who would later claim to have been in the grip of huge impersonal forces.

That the war was wicked, horrific and inhuuman is memorialized in part by the poetry of men like Wilfred Owen and Siegried Sassoon, but also by cold statistics. Indeed, more British soldiers were killed in the first day of the Battle of the Somme than Americans in the Vietnam war. The total British fataliaties in that single battle -- some 420,000 -- exceeds the entire American fatalities for both World Wars. And yet, as Ferguson writes, while the war itself was a disastrous folly, the great majority of men who fought it did so with little reluctance and with some enthusiasm. For anyone wanting to understand why wars are found, why men are willing to fight them and why the world is as it is today, there is no sharper or more stimulating guide than Niall Fergusaon's The Pity of War.

I don't award Ferguson any merit with his notions...
I subscribe more to J. C. Fuller and others...
Particularly those who lable the US intervention as a disaster....
Without the US involvement the "unconditional surrender demands" of both World Wars would not have arisen...which un-neccessarilly prolonged both conflicts.
In 1917, both hostile camps were war-weary and receptive to a negotiated peace. The potential of the US in men and material made the Brit/French axis implacable. Ironically in the end, it was the successful British Amiens offensive that caused the German demand for an armistace.... the US contribution was for the most part really irrelevant.

You seem to think the Prime Minister took a direct hand in the ending of Stogran's tenure. I would tend to think that, due his lack of pur laine ethnic heritage, the federal civil service froggy mafia was probably on his case and out to get him from day one.
Posted by: abcd at August 17, 2010 3:47 PM"

well it happened on his watch so that's good enough for me. also he didn't oppose it. what does that tell us?

Also, I think that the first offensive where more enemy was killed than those launching the assault was the Battle of Messines Ridge, 1917. The miners tunneled under the German fortifications - the explosion alone killed 10,000 men.

Such an utter waste.

I've heard a good analogy that the Three Peloponnesian Wars reflect WWI - WWII - Cold War.

Hey, sasquatch, I said they were valuable allies, not selfless ones. I think they earned themselves a cold Tsing-tao, don't you?

My thinking on WWI is pretty simple. It was a damned bad thing, and it was wrong to have gotten into it. Wrong for Germany, wrong for Britain, wrong for the USA. The problem is that there was no way to tell in advance how wrong it would prove to be. We can say that Germany should have stayed calm when Russia mobilized, because we know that the Germans would have been able to fight and win a defensive war even on two fronts, even if it actually came to that, and it needn't have come to that. But no one knew that then. We can say that Britain should have stayed out, because a neutral Belgium, valuable to Britain though it was, was almost certainly not worth the terrible price Britain would paid for it. But no one knew that then. We can say that it would have been better for the USA to have stayed calm and stayed out, because the Allies could and probably would have won the war without them, and would have done so by a final conquest of Germany which would not have left so many causes of future conflict lying around loose.

But nobody knew that. And, indeed, no one will ever know what other horrors might have resulted if everybody'd done it my way. This kind of recrimination is only useful to the extent we can learn from it what to do today, and I'm afraid the lessons are limited.

But, once we were in it, the only thing to do was win it. And that we did, and we can be proud.