History

One of the books I’m reading for a class, Confederates in the Attic, is a travelogue of sorts, the author roving about in the South, talking to people and trying to learn about the Civil War. One of the women that the author speaks to studies letters from the war period, specifically letters that were sent between prisoners of war and women. Reading about her studying the letters made me ponder: in regards to source material which is of a personal nature, what will historians be studying in a few hundred years?

Speaking for myself, I can remember writing 2 letters within the past, say, 10 years; those were a couple of years ago when I was considering getting into a penpal thing. It didn’t go anywhere. Email has replaced the letter for me, and unless I’m way off the mark, it has done the same for millions of other people, too. For me and the people around me, the only time snail-mail is sent is around Christmas time, when holiday cards are sent out. The switch from paper letters to email will perhaps, in a few hundred years, lead to a curiosity: there won’t be any personal correspondence for historians to study.

Obviously, when people regularly corresponded via letters, their correspondence was in solid form. It was in a form that family members could store in a box after the receiver of the letters had died. How many of us have found a letter, two letters, a stack of letters in a dead family member’s dresser when cleaning it out? I have found a few, and my older family members have told me of finding large stashes of them.

On the flip side, how would you store email for a long period of time? Of course, printing it out is a possibility, but the only time I’ve ever found myself printing out an email was when it had directions in it that I needed to have on me while driving somewhere. Beyond that, all of my “correspondence” stays in my Gmail inbox - where it’s password protected from everyone but me. There’s nothing amazing in my inbox that I think would need to be shared, but suppose I died tomorrow. All of the emails I’ve received from family and friends would essentially be lost, just like that. No one would ever get into my account, and it would sit there until either A) Google went belly-up and Gmail died or B) Google decided that, after 20 years of inactivity, indeed, that user is gone. They’d scrap the account, free up the username, and that would be that.

Email isn’t the only “personal” primary source material that might simply disappear as technology changes (or breaks). I’m sure many people still keep bound journals, but I’m also sure that a huge percentage of journal keepers have leapt online. Will online journals that are in existence today still be floating around somewhere online in 300 years? Will there be a WayWayWayBack website? Or will millions of journals housed at, say, LiveJournal, just disappear in a century or so with the closing of Six Apart, a major hack attack, a massive datacenter fire?

With all of this, I’m not saying that paper correspondence and bound journals are necessarily better than their digital counterparts. Paper deteriorates, ink fades, libraries burn. Material sources are susceptible to destrution and loss just like digital sources. It does seem, however, that digital “stuff” has, relatively speaking, a much shorter existence in comparison to material stuff. I think we’ve all lost plenty of our favorite websites to the 404 void to realize that.

There is one positive to all of this, though. If all of our digitally based personal communications are lost to future historians, at least they won’t have to slog through billions of text messages, 160 characters or less, consisting of acronyms and bad spelling.

I wrote a few weeks ago about misconceptions that people often have about tanks (the armored vehicles). This post is an addition or post script to that one, so to speak, so if you missed the first, check it out.

I received my copy of World War II Infantry Anti-Tank Tactics via OhioLINK, and wanted to remark on just a few of the things that popped out at me while I was reading it:

Despite their psychological impact on infantrymen in the open, tanks were far from being the undefeatable, unstoppable, fire-breathing monsters so often portrayed. Vulnerabilities abounded - if conditions were favourable to those fighting against them; . . . .

Hah! Well, now I don’t feel bad at all about my former misconceptions about tanks.

Except to the tank’s immediate front and the direction in which the turret was oriented, the crew were for all practical purposes blind. Many of the means of vision were mounted high to maximize their fields, and stealthy and courageous infantry could easily move into the tank’s blind zone or ‘dead space.’

Apparently my ideas based on playing Red Orchestra were right. Who said games are useless for education?

Fuel consumption limited operating range, and was measured in gallons per mile rather than miles per gallon.

This is another factor that I’d never considered before when thinking about tanks. I’m not entirely sure why, but I had never really taken all of the mechanical problems and issues of a tank into consideration. The tank was, in my mind, when I didn’t look at it too closely, above being a vehicle. It was closer to being alive rather than being a machine; that probably sounds absurd, but as I poke around in my memory, I realize that’s how I saw it. Logically, of course, I knew that it was a vehicle that had an engine, that required fuel, etc. - but just skimming over “tank” in my mind, none of that popped up. Maybe that just goes back to the above paragraph though, describing how many people viewed them as fire-breathing monsters rather than what they really were.

The tank crew had to endure great heat, deafening noise from the engine and running gear, dizzying fumes from the engine and gun, cramped space hampered by awkward interior fittings, violent pitching and lurching during cross-country movement, poor visibility, and the ever-present fire hazard.

Again, something else that I had never really considered. I always assumed that things on the inside of the tank, besides it being a bit cramped, were just fine. I’d never thought about extreme heat, fumes, and noise. Then again, in my defense, I’ve never been in a tank. All I’ve heard from them is the rather tank-specific sound of treads creaking. I suppose that, on the inside, the sound of creaking treads, guns firing, and the engine roaring would drown out most other sounds. I won’t quote it, because it’s a fairly long section, but the book explains that tank crews often had quite a time communicating with infantry and other tanks, which complicated movement and attack coordination considerably.

After reading the book, I’m left with an understanding that has been furthered, but is still quite close to what I had when I finished writing my first post on tanks. Tanks were:

• Terrifying
• Unstoppable
• Useless
• Battlefield dominating
• Total junk
• More trouble than they were worth
• The turn of the tide in many battles

The list could go on, but in short: it just really depended on the battlefield, what the attackers and defenders had available, and more than a little luck.

I could continue yanking quotes from the book that caught my attention, but I won’t, because I would most likely come close to rewriting it, which 1) I don’t want to do and 2) the publishers don’t want me to do. If you’re interested in how infantry went up against tanks, do get the book; it’s quite good.

I’ve long been interested in World War 2; I’ve read about the major actions in the war, as well as about many of the major players in it. I’ve played (perhaps far too many) games set during World War 2. It is only, recently, however, that I’ve become interested in understanding how combat during World War 2 really worked.This interest stemmed from my general interest in the war, and from two of the games I’ve been playing lately: Red Orchestra and Company of Heroes. Red Orchestra is a first person shooter, built to be more realistic than most FPS games; bullets drop, tanks behave (mostly) as they would in the real world, there are no crosshairs (just ironsights), etc. There is, of course, that one not-so-realistic factor: players regularly respawn after being killed.

Company of Heroes is a real time strategy game, giving the player control over infantry, tanks, artillery, and a smattering of air support. The goals are what one would expect: capture this strategic town, defend against a counter-attack, protect convoys. It’s a good deal more arcade-ish than Red Orchestra, but there are still lessons to be learned from it. What are they?

My Major Misconception About Tanks

While playing both of these games, I noticed something: the tanks weren’t behaving as I expected them to. I had always imagined tanks to be these massive, unstoppable monstrosities, charging (or lumbering) across the battlefield, immune to infantry. If you had tanks and the enemy had infantry, you had already won. I assumed that the path that many combat operations went during World War 2 was like this: a group of tanks would basically smash into a defensive line (because they were unstoppable, you see), and the infantry would follow in their wake.

It’s amazing what our brains will come up with when they don’t have any real information.

In both games, I found that tanks were, alas, not immune to infantry. While sometimes infantry would fall before the might of schwere Panzers, quite often, if I was not careful with my tanks, they’d soon be flaming heaps of metal, surrounded by infantry.

A little bit of reading on tank warfare during World War 2 did two things for me. First, it confirmed what I was seeing in the games: infantry, with the right tools (anti-take mines, Panzershrecks or bazookas, anti-tank grenades) could and did take out enemy tanks. It certainly wasn’t a piece of cake, but it was doable. The second thing that my bit of reading did was make me realize just how little I know about combined arms tactics, and how very complicated the matter is.

Many Points in Time, Many Truths

I thought it rather ironic that, when I sat down to write this post, I thought I knew pretty much what I was going to say. I wanted to check a few more sources to double check what I “knew”; those few sources threw everything I had learned on its head.

The source that really knocked things into perspective for me was World War II Infantry Anti-Tank Tactics - or perhaps I should say just the first few pages, as that is all I can currently access. (I’ve already requested the book through interlibrary loan; perhaps once I’ve finished reading the book, I’ll find that this whole post is incorrect.)

In those first few pages, the book proved and disproved what I had thought about tanks. Let me elaborate…

From page 1:

The 1940 Blitzkrieg sent other armies into near panic, and a rush to find a means of countering it ensued on both sides of the Atlantic. The fear was often exaggerated, convincing some that infantry units were helpless against tanks. Often the planning committees looked only at the tank itself, and did not consider the combined arms aspects of German doctrine; but effective anti-tank defence would also have to be a combined arms effort.

Reading this made me feel not quite so silly, in assuming that tanks were the end-all, be-all of the battlefield; apparently, some pretty intelligent military people thought the same thing.

Perhaps a segment from the next page will explain, at least in part, where I got my ideas about what tanks were and what they were capable of:

From their first use by the British Army on the Western Front in September 1916, infantry has perceived tanks as a ‘terror’ weapon capable of routing troops, piercing defensive lines and driving deep into rear areas. Considering the limitations of period anti-tank weapons, there was considerable justification for this fear.

The first sentence sums up excellently how I viewed tanks. The view that tanks were basically unstoppable, terror-inducing machines has some truth behind it. The problem with this view, however, is that it’s too general and too static. The problem, in short, is not considering time. Again, from page 1 of the same book, providing an important key to understanding tanks during World War 2:

Anti-tank tactics and weapons were in a constant state of evolution throughout the war. Improved models of tanks, evolving armour tactics, new field innovations and the overall development of combined arms tactics all contributed to the process.

It may be that this is the second biggest misconception I had about tanks: that the tactics they used were the same throughout the war. If I had stopped to make my grey matter work a little, I would have realized that this was a silly notion. Tanks varied widely throughout the war, and how they were used (and how the enemy fought against them) varied accordingly. Why I had shoved all tanks of all nations into one general lump, I’m not entirely sure. In my defense though, until one starts digging into the matter, let’s face it: tanks look pretty similar across the board. How was I supposed to know that a Churchill tank was built to go up against dug-in infantry (World War 1 style), and not go toe-to-toe with a Tiger? They’re both big, armored vehicles, both with a big gun on a turret!

How Things Worked

While my understanding of how infantry and tanks worked together is still tenuous at best, something which I’m going to rectify with more study, as I understand it right now, here’s how things went down:

Early on in the war, my vision of how tanks functioned wasn’t too far from the mark. The anti-tank weapons that infantry had access to were all but useless, particularly the anti-tank rifle. This lack of decent hand weapons to go up against tanks led to the tanks controlling a battle if the defenders had no other anti-tank defenses, such as AT guns. It also led to desperation on the part of many defenders; there are records of Polish cavalary attacking German tanks. Incidentally, even many of the “anti-tank guns” early in the war were fairly useless; the Germans nicknamed a 37mm gun as an “armoured door knocker”; all it did was let the attackers know where the gunners were. This, however, was all to change, as both tanks and anti-tank weaponry were developed further.

Once these developments had taken place, the relationship between infantry and tanks shifted and became truly symbiotic. Instead of tanks bashing through lines followed by infantry, often, the infantry would move forward first to clear out anti-tank infantry; at this time, the tanks would support the advancing foot troops. After an area was secure from anti-tank defenses, then the tanks could move up, accompanied by the infantry. It sounds almost like some peculiar give-and-take dance.

At long range, clearly, tanks would have an advantage over infantry that did not have tank support or long range AT guns. However, at close range, particularly if the area being traversed is cramped with trees and buildings, advancing tanks need infantry support; otherwise, they’re basically sitting ducks, inviting enemy infantry to attack. To quote one of the acknowledgement voices from Company of Heroes (and pardon the language): “This tin can’s a fuckin’ death trap.” In an area of limited mobility, without infantry support to cover the tank’s flanks, this is rather true.

One of the major problems facing a tank crew in close quarters is the fact that visibility is awful. While I’m highly hesitant to trust Red Orchestra’s damage model completely, I do trust that the creators modeled the interior of the tanks correctly. From the positions available - driver, machine-gunner, and commander, who has access to the main gunsight as well as small rectangular holes in the tank cupola - one can mostly see in front of the tank, and even then, it’s not great visibility. The slits in the cupola afford the commander, in theory, a 360 view around the tank; however, there are rather large gaps in that view, as the slits aren’t very wide, and have pieces of the hull in between each one. There are three further options for getting a good view to the sides and rear of the tank:

1. Rotating the gun turret all the way around to use its sight; not a very practical method, as the vast majority of the turrets had a slow rotation time.
2. Popping the hatch and looking out. In a closed area, this obviously was quite dangerous; often, due to the tank’s noise and visibility issues, infantry could flank the tank and wait for an opportune time to attack. A commander popping his head out of the tank would be one of those times.
3. Some tanks had an almost trapdoor-like hatch on the front of the tank, allowing the driver to pop it open and stick his head out; the T34 to the left (painted with German markings) is a good example of this. Obviously, sticking your head out of that hole during a battle wouldn’t be a good idea.

Furthermore, even if the crew could see enemy infantry, problems arose when the infantry got near the tank for a close assault - namely, the tank couldn’t target them. Due to how most tanks were built, they couldn’t lower the angle of the main gun or the coaxial machine-gun enough to target enemies that were practically on top of the tank. So, if infantry could flank a tank in a tight area, not only would it be possible that the tank crew wouldn’t know about it, but even if they did, they couldn’t do anything about it. They were fish in a barrel, in other words. At that point, infantry could use a number of anti-tank weapons to knock out or immobilize the vehicle. (One of the more “interesting” assault weapons I read about was a smoke hand-grenade, which was typicaly smashed over an air vent, filling the tank with smoke, which would force the tankers to evacuate, at which point they’d be captured.)

While I realize that manning a tank in a videogame is far from being the real thing, I can add to all of this that while tanking in Red Orchestra, at least half the time when your tank is taken out, it’s from an enemy that none of the crew could see. I don’t know if that particular statistic for tanks being taken out by infantry during the war, but I’d say it was still a pretty high amount.

Misconceptions Overturned?

As I mentioned above, when I first thought of writing this post, I figured I’d set out to tear apart the common misconception that tanks were unstoppable. I knew my stuff, damnit! Instead, as I wrote the post, I think I simply opened a giant can of worms: as usual, instead of there being one simple truth that we can fall to, there are multiple truths, which vary a great deal depending on the circumstances at and.

Sometimes, tanks were unstoppable; if infantry were without proper weaponry, such as during early in the war, tanks could charge right through enemy lines, then surround the defenders. Other times, tanks were at a loss, relying on other parts of the military for support - aircraft, infantry, artillery.

I suppose, though, that I’ve at least “fixed” my misconception to a certain degree: I know that tanks weren’t always unstoppable, and that’s something, isn’t it?

While I know I have a long way to go to reach true understanding on this complex matter, I’ve nonetheless enjoyed learning what I have so far; I also enjoyed writing this post, even though it’s been more of a drain on me than most of my blog posts. If the post doesn’t make all of my subscribers run screaming into the hills, I’ll certainly continue writing stuff like this. (And, come to think of it, even if it does scare folks away, I’ll probably continue writing some stuff like this; it’s been a blast learning about all of it, even if I’ve only learned enough to realize I still know very little.)

As a final remark, while I’m all for learning, I have to admit that it is (and always will be) one thing to sit in my general’s armchair and study this stuff, and quite another to really experience it (which I have no great desire to do). While hindsight says that infantry did have ways to go up against tanks, that they weren’t always as unstoppable as I once had thought, if a sight like this came rolling at me…

… I can’t imagine how I’d respond. I think anyone can look at that picture and have at least a vague sense as to the terror these things instilled in people.

Cheers to the guys who went up against those mechanized monsters; you’re better men than me.

One of my courses this semester is Third World Politics. To set the groundwork for the course, during the first two weeks, the professor has given us a brief history of the third world (or global south, as sociologists now call it, as opposed to the global north, a.k.a. first world). From the brief history we’ve been given, I can already tell that this course is going to be depressing.

I’ve known for a long while, somewhere deep in my mind, that not all in the world is as, for lack of a better word, nice as things are for me and many of my online friends. We all live in developed countries, we all have the internet, none of us are starving, we’re attending college or have already graduated. Obviously, not everyone in the world lives in such a setting. In fact, I came to find out that only about 15% of the world lives in such conditions. The rest live in conditions that we in the “first world” would find horrible and unbearable.

I think most of us in the “global north” know that things aren’t so great elsewhere. In fact, most of us know that elsewhere on this little rock of ours, things suck pretty bad for a lot of people. However, the mind has a way of suppressing such overwhelming thoughts. We might acknowledge such problems when we see a starving kid in Africa or Ethiopia on our televisions, but most of the time, you and I are stuck in our own little world, oblivious to the problems and suffering of others.

The first two weeks of my Third World Politics course has been a real eye opener. Having never really paid much attention to the third world or studied its history, I didn’t truly understand why things are the way they are. I knew the nations of the global south were in pretty dire straits, but I didn’t understand how they had reached that point.

These past two weeks have shed some light on that for me, and learning of the causes has made me more than a bit upset. How did many third world nations get into the predicaments that they now find themselves in? We, the first world nations, put them in those positions. We colonized the areas, we stripped them of their natural resources, and, within the past 50-75 years or so, we started letting them loose as they clamored for independence. In other words, they were crippled right out of the gate.

Just as many of these third world nations gained their independence, the Cold War started, which left the third world nations in a bit of a bind: should they side with the United States, which wasn’t overly keen on helping them develop? Or should they side with the Communists, who were willing to help them develop? Doing so, obviously, would put the third world nation on the United States list of “bad”nations.

Clearly, these are generalizations - the stories of third world nations are varied, just as the stories of first world nations are - but their stories are all rather similar. Usually, some first world nation (or a group of them) has played a large role in crippling a third world nation. And now that the third world nations have independence, what do many first world nations say? “Hey, what’s up with the third world nations? Why aren’t they developing?” Huh. I wonder.

I don’t know what the solutions are to all of the problems facing the third world are, but I do know this: if the first world nations don’t decide to truly help, to make ending poverty and disease throughout the third world a top priority, it won’t happen. While a few third world nations are crawling out of the pit we threw them in (South Korea, for example), most of the third world nations don’t have a chance in hell of improving without our help. While I certainly don’t know the solutions, I suppose the first step is for the first world nations to truly see and acknowledge the problems that the third world nations face, and accept that we have a huge role to play in fixing them.

Time to call on a cliché: we’re all in this together. I think it’s time we started acting as such.

Being a history major, I often run into a widespread misconception: people think that if you major in history, the only thing you can do once you’ve graduated is teach history. While that is a viable path, that’s certainly not the only path.

What else can you do with a history degree?

A lot. The American Historical Assocation has a detailed page about what a history major might do after graduation. People with a history degree might find themselves working in education, obviously, but they could also end up being communicators of some sort. Working in business, particularly administration, is also a possibility.

If you do a Google search for “what can you do with a history degree” and check out some of the top results, you’ll find that a lot of people think that all you can do with one is teach. They’re wrong.

Where It Gets Personal

It’s not a crime to be misinformed. It’s not a crime to put your nose where it doesn’t belong, either. While neither are a crime, when you combine those two things, the end result can be quite frustrating.

I can’t tell you how many people have questioned my choice of major; not in a curiosity way, either, like “Oh, cool, what do you want to do with that degree?” Instead, people have essentially attacked my choice of major: “History? What are you going to do with that?” (scorn) “You should switch to being a business major, they make way more money.” Their argument always follows the path of “Well, if you aren’t going to teach, you can’t do anything with it.”

I’ve learned to take such nonsense in stride, but it’s still a bit of a put off. I’m not an idiot (really); I have looked into this stuff, you know. While I can be spontaneous smetimes, I don’t often set aside 4 years of my life to get a degree without looking into what I can do with said degree.

Insult is often added to injury when these people will try to argue with me about this. I’ll tell them that you can do many things with a history degree; that I’ve looked into it a great deal. And they will, without missing a beat, tell me that I’m wrong, and that if I’m not going to teach, I can’t do anything with the degree.

Argh.

What ever happened to getting a degree in something that you enjoy? What’s with the obsession with vocation-based education? Jobs are important, but they aren’t the end-all, be-all of your life. If I wanted to major in business or nursing or dental hygiene or some other “you can get a high paying job immediately after graduating with this!” degree, I would. But I don’t. I want to major in history, and I refuse to be swayed by the masses.

I can hear the army of history geeks mustering now, to back me up. I hope.