What Are You Reading?

Helene Munson's Hitler's Boy Soldiers. Her father was volkdeustch from Chile who was sent to Germany for his education. He is selected for Feldafing, an elite boarding school where the boys are indoctrinated into nazism. As he gets older in 1943, he becomes a flakhelfer (age 15) and at age 17, instead of serving in the Reichsarbeitdienst, he is sent to the barracks for military training. They are assigned to the Panzer Grenadier Regiment 39, III Battalion of the 18th SS PZGD Horst Wessel. They are thrown into battle in the Sudatenland where most of his classmates are killed and he is injured by a grenade.

 

Tim Heath's Women of the Third Reich.

 

Just remember all those amendments..."You can't change the constitution!" - Yes, yes you can. They are called amendments.

 

The Living Document perspective is from the progressives who cite it to have interpretations contemporaenous with the times. It's more of a rule set to restrict government but with all these alphabet agencies it's been circumvented. Let's start with repeal of the 16th Amendment b/c Woody Wilson was a tool. No 16A and voila! Smaller dawt.gov.

About halfway through Women of the Third Reich. I know concentration camp inmates were taken advantage of, but I didn't realize there was so much rape (men or HJ taking advantage of BDM girls). Makes me think the same thing happened in Soviet Union (Beria was notorious for it) and in the PRC.

On the lighter side is this gem from the book. Modern fyre-arms have a steel chamber that encases the bullet with, along with a bolt (or slide), seals the breech. Their utility is not overrated. The following happened to a boy who along with his friends snuck into a German training camp.

I remember the TV show The Avengers where Steed did the same thing to kill his opponent.

Also do not throw rocks at undetonated bombs that are lodged in trees. One girls saw her siblings doing just that and when she recognized the thing in the tree, she shooed them away and told her papa (who in turn reported it to the Army). Another child was shaving magnesium off an incendiary shell when an older HJ boy told them to stop and to get rid of it. The girl dropped it into the fire and the HJ boy immediately kicked it away. Only later did she realize that they were filled with phosphorous and could have caused severe injuries.

 

Not what you might think...

 

Australia Comedian on US gun control...Pt1 you can watch Pt2 if you like it...

 

I've seen Mon Megs in Edinburgh and subsequently learned that the Ottomans never hauled around their super cannons that were used to tear down Constantinople's walls. There were casted in place and after the siege was successful, broken up and the metal transported to the next site. Good read that described the practice of hauling around the metal via horse/camel was Barleti & Hosaflook's The Siege of Shkodra. (Scutari in Italian).

I have a replica Bess, a smoothbore trade gun and several powder horns and a good supply of flints (in case King Chuck wants to dominion over estados unidos). BTW, I live in land formerly claimed by Spain and not Great Britain.

 

Shortly after the end of the war, Eisenhower visited Moscow, accompanied by his son John, then a lieutenant. Ike quotes John saying, after they saw the Tsar Cannon, "I suppose this was the weapon which, two hundred years ago, made future wars too horrible to contemplate."

 

They could bucket brigade the metal if they had enough people (and water).
Back on topic. Jon Diamond's (big picture book): First Blood in North Africa.

First time I got a detailed breakdown of the units involved in the three landing forces (Western, Central, Eastern). Lots of images I've never seen before but there are some inaccurate captions.