world war II

During World War 2 the German Tiger tank earned an outsized reputation among those who faced it.

Stalin was likely personally responsible for the deaths of around 6 million people. His lunatic policies claimed another 3 million lives beyond that.

Whether it is spontaneous road rage or a husband spurned, it is the heat of the moment that drives so many people to do so many things they might later regret. Little is more emotionally heated than modern combat.

Today’s crop of actors is, with few exceptions, a bunch of vapid amoral losers. Their standard of accomplishment is running about naked and flying on private jets to A-lister conferences while telling the rest of us what we should be sacrificing to battle climate change. By contrast, David Niven was a real-live warrior.

The Germans gifted the world with the first examples of the assault rifle, optimized combat submarines, operational jet fighters, and surface-to-surface ballistic missiles. While German military innovations have shaped the world for seventy years, in no place has the Nazi martial mythos been more profoundly manifest than in their tanks. The German Panther and Tiger tanks struck fear in the hearts of Allied servicemen wherever they fought.

That SSG Alan Magee survived being thrown clear of his disabled B17 at more than 20,000 feet without a parachute was a legitimate miracle.

Young ideologically naive men always make the best soldiers. WW2 stole life on an unprecedented scale. Major Gangl’s heroic sacrifice was swallowed up in the carnage.

Heinrich “Hein” Severloh should have been a farmer. Born on June 23, 1923, in the town of Metzingen in Northern Germany, Heinrich was a man of the earth. However, in the Summer of 1941 his country called. Conscripted into the Wehrmacht, Severloh was trained as a dispatch rider and assigned to the 3d Battery

The winners write the history, and war is bad. Normal men forced into such abnormal circumstances are frequently driven to do things that seem unnatural from the comfort of our living rooms. The very act of combat is the most repugnant of human pursuits.