Leave it to Sky News Australia to point out the obvious truth so many in the American MSM insist on ignoring.
“It was the far left, it’s almost always the far left.”
“What they do is textbook terrorism.”
“Antifa is not a wholly domestic group.”
Posts Tagged ‘video’
The Insane Engineering of the A-10
Tuesday, May 26th, 2020For those who feel my video offerings have been too tank-centric as of late, here’s a video featuring the design choices behind everyone’s favorite flying tank killer, the A-10 Warthog.
(Hat tip: Regular reader Brandon Byers.)
The Chieftain Talks About His Time In An M1 Abrams
Sunday, May 17th, 2020More tanks? More tanks!
This time Moran climbs around an M1A1 Abrams tank and talks about his time serving inside one during (I’m assuming) Desert Storm [evidently the Iraq War]. Highlights include how an Iraqi bullet missed his head by three inches, and how a tank designer including a pressure sensor on a loading door kept it from taking his arm off when they forgot to throw the proper safety switch.
Edited to add:
Desert Storm? Why do people keep thinking I'm that old…? Add about 13 years to the story….
— Nicholas Moran (@ChieftainWG) May 17, 2020
Plenty of Fear and Favor
Saturday, May 9th, 2020The mainstream media bristles at President Donald Trump’s description of them as “fake news” and “enemies of the people,” then go out of their way to prove his assessments accurate.
This week, CBS News not only faked long lines at Wuhan Coronavirus testing centers, they pulled medical professionals off their real jobs to do it:
CBS News crew pulled medical professionals off the floor at the Cherry Medical Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to line up in their vehicles so a CBS film crew would have a long line for their COVID-19 coverage.
“Our insider witnessed the whole thing and came to Project Veritas, because he knew we would protect him,” said James O’Keefe, the founder and CEO of Project Veritas.
“The insider told us that medical personnel were taken away from treating patients and making the line longer for actual patients wait for the COVID-19 test,” he said.
In an interview with the insider, O’Keefe asked the insider: “You’re telling me you’re a hundred percent certain that CBS News, CBS News Corporation–national, staged a fake event. They faked the news. They faked the reality and broadcasted that to all of their audience last Friday on “CBS This Morning.”
The insider said to him: “A hundred percent. Absolutely.”
Nick Ross, a corporate cleaning site supervisor at the Cherry Health facility, said he was there when the CBS News crew arrived and set up the video shoot at the COVID-19 testing site in the parking lot, “Apparently the news crew wanted more people in the line because they knew it was scheduled.”
Maria Hernandez-Vaquez, a professional registration specialist, told the insider that Cherry Health Director of Quality and Informatics Glenda Walker helped to organize the facility’s workers into the COVID-19 testing line.
The old school media used to claim that it reported the news “without fear or favor,” but today’s media shows plenty of both. Everyone involved in this piece at CBS News should be fired for cause for actively faking news. Of course they won’t be, since defeating President Trump and defending the Democratic Party (and its agenda) are far more important goals to them than reporting the news objectively.
Shermanpalooza!
Tuesday, May 5th, 2020Not sooner do I start writing about Sherman tanks than suddenly all sorts of Sherman-related information starts popping up.
First, here’s are two really detailed videos from Nicholas Moran, AKA The Chieftain, of the features of a Sherman M4A1:
Second, Dwight sent me this twitter thread, that goes into a great deal of detail about how the Sherman’s later reputation for being Not So Great came almost entirely for the way they were deployed in roles they were not specialized for.
Here’s a Tweet from that thread that talks about the weird (but highly effective) redesign that became the Sherman M4VC Firefly used by the British Army:
The story of the Sherman Vc's development is amazing (and look I've fixed the meme for you)… but they arrive at units with a shitty No. 43 Telescope with 3x magnification.
It's marginally better than the standard offering, but isn't really even remotely suitable. /27 pic.twitter.com/ZrHOtGM0Qr
— Jonathan Ware (@ReassessHistory) April 27, 2020
(The way embedded tweets work is you’ll probably have to click on that to see the full meme.)
The British 17 pounder/76.2mm gun used a much longer (and thus higher velocity) shell, powerful enough to take out a Tiger I from the front (though I don’t fancy its chances against the Tiger II), a gun about on par with the German 88mm L/56 on the Tiger I (but not the 88mm L/71 on the Tiger II).
And speaking of the Firefly, Moran did a tour of the Firefly in these videos:
And here’s Moran and Forgotten Weapons host Ian McCollum joining forces to fire the weapon systems on a Sherman:
Finally, it being the Internet, there’s a site dedicated to Sherman tanks. This myths about Shermans post is particularly interesting.
The History of Firearms Development Part 1
Saturday, May 2nd, 2020This Borepatch post got me thinking about the history of firearms development, and all the mistakes and blind alleys along the way. Plus I wanted to put up videos (where available) of how some of the weird firearms Borepatch described actually worked.
But before I did that, I realized I needed to delve into the basics of gunpowder and early firearms development, to set out things in chronological order.
Here’s a short one covering the invention of gunpowder in China, featuring primitive proto-firearms like the firelance, up through early European cannons, the hand-canon and the arquebus.
Here’s a video of someone testing a home-built recreation firelance using bamboo. The first attempt does not go well, so they reinforced the bamboo on the second with electrical tape.
A longer look at the development of early gunpowder weapons in Europe up through the early Napoleonic War:
Highlights: the difficulty of getting saltpeter means Europeans needed to make it by boiling down animal waste, how “corning” vastly increased the power of gunpowder, how they made cannon bodies out of strips of metal bound with iron hoops (why they’re still know today as bun barrels), and how the Pumhart von Steyr is the largest siege cannon still existent, firing stones that weighed 1,533 pounds. Also, Henry Knox, George Washington’s master of artillery, was by profession a bookseller of military history. And the exploding shell was invented by British Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel.
A short look at gun development from the hand-cannon to the musket:
Movie Review: Fury
Sunday, April 26th, 2020Yesterday’s post featured Sherman tanks facing Panzers on the Golan Heights in 1967, so let’s do a review of a movie about a Sherman tank crew late in World War II to make it an All Sherman Tank Weekend, because why the hell not? (Plus it’s a chance not to talk about the Wuhan coronavirus, China or the lockdown.)
Title: Fury
Director: David Ayer
Writer: David Ayer
Starring: Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena, Jon Bernthal
IMDB entry
Fury is the story of the crew of a M4A2 Sherman tank crew driving deep into Germany in April of 1945. It starts with the aftermath of a battle where where the crew had to haul a dead crewmate out and every other American tank but the titular Fury was wiped out. Soon tank commander ‘Wardaddy’ Collier (Brad Pitt) welcomes green recruit Norm (Logan Lerman) as their new assistant driver/machinegunner. They’re sent with a new platoon of tanks to rescue a trapped unit and the lead tank is promptly taken out by a panzerfaust. Fury leads an assault on a German antitank unit in a treeline, then participates in taking a large German town, where the tank crew spends some occasionally tense R & R with two German fraulieins before moving out to help defend a key crossroads. On the way, all the tanks in the platoon but Fury are destroyed in an encounter with a Tiger tank. The last 45 minutes or so of the film depict Fury’s crew, one tread taken out by a mine, defending the crossroads against an SS company.
Fury succeeds when it focuses on being a World War II tank film, and loses momentum when tries to Make Serious Statements About The Human Condition And How War Is Hell.
The scenes that work best are the everyday lives of the crew. They used real Shermans in the film, and the scenes inside the tank have the convincing claustrophobia of a real tank interior. (Though they vastly understate how noisy a tank interior is; some of that is inevitable, as no audience would want to watch an entire tank movie with the noise as loud as an actual tank, but the nosiebed here should have been louder to at least give a hint of the real thing.) The battle scenes are gripping, and the attention to detail pretty good; I especially liked the improvised log armor on the sides, and the use of different types of main gun ammunition for different purposes, including laying down smoke just like in the instructional videos.
A video tour of the interior of a Sherman (with some clips from the movie) is here:
Ignore the guy in the knight’s helmet.
On the other hand, no World War II unit used that many tracer rounds in daylight, and they didn’t look like lasers.
It’s the Deep Meaning Of It All Scenes that drag the movie down. Norm fails to machine-gun teenage German troops with the panzerfausts, with Dire Consequences. Collier forces Norm to shoot a German prisoner to Prove His Loyalty. A burning soldier shoots himself in the head. Another falls on a live grenade. After Norm makes out with a hot frauliein, want to guess who gets killed in a random artillery barrage?
No cliche will be left behind.
Despite that, the acting is very good. Pitt is fine as Hardened Stoic Leader Who Will Get His Men Through. Lerman is good in the green ostensible-viewpoint character role. Michael Pena (Luis in the Ant Man films) is solid as driver (and semi-comic relief) Gordo. Jon Berenthal does fine in the thankless “rude redneck with bad hygiene” role of gun-loader Coon-Ass.
Weirdly enough, the actor who comes out best is Shia LaBeouf as gunner Boyd “Bible” Swan. He brings a quiet, understated dignity to a role as a devout Christian, and “quiet,” “understated” and “dignity” are adjectives that seldom accrue to LaBeouf in any aspect of his life, and whose acting usually tops out at “only mildly annoying.” Jason Isaacs is also excellent in a supporting role as a gritty, unsentimental, matter-of-fact Captain.
Fury is worth watching, but it really could have been about 45 minutes shorter. The best war movies tend to be those that focus on soldiers just trying to do The Task At Hand (Das Boot being the classic example) and not worrying about making Deep Meaningful Statements.
6/10
Also, Hollywood needs to make more movies about tanks.
Here’s the trailer:
The Last Panzer Battle
Saturday, April 25th, 2020When would you think the last World War II German Panzer IVs saw combat? The Battle of Berlin in 1945?
Try the Golan Heights in 1967:
Syria had sourced leftover Panzer IV from all over Europe (along with a handful of Sturmgeschütz III assault guns and Jagdpanzer IV tank destroyers), which they deployed to the Golan Heights. Ironically, some of the tanks they faced were uparmed “Super Sherman” M4 tanks, some with 105mm guns. But the Israelis were also using British Centurion tanks (also with 105mm guns), which handily outclassed the German tanks, and the better trained and equipped Israeli forces routed the Syrians from the Golan Heights as part of the Six Day War. At least 10 of the 25 operational Panzer IVs were knocked out by the Israelis. “Not one Israeli tank was knocked out by a German Panzer.”
Some Super Shermans were pressed into service in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and some even found their way to Israeli-supported factions in the Lebanese Civil War that stretched into the early 1980s.
Believe it or not, Paraguay was still using not only Sherman tanks, but M3 Stuart light tanks in 2016.