In what I suppose he believed to be a triumphant demonstration of his superior intellect, one of the comrades undertook to tutor me on Islam’s superiority to Christianity:

Women serve as religious judges—Qadis—on Sharia courts. Most Christian Churches won’t allow women to even be a pastor, a position with far less power and authority. Misogyny.

Christians are leading the homophobic gay-hating movement here in the US.

Most White evangelical Christians in the US have rejected liberal values and have thrown in their lot with the Fascist Donald Trump.

And modern European history is mostly about Christians massacring Christians in war after war after war, with millions of deaths. And I haven’t even mentioned the death toll from their colonial wars.

So STFU with the WTF.

It takes a postmodern progressive to barf out waste matter like that. If he’d stopped to think, this character might possibly have realized that his indictment of Christianity could just as well be applied, and with far greater credibility, to Islam. Misogyny? Homophobia? Illiberalism? Fascism? Colonial wars? The past and present of Islam embody every one of those vices, which are not at all mitigated by female religious judges being permitted to participate in the administration of their own oppression.

The perceptive reader will have noticed that Comrade Clueless is comparing Christianity’s past to Islam’s present. Say what you will about “White evangelical Christians,” but when was the last time they threw a homosexual off the roof of a high-rise or slaughtered a Jewish infant? How long, indeed, has it been since Christianity played an active political role in Western countries? Yes, there was a time when such a thing as political Christianity existed. Centuries ago, it was accepted that the Pope in Rome wielded temporal power, not only in his Italian Papal States but throughout Europe. But the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion put an end to all that, a change of status formalized for America by the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

But political Islam is a living—and malign—force in the modern world.

As demonstrated by The Handmaid’s Tale, one of the dumbest novels ever written, the idea of a fundamentalist Christian dictatorship in a Western nation can scarcely be made plausible. It takes a Canadian to imagine otherwise. But an Islamic dictatorship is not just plausible. Such regimes actually exist, e.g. the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And even in Muslim countries with nominally secular governments, political Islam wields considerable power. In the Islamic world, even where “separation of church and state” is not rejected in principle it tends to be disregarded in practice.

If progressives were really concerned about the rights of women, they’d have a lot to say—much of it highly critical—about the status of women in Muslim countries. But when Joe Biden bugged out of Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to power, the comrades had nothing to say about the re-enslavement of women and girls in that unfortunate country. Indeed, they turn a blind eye to all such matters involving Islam and women: grooming gangs in the UK, honor killings in America, public executions in Iran. Merely to mention such horrors is enough to get you branded as an Islamophobic racist. But Christianity? As the screed quoted above shows, you can slander and revile that religion in the most savage terms. It’s one of the ways in which postmodern progressives demonstrate their virtue and enlightenment.

I doubt, however, that Comrade Clueless plans on converting to Islam.

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Scene One: On the Cultural Front

Everything that the comrades touch turns to crap, of course. It’s just the way they roll. But the Left’s recent cinematic desecration of George Orwell’s Animal Farm is an exceptional horror, verging on a crime against humanity.

My copy of Orwell’s celebrated novel is a slim volume of just 124 pages. Yet despite its brevity, Animal Farm is a masterpiece of imaginative literature that manages to exist on two levels: as a simple fairy tale, and as a sharp and vivid satire on the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Stalinist USSR. Now it’s been made into a movie (directed by Andy Serkis; screenplay by Nicholas Stoller), and as you might imagine, progressive pieties have twisted and trivialized Orwell’s allegory.

Gone is the historical context. Instead of the conflict depicted by Orwell—socialism versus communism—the animals are depicted as earnest revolutionaries, striving for freedom and equality. But they’re betrayed by the traitors among them, the pigs, who are depicted not as fanatical Bolsheviks but as greedy capitalists in cahoots with human plutocrats. That and various rather lame efforts to render the film “family friendly” make a mess of it.

This cultural vandalism is one particularly repellant aspect of the postmodern Left’s campaign to spoil just about everything. On the stupid and condescending argument that the BIPOC and other progressive mascot groups can’t cope with the outrageous political incorrectness of literary classics, they’re either sanitized (Shakespeare and the James Bond novels) or consigned to the memory hole (Huckleberry Finn).

Granted, the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalin are old news, and it’s interesting to speculate how Animal Farm might emerge from Orwell’s imagination if he were writing it today. One thing seems certain, however: It wouldn’t be the kind of pig’s breakfast that Serkis and Stoller have cooked up.

Scene Two: Other People’s Money

Comrade Zohran Mamdani, mayor of what he aspires to establish as the People’s Democratic Socialist Republic of New York City, has hit a snag along the way to the Radiant Future: Free stuff turns out not to be free.

Mamdani’s problem is that there’s a multibillion-dollar hole in NYC’s $127 billion annual budget, which by law is supposed to be balanced. As a candidate for the mayoralty, he airily dismissed the city’s fiscal travails: Taxing evil billionaires and greedy corporations would fix things in a jiffy. Unfortunately, the Mayor needs the cooperation of state government to enact the major tax hikes he proposes, and Governor Kathy Hochel has proved reluctant to play along. So Mamdani is taking hostages. If Albany won’t give him everything he wants, he’ll squeeze it out of the city’s middle class by means of a huge property tax hike. Oh well, at least the proles will get free bus rides!

But this climate of leftie storm and strife has an air of unreality about it. With a population of about 8.5 million, the Big Apple’s annual budget is significantly higher than the budget of the state of Florida, population 24 million, which spends about $117 billion annually. This rather comical disparity is due to the fact that where progressives rule, the clamorous demands of various favored groups and the ever-increasing plentitude of “unmet needs” drive spending relentlessly upward.

But progressivism, democratic socialism, or whatever it might be called, is not classical socialism. Its anti-capitalistic rhetoric is pure theater. Mamdani is not such a fool as to think that he can expropriate the bourgeoisie and seize the means of production. He espouses what might be called vampire socialism. Plutocrats, capitalists, billionaires are not to be purged. Instead, they’re to be battened upon by the comrades whenever some “unmet need” demands resources. After all, there’s not a single solitary person on the postmodern Left who knows or cares where wealth comes from. The only thing they’re good at is looting.

The only problem arises when those capitalist milch cows decide that they don’t want to be battened upon and simply vamoose. Then Comrade a Mamdani will be reduced to scrounging for change under the sofa cushions of Gracie Mansion to pay for his pathetic little down-market socialist paradise.

Problematical Definitions of Political Violence

As the postmodern Left’s appetite for political violence grows, the comrades have undertaken a campaign to convince Americans that almost all political violence originates on the Right. This campaign involves considerable sleight of hand—for instance counting gang violence in prisons as right-wing political violence. Another dodge is the argument that destruction of property, such as we witnessed during the “mostly peaceful” George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, isn’t political violence at all, because property is insurable. You see, if the comrades loot and burn down a few convenience and liquor stores, it’s all good—the insurance company will pay the bill!

There are several problems with this latter argument. For one thing, the insurance company doesn’t actually pay the bill: It just gets passed along. If violent protests damage a large amount of property in, say, Portland, the cost of insuring property in Portland goes up in the form of higher insurance premiums, which means that the cost of doing business in Portland goes up. And that, of course, might well depress the level of business activity in Portland.

In 2020, the comrades were pretty cavalier about the destruction of other people’s property. For instance, National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher made light of all the looting and arson. “I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive,” she conceded at the time in a social media post. “But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.”

One wonders if Katherine would have found it so gosh-darned hard to be mad if her car or her house had been torched by rioters as a token of their devotion to the memory of petty criminal George Floyd. I suspect not.

In any case, her argument hasn’t worn well—because it turns out that the horrific Pacific Palisades fire of January 2025, which destroyed or damaged some 16,000 structures in Los Angeles and killed a dozen people, was kindled by a left-wing lunatic inspired by progressive glamour boy Luigi Mangione, who had shot and killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson just a few weeks earlier. The arsonist, Jonathan Rinderknecht, was motivated by anti-capitalist rage and “resentment of the rich”—who, he claimed, have enslaved everybody else. Mangione showed him that it was possible to even the score.

The result? Twelve people killed. Thousands and thousands of homes, businesses, and other properties destroyed or damaged. Oh, and let it be noted that the progressive city government of Los Angeles not only mismanaged its response to the holocaust but has bungled the rebuilding effort. So tell us, Katherine Maher, how’s all that for striking a blow against the “system of oppression” that’s got your frillies twisted into a knot?

As for the rest of the comrades, let them get back to us about the horrors of right-wing political violence after they’re come to terms with the evil deeds of their precious Heroes of the Revolution, Luigi Mangione and Jonathan Rinderknecht. Not that I think they ever will.

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Author’s Note

This story was born during a walk around the subdivision to which my wife and I moved in 2011. A couple of weeks earlier, I’d reread George R. Stewart’s celebrated 1949 novel, Earth Abides, wherein a mutant strain of measles kills off all but a fraction of the human race. It must have been Stewart’s vision of the end times that focused my mind’s eye on what our subdivision would look like after the apocalypse. The next morning, when I sat down and began to write, the pieces fell into place rather too easily. I seemed to be taking dictation. But from whom?

“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” is included in my first short story collection, A Cold Day in August: Thirteen Tales of Criminality Most Foul, which is available on Amazon as a Kindle edition and a paperback edition. If you read and enjoy this story, I hope you’ll share it with family and friends, and perhaps even go on to read the other tales that comprise A Cold Day in August.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

A Short Story by Thomas Gregg

The sun was climbing into a cloudless sky and the thermometer on the patio registered fifty-four degrees. It was shaping up to be a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

From his chair in a shaded corner of the patio, Charlie Curtis surveyed the back yard. It badly needed mowing. And the weeds were out of control. But he was done messing with the lawn. It was better—safer—to let it go to seed. Only one small area, in the angle formed by a tall wooden fence and the tree line that demarcated his property, showed signs of care. It was there that he’d laid his family to rest back in the spring. He kept the graves and their immediate surroundings trimmed and neat. Charlie sipped his coffee. Later he’d visit with Amber and the boys. He did so every day.

As usual the neighborhood was quiet. When the breeze picked up you could hear it rustle the leaves of the trees. Charlie missed the distant hum of traffic that used to be audible from the main road to the north. These days he rarely heard a motor and when he did, it was a lost, forlorn sound, like a summoning of ghosts.

Charlie finished his coffee. There wasn’t much left and he didn’t relish the prospect of foraging for more. From the outside most of the houses in Oak End—that was the name of the subdivision—looked normal, if a bit weathered and showing signs of neglect. But inside, well, that was another story. Some houses were deserted, their former occupants having packed and fled in the early stages of the plague. But in others there were the remains of what must have been terrible scenes. Though Charlie had never thought of himself as an imaginative man, he found it all too easy to picture how the endgame had played out for some of his neighbors.

Glancing at his watch—a windup Timex—he saw that it was time for his morning walk. Time. What was it now? Time in the old sense, minutely computed, constantly regulated, no longer existed. Still, he’d worn a watch all his life and old habits die hard. But he’d let the calendar go. What did the date or even the day of the week matter? Here and there, touches of scarlet and yellow were showing among the green leaves of the trees. So probably it was early October.

With a grunt Charlie levered himself out of the chair. He was forty-six and beginning to feel some stiffness in the morning. He didn’t mind that very much. What worried him were his teeth. Charlie had good teeth, an inheritance from his mother, and he’d never been prone to cavities. But suppose some dental problem flared up? That, to Charlie, was a frightening thought. So he brushed and flossed. He did this three times a day: morning, noon and night. Like his daily walk through the neighborhood, oral hygiene was a key element of his daily routine.

He was already wearing his windbreaker and sunglasses, so Charlie didn’t bother to go back inside. Instead, he went along the side of the house to the street. Pine Street. All the streets in Oak End were named after trees. He stood for a moment with his hands in his pickets, looking left and right along the street. Sometimes he turned right to begin his walk and sometimes he turned left. Today he turned right.

Pine Street was sunny, with patches of shade laid down by the large trees that stood in most front yards. The lawns, like his own, had run to seed. Charlie’s next-door neighbor, Dan Patterson, had been a major lawn Nazi. He was probably dead now, which was just as well, given the sorry state of his long-neglected front yard. Dan and his family had split early. It may have seemed like a good idea at the time but from what Charlie had been able to gather before the final news blackout, there really hadn’t been any place to hide.

Farther along Pine Street one of the houses had burned. That too had happened in the early stages of the plague, when the O’Briens came down with Yellow Face and some in the neighborhood tried to quarantine them. Charlie had steered clear of that ugly scene, which ended in an exchange of gunfire. The mob—that’s what it was, a mob—then torched the house with the bodies inside. But it made no difference. Within days everyone still remaining in Oak End was sick, including Charlie’s wife and his two sons. Some fled; others retreated behind closed doors and drawn blinds to await the end. And when the time came for Charlie to dig his family’s graves there was no one to help him.

He was occasionally troubled by his failure to do anything for his neighbors. The dead of Oak End should have been given a decent burial. But his heart had sickened at the thought of it. All he could bring himself to do was take the few bodies he found outdoors back to their homes. For some time afterwards a distressing stench permeated the neighborhood. Charlie bore this stoically, as a penance. But now the stench was gone.

At the end of Pine Street, he turned left onto Sycamore. The front door of the first house he passed stood open, as it had since everybody died. In the living room, he knew, Mary Rosario lay dead. Years before, when he and Amber had been going through a bad patch, Charlie and Mary came close to having an affair. She was a slim, vivacious brunette, not actually pretty but the kind of woman who pulled your focus. Newly divorced and not yet forty, she’d made her availability plain to Charlie. And though he was sorely tempted, in the end he drew back. He remembered the look she’d given him—arch, affectionate—and how she said he’d live to regret his decision.

“Ah, Mary…” Charlie sighed as he went by. It was the first time in days that he’d spoken aloud.

There were elements of his daily routine that held dangerous memories at bay, but his morning walk was not one of them. The walk was his way of managing memory. It was the stretch of time—about an hour—when he permitted himself to remember. Charlie was a methodical man, an organized man. Before the epidemic, he’d been the manager of a big box store. And when he found himself alone, when he decided that yes, he wished to go on living, Charlie realized that memory would be a major problem. You could not forget. You could not even pretend to forget. But you couldn’t let yourself remember, and remember, and remember. Too much remembering would drive you mad. So he made it a time-limited task, to be completed during his daily walk along familiar streets, past familiar houses.

Oak End hadn’t really been a close-knit neighborhood. Charlie and Amber had had a few casual friends among the neighbors, couples with whom they’d swapped invitations to come over for drinks or a barbecue or a Superbowl party. He was grateful now for that lack of close connection. It made the memories less poignant, easier to bear.

There were exceptions, however. Mary was one. And here was another, coming up on the right as he walked along Sycamore: the Silvera house. Ron and Debbie had been practicing Catholics with four children, three daughters and a son, the oldest no more than seventeen. Ron’s elephantine SUV was parked in the driveway. The garage door and the front door were both shut. All the blinds were drawn. Charlie didn’t like thinking about what he might find if he entered the Silvera house.

But it was a beautiful day in the neighborhood. The sun was higher now and Charlie half-unzipped his windbreaker. He came to the intersection of Sycamore and Hawthorne, turning left again. This put the sun at his back so that his shadow preceded him along the street. The air was still and the silence was profound.

Here as everywhere in Oak End the street was littered with dead leaves and branches and miscellaneous trash. Charlie had debated with himself whether he should clean things up a little. A chore like that would pass the time. But he’d decided against it, for the same reason that he’d ceased to tend his lawn. It was safer to maintain an appearance of desertion and neglect. People did pass through—not often these days but sometimes. And strangers could be dangerous. They might be down with Yellow Face. Or the end of the world might have given them strange ideas.

He was reflecting on this when someone behind him cried, “Oh my God—!”

Actually, it was more of a sob. Slowly, making sure that his hands were visible, Charlie turned. And there on the front steps of the house he’d just passed stood a young woman. “Oh my God!” she cried again. “Another person—!”

Then Charlie recognized her. “Hello, Jessica,” he said. With that the girl’s legs gave out, and she collapsed into a sitting position.

Her name was Jessica Tarkington, his sons’ old babysitter, now a college student. Once a college student, Charlie corrected himself. Now she, like him, was—what? A remnant, Charlie supposed. A leftover.

He stood where he was while Jessica cried herself out. When the tears ceased to flow, she looked up. “Mr. Curtis? It is you? I’m not having a hallucination?”

“No, it’s me.” Charlie to a careful step toward her. He nearly asked if she was all right: a ridiculous question in the circumstances.

“You’re alive,” she said. There was wonder in her voice. “I thought…I really believed…”

“No,” he said, taking another step toward her. “You get to imagining that, but it isn’t true. A few people survived. Not many but some.”

“Is there anybody else…?”

“Here? In the neighborhood?” Charlie shook his head. “All gone, all dead. It’s just me.”

She looked down and sighed. Jessica had once been pretty but now she was a mess: red hair matted, face thin and sallow, dressed in dingy gray sweatpants and a black hoodie. On her feet were heavy black work boots, much the worse for wear. A military-style rucksack lay on the porch behind her.

“I came home,” she said eventually. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

Charlie nodded as if this made perfect sense. Well, in a way it did. He indicated the front door, which stood open. “Your parents…?”

“No,” she said. “I knew they wouldn’t be. When…when it began to happen…they called me and said I should stay on campus…that they’d come to get me. But they never did…”

That was good, Charlie thought. It was a mercy that she’d come home to an empty house.

But now he looked more closely at her. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“I’m so tired, Mr. Curtis.” And she told him her horror story. First the descent into anarchy and chaos on campus. Then the beginning of her trek home through the land of the dead. Bodies everywhere, she said. In the streets, in their cars, once a school bus full of bodies. Military roadblocks with shot people all over the place, the soldiers just as dead as everybody else. Whole towns burning to the ground.

Charlie nodded. He’d seen some of this on TV before the final blackout.

Then she fell in with a man named Kurt, who became her protector until he went mad and became her tormentor instead. In a dead voice Jessica described the things he’d done to her, the things he’d made her do to him—until one day she cut his throat with a jagged piece of metal that came to hand. And it was awful, Jessica said, but watching him choke on his own blood and die made her laugh for the first time in a long, long time.

Kurt was the only living person she’d encountered on her journey home.

After killing him, she found a place to hide, somebody’s garden shed, and stayed there, sleeping a lot, sneaking out from time to time to forage for food, trying to gain some weight back, some strength back, so she could make it home. “I’m better now,” she said. “Really I am.” And Charlie understood. Jessica’s need to go home had staved off the madness, just as his daily walk around the neighborhood kept the dangerous memories under control.

But in the end, it hadn’t mattered.

He took another step toward her. Yes, the signs were there. Her jaundiced appearance. The sheen of sweat on her forehead. The involuntary tic that twisted her lips every couple of minutes. They could be taken as symptoms of exhaustion and grief, but Charlie knew better. Hadn’t he seen the same signs on his wife’s face? On his sons’ faces? Hadn’t he watched those dear faces turn that sickening shade of yellow—hadn’t he watched his wife, his sons, jerk and writhe in in the throes of the agonizing muscular contractions that preceded catastrophic hemorrhage and death? It was the end of the world, and he couldn’t be blamed for that. But Charlie did blame himself for the weakness, the selfishness, that stayed his hand when his family needed him to be strong.

“Can you help me, Mr. Curtis?” Jessica started to cry again. “I made it home…I made it home…but I’m so tired now…

“Yes, I can help you,” Charlie replied. He reached into his windbreaker, brought out his Glock, and put a bullet through Jessica Tarkington’s head.

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The World War II at Sea Series

Note on Nomenclature

The following terms and abbreviations are used in this article: AA (antiaircraft guns), AAMG (antiaircraft machine gun), A/S (antisubmarine), DC (depth charge), DCT (depth charge thrower), HA (high-angle surface/antiaircraft gun), HMS (His Majesty's Ship), MG (machine gun), RAN (Royal Australian Navy), RIN (Royal Indian Navy), RN (Royal Navy). Some British guns were identified by the weight of the shell they fired, e.g. the 2-pounder (40mm) AA gun.

Main battery gun mounts on RN warships were identified by the letters “A” and “B” (forward) and “X” and “Y” aft.

In 1939-45 Royal Navy parlance, the term sloop denoted a small multipurpose warship. The first such vessels in service with the RN were the “Flower” class sloops, built during World War I. Classed as “fleet sweeping sloops,” they were capable of serving as minesweepers, patrol ships and, as the U-boat threat developed, convoy escorts. They displaced around 1,200 tons, were about 250 feet in length and had a maximum speed of sixteen knots. Armament was 2 x 12-pounder (3in) guns, 2 x 4in guns or 2 x 4.7in guns and, if serving as escorts, depth charges. Some were retained in service after the war and two survived long enough to serve in World War II.

In the mid-1920s, as the war-built sloops were beginning to be discarded, a modest replacement program was authorized. In that time of financial stringency, new sloops were justified on the grounds that they were needed for colonial service and general fleet duties. But such ships would obviously be useful as A/S escorts in wartime, and their design made allowances for this

The first two sloops of the new series were laid down in 1928 and entered service in 1929. Bridgewater and Sandwich were much the same size as the “Flower” class, and they were armed with 2 x 4in guns and 2 x 3pdr saluting guns. The latter were replaced by 8 x 0.5in AAMG (two quadruple mounts) in 1938. As designed, they could be fitted for minesweeping but during World War II they were employed as escorts. They received asdic (sonar), were rearmed with 1 x 4in HA, 4 x 20mm (single mounts) as light AA, DC racks and DCTs, and could carry up to eighty DC.

The two follow-on classes were basically improved versions of the “Bridgewaters.” The four ships of the “Hastings” class entered service in 1931-32. Prewar, one served on fishery protection duties with armament reduced, and two others were disarmed for service as survey ships. During the war all were employed as escorts. Gun armament varied from 1 x 4in HA and 1 x 12pdr (3in) HA plus 8 x 20mm to 2 x 4in HA plus 4 x 20mm. All had DC racks and DCTs; two were also fitted with the Hedgehog A/S mortar. Up to eighty DC could be carried.

The eight ships of the “Shoreham” class entered service between 1931-34. They had a slightly longer hull than their predecessors. All were used as escorts during the war, with gun and depth charge armament similar to the preceding classes. Only one, however, received Hedgehog.

Next came the eight ships of the “Grimsby” class, which entered service between 1935-40. As designed, they were slightly smaller than the “Shorehams” but more heavily gunned, with 2 x 4.7in plus 1 x 3in HA in “B” position. As completed, however, their armament varied. Three ships had 3 x 4in HA (single mounts). One had 3 x 4in HA (one twin and one single mount), and one had 4 x 4in HA (two twin mounts). The other three were rearmed during the war with 4 x 4in HA (two twin mounts) replacing the 4.7in and 3in HA guns. Light AA initially consisted of 8 x 0.5in AAMG (two quadruple mounts); later all eight ships were rearmed with 2 to 6 x 20mm. DC racks and DCTs were fitted and six ships also received Hedgehog, replacing the 3in HA or one 4in HA. They could carry up to 90 DC.

In addition to the twenty-two sloops built for the RN, two were built in Britain for the Royal Indian Navy and four in Australia for the Royal Australian Navy. The RIN ships were based on the “Hastings” class, with modifications to suit them for tropical service; the latter were of the “Grimsby” class. The second of the Indian ships had 4.7in guns in place of 4in guns.

The first four prewar sloop classes make an interesting comparison with the Royal Navy’s other two principal escort classes, the “Flower” class corvettes and the “River” class frigates. Their design speed, 16.5 knots, was about the same as the corvettes, but they were larger and more seaworthy. On the other hand, they were smaller and slower than the frigates, though their armament was similar. Only with the three units of the “Bittern” class, which entered service in the late 1930s, was there a marked increase in the size, speed, and armament of sloops. These ships set the pattern for the sloops constructed immediately before and during World War II.

Compared to the preceding “Grimsby” class, the three “Bitterns” were substantially larger (1,190 tons versus 990 tons standard displacement) and faster (18.75 knots versus 16.5 knots). Two of them were armed with 6 x 4in HA in three twin mounts. The third ship, Enchantress, was originally completed to serve as the Admiralty yacht and was armed with 2 x 4.7in (single mounts) In all three ships, the initial light AA armament was 4 x 0.5in AAMG in a quadruple mount.

When war came, Enchantress was refitted as an escort, with 4 x 4.7in (single mounts), 1 x 3in HA and DC racks and DCTs. The AAMG were replaced by 2 x 20mm. The other two received 4 x 20mm replacing the AAMG, DC racks and DCTs. All three could carry up to 90 DC. One of them, Stork, also received Hedgehog. Four similar ships were built for the RIN.

The three ships of the following “Egert” class were larger and slightly faster editions of the “Bitterns,” with a fourth 4in HA twin mount. However, the 4in HA mount in “X” position was removed from the two surviving ships in 1942-43 and replaced by 4 x 2pdr (40mm) pom-pom (quadruple mount). Their original 4 x 0.5in AAMG (quadruple mount) were replaced by 4 x 20mm They had the usual outfit of DC racks and DCTs and could carry up to 120 DC.

The “Black Swan” and Modified “Black Swan” classes constituted the final and most numerous group of escort sloops to be built for the RN. Slightly enlarged and faster (19.75 knots versus 19.25 knots) editions of the “Egert,” they were completed between 1942-46: thirty-two ships in total, plus two more built for the RIN.

As designed, the “Black Swans” were armed with 6 x 4in HA (three twin mounts), 4 x 2pdr pom-pom (quadruple mount) and 8 x 0.5in AAMG (two quadruple mounts). Later ships in the series had 8 x 2pdr pom-pom (two quadruple mounts) or 4 x 40mm Bofors (two twin mounts), with a variable number of 20mm Oerlikons (twin and single mounts) replacing the AAMG. In many of the earlier ships, the quadruple pom-poms were replaced by two twin Bofors and in some ships, the light AA armament was further strengthened by 4 x Bofors (single mounts). The “Black Swans” had two DC racks and eight DCT, and could carry 110 DC. If Bofors guns were not fitted an additional 50 DC could be carried in the Bofors magazine, and in that case light AA consisted of 10 x 20mm.

All of the RN’s sloops except the Modified “Black Swans” that were completed late in the war or postwar saw extensive service, mostly as convoy escorts. Many served in the RN’s antisubmarine hunter-killer groups, which were given a “roving commission” to track down and destroy U-boats, with the secondary mission of reinforcing convoy escort groups. Five such groups were organized in in 1943, one of which, the 2nd Support Group, was entirely made up of “Black Swan” class sloops under the command of Captain F.J. “Johnnie” Walker, the RN’s premier antisubmarine warfare specialist. With their powerful gun and A/S armament, seaworthiness, endurance and speed, the “Black Swans” were well suited to the tactics that Walker developed. From 1943 to 1945, the 2nd Support Group scored twenty-two confirmed U-boat kills, including six in the course of a single cruise. Toward the end of the war, the group’s makeup became more variable, with “Loch,” “Captain,” and “Colony” class frigates joining the sloops at various times.

Fourteen RN sloops, two RAN sloops, and one RIN sloop were sunk during the war: torpedoed by submarines or aircraft, sunk by surface ships, or bombed.

With the end of the war, most of the RN’s prewar sloops were paid off into reserve, and all had been sold or scrapped by 1950. Many of the “Black Swans,” however, were retained in the postwar fleet. Black Swan herself served on the China Station and in the Korean War before being paid off and scrapped in 1956. Four “Black Swans” were transferred to the West German Bundesmarine in 1959. They were refitted as training ships and served as such for a number of years. The sloops originally built for the RIN lasted even longer in Indian and Pakistani service. The two RIN “Black Swans,” for instance, seerved until 1979-81.

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The huge black headline on today’s Drudge Report is ominous in the extreme:

MAY DAY!

ECONOMIC BLACKOUT

The headline links to a front-page story in the US edition of that reliable socialist propaganda rag, The Guardian. Here’s the lede:

Thousands are set to join an economic blackout for International Workers’ Day on Friday, as part of 3,500 “May Day Strong” events across the country. Organizers are calling for “no school, no work, no shopping” with walkouts, marches, block parties and other gatherings planned into the evening.

Context: There are about 170 million working Americans, 80% of whom work full time. Which is to say that with the exception of a handful of crack-brained radical activists, no one in America is waving the red flag on socialism’s day of days.

Well of course they aren’t, for May Day is obsolete and the subjects of its iconography are as extinct as the dodo. What, if anything, comes to mind when its name is evoked? Red flags fluttering in the breeze over street barricades, the aroused proletarian masses facing off against mounted Cossacks, Lenin haranguing the crowd at the Finland Station, strikes, the expropriation of the capitalists—revolution!

But except for that handful of crack-brained radicals, nobody in America wants a revolution, which would mess up people’s plans for the weekend. That’s why the comrades pretend to have landed a major blow against capitalism when the employees of an Amazon fulfilment center or a Starbucks franchise vote to unionize. In the large, however, American workers exhibit scant interest in labor unions. And in this they display wisdom, for “organized labor” is largely the organization of thuggery and corruption.

As for the proletarian masses, if union membership defines them, then government employees at the local, state and national level must be America’s downtrodden sons and daughters of toil. About half of all unionized workers—just over seven million—are employed in then public sector. A mere 6% of workers in the private sector are unionized, versus 33% in the public sector.

What we actually have in America is chump change socialism. When he’s not promoting Islamofascist terrorism, New York City Gauleiter Zohran Mamdani is touting such radical revolutionary policies as free bus rides (transforming public transportation into mobile homeless shelters) and half a dozen government grocery stores (startup cost per each: $30 million). Up in Maine, Nazi Tat Guy Graham Platner is running for the US Senate on a pledge to “fight the Oligarchy” (details to be announced at some indeterminate future date). And of course, all the comrades swear that on the morrow of their inevitable victory, they’ll impeach the Ogre Trump—provided that some warrior of the revolutionary vanguard doesn’t assassinate him first.

Yet despite all its gassing about affordability, predatory capitalism, evil billionaires, Führer Trump, MAGA, etc. and so forth, the Left’s true obsession, the focus of its rage, is Zionism—Israel—the Jews. That’s the thing that gets the comrades out of bed early, that’s what gets them out on the street. And the flags they wave aren’t red. No, they’re the flags of “Palestine,” Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation? Yeah, whatever—but let’s get our priorities straight. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free (of Jews). First things first!”

Long ago, the Austrian liberal politician Ferdinand Kronawetter observed that antisemitism is the socialism of fools. And he knew what he was talking about, as the most cursory glance at that carnival of fools, contemporary American socialism, will reveal. And if you’re dumb enough to be an antisemite, you’re certainly dumb enough to believe that “real socialism” has never been tried.

Comrade Stalin would have begged to differ. In fact, if you’d suggested any such thing to him, the Kremlin Mountaineer would have dispatched you to the Gulag or the execution cellars.

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It’s really the simplest thing in the world to prove that one cannot trust the word of the broad Left—from radical leftists and progressives to supposedly mainstream Democrats—on any issue whatsoever. And why is that? Because in the name of anti-Zionism, the comrades have embraced a lie whose enormity, shamelessness, and evil demands an additional circle of Hell to accommodate those who embrace and repeat it. The lie is this: that since the founding of Israel, the Jews have been committing genocide against the Palestinian Arabs.

This is, of course, a preposterous claim. In 1947, on the eve of the foundation of the Jewish state, the population of Mandate Palestine (corresponding to modern Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) had a population of around 1.8 million: some 1,180,000 Arabs and 630,000 Jews. Today, Israel proper has a population of around 7.8 million Jews and 2.1 million Arabs; the West Bank has a population of 3.4 million Arabs and 700,000 Jews; and Gaza has a population of 2.1 million Arabs.

So today, there are 7.6 million Arabs living in the territories that once comprised the British Mandate for Palestine—a decisive refutation of the charge that the Jews of Israel are now waging or have ever waged a campaign of genocide against the Arabs. Indeed, the numbers expose that charge as a pure fantasy.

I could terminate this article right here, on the argument that the progressive anti-Zionists who push the “genocidal Jews” narrative are condemned by the arithmetic, which makes manifest their mendacity, bad faith, and antisemitic bigotry. But they’re even worse than that, in that their master lie is accompanied by a bodyguard of supplementary lies, each one more preposterous than the last.

We’ve been treated to countless examples of these supplementary lies since 10/7/2023. There was, for example, the charge that the IDF was “carpet bombing” Gaza. I disposed of that one here:

As for “carpet bombing,” that term is correctly applied to the tactical employment of heavy bombers during World War Two. In one notorious case, on 15 February 1944, 229 heavy and medium bombers of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces dropped over 1,000 tons of bombs on the Abbey of Monte Cassino (Italy) in an attempt to suppress German defenses in the area. During the Battle of Normandy (June-August 1944), heavy bombers of the US Eighth Air Force and RAF Bomber Command conducted saturation bombing attacks on German defenses ahead of ground operations. Given the technology of the day, such bombing attacks were less than precise; in Normandy, for instance, stray bombs caused many Allied casualties. Similar, strategic, attacks against urban targets in German and Japan are better categorized as “area bombing.”

No evidence exists to show that the IDF is conducting carpet bombing or area bombing attacks in Gaza.

Then there’s the charge that the IDF was deliberately targeting “civilian infrastructure” such as schools and hospitals. There were charges that the Israeli military campaign was causing famine in Gaza, that the IDF was preventing food aid from reaching the Gazan Palestinians, and even that the wicked Jews were using food aid to lure Gazan Palestinians into the sights of IDF snipers. Hamas concocted false stories of starving Palestinian children—which the Western media swallowed uncritically, as it did every other tall tale of Israeli perfidy.

All of these stories were eventually shown to be false. Meanwhile the clear, indeed glaring, evidence of Hamas war crimes was either treated with extreme skepticism or simply ignored.

There’s nothing new here. The above lies are simply the latest in a long line of blood libels that have been levelled against the Jews since time immemorial. In times past it was alleged that the Jews were in the habit of kidnapping Christian children, killing them, and using their blood to make the Passover matzah. This has since been updated to the charge that the Israel harvests the organs of dead Palestinians for sale around the world. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

One of the most reliable—and despicable—purveyors of modern blood libels is Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Just recently, she has seized up on the charge that Israeli police and soldiers posted to detention camps have trained their guard dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. You’ll never see a trick like that at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show! How do you train a dog to rape a human being?

We’re often told that “criticism of Israel” is a legitimate undertaking, and that “anti-Zionism” is not antisemitism. Well, criticism of Israel that makes use the great lie, genocide, and its supporting supplementary lies is nothing but antisemitism. And since anti-Zionism uses those lies to build its case against the Jewish state, an anti-Zionist is really nothing but an antisemite. The blood libel has always been a symptom of antisemitism. It still is today.

When former President Joe Biden opined in his speech to the Democratic National Convention, said that anti-Israel protesters, wearing their stupid keffiyehs and waving their various Islamofascist flags, “have a point” about Israeli evil, he revealed just how far the rot of antisemitism had spread. By that time, Biden had abandoned his earlier full-throated support of Israel in the wake of 10/7/2023 and was, along with many other Democrats, desperately trying to placate the party’s progressive, Jew-bashing base. It hasn’t gotten any better since then; on the contrary, it’s gotten far worse.

Yes, yes, I know that here are antisemites on the Right was well. The difference is this, however: On the right, antisemitism is mostly confined to the radical fringe. On the Left, antisemitism has become a mainstream political position. Don’t believe me? Check out Abdul El-Sayed, candidate for the Democratic Senate candidacy in Michigan, whose good friend is the odious Hasan Piker, an out-and-proud antisemite who’s also pretty chummy with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.

Elsewhere, I’ve written about the poisonous influence of postmodern discourse in fueling the rise of the anti-Zionist variant of antisemitism, for example here. Postmodern dogmas focusing on imperialism, colonialism, White supremacy, the oppressor/victim binary, etc. have been seized upon to invest an ancient hatred with a spurious air of intellectual respectability. But note that STOP THE GAZA GENOCIDE is accompanied by FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA. It’s quite a tribute to Mr. Orwell that anti-Zionism provides a real-world example of doublethink, the core mental discipline of his dystopian vision.

It seems appropriate to close with a characteristic example of the antisemite/anti-Zionist. And unfortunately for him, one such terrible person, William Hancock or William the Silent as I dubbed him during a previous encounter, called himself to my attention once more as I was meditating on this essay. William qua William is of no intrinsic interest, but he is worthy of note as a typical specimen of the postmodern progressive and anti-Zionist: He embodies all the evils of those allied categories.

An ancient maxim of the law states: “False in one thing, false in everything.” Anti-Zionism, the modern, most recent variant of antisemitism, bases itself on a narrative that turns the martyrdom of the Jewish people on its head. The survivors of a genocidal campaign that took the lives of some six million Jews are falsely equated with the planners and executors of the Nazi Final Solution. How can you believe anything said by goons who spew forth such a monstrous lie? How can America continue to call itself a liberal democracy when one of our two major political parties tolerates and protects its growing cadre of genocidal antisemites?

Well, now at least they can’t hide behind a smokescreen of sanctimony and Newspeak. We can see them clearly as the garbage human beings they truly are.

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The time has come to call out the anti-Trump Resistance and its media enablers for creating a safe space for political violence in America. Third time’s the charm, and last weekend’s third attempt to assassinate President Trump banished from my mind any lingering doubts that the American Left, broadly defined, has developed a taste for blood.

This observation will of course enrage the comrades. Too bad. A direct line may be traced from the master narratives of the Resistance to Cole Allen’s unsuccessful attempt on the lives of Trump and members of his cabinet. Trump the fascist, Trump the destroyer of “our democracy,” Trump the Russian puppet, Trump the rapist, Trump the pedophile—all patent nonsense. But given the comrades’ embrace of this nonsense, it’s no wonder that Trump has been the target of three assassination attempts. They’ll never admit it—denial of responsibility is reflexive in them—but the warriors of the Resistance own those three assassination attempts, and a good deal more besides.

Among the dogmas of the postmodern Left is the claim that “words are weapons.” It will be recalled how an op-ed in The New York Times by Senator Tom Cotton triggered a meltdown among the paper’s snowflake staffers, who claimed that the Senator’s words were violent. “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger,” they whined. And the pressure they brought to bear forced James Bennet, the paper’s opinion page editor, to resign. But now, it seems, the comrades have changed their tune. How dare anybody suggest that their unhinged, nay lunatic, hate-Trump rhetoric constitutes incitement to violence? Words aren’t weapons when the words are theirs!

Oh, really? In his “manifesto,” would-be assassin Cole Allen wrote: “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” Gee, I wonder where he got that idea from?

Well, he got it from the American Left, which really has no problem with political violence and, indeed, valorizes it. When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, many on the Left could scarcely contain their glee:

But characteristically, the comrades refused personally to own the murder that gave them such satisfaction. Instead, they went out of their way to deflect the blame in other directions, portraying Kirk’s assassin as a “trumper,” even though it was clear that he was motivated by left-wing ideology, especially as regards gay and transgender rights. In fact, the shooter had no connection with MAGA and in recent years he’d become alienated from his family’s conservative politics.

Kirk’s assassination (September 10, 2025) was no isolated incident. It came on the heels of the murder of two Democratic Minnesota legislators and their spouses (June), the killing of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C. (May), an arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro (April), the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York (December 2024), and two assassination attempts on Donald Trump (July and September 2024). With the exception of the Minnesota murders, all of these outrages were inspired by leftist politics. (Given its fervent embrace of “anti-Zionism,” the Washington DC murders and the attack on Governor Shapiro’s home are obviously down to the Left).

Particularly noteworthy was the killing of Brian Thompson, who was gunned down on a New York City street by Luigi Mangione, a leftie child of privilege who claimed to be outraged by the malfeasance of the health insurance industry. Mangione had no personal beef with UnitedHealthcare or Thompson; his crime was purely political. And, of course, he was fêted by the Left and its media enablers as a Hero of the Resistance—the distaff side of which swooned over his good looks. The New Yorker was in the forefront of this project to transform a common murderer into an outlaw-hero.

Even those on the Left who affected to deplore Mangione’s sanguinary exercise in “direct action” adopted a “yes, but…” It might be wrong, kind of, to shoot someone in the back and kill him, but didn’t Brian Thompson kind of deserve it…?

It must be said, however, that another glamorous Resistance poster boy, social media superstar Hasan Piker, did not equivocate. This hater of America and Israel, enemy of the Jews and apologist for genocidal terrorism, advocate for “restorative justice” via deadly force, was blunt in his approval of Mangione’s evil deed. During a New York Times podcast with the paper’s Nadja Spiegelman and—surprise!—The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino, Piker made out that Brian Thompson’s assassination morally justified, given that he was guilty of something called “social murder.” The trio then went on to tout the wonderfulness of shoplifting from Whole Foods, stealing art from the Louvre, etc. “I think it’s cool,” Piker enthused. “We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.”

Piker is, of course a monster: In addition to his “social murder” theory and support of Islamofascist terrorism, he’s also tight with various progressive Democrats who share his views, including Comrade Congresspersons Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ro Khanna, NYC Gauleiter Zohran Mamdani, and Democratic candidate for the US Senate from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. The latter is a particularly unsavory antisemite; Piker has appeared with him at several campaign events. And why not? They’re so totally sympatico.

The case of Hasam Piker is particularly revealing. He’s an out-and-proud antisemite who doesn’t trouble to conceal his vile opinions. As I wrote just recently:

Piker thinks the world of Hezbollah and Hamas. He seems not to have made up his mind whether the orgy of rape that occurred during the latter group’s pogrom of 10/7/2023 was a “hallucination” or just didn’t matter all that much. You can understand why. Piker insists that “Hamas is a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state of Israel.” That being the case, of what significance are a few rapes here, a few dead babies there, if they further the cause of “Palestine”?

Piker personifies a perfect storm of every disgusting and moronic orthodoxy of the progressive Left. In 2019, he opined that America got what was coming on 9/11/2001. He never apologized for what he said, so I offer no apology for quoting this monster of evil, word for word: “America deserved 9/11, dude. Fuck it, I’m saying it. We fucking totally brought this upon ourselves, dude. Holy shit. We did. We fucking did.”

But who on the Left has spoken up in opposition to Piker? Have supposedly mainstream Democrats demanded that Abdul El-Sayed and other progressive Democrats cut ties with this rat? Of course not. But how could they? Mainstream Democrats—if such they can be called—have come to embrace the narratives that fuel the violence of the Left. Perhaps they do so for reasons of expedience. Perhaps they simply live in terror of their party’s progressive base. Whatever the explanation, they’ve become enablers of some of the very worst people in America.

As for the Left’s media accomplices, a recent example will suffice to illustrate their complicity in the promotion of violence. In a 60 Minutes interview with President Trump, CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell covered herself with shame and ignominy by asking the following question:

The so-called manifesto is a stunning thing to read, Mr. President. He appears to reference a motive in it. He writes this, quote, “Administration officials, they are targets.” And he also wrote this, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” What's your reaction to that?

My reaction to O’Donnell’s question is that she’s a garbage human being for reading from the “manifesto" of a would-be presidential assassin and asking the assassin’s target how he feels about it. She seems to think that the assassin maybe had a point. Trump reacted as, I think, anybody would: with indignation. And to his credit, after chastising O’Donnell for her execrable behavior, he moved on with the interview.

These days, you can’t hate the media enough. Honestly, you can’t.

There is, to be sure, a discussion to be had on the subject of words as weapons. To me it seems that the issue is not black and white. Sometimes words are weapons. As I put it in a recent Substack Note:

[T]here are historical examples of language as violence, e.g. Nazi Germany. The space between the National Socialist regime’s antisemitic propaganda and actual violence against Jews was so narrow as to be nonexistent. That language was violence. When the SA was marching through the streets of German cities, calling for the extirpation of the Jews, the Brownshirts weren’t merely engaging in hyperbolic rhetoric. The word and the deed were one.

But even when things don’t go that far, intemperate words, if they’re loud enough, and repeated often enough, can incite violence. As mentioned above, Cory Allen’s manifesto was pure Resistance agitprop—which convinced him to make an attempt on President Trump’s life. Respect for the principle of freedom of expression does not preclude holding people morally responsible for the consequences of the things they say and broadcast, nor does it immunize them against condemnation when, as in this case, it’s well merited.

The Left has always justified and, indeed, romanticized political violence. Dostoevsky saw this clearly and shared his vision in Devils, one of the most prophetic novels ever written. All too soon, his prophecy was borne out by the Russian Revolution and its results: the orgy of mass murder, terror and oppression that accompanied the building of socialism in the form of the USSR. In the Sixties and Seventies occurred another spasm of revolutionary violence in Europe in America—which, incidentally, the contemporary Left remembers fondly. No wonder the comrades adore Mangione and Piker. It’s in their DNA.

So yes, the warriors of the Resistance, the monsters they valorize, those cowardly mainstream Democrats, and the journalists who run interference for them deserve to be shamed and reviled. More than anybody else, they’re responsible for the current climate of rage, hate and violence that grips America.

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It’s not every day—in fact, as far as I know there’s never been such a day—that the story of the century breaks by way of Substack Notes. But it happened today, right before my eyes—or it would have if I believed a word of it, which I don’t.

Here’s what happened. In response to my Substack Note pouring scorn on the Democrats’ plan to impeach President Trump on day one of the next Congress, I got this comeback:

Maybe you’re facing opposition because the President you’ve backed is a pedophile, a rapist and a criminal.

I get so tired of these people. My reply:

Or maybe you’re just an asshat…

That touched a nerve and he shot back:

Truly a thrilling repartee. I can tell I’m talking to a mental giant here.

Are you opposed to impeaching a man who is alleged to have raped young girls and trafficked them to Epstein with his wives?

If so, how can anyone possibly take you seriously?

Ho-hum. My answer:

Yes, I am.

So he asked me why and I responded:

Because there’s not a speck of evidence that any such thing every happened.

And then came the Scoop of Scoops—accompanied by the graphic at the head of this article.

You have got to be kidding me. Go talk to some actual Epstein survivors. I have talked to two personally and I assure you both would testify that both Trump and Clinton are guilty as sin.

He assures me. And as a bonus, he throws in Horndog Willie. And apparently, I’m expected to take some cockamamie, cobbled-together TRUMP RAPING CHILDREN! graphic as proof positive that the tale is true.

Now, I’m not going to identify this particular Resistance comrade. There would be no point: People like that are utterly shameless, if not mentally deranged. And his identity doesn’t really matter. After all, in the context of the above exchange he’s a mere stand-in, the Resistance Everyman, channeling the nether regions of its collective reptile brain.

Could the tale be true? Anything’s possible, I suppose. But as I learned from watching the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, the comrades are none too reliable when it comes to accusations of this kind, which do seem to bubble up at the most convenient times for Team PoMo Bolshevik. And in this case, I have to ask: If these women, as they must be by now, are so ready willing, and eager to dish on Donald—what are they waiting for? Why don’t they go ahead and do it? Why haven’t they done it long ago?

And that’s not all. When one pauses to reflect how very deeply most of the media loathes Trump, it’s truly remarkable that some intrepid investigative reporter never tracked them down and got them to tell their story. The excuse likely to be proffered is that they were afraid to tell what they know. Yeah, right, but they have, supposedly, spilled their guts to some no-name Substack troll who is, as I discovered when I checked him out, a crack-brained conspiracy theorist for whom Jews, Zionists, and Israel represent the focus of evil in the modern world. For example:

The links between Trump and dead Jewish-American mafia head Meyer Lansky remain one of the biggest subjects in need of investigtaion.

Is Trump essentially a head of the international mafia that Lansky also belonged to?

Were the Rоckefellers and Rоthschilds also heads of this mafia?

Was Epstein running kompromat rings on their behalf?

Okaaaay…

What the hell can you say about a loony bird like Comrade Trump Raping Children? I ponder. I interrogate my imagination. I rummage through my memory. And I come up with that classic observation of the immortal Three Stooges: Nyuk. nyuk, nyuk! What a maroon!

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The Great War Series

Part Nineteen: Round Two in the East (4)

Note on Nomenclature

OHL (Oberste Heeresleitung or Army High Command) was the wartime title of the German Army’s Great General Staff; it was the general headquarters of the German Army. Ober Ost (Oberbefehlshaber der gesamten Deutschen Streitkräfte im Osten or Supreme Commander of All German Forces in the East) was Field Marshal von Hindenburg’s appointment from November 1914 to August 1916; the abbreviation was also used to denote his headquarters, with responsibility for the northern sector of the Eastern Front. AOK (Armeeoberkommando or Army High Command) was the Austro-Hungarian general headquarters, responsible for the southern sector of the Eastern Front, the Balkan Front, and the Italian Front. Stavka (General Headquarters of the Army) was the headquarters of the Russian Army, with responsibility for all fronts.

In Germany, the Kaiser was the nominal commander-in-chief (Oberster Kriegsherr or Supreme Warlord), but effective command was exercised by the Chief of the OHL. In Austria-Hungary the nominal commander-in-chief was the Archduke Friedrich, Duke of Teschen, but effective command was exercised by the Chief of the AOK. In 1917, the Emperor Charles dismissed Archduke Friedrich and assumed command himself. In Russia, the commander-in-chief at Stavka was the Grand Duke Nicholas, Tsar Nicholas II’s uncle. In late 1915, however, he was sent off to command the Caucasus Front against Turkey, and the Tsar himself assumed command at Stavka.

(For clarity, German and Austro-Hungarian formations are rendered in italics.)

The breakdown of Conrad von Hötzendorf’s ill-advised winter offensive in the Carpathians seemed to present the Russians with an opportunity to knock Austria-Hungary out of the war. Between January and March 1915, the Austrians suffered astronomical casualties, such that the strength of their army on the Eastern Front had dwindled to a mere 500,000 men. The Germans were alarmed. Ludendorff, Hindenburg’s chief of staff at Ober Ost, remarked to Falkenhayn, Chief of the OHL, that the Austria’s parlous condition represented “our great imponderable.” The likelihood of a Russian offensive through the Carpathian passes into Hungary, not to mention Italy’s probable entry into the war on the side of the Entente, made it obvious that something must be done to help Germany’s faltering ally. Thus Falkenhayn decided—reluctantly, for he disliked having to cooperate with the Austrians—that in 1915 Germany’s main military effort must be directed east.

It was fortunate for the Central Powers that on the Russian side, the dispute between “northerners” and “southerners” rumbled on. Though Conrad’s debacle in the Carpathians swung the commander-in-chief, Grand Duke Nicholas, over to the side of those arguing that Russia should deliver a knockout blow against Austria, sufficient forces to ensure success could only come from the armies facing the Germans.

By now, General of Infantry Mikhail Alexeyev had replaced General of Infantry Nikolai Ruzsky in command of Northwest Front after the latter resigned, pleading ill health. Alexeyev was supposed to be sympathetic to the arguments of the southerners. But to Stavka’s directive that the necessary troops should be transferred south, he replied like his predecessor with a litany of protests and excuses.

The Grand Duke himself did not help matters by refusing permission for Northwest Front to withdraw to a more defensible line. This lent some credibility to Alexeyev’s claim that he had no troops to spare. So in the end, Southwest Front got one second-line reserve infantry division and a promise that III Caucasus Corps (two infantry divisions, one cavalry division) would also be sent. It took more than a month to arrive, and then only after a preemptory order from Stavka. Two-thirds of the Russian Army on the Eastern Front, some sixty divisions, thus remained with Northwest Front, doing nothing in particular.

So General of Artillery Nikolay Ivanov, commanding Southwest Front, had to make do with what he had, reshuffling his order of battle to assemble a barely adequate attacking force of some thirty divisions. The Russian Carpathian offensive commenced in mid-March, and though it made some progress and inflicted further heavy losses on the Austrians, it failed to achieve a breakthrough into Hungary. Ivanov called a halt on 10 April.

The Germans had already sent troops to bolster up the tottering Austrians: the Beskidenkorpks, two and a half divisions strong. Falkenhayn now transferred four corps (eight infantry divisions) from the Western Front for an offensive in the east. These, together with an Austrian corps (two infantry divisions, one cavalry division) were used to form a new Eleventh Army under the command of Colonel-General August von Mackensen, with a certain Colonel Hans von Seeckt as his chief of staff. Eleventh Army and Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army (General of Infantry Archduke Joseph Ferdinand) with two corps (five Austrian infantry divisions, one German infantry division) constituted Army Group Mackensen under AOK. The total force amounted to seventeen divisions.

But the Chief of the OHL has no intention of allowing the Austrians to run the show. He therefore transferred his headquarters to Pless in southern Poland, not far from AOK in Teschen—this supposedly to facilitate German-Austrian “consultation.” In reality, Falkenhayn was determined to keep both planning and conduct of the operation firmly under German control.

The plan eventually agreed to was for an offensive in western Galicia, south of Cracow, proceeding along the northern slope of the Carpathians, levering the Russians out of their mountain positions, terminating on the line of the San River. This was much the same operation that the Austrians had tried in March in their unsuccessful attempt to relieve Przemysl. Both Falkenhayn and Conrad were banking on a tactical victory: the Russians pushed back to the San and the Austrian position in the Carpathians made secure enough for troops to be sent south in case of Italian intervention or possibly for a summer offensive to knock out Serbia.

When the offensive was launched, however, it exceeded German and Austrian expectations. One reason for its unexpected success was timing: By May the spring thaw had run its course and roads were passable. Another was the Russian Army’s increasingly serious shortage of weapons and munitions. But above all, it was the Russians’ defective strategic and tactical posture that determined the outcome.

It will be recalled that Ivanov’s Southwest Front had not been provided with sufficient reinforcements to conduct its earlier Carpathian offensive. This not only negated the possibility of a decisive victory over the Austrians, but deprived Ivanov of the reserves necessary to deal with the German-Austrian offensive when it came. He had been compelled to raid Third Army (Lieutenant-General Radko Ruskov Dimitriev) to assemble sufficient troops for his March offensive; now, Dimitriev’s diminished army was left to hold the wide central sector of the Carpathian front. In theory he could, if necessary, call on reinforcements from the armies on his flanks. But they were far away, and Third Army itself was too weak to create an operational reserve of its own. The forces that could have remedied this unsatisfactory state of affairs were either immobilized on the northern sector of the front or were being hoarded for yet another Carpathian offensive.

On the Gorlice-Tarnów sector of Third Army’s front were stationed IX Corps and X Corps, with five infantry divisions and an infantry brigade between them, consisting mostly of poorly trained conscripts and reservists, supported by a mere 140 light field guns. The Russian trench defenses were sketchy, shallow and inadequately screened by barbed wire. In many places, no secondary trench line had been dug. It was in this vulnerable sector that Army Group Mackensen would strike, with seventeen German and Austrian divisions supported by 700 light, medium and heavy guns and mortars.

So once again, the dispute between the “northerners” and the “southerners” set up the Russian Army for failure. On May 2, the enemy struck. The intense four-hour bombardment preceding Mackensen’s attack wrecked the Russian trenches, swept away such barbed wire entanglements as existed, cut field telephone lines and, above all, terrified the defending troops. They abandoned their positions and fell back into open country, suffering heavy casualties from the enemy’s artillery fire in the process. And when the attacking troops jumped off, they scored a quick breakthrough.

In two days, Army Group Mackensen advanced eight miles. One division of IX Corps panicked and disintegrated; X Corps sank from a strength of 34,000 to 5,000, about the strength of a brigade. Between the remains of the two corps was a gap of some five miles. Troops were scraped together in a desperate attempt to plug the hole: a few battalions of infantry here, two cavalry divisions there. They simply disappeared into the smoke and fog of battle. On 3 May, Dimitriev informed Southwest Front that IX Corps, X Corps and his cavalry had been so badly knocked about that III Caucasus Corps, belatedly ordered forward from its positions far in the rear, could be expected to do little but cover the army’s retreat.

Yet the enemy too had their problems. Having smashed Third Army’s front, taking a large number of prisoners in the process, the Germans and Austrians found themselves beset by supply difficulties. And when they came up against III Caucasus Corps on 4-5 May, the latter put up stiff resistance. It proved impossible, therefore, to cut off and destroy Third Army’s left flank corps in the Carpathians. Only one division failed to get away. It was surrounded and forced to surrender on 6 May.

Still, the Russians had sustained a heavy defeat, and the outlook was grim. On 6 May, Mackensen reported that on the line running from the Vistula to the Carpathians, the Russians were in full retreat. He added that his army group had captured some 60,000 prisoners so far. On 11 May, after an advance of sixty miles, German troops had reached the line of the San River. On the Russian side, Third Army’s X and XXIV Corps had virtually ceased to exist, while IX Corps and III Caucasus Corps were down to twenty and thirty percent of their authorized strength respectively. Lieutenant-General Vladimir Dragomirov, the Southwest Front chief of staff, told Grand Duke Nicholas that the strategic position of Russian forces on the southern sector of the front was “hopeless.”

On 12 May, Mackensen ordered his troops to establish bridgeheads across the San River. By 17 May they had one at Jaroslau and began crossing the river. Farther south, troops of Austro-Hungarian Third Army closed in on the fortress city of Przemysl, which was garrisoned by troops of Eighth Army (General of Cavalry Aleksei Brusilov). With Third Army to his north in a state of collapse, Brusilov judged it impossible to hold Przemysl, and he ordered its evacuation. The Germans and Austrians marched in, unopposed, on 3 June. By this time Dimitriev had been sacked; command of the shattered Third Army was given to General of Infantry Leonid Lesh—a dubious honor indeed.

The Russian retreat went on. The Central Powers now focused their main effort in the direction of Lemburg, whose capture would sever communications between Northwest Front and Southwest Front, compelling the former to retreat also. For this operation, Mackensen’s command was enlarged to include the Beskidenkorpks and Austro-Hungarian Second Army, (General of Cavalry Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli).

The final attack commenced on 13 June and made steady progress toward Lemburg, with the Russians once more in headlong retreat. On 21 June, Grand Duke Nicholas ordered the evacuation of Galicia, and two days later, Austrian troops entered Lemburg. By mid-July, the Russians had been pushed well away from the Carpathians, eliminating the threat to Hungary, while their armies in what was left of the Polish salient stood in danger of being encircled and destroyed. And here the advance of the German and Austrian armies came to a halt—temporarily, as it proved.

The Gorlice–Tarnów offensive had lasted seventy days, engaging some 4.5 million men on both sides. Casualties are estimated to have totaled 1.5 million killed, wounded and taken prisoner, with about 171,000 Russians and 140,000 Germans and Austrians killed. It was, by any measure, one of the three or four largest battles of the war, and remarkable by comparison with those on the Western Front for the large amount of territory that changed hands.

The German reinforcements transferred from the west for the offensive had brought with them the lessons learned in battle against the British and French. This was reflected, above all, in the carefully planned artillery bombardment that preceded the infantry’s advance on May 2. The Russian positions had been reconnoitered by air and ground and accurately plotted, enabling the artillery to put down heavy concentrations of fire on every strongpoint. This was an early example of the “hurricane bombardment:” a relatively brief but intense artillery preparation intended to shock and disorganize the enemy, cut his communications and suppress his artillery, that the Germans were later to perfect.

On the Russian side, the generals had a ready excuse of the defeat they’d suffered: an insufficiency of weapons and ammunition. And it was true that Russian industry, for which no war mobilization plan had existed in August 1914, was unable to supply the Army with rifles, machine guns, artillery and, above all, artillery ammunition in the required quantities. But the difficulties caused by these shortages were exaggerated; sensible defensive preparations and tactics could have done much to mitigate them. Russian trench defenses tended to be primitive, poorly laid out, and of insufficient depth. Protective barbed wire entanglements were sketchy, thus easily destroyed by artillery fire. As ever, cooperation between the infantry and the artillery was poor. The troops manning these defenses, inexperienced and half-trained at best, could hardly be expected to stand up to such an offensive as was mounted against them.

As for the Germans and Austrians, Falkenhayn at OHL remained convinced that the Central Powers could never muster sufficient strength in the east to knock out Russia. Italy had declared war on Austria-Hungary on 23 May (though not on Germany until late August) and the success of the Gorlice–Tarnów offensive enabled Conrad to transfer troops to the new front. That was well and good, but the Chief of the OHL found it difficult to counter the arguments in favor of a further offensive emanating from Hindenburg and Ludendorff at Ober Ost. And in the end, he yielded to them.

Organizational Diagrams

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The evidence is in, and it can now be said without a shadow of a doubt that Democrats, progressives, leftists—overlapping categories, to be sure—are totally unfit to preserve, protect, and defend “our democracy.”

Recent events in Virginia illustrate the point. When running for governor, Abigail Spanberger successfully marketed herself as a moderate, touting in particular her credentials as a national security diva: former CIA officer and all-around tough cookie. Once in office, however, she and the Democrat-controlled state legislature set about transforming the Old Dominion into a people’s republic. The most obvious manifestation of this leftist rampage was their attempt to disenfranchise Republican and conservative voters by means of a blatantly partisan congressional redistricting scheme.

Virginia is a purple state; in 2024, Donald Trump got 46.1% of the popular vote there. (In Massachusetts, a state of similar size, Trump got just 36% of the popular vote.) Currently Virginia’s congressional delegation has eleven members: six Democrats, five Republicans. The Democratic gerrymander, passed by referendum earlier this week but ruled unconstitutional by a state court, would almost certainly flip four GOP seats to the Dems. Supposedly, this power grab will restore “fairness” to future congressional elections after Texas enacted a redistricting scheme in 2025. Fairness for whom, though? Effectively, the Virginia gerrymander would hand full political control of the state to ultra-progressive Fairfax Country and its environs—and to hell with everybody else.

After all the screaming and yelling we’ve heard from the Left about the evils of gerrymandering, this Virginia power grab (and the similar one in California) demonstrates that the comrades’ devotion to “our democracy” is strictly dependent on who wins and who loses. If they win, then hurrah for democracy! But if they lose, then the Constitution is a racist, white supremacist document, voters are idiots, and all bets are off.

Then, even more ominously, there’s the question of the Jews and Israel. That liberal democracy and antisemitism are fundamentally incompatible is a genius of the manifest. You can have one or the other, but not both. You can either defend “our democracy,” or you can be an “anti-Zionist.” If you choose the latter, you have, as a matter of hard fact, taken a stand against every principle of liberal democracy.

Oh, sure, the progressive anti-Zionist will tell you that he or she has nothing against the Jews. No! It’s Israel that’s the problem! The Jewish state is a fascist/apartheid monstrosity and Israeli Jews are evil white seller-colonialists, waging a campaign of genocide against brown Palestinian Arabs, etc., etc. This narrative originated on the radical fringe of the progressive Left, to be taken up with enthusiasm by intellectual/academic circles. Antisemitism, humanity’s ur-racism, proved readily adaptable to the categories and language of postmodern discourse. By that means, antisemitism was, so to speak, bioengineered to enhance its toxicity and communicability, especially in the hothouse environment of America’s college campuses, with the result that young Americans in large numbers have been infected with it.

And as a result, antisemitism, rebranded as progressive anti-Zionism, is infiltrating the political mainstream, with poisonous consequences for the Democratic Party.

A certain Hasan Doğan Piker has been much in the news lately. He’s a Twitch streamer, a proud socialist, and an absolutely garbage human being. Piker was born in America and grew up in Turkey but now, alas, he’s back with us. And he wants us all to know how much he hates America, reviles capitalism, and supports the assassination of health insurance company CEOs (“Let the streets soak in their red-capitalist blood”).

Nor is that all. Piker thinks the world of Hezbollah and Hamas. He seems not to have made up his mind whether the orgy of rape that occurred during the latter group’s pogrom of 10/7/2023 was a “hallucination” or just didn’t matter all that much. You can understand why. Piker insists that “Hamas is a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state of Israel.” That being the case, of what significance are a few rapes here, a few dead babies there, if they further the cause of “Palestine”?

Piker personifies a perfect storm of every disgusting and moronic orthodoxy of the progressive Left. In 2019, he opined that America got what was coming on 9/11/2001. He never apologized for what he said, so I offer no apology for quoting this monster of evil, word for word: “America deserved 9/11, dude. Fuck it, I’m saying it. We fucking totally brought this upon ourselves, dude. Holy shit. We did. We fucking did.”

Would those have been his last words if he’d been trapped in one of the Twin Towers that day? Somehow, I doubt it.

All this being the case, it makes perfect sense that progressives have talked themselves into the delusion that Hasan Piker is their very own Joe Rogan. He has, indeed, become the darling of the progressive establishment—the subject of no fewer than three gushingly positive New York Times profiles over the past few years. All this, despite the vile, horrible things he says—not to mention the fact that he’s dumb as a box of rocks. Piker has, for example, opined that “The biggest terrorist internationally is the Republican Party.” What’s left of the Hezbollah and Hamas would surely take exception to that! It can, I think, be taken for granted that when this mouth-breathing leftie starts blathering about fascism and socialism and terrorist threats, he has no idea what the hell he’s talking about. It’s just Hasan, doing his impression of a burst sewer pipe.

Piker is pretty chummy with Comrade Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gauleiter Zohran Mamdani, and why not? He’s merely saying aloud, and with glee, what they and other young progressives think. He’s their herald, their winged Mercury, and his message terrifies supposedly mainstream Democrats. Their fear of the party’s increasingly antisemitic progressive base is what motivated forty Democratic Senators to vote in favor of a Bernie Sanders resolution that would have banned $500 million in U.S. arms sales to Israel. Sanders, a Jew, can only be described as a traitor to his people, and the same much be said of Senator Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan, also a Jew, who voted for the Sanders resolution, thus making a mockery of her oft-professed support of the Jewish state. Oh, what a fall was there—not just for Slotkin but for her party.

Conclusion: With minor exceptions, those Democrats who aren’t proud antisemites may fairly be described as antisemitic adjacent. The Democratic Party began by tolerating the Jew haters in its ranks. Now it’s in thrall to them. Can such a party plausibly lay claim to America’s liberal democratic tradition? Can Democrats plausibly present themselves as defenders of “our democracy”? Don’t make me laugh. In their surrender to the bearers of an ancient and vicious hatred, in their mendacity and two-facedness, in their embrace of illiberal authoritarianism, the Democrats have abandoned liberal democracy.

Hasan Piker is indeed the ideal spokesman for today’s Democratic Party.

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Author’s Note: I don’t spend all my time here bashing the enemies of truth, justice and the American way. Collected on this page are links to the short stories, poems, literary essays, and reviews that have appeared on “Un-Woke in Indiana.” More will probably be added as I comb through the more than 650 articles that I’ve published on Substack since 2022.

The Stories

• A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

• Gangs of Suburbia

• If Two Be Away

• The Loading Dock

• Mothers and Daughters

• Nemesis

• The Painted Queen

• The Pricking of Her Thumbs

• The Revolution Betrayed

• The River Shall Bear Them Away

• Survivor

• Subtraction

• Terms of Service

• That Is the Question

• Virus

• Reflections on Writing Fiction

The Poems

• But Now We Have Cable

• J.S. Bach at the Court of Frederick II of Prussia

• A Pachyderm Not Pink

• This Property Available

• A Visitor to Ephesus

Essays and Reviews

• The Classic Science Fiction Short Stories

• An SF Classic: Brain Wave by Poul Anderson

• A Touch of Prophecy: Robert H. Heinlein

• Bruce Catton: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

• A Characteristic Pageantry: Susan Sontag on the Aesthetics of Fascism

• Crowns and Coronets: Shakespeare’s Royal Pageant

• God in the Machinery of Death: Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7

• The Handmaid’s Tale of Roe & Woe

• Kipling: “The Doorkeepers of Zion”

• On Stephen King: Stevie Joins the Establishment

• The Prevention of Literature Revisited

• “That Curiously Crucified Expression”: George Orwell and Me

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Even with the presence in the party of an absolute idiot like Hawaii’s Senator Mazie Hirono, there remains plenty of competition for the title of dumbest Democratic member of Congress. Take for instance, Connecticut’s Senator Chris Murphy. Earlier today, he took to X with this:

Murphy seemed thrilled that the wily Iranians had somehow outfoxed the hapless United States Navy. But you know what really was awesome? Senator Murphy had his head firmly lodged up his third point of contact. The report that so thrilled him was nothing but Iranian propaganda. And when he was called out for his stupidity, the Senator sputtered that people just didn’t understand: He was being sarcastic! Yeah, right.

Readers may recall that when Pete Hegseth was nominated by President Trump to be Secretary of Defense/War, Democrats and the Left—but I repeat myself—had a meltdown over his assortment of tats, to which they attached sinister fascistic and white supremacist significance. It seems they’ve gotten over such worries, however. Up in Maine, the frontrunner in the Democratic Senate primary is one Graham Platner, a truly despicable, rabid antisemite who until recently sported an actual Nazi tat. But no worries! Once people noticed that he was branded with the insignia of the SS-Totenkopfverbände (those were the guys who ran the death camps) Standartenführer Platner had it inked over.

Speaking of antisemitic scum, the Michigan Democratic Party outdid itself recently by dumping a Jewish member of the University of Michigan Board of Regents and replacing him with an out-and-out Jew-bashing, Hezbollah-supporting, Hasam Piker hugging monster of evil. (It requires to be noted that in the Wolverine State, such appointments are highly political by design.) Amir Makled, a radical lawyer from Dearbornistan, is replacing Jordan Acker, who is guilty of that most unforgivable sin in the eyes of today’s Democratic Party: Zionism. Acker has had to endure a sustained campaign of intimidation and harassment on account of his support of the Jewish state, so maybe he’s glad to go.

As for Makled, his greatest hits include numerous outbursts of “anti-Zionism,” i.e. antisemitism, and fulsome support for the Iranian proxy terror group Hezbollah. When the IDF terminated Hezbollah’s mass-murdering leader, Hassan Nasrallah, Makled mourned his death, calling him a “martyr.” He’s also a fan of the odious Candace Owens, many of whose social media posts he’s reposted, such as the one in which she characterized Israeli Jews as “demons.” Yes, indeed, Amir Makled is just the sort of garbage human being that the Democratic Party seems to prefer these days.

And let us not forget how New York City, under the direction of another darling of the Dems, Zohran Mamdani, is coming more and more to resemble Berlin, circa 1935. With a wink and a nod, Gauleiter Mamdani is normalizing Jew hatred in the Big Apple. And why not? He himself hates Jews. If he didn’t then surely, he wouldn’t be consorting with the likes of Hasan Piker and Linda Sarsour. If he didn’t, he would never have smeared Israel with false accusations of “genocide.” If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be such an avid supporter of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanction) campaign targeting the Jewish state. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be married to an antisemite. But he does, and so it’s no wonder that…

Finally, we have Thomas Friedman, New York Times foreign-affairs columnist, celebrated for his deep understanding of US Middle East policy, who recently on CNN said this:

I find myself, Michael [Smerconish], in a situation where I really want to see Iran defeated militarily. Because this regime is a terrible regime for its people in the region. And nothing would improve the region more than the replacement of this regime with the [sic] regime in Iran that was focused on enabling its people to realize their full potential and integrating peacefully with other countries and stop occupying Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. So, I’m all for that.

So far, so good. But then:

The problem is I really don‘t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war, because they are two awful human beings,” the Times columnist said. “They are both engaged in anti-democratic projects in their own countries. They‘re both alleged crooks. They are terrible, terrible people doing terrible things to America’s standing in the world and Israel’s standing in the world. And so I really find myself torn. I want to see Iran militarily defeated, but I do not want to see these two terrible people strengthened.

Friedman’s two-facfed moral posturing is positively comical. He’s torn? Seriously? Considering the blood-soaked record of the Islamic Republic of Iran, stretching back nearly fifty years, to fret that its defeat would strengthen a couple of politicians whom the pundit dislikes betrays—what? A secret desire to see America defeated and humiliated? A lack of moral clarity? A penchant for doublethink? Sheer stupidity? I’m going with all four. And I’ll add that the kind of leaders whom Friedman likes would never have lifted a finger to slap down the Islamofascist regime he describes as “terrible.”

No wonder the Democrats love this guy. He’s their kind of moral idiot.

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First, a backward glance. Frederick the Great once said that “The best way of achieving victory is to march briskly and in good order against the enemy, always endeavoring to gain ground.”

I can hear the eyeballs of the comrades of the Resistance click as they roll them. And I can hear them sneering: What does that have to do with anything? The guy’s been dead forever! Well, true enough. And his wars were fought with flintlock muskets and bayonets, bronze smoothbore cannons, swords and sabers. But Frederick’s advice evokes a timeless principle of the art of war: Seize the initiative and exploit it. But it seems that the Pope and the Catholic bishops of America want America to do the opposite.

The point at issue—which the comrades have seized upon with their customary hypocrisy—is whether the US/Israeli war against the Islamic Republic of Iran is a '“just war” as St. Augustine taught. The Pope and the US bishops think not. Easy for them to say! They’re not responsible for the safety and security of the United States of America. And the just war standard they set forth is, in the present context, nothing short of ridiculous.

During her interview with three prominent US cardinals, CBS’s Norah O'Donnell asked one of them, Cardinal Robert McElroy, whether the US/Israeli war against the Islamic Republic is a just war. He answered:

No, in the Catholic teaching this is not a just war. The Catholic faith teaches us there are certain prerequisites for a just war. You can’t go for a variety of different aims. You have to have a focused aim, which is to restore justice and restore peace. That’s it.

If the Cardinal thinks that such a sweeping generalization constitutes a “focused aim,” he needs to do a good deal of additional thinking. Justice is to be restored how? Peace is to be restored by what means? Are the Islamofascist goons who run the Islamic Republic at all interested in either peace or justice? Cardinal McElroy didn’t say. And Ms. O’Donnell seems to have been a bit dissatisfied with his answer, because she then asked: “Iran has been the chief exporter of terror. Is there no scenario in which preventing that can be a just war?” The Cardinal’s answer? This:

It's an abominable regime, and it should be removed. But this is a war of choice that we went to, and I think it's embedded in a wider moment in the United States that's worrying, which is this: We're seeing before us the possibility of war after war after war.

Call me uncharitable, but I can only characterize this as a dodge. In the first place, all wars are wars of choice. In 1861, President Lincoln could have decided to let the slave states succeed instead of forcing them back into the Union at bayonet point. In 1939, the leaders of Britain and France could have abandoned Poland to its fate at the hands of Nazi Germany. Some choices are bad, some are good, but every war is chosen by the nations that fight it.

Then there’s the matter of that “abominable regime,” the Islamic Republic, which “should be removed.” Really? By whom? Again, Cardinal McElroy didn’t say. Clearly, he feels himself under no obligation to answer such a sticky question.

There’s also the argument that the war is unjust because the Islamic Republic poses no “imminent threat” to America. Here’s how Father Edward Beck put it in a back-and-forth with National Review’s Noah Rothman on CNN News Night With Abby Phillips:

Self-defense, first of all, is not the only qualification for just war. However, they did not attack us on our territory. They did not bomb our innocent people in the same way that we have waged this war. It's an unjust war, according to the pope. And so you can't just pick up one thing and say, well, if it was self-defense.

Father Beck is saying, in effect, that for a war to be just, it must begin by ceding the initiative to the enemy. He’s saying that until the enemy makes a move, possibly killing a lot of Americans, the US government can do nothing. Because hey, we were not attacked on our own soil. Indeed, he’s arguing that the US government has no moral right to do anything at all until the arbiters of just war theory are satisfied. Well, that’s easy for Father Beck to say! If such fine moral posturing were to culminate in a catastrophe, he’d never be called to account for advocating it.

The irony here—which, I am sure, these US Catholic clerics fail to appreciate—is that even by their own high standards, Israel is fighting a just war. On October 7, 2023, Hamas, an Iranian proxy terrorist group, invaded the Jewish state and perpetrated a bloody massacre of Jews and others, including American citizens. Not long after, another Iranian terrorist proxy group, Hezbollah, joined in with barrage after barrage of rockets and missiles into northern Israel. And of course, from the day of its birth, the Islamofascist regime that controls Iran has pledged itself to the genocidal eradication of the Jewish state and has been working toward that end, for example by developing nuclear weapons.

I doubt however, that either Cardinal McElroy or Father Beck would feel comfortable if asked whether Israel is fighting a just war.

And the same is true of the Islamic Republic’s attitude toward the United States. From the day of its birth, the regime has been at war with America, which it designates as the Great Satan. It has the blood of many hundreds of Americans on its hands. It has conspired to assassinate President Trump and other prominent Americans on US soil. The late Supreme Leader of Islamofascist Iran, Ali Khamenei, said more than once that Death to America! isn’t just a slogan, but a statement of policy. And President Trump, to his credit, took Khamenei at his word. Where’s the injustice in that?

I do fault the President for allowing himself to be drawn into an unseemly public spat with Pope Leo. But there’s not much point in complaining about that: Trump is who he is. But on the substance of the issue, he’s the one who occupies the high ground. And as a Catholic, I’m sorry to say that in my opinion, the leaders of the Church in America are playing politics behind a facade of theological posturing that fails or refuses to grapple with the complexities of this war to defang a regime of terror, mass murder, and genocidal fanaticism.

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Earlier this week, forty Senate Democrats voted in favor of a resolution that would have banned $500 million in U.S. arms sales to Israel. “U.S. taxpayers have spent tens of billions of dollars in support of the racist, extremist Netanyahu government. Enough is enough,” trumpeted Bernie Sanders, further cementing his status as a traitor to his people. And though the resolution was not adopted, the Democrats’ desertion of a key US ally shows you just how much influence the antisemitic postmodern Left now has over supposedly mainstream Democrats.

One of the Democratic senators who voted for Comrade Sanders’ anti-Israel resolution was Elissa Slotkin: like him a Jew and a traitor to her people. In her statement justifying her vote Slotkin piously declared:

My entire life, I have been—and continue to be—a strong supporter of a Jewish and democratic State of Israel. The people of Israel, like all people throughout the region, deserve long-term security and peace. But being pro-Israel today is not about simply supporting the political or military agenda of Prime Minister Netanyahu, just like being pro-American should not be equated with loyalty to President Trump.

This, of course, is nothing but cant. Slotkin knows very well that by voting for the Sanders resolution, she’s signing on with the anti-Israel faction of the Democratic Party. Bernie Sander has long been an enemy of Israel. To him, it makes no difference who happens to be the country’s prime minister. His issue is with the Jewish state, which he clearly regards as illegitimate and evil.

But I don’t believe for a moment that Slotkin agrees with him. In a way, it’s actually worse than that. Her problem isn’t antisemitism, it’s pusillanimity. Like many other Senate and House Democrats she lives in fear of her party’s leftist, Jew-hating base. And in Slotkin’s case, she no doubt fears as well to anger the Jew-hating citizens of Dearbornistan. Her support of the Sanders resolution was nothing more than an attempt to placate all those despicable people. That the vote on Sanders’ resolution occurred just after the conclusion of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah, which began at sunset on April 13 and ended at nightfall on Tuesday, April 14, only highlights the shamefulness of Slotkin’s behavior.

The antisemitism of the postmodern Left, which has now infected the Democratic Party, is premised on a narrative of racism, imperialism, colonialism, and genocide that casts the Jews of Israel as white alien oppressors of the indigenous brown inhabitants of the land, the Palestinian Arabs. The charge of genocide is key to that narrative, in that it turns the great tragedy of the Jewish people against them. Now, supposedly, the Jews are the fascist mass murderers, and the Arabs are their victims.

This charge of genocide is, of course, infamous in its falsity and ludicrous in its stupidity. If the Jews of Israel are engaged in genocide, they must be the most inefficient agents of genocide ever. In 1947, there were about 1.2 million Arabs living in Mandate Palestine, as it was then. Today there are around 7.5 million Palestinian Arabs living in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel proper. Some two million of them hold Israeli citizenship.

What kind of genocide is that?

For a long time, the Endlösung (Final Solution), as the Nazis titled their genocidal campaign to exterminate the Jews, was held to be the supreme example of genocidal evil. It’s not, however, the only such episode of mass murder on an epic scale. In terms of body count, Russian Bolshevism from Lenin through Stalin bears comparison with the Holocaust. So too do the horrors inflicted on China by Chairman Mao: The Great Leap Forward (1958-62) and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76) killed scores of millions. Then there was the Cambodian genocide (1975-79), which killed off around two million people: some twenty percent of Cambodia’s total population.

But the Holocaust catches the imagination and inspires horror in a special way. Of all the world-historical crimes in the categories of mass murder and genocide, it was, in its focus, objective, and methodology, sui generis. The Endlösung was a campaign focused on one very specific group of human beings, the Jews, with the objective of rendering them extinct. The world was to be made judenrein, with every trace of Jewry eradicated. And to achieve that objective, its methodology amalgamated bureaucratic and industrial techniques—an actual mechanization of genocide.

The characteristic elements of the mid-twentieth-century administrative state—the manual of regulations, the standardized form, the rubber stamp, the case file, the reports and records—acquired a sinister slant when applied to the task of genocide. Just as the German armed forces relied on carefully plotted railroad timetables to shuttle troops and tanks and guns and supplies across Europe, so too did the agents of genocide rely on such timetables to deliver the Jews of Europe to their final destination: the death factories located far from prying eyes in Eastern Europe. The true exemplar of the Endlösung was not some brutal and sadistic camp guard but SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, a bureaucrat in uniform who never personally killed a Jew. He merely saw to it that the trains ran on time.

For antisemites Left and Right, the Holocaust has always been an inconvenient truth. Hence the appearance, soon after the end of the Second World War, of Holocaust denial. Either the extermination of six million European Jews never happened at all, or the story has been greatly exaggerated: Those were the usual claims. But the postmodern Left, which valorizes victimhood above all other human characteristics, has introduced an innovative twist. The real, historical Holocaust is minimized or sidelined in favor of other narratives of genocide, for example the claim that Israel is guilty of committing genocide against the Palestinian Arabs. That narrative is supported by innovative definitions of genocide and pseudo-intellectual blather, buttressed by plain lies; we got plenty of that during the Gaza War.

Portraying the Palestinians as victims of genocide is a way of distracting attention from another inconvenient fact: that Palestinian nationalism is genocidal in root and branch. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”: That chant has often been heard since October 7, 2023. What it means is, “free of Jews.” The coming Palestinian state will be built over the ruins of the Jewish state and the bones of the Jews. And such leftists as Gauleiter Mamdani of NYC refuse to repudiate that slogan.

In the end, river-to-sea Palestinian nationalism is what those forty Democratic senators voted for earlier this week—and Elissa Slotkin’s declaration of strong support for Israel rings hollow. At her left elbow, insistent in their demands that she toe the “anti-Zionist,” line, are the antisemitic, progressive Democrats and leftists who drape themselves in the keffiyeh and wave Palestinian flags. Slotkin, one of the Democratic Party’s national security divas—she served in the CIA and the Department of Defense—might have been expected to show some spine in the face of pressure from such disreputable quarters. But this week, alas, we found out that she possesses the backbone of a chocolate éclair.

Elissa Slotkin’s moral collapse is another bad sign for American Jews, who are already under indictment by the Left on the charge of Zionist sympathies. And it’s a bad sign for America as well. After all the contributions that they’ve made to this country in a multiplicity of fields—this is the thanks that the Jews of America get?

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Note: To supplement yesterday’s article, “The Blood-and-Soil Left,” I’m republishing this article from October 2025, in which I called out the postmodern Left’s two-faced position on immigration and traced contemporary Palestinian nationalism back to its blood-and-soil roots.

A time like this abounds in absurdities and ironies, but few as discordant as the ICE fascism/Zionist settler colonialism short circuit.

In the telling of the Resistance Left, unchecked immigration into America is supposed to be an unalloyed blessing. For how else is the demand for nannies, lawn care professionals, pool boys, grape pickers, and Walmart shelf stockers to be met? Obviously, the preservation of “our democracy” depends on a reliable supply of stoop laborers, even if they snuck across the border. What sort of white racist MAGA monster of evil could possibly object to that?

If I knew nothing of history, I might accept this reasoning. But I have some problems with it, having noted that many of the same people wringing their hands over the sad plight of illegal immigrants in America are also keffiyeh-wearing “anti-Zionist” activists.

Let’s review. At the end of the Second World War, the Jews of Europe—those who against all odds had survived the Nazi Endlosung—were truly the wretched of the earth. They were the remnants of exterminated extended families, of ancient communities deeply rooted in the soil of Europe that the soldiers of genocide had wiped out in a matter of days or even hours. To those Jews, Europe was no longer home. It had morphed into a killing ground and now it was a graveyard.

Where were they to go?

In 1945, the land that would become the State of Israel was part of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, formerly a province of the defunct Ottoman Empire. Its population at that time was around 1.8 million, of whom about 1.1 million were Muslim Arabs and 560,000 were Jews. Significant numbers of both groups were recent immigrants who’d arrived in the Twenties and Thirties. The Mandate was administered by Great Britain, whose charge from the League was to prepare the territory for independence. Palestine was classified as a Class A mandate, meaning that its level of development was deemed high enough to fast-track the transition to independence.

But as the British soon discovered, the creation of an independent unitary Palestinian state was impossible. The Arab population of the Mandate was unanimous in its rejection of a nonsectarian Palestinian state. What they wanted was an exclusively Arab state, and they refused to work with the Jews in the preliminary governing institutions that the British tried to set up. The Arabs were also opposed—virulently so—to Jewish immigration into Palestine.

From the first days of the Mandate, that opposition was violent. On April 4, 1920, the Arab mayor of Jerusalem harangued a large crowd, calling on them “give their blood for Palestine.” “We will drink the blood of the Jews!” his listeners replied. “Slaughter the Jews!” This was the signal for a four-day pogrom. The British-led Arab police refused to intervene; some Arab police officers even joined the mob. More than two hundred Jews were injured, mostly by stabbing. Six were killed. Many women were raped.

Worse was to follow. A year later, violence broke out in Jaffa, a city whose population included 26,000 Arabs and 16,000 Jews. On May 1, 1921, Arabs disrupted a May Day demonstration by Jewish Communists and Socialists, and the disturbance soon escalated into a pogrom. The first Jewish victims were the members of an immigrant Jewish family: Arab rioters broke into their house and massacred them. Again, most of the Arab police officers either refused to intervene or even took part in the rioting.

The rampaging Arabs did not discriminate between Jews long resident in Palestine and recent Zionist immigrants. Their violent hatred was directed against the Jews as a whole. The pogrom quickly spread from Jaffa to neighboring towns and villages. Fifty Jews were slaughtered, and fifty Arabs were killed by British police, who belatedly intervened to suppress the rioting.

Throughout the Twenties and into the Thirties, such violent flareups multiplied. One notorious incident was the Hebron pogrom (August 24, 1929). At that time, Hebron was home to some six hundred ultra-Orthodox Jews. That day, over a two-hour period, sixty-seven Jews, twelve of them women, three of them children, were slaughtered. And that was the end of the town’s Jewish community. Two days later, the surviving Jews departed under British police escort. Hebron was judenrein.

The breaking point was reached with the Arab Revolt of 1936-39. This was an uprising against both the Mandate authorities and the Jews of Palestine. Once again there were pogroms and massacres, often featuring bestial atrocities. By this time, however, the Jews had organized self-defense militias, and violence was met with violence. More than 5,000 Arabs were killed, mostly by British troops and police, and some five hundred Jews were killed, mostly by Arabs. The British security forces suffered 262 fatal casualties. Though the revolt was put down, the Mandate authorities made concessions to the Arabs regarding Jewish immigration and sales of land to Jews.

The Arab Revolt led to the appointment of a Palestine Royal Commission under Lord Peel to investigate the situation in the Mandate and make policy recommendations. The conclusions detailed in its 400-page report boiled down to an admission that the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine was a failure. No unitary Palestinian state was possible; partition into separate Arab and Jewish states was the only alternative. Thus was born the “two-state solution.”

The Peel Commission produced a partition plan establishing an independent Jewish state embracing the northern quarter of the Mandate plus a narrow coastal strip terminating about twenty-five miles north of Gaza. The coastal strip was bisected by a narrow corridor that expanded to the east to encompass Jerusalem. This enclave would remain under British control. The rest of the Mandate would become the independent state of Arab Palestine.

The Arabs immediately and unanimously rejected this partition plan, as indeed they have rejected all later variants of the two-state solution. They refused even to guarantee the rights of the Jewish population in a future Arab Palestinian state. Long before the birth of the State of Israel, the Arabs, both in Palestine and in the wider Arab world, regarded the Jews with hatred and loathing, and wished to see their communities exterminated. The plight of the Holocaust Jews who began arriving in Palestine after the Second World War ended did not soften their hearts at all. Indeed, the Arabs had wished and prayed for the victory of the Axis, which they believed would facilitate a Palestinian Final Solution, ridding them of the Jews once and for all.

This is the true face of the Palestinian nationalist idea to which “anti-Zionists” in America and Europe pledge their allegiance: racist, xenophobic, genocidal. In truth, the charge of apartheid, which they so often hurl against the Jewish state, is an accurate one-word summation of Palestinian nationalism. And it’s an old, old story: The record of antisemitism and pogroms in Palestine and the wider Arab world is long and bloody.

As is well known, anti-Zionism and the hate-Trump Resistance are overlapping categories. Many of those who wring their hands and denounce the President for his deportation policies are also those who wave Palestinian flags and call the Jews of Israel “settler-colonialists” and white devils. The Palestinian Arabs seem to have been granted an exemption from the demand that the stranger should be welcomed. They have the permission of postmodern progressivism not just to deport the people they dislike but to kill them all.

During their revolt, the battle cry of the Palestinian Arabs was: “The English to the sea and the Jews to the grave.” Well, they’re batting five hundred.

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Several times I’ve remarked upon the gross hypocrisy of the comrades of the postmodern Left, who from one side of their mouths denounce the very concept of borders while from the other side declare that the Palestinian Arabs are “indigenous people” with exclusive rights to the land between the river and the sea. No infidels need apply for admittance to the future Palestinian state!

This observation is, I believe, true as far as it goes. But recently Elana Gomel, a collection of whose typos would have more intellectual interest than the total output of Substack’s “anti-Zionist” brigade, added depth to it. She noted that Palestinian nationalism is, in fact, a variant of the blood-and-soil nationalism that is a key characteristic of all fascist and many authoritarian regimes.

Blood-and-soil nationalism is, of course, nothing but a fantasy, since with the possible exception of the Aboriginal people of Australia, no group of human beings is indigenous to the land it inhabits. In the prehistorical and historical sense, we all came from elsewhere. It makes more sense to say that H. sapiens are indigenous to planet Earth and leave it at that.

The comrades, however, make out that the Arabs are indigenous to Palestine. They claim that the ancient Canaanites were proto-Arabs, though the language they spoke was closely akin to Hebrew and they had no real connection to Arabia. On the other hand, we do know that the modern Arab populations of the Middle East owe their tenure to the Arab conquest of the Levant and North Africa, which commenced with the conquest of Byzantine Syria (634-638 AD). The Byzantine Diocese of the East, as it was called, included the lands comprising modern Palestine (Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip). The “anti-Zionist” Western Left, however, dismisses the significance of this epoch-making historical event with the specious argument that the Arabs were already there.

Thinking over Ms. Gomel’s insightful observation, it occurred to me that even leaving “Palestine” aside, blood-and-soil nationalism fits in nicely with the ideology of the postmodern Left. That ideology, which is based on a hierarchy of victims and oppressors, is one of exclusion. The oppressed are to be granted their safe spaces, physical, social, and psychological, from which the oppressors are barred—all too often by intimidation and threats of violence. And the oppressors are, of course, denied safe spaces of their own. The comrades would stridently denounce an all-white college dormitory or graduation ceremony as a racist abomination. But universities are glad to provide such accommodations for supposedly victimized BIPOC groups. How could that possibly be racist?

The postmodern Left’s principle of exclusion extends even to speech. If you’re a person of color, trans, female, or an illegal immigrant, you can denounce the racist, misogynist, homo- and transphobic white male oppressor class in the crudest, most insulting terms. No denunciation is too vile. But should the oppressor answer back, say by opining that contemporary feminism is a conspiracy of crack-brained malignant harpies—call the Thought Police!

In short, while it preaches the wonders and marvels of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and reviles the United States for having a border, the postmodern Left is busily erecting borders all over the place. And if the comrades had their way, American society would resemble nothing so much as a map of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Left’s de facto endorsement of exclusionary blood-and-soil Palestinian nationalism is, therefore, much more than a manifestation of its antisemitism. No, it’s just one, albeit the most evil, facet of its worldview, an extended exercise in doublethink by which diversity = segregation, equity = discrimination, and inclusion = exclusion.

That people calling themselves enlightened, progressive defenders of “our democracy,” devotees of “the Science,” etc. have succumbed to this ideological virus demonstrates the danger of a firm belief in one’s intellectual and moral superiority: You never pause to question the toxic orthodoxies, colonial oppressors indeed, that have infiltrated your brain.

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The Operation Overlord Series

Note on Nomenclature

By the late 1930s tank battalions of the British Army were either former horse cavalry regiments or belonged to the Royal Tank Regiment (RTR). The cavalry retained their traditional titles, e.g. King’s Dragoon Guards, 1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry. They also retained the designation regiment even though they were battalion-sized units. Tank battalions belonging to the RTR were numbered, e.g. 1st Battalion, Royal Tank Regiment, usually abbreviated to 1st RTR. Eventually, however, all armored and tank battalions were designated as regiments. The title regiment was also used to designate battalion-size units in other branches of the Army, such as the field artillery. To avoid confusion, battalion will be used in this article to designate all such units.

Britain has a solid claim on the title Birthplace of the Tank—ironically in view of the mediocre performance of the British Army’s armored force during World War Two.

At the end of the Great War, Britain had the rudiments of an institutional framework for the development of armored warfare doctrine: the Royal Tank Corps (RTC; later the Royal Tank Regiment or RTR) of the British Army. Conventional military opinion, however, held that the tank, though it had proved useful, would nevertheless remain an adjunct to the infantry. Existing tanks were slow, unmaneuverable and mechanically unreliable. There were only a few imaginative military thinkers who envisioned the tank as the decisive weapon on future battlefields and they were mostly disregarded—the more so as the conflict just concluded was widely thought to have been “the war to end war.” In Britain, these “tank prophets” were mostly to be found in the RTC.

The tank prophets were not in agreement as to the future of armored warfare. Some, like Colonel J.F.C Fuller, thought that the tank could function independently as a “land ironclad”; others believed that the tank should form part of a mechanized all-arms battlegroup including infantry, artillery, engineers, etc. equipped with specialized armored vehicles of their own. Prominent among that faction was Captain B.H. Liddell Hart, a former Army officer, invalidated out of the service in the 1920s due to wounds sustained during the war. As a military commentator and journalist with many contacts in the Army, he was well placed to spread the gospel of the tank and became its foremost proponent, far better known than serving RTC officers such as Fuller, Hobart and Martel.

Parsimonious peacetime military budgets and the skepticism of orthodox soldiers limited the RTC’s ability to try out its ideas, but in 1927 an Experimental Mechanized Force (EMF) was formed for that purpose. The EMF was a brigade-sized unit combining light and medium tanks, armored cars, motorized infantry and engineers, and motor-towed field artillery. In the 1928 Eastland/Westland war game, the EMF’s performance proved the concept of the mechanized all-arms battlegroup. Eastland/Westland and subsequent field exercises refined tank tactics and drew attention to other requirements of mechanized warfare: reconnaissance, communications, supply, maintenance. It was particularly noted that tanks should be equipped with radios to facilitate tactical control.

In 1928 the EMF was renamed the Armoured Force (AF) and in 1933 a permanent armored brigade was established. This led to the formation of the Mobile Division (later the 1st Armoured Division) in the UK (1937) and the Mobile Force (later the 7th Armoured Division) in Egypt (1938). The commander of the Mobile Force was Major-General Sir Percy Hobart, the British Army’s leading tank expert. But by this time the British Army, which pioneered armored warfare concepts in the 1920s and early 1930s, had surrendered its lead to Germany. This was due partly to insufficient funding and partly to the innate conservatism of the British Army.

It was not that senior officers resisted the necessity of mechanization. They accepted that the Army’s prestigious cavalry regiments must replace their horses with tanks and armored cars. What did not change, however, was the cavalry mind-set. Tanks would replace horses, but they would be employed in the traditional cavalry manner: operating en masse against opposing armored formations, exploiting breakthroughs, pursuing retreating enemy forces. But the infantry support mission was seen in a different light: tanks operating in small groups, moving at the pace of the infantry, as they’d done during the Great War. Thanks to this division of roles and missions, neither the RTC nor the Royal Armoured Corps (RAC), set up in 1939 to administer all armored units, ever succeeded in evolving a unified mechanized warfare doctrine.

British tank design thus proceeded on two tracks. The cavalry was equipped with light tanks and “cruiser” tanks, both fast and lightly armored, the former armed with machine guns, the latter armed with a 2pdr (40mm) antitank gun plus machine guns. Tanks for infantry support—“I” tanks as they were designated—would be relatively slow, well armored and armed with a 2pdr gun plus a machine gun. Organizationally, the light tank and cruiser tank battalions would be used to form armored divisions, while the “I” tank battalions would be used to form tank brigades. Light tanks would also equip the armored reconnaissance battalions of infantry divisions and the corps armored reconnaissance brigades. With a few exceptions, light and cruiser tank battalions were cavalry units while “I” tank battalions were part of the Royal Tank Regiment (RTR)—as the RTC was retitled in early 1939.

The British Army’s failure to group all armored units in a single arm of service, as happened in Germany, had unfortunate effects on tank design and tactical doctrine. The Mk I (A9) cruiser tank, which entered service in 1939, was certainly fast and its 2-pounder ATG was an effective weapon, but its armor was altogether inadequate. The Mk I was followed into service by the Mk II (A10), originally intended to serve as an infantry tank. Judged unsuitable for that role, it was reclassified as a “heavy cruiser tank”—this reflecting its thicker armor and lower speed compared with the Mk I, now classified as a “light cruiser tank.” There were close support (CS) versions of both tanks, armed with a 3.7-inch howitzer in place of the 2-pounder ATG. The CS tank’s role was to support other tanks, primary by firing smoke shell to shield their movements. The light tank was the Mk VI, armed with one caliber .50 and one caliber .303 machine gun.

None of these tanks met the criteria for what nowadays would be called a main battle tank, i.e. a tank whose firepower, armor protection and mobility enable it to perform any mission. But the technical deficiencies of British tanks were less important than the faulty tactical doctrine governing their employment on the battlefield.

Organizationally, the first British armored divisions had too many tanks and too little infantry. On the eve of war in 1939, the 1st Armoured Division had some 275 light, cruiser, and CS tanks in one heavy and two light armored brigades, each with three armoured battalions. A support group embodied two motorized infantry battalions, two field artillery battalions (motor towed), a motorized engineer battalion and a battery of 2-pounder ATG (motor towed). The Armoured Division (Egypt) was incomplete, with only one light and one heavy armored brigade, a reconnaissance battalion with wheeled armored cars, a single motorized infantry battalion and one battery each of field artillery and ATG, both motor towed. Thus the tanks could count on very little by way of infantry and artillery support, and combined arms tactics, integrating the action of tanks, infantry and artillery, were largely disregarded. But these disadvantages were not recognized, for it was thought that tanks, massed in large formations, could fight on their own in the old cavalry style. War experience, particularly in North Africa, was to show just how wrong that idea was.

By 1939 the “I” tanks were grouped in tank brigades, each with three tank battalions, for a total of 151 “I” tanks and twenty-one light tanks. The first “I” tank was the Mk I (A11), armed with a machine gun only. Its replacement, the Mk II (A12) Matilda, armed with a 2-pounder ATG and a machine gun, was just beginning to enter service—only two had been delivered by September 1939. Though slow, the Matilda was the best tank in the British Army’s inventory at the beginning of World War II. Its armor was impervious to any antitank gun then in service and its gun could penetrate the armor of any German or Italian tank. Curiously enough, though it was intended to support the infantry, the Matilda was not provided with high-explosive ammunition for its 2pdr gun, which could only fire solid antitank rounds.

Though some of these problems were ironed out as the war went on, the distinction drawn between “cavalry” tanks and “infantry” tanks was never shaken off. The Matilda’s replacement, the Churchill, was in the “I” tank tradition: heavily armored but slow. There were three versions in service by 1944: one armed with a 6pdr (57mm) high velocity gun, one armed with a 75mm medium velocity gun, and one armed with a 95mm howitzer as a support tank. The Cromwell Mark VIII (A27M), still described as a cruiser tank, was roughly equivalent to the US Sherman as regards armor and was armed with a medium-velocity 75mm gun.

Between 1941 and 1944, the British armoured division underwent several reorganizations; what follows describes its 1944-45 organization for D-Day and the subsequent campaign in northwest Europe.

Three British armored divisions were committed to the invasion of Normandy: Guards Armoured, 7th Armoured, and 11th Armoured. By then, they were similar in size to a US armored division, though differently organized. (The 79th Armoured Division, commanded by Major-General Sir Percy Hobart, had a nonstandard organization and was equipped with a variety of modified tanks for mine clearance and other tasks.)

Each division’s armoured brigade embodied three armoured battalions and a motor (mechanized infantry) battalion. Their infantry brigades, identical to those found in the infantry division, embodied three infantry battalions. The infantry battalions were not fully motorized but could be made so by attaching an RASC transport platoon (30 x 6-ton lorry). There were two field artillery battalions, one self-propelled and one towed, each with 24 x 25pdr field guns. There was also a reconnaissance battalion, an antitank battalion, and a light antiaircraft battalion. The divisional organization was completed by a mechanized machine gun company, an engineer battalion, a signal battalion, and the usual service units.

The armoured battalions of Guards Armoured and 11th Armoured were equipped with the US Sherman tank; the Cromwell equipped their reconnaissance battalions only. The 7th Armoured, however, was almost completely equipped with the Cromwell. In all three divisions, each troop (platoon) of the armoured battalions had four tanks, one of which was a Sherman Firefly, armed with a high-velocity 17pdr gun in place of the standard medium-velocity 75mm gun.

Besides the armoured divisions, four independent armoured brigades and three independent tank brigades were committed to the invasion. The former were nearly identical to the divisional armoured brigades, though two of them had no motor battalion. They were equipped with US Sherman tanks. Five of the battalions assigned to these brigades had Sherman DD (duplex drive) tanks capable of swimming ashore from a tank landing ship (LST). The tank brigades had much the same organization as the armoured brigades but were equipped with Churchill tanks.

It was fortunate for the British that large-scale armored engagement like those common in the Western Desert campaign and on the Eastern Front were a rarity in northwest Europe in 1944-45. As the organization of its armoured divisions shows, the British Army still had not absorbed the teachings of its own tank prophets, nor the lessons of the war regarding armored warfighting. The tendency to treat tanks and infantry as two separate entities was still there. Nor had the British Army shaken off the idea that there were two entirely separate missions for tanks: fighting other tanks and providing infantry support. The concept of a mechanized battlegroup, organized and trained to perform both missions, remained out of view.

Certainly Field Marshal Sir Bernard L. Montgomery, who commanded British 21st Army Group in northwest Europe, was not the man to drive such innovations in the middle of a war. And perhaps that was for the best. For all his vanity and bombast, Monty was a realist. He understood that the citizen army under his command could only to asked to do so much. He was also determined to “do the business,” as he put it, at the smallest possible cost in lives. The caution for which he was so roundly criticized sprang from those motives. And surely the men he commanded appreciated them, even if his critics did not. In any case, it was only after the war that the British Army worked out an armored warfare doctrine incorporating all the lessons of history and bitter experience.

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The other day, UK prime minister Kier Starmer minister all but implied that the US/Israeli operation to defang the Islamic Republic was much the same kind of thing as V. Putin’s war of aggression. It’s hard to believe that anybody could be that stupid—hard, but not impossible given Starmer’s dismal record so far as PM—but I’ll be charitable and assume that he’s just doing some belly crawling to appease Britian’s large, antisemitic, anti-American, terrorist-supporting Muslim minority. The Labour Party depends on their votes after all: one example among many of the Red-Green Alliance.

Donald Trump, of course, has barraged Starmer and the leaders of other European nations with withering criticism and crude insults over their refusal to back the US and Israel. Their retort is that the war against Iran is outside the writ of the North Atlantic Treaty: America’s NATO allies are under no obligation to join in. And that’s true enough. But it’s in their interest to join in because, as Trump has correctly pointed out, free passage through the Strait of Hormuz is more important to Europe than it is to America.

It seems fair to conclude, then, that Europe is just fine with the continued existence of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Let the ayatollahs oppress and massacre their own people, let them spread terror around the region, let them pursue nuclear weapons and plot the destruction of Israel, as long as Europeans are not inconvenienced!

The Resistance in America is naturally on the side of Starmer & Co., echoing the narrative that what’s happening in the Middle East is not Europe’s war. But it occurs to me that there’s a good deal of hypocrisy in play here. For if Europe and the Resistance have a valid argument regarding the Iran War, Trump & Co. have an equally valid argument regarding the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Now, as a matter of policy, I believe that it would have been in the best interest of the United States to support Ukraine, providing it with the resources it needs to defeat Russian aggression. I’ve said so many times, right here on Substack. In view of the demonstrated incompetence of V. Putin’s armed forces, this would never have required direct US military action. Helping Ukraine give Russia a bloody nose would have been good for America, Europe, and the world. But the Russo-Ukrainian War is outside the writ of the North Atlantic Treaty. America has no obligation to intervene.

You wouldn’t know that, however, from the behavior of the Resistance. Trump’s reluctance to get involved in the Russo-Ukraine War has been ballyhooed as proof positive that he’s a “Russian asset.” Maybe, but then on the other hand, maybe he just can’t see what’s in it for America. Either way, he’s not committing “treason",” he’s simply declining to do what our European allies and the Resistance want America to do.

Incidentally, the contrast between the Resistance attitude toward Ukraine and Iran is striking. Supporting the former is practically a moral obligation. The latter is characterized as lunatic aggression and genocide, probably designed to distract attention from “Epstein.” The comrades’ complaints on both issues can therefore be dismissed as typical examples of their doublethink and bad faith.

But now we come to the underlying question: Is NATO still the foundation stone of American national security?

Up to the end of the Cold War, my answer was an unambiguous yes. And even afterwards, it seemed to me prudent for America to maintain a military presence in Europe, reduced though it might be. Having studied history, I never placed much stock in the idea, popularized by Francis Fukuyama, that it had come to an end of sorts with the fall of the Soviet Union.

And my skepticism proved warranted, for the Russia that emerged from the chaos of collapse was no liberal democracy. It was a defeated, demoralized, impoverished nation, mourning its lost empire, nurturing bitter resentments. The rise of V. Putin and the creation of a regime in his image was the expression of that national malaise. But malignant though it is, Putinist Russia is no superpower. It’s a ramshackle despotism, resembling nothing so much as late tsarism. Russia’s complete failure to prevail in its war of aggression against Ukraine despite more than four years of fighting is proof enough of that.

And if Russia can’t even conquer Ukraine, how much of a threat does it really pose to the rest of Europe? At an earlier stage of the Russo-Ukrainian War, I argued that a Russian victory would lead to further acts of aggression by V. Putin, against the Baltic States perhaps, or against Poland. That now seems very unlikely indeed. But if it were to happen, the nations of Europe should certainly be able to defend themselves, even without US military involvement.

The precedent I have in mind is the one established by Charles de Gaulle in 1966. He withdrew France from participation in NATO’s joint military command structure, though not from the North Atlantic Treaty itself. In an early sign of its willingness to side with anybody against the United States, the editorial board of The New York Times blamed America for de Gaulle’s action: “Bonn and London…must make it clear to Washington that continued American predominance cannot save NATO, but only destroy it. The Atlantic alliance can only be restored in one way, through restoring the unity of Europe.”

The NYT was certainly wrong then, but times have changed. NATO’s first secretary-general, Lord Ismay, famously quipped that the alliance’s object was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” But perhaps that formula no longer applies, and America should take the Gray Lady’s advice

One advantage of an American withdrawal from NATO’s joint military command would be an end to disputes over burden sharing. With America out of the picture, our European allies would have every incentive to ramp up their military spending and establish a credible deterrent—buttressed by the principle of strategic ambiguity. For America, still a party to the North Atlantic Treaty, would be there in the background. Oughtn’t that be enough to make V. Putin and whoever follows him mind their manners?

This change of policy would also free America to concentrate on the Pacific region, where China poses a serious threat to world peace and our national security. Among other advantages, it would enable the US to recast its defense strategy and rebalance its military capabilities in the direction of that threat.

There will surely be many objections to my proposal. NATO has been around for so long that major changes to its structure and the terms of America’s participation therein may seem dangerously revolutionary. But something must be done about the present unsatisfactory state of affairs, and neither soothing bromides nor nagging and complaining will do the trick. The bottom line is that if the NATO allies insist on limiting their liability under the North Atlantic Treaty, they must assume primary responsibility for European defense. America should give them a reason to do just that.

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No sooner had the US/Israeli-Iran ceasefire been announced than the usual suspects rushed to declare that the former had been humiliatingly defeated, while the latter was triumphantly victorious. I could call this absurd and move on, but it does invite a few additional comments.

Now of course this celebration of the Ogre Trump’s supposed comeuppance is little more than the rationalization of a wish, but that in itself doesn’t necessarily mean that the comrades are wrong. In this instance, however, they are wrong; their defeatism is impossible to square with the facts. Even if nothing else is achieved by Operation Epic Fury, even if not one more bomb is dropped, the Islamic Republic of Iran has sustained a crushing defeat, such that its status as a regional power to be reckoned with has, quite literally, been blown to bits.

The Islamic Republic’s regional imperialism was based first and foremost on the various proxy groups that it nurtured and sustained. There was the Assad regime in Syria. There was Hezbollah in Lebanon. There was Hamas in the Gaza Strip. There were the Houthis in Yemen. Of these, the Assad regime is no more, Hezbollah and Hamas have been decimated, and the Houthis are isolated. The last three are now cut off from Iranian support. Hezbollah and Hamas are likely soon to enter history alongside Assadist Syria; the Houthis have now been demoted from threat to nuisance.

As for the Islamic Republic itself, the military props of its former power are essentially gone. Its air force has been wiped out, most of its navy rests at the bottom of the sea, its air defenses, which anyway proved useless, have been stripped away, its nuclear weapons program has been destroyed. All it has are the remains of its ballistic missile and drone force which, like its air defense systems, proved more or less useless when the test came.

The comrades and their numerous media enablers wave all this away with the claim that the Islamic Republic can rebuild its armed forces in short order. Russia and China will help! As for that, when the crunch came how much help was all the aid provided to Iran by its good friends Russia and China? The supposedly formidable air defense systems they supplied to Iran, which were supposed to deter a major air campaign, did not, shall we say, live up to their billing. The US Air Force and US Navy flew probably 18,000 sorties during Epic Fury, for the loss of one F-15E Strike Eagle and one A-10 Warthog. The crew of the former and the pilot of the latter all survived.

Beyond that, the idea that Iran can rebuild its military power in a year or two is fanciful. For example, the Islamic Republic’s Moudge-class frigate, IRIS Dena, which was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Sri Lanka by the attack submarine USS Charlotte (SSN-766), was laid down in 2012 but was not commissioned until 2021. It takes a good long time to build a major warship. Combat aircraft could be supplied more quickly but considering how easily Iran’s former air force was wiped out, that would be a futile exercise. No, Iran is done as a regional power for a decade at least, even if one disregards the possibility of further action by the US, Israel or both.

President Trump was probably wrong to engineer a ceasefire at this particular moment. His invincible faith in his own deal-making magic seems to have blinded him to the fact that the Iranian regime has no real interest in any deal with the Great Satan. Whatever deal it signs, it will violate—if not in the short term, then down the road. Indeed, Iran is already in violation of the terms of the ceasefire, still denying free passage for merchant shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Islamic Republic has been disarmed and defeated.

The comrades are also crowing that regime change has not occurred. And admittedly, the Trump Administration’s claim that it has occurred is ridiculous. But whatever the makeup and character of the current ruling group, it’s probably living on borrowed time. The full effects of the defeat which the Islamic Republic has sustained will take time to manifest themselves—certainly with an assist from Israel, which has made no secret of the fact that its principal war aim is the downfall of the Islamofascist Iranian regime that has repeatedly threatened the Jewish state with nuclear annihilation.

The delusional defeatism of the Hate-Trump Resistance—variously Democrats, progressives and their media lapdogs—is a nauseating but not surprising spectacle. It has a history, after all, dating from the Vietnam War. The storied antiwar movement of that time waved Viet Cong flags, reviled American soldiers as war criminals, and cheered America’s defeat. It’s just the same today. These people not only hate Trump but America, which stubbornly refuses to conform to their ideological fantasies. That their hatred has driven them into a de facto alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran is a revealing and worrisome manifestation of the Red-Green Alliance.

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The World War II at Sea Series

Note on Nomenclature

The German Navy bore the title Reichsmarine during the period of the Weimar Republic (1919-33) and for the first two and a half years of the National Socialist period (January 1933-May 1935). Thereafter it bore the title Kriegsmarine (literally: War Fleet). From 1935, ships were titled Kriegsmarineschiff (KMS), e.g. KMS Bismarck.

The following abbreviations used in this article: AA (antiaircraft gun), DP (dual-purpose surface AA gun), GRT (gross registered tonnage), HA (high-angle antiaircraft gun).

Introduction

In the spring of 1941, after twenty months of war, Great Britian’s fortunes were at their nadir. Nazi Germany stood dominant over continental Europe, and though victory in the Battle of Britain has staved off an invasion of the British Isles, the subsequent German night bombing campaign—the Blitz—had devastated many British cities, inflicted severe damage on vital industrial targets, and killed tens of thousands of civilians. In North Africa, the arrival of Lieutenant-General Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps had turned the tide of the Western Desert campaign, negating the earlier British victory over the Italians. And in the Mediterranean, the British Army and the Royal Navy were fighting and losing a desperate battle for control of the Greek island of Crete.

But nowhere was the war news worse for Britain than in the North Atlantic. Spanning those long waters were the country’s vital lifelines: the convoy routes over which food, raw materials, and military supplies flowed from the Western Hemisphere to Britain. If that lifeline could be severed, Germany would win the war. And on 1 May 1941, that outcome seemed more than likely. German U-boats, surface raiders and long-range aircraft were savaging the Atlantic convoys. In 1940, ships totaling 3,991,641 GRT were sunk. In the first four months of 1941, ships totaling 1,766,154 GRT were sunk: a trend that if continued would seal Britain’s fate.

This was the background to one of the most dramatic episodes of the war at sea: the pursuit and destruction of the German battleship Bismarck.

On the Eve

KMS (Kriegsmarineschiff) Bismarck and her sister ship Tirpitz were the largest battleships ever built by Germany and, in 1941, among the most powerful battleships in the world. Bismarck was laid down in July 1936, launched in February 1939, and commissioned on 24 August 1940. By April of 1941, she had completed trials and working-up exercises in the Baltic and was ready for active service. With her armament of 8 x 15in guns and 12 x 5.9in guns, supplemented by 16 x 4.1in HA guns plus light AA, and with a design speed of 29 knots, she represented a serious threat to the vital Atlantic convoys.

Already, the big ships of Kriegsmarine had proved their worth as surface raiders. During Unternehmen Berlin (Operation Berlin; 22 January-22 March 1941) the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau sank or captured twenty-two ships totaling 115,622 GRT. Their mere presence in the North Atlantic badly disrupted convoy operations and placed severe strain on the limited resources of the Royal Navy. Bismarck, an altogether larger ship with much more firepower, could be expected to exceed that total by a considerable margin—if she could successfully break out into the North Atlantic.

And that was the rub. Britain’s principal advantage in dealing with the threat of German surface raiders was its geographical position. There were four possible routes out of the North Sea and into the Atlantic that Bismarck could use to reach the convoy routes: the Shetland-Orkney Islands passage, the Orkney-Faroe Islands passage, the Faroe Islands-Iceland passage, and the Denmark Strait (between Iceland and Greenland). The Royal Navy’s Home Fleet, based at Scapa Flow in the Shetland Islands, was well placed to intercept German warships attempting to transit any of these routes—given sufficiently early warning.

But as noted above, the Royal Navy’s resources were severely stretched. The heavy Mediterranean commitment, the need to cover Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, now based at Brest (France) after their North Atlantic sortie, and the need to provide escorts for numerous convoys left too few ships to cover the North Sea-Atlantic passages. On 1 May, the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow embodied battleships King George V and Prince of Wales, battlecruiser Hood and aircraft carrier Victorious. Prince of Wales and Victorious were newly commissioned and not fully worked up. Light cruisers Birmingham and Manchester were covering the Faroe Islands-Iceland passage; heavy cruisers Norfolk and Suffolk were covering the Denmark Strait. The other two passages, which were much closer to Scapa Flow and considered less likely be used by a German surface raider, were covered by smaller patrol vessels.

Unternehmen Rheinübung

With the invasion of the Soviet Union on Germany’s agenda, an operation in which the Kriegsmarine would play but a minor part, its commander-in-chief, Großadmiral (Grand Admiral) Erich Raeder was anxious to follow up Operation Berlin with another such sortie, which would include Bismarck and impress Hitler with the effectiveness of the Navy’s surface fleet. The operation was christened Unternehmen Rheinübung (Operation Rhine Exercise) and the original plan was for a breakout into the Atlantic by Bismarck and the new heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen (main armament 8 x 8in guns in four twin turrets, design speed 32.5 knots), coordinated with a sortie from Brest by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. But neither of the battlecruisers were fit for action: The former was undergoing repairs to her engines while the latter had recently suffered severe damage from a torpedo hit that would take months to repair. The option of including Bismarck’s sister ship, Tirpitz, was considered but rejected on the ground that her crew was not yet fully trained. Rheinübung would therefore be carried out by Bismarck and Prinz Eugen alone.

Commanding the operation was the fleet commander, Admiral Günther Lütjens, with his flag in Bismarck. Lütjens had also commanded Unternehmen Berlin and Raeder reposed great confidence in his tactical acumen and judgement. Raeder’s instructions to Lütjens stated that “The primary target in this operation is the enemy’s merchant shipping; enemy warships will be engaged only when that objective makes it necessary and it can be done without excessive risk.”

Rheinübung commenced on 18 May 1941 when Bismarck and Prinz Eugen departed from the Baltic port of Gotenhafen (now Gdynia, Poland), proceeding separately under escort. They rendezvoused off Cape Arkona (Germany) in the western Baltic, where they were joined by two destroyers. On 20 May the four ships sailed through the Danish island passages into the Kattegat (the passage between Jutland and southern Sweden) and on into the Skagerrak (the strait between Jutland and southern Norway), where the two big ships parted company with the destroyers and made for the North Sea. During these passages, they were sighted by coast watchers of the Norwegian resistance, by Swedish aircraft on patrol, and by the Swedish cruiser Gotland, all of whom reported two large German warships streaming west.

On 21 May, news of these sightings reached the British Admiralty in London. Meanwhile, having entered the North Sea, Bismarck and Prinz Eugen put in at Grimstadfjord (Bergan, Norway), where the cruiser’s fuel was topped off. The next day, they sailed for the North Atlantic.

The pattern of the German ships’ movements convinced the Admiralty that they would attempt their breakout via either the Denmark Strait or the Faroe Islands-Iceland passage. Accordingly, on 21 May Admiral Sir John Tovey, commanding the Home Fleet, detached Hood, Prince of Wales and six destroyers with orders to make for the Denmark Strait. This force was under the command of Vice-Admiral Lancelot Holland, with his flag in Hood. The next day, Tovey, with his flag in King George V and the balance of the Home Fleet, put to sea in support, where it was joined by the battlecruiser Repulse.

And indeed, Admiral Lütjens had decided on the Denmark Strait, setting the stage for the war’s first—and fateful—clash of German and British capital ships.

The two British capital ships were a study in contrasts. HMS Hood, the most famous ship in the Royal Navy and the pride of the fleet, was a battlecruiser, laid down in 1916 but not completed until 1920. She was to have been the first of a four-ship class, but construction of her sisters was suspended in early 1917, and they were scrapped incomplete at the end of World War I. Hood herself, though classed as a battlecruiser, was a step in the direction of the fast battleship. She was better armored than earlier battlecruisers, with a design speed of 31 knots and a main armament of 8 x 15in guns in four twin turrets. But her design did not reflect lessons learned during the war, and her great size and impressive appearance were not an accurate gauge of her fighting power. Though between the wars she received various modifications, Hood never underwent a major reconstruction to correct her defects, principally inadequate armor protection. In 1941, her main armament was unchanged, while her secondary armament consisted of 14 x 4in HA guns in seven twin mounts.

In May 1941, HMS Prince of Wales was the newest British battleship in service. She was the second unit of the “King George V” class, having been completed in late March of that year. At the time of Bismarck’s breakout, though she was with the Home Fleet, her crew’s training was incomplete and there were still civilian shipyard workers on board to correct various faults in the engines and main battery gun turrets. These workers remained aboard when she and Hood sailed for the Denmark Strait. Prince of Wales had a main armament of 10 x 14in guns in two quadruple turrets and one twin turret, a secondary armament of 16 x 5.25in DP guns in eight twin turrets, and a design speed of 28 knots.

Late in the day on 23 May, heavy cruiser HMS Suffolk sighted Bismarck and Prinz Eugen in the Denmark Strait, off the coast of Greenland. She immediately turned about into a fog bank and flashed the news to the Admiralty. Bismarck spotted the other British cruiser, Norfolk, and opened fire on her at a range of six miles. But Norfolk too sought refuge in fog and the Germans scored no hits.

Thereafter, the British cruisers stayed outside the range of Bismarck’s guns, shadowing the German ships by radar. When the Admiralty received their sighting reports, all available ships were ordered to concentrate against the German ships.

The Battle of the Denmark Strait

At first light on the morning of 24 May, Hood and Prince of Wales sighted the German ships, and the two sides began exchanging fire at 5:52 am. The initial range was about 25,000 yards. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen both concentrated on Hood. Admiral Holland’s intention was for both of his ships to concentrate on Bismarck, but Hood’s gunnery team mistook Prinz Eugen for Bismarck (in profile the two ships resembled one another) and opened fire on her instead. Prince of Wales, however, correctly identified the German ships and opened fire on Bismarck. The first hit was scored by Prinz Eugen on Hood, starting a fire amidships.

Eight minutes into the action, at about 6 am, Bismarck scored a direct hit on the British battlecruiser. A 15in shell penetrated the Hood’s main deck, bursting in one of the ship’s magazines and causing a massive secondary explosion that broke her back and sent her to the bottom in a matter of minutes. Only three members of the crew survived, to be picked up later by a British destroyer. The rest, 1,415 men, Vice-Admiral Holland among them, went down with their ship.

Prince of Wales, meanwhile, had scored three hits on Bismarck. One shell struck the captain’s launch and damaged the amidships seaplane catapult. A second shell went through the bow without exploding, though it severed the line to the forward fuel tanks and caused a serious fuel leak. The third did the most damage, penetrating the hull below the waterline and bursting inside the ship. This hit flooded a generator room and damaged a bulkhead, partially flooding the adjoining boiler room and cutting a steam line. The damage caused by the second and third hits reduced Bismarck’s speed by two knots and left her with a nine-degree list to port, six feet down at the bow, and leaking fuel oil from the damaged forward fuel tanks.

But with Hood disposed of, the German ships were free to concentrate on Prince of Wales. She was forced to execute an emergency turn to avoid the shattered, sinking remains of the battlecruiser. This not only interfered with her own gunnery but made her an easier target. She received four hits from Bismarck and three from Prinz Eugen. Two of them, one to the ammunition handling room of a 5.25in gun mount and one below the waterline under the ship’s armor belt, might well have been fatal, but fortunately neither shell exploded. The most serious hit, by Bismarck, was to Prince of Wales’s bridge. The shell passed through the bridge without exploding, but it killed everybody in the bridge party except the captain, John Leach, and one other crewman.

By this time, Prince of Wales was experiencing serious problems with her main battery guns, significantly lowering her rate of fire. Captain Leach therefore decided to break off the action. The British battleship retired behind a smokescreen. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen did not pursue, Admiral Lütjens being conscious of his instructions to avoid engaging British capital ships if possible.

On the British side, with Admiral Holland dead flag command on the spot devolved upon Rear-Admiral Frederic Wake-Walker, commanding the 1st Cruiser Squadron with his flag in Suffolk. He decided against renewing the action, judging that the risk of further damage to Prince of Wales was too great. Later both he and Captain Leach were harshly criticized for this decision, but Admiral Tovey backed them up.

Aboard Bismarck, Admiral Lütjens was wrestling with a similarly difficult decision. The element of surprise had been lost, and his flagship had suffered a fair amount of damage. The question was whether Rheinübung was still viable. Ultimately, he judged that it was not. The fuel oil leak was what made up his mind; Bismarck no longer had sufficient fuel to operate effectively on the British convoy routes. Lütjens decided to detach Prinz Eugen for independent raiding operations while Bismarck made for Saint-Nazaire on the French Atlantic coast. There her damage could be repaired; that accomplished, she would be well positioned to resume raiding operations on the convoy routes, perhaps in company with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau from Brest.

The Pursuit of the Bismarck

Prince of Wales, Norfolk and Suffolk continued to shadow the Germans. When Prinz Eugen was detached, Bismarck covered her withdrawal by turning and briefly engaging the British ships. In the meantime, Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of U-boats, established two support lines totaling fifteen U-boats, to interdict the Home Fleet if possible as Bismarck made for Saint-Nazaire.

On the British side, Admiral Tovey feared that Bismarck would reach safe haven before the Home Fleet, now including battleship Rodney (9 x 16in guns in three triple turrets, 12 x 6in guns in six twin turrets, design speed 23 knots), could catch and sink her. In an effort to slow her down, Tovey detached aircraft carrier Victorious to close with Bismarck at top speed and conduct a torpedo attack. When the carrier got within 120 miles of the German ship, she launched a strike of nine Swordfish torpedo bombers. Though the aircrews were inexperienced, the weather was bad, and Bismarck put up heavy antiaircraft fire, they pressed home their attack and managed to score one hit. The torpedo exploded under the battleship’s bridge but caused no significant damage. All nine Swordfish made it back to Victorious and were recovered. But it was beginning to look as though Bismarck might indeed make good her escape.

Early in the morning of 25 May, Rear-Admiral Wake-Walker’s shadowing ships lost contact with Bismarck. On the assumption that she would head for the North Sea, British ships were deployed to intercept her. Almost certainly, Bismarck would have escaped except that Lütjens, unaware he’d shaken off the British, broke radio silence with a long message to Naval Group West, the higher headquarters responsible for Atlantic operations. This enabled the British to determine Bismarck’s approximate position and RAF Coastal Command immediately dispatched aircraft to search for her. But Bismarck still had a long lead on the Home Fleet, and despite her damage and loss of fuel was still able to steam at around 25 knots. The Admiralty had ordered Force H, based at Gibraltar, into the Atlantic, but it was doubtful whether they could find and corner the German battleship.

Admiral Tovey had another worry. His big ships, King George V and Rodney, were running low on fuel and would soon be forced to return to base. From the Admiralty came instructions, almost certainly originating with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, that the British battleships must intercept and sink Bismarck even if they then had to be towed home. Tovey dismissed this idea, calling it ridiculous and certain to result in their loss.

But then the clouds parted. At midmorning on 26 May, a Coastal Command PBY Catalina spotted Bismarck. She was about 700 miles from Saint-Nazaire: still out of range of Luftwaffe fighter cover.

Vice-Admiral James Somerville’s Force H, consisting of aircraft carrier Ark Royal, battlecruiser Renown (Sommerville’s flagship), and light cruiser Sheffield, was racing to intercept Bismarck. Though it would have been highly inadvisable for Renown, a thinly armored battlecruiser of World War I vintage, to take on the German battleship, a torpedo attack from Ark Royal might at least slow her down enough for the Home Fleet to close in.

That afternoon, two of the carrier’s Swordfish relieved the PBY on shadowing duty, and a little later Ark Royal launched a strike of fifteen Swordfish. Unfortunately, the aircrews had not been briefed that Sheffield was in Bismarck’s vicinity. They spotted the cruiser, mistook her for the German ship, and attacked. A disaster was only averted by a technical fault in the new magnetic proximity detonators with which the torpedoes had been fitted. Of those that were dropped, some torpedoes promptly blew up in the water. Others missed Sheffield and the Swordfish that had not yet attacked broke off after receiving a warning message from Ark Royal. The flight returned to the carrier, and all were safely recovered.

Though the hour was growing late and the weather was deteriorating, Ark Royal readied a second strike of fifteen Swordfish. This time, their torpedoes were fitted with contact fuses. By now the range to Bismarck was only forty miles, and she was quickly located and attacked. Two hits were scored, one of which severely damaged the ship’s steering machinery and jammed her rudder. Bismarck steamed helplessly in a wide circle until partial control was recovered. But it proved impossible to shape course for Saint-Nazaire, and Admiral Lütjens knew that his flagship was doomed. He signaled the grim news to Naval Group West: “Ship unmaneuverable. We shall fight to the last shell. Long live the Führer!”

The End of the Bismarck

Admiral Tovey had no desire to fight a night action with his battleships, so after closing with Bismarck, he sent in the 4th Destroyer Flotilla, Captain Phillip Vian commanding, which had been detached from convoy duty and ordered to reinforce the Home Fleet. (The destroyers originally with the Home Fleet had been low on fuel and were sent back to Scapa Flow.) All that night of 26-27 May, the flotilla’s five destroyers, four British, one Polish, launched harassing attacks on Bismarck with guns and torpedoes. They inflicted no serious damage but did force her already exhausted and demoralized crew to remain at action stations throughout the dark hours.

As dawn approached, Tovey issued his orders for the coming battle. Prince of Wales, damaged and running low on fuel, was ordered to return to Scapa Flow. So were Victorious and Suffolk, also low on fuel. Battlecruiser Repulse was detached as well. She was the sister ship of Force H’s Renown, and like her was considered no match for Bismarck because of her inadequate armor protection. Only Norfolk remained in company with Tovey. A little later, heavy cruiser Dorsetshire, detached from convoy escort duty, rendezvoused with the Home Fleet in time to participate in the final battle. Tovey then made his final dispositions. He ordered Rodney to take station astern of King George V and conform to the flagship’s movements. Rodney was further instructed to close the range to 15,000 yards after contact with Bismarck was made. The cruisers were to scout ahead and upon sighting the enemy, fall back and take station behind the battleships.

At dawn on 27 May the sky was overcast, a northwesterly gale was blowing, and the sea was rough. Tovey decided to await full daylight before engaging, making his approach on a northeasterly bearing. Norfolk made first contact with Bismarck at about 8:00 am, identifying her with some difficulty in poor visibility. She reported her sighting to the flagship as both cruisers fell back as ordered. Lookouts on King George V sighted the enemy at 8:43 am. The range was about 25,000 yards, and both British battleships opened fire starting at 8:47 am: first Rodney, then King George V. Between the damage to her rudder and the heavy seas, Bismarck was a far from stable gun platform. Nevertheless, she returned fire with her four forward guns, and her second salvo straddled Rodney. But after that, the end came quickly.

At 9:02 am, a 16-inch salvo from Rodney hit Bismarck’s forward superstructure, wrecking the bridge and the forward fire control director. Admiral Lütjens and Bismarck’s captain, Ernst Lindemann, were both killed, along with most of the ship’s other senior officers. The forward main battery turrets were also put out of action. Main battery fire control was shifted to the aft director, but three more salvos from the British battleships destroyed it as well. With that, Bismarck’s firing became erratic and intermittent, allowing the British ships to close the range. Norfolk and Dorsetshire now opened fire with their 8in guns. They also launched torpedoes, but no hits were obtained.

By 9:30 am, Bismarck’s four main battery turrets had all been silenced. Seeing that the ship was helpless, the senior surviving officer ordered scuttling charges to be set and ordered the crew to abandon ship.

By then Rodney had closed the range to 3,000 yards and was blasting Bismarck’s superstructure with point-blank salvos. She and Norfolk also fired torpedoes, the battleship claiming one hit. King George V stood farther off, so that her plunging fire might penetrate into the ship’s hull. But though Bismarck had quickly been put out of action she proved hard to sink, and the British battleships were now critically short of fuel. At 10:20 am, Tovey therefore ordered them to break off the action, and Dorsetshire to close in and finish off Bismarck with torpedoes. The cruiser launched three torpedoes, all of which hit. Bismarck slowly capsized, the sea closing over her at 10:40 am. Four British torpedoes and 2,800 shells, four hundred of which hit, had been required to sink the Bismarck.

The Aftermath

Of Bismarck’s crew of over 2,000 men, there were just 114 survivors. One hundred and ten were picked up by Dorsetshire and destroyer Maori, three by a U-boat, and two by a German weather ship. Hundreds of others were abandoned in the sea after a U-boat alarm, probably false, caused the British ships to break off their rescue operations. One of the Germans picked up by Dorsetshire died of his wounds and was buried at sea with full military honors.

The last casualties of the pursuit and battle occurred on 28 May. Luftwaffe bombers, putting in a belated appearance, spotted and attacked two ships of the 4th Destroyer Flotilla, Mashona and Tartar, which were heading for home at their most economical speed, being low on fuel. Mashona was hit by a bomb which cripped her and killed forty-six of her crew. After the rest of the crew were taken off, she was scuttled.

In Britain, the news of Bismarck’s destruction was received with grim elation: HMS Hood had been avenged; the vital convoys, if still not safe, had not been savaged. But in Germany, the loss of Germany’s most powerful warship was a terrible blow to national morale. Hitler himself was stunned; whatever faith he’d reposed in the big ships of the Kriegsmarine evaporated. Later on, he went so far as to order the surviving battleships and heavy cruisers to be decommissioned and disarmed, with their guns going to reinforce the Atlantic Wall. Only with difficulty did Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the former U-boat chief who by then had replaced Raeder as commander in-chief, talk the Führer out of this idea.

Prinz Eugen, which came to be known as the “lucky ship” of the Kriegsmarine, made it into the South Atlantic and refueled from a prepositioned supply ship. But she then developed engine trouble, cut short her cruise, and arrived at Brest unscathed.

The loss of Bismarck did not extinguish the threat of German surface raiders. But henceforward they would be “auxiliary cruisers”: modern and relatively fast merchant ships refitted and armed, that would employ deception and stealth to prey upon Allied shipping in distant waters.

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