Friday, October 27, 1944. Somewhere in Germany.

The Spanish Army launched an offensive against Republican forces in the Pyrenees.

The 7th Infantry Division took Buri Airfield on Leyte.  Tacloban airstrip became operational.

The Navy conducted airstrikes on Luzon.

The Red Army's Gumbinnen Operation in East Prussia ended in failure.  

Sarah Sundin reports that Allied Offensive actions in Italy were halted for the season:

Today in World War II History—October 27, 1939 & 1944: 80 Years Ago—Oct. 27, 1944: In Italy, Gen. Sir Henry Maitland Wilson orders halt to Allied offensive for the winter due to fatigue, heavy rains, and flooding.

She also reports that that this was Navy Day for 1944, which it would have been, as Navy Day is always October 27.  I missed that, however.

The Germans put down the Slovak National Uprising.

A white cloud of smoke partly envelopes this German tank which is still smoldering in a street somewhere in Germany. U.S. infantrymen, crouching on both sides cover the tank. 27 October, 1944.

Last edition"

Thursday, October 26, 1944. End of the Battle of Leyte Gulf and the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, A Mystery, Australian Navy, Battle of Leyte Gulf, Imperial Japanese Navy, Monarchy, Norway, Personalities, U.S. Navy, Women's Air Force Service Pilots, World War Two

Sunday, August 16, 1942. The mystery of the L-8.

The Navy blimp L-8, put out earlier that day in search of Japanese submarines, coasted into Daly California without its crew.

The blimp and its crew of two had taken off at 06:03 from Treasure Island off of San Francisco.  At 07:38 its crew radioed that they had seen an oil slick off of Farallon Islands, Point Reyes.  A Liberty ship and a fishing boat both later reported that the blimp descended to about 30 feet above the slick and then headed east, rather than its planned route, which would have taken it northwest.  It was next spotted at 11:15 off of Ocean Beach, by which time it lacked a crew.  The blimp contained its parachutes and life raft, so the crew had not bailed out.

They've never been found.

Official speculation is that they were trying to deploy a smoke signal when one slipped out and the other went to rescue him, with both going into the ocean, or some variant of that. This seems fairly likely, although other theories abound.

The 101st Airborne Division, provided with cadre from the 82nd Airborne Division, was activated.  The 82nd had been converted organizationally from a conventional infantry division to an airborne division the day prior.

Shoulder insignia of the 101st Airborne Division.

The 101st had come into the table of organizations during World War One, but just existed for nine days on the charts, having been created immediately before the end of the war.  In contrast, the 82nd "All American" Division had seen action in World War One and included in its ranks the famous Alvin York.

Shoulder patch of the 82nd Airborne Division.

The USS Alabama was commissioned.

The Alabama in 1942.

The ship avoided being scrapped in 1964, which the Navy intended to do, and was acquired by the State of Alabama where she became a museum ship.  In spite of the original scrapping intent, a provision of the Navy's transfer of her ownership was that she could be recalled if needed, and in fact when the Iowa Class battleships were reactivated in the 1980s, some of her engine parts were cannibalized by the Navy as they were needed for those ships and were no longer manufactured.

The German Navy began Operation Wunderland with the goal of entering the Kara Sea, an extension of the Arctic Ocean, in order to attack Soviet ships that took refuge in the region which was iced up ten months out of the year.  The German Navy also sank three ships off of Aracaju, Brazil, operating under the belief that Allied ships were operating in neutral territorial waters off of eastern South America.

The Japanese, operating off of faulty areal reconnaissance, dispatch the 28th Naval Infantry Regiment from Truk to retake what they believe is a mostly abandoned Guadalcanal.

The U.S. Army Air Force bombed Axis targets in Egypt for the first time.

What started as a Mass to commemorate members of the Begona Regiment who had died in the Spanish Civil War degenerated into a riot between Falangist and Carlist factions in which a Falangist member, who had hand grenades with him, through two resulting in the wounding of thirty people.

Saturday, November 22, 1941. Advances and Reversals.

On this day in 1941 the Germans captured Klin on their advance towards Moscow.

The Atlantis.

On the same day, the German surface raider Atlantis was sunk off of Ascension Island by the HMS Devonshire, ending her surface raiding career.  The commander of the U126 which had been with her was left on board the Atlantis when the Devonshire appeared.

With the Atlantis sinking the Devonshire left the area and the U126 resurfaced and picked up 300 German survivors and one American prisoner.  She then towed the survivors in rafts towards Brazil until they were taken on board the refueling ship Python, which in turn was surprised by a British vessel on December 1 and scuttled.  It too left the area, and the survivors were then picked up by a collection of German and Italian submarines.

This interesting event gives us a window into the state of naval combat at the time. The Atlantis, a converted merchant ship, had been an effective surface raider, which is something that was on its way out.  And the Royal Navy didn't linger on station after the sinking, no doubt for good reasons, but with the results that survivors of sinkings were twice left to the Axis to pick up themselves.  Finally, the Italian navy participated in that recovery, even though their role in the Battle of the Atlantic is nearly forgotten.

Also, on this day German Luftwaffe squadron leader Werner Mölders was killed when a HE 111 he was a passenger in crashed while landing in a thunderstorm.  The plane was carrying him and other Luftwaffe figures to the commemorations for Ernst Udet.  Mölders was the first pilot in history to claim 100 aerial kills, a tally that dated back to his service in the Spanish Civil War.

Mölders was an enigmatic character who in some ways bests presents the myth of Luftwaffe pilots as somehow being above the taint of Nazism, although his service in the Spanish Civil War should cause and has a person to question that.  His father was killed in World War One when he was just a boy, and he thereafter was very much influenced by a family friend who was a Catholic Priest and was in contact to some degree with Westphalian Bishop Graf Von Galen during the war.  He was devoutly religious in spite of his German military service being 100% within the context of the Nazi regime.  When he was shot down over France early in the war he asked to meet the pilot who had brought him down, only to learn that the pilot had been killed.  He was at first somewhat mistreated as a Prisoner Of War, until a French airman intervened on his behalf, and then he later intervened with Goering to keep one of his former captors from being executed.

At the time of his death he'd only been married for a few months, with the Catholic ceremony having been preformed by his Priest friend and having been disapproved of by the Nazi regime.  Indeed, the Priest was under suspicion from the authorities.  His wife was pregnant at the time of his death.

West Germany honored him after the war with the naming of a ship and other military fixtures for him, although they were later reversed when the honors rescinded due to his service in the Spanish Civil War. At least one street remains named for him.  His grave was destroyed by East German authorities with the destruction of a graveyard, but it was restored in 1991.

At the time of his death he had been appointed Inspector of Fighters, a ground role, in part because the Nazi regime felt that it didn't wish to risk his combat death due to publicity reasons.  It's interesting to speculate what rule he may have played, if any, in the July 1944 plot had he still been living, given his strong Catholic nature, something he shared with several of the plotters of that attempted coup.

The 2nd New Zealand Division captured the Italian Fort Capuzzo in the Commonwealth drive to relieve Tobruk.

Discussions with the Japanese legation continued.

The Japanese Ambassador and Mr. Kurusu called at the Secretary's apartment by appointment made at the request of the Ambassador. The Secretary said that he had called in the representatives of certain other governments concerned in the Pacific area and that there had been a discussion of the question of whether things (meaning Japanese peaceful pledges, et cetera) could be developed in such a way that there could be a relaxation to some extent of freezing.

The Secretary said that these representatives were interested in the sug gestion and there was a general feeling that the matter could all be settled if the Japanese could give us some satisfactory evidences that their intentions were peaceful.

The Secretary said that in discussing the situation with the representatives of these other countries he found that there had arisen in their minds the wine kind of misgivings that had troubled him in the course of the conversations with the Japanese Ambassador. He referred to the position in which the Japanese Government had left the Ambassador and the Secretary as they were talking of peace when it made its move last July into Indochina. He referred also to the mounting oil purchases by Japan last Spring when the conversations were in progress, to the fact that he had endured public criticism for permitting those shipments because he did not wish to prejudice a successful outcome to the conversations and to the fact that that oil was not used for normal civilian consumption.

The Secretary went on to say that the Japanese press which is adopting a threatening tone gives him no encouragement and that no Japanese statesmen are talking about a peaceful course, whereas in the American press advocacy of a peaceful course can always get a hearing. He asked why was there not some Japanese statesman backing the two Ambassadors by preaching peace. The Secretary pointed out that if the United States and other countries should see Japan coming along a peaceful course there would be no question about Japan's obtaining all the materials she desired; that the Japanese Government knows that.

The Secretary said that while no decisions were reached today in regard to the Japanese proposals he felt that we would consider helping Japan out on oil for civilian requirements only as soon as the Japanese Government could assert control of the situation in Japan as it relates to the policy of force and conquest. He said that if the Ambassador could give him any further assurances in regard to Japan's peaceful intentions it would help the Secretary in talking with senators and other persons in this country.

Mr. Kurusu said it was unfortunate that there had been a special session of the Diet at this time, as the efforts of the Government to obtain public support had brought out in sharp relief the abnormal state of the present temper of the Japanese people who had been affected by four years of war and by our freezing measures.

The Secretary asked to what extent in the Ambassador's opinion did the firebrand attitude prevail in the Japanese army. Mr. Kurusu said that it took a great deal of persuasion to induce the army to abandon a position once taken, but that both he and the Ambassador had been pleasantly surprised when the Japanese army acceded to their suggestion in regard to offering to withdraw the Japanese troops from southern Indochina. He said he thought this was an encouraging sign, but that nevertheless the situation was approaching an explosive point.

The Secretary asked whether it was not possible for a Japanese statesman now to come out and say that Japan wanted peace; that while there was much confusion in the world because of the war situation Japan would like to have a peace which she did not have to fight for to obtain and maintain; that the United States says it stands for such ideas; and that Japan might well ask the United States for a show?down on this question.

The Ambassador said he did not have the slightest doubt that Japan desired peace. He then cited the popular agitation in Japan following the conclusion, of the peace settlement with Russia in 1905, as pointing to a difficulty in the way of publicly backing a conciliatory course.

The Secretary asked whether there was any way to get Japanese statesmen to approach the question before us with real appreciation of the situation with which we are dealing including the question of finding a way to encourage the governments of other powers concerned in the Pacific area to reach some trade arrangement with Japan. He pointed out that Japan's Indochina move, if repeated, would further give a spurt to arming and thus undo all the work that he and the Ambassador had done. He suggested that if the United States and the other countries should supply Japan with goods in moderate amounts at the beginning those countries would be inclined to satisfy Japan more fully later on if and as Japan found ways in actual practice of demonstrating its peaceful intentions. He said that one move on Japan's part might kill dead our peace effort, whereas it would be easy to persuade the other countries to relax their export restrictions if Japan would be satisfied with gradual relaxation.

Mr. Kurusu said, that at best it would take some time to get trade moving. The Secretary replied that he understood this but that it would be difficult to get other countries to understand until Japan could convince those countries that it was committed to peaceful ways. Mr. Kurusu said that some immediate relief was necessary and that if the patient needed a thousand dollars to effect a cure an offer of three hundred dollars would not accomplish the purpose. The Secretary commented that if the Japanese Government was as weak as to need all that had been asked for, nothing was likely to save it.

Mr. Kurusu said that Japan's offer to withdraw its forces from southern Indochina would set a reverse movement in motion.

The Secretary said that the Japanese were not helping as they should help in the present situation in which they had got themselves but were expecting us to do the whole thing.

Mr. Kurusu asked what was the idea of the American Government.

The Secretary replied that although the Japanese proposal was addressed to the American Government he had thought it advisable to see whether the other countries would contribute and he found that they would like to move gradually. The effect of an arrangement between these countries and Japan would be electrifying by showing that Japan had committed herself to go along a peaceful course.

Mr. Kurusu asked what Japan could do. The Secretary replied that if, for example, he should say that he agreed to enter into a peaceful settlement provided that there should be occasional exceptions and qualifications he could not expect to find peaceful-minded nations interested.

The Secretary then asked whether his understanding was correct that the Japanese proposal was intended as a temporary step to help organize public opinion in Japan and that it was intended to continue the conversations looking to the conclusion of a comprehensive agreement. Mr. Kurusu said yes.

Mr. Kurusu asked whether the Secretary had any further suggestions. The Secretary replied that he did not have in mind any suggestions and that he did not know what amounts of exports the various countries would be, disposed to release to Japan. He said that Japan made the situation very difficult, for if Japan left her forces in Indochina, whether in the north, east, south or west, she would be able to move them over night, and that therefore this would not relieve the apprehensions of neighboring countries. The British, for example, would not be able to move one warship away from Singapore. .

The Ambassador argued that it would take many days to move troops from northern Indochina to southern Indochina, and he stated that the Japanese desired the troops in northern Indochina in order to bring about a settlement with China. He said that after the settlement of the China affair Japan promised to bring the troops out of Indochina altogether.

The Secretary emphasized again that he could not consider this, that also uneasiness would prevail as long as the troops remained in Indochina, and commented that Japan wanted the United States to do all the pushing toward bringing about a peaceful settlement; that they should get out of Indochina.

Mr. Kurusu observed that the Japanese Foreign Minister had told Ambassador Grew that we seemed to expect that all the concessions should be made by the Japanese side.

The Secretary rejoined that Mr. Kurusu had overlooked the fact that in July the Japanese had gone into Indochina. He added that the United States had remained from the first in the middle of the road, that it was the Japanese who had strayed away from the course of law and order, and that they should not have to be paid to come back to a lawful course.

Mr. Kurusu said that this country's denunciation of the commercial treaty had caused Japan to be placed in a tight corner.

The Secretary observed that Japan had cornered herself; that we had been preaching for the last nine years that militarism was sapping everybody and that if the world were to be plunged into another war there would not be much left of the people anywhere. He said that in 194 he had told Ambassador Saito that Japan was planning an overlordship in East Asia. The Secretary added that he had tried to persuade Hitler that participation by him in a peaceful course would assure him of what he needed. The Secretary said it was a pity that Japan could not do just a few small peaceful things to help tide over the situation.

Mr. Kurusu asked what the Secretary meant. The Secretary replied that the major portion of our fleet was being kept in the Pacific and yet Japan asked us not to help China. He sand we must continue to aid China. He said it was little enough that we were actually doing to help China. The Ambassador commented that our moral influence was enabling Chiang to hold out.

The Secretary said that a peaceful movement could be started in thirty or forty days by moving gradually, and yet Japan pushed everything it wanted all at once into its proposal. The Ambassador explained that Japan needed a quick settlement and that its psychological value would be great.

The Secretary said that he was discouraged, that he felt that he had rendered a real contribution when he had called in the representatives of the other countries, but that he could only go a certain distance. He said he thought nevertheless that if this matter should move in the right way peace would become infectious. He pointed also to the danger arising from blocking progress by injecting the China matter in the proposal, as the carrying out of such a point in, the Japanese proposal would effectually prevent the United States from ever successfully extending its good offices in a peace settlement between Japan and China. He said this could not be considered now.

There then ensued some further but inconclusive discussion of the troop situation in Indochina, the Secretary still standing for withdrawal, after which the Ambassador reverted to the desire of the Japanese Government to reach a quick settlement and asked whether we could not say what points in the Japanese proposal we would accept and what points we desired to have modified.

The Secretary emphasized that there was no way in which he could carry the whale burden and suggested that it would be helpful if the Japanese Government could spend a little time preaching peace. He said that if the Japanese could not wait until Monday before having his answer there was nothing he could do about it as he was obliged to confer again with the representatives of the other governments concerned after they had had an opportunity to consult with their governments. He repeated that we were doing our best, but emphasized that unless the Japanese were able to do a little there was no use in talking.

The Ambassador disclaimed any desire to press the Secretary too hard for an answer, agreed that the Secretary had always been most considerate in meeting with the Ambassador whenever an appointment had been requested, and said that the Japanese would be quite ready to wait until Monday.

The Secretary said he had in mind taking up with the Ambassador sometime a general and comprehensive program which we had been engaged in developing and which involved collaboration of other countries.

The Ambassador said that the Japanese had in mind negotiating a bilateral agreement with us to which other powers could subsequently give their adherence.

The U.S. Navy launched the USS Aaron Ward, a Gleaves class destroyer.  Her service would be brief, as she was sunk by the Japanese in 1943 off of Guadalcanal.

March 3, 1941. Deepenings

The Germans started sealing off Krakow to establish a Jewish concentrated ghetto there.

More on the evil of Germany in Poland can be read about here:

Today in World War II History—March 3, 1941

Mars Candy received the patent for M&Ms on this day in 1941.  They were based on a British candy called Smarties which Frank C. Mars, the owner of the company, had observed soldiers eating during the  Spanish Civil War.  The first customer was the U.S. government which purchased them for servicemen serving overseas as they wouldn't melt.

On the same day, Winston Churchill urged FDR to ignore the growing caloric crisis in France.

Churchill – ‘Don’t feed the French’

Turkey had second thoughts about its non aggression pack with Bulgaria and cancelled it after only one week of existence.  The U.S. froze Bulgarian assets in the country.

Guardsmen from Pine City, Minnesota, departed for Federalized service.

Other events in World War Two from this day:

Day 550 March 3, 1941

December 23, 1940. Aviation construction and disaster.

On this day in 1940, a photo was taken of some new construction benefiting aircraft at a Naval Air Station in Rhode Island.

On the same day, famous aviator August Eddie Schneider was killed in an aviation accident.

Schneider was a well known daring aviator and had won multiple aviation speed records.  He'd also flown for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.  On this day he was training a student when his plane was struck by a Navy aircraft, taking it down and killing him.

And of course the war raged on:

Day 480 December 23, 1940

Today in World War II History—December 23, 1940

On this day in the war, Winston Churchill addressed the Italian people and urged them to rebel against Mussolini and take Italy out of the war.  The overall poor performance of Italian troops in combat was already effectively achieving that result.

Label Appendix to Growing Up In the 1960s

This post only serves the odd feature, for this blog, for adding in Labels for Growing Up in the 1960s.

The reason is that the labels would otherwise exceed the allowable limit.

The Hornet's Nest: TheRussian Bear in Syria is stung in Turkey, and an Islamic radical strike in Berlin

 American Committee for Relief in the Near East poster from World War One.  The tragedy of the Middle East just keeps going on and on.

Yesterday brought us two terrible news stories that relate to the ongoing disaster in the Middle East.

The first of them was the assassination of the Turkish Ambassador to Turkey by a Turkish policeman.  Before he was shot down himself he claimed his act to be an act of vengeance for Aleppo and Syria in general.

Time will tell if he was part of a larger movement, or merely enraged to extreme violence by the  Russian participation in the war.  Anyway you look at it, and saying something that you are not supposed to, this was pretty predictable.

Here on this blog, from the very onset of the war in Syria, I've taken the position that getting involved in the Syrian mess would be a huge mistake.  I've thought that we should take on ISIL, but I have also thought all along that people who thought that there was a nice way in and out of Syria were delusional.  Recognizing that I would have simply stepped back from there except to take on the specter of ISIL which grew as time went on.

Russia, lead by neo-Tsar Vladimir Putin, took the opposite course and in so doing reverted to a heavy handed type of warfare the world has not really seen since World War Two.  Nations simply do not bomb cities into oblivion anymore.  It isn't done, as it isn't right.  A person can (and quite a few do) go back and debate the morality of what occurred in the Second World War, but everyone accords that this is not allowable now.

Russia's mere presence in Syria is an odd thing, quite frankly, and in some ways we can take a little of the blame for that.  Delusional in our own right, we supplied arms to factions that we knew little about and which had (as I noted here all along) no chance of winning. But even poor combatants can lengthen a war and make it worse.  That may well be what we achieved and as that occurred the forces we really opposed grew in strength there.  In the end a Syrian government that was always fascistic but which looked somewhat to the West turned to the only friends it could find, Russia and Iran, and Russia took the role in that civil war that Germany did in the Spanish one, with similar results.

Well, he would live by the sword will die by it, and now inflicting violence on Syria has been revisited on a Russian diplomat in Turkey.  The Russians will react badly, but this won't end there.  Putin is one of those characters who can read the signs in his own times, but can't seem to read history accurately.

 

In terms of not reading history accurately, President Obama, while he played out the combat in this region masterfully (and contrary to the way I would have gone about it) may deserve a bit of blame as well for drawing lines in the sand he wasn't prepared to enforce.  It would have been better to draw no lines at all, but perhaps that was not possible.  At least one commentator has noted that drawing "red lines" and then doing nothing about them probably taught Putin that he could steal cyber secrets and nothing would happen to him.  I suspect that was a lesson badly learned, as something will likely happen now.

In a lot of ways, quite frankly, Russia is a paper tiger.  It's a mere shadow of the USSR with large scale suppressed internal opposition and an involvement in two internal wars. The USSR could not endure an arms race with the West and Russia can't either.  I don't know what the US will do to counter Russia (and with Trump coming in its really difficult to tell, to say the least) but mounting a counter electronic attack would likely be pointless.  They have a lot of hackers, but we depend on computers a lot more than they do.  

But they do depend on oil for their economy.  They are vulnerable there. The US domestic oil industry has been crying for assistance in the wake of the crashed prices and that same phenomenon has hurt Russia.  Closing Russian oil experts would devastate Russia, and it wouldn't hurt us a bit.  It would hurt Europe however.  Still, there may be an avenue there, if cooperation for the effort could be amassed.

Beyond that, a nation involved in two smouldering wars can't really afford to have their opposition really supplied.  Getting into Syria now would be an error for us, but backing the Ukraine to a much greater degree may not be.  Even simply training and supplying a good Ukrainian army is a problem for Russia.

Of course we'll see what actually occurs.

What did occur also yesterday  is that another Islamic attack occurred in Europe, this time in Berlin.  The suspect in the bus assault is Pakistani, so he falls outside of the region, for Europe, that we'd expect this to occur, but that may show the power of Islamic extremism to attract the Islamic dispossessed everywhere.  The sad fact is that this is not going to be the last of this.

On a more positive note, however, while the story has been barely noted, exposure to European culture and an open society is corroding Islamic adherence amongst the refugee population at large at the same time its attracting some to violence.  Priests in Germany and France have noted that in some places their pews are now full. . .with Arab refugees who have converted or are converting to Christian faiths.  A faithful people, in the free market of ideas, that faith is going away from Islam.  And even here in the US a couple of weeks ago a nominally Islamic Washington Post reporter announced that he was being baptized a Catholic, as was the former Miss USA who was the first Muslim to obtain that title.  

Changes in the wind.

Persistent Myths VIII: The Spanish Civil War Edition

The Spanish Civil War Edition

That Spain fought a tooth and nail civil war in the 1930s, leading up to World War Two, is of course well known, but the version of it remembered by most people, and even by quite a few historians, is mostly bunk.

The common popular view of the war is that nasty Spanish fascist in the Spanish army launched a war against the republican democracy loving legitimate government and squashed democracy in the name of fascism.

That didn't happen.

In reality, Spain's pre civil war government was extremely weak and unstable and was very obviously rocketing towards falling into Communism.  That instability wasn't novel for the time, there were a lot of European governments that were having trouble sustaining democracy, in part because their experiment with democracy was quite young and quite a few political parties had no real concept of being more loyal to the country and the system than themselves.  The more unstable of them tended to teeter between Communism and Fascism in the 1930s, with Italy and Germany of course falling into Fascism.  Other countries rocked back and forth, like France, but survived with democracies in tact.  Others fell into other forms of totalitarianism.  Poland fell into a socialist dictatorship, Austria into a right wing dictatorship, Hungary had a Communist uprising, and so on.  In Spain, it was pretty clear that it was reaching the end of its democratic days and was going to fall into some sort of left wing radical government.

The Army did revolt against the government, that's quite true, but contrary to myth it wasn't all Francisco Franco.  Franco wasn't even the most senior of the rebels, and he wasn't in Spain, but in Morocco, when the revolt broke out.  He did rise to leadership of it, however.

But, contrary to the common myth, he wasn't a Fascist and the war wasn't one between Fascism and democracy.  It was one between the hard right/military and Communism.

Spain had a fascist party, the Falange, but Franco never joined it.  It contributed members to his various governments over the years, but at no point did it ever dominate it.  Spain also had a monarchist party, the Carlist, that Franco was quite sympathetic with, but he never joined that either.  He was basically a military dictator of the Spanish type, but he used parties that were fellow travelers with him. Those groups had nowhere else they could go, as Franco was the only game in town.

As for the Spanish Republicans, there were no doubt some democrats in that movement early on, and some officers in the Spanish army went with the Republicans. But the Republicans were radical to start with and very quickly became more radical.  And when it appeared that they would win, the Communist took the opportunity to begin to eliminate other radicals within the movement, acting as it turned out prematurely.  That was to Communist type, as the Communist always wiped out competition once they'd won, and in Spain's case, they just acted too soon.

So why all the romance about the Republican cause and the common view of the war, when in real terms the Spanish Civil War belongs more to the revolutions of the 20s and 30s and is uniquely Spanish in nature?  Well, the answer is World War Two.

Because the Italians first, and the Germans, backed the Nationalist (with the USSR backing the Republicans), and because the Republicans lost, it's been easy and inevitable to recast the war as "a dress rehearsal for World War Two."  It wasn't in any way.  But it's been commonly viewed through the thick lens of the Second World War which has allowed people to grossly simplify the war and completely misunderstand it.  It's also let foreign volunteers to the Republican side off the hook, as they've been re-imagined as armed democrats, rather than Communist dupes, as they really tended to be.

The Evolution of Armor

Renault FT, introduced in 1917.  Some served all the way to 1949 even though they were really obsolete by 1930.

Soviet T33, served in the 1930s in Spain (photo courtesy of Daniel, in the photograph) and into World War Two, during which it quickly became obsolete.

M3 Stuart, produced from 1941 to 1944.  One of a series of light tanks that served in the U.S. Army during World War Two, all of which rapidly became obsolete.

M4 Sherman, it entered service in 1942 and was arguably approaching obsolescence by 1945.  Used by every Allied army during World War Two.

 

M18 Gun Motor Carriage, a "tank destroyer" which was really a sort of tank. Note the chassis evolution from the Sherman.

M48 "Patton" tank of the South Korean Army in 1987, this tank went into service in 1953 but was being replaced in U.S. service by the mid 1960 by what was essentially an upgraded model, the M60.

M60s.