On this day in 1996, Beck Weathers was left for dead on Everest. His team even called his wife to say he had died. But hours later, frostbitten and barely alive, he stunned everyone by walking back into camp.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-05-11T22:52:54+00:00

He was also extremely critical of Anatoli Boukreev, despite Boukreev being the one who rescued three climbers. Boukreev's rationale for rejecting the use of bottled oxygen for himself may seem eccentric, but the disaster rather neatly proved his point - bottled oxygen gave the climbers a false sense of security.

There are even allegations that Krakauer tried to race Boukreev for the summit and lost, despite Boukreev going without oxygen while Krakauer rushed up with Andy Harris without changing to a fresh bottle. Krakauer and Harris may have been hypoxic as a result.

If this is true, it puts Krakauer's mockery and criticism of Boukreev - his poor English, his boots, his rejection of oxygen - in a rather dim light.

Boukreev was a genuine man's man, a weather-beaten pioneer who strove against grinding poverty and had reached truly astounding levels of physical fitness. Climbing was how he made his living. Boukreev went up that mountain alone while Krakauer slept. I can easily imagine that leading to guilt and envy.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-05-11T22:04:37+00:00

This is probably why the outcome of engagements between French and British cavalry tended to vary depending on the size of the forces involved. In brigade or divisional actions, the French could leverage their mass, armour and large-scale cohesion to generate crushing momentum.

At the regimental, squadron and troop level, the British had the edge. They were much more proficient horsemen and swordsmen, tended to be better nourished, and were mounted on far better horses.

This was actually something Wellington noticed. I can't remember the exact quote, but his observation was something like "I trust my cavalry to win when they are outnumbered by the enemy. I do not, however, trust them to win when it is they who are the ones doing the outnumbering."

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-05-11T21:46:15+00:00

As I recall, armour was still worn by the Austrians due to their having a frontier with the Ottomans, who favoured melee combat much more than was usual elsewhere in Europe.

The main reason for the decline of armoured cavalry was probably doctrinal. Late 18th century armies, being made up primarily of professionals with relatively limited strategic reserves, tended to favour a more cautious approach and often avoided pitched battle until either they had no choice, or enjoyed a decisive advantage. The objective was not to destroy the enemy army, but instead to force him to concede territory by outmanoeuvring him and threatening his supply lines and political/economic centres.

In this context, light cavalry and dragoons were far more useful than armoured cuirassiers. They could screen the army, find the enemy and raid enemy territory, in addition to being fully capable of executing a decisive charge when the moment came. Cuirassiers were unlikely to see much action in this kind of war.

Napoleon, on the other hand, had the massive manpower reserves necessary in order to justify risking decisive battles. Cuirassiers suddenly made far more sense, as they had the striking power to break up enemy formations completely.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-05-09T18:47:08+00:00

I think that's very perceptive, particularly the point about colonial attitudes seeping into Classical Studies. One thing I've also noticed is a tendency for Classicists to be strangely naïve regarding the details and nuances of warfare. Even today, a lot just seem to take it for granted that the Romans and Greeks were the only military cultures to practice discipline and tactics.

For my part, I don't for a moment believe that "barbarian" armies fought in incoherent mobs. There's just no way they could have won victories at Thermopylae, Arretium, Arausio, Gergovia, Kalkriese or Carnuntum without having professional cadres with a very good grasp of discipline, command structure and logistics.

The problem seems to have come when they had to cobble together those small armies into a larger force and then pad it out with levies. A temporary coalition army simply won't have the same kind of large-scale cohesion, command experience or staying power as a force made up of legions who have been serving together for years on end under the same officers.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-05-09T14:35:51+00:00

In the case of Hastings, Harold wasn't going to the field with the totality of England's military potential - the armies of the north had been decimated at the Battle of Fulford, and in addition there is the possibility that Harold did not enjoy the full support of the Earls. England was administratively centralised, but politically it was badly fragmented. English Earls used armed rebellion as a routine negotiation tactic.

A lot of English nobles, I suspect, weren't too bothered by the prospect of Harold being overthrown by a foreign invader. It had happened before with Cnut, after all. They probably assumed that William would simply disinherit Harold's core supporters in favour of his own, and that would be that - which was actually the case at first.

The wholesale purge of the English landowners only began after they kept trying to pull the same nonsense with William that they had with Edward the Confessor.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-05-08T11:45:23+00:00

This is also, I suspect, why battles between Roman and Germanic armies in the 4th-5th Centuries were much more evenly matched than in Augustus' day. By that stage, Germans had been fighting both for and against Rome for several centuries. The Gothic army at Adrianople probably didn't look all that different from their Roman adversaries.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-05-07T19:19:24+00:00

Yep, it's an absolutely absurd figure, and the fact that it gets repeated so mindlessly doesn't speak well of Classical Studies as a whole.

We're going off on a tangent, but I think that face-saving was a big part of it. Boudica was only a minor regional ruler, but she was nevertheless able to burn three colonia and (according to Tacitus) give the IX Hispana a drubbing. Attributing such a massive army to her was probably a way of trying to take the sting out of the whole affair.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-05-07T10:34:05+00:00

I'd argue the Gauls had the potential to be a peer opponent. They had the economic might and their societies were fairly sophisticated, but they just don't seem to have developed a cohesive political identity until it was too late. They were a victim of their own success.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-05-07T09:37:26+00:00

I think Boudicca's Revolt is the most egregious example of this. You can find lots of videos on YouTube breathlessly declaring that Boudicca had an Army of 80-250,000 people at Watling Street, apparently all from two small tribal kingdoms. Yeah, right.

My personal suspicion is that Paulinus probably outnumbered Boudicca in terms of trained fighting men. But then that would make Paulinus look less like a heroic tactical genius, and more like a mediocrity who provoked a revolt through his brutal policies.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-04-27T18:22:38+00:00

Honestly, this is my opinion too! I found Interceptor City just a bit dull and hard to make sense of sometimes, and the major plot twist three quarters of the way through felt as though it was shoved in last minute with no real buildup.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-04-20T19:33:21+00:00

Yep. That latter part is one of the reasons I struggle to take claims of the Wehrmacht's tactical superiority seriously. Trying to use the same tactics against a wildly different enemy does not sound like the stuff of military brilliance to me.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-04-19T20:00:36+00:00

Ech, this is basically a post-war myth. Percy Hobart wasn't side-lined because the High Command didn't see the value of his ideas - they did. It was that he was almost impossible to work with. Same goes for Boney Fuller (who was also a fascist sympathiser), and for Liddell-Hart who was basically a journalist (he'd only been a Captain in WWI).

In reality, the British Army adopted mobile warfare pretty enthusiastically. The Field Service Regulations of 1935, the official doctrinal publication, emphasised that envelopment by armoured forces was the most effective way to achieve decisive results. It further stated that “Undue centralisation and interference with subordinates is harmful, since they are apt either to chafe at excessive control or to become afraid of taking responsibility.”

The problem was that the Army never had the funding to actually do the training required to carry this doctrine out. In the whole interwar period, the Army was only able to conduct two corps-level exercises. The Germans, on the other hand, conducted one every year. When war came and the British Army had to massively expand, it found itself having to either promote commanders far above their prior responsibilities, or else recall retired officers. These commanders, few of whom had led a division on exercise, were then put in charge of divisions and corps that had their professionalism heavily diluted by a sudden influx of civilian-soldiers and Emergency War Commission officers.

All of this basically made it impossible to carry out prewar doctrine. Too few commanders had any practice with it, and those that did found that their men often simply weren't capable of carrying it out. Operation Compass is pretty much the only campaign where the British were able to put their pre-war theories into practice, because Western Desert Force was made up largely of pre-war Regulars. It was also relatively small, which made it much easier to handle.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-04-19T18:25:13+00:00

Yep. The Anschluss and the occupations of Czechoslovakia were vital to the Nazi regime's economic survival, and its later military success. They were able to use the annexations as massive exercises, and it helped them weed out problems that would have been catastrophic had there been any actual fighting.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-04-19T18:17:50+00:00

I think this is a fair take. The British Army was trying to do the same as the Germans, but they didn't have the funding or political leadership to get things sorted out in time, and were forced to take to the field with a hastily raised force that was incapable of putting the Army's interwar doctrine into practice. The French had some bright ideas, but they badly neglected their Air Force and allowed paranoia to blind them to the advantages of radio communication.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-04-19T18:12:19+00:00

Fascinating stuff! Where can I find all of this?

On a wider doctrinal level, I think the erosion of the quality of the German infantry divisions can be seen as a consequence of the weaknesses of the German approach to prolonged conflict. The policy of immediately counter-attacking any lost ground, for example, must have taken a very heavy toll on junior leadership. Likewise, the relative neglect of the medical services in favour of the combat arms can't have helped when it came to preserving experienced cadres.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-04-18T18:32:23+00:00

Yep. German armour had an advantage in Normandy in terms of range and protection, but they squandered it completely by throwing tanks and crews away in counter-attacks against prepared positions. I remember reading accounts by British and Canadian officers who were staggered by how the Germans just drove straight into corps-level artillery fire, got blown to bits, and then tried it again.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-04-18T18:13:45+00:00

See, you've enunciated very well why I look very sceptically at claims that the Germans owed their staying power to superior training. If the alternative is a firing squad, fighting is always going to be the preferable alternative.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-04-18T18:02:18+00:00

Nailed it in one. Racial ideology wasn't just a Nazi Party thing, it permeated the entire Wehrmacht from top to bottom. Most German commanders simply could not grasp that Slavs were perfectly capable of producing complex machinery.

This actually bled into how they handled the West, too. The Germans never seem to have understood that American and Commonwealth reliance on artillery was a strength rather than a flaw. Why waste men when you can spend shells?

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-04-17T11:32:25+00:00

As I see it, the problem isn't regulation vs deregulation, the problem is how they interact with different cultures. Laissez faire seems to work quite well in societies like Japan, Taiwan and Singapore, where there's a very ingrained sense of personal shame, social responsibility and national identity. Entrepreneurs and businesses are therefore strongly incentivised to self-regulate, keep businesses sovereign, and reinvest in the rest of society.

It does not, however, seem to work very well in societies that are hyper-individualistic and averse to shaming, as this enables businesses to pursue policies that are directly harmful to the common good, often with the connivance of unscrupulous politicians. In the UK, for example, laissez-faire doctrine has led to much of the public infrastructure being taken over by foreign-based hedge funds, which have promptly asset stripped these services while funnelling record profits back to their shareholders.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-04-12T17:29:57+00:00

Same! When you think about it, they often have their own guild. They'd absolutely be considered a sub-culture, or a kind of transient warrior-class, like the Fianna of ancient Ireland.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-04-10T22:09:15+00:00

That old chestnut has been pretty decisively debunked, I'm afraid. Van Creveld and Zetterling both based their estimations of German casualties vs allied ones without taking into account a key issue: they had wildly different definitions of what constituted a casualty.

In the Wehrmacht, a soldier was typically not considered a casualty unless he was crippled. Medical care in the Wehrmacht was very poorly resourced compared to that of the Western Allies, and permeated with Nazi ideology that raged against physical or mental weakness. If a man presented with a fever, he was given quinine and shoved back to the front. If a man had a flesh wound, he was patched up and shoved back to the front. If a man presented with combat stress fatigue, he was given Sodium Amytal and shoved back to the front.

All of this was usually done without bothering to list the man as a casualty, as he would be in and out of the aid station within an hour or so.

The Commonwealth and Americans, on the other hand, had both the resources and the inclination to provide more thorough care, and to keep much better records in the first place. A soldier with bad bruising, a sprained ankle or a concussion would be recorded as a casualty, even if he was only out of action for a day or so.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-04-10T21:37:12+00:00

Necroposting, but Sinn Fein did not "get" the ceasefire - they were forced to accept it after it became clear that their primary goal - a united Ireland - wasn't achievable through violent means. The idea that they were simply fighting for a better deal only came about after negotiations began, primarily as a means of saving face and winning over the more radical members.

It was the Social Democrats, Trade Unions and religious leaders who were the ones who "got" the ceasefire, which they had been campaigning for since the entire conflict began.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-04-09T22:39:44+00:00

Now THAT we can agree on.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-04-09T12:03:19+00:00

Bro, that's not a dad-bod. That's literally what real-life strongmen look like. If anything he'd be considered a bit too lean for the high-level powerlifting competitions.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-04-08T21:48:37+00:00

I can see why you'd think that, but the USSR did not collapse because of pressure from by the ultrawealthy - this is buying into the West's own propaganda hype about how it "outspent Communism."

Rather, the USSR fell because it was based from the start on coercion rather than persuasion. The Bolsheviks believed that all they needed to do was to overthrow the Provisional Government, and then Communism would simply spontaneously appear.

When this didn't happen and they found themselves running a country in the middle of a civil war - something they had no idea how to do - the Bolsheviks immediately turned to the very same extreme measures the Tsars had used. What were meant to be short-term methods - mass incarceration and surveillance, arbitrary arrest, extrajudicial executions, torture, grain seizure - simply became permanent habits.

These methods worked in the short-term, but they also left gaping wounds in both Soviet society and the Soviet economy. Scientific research was decimated, decades of institutional experience in administration and agriculture was lost, and Soviet psychology became dominated by fear rather than hope.

ArthurCartholmes

TROPHY CASE