War and Peace

Ivan

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Here’s a picture of a display I like from the World War II museum in Moscow. My first impression was that’s a lot of dead/captured of the Wehrmacht’s best.

Lex put it better than me:

It was the Soviet soldier who killed the Wehrmacht. His story is too little known. It does not in any way diminish what our GIs and the British tommies did to say that Ivan bore the heaviest burden, rose from the ashes of defeat, never gave up, and battered the Germans into the dirt. He served an evil regime, but he was fighting for his life and the life of his people, and his country had been invaded, so by the playground rule (who started this?) he was the good guy.

Incredible!

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Here’s a webpage that claims to have color photos from WWI. It looks reasonably legit from what I can see, but I can’t say for sure.

Click on over and have a look.

UPDATE
Reader Paul Stinchfield has sent me two links where WWI color photos may be found. They are this one and this one.

If you’re interested in looking over a huge online archive of French photographic pioneers, then I suggest that you click this link and start browsing. Lots of stuff there.

(Hat tip to Spoons, and he got from Vodkapundit.)

Gung Ho

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Drudge has a good link to raw footage of the fighting in Fallujah.

When this battle started for some reason I kept thinking of the battle of Stalingrad in World War 2 and the street fighting there. It says something about our boys over there that we had so relatively few casualties. I know, I know, tell it to the mother who lost a son. But, Thank God.

Quote of the Day

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The “Global Test” standard is likely to raise more questions than it answers because it is a threshold without a real specification, a probability without degree. It is analytically defective because the degree of risk one is willing to endure depends on the severity of the consequences. . . Yet standards do have a value in this context, provided they are not the pseudo-absolute ones implied by a “Global Test”. It is the test of reasonable action in the face of the best available information, the standard on which Eisenhower decided to launch Overlord in the middle of an Atlantic storm or which impelled Spruance to proceed to Point Luck in defense of Midway in ignorance of the exact whereabouts of the Japanese Fleet. It is no guaranty against mistakes. But it is a guaranty against paralysis.

–“wretchard”