History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VIII
- Thread starter Flying Pig
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JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
I wonder if you could do a similar post about the French, cause nobody knows about the Free French in WW2 other than the French
Gen.Mannerheim
Grand Moff
The commander of the CEF, the Free French Corps during the Italian Campaign, was Alphonse Juin. A former Vichy commander of Vichy French forces in Morocco. After capture during Operation Torch, he switched over to the Free French forces. He voluntarily took a demotion in order to command the CEF under Clark’s American 5th Army. Most of the American commanders who served with/over Juin in Italy had positive things to say about him. The Juin was instrumental in the key role the CEF played in cracking the Gustav line in 1944. He actually argued against pulling out the French Corps from Italy for Operation Dragoon, as he was afraid that the smaller French forces would be relegated to minor action in the grander Allied Western Front and believed the CEF was making true gains in Italy. After Italy, Juin was made Chief of Staff for de Gaulle.
Well the mass raping and pillaging of Moroccan & Algerian troops in Italy during the Monte Casino campaign (the Marocchinate) played right into to those with racist thinking. Even Juin instituted the death penalty for rape during the later half of the Italian campaign for his troops.
SS-18 ICBM
Oscillator
Ah, the histories they don't tell you in school...
Anyway, can anyone give a short overview of what cavalry units transitioning to armored vehicles from horses was like? What challenges did they face in doing so in terms of training, logistics, and culture?
The former British officer C. J. Dick recently wrote a two-part series comparing Western and Soviet operations in 1944: From Victory to Stalemate and From Defeat to Victory. They are very, very good. Although he's not a professional soldier or historian, John Adams' The Battle for Western Europe contains some very interesting takes on Western commanders during the fall of 1944. For Soviet forces overall, Glantz and House's When Titans Clashed is still excellent, although Alexander Hill's The Red Army and the Second World War is more up-to-date and focuses on the organization as an institution rather than on operations.
One problem is that, while all these books are reasonably authoritative on their own and in general, the literature on the war is so vast and the scope so huge that, invariably, many of my impressions come from things I have read in texts on other subjects related to the topic of Allied generals. For example, Rob Citino has written extremely extensively on the Wehrmacht, and one of the stronger aspects of his most recent books (Death of the Wehrmacht, The Wehrmacht Retreats, and The Wehrmacht's Last Stand) is his work to try to underline the different challenges faced by German military leaders compared to those of other countries; necessarily, he discusses those other countries' leaders, too. Similarly, although the overwhelming focus of David Stahel's series on the German offensive against the USSR in 1941 is on German documentary evidence, it's impossible to come away from his books without an appreciation for many Soviet leaders, as well.
The thing that most people emphasize about Rokossovskii is that, with the exception of the Soviet offensives against Belorussia in 1943 (in which his Front played a supporting role), it is basically impossible to find an example of him repeatedly hammering away at a failed line of attack or wasting his soldiers' lives. (Also, since the Belorussian campaign did not get a monograph until last year, when Glantz published an extensive, albeit extremely dry, study, most people weren't even really aware that First Belorussian Front was even doing anything between September 1943 and June 1944.) Rokossovskii is also associated with inventive military solutions and complex operations. Ever since John Erickson's The Road to Berlin came out in the 1970s, Western historians have been marveling at Rokossovskii's plans - how he managed to get heavy mechanized units through forbidding Pripet marshes, for example, or how in the Belorussian Strategic Offensive Operation he had to manage two complex attacks, spread out in both space and time, and synchronize them effectively with the other Fronts participating in the offensive. Just as Vatutin argued his case during the Battle of Kursk, Rokossovskii went to the Vozhd himself to argue for his plan in 1944, and possessed the immense moral courage to refuse to alter his plan, even when Stalin demanded it, until he successfully changed Stalin's mind.
It is extremely easy to find examples of Zhukov repeatedly hammering away at a failed line of attack and wasting his soldiers' lives. There is even a book about the most egregious failure: Zhukov's Greatest Defeat, Glantz's text on the failure of MARS in 1942. S. A. Gerasimova's Russian-language text, The Rzhev Slaughterhouse, expanded the treatment of the fighting in the salient and makes quite clear the unimaginative and bloody nature of Zhukov's repeated obsession with the place. If I had to guess about why he was so willing to do these sorts of things - and, again, I'm not even qualified to psychoanalyze people who are alive, let alone the dead ones - I would say that Zhukov's determination and stubbornness was just something he couldn't turn off. In 1941, when every defensive line the Red Army stood at collapsed, Zhukov's willingness to order men to stand and die in increasingly hopeless positions paid off. It saved Moscow. He refused to admit defeat. However, he also refused to admit defeat even when doing so would have saved his men's lives, like at Rzhev, which he spent fifteen months attacking - each time failing to reduce the salient while piling up massive casualty lists - before the Germans voluntarily withdrew from the salient to free up troops to fight at Kursk.
I don't know that I've ever said that Blaskowitz was the most underrated German commander of the war. I doubt I would've said that, because he spent most of the war in relatively undistinguished posts due to the questions he raised about SS and Wehrmacht atrocities against Poles and Jews in 1939. He possessed at least some moral courage, unlike most of Hitler's generals, but not very much: he continued serving the regime, albeit not in positions that made him responsible for atrocities.
Most of the successful and skillful German leaders have people to sing their praises, anyway. Men like Balck, Hube, Mackensen, Hoth, Raus, Guderian, Model, and (sigh) Manstein are securely ensconced in the history books. Balck's stand on the Chir River, Hube's "moving pocket", Manstein's Rochade - all are well-studied topics at places like CGSC or JSCSC. If anything, many of the German leaders of the war are overrated, rather than the reverse. Rundstedt, for example, enjoyed a tremendously good press, largely because he was not as overtly Nazi as many of the other members of the marshalate (and also because he defeated the British, who wrote the history books). Manstein himself was a highly gifted commander who thought he was God and did his best, in his autobiography, Lost Victories (even the title is super cringe), to perpetuate the belief. As Citino aptly points out, though, after the Battle of Kursk, Manstein got his opportunity to do the "elastic defense" he so often demanded of Hitler, and he had the majority of Germany's panzer forces to do it. The result was a bunch of inconclusive armored clashes at places like Okhtyrka that nobody will ever remember, all of which resulted in an increasingly disorganized Army Group South bugging out to try to reach the Dnepr River. For all his vaunted operational ability, Manstein failed, and it was not Hitler's fault.
Montgomery's network of liaison officers. "Phantom" Regiment was initially created as a reconnaissance unit; Montgomery adapted it to effectively spy on people lower in the chain of command, so that he could form his own opinions about things at the tactical level without getting that information filtered through his immediate subordinate commanders. It was one of his most effective tools at micromanaging 21 Army Group.
Most Americans know the Phantom Regiment better as an international-quality drum corps.
No. The Americans' problem wasn't really a lack of fire support. The location Clark selected for the crossing was a natural bowl-shaped depression, with II Corps' crossing point at the bottom. US forces had difficulty bringing German artillery under effective fire, but were themselves subjected to murderous fire from all varieties of German weapons. They also lacked the space to maneuver around the Germans effectively. A brief attempt to introduce 1st Armored Division directly into an already small bridgehead simply caused a traffic jam and clumped forces up too much, making them an even better target.
The entire assault was a fiasco from top to bottom.
The problems are best documented in the British Army. Britain maintained extensive cavalry forces during the Great War and also possessed tanks in significant quantities. Several officers believed that tanks were the wave of the future and should be used like cavalry, riding hard to attack from unexpected directions at high speeds. British tank design philosophy emphasized purpose-built armor for different roles: "infantry tanks" for direct support of infantry, and "cruiser tanks" and "tankettes" acting as the light cavalry, moving quickly around enemy flanks and through breaches in enemy lines.
Conceptually, this kind of made sense. Plenty of other armies thought that there should be a division between lighter and heavier armor, and that some armor should directly support infantry and some shouldn't. However, the implementation was shot through with flaws. First of all, tankettes were a dumb idea, an attempt to directly transpose the cavalry concept onto tanks by having a tank that could move really fast and only needed one or two men to control. They were effectively worthless; any tank with armament worth using required more than one or two men to keep it working in combat. Secondly, the fascination with cavalry extended to British tactics. One officer in the Western Desert campaign ruefully noted that British tankers seemed to want to fight tanks like cavalry. All too often, Rommel's integrated antitank defenses found themselves pounding away at an unsupported line of British tanks, charging out of the dust like a bunch of horses. Unsurprisingly, British tank attacks usually ended with the Germans and Italians turning British armor into a line of smoking, burning hulls. The British abandoned combined arms in their early tank experiments, and it took them years to find it again.
(Interestingly, all-cavalry formations that were incapable of combined-arms fighting were also bad at cavalry warfare. In the First World War, the German Higher Cavalry Commands were an effective blend of horse cavalry, light Jäger infantry, machine guns, and light artillery. HKK 2 performed very well on the extreme right flank of the German army, despite the foibles of its commander, Georg von der Marwitz, and those of the commander of the infantry formation to which it was attached, Alexander von Kluck.)
The light tank mania extended to other powers, of course. Famously, over half the Soviet tank park in 1941 was made up of light tanks that were obsolete when they rolled off the assembly line. One of the reasons the Germans were able to destroy so many Soviet tanks early in the war was because the T-26 had very little prospect of surviving long in combat against virtually any German formation. Its armor was too thin, its armament too weak, and its speed too low. Germany itself possessed a very high number of Panzer Is and Panzer IIs, neither of which even had a main gun worth the name (Panzer IIs were armed with 2 cm guns), which comprised a shockingly high percentage of their armored force in both 1940 and 1941. The Americans mostly avoided light tanks, because they didn't really start mobilizing until 1940; the one light tank they produced in significant quantity during the war was the M3 Stuart, which still had some utility as a reconnaissance vehicle. It's also, of course, worth pointing out that "light" and "fast" are usually euphemisms for "cheap", and in the interwar years, most governments were very interested in "cheap", regardless of military doctrine.
In most other countries, cavalrymen contributed to armored doctrine, but did not control it. Many of the contributions were positive. In the USSR, M. N. Tukhachevskii, G. S. Isserson, and V. K. Triandafillov formulated the concepts of operational art and deep operations based largely on cavalry examples from Russian and American history, but adapted them quite easily to armored concepts. The notion of extended raids and strikes at enemy communications remained a constant when shifting from cavalry to armored doctrine. It is quite easy to imagine Tukhachevskii, for example, conducting his wide flank maneuver in the Polish campaign with tanks. So long as they avoided the less well thought-out aspects of applying cavalry ideas to armored warfare, cavalry generals could usually do quite well. Patton, of course, was the archetypal cavalryman, and the outstanding example of operational thinker in the entire US Army in the Second World War. But unlike the British, who maintained formations that were almost entirely made up of tanks and then, late in the war, attached them to infantry units as necessary, the Americans, Soviets, and Germans all used combined-arms formations as the core of the armored force. The US armored division, the Soviet mechanized corps, and the German panzer division all possessed large amounts of infantry, usually motorized infantry, to cooperate with the armor: breaking through enemy lines, holding flanks, and providing the core of the unit's fighting power. Cavalry-minded thinkers in all of those armies did not prevent those formations from being created.
Of all the interwar Great Power armies, the Germans were probably the one with the smallest amount of cavalry influence. Most of the German cavalry formations were disbanded during the Great War, and although the Reichswehr, the postwar treaty-limited army, was limited to nine infantry divisions and one cavalry division, many of the cavalrymen saw themselves as armored soldiers manqué anyway. The real testbed for armored doctrine was the German supply services, where the truck-mounted communications formations controlled by Oswald Lutz (and, later, Heinz Guderian) were in reality a secret tank training organization. Bizarrely, while the Wehrmacht largely abandoned the horse soldier (although not the horse itself, which formed the core of the German infantry's supply trains), old-style cavalry found a new home in the Waffen-SS during the second half of the war. Units like the 8th SS Cavalry Division were a mixture of horse cavalry, motorcycle infantry, and straight-leg infantry. In the conditions of Eastern Europe, they were more than just a curiosity, but they were undoubtedly an oddity.
The USSR, on the other hand, made the most effective use of horse soldiers. During the Civil War, Stalin and his cronies formed what was known as the "cavalry mafia". His buddies Voroshilov and Budennii remained in the army at the beginning of the Second World War and helped keep the spirit of horse cavalry alive. In some conditions, however, there was undoubtedly plenty of scope for the traditional horse soldier to shine. Horses required a vast amount of food, but no gasoline, and they could move more easily during the spring and autumn rasputitsa, the rainy period that turned the entire road network into an endless sea of mud. By 1943, cavalry groups were effectively cooperating with tanks; by 1944, the "cavalry/mechanized group" combined horse soldiers (for flexibility) and armored columns (for firepower) into a highly useful formation good for exploiting breaches in enemy positions and racing through to encircle them. I. A. Pliev's cav/mech group earned immortality in the Belorussian Strategic Offensive Operation by infiltrating through the swamps to take the German Ninth Army totally unaware.
Overall, then, the transition from cavalry to armored cavalry was relatively easy in most armies. It was not painless - the interwar era was full of acrimonious arguments over the proper role of the tank in doctrine, disagreements that were initially a matter of infantrymen vs. cavalrymen - but it was basically complete by 1939. Only in Britain did the cavalry issue actually crop up on the battlefield in a negative way. Only in the USSR did the military manage to find an effective, if technologically limited, synthesis between cavalry and armor.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
Do you have formed opinions on the individual French generals?
Buster's Uncle
AC2 Owner
Was Marshal Stalin, notwithstanding his participation in military planning, anything like a real, albeit entirely rear-echelon, general?
I've long thought the Russians couldn't have done it not ruled by a remorseless bloody-handed butcher, but how bad were his strategic military decisions compared to, for instance, his German opposite number the allies concluded they oughtn't assassinate, he hurt his side so...
I've long thought the Russians couldn't have done it not ruled by a remorseless bloody-handed butcher, but how bad were his strategic military decisions compared to, for instance, his German opposite number the allies concluded they oughtn't assassinate, he hurt his side so...
For the most part? Not really. Most of what I understand about the Third Republic's military comes from "the other side", as it were. If you were to try to formulate your own, you would probably have to start, at bottom, with Bloch's Strange Defeat. He doesn't spend that much time on military leadership, but his whole set of conclusions contextualizes much of what follows. Robert Doughty's The Seeds of Disaster and Breaking Point form the core of the modern historiographical discussion of the French military collapse in 1940. There are some more revisionist accounts coming in more recently that take issue with some of the conclusions of Bloch and Doughty, e.g. Forczyk's Case Red, that are also worth a look.
It's hard to avoid the impression of most of the Third Republic's generals as simply having been overwhelmed at the crisis point in 1940. They were generally not good operational thinkers, although as the chaos on the German side shows, almost nobody was. They lacked the flexibility to respond to a rapidly changing situation vigorously. When given a chance, French soldiers fought hard in 1940, at places like Stonne, or in the defense of Dunkirk. The generals, and the institutions, failed their soldiers, not the other way around.
Early in the war, Stalin made some unquestionably disastrous decisions. His refusal to allow Kirponos and Southwestern Front to retreat did not cause the Kiev catastrophe, but it made the catastrophe much, much worse. His decision to have L. Z. Mekhlis act as a roving representative to various parts of the front and intimidate generals into fighting "properly" backfired when Mekhlis showed himself to be a military incompetent who made the situation for the Red Army incomparably worse.
After the middle of 1942, however, Stalin's effect on the war was noticeably more restrained. He gave his generals much more leeway to formulate their own methods within the context of existing plans, and he eased up somewhat on the threat of murder if a general faltered. The same did not go for the Red Army's private soldiers. Ni shagu nazad!, "not one step back", Stalin's general order from the summer of 1942, was the watchword of often-brutal discipline to ensure that soldiers stayed in ranks well into 1943; there are accounts of Soviet rear-echelon roadblocks at Kursk with authority to shoot stragglers, shirkers, and malingerers that unquestionably used that authority.
After the disasters of the first year of war, when generals' sometimes-complicated plans came to grief through German action and lack of Soviet means, Stalin became more critical of complex operations and unorthodox tactics. He believed that the Red Army was a blunt instrument best used in a way that would not offer much opportunity to the Germans to pull something clever. However, he could be persuaded to look favorably on complexity by commanders with good track records and firm beliefs, like Vatutin at Kursk and Rokossovskii at Bobruisk. He was also a highly effective manager who understood that significant sections of his marshalate were barely-restrained attack dogs (esp. Zhukov and Konev). Decorations rained down on their shoulder boards and across their chests for successes. He even managed to get their egos to work against each other. Of course, a primary casualty of this method of management was the Soviet soldiery, whose lives the likes of Konev and Zhukov traded for time (as, most memorably, in Berlin). Stalin was aware of the USSR's growing manpower problem and authorized ruthless combing-out operations in newly conquered territory to fill the ranks, but doesn't seem to have done much to force generals to curtail failed attacks quickly in order to mitigate casualties.
In recent years, there has even been a push to label Stalin as having become considerably more militarily competent over time, the inverse curve of Hitler, whose famous intuition worked quite well for him in 1940 and 1941 but who is usually described as significantly more unhinged after that. In the case of Hitler, this is exaggerated, mostly due to the effect of the German generals' memoirs after the war. Manstein and his ilk blamed Hitler for everything that went wrong for Germany during the war so they could escape opprobrium and enhance their own warriors' reputations. But in Stalin's case, it seems to mostly be correct. As a symbol, as a leader, and even as a military thinker, Stalin eventually became everything the USSR needed to achieve victory. He bears a great deal of responsibility for the high cost of that eventual victory, but the fact that it was a victory at all is due in part to him.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
And about Free French generals in particular? Do you have a starting point for those?
Buster's Uncle
AC2 Owner
Thanks Dachs; that is a highly satisfactory answer, pleasingly confirming, as it does, my vague and uninformed conclusions.
Stalin was no simple character one ought to simply dismiss as Evil Butcher, and look no further, I think, same as with Hitler, though it seems far easier to find information about the latter...
Stalin was no simple character one ought to simply dismiss as Evil Butcher, and look no further, I think, same as with Hitler, though it seems far easier to find information about the latter...
Buster's Uncle
AC2 Owner
Got one for Owen -
A Belgian Flemish guest several years ago, as I was showing him around my home and native area -my family has roots that go back 500 years here- said there was a concept we were, over-all, talking about; -the word in question means something more than just Home, but your proper place, where you belong, if not own - it owns you back. He doesn't remember, now, suggested Dutch 'haard', or hearth, the other day, which jogged my memory to recall that he'd said hearth, and either said, or I just thought, that it's cool how close Hearth and Heart are in English.
And ISTR -at least I hope my imagination hasn't butted in as it will when you struggle to recall- the word he'd told me was supposed to be German, actually, at least a neighboring lowland dialect, the concept sounding one heck of a lot more Bavarian than Prussian, maybe...
Any help? It's a lovely concept for a well-rooted person...
A Belgian Flemish guest several years ago, as I was showing him around my home and native area -my family has roots that go back 500 years here- said there was a concept we were, over-all, talking about; -the word in question means something more than just Home, but your proper place, where you belong, if not own - it owns you back. He doesn't remember, now, suggested Dutch 'haard', or hearth, the other day, which jogged my memory to recall that he'd said hearth, and either said, or I just thought, that it's cool how close Hearth and Heart are in English.
And ISTR -at least I hope my imagination hasn't butted in as it will when you struggle to recall- the word he'd told me was supposed to be German, actually, at least a neighboring lowland dialect, the concept sounding one heck of a lot more Bavarian than Prussian, maybe...
Any help? It's a lovely concept for a well-rooted person...
sophie
Break My Heart
Not...entirely sure what you're asking here?
heart comes from *ḱḗr (long e; lengthened owing to the loss of -d in the nominative form, still present in the genitive form: *ḱr̥dés). This word is reflected in, e.g. Latin cor (gen. cordis). Grimm's law notes k -> x in the shift from PIE to PGmc, so the PGmc form is *ḱḗr(d) -> *hertô (d -> t is another part of Grimm's Law)
hearth comes from the PIE root *ker- (not the same as a noun; note also a straight velar /k/ rather than the palato-velar /ḱ/) which means "to burn", giving us the aforementioned hearth (via OE heorþ), but also: Goth haúri ("coal"), ON hyrr ("fire"), and via the ablaut PIE *kr-em- -> Lat. cremo ('burn')
Another word that sounds similar: hart (the original word for a male deer; reflected in German Hirsch, Dutch hert) which comes originally from PIE *ḱóru ("horn"), which went, again k -> in Germanic (PGmc. is *herutaz), and this PIE term also gives us Lat. cornu ("horn")
Similar sounding, yes, but not at all related.
To the second part of the post (the possibly-German word that means home and is related to hearth) - the German word for hearth is der Herd, although the reference to a hearth is archaic now. Other descendants of PGmc herþaz ("hearth") are Luxembourgish Häerd, Frisian Herde, Heet, and hurd, Low German Heerd.
There's also the word home, coming from PIE *ḱóymos ("village, home") -> PGmc *haimaz ("home") reflected in a butt-ton of assorted words, notably Heim and Heimat in German, heem and heim and Dutch, Heem and Heim in Low German, ham and home in English, hamm, Heem, and hiem in various Frisian dialects. Also French hameau, whose Old French ancestor hamelet gave us hamlet.
heart comes from *ḱḗr (long e; lengthened owing to the loss of -d in the nominative form, still present in the genitive form: *ḱr̥dés). This word is reflected in, e.g. Latin cor (gen. cordis). Grimm's law notes k -> x in the shift from PIE to PGmc, so the PGmc form is *ḱḗr(d) -> *hertô (d -> t is another part of Grimm's Law)
hearth comes from the PIE root *ker- (not the same as a noun; note also a straight velar /k/ rather than the palato-velar /ḱ/) which means "to burn", giving us the aforementioned hearth (via OE heorþ), but also: Goth haúri ("coal"), ON hyrr ("fire"), and via the ablaut PIE *kr-em- -> Lat. cremo ('burn')
Another word that sounds similar: hart (the original word for a male deer; reflected in German Hirsch, Dutch hert) which comes originally from PIE *ḱóru ("horn"), which went, again k -> in Germanic (PGmc. is *herutaz), and this PIE term also gives us Lat. cornu ("horn")
Similar sounding, yes, but not at all related.
To the second part of the post (the possibly-German word that means home and is related to hearth) - the German word for hearth is der Herd, although the reference to a hearth is archaic now. Other descendants of PGmc herþaz ("hearth") are Luxembourgish Häerd, Frisian Herde, Heet, and hurd, Low German Heerd.
There's also the word home, coming from PIE *ḱóymos ("village, home") -> PGmc *haimaz ("home") reflected in a butt-ton of assorted words, notably Heim and Heimat in German, heem and heim and Dutch, Heem and Heim in Low German, ham and home in English, hamm, Heem, and hiem in various Frisian dialects. Also French hameau, whose Old French ancestor hamelet gave us hamlet.
Buster's Uncle
AC2 Owner
I think I was asking for Heimat. That rings a bell as what he said.
I think I described what he told me well enough, but buried the lede: "the word in question means something more than just Home, but your proper place, where you belong, if not own - it owns you back" -where your roots are.
Anything to add, based on that?
-Also, Thanks.
I think I described what he told me well enough, but buried the lede: "the word in question means something more than just Home, but your proper place, where you belong, if not own - it owns you back" -where your roots are.
Anything to add, based on that?
-Also, Thanks.
sophie
Break My Heart
I think I was asking for Heimat. That rings a bell as what he said.
I think I described what he told me well enough, but buried the lede: "the word in question means something more than just Home, but your proper place, where you belong, if not own - it owns you back" -where your roots are.
Anything to add, based on that?
-Also, Thanks.
That would describe Heimat, yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimat
How humane is Islamic 'military slavery' regarded compared to other forms of slavery? I mean the practice of staffing the military and bureaucracy with slaves, rather than making them a lower class. I'm not denying that the latter form was always present under the Mamluks or Ottomans, but the practice of importing foreign slaves to serve as high-ranking officials seems like it deserves special attention.
r16
not deity
- Joined
- Nov 10, 2008
- Messages
- 11,999
take it as Goverment service in the US or whatever . You show loyalty to the system , gain experience and rise . Maybe up to the point that you will be able to rule the system . Especially in the case of Ottomans it allowed the "Minorities" participate in the Goverment without losing face . One son of the Sokolovic family was an archbishop or whatever and his folk would never question that the other son was the Grandvisier of the hated Ottomans , because , you know , the Ottomans "stole" him .
Buster's Uncle
AC2 Owner
Actually a pretty good answer.
r16, I want you to know that I was following your stream-of-consciousness walls of text, thought I somewhat understood -yes; somebody was reading and trying to grok, really- and hate that the thread was locked. You have an interesting Turkish perspective. Respect!, sir.
r16, I want you to know that I was following your stream-of-consciousness walls of text, thought I somewhat understood -yes; somebody was reading and trying to grok, really- and hate that the thread was locked. You have an interesting Turkish perspective. Respect!, sir.
Buster's Uncle
AC2 Owner
Well, a whole dynasty of sultans happened that way, didn't it? That was something more than a coup by slave-soldiers, or they couldn't have legitimized and passed it to sons. The most successful had real political/administrative power before they took the throne...
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