I’m reading Max Hastings Inferno, and he references in Part III the sinking of a Vichy French “super-destroyer” during the battle for Syria. Upon looking online I can’t find any reference to a “super-destroyer” besides a wrestler. Can anyone elaborate to what Hastings was referencing?

Edit: Whoops, I meant the city of Angkor, my bad. Angkor Wat was a famous temple within the city.

I am interested in medieval warfare so I want to ask this (I am not talking about knights or high class warriors, just the most common soldiers in medieval battlefields - archers, footmen,....):

Were they levied peasants? Which mean they worked on their fields during peace time and served as soldiers during war. If so then who would tend their fields when they were away fighting? If they had families, who would take care of them?

Or were they full-time soldiers? If so then were they get paid directly by their lords (like household servants)? Or were they given lands and serfs to sustain themselves (like vassals)? How many serfs needed to support a common soldier?

I know there were many classes of soldiers and the recruitment practice varied across medieval Europe. I just want to know the most common way to do so. Thanks in advance!

So, the question says everything. I know about the DP Camps. I'm actually taking a course on History of the Holocaust. So this seemed like the place to discuss post-WW2 stuff.

Like, it can explode, bleed, cause infection by bacteria... how one survives this without removing it?

I'm working on a book, for this book there's a lot I need to know about the Nordic Bronze Age as I want to incorporate as much historically/archeologically correct and plausible details as possible. I've spent 6 months getting background info from the bronze age to the medieval age. I keep hitting walls with the bronze age as most of the research is hyper focused, niche and difficult to access, There's also a lack of comprehensive overviews comparable to other historical cultures which I suspect is due to the nature of the culture taking place before written history. I started with a list of 100 questions I may need answers for after doing my initial research, I've whittled it down to 35 questions, help me whittle it down more please.

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Questions:

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A) Bronze Age Trade routes/Denmark's ties to the Amber Road.

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1. Did Denmark Have a Bronze Trade or was the amber road more of an intermediary for them since more amber was found to the west?

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2. Could/did the Bronze age Nordic peoples sail through rivers to the Mediterranean themselves or was the trade more of a relay system?

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3. Did they have to portage and large distances and if so where?

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4. Is it realistically possible for individual Nordic Bronze age people to have been embroiled in minor rolls in the raids of the Sea People since the Black Sea Civillizations Minoans and Myceneans were all groups that the Nordic Bronze age had ties too?

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5. Did the Nordic Bronze Age inhabitants sail around the Iberian Peninsula?

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B) Bronze age Climate/Geography and population dynamics.

From what I understand around 8300BCE Drastic Temperature rise beginning Brings Aspen, Birch, Pine, Aurochs and Elk to Denmark, then in 7000BCE, continued temperature rise brings Oak, Elm, Hazel, Deer and Boar to the area. By 4500BCE Denmark coastline starts to look like islands we see today and the populations shifted to a more seafood based diet increasing the population. I also understand that the settlements were usually only 2 or 3 families at the largest and towns weren’t sustainable yet…

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1. How Dense and vast would these forrests be?

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2. How far would settlement have been from each other on average (would they see the lights and smoke of each-others fires)?

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3. Were groups more cooperative or weary with each other?

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4. What would be the main dips and bumps in the regional climate between the modern era and the 8.2 kiloyear BP climate event?

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5. Was there any climate change after 4500BCE that was more local?

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6. Was there any seasonal sea ice around Denmark?

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C) Bronze age belief systems/Indo-European,Celtic and Iron Age Comparative Mythology and language

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1. Could Bronze age and Nordic people understand the other Germanic groups or even celts or would translators have been required and at what point would there languages have split too much?

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2. How far back would oral history have reached during the bronze age, e.g. would they have stories and myths about the arrival of agriculture, horses and proto-indo-european culture, their own migrations or even the sinking of Doggerland or the end of the Ice age and extinct MegaFauna?

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3. Did the Bronze age Scandinavians Germans and Celts recognize the shared indo-european roots of many of their beleifs?

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4. When did Odin and other distinctly Scandinavian myths show up in the mythology of the region?

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5. Did they see dragons as Tolkienesque depictions portray them or would they have been more serpent-like as they were familiar with snakes, do we know if they saw them as scaled/reptillian?

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6. Any early Scandinavian myths that could reference Giant Squids as they occasionally washed ashore?

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7. Do we know how the (much later) belief of the 9 realms evolved?

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8. Does the (much later) belief of Yggdrasil the world tree have any earlier parallels or roots?

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9. Are there Euhemeristic Historical interpretations of any Germanic or early Norse myths?

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10. How were most people sacrificed when it happened? Where they bled like livestock, hung like Tollund man or something else do we know what classes of society would have been chosen for sacrifice and whether it would have ever been voluntary due to religious beliefs?

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11. Was the Runic alphabet originally used for simple symbols, narratives, preserving statements or for more practical bookkeeping purposes (perhaps like the cuneiform script)? How quickly did it change when it first appeared? Was it related to other written languages?

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D) The evolution of Bronze age to Iron Age boats.

1. Why did boats like the Hjortspring Boats and the boats in the petroglyphs have 2 beaks/horns on each side one extending from the gunwale on either end of the boat as well as one underneath extending from the keel. The upper one makes sense for perhaps a figurehead or attaching things to like in the boats of later ages that have the dragon head and tails but the second seems redundant both functionally and aesthetically. What are the main theories on this? Was the bottom one used for Fishing nets, taking the hits of ice packs? Coming ashore? Portaging? This double-beaked style seems very unique.

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2. When did the boats likely become klinker built? When did they become capable of open ocean travel?

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3. Why were the early petroglyph boats larger than the later petroglyphs and were there actually boats that big during the bronze age?

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4. Did the Scandinavians take or give influence on boat designs from the Greeks or Egyptians during their trade?

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E) Other

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1. When did Scandinavian cultures shift from round huts to longhouses?

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2. When and where were the first buildings with sod walls and or roofs built?

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3. What was the range of settlement sizes for the Bronze Age?

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4. How much livestock would make a family considered wealthy?

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5. What Percentage of Livestock were harvested each year for food and where they mostly processed at a certain time of year?

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6. Was meat preserved with salt and or drying? Was Snow or streams used as natural refrigerators?

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7. What was bathing like and did they have a similar sauna culture to the Finns?

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8. How was Childbirth handled and were was the baby usually delivered?

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9. When did longhouses shift from straight A-frames to ballooned boat-hull-shaped longhouses?

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Excuse my spelling and grammar if there are any issues i did not review this as I typed it between other things.

To my knowledge those transfers were one of the GDRs main sources of income and so important they often sold them ordinary criminals as political prisoners.
Wouldn't it have been more sensible for the FRG to not give the GDR any money and just wait for them to go bankrupt, especially since the GDR seems to have been on the verge of economic collapse for all of its existence?

Me and my dad were having a conversation about drugs being used in war and then he brought up he was listening to a podcast on Spotify mentioning Hitler was into occultism. That he was into rituals and what not.

I have done very little research and it’s hard to find a reliable source but would love to hear a historians opinion and what they know

I am really into both Scottish and Japanese history and I have noticed quite a lot of similarities, they both had warlords, clans, warriors etc. And I was wondering if it may have something to do with the landscape. Scotland and Japan both have similar landscape with a distinct highlands and lowlands and both have some of the oldest mountains and volcanos on earth. The appearance of the landscape and the history of Scotland and Japan is extremely uncanny and I would go as far to say that Scotland is a mini Japan just at the other side of the world (just not and island). So why are these two countries from two corners of the world so similar even though at the time the people would’ve never met each other before?

In fantasy and story’s it’s fairly common for their to be some kind of city watch (the gold cloaks of game of thrones/ a song of ice and fire being a good example) but would these exist in real life? If so how many men would the city watch of say Paris have? What about other city’s? Was their any kind of uniform or was it like most medieval army’s?

From what I've read, Black South Africans were banned from public transport. What system was put in place for them to get from place to place and how did it work?

And if it is true, why is that fact suppressed?

It may seem like a dumb question. Nevertheless I couldn't come with a logic.

It would take time so Vercingetorix and his men would be dead inside. However wouldn't they win the battle overall? Caesar would be in Vercingetorix's position.

I just finished watching Greyhound with Tom Hanks. Pretty solid movie. Liked all the detail it went into. It felt authentic to me. What I didn't like was how the Germans can be heard on the radio taunting the Greyhound ship. We get it, the Germans were the bad guys. But it got me thinking, was it common for ships/submarines to break radio silence just to taunt the enemy? Seems rather foolish, but what do I know. Thoughts? Thanks!

I gather we can keep track fairly well now but not sure how they did it back then. Or did they not care? Was inflation a thing or not without knowledge of how much currency was in circulation? Even gold, in excess abundance, would lose value I’d think?

Even when accounting for the persecutions, genocides, and exodus that culminated in the population exchange of 1923, the sizable Greek population of Istanbul (~200,000) remained in Turkey, having been specifically exempted from removal in the Lausanne Treaty. Yet, despite having been granted special permission to remain in their home city, even this remnant Greek population of Istanbul continued to rapidly decline in the ensuing decades. Why?

It’s seems that everything that has happened in battles over a thousand years ago for example Battle Of Cannae is so well documented. How did we know that a specific cavalry charge happened or a flanking manoeuvre ? Was there some sort of battle scribe that kept documentation on what happened ?