Holy Fucking Shit You’re Dumb!

The longest battle in the history of humanity took place between February and December of 1916 near the French city of Verdun.  It’s only fitting that Word War I, possibly the dumbest war in the history of forever, has as its centerpiece one of the dumbest battles ever fought.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking “You’re just going to make fun of the French some more, aren’t you?”  And, well, you’re right.  I know, it’s cheap and easy to make fun of French military blunders.  But the best part about the Battle of Verdun is that the French were arguably being less dumb than the Germans who were attacking them.  Any time you have a situation where someone fucks up harder than the French while fighting a battle, you know you’ve got an all-time blunder on your hands.

Here’s the situation.  World War I started in late summer 1914, and by early fall the western front had stagnated.  The two sides (Britain and France on one side, Germany and Austria-Hungary  on the other) settled down into a network of trenches and didn’t move much for the next four years.  Throughout 1915 both sides attempted to achieve the elusive breakthrough that would end the stagnation and bring victory for their side.  Alas, all this achieved was minuscule movements of the trench lines and lots and lots and lots of casualties.

In 1916, the Germans decided to try a different tactic.  They reasoned that a breakthrough was no longer possible in the current situation, and instead they would pick a spot on the French lines that the French Army could not afford to abandon, and attack it endlessly, forcing the French to bring more and more men into the fray.  They sought to “bleed them white”, to inflict such great casualties on the French that they would either lose the will to fight or would be unable to defend other parts of the line effectively.

They picked the fortifications in and around the city of Verdun.  Verdun had played a major role in several previous French wars; it had withstood an assault by Attila the Hun in the fifth century, and had been built up after the Franco-Prussian war specifically to bolster French defenses against future German aggression.  The German plan was to attack, and bait the French into an all-out defense of the city and forts.

Well, it worked… sort of.  The Germans attacked, and the French took the bait and committed to hold the city at any cost.  It became not just a matter of military importance, but of French national pride.  Before the battle was finally over,  70% of the French army had been through “the wringer of Verdun”.  However, this might have been to France’s ultimate advantage–the French army had a policy of rotating troops out of the battle every 2-3 weeks, which is why such a high percentage of the army eventually saw action at Verdun.  By comparison, only 25% of the German army saw action at Verdun, so the French troops were comparatively fresh at any given time.

The Germans spilled a lot of French blood at Verdun, but at a price that was far too high.  The French casualties from the battle (approximately 371,000 killed, missing, or wounded) were only slightly higher than the German casualties (337,000).  By the time all was said and done, the entire thing was a wash–the Germans made small advances, but were eventually turned back by French counter attacks.  The Germans had managed to do nothing other than reduce the number of available fighting men on both sides by approximately the same amount, and also to blast the shit out of small portion of the French countryside.

The French, in turn, took their successful (if highly costly) defense of Verdun as a sign that fixed fortifications were a good idea, now and forever, and this led to the creation of the Maginot Line after the war.  And we all know how well that worked for them.  Also, the demoralizing effect of the war, and the Battle of Verdun in particular, is often credited with contributing to the French collapse at the start of World War II–they just didn’t have the heart to go through it all again.

So there you have it.  The Germans failed to either take Verdun or kill enough Frenchmen to change the course of the war, and they lost nearly as many men as they killed.  The French in turn held a line that probably didn’t need to be held, at such a huge cost that the effects were still being felt decades later.

Dumbest battle ever?  It’s in the running, for sure.

Ty Cobb was an asshole.  There’s really no getting around it.  Whenever anybody starts going off about how we can’t let Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame because he gambled on baseball, or how Shoeless Joe Jackson shouldn’t ever be allowed in because he might have thrown some games, or how Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, and Mark McGwire will never get in because they (stick with me here) corked a bat and probably took steroids, probably took steroids and was an asshole, and probably took steroids (and had an awful case of backne either way), just remind them that Ty Fucking Cobb is in the Hall of Fame.

Stats wise, there’s no doubt Ty deserves to be in the Hall.  The all-time hit king before Rose played for seven thousand years and beat his record (and his career .366 average is still the best ever), Cobb was also a demon on the basepaths, stealing somewhere north of 800 bases in his career, which is good for fourth on the all time list–and 2-3-4 on the list are bunched up fairly close together.  Lou Brock in second has 938, Billy Hamilton in third has 912, and Ty in fourth has 892.  Of course, Rickey Henderson swiped 1406 because he was a mother fucking base stealing MACHINE sent from the future to steal our bases.

But we’re here to talk about Ty Cobb.  And part of the reason he was so good at stealing bases wasn’t just because he was fast (although he was).  It was because he’d spike the shit out of you if you got in his way.

Here he is kicking some poor catcher in the dick:

Seriously, look at that.  He gave that guy a flying kick right in the goddamn dick.  And why?  Probably because he had the unmitigated gall to try to tag Ty out at home.  Or maybe JUST BECAUSE.  For all I know, Ty just walked, and decided to jump-kick the catcher’s ball sack before heading to first, just on goddamn principle.

Cobb fought everybody.  He once challenged an umpire to fight him under the grandstand after the game.  The hell of it is, the umpire accepted, and Cobb knocked him down and choked the shit out of him until some spectators intervened.  He fought with fans–he once climbed into the stands and beat the shit out of a handicapped man who called his momma names.

He was a well known racist.  He once slapped a black elevator operator for being “uppity”.  When a black security guard intervened, Cobb stabbed him.  It being the early 1900s, this was apparently acceptable, and the issue was never taken to court.

He was hated by so many people, one time a manager basically threw a couple games just to prevent Cobb from winning a batting title.  St Louis Browns manager Jack O’Connor ordered his third baseman to play back on the outfield grass every time Nap Lajoie came up to bat in the final two games of the season.  Nap was behind Ty by just a few percentage points in the batting title race, and old Jack hated Ty so much, he tried to rig it so Nap would win.  Nap went 8 for 8 in the double header, with six bunt singles, but MLB cottoned on to what Jack was up to and ended up awarding the title to Ty anyway.

So, in conclusion, Ty Cobb was a huge cock.  He was a shithead, a racist asshole, and a loudmouth punk with an inferiority complex that caused him to lash out at everybody.  But holy shit could the man play baseball.

So the next time someone tries to tell you Barry Bonds shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame because maybe he took roids, show them that picture of Ty kicking that poor dude in the dick.  If that’s “playing the game the right way”, I’m not sure what Barry (probably) did was so wrong.

This here is flippin’ awesome:

This is a video of Dr. Josiah Thompson, noted JFK conspiracy author, explaining why Oswald could not have fired the number of shots he is said to have fired (3) in the amount of time it is said he had (most conspiracy buffs cite a number around 6 seconds, usually something overly exact like “5.6 seconds”).

Now, never mind that the FBI test he is apparently misrepresenting shows that it is possible to shoot three accurate shots with a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle like Oswald’s in as little as 4.5 seconds.  This guy proceeds to tell us that the “necessary minimal mechanical firing time” of this rifle (which he defines as taking one shot, cycling the bolt, and taking another shot) is 2.3 seconds.  He flat out says this is the minimum time it takes to fire a shot, prepare the rifle for another shot, then fire again.  So obviously, you can’t take 3 shots in 5.6 seconds or whatever sub six second number you would like to pull out of your ass today.

Thing is, as you can see in the video, he demonstrates what he means by “minimum mechanical firing time”.  Are you seeing where I’m going with this yet?  For those of you who don’t have a stopwatch handy, go here and time it for yourself.

What did you get?  I tried it a few times, and never got more than 1.9 seconds.  From the time he dry fires the rifle the first time to the time he dry fires the second time is somewhere between 1.7 and 1.9 seconds by my tests.

Good job, asshole. Way to parrot incorrect information then make a complete jackass of yourself on television.

When you go looking for dumb shit from the past, especially when said dumb shit has to do with military matters, the French are easy targets.  The two greatest military minds in French history are a 16-year-old girl and a midget from Corsica.

It’s often said that in each new war, the generals start out trying to re-fight the last war, and that was never more true than during the lead-up to World War II.  France had spent nearly all of World War I on the defensive in their own territory, fighting off the invading Germans with neither side ever able to score a decisive breakthrough.

After the war, the French figured they’d build a huge defensive line of forts on their eastern border with Germany, which became known as the Maginot Line.  In fairness to the French (note: this may be the last time you ever hear me say those words), the Line was not supposed to be the be-all, end-all of defense against the Germans.  It was merely supposed to hold them off long enough to allow the French army to mobilize to meet the threat, which could take as long as two to three weeks.

Well, it sort of worked.  Hitler took one look at the long line of forts that stood between him and Paris, and did what any sensible person would have done:  he went around it.   He faked a frontal assault on the Line, and then attacked through Belgium.  France was, for some reason, counting on the Belgians and their own line of defensive forts to hold off the Germans just in case they turned out to be smart enough not to just barrel-ass headlong into the Maginot Line.  Needless to say, this was not the best plan ever.  Once the French and the British moved into Belgium to offer help in fighting off the Germans, the bulk of Hitler’s forces then moved through the “impenetrable” Ardennes region and flanked the allies.  Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe just, you know, flew over the Line, dropping paratroopers and just generally bombing the shit out of whatever they felt like.

The whole thing was over in less than six weeks, with the British heroically running away at Dunkirk and the French surrendering and being occupied by the Germans.  Oddly, this was exactly the outcome the Germans had expected to achieve in World War I, so in this instance, maybe the Germans are the first people in history to successfully fight the previous war during the successive campaign.