Patrick Shrier

I own this site see my About me page

Heroe’s Portraits: Captain Charles Upham.

by

Captain Charles Upham is one of the three men who were awarded the Victoria Cross twice.   Both his awards were won during World War II, the first in the Battle for Crete in 1941 and the second at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942.   He was captured in the action that earned him the second VC and spent the remainder of the war as POW in Colditz prison.   He retired to New Zealand after the war and bought a farm.   He died in 1994 at the age of 86 in a Christchurch, New Zealand.   His VC and Bar are on display at the Queen … More after the Jump…

Postmodernism and Historiography

by

I figured I would touch on post-modernism/post-structuralism and my personal opinion of the phenomenon because I am seeing it more and more in contemporary academics.   Let me preface this whole post by saying up-front that I think the whole post-modernist movement is a bunch of hogwash that has little if anything to add to the discipline of history. I was first introduced to the phenomenon of post-modernism/post-structuralism in my very first Graduate level class, which was Historiography.   you can almost say it was hate at first sight because from the get-go I have been struck with the way post-modernists obfuscate and use odd language to describe their concepts.   … More after the Jump…

Heroe’s Portraits: Surgeon Captain Arthur Martin-Leake

by

Double VC holder: Surgeon Captain Arthur Martin-Leake

Surgeon Captain Arthur Martin-Leake is a two-time winner of the Victoria Cross.   He is one of only three men who have won the VC twice, and two of the double winners were medical men.   He won his first VC in 1902 during the Boer War in South Africa when he treated 8 wounded men in full view of the enemy and remained at his position providing them treatment despite being shot three times himself.   He recieved his second award in World War I during First Ypres for continually exposing himself to enemy fire to retrieve wounded men forward of the British trenches.   He survived the First World War and died in 1953.   He is buried at High Cross in Hertfordshire, England.

More after the Jump…

Where is the Serious National Conversation about American Debt?

by

I really try to stay away from politics but I find that I just have to say something her, even if I just howling in the wilderness and nobody is listening. Debt or at least the current and future debt of America has been much more prominent in the news lately.   It is always in the news, but people are actually, hopefully, starting to talk about addressing the issue in a serious manner.   I ran across these three pieces recently that address the issue and also talk about what America needs to do versus what it is doing. Niall Ferguson, The End of Prosperity? Fareed Zakaria, Are America’s … More after the Jump…

Battle of Carrhae, 53 B.C.

by

The Battle of Carrhae in 53 B.C. was one of the biggest military disasters Rome ever suffered, ranking right up there with Cannae, The Teutoberg Forest, and Lake Trasimene.   The battle occurred in what is today Syria between a Roman army under Marcus Licinius Crassus and a Parthian (Persian) army under a general Surena.   In the battle, seven legions were destroyed and their Eagles taken and Rome did not trouble the Parthian Empire again for almost 50 years.

The battle was written about by both Livy and Plutarch.   The links are to translations of their texts.

More after the Jump…

I Suppose I Can Consider Myself Published Now

by

I got my first article published this past week.   I belong to the Society for Military History and in a recent society newsletter, they asked for people who had recently worked in an archive to submit a guide.   I visited the Austrian Kriegsarhive last spring while doing research for my MA thesis and emailed them contact person that I would be interested in providing a guide for the Kriegsarchive.   I got a positive response and pulled out my notes and recollections of my visit and over the next week or so, I wrote up a guide.   It has now been posted on the SMH website at: … More after the Jump…

Are there similarities between the War in Vietnam and the War in Afghanistan? – Part 2

by

The last question that needs to be answered as concerns the parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam is why we are not pursuing a campaign of territorial conquest.   In Vietnam, the U.S. did not seek to gain and maintain control of territory; rather they sought to combat only the military forces of the insurgents.   That is why the now legendary “body count” was so important in Vietnam.   The same thing is not happening in Afghanistan, at least to the extent that the “body count” is important.   The metric I see being used to determine progress in Afghanistan in place of the “body count” is tracking how many attacks occur within delineated sectors of territory.   This metric is probably just as useless in determining victory or progress, as was the body count.   So many factors go into determining how many attacks occur in a given region that the actual number of attacks is meaningless.

More after the Jump…

Bureaucratic Redundancy

by

I generally try to avoid posting or saying negative things about work for fear that the fickle-demons of the internet will find out and get me in trouble but I have to share this one. I saw this today at work and just thought it was one of the dumbest things I have ever seen in my 20+ years of government service.   I have to go through all the SOPs at work and ensure they are in the correct format as part of yearly update drudgery.   What did I find that is so stupid you ask?  We actually have a SOP at work about when and who is … More after the Jump…

Heroe€™s Portraits: Sergeant William Wilson, US Army

by

I had to include Sergeant William Wilson because he is one of the nineteen people who have been twice awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and because he belonged the regiment that I was assigned to for both of my deployments.   My unit Forward Operating Base was also named in his honor in Iraq in 2004-2005. There is actually not much known about him.   His citations are below but they do not provide much in the way of detail about the actions in which he earned the award or about him in general.   He is buried in the San Francisco National Cemetery.  WILSON, WILLIAM Rank and organization: … More after the Jump…

Book Review: Soldat: Reflections of German Soldier, 1936-1949 by Sigfried Knappe

by

Book Review: Soldat: Reflections of  German Soldier, 1936-1949 by Sigfried Knappe and Ted Brusaw

I realized this morning that it has been a while since I posted a book review and I just finished re-reading this book yesterday and thought I would post a review of it.

This is a ghost-written account of Major Knappe’s time in the Wehrmacht between 1936 and his release from Russian captivity in 1949.   I first read this book in the mid-90s when it was first released.   At the time, I was very much into reading about World War II and thought that reading a book from the German perspective would be enlightening.   I was not disappointed with this book.

More after the Jump…

The Tolerance of the American Left

by

Last month, after Rep. Giffords and five others were killed outside of a Safeway store in Tucson, AZ. the opinion pages were full of folks on the left blaming conservatives, the Tea Party, talk radio, and Sarah Palin for rhetoric that led the shooter to target Rep. Giffords.   A month and a half later we now know that rhetoric, political or otherwise, had absolutely nothing to do with why Jared Loughner decided to shoot his congresswoman.   We knew that almost as soon as we knew the shooter’s name;  that did not stop the left from laming conservatives anyway. The left tries to portray themselves as some sort of … More after the Jump…

The Military Aspects of Feudalism in Europe in the early Middle Ages

by

The feudal system’s origins can be traced back to late Roman imperial practices of land tenure.   The biggest difference between feudal and late Roman practices is the feudal system contained a military obligation in return for holding land.  

            The kings and leaders of the early Carolingian empire maintained bands of fighting men known as comitati, these bands of fighting men evolved into the later aristocracy of the Frankish kingdom.   In the early eighth century Charles Martel began the practice of granting lands known as benefices to retainers in return for specified terms of military service.   These lands were not hereditary at first there retention being conditional on fulfillment of service, but over time they became hereditary.

More after the Jump…

The Crimean War part one – The Narrative

by

This war has always interested me; mainly because of the use of technology and the admittedly fuzzy reasoning for the war in the first place.   The war was probably the last European Great Power War that was fought for limited dynastic and prestige reasons.   The ostensible cause of the war was a dispute in 1852 between the Orthodox and Catholic churches over control and access to some of the shrines in Jerusalem.   The Russians decided to get involved as the self-appointed guardians of Christian places in the Turkish Empire and the French got involved in their self-appointed role as the guardian of Catholics.   At that, war was not declared until October 1853 and the shooting did not really start until November when the Russian Black Sea Fleet decimated the Turkish navy.

More after the Jump…

+ More