He must have been an economics teacher before the war.
Vintage Saturday: Guns and Butter
Shotgun
Walther Toggle-Locked Semiauto Shotgun (ouch!)
Between the world wars, the Walther company designed and marketed a short recoil, toggle-locked 12 gauge shotgun for sporting use. It was patented by the Walther brothers, but actually manufactured by the Deutsche-Werke consortium, which […]
Artillery
Germany’s Not-So-Light 5cm Le GrW 36 Light Mortar
RIA’s catalog page for this mortar The 5cm 5CM Leichte Granatwerfer 36 was the standard German light infantry mortar going into World War Two. It was designed by Rheinmetall-Borsig in the mid 1930s and adopted […]
Anti-Tank Rifles
PzB-39 German Anti-Tank Rifle at RIA
Most countries still had anti-tank rifles in their military inventory at the beginning of WWII – the Solothurn S18-100, the Lahti L39, the Boys AT Rifle, the PTRD and PTRS, and so on. For Germany, […]
A young friend of mine was in a history class in college and the old “Guns and Butter” discussion came up. He avered that it was better to have guns, because “If I have guns, and you have butter, then I have butter too”…(grin)
hai boys. the coking handle of the
MG42 has the very first design of
the 1942
Go ahead and smile today Nazi, but tomorrow, you’ll be toast.
Wow, that’s a bad pun even for me.
Ian, you owe me a new monitor/keyboard. “He must have been an economics teacher before the war.” I laughed quite hard at this but unfortunately I happened to be drinking my coffee at the time.
“If I have guns, and you have butter, then I have butter too”…
I have never seen a historical example of a nation with less economic strength (Butter)losing to a nation that is less economically advantaged.
GDP wins every time.
Dean from Idaho
If that is real butter he’s having with his sauerbroten, I can understand why he is smiling. The privations suffered by the ordinary soldier in a war that created acute shortages of supplies, and which typically reduced personal value systems to stark, bare basics, made the smallest, simplest everyday things a peacetime civilian would take wholly for granted something to be truly grateful for, if even for a fleeting moment. Although it’s from a different era than what you see in the photo, Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet On The Western Front” still brings this theme to mind, among others.
Nice call on the early-model MG-42, Dimitris :).
Butter….that’s one way to lube your gun.
Turk – a truth that seems to be forgotten in our modern schools. “If I’m a pacifist, then I have nothing to worry about with the bullies, I will negotiate with them and they’ll leave me alone” Reminds me of the Blgubatter Beast in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The way you defeat the this most logical of creatures is to put your hands over your eyes. It then deduces that since you can’t see it, it can’t see you and doesn’t eat you.