I recall reading an article by a company official who purchased alot of these guns from the U.K. back in the 70’s. He described what types of firearms and their conditions. they had hoped to find some very collectible pieces in these lots, but found them to be the more mundane, and utilitarian weapons, and onl few of the types he sought to find. Still, it was an interesting bit of history to open , and see.
Exactly. The Swiss were the German’s bankers, money launderers, and one of their key ammunition suppliers as strategic bombing disrupted German arms production. And a bigger impediment to the German conquest of Switzerland was the Alpine mountains and their fortress redoubts rather than the widespread issuance of militia firearms (which all would have been taken to the front anyways)…
And as far as private firearms ownership being a hindrance to an occupying force, it simply is not. Most evidence portrays resistance & partisan movements as little real problem for the Germans in any sort of direct paramilitary roles. They were much more effective as intelligence gathering networks for conventional armies…
Concur. Any form of militia which stands and fights gets slaughtered in short order unless they are very lucky or get a lot of external fire support. The only way they can survive is to fight in ways not protected by the Geneva conventions - i.e. in disguise, using bombs and the like or occasionally from ambush.
As for Switzerland, where is the benefit to the Germans in invading it? They control all the surrounding countries, and get everything they want from it (mainly banking services, with some weapons production) without invading. Invading would be rather expensive due to the mountains and the fact that the Swiss have quite a large army who do nothing but practice defending one part of the country for their entire careers. High cost for no benefit - so they didn’t bother.
Sounds like a good idea.
Men are born with a dick.
They’re not born with a gun.
Moreover, I’ve never heard of anybody being able to get a more dangerous dick or assemble a collection of them, let alone have semi or fully automatic ones (whatever they’d do :D).
Given the number of men who don’t accept parental, social or financial responsibility for children they father, which as a taxpayer who had nothing to do with it and who didn’t even get any fun out of it but for which I still pay for at least the first 18 years of their unwanted lives, I think there’s a good argument for licensing dicks.
Overall, given the damage they do in careless and irresponsible hands, dicks create bigger and more enduring social problem than guns.
The death rate, and social and tax burden, from guns in any nation is vastly less than the misery rate for children and mothers from blokes who father children and won’t accept responsibility for them.
I’d take a guess that the blokes who are most likely to be dangerous to others with firearms, whether through stupidity or criminality or anger or whatever, are also those most likely to be irresponsible in other areas such as fathering children and drunk driving and driving while unlicensed and getting into stupid bar fights and so on.
That’s just my take on it after 30 years of dealing with blokes who do some or all of those things. :evil:
Not quite.
Japan never intended to invade Austarlia but that wasn’t known to the Allies at the time. http://www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6516&page=2
The only land based Japanese thrusts which seemed to be aimed directly at Australia were actually repelled by Australian troops on Kokoda and at Milne Bay, but in the bigger picture they were bound up with the American effort at Guadalcanal which together with the Australian effort blunted Japan’s south eastern advance.
Even if Japan had invaded Australia, if we got to the point of relying upon armed civilians it would have been a slaughter. By the Japanese.
Randomly armed civilians without sustained and effective military training and without the cohesion produced by that training will invariably fail under attack from battle hardened troops.
Even Australia’s, and Britain’s, supposedly trained troops failed in Malaya under Japanese attack by much smaller forces of better troops in, admittedly, strategic circumstances not of their own making which gave Japan the initiative and which it never lost. American and Filipino troops lost in the Philippines without even the strategic inhibitions which impeded the defence of Malaya.
If Japan had wiped out even the substantial Australian military forces here in the first half 1942, the whole civilian population could have been armed with any weapon you like to think of, up to field artillery and naval shore batteries, and we still would have lost.
Armed civilians are at best a nuisance to well trained and effective troops.
Just to add to my last post, anyone who thinks armed civilians are a threat to trained troops, get about 50 civilians aged 16 to 60 and armed with the usual variety of civilian weapons from .22 to .45 short and long arms and pit them against a modern military section of about 10 to 12 competently led infantry troops who have passed basic and corps training and who are armed with the usual infantry weapons.
When it’s over, see who understood and could apply fire and movement and suppressing fire and who could fire most accurately in combat and who had the most cohesion and who broke first, and who ended up with the most casualties.
I think a good example of all this took place during the “Rape of Belgium” of 1914, as German troops were desperately bulling their way through in order to affect the futile Schlieffen Plan. The Belgian troops offered stout resistance, and when dislodged from their fortifications, they continued a fighting retreat. There probably were also some older Belgian militiamen that carried out individual sniper actions, but by and large, it is today believed to have been conventional Belgian soldiers firing in rear guard actions as they retreated to their final defense lines prompted the German Army to believe they were being attacked in a general civil/militia partisan uprising and in turn reacted in a brutal occupation closer to the stereotype of the German military in WWII.
The Germans assumed that is was partisan activities and so they began to take internal security type reprisals using their infamous military police, including massacres and hostage taking; and the overall effect was to increase brutality without any real impact on the war --other than to give the Allies a major propaganda victory on “the evil Hun.” But it was the conventional Belgian Army holding out at Antwerp was the only force able to disrupt German planning and tie down precious manpower…
Could you please give some examples of Anti-Partisan- and/or Anti-Population-Massacres in Belgium which happened in 1914 and were done initially by the Feldjägers?
THE DYNAMICS OF DESTRUCTION Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War by Alan Kramer.
Published in 2007 by OUP ISBN 978-0-19-280342-9Alan Kramer is Associate Professor of History at Trinity College, Dublin.
" The German troops arrived in the town in the morning of Wednesday, 19 August, to find a peaceful population frightened by the news of German cruelties perpetrated along their invasion route since 4 August. In the area around Liege, closest to the German border, some 640 civilians had been killed by 12 August, but no precise numbers were known at the time. The town of Aarschot, only some ten miles north-east of Louvain, was the scene of mass killings on 19 August, with 156 dead; in Andenne, further south,262 were killed the next day. The Louvain civic authorites had confiscated all weapons in private hands in early August, to prevent any spontaneous individual acts of resistance that might provoke reprisal, and published warnings that only the regular army was entitled to take military action. The population was in any case so scared that any idea of fighting the juggernaut would have been regarded as folly…Heightening the anxiety of the citizens, hostages were taken from the city’s notables…who would forfeit their lives if there were any hostile acts…In the late afternoon of Tuesday, 25 August…the alarm was sounded at about 6 pm…Some two hours later, firing suddenly broke out at several points in the town, and wild shooting ensued…The shooting bore all the signs of panic : trops were on high alert because the Belgian army had launched a counter-attack from the North…On the pretext, or possibly the genuine misapprehension on the part of many soldiers, that they were being fired on by Belgian civilians, the hunt began for these presumed “franc-tireurs”…This was a search for a chimera, for in reality no civilians had fired…The worst was yet to come. In front of their terrified families some men were beaten and shot on the spot…a man of eighty three was tied up and made to watch his house burn, beaten with bayonets and finally shot, together with his son. Other were killed during the night as they fled from their burning houses. Three cafe owners and a waiter were executed in the station square, and several other civilians who had taken refuge in their cellars…were dragged out and killed elswhere…others died in the flames…The killings continued…In all, 248 citizens were killed"
“Less well known today…was the destruction of the small town of Dinant and the mass executions of its citizens…As in Louvain, it was clear to the officers and men that the victims of the killings could not have been involved in firing at the Germans, but there was an assumption that civilians had been engaged in shooting…the killings were driven by high emotion…More than half of the 77 killed at Les Rivages [a suburb of Dinant] were women and children : thirty eight women and girls, and fifteen children under 14, of whom seven were babies; seven of the men were over 70 years old…These arbitrary killings were not committed to punish alleged franc-tireurs, for the soldiers knew the victims were “innocent”, but they perceived the civilians as collectively culpable for the supposed actions of franc-tireurs…A total of 674 people, including many women and children, or one in ten of the population of Dinant, had perished in the executions.”
There were many other examples of this behaviour by the Germans - sometimes hundreds, sometimes scores, of people - including women and children - killed; some in cold bloodied executions, some in white hot rage.
The ‘Rape Of Belgium’ may have been overblown by Allied propaganda but it was no myth
Interessting, thank you! 
No one in their right mind would suggest civilians should or would ever attempt to meet an organized military force on the battlefield. The only logical use for armed civilians would be guerrilla type tactics and sabotage such as what is going on in Iraq today.
I would have to respectfully disagree. It is purely speculation on my part, but if Germany and Japan had completely defeated their enemies, I would expect Australia and Switzerland to eventually be taken.
I agree that firearms ownership was never a hindrance to an occupying force for the simple reason that it did not exist on a wide scale. This is why it was necessary for the Allies to air drop supplies and also the reason for the existence of the liberator pistol.
Again, I would not suggest partisans would directly engage military units.
While that may be the case in 1914, I doubt that during WWII, the nazis would have treated civilians better if they had not resisted. The nazi idea of Lebensraum pretty much would have sealed the fate of the population in the East. The majority of the population in the death camps were not resistance fighters nor were they the result of resistance movements. This is also true of any other genocide of the 20th century.
Mr. Grot, not to be disrespectful, but do you really think that a case like that would have been reality in any case?
If it would have been realistic, i would now be perhaps gouvernator of a nice state in the ‘ancient USA’ or another native german speaking person from the ‘Greater Germany’ … oh wait … i forgot California :mrgreen:
It stands to discussion, but in the end everyone has his/her own ideas about that subject
No disrespect taken, you are right. It is purely a “what if” scenario. Such as “what if” Germany didn’t invade the Soviet Union and Japan didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor? Without the Soviets and Americans as adversaries it was definitely possible the axis could have won in which case I still stand by my statement that Australia and Switzerland would not be safe.
The ad I posted above is from before the US and USSR involvement and shows the desperate situation the British were in. When faced with such a situation it shows they would rather be armed. I know I would. Even if the situation was hopeless and you were forced to surrender, would you rather have the option to fight, lay down your arms, or have no arms to lay down? I realize this is probably the most far-fetched argument for gun rights but nonetheless a valid one.