Don't know whether your pic is of a time when Ms Hughes was actually speaking on this subject, or a "library" one, but I have to say I find it interesting and rather offensive.
I hate the way she is doughnutted by female MPs. Here we are again saying women need a special agenda, women are the only caring ones, etc.
Can't we get away from all this tripe. Yes, women are half the population, but not anything special. I'd rather see Ms Hughes and her friends talking about aeronautical engineering or something, then we would really know that there was equality between the genders, in both directions.
Why is it just like Stalingrad? Surely that was the one battle when the Commissars actually did stop doing the "tried and tested" and actually did something out of the ordinary.
Or perhaps you refer the German behaviour?
I take it TDK that you know nothing of the battle of Stalingrad and how the commissars just kept pushing million upon million of Russian youth to their death and eventually wore the Germans down?
Or perhaps you agree with this tactic?
"Great Leap Forward"!!
I have this picture in my head of four year olds running down Whitehall waving the NuLab Party Manifesto.
Sepoy Agent
It's actually a pic of Bev making her Home Office resignation statement. And I agree- the doughnutting is extraordinary.
But I guess another way of looking at that would be to ask where were her bosses- all men? Surely they wouldn't mind being associated with a floundering junior who'd been caught being economical with the actualite? They have to do it all the time.
TDK and Shotgun- if you haven't already done so, may I strongly recommend you read Anthony Beever's outstanding Stalingrad.
The top brass on both sides drove their cannon fodder troops forward at gunpoint, irrespective of loss. Retreat was never an option, no matter how bad the situation.
Whether by design or negligence, this item implies that the nursery teacher is at fault here.
One major problem with schools today is that the virtually omnipotent headteacher has enormous sums of cash to play with as he wishes; a determined head can easily bend the Governors to his will with waffle about targets, tests, etc.
The early years child (rightly) provides the school with its largest proportion of the budget, but heads are free to spend this cash on whatever takes their fancy. In recent years, my wife's nursery/reception classes have been without the most basic of features and resources because the money given to the school for such items has been channelled into pet schemes having no benefit to the young child.
It's just a huge game of Monopoly to some heads - and providing the worthless inspections are passed, there is no-one realistically able to stop them.
My point exactly Wat...I did get it.
I understand that both sides drove their troops. Russian brigades were sent into battle with one ruifle between several men. When the rifleman died another would pick up the rifle. The Russians in particular had a final line of troops who would fire on their own retreating men. That I undertstand but it isn't unique to Stalingrad.
What is unique is that on the Russian side they simultaneously prepared and later launched a counter offensive that encircled the city and the Germans within it.
That meant they did not press on regardless, they did something unexpected.
PS: I have read Anthony Beever's Stalingrad and I share your recommendation. You may also have enjoyed the equally brilliant Berlin, which again depicts the standard Russian (and German) practice of "no retreat".
In particular you will have read in the former the instruction from Stalin to put enough men into the Stalingrad battle to tie in the Germans so that the subsequent encirclement would work. That indicates two potential alternatives:
The Russian might have just thrown more men in, and better armed men too - they had them after all. But that would have continued the attrition. The Russians might have surrendered the strip of land they held on the banks of the river but they couldn't because it would have freed up Germans to rest and regroup. They thus had to keep enough men in the battle to neither win nor lose, while they prepared the counter offensive.
PPS. I wasn't being snide or picky. It was a genuine question - I now understand what you had in mind - the Russian Steamroller.
Commenting by HaloScan
