Jamby

Recently I read a book by Max Hastings called Catastrophe: Europe Goes To War 1914. I must confess, first of all, that I didn't finish it due to a bit of a breakdown that may or may not have been related to its contents, so I'm steeling myself for an eventual re-read. Anyway, the parts I did read told a fascinating if bleak and miserable tale that flipped some of the stories I'd been told about the First World War on their head. I got into reading Max Hastings' work when I decided on impulse to pick up one of the dictionary-sized history books in my friend's collection. Much of what I've read on the World Wars is by him, Antony Beevor or Max Arthur, but this was the first time I'd read a lengthy book about the lead-up to, and early days of, the First World War. I understand it's caused a bit of controversy, drawing fire not only for some elementary errors (which likely were missed due to it being sped along to meet that important 2014 release date) and also being seen as a Germanophobic "cash-in" (though it was, interestingly, a German historian named Fritz Fischer who originally caused uproar by arguing in Griff nach der Weltmacht that Germany's leaders bore much of the responsibility for the Great War). I can personally level some criticism at Hastings for carelessly citing the no-doubt familiar memoir Death Traps in past work, along with all the inflammatory rhetoric that entails, but it's also become clear to me in the past few years that every account has at least a grain of historical truth in it, so it seems intellectually lazy to dismiss an entire work, the scope of which is enormous, over comparatively minor and perhaps inevitable mistakes; to do so would be to risk missing out on some real gems. I'd certainly never discard Antony Beevor's harrowing saga on the Second World War over his relative shortcomings in the Pacific theatre. TL,DR: Since this seems about as historically well-read a forum as I've come across on the internet, I'm curious to know what the residents have to say about Catastrophe: Europe Goes To War 1914.

I'm very excited about WT's 1.77 update, particularly the sound and graphical updates (because I'm so naff that 90% of my battles are against bots in Custom Games and I like to stop to look at the wavy grass). Bit of a weird side note there: I'm in a Discord server with the creator of the 'Epic Thunder' sound mod (sound mods are no longer banworthy, hooray!). He remarked that the use of the sound layering system was somewhat unwise, and posted a screenshot that showed the devs had apparently just taken a lot of his sound mod files and pasted them in without even changing the file names. According to the ToS, I think they actually can use whatever gets uploaded to WTLive, but it's still bizarre and not really a good look IMHO. And since they did use the version uploaded to WTLive, a lot of the files were outdated. I'm also somewhat perplexed by the controversy on the WT subReddit about the T-64B allegedly being unfairly buffed against the M1 Abrams. I think it's due in large part to confusion over which versions of the Abrams had what armour. I love tanks and their history, but my knowledge on the Abrams is virtually nonexistent. I was told flattery can get you a long way in life, so what do the handsome experts here think?