Indulging my voluminous knowledge of things trivial...

First of all, I'm still trying to figure this friggin system out, so bare with. Trying to post more than one picture in this thing but it keeps going tits up on me, so it'll be a two or three parter. Here goes.

If anyone is curious about the rockets that Hezbollah are firing at Israel every day, called "Katyushas" in the press, here's yer lesson. No charge. Started in the 1930s when the Soviets deployed a 132mm rocket artillery system in deep secrecy. Nobody knew they had them till they started pounding the shit out of the Germans with them in 1941. They were supposedly initially manned by special NKVD (secret police) troops till the mid part of the war. They mounted them on American Lend-Lease Studebakers, which we gave them by the tens of thousands (about 180,000 by 1943). They liked to fire them off in groups of four trucks at a time, something to do with long standing soviet practice with artillery, as well as the fact that these things are notoriously inaccurate. Sort of like a fancy bottle rocket. You can imagine the effect on a widely spread out target, like a concentration of German troops or armor. The folks in Northern Israel can tell you a little bit about that today.

Everybody ended up producing their own version of this thing during the war, even the Germans, and they still find their way onto the battlefields today. We have a very fancy, high tech, very effective version in use today called an MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket System). You DON'T want to be on the receiving end, believe me. Believe it or not, the name comes from a popular Russian folk song of the time made famous by a lady named Lidiya Ruslanova. The Germans called them "Stalin's Organs". Ever since this current unpleasantness began in Lebanon I've had that fuckin song runnin through my head every time I tune in the news. In Russian. First verse only. It's about the only Russian I remember from college. Anyway...