DUFF & NONSENSE!

Win (the right) friends and influence people!

Some wise advice today from Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph to 'Dim Dave' who needs all the wise advice he can lay his hands on!  Moore begins by re-iterating not just the help the Americans gave us before and during the Falklands war but the nature of it.  These reminiscences are provoked by a commemorative dinner to be held this week in Portsmouth by the Navy Museum.  The main guest is John Lehman, the Sec. of Defence at the time, who describes the 'bottom up' nature of the assistance provided:

Mr Lehman will explain how, contrary to current historical orthodoxy, the Americans helped Britain instinctively, secretly and right from the start of the Falklands war. He should know, because he did it.

Mr Lehman’s key point is that this help came from the bottom up. So great were what were called “the customary patterns of cooperation” between Britain and the US that they could provide the cover for a huge operation. Weeks before the US announced its public policy “tilt” to Britain on April 30, 1982, there was, as Mr Lehman puts it, “already water flowing through the pipes”. President Reagan felt benign towards Britain, and particularly towards Mrs Thatcher, his friend since both were in opposition, but it was not necessary for him to approve anything for help to start.

The point Mr. Lehman stresses is that the very many mutal links up and down the chain of command between American and British armed forces made the donation of aid in its myriad forms from weapons to intelligence not only easier but in reality perfectly natural:

US and British personnel, already in place before the Falklands war, worked together at the headquarters at Northwood in Britain and at Norfolk, Virginia. Mr Lehman and his boss, the defence secretary Caspar Weinberger, made sure Britain was helped with fuel, logistics, intelligence, use of a base on Ascension Island and of a naval missile test range in Puerto Rico, and Stinger surface-to-air missiles. They achieved this without informing the more wobbly State Department, and often without making Britain pay. Later, the US supplied Sidewinder missiles and 200 Mk-46 torpedoes. Lehman was even authorised to prepare the helicopter carrier USS Iwo Jima in case one of the two British aircraft carriers should be lost.

Far from being a mere phrase in polite diplomatic speeches, the “special relationship” in the Falklands war was what Mr Lehman calls a “functional reality”. The ties of history, culture, kit, intelligence, men and know-how were all there, all ready, all working. They won the day.

But "the times they are a-changin'"!  Whilst it is necessary for 'Dim Dave' to cuddle up close to President Obama despite, or perhaps, particularly given his incipient anti-British feelings, it would be a colossal error to shun Mitt Romney.  'Dim Dave' should ignore the mandarins in the 'Ministry for Foreigners' who regularly illustrate their complete ignorance of the reality behind this or that foreign ruler.  A prime example was given just recently when the FO, presumably, advised 'Dave' to continue the love-in with Sarkozy and snub Hollande even when it became increasingly clear that Hollande was likely to win.  As regular readers of this blog will know, not least because I keep reminding them, I have been telling you all that Obama is 'dead man walking'.  Even after the train crash mutilations which the Republicans inflicted upon themselves during the endless months of their nomination primaries, Mitt Romney, the badly bruised winner, is still ahead of Obama in some of the polls.  It would be a crass mistake by 'Dim Dave' to refuse to hold out a hand to Romney, a fellow conservative, even if Obama has a hissy fit over it.

Alas, given his obvious dimness, 'Dave' is quite likely to do exactly that!

 

Old 'King' Kohl was a total arsehole!

Apologies for the somewhat crude headline based on an old English song but my grumpiness is well-founded, as you will see if you read on.  First of all my thanks to 'SoD' for pointing me to this article in Spiegel yesterday which, due the pressure of "events, dear boy events" , I might have missed.  If, like me, you find yourself raging against the imbecilic follies of the Euro-fanatics then this is a MUST READ article.  However, if you have blood pressure problems then better you stick to this synopsis.

At last, and I don't quite know how, a whole raft of government documents have been released by the German government covering the period from about 1990 up to the introduction of the euro in 1998.  They show, without a shadow of a doubt, that Chancellor Kohl was made fully aware, indeed, he was warned over and over again, that Italy was lying and cheating on its economic data in order to gain entry to the proposed new euro currency. Kohl, whose stupidity had already been demonstrated by his inept economic handling of German re-unification which placed enormous strains on the West Germans, was the main driving force behind the idea of a monetary union which must include the 'founding six' nations including Italy (my emphases throughout):

In response to a request by SPIEGEL, the German government has, for the first time, released hundreds of pages of documents from 1994 to 1998 on the introduction of the euro and the inclusion of Italy in the euro zone. They include reports from the German embassy in Rome, internal government memos and letters, and hand-written minutes of the chancellor's meetings.

The documents prove what was only assumed until now: Italy should never have been accepted into the common currency zone. The decision to invite Rome to join was based almost exclusively on political considerations at the expense of economic criteria. It also created a precedent for a much bigger mistake two years later, namely Greece's acceptance into the euro zone.

To be fair to Kohl, which I am not inclined to be, much of his motivation appeared to be a fervent wish for Germany to appease for past wrongs and to be seen as a team player for 'Europe United'!  For me personally, when it comes to politicians, give me a Machiavellian realist over a dreamy idealist any day of the week:

Instead of waiting until the economic requirements for a common currency were met, Kohl wanted to demonstrate that Germany, even after its reunification, remained profoundly European in its orientation. He even referred to the new currency as a "bit of a peace guarantee."

Of course, financial data doesn't play much of a role when it comes to war and peace. Italy became a perfect example of the steadfast belief of politicians that economic development would eventually conform to the visions of national leaders.

To which one can only reply with the age-old question, when will they ever learn? There is no excuse for Kohl's wilful stupidity because everybody and his uncle was telling him that Italy was nowhere near ready to comply with the financial criteria required of entrants to the new monetary union.  Even the Dutch government sent two representatives to Germany to state quite baldly that Italy was unfit to join and that the Dutch would not agree to it.  Needless to say , they had their arms twisted up their backs ("Ve haf veys of making you agree!") and they swallowed their objections.  Almost every single senior politican and economic expert in Germany knew that Italy was cheating and said so in private but when it came to the vote only one man had the guts to say "Nein".  He was Kurt Biedenkopf and he deserves a big statue in every German town:

Kurt Biedenkopf, a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), predicted the dilemma in which the monetary union finds itself today even before the introduction of the euro. At the time, Biedenkopf was governor of the eastern state of Saxony -- and was the only German governor to vote against the monetary union in the Bundesrat, the legislative body that represents the German states. "Europe wasn't ready for that epochal step," says Biedenkopf today, noting that the individual countries differed too widely in terms of economic performance. "Most politicians in Germany thought that the euro would function even without common institutions and without financial transfers. That was naïve."

Now, of course, our European leaders are learning the hard way never to shit in a wind tunnel but their probable course of action will be the worst of all choices:

The euro is now in its 14th year, and after two years of ongoing crisis, there is a growing realization in Berlin and other capitals that the status quo cannot continue. All reform efforts still resemble small steps to nowhere, and yet politicians are beginning to think in terms of broader categories as they cope with the crisis. The new fiscal pact is not providing a quick solution yet, and as a result European politicians are developing new visions while old taboos are falling.

While the southern countries and France are coming to terms with a debt brake based on the German model, the German government no longer has any objections to an economic government within the euro zone, a French idea to which Germany was once staunchly opposed. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, for his part, is considering upgrading the EU finance commissioner to a kind of European finance minister, who would monitor the budgets of euro-zone member states and would also have the power to intervene, if necessary.

All of these measures boil down to individual countries relinquishing more authority and the central government in Brussels acquiring more power in return.

About 15 years ago I began to write a play based on a 'tragic hero' figure who was the commander of a European Union interrogation centre, part of the security apparat run by the EU which was struggling to deal with an extreme nationalist anti-EU terrorist organisation executing atrocities all across Europe.  I never finished it but I think I might revisit it and perhaps turn it into a book.  Then, after I'm dead and it all comes 'true' everyone will remember my prescient genius instead of my boring blog!

I urge you all to read the Spiegel article.

 

Consider the atom!

Oh, go on, give it a try!  I know it's Sunday morning and you're sitting slumped there regreting opening that extra bottle last night, but try it, just think about atoms.  Pesky little critters, ain't they?  So simple and yet so unbelievably complex.  I am moved to these ruminations because, yet again, I have fallen foul of that little imp - coincidence.

Yesterday I was re-reading Michael Frayn's superb play Copenhagen because there is just a tiny chance that I may be able to direct it next year.  The play concerns the 1941 meeting which took place between Neils Bohr, the Danish-Jewish 'Godfather' of quantum physics, and his favourite 'pupil' and supreme genius in his own right, Werner Heisenberg.  The play takes place in the spirit world because the particpants, including Bohr's wife, Margrethe, are all dead.  They meet to try and agree on the nature of the meeting which took place at such an ominous moment in history.  Ominous for both Bohr living as a Jew in occupied Denmark, and for Heisenberg who worked under the baleful eye of the German authorities who could not forgive him for having taught 'Jewish science' at university.  Ominous for the rest of us because 1941 saw the first moves in the race to develop the atom bomb - and Heisenberg was the team leader on the Nazi side investigating atomic possibilities.  Frayn is far too intelligent not to enjoy the irony that the participants of this meeting are unable to agree on what was actually said because they are all beset with uncertainty!  An excellent play and worth reading even if reading play scripts is not your usual litarary fare.

The other half of my 'atomic coincidence' was re-reading part of David Bergamini's WWII history book Japan's Imperial Conspiracy in order to prepare my talk on "How Japan Lost WWII in the First Six Months" which I am thinking of recording for those of you having difficulty in sleeping at night!  It reminded me of the little known fact that the two bombs employed used totally different mechanisms for splitting the uranium-235.  In the first bomb, small particles of uranium were held at one end and at the due moment were fired down the 'tube' to a larger piece of uranium at the other end thus setting off the chain re-action.  Hence its nickname of "Thin Boy".  The Nagasaki bomb, on the other hand, employed a different means in which the large piece of uranium was surrounded by smaller pieces which were driven inwards by explosive force to set the chain re-action going.  Hence its nick name of "Fat Boy".  This is the sort of totally useless information for which this blog is famous the length and breadth of my attic!

The other little-known fact of which I was reminded concerned the A-bombing of Nagasaki.  Not too many people know that Nagasaki was not the original target, that was to be the intended fate of Kokura, which lay in a conglomoration of industrial towns in the southern-most island of Japan, Kyushu.  It is a delicious irony that will be completely missed by any 'Greenies' that the thing that saved Kokura was pollution!  President Truman had laid down strict instructions that the A-bombs were to be dropped under visual rather than radar observation in order to avoid mistakes.  The smoke from all the factories around Kokura hid the specific aiming point for 'Fat Boy' and after several efforts it was decided to go for the secondary target of Nagasaki.  Bergamini reckons that if Kokura had been hit the death toll would have been at least 300,000 of the 600,000 who lived in and around the area.  As it was, the plane turned for Nagasaki and at this point yet more 'atomic uncertainty' enters the picture!

As the crew approached Nagasaki they saw considerable cloud formations and an argument began as to whether or not to disregard orders and use radar to identify the target - they were running low on fuel and time was of the essence.  Reluctantly permission was granted but suddenly Bombadier Beahan sighted a distinctive stadium through a gap in the clouds and he shouted to the pilot that he would take the plane in.  He asked for a slight alteration in course and then, at 10.58 am he released 'Fat Boy'.  But, Bombadier Beahan made a mistake and dropped his bomb more than two miles off target!  Directly beneath the bomb the destruction was total but because of the geography of the surrounding hills large parts of the city were shielded and only - only? - 40,000 perished, perhaps half of what might have been.  Yet more uncertainty arises as to whether or not Bombardier Beahan deliberately made his 'mistake' or whether perhaps he had been given a nod and a wink from higher up the chain of command.

Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle seems to apply to history as much as it does to sub-atomic particles.

 

Bringing home the Bacon #1

Sorry about the corny headline, it's a weakness and I throw myself on the mercy of the court!  However, I have rediscovered one of my old 'Favourites'  - Sir Francis Bacon.  What a wise, shrewd , old cove he was.  You can read him for yourself at the excellent Bartleby Books which might be a good idea because in paraphrasing him I am more than likely to set the old boy spinning in his grave with my misunderstandings.  Even so, for those of you 'working stiffs' without too much time on your hands, perhaps my occasional synopsizes will intrigue you enough to encourage you to look him up later.

In Essay VI, Of Simulation and Dissimulation, Bacon considers these behaviours particularly as they appear in the conduct of politicians:

There be three degrees of this hiding and veiling of a man’s self. The first, closeness, reservation, and secrecy; when a man leaveth himself without observation, or without hold to be taken, what he is. The second, dissimulation, in the negative; when a man lets fall signs and arguments, that he is not that he is. And the third, simulation in the affirmative; when a man industriously and expressly feigns and pretends to be that he is not.

Oh yes, several contemporary names instantly spring to mind in all those three categories!  He investigates each of them in greater depth:

For the first of these, secrecy; it is indeed the virtue of a confessor. And assuredly the secret man heareth many confessions. For who will open himself to a blab or a babbler? But if a man be thought secret, it inviteth discovery; as the more close air sucketh in the more open; and as in confession the revealing is not for worldly use, but for the ease of a man’s heart, so secret men come to the knowledge of many things in that kind; while men rather discharge their minds than impart their minds. In few words, mysteries are due to secrecy.

Next, he moves onto dissimulation:

For the second, which is dissimulation; it followeth many times upon secrecy by a necessity; so that he that will be secret must be a dissembler in some degree. For men are too cunning to suffer a man to keep an indifferent carriage between both, and to be secret, without swaying the balance on either side. They will so beset a man with questions, and draw him on, and pick it out of him, that, without an absurd silence, he must show an inclination one way; or if he do not, they will gather as much by his silence as by his speech.

Finally, simulation:

But for the third degree, which is simulation and false profession; that I hold more culpable, and less politic; except it be in great and rare matters. And therefore a general custom of simulation (which is this last degree) is a vice, rising either of a natural falseness of fearfulness, or of a mind that hath some main faults, which because a man must needs disguise, it maketh him practise simulation in other things, lest his hand should be out of [practise].

In his final paragraph he sums up the pros and cons of these essential political and social 'arts and crafts':

The best composition and [temperament] is to have openness in fame and opinion; secrecy in habit; dissimulation in seasonable use; and a power to feign, if there be no remedy.

There you have it - Politics 101!  

 

     Lord Edmund Blackadder                        Sir Francis Bacon

 

When Japan went mad!

 

(Sorry for the tiny font size but TypePad is playing up! 19/4: fixed!)

I am refreshing what passes for my, er, you know, my, um . . . memory and also learning a few more things about Japan and the decision to go to war with the United States.  There is no doubt in my mind that Hirohito was the luckiest war criminal of all time.  He it was who with enormous and lengthy deliberation led his country into an utterly useless and disastrous war that it was bound to lose and who not only survived but continued his reign as emperor!  I have remarked before on the similarities to the psychotic lunacy that gripped Wilhemine Germany in the early years of the 20th century but there was one huge difference.  Virtually no-one in Germany questioned whether or not war was the right policy and, equally, hardly anyone doubted that Germany would win.  But in Japan, the top High Command was riddled with doubters.  IN 1940, Yamamoto, the naval strategist (and near genius - only 'near' because he lost!), said this:

In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory.  But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success. (*)

His views were widely shared throughout Japanese government circles both military and civilian, and yet and yet, they still went to war.

To be fair, it was, to use the words of the dear old 'Duke of Boot' describing his own victory at Waterloo, "A fine run thing, the finest thing you ever saw" using the word 'fine', of course, in the old sense of 'close'.  Pearl Harbour was an unmitigated disaster for the Japanese.  There were only two real objectives in that surprise attack - the aircraft carriers and the dock installations.  The former had been shifted out by orders from Washington where the likelihood of war was well known, if not the details; and the latter were largely missed by the attacking aircrews who wasted their time sinking old and virtually useless battleships.

Six months later, after the inconclusive skirmish in the Coral Sea, the one truly crucial and historic battle was fought at Midway.  The irony drips from the telling when I remind you that Midway is, in the scale of the Pacific Ocean, the tiniest of insignificant specks consisting, as it does, of two microscopic coral shoals barely large enough to get a runway on one of them.  Midway was Yamamoto's next strategic aim.  In attacking them he was certain the Americans would have to commit the carriers he had missed before and in doing so he would trap them and destroy them.  Having cleared the Pacific of American carriers and with Midway occupied, the approaches to Hawaiian Islands were wide open.  They would be easily taken and then the next target was Panama.  This would pose an enormous threat to the southern States of America and in order to defend themselves they would be forced to withdraw support from Britain in its fight against Germany.

So everything, and I do mean absolutely everything, depended on the battle of Midway.  That the Americans won was due in large part to colossal luck and to heroism of the very highest order.  I stress that because the courage required by the aircrews of the attacking American planes was of the cold and calculated variety.  They knew, even before they reached their target, that they simply did not have enough fuel to get back to safety.  And the crews of the later torpedo formations also knew that their chances of surviving the attack as they lumbered slowly and at low level towards the massed anti-aircraft fire from the Japanese fleet, to say nothing of the Zero fighters screaming in at them from above, was virtually nil.  As one writer(*) put it, the Japanese were not the first to invent the kamikaze attack! 

So the Japanese lost but at this point, like their German counterparts who saw the (modified) von Schlieffen plan fail in 1914, the Emperor and his High C0mmand refused to face the inevitable and chose to waste millions of lives rather than lose face.

(*) Japan's Imperial Conspiracy: How Emperor Hirohito led Japan into war against the West by David Bergamini

The Sunday Rumble 15:4:12

I haven't indulged in a Sunday rumble for some time.  For newcomers, what happens is that instead of droning on and on, and then on for a bit more, on one subject, I sit here scratching myself and emitting short burps in different directions on different subjects.

Titanic RIP:  And, boy oh boy, do I mean REST in peace!  I don't know about you but I am sick to death of all this Titanic stuff, there seems to be no end to it.  Of course, there are no really decent wars or famines going on at the moment and so the MSM, bless their smelly socks, have nothing else to waste their ink or their running time on.  Of course, it's worth a pause and a quick thought or three but not his constant ghoulish obsession.

Darlings, I was wonderful!  I know you have all been on tenterhooks wanting to know how my rehearsals went for the important, nay, critical, role of Abhorson in Shakespeare's wonderful play Ye Olde Mysterie of Abhorson, ooops, Measure for Measure.  I think I can say with all modesty that I was a tremendous success.  The rest of the cast, including my understudy, who have been rehearsing the play for some time now were left in stunned silence at the end of my two scenes and one was heard to mutter, "Darling, wonderful isn't the word!"  Of course, it remains a mystery to me as to why the Bard in all his wisdom chose to give quite so many scenes to that bloody nun and Duke but that's the problem with writers, they never listen to actors!

China again - but no politics:  I missed the first half of the Chinese Grand Prix because I was swimming - oh, by the way, have I mentioned that I - oh, right - I have - fine, move on then, shall I? - anyway, I caught the last half and it was the best F1 race I hace seen for some time.  Many moons ago, in part of my rickety-rackety life, I was involved with one of the F1 teams and spent some time following 'the circus' round Europe.  As a man whose interest in cars has always rested somewhere on the minus scale I was surprised to find myself rather hooked on it.  However, like a lot of sports, you really do need to be there.  The sheer brute power of those machines can only be appreciated up close and personal, as it were.  Even so, today's race was terrific.  I think only one driver fell out and the remainder were really racing - at one stage there were three cars side by side hurtling towards a corner - exciting stuff and the fact that no-one was shunted off is a magnificent tribute to the skill of the drivers.  If you can catch a late recording of the race, watch it!  One oddity, I noticed, was the very low turnout of spectators.  I can't believe the Chinese are not interested.  Perhaps the organisers priced it too high, or perhaps times are beginning to get hard in China.

Prize-winning humbuggery:  I am grateful to my e-pal, Dom, who responded to my post on just one of the reasons why Obama and his wrecking crew need to go.  I reported, with glee, the tale of that intrepid investigator, James O'Keefe, who managed to waltz in to a voting office and obtain Attorney-General John Holder's voting ballot because, in line with government policy, no ID was required. All American Left-wing opinion and organisations are resolutely opposed to making voter ID a requirement and you do not need to be Brain of America to guess why.  Anyway, Dom sent me a film from the admirable PJTV who despatched reporters to various bastions of liberal organisations including, of course, John Holder's department and none were permitted to enter without proof of identity.  Watch the film - but have a sick-bucket to hand!

Will 'Dim Dave' make it to the next election?  All prime ministers go through a period of squalls and showers but usually they are confined to the perceived differences between them and their electorate.  The difference today is that Cameron is losing, at an accelerating rate, the support of his own backbenchers and his party workers.  They are catching up with what this erudite blog has been telling them for the last two years, that Cameron simply isn't very bright.  He's an Old Etonian twit with absolutely no political philosophy - and not only do I doubt he would understand what that meant, I doubt he could even spell it!  According to various reports, which began as whispers but are now being spoken out loud, he disdains the so-called 'worker bees' who keep the Tory party running in the country and surrounds himself with ex-public schoolboys of his own ilk.  He has never run anything in his life - and it's beginning to show.  So I ask, will he make it to the next election?  And if he's knifed in the back, who will play Brutus? 

A deadly beauty:  In the history of warfare was there ever a more beautiful but deadly weapon designed than the Vickers Supermarine Spitfire?  Even to today it still looks lethal. 

I am thrilled that we have cut a deal with the Burmese government to extract the twenty Spitfires which were buried there at the end of WWII.  If they can be restored they will be worth a fortune and what I hope is that the government will sell off some of them to provide a trust fund to keep, say, three of them in Britain as a heritage project.  If 'Dim Dave' does that I will forgive him his many sins!

 

Rendition - Elizabethan style!

Of course, I refer to the first Elizabeth not the kind, grandmotherly lady who adorns our throne today.  This from Ian Mortimer's 'must-read' book The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England which will tell you in engrossing detail how life was lived - and lost - in those more robust times:

Consider the case of Dr. John Story, a Catholic lawyer and MP, who is locked up in 1563 after speaking some poorly chosen words against the queen.  Escaping by night and reaching the Spanish ambassador's residence, he manages to slip the country and flee to the Netherlands.   There the duke of Alba appoints him to search all vessels coming from England, and Story assiduously combs every English ship for Protestant letters, books and messages.  The zeal with which he conducts his work leads him to becoming the leader of a group of  émigré Catholic activists, and more than just a minor irritant  to the English merchants trading with the Low Countries.  [Sir William] Cecil therefore decides to take action.  In 1570 he sends agents to Dr. Story who win his trust.  They join him in searching English boats, until one day they lead him onto a boat whose captain has been primed.  Dr Story is seized, taken to England and handed over to the privy council for interrogation and trial.  Found guilty of high treason, he is drawn, hanged and quartered.  'Black operations' such as this, in which government agents seize residents in a foreign country and subject them to rendition, torture and eath, have a long pedigree.

Tut, tut, who'da thunk it?!  Not that 'good Queen Bess' didn't sometimes live up to her image:

On July 1579 a young man named Thomas Appletree is fooling about with some friends in a boat on the Thames near Greenwich.  He has a loaded gun, which to the great amusement of the party he fires three or four times at random.  Unknown to him, the glass-sided royal barge is slowly floating towards them.  The queen is aboard, discussing with the French ambassador the possibility of her marrying the duke of Anjou, when one of Appletree's bullets strikes the helmsman six feet from her and leaves him lying on his back bleeding profusely.  The queen tosses the injured man her scarf and tells him to be of good cheer: the bullet was surely meant for her and the fact that it struck him is good news, for the assassin had failed.  Later, there is a thorough investigation, and Appletree is soon found.  He confesses and is duly condemned to death for endangering the queen's life.  A gallows is set up on the bank of the river so that he may be hanged close to the scene of his crime.  Before his execution, Appletree makes a speech to the assembled crowds.  He is no traitor, he says, but admits that through his carelessness he had endangered the life of the sovereign and therefore deserves to diw.  When he has said goodbye to his friends, the hangman places the noose over his head.  Just then, when he is on the very brink of death, a man in the crowd steps forward with a pardon from the queen.  She knows Appletree is just a silly young man, but he had to be taught a lesson. 

So, not only were the dark arts of the security services in operation 450-odd years ago but so were the ones of the public relations industry, too!

 

Never go back!

This has been a firm belief of mine ever since I made the mistake 40-odd years ago of paying a return visit to my old school.  Quite the most unsettling, disturbing action I ever took.  Perhaps I should make clear that I mean returning after a long interval is bad, regular returns are easier.

I am reminded of this by reading Ian Mortimer's superb book The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England.  As something of a Shakespeare fan I have often wondered (or perhaps wondered 'many a time and oft''!) what life was like in Stratford and London in those times?  Well, based on Mortimer's description the only words that spring to mind are 'bloody awful'!  Life, compared to today, was lived at snail's pace.  For everyone, bar the wealthy, if you wanted to go anywhere you walked - and walking in those days was definitely not a pleasure!  Water was scarce and had to be queued for and then carried.  You dare not drink it!  In the cities and towns the stench was abominable.  Personal hygiene was minimal to nil the further down the social scale you went and it wasn't too brilliant amongst the upper classes. 

If today you are worried about HMG storing your e-mails, then Elizabethan England is not for you.  Attendence at Church every Sunday and Holy Days was compulsory and absence was always reported by vigilant priests or nosey neighbours and the result, at best, was a hefty fine.  If your were Catholic - God help you!  And if the government didn't get you then the plague or general starvation during bad harvest times would.  If you were tempted to get away from it all by running off to sea, forget it! A sailor's life was such that I suspect the near certainty of an early and unpleasant death was actually a comfort! 

No, I think I'll stick to the 21st century and if Mortimer's descriptions are accurate - and I am certain they are - then I promise never to complain about anything ever again.  (Well, up until my next blog post, I suppose!)  One thing's for sure, you can stick 'Merrie Olde England' where the sun don't shine!

Treat yourself to Mortimer's book, it is truly fascinating.

 

Things to do on a holiday weekend

Well, I expect you have your things to do and for sure I have my things and never the twain will meet, I guess, particularly given that my entire weekend so far has been given over to designing a new PowerPoint talk on the subject of - wait for it - How the Japanese Lost WWII in the First Six Months!

Alright, I have said before, many a time and oft', that everyman's hobby is a total mystery to every other man.  But in this case several strands have linked in my life to bring about this particular hobby.  First, as you all know, I have a tendency to bore!  (I don't know why I put that doubt-inducing exclamation mark at the end because the fact is that I do like to hear the sound of my own voice or to read my own scribblings.)  Second, a sort of miracle has occurred in that a technophobe like me - no, that's not quite accurate, I think technoprat is better - has managed, against all odds, to master PowerPoint.  Each time I design a new slide filled with ever-more jazzy, snazzy tricks of the trade, I giggle and chortle in total childish pleasure which you will  understand better when I tell you that in this house it's the 'Memsahib' who changes electric plugs - on 'elf 'n' safety' grounds!

Finally, of course, the subject matter of most of my talks is history, mostly military history, by which I am endlessly fascinated.  It is all so much more satisfying than current affairs because  you know the ending!  Also, finding out the details of the colossal bollocks dropped by so many 'Very Important People' who are all supposed to be so much cleverer than me is deliciously satisfying.  Reading of their errors of omission and commission one feels, with absolute certainty, that one could have done so much better had one been in charge at the time!

As you regulars will know, one of my pet subjects has been the lead up to war between Wilhemine Germany and Great Britain at the beginning of the 20th century.  The similarities between those unhappy events and the equally disasterous ones which occurred between Japan and the USA in the 1930s  and early '40s is enough to make you weep.  Surely, you are tempted to moan, the fools could have seen where it would all end.  But they didn't, and that's history, and that's what makes it, for me anyway, totally fascinating.  It is also, and I cannot stress this strongly enough, absolutely contemporary.  America is facing yet another burgeoning Oriental state with the mother of all inferiority complexes and enough historical resentments to keep them belligerent for decades.  It is imperative that presidents and secretaries of state, both now and in the future, read up on their history books and understand what went wrong in the past.  Of course, I know this blog is read avidly in the White House  and has its own file in the HQ of the CIA, so let me just say that I am available to provide some of my lectures if the Dean of History at Harvard is otherwise occupied.  Usual terms, of course!

Anyway, enough of this prattle, the 'Cecil B. de Mille of PowerPoint' has work to do!

 

Schrödinger's pussy!

Well, I knew Schrödinger was pussy-mad because he kept banging on about that poor old pussy that he insisted be locked up in a box until some particle - or was it a wave? - anyway, something happened down at the really, really titchy level of existence and either poor old Tibby was dead or she was alive and no-one would know until they opened the box.  He won a Nobel prize for that but frankly I would have thought it was dead obvious - no pun intended!

However, according to a review by Nicholas Blincoe(*) of John Gribbin's latest book, "Erwin Schrödinger and the Quantum Revolution", the rascal kept forgetting High Science and instead went looking for Low Pussy!  Very low, in fact, because at one stage he fancied his neighbour's 14-year-old daughter, he impregnated a famous actress of the day and had to be warned off the 12-year-old niece of a friend!

I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked - but suddenly quantum physics has become just that bit more interesting!

(*) Blincoe's review is in today's Daily Telegraph but there does not appear to be a link at the moment.

(**) Via the comments below, Nicholas Blincoe has kindly sent the link to his review: 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9188438/Erwin-Schrodinger-and-the-Quantum-Revolution-by-John-Gribbin-review.html

 

What do you with a dragon? Hug it or slay it?

As the regulars here will know, I have decided that I must try and rectify my almost total ignorance of Chinese affairs.  To this end I have been pestering a friend of mine based in Singapore for a news site that would offer regular and informed reportage but the only one he suggested was behind a pay-wall (probably owned by 'Rupe', I suspect!) and I refuse to pay for my news.  But then I remembered - yes, yes, I know, I should have done it from the off - to try that cornucopia of information, Google.  Almost immediately I came across a truly fascinating book review from last year by Mr. Gordon G. Chang on the subject of Henry Kissinger's last book titled On China.  This critique published last Summer on the World Affairs site is worth reading in its entirety but I will pick out some salient points here.

Mr. Chang, hitherto unknown to me, begins by praising Kissinger for his very acute study of Chinese history from ancient times to the present day but then ends it with a sting in the tail:

When Kissinger writes about China’s past, he displays a subtle understanding of the country. When he relays his conversations with the endlessly fascinating Mao Zedong, he dazzles us. When he considers the future, however, he flounders.

It takes a brave man to gainsay 'The World's Greatest Living Geo-Politician' but Mr. Chang does not hesitate.  Whilst the book pretends to be about China, in fact, according to Mr. Chang, it is mostly about America's relations with contemporary China than which there is nothing more important facing the USA and, indeed, the rest of the world:

As Kissinger notes, “The relationship between China and the United States has become a central element in the quest for world peace and global well-being.”

As part of this quest, Kissinger articulates a vision of “a Pacific Community,” which he describes as “a region to which the United States, China, and other states all belong and in whose peaceful development all participate.” The concept, based on the Atlantic Community formed after the Second World War, would both “reflect the reality that the United States is an Asian power” and respond “to China’s aspiration to a global role.”

Mr. Chang, whose elegant side-swipes are delivered with the deadly accuracy of a black belt Kung Fu practitioner:

Nonetheless, in his more sober moments [my emphasis], Kissinger implies there is not much possibility of ever reaching across the world’s largest ocean to form this grand community.

At around this point warning bells started ringing in my head.  Beyond Wiki, I know nothing of Mr. Chang and his background but back in the '40s and '50s there was a China lobby operating in the USA whose power was only exceeded by its malignancy.  I don't know if it still exists in a 21st century form and nor do I know if Mr. Chang is part of it but if it is so then one needs to be aware that the hatred of these particular Chinese expatriates against the 'communist' rulers of China is deep and abiding.  (Incidentally, you will have noticed the inverted commas around the word 'communist' because I do not believe that today that is a meaningful or accurate description of the current Chinese government.)

Back to Kissinger.  In effect he advocates a live and let live policy:

A more likely development is what he calls “co-evolution,” which means that “both countries pursue their domestic imperatives, cooperating where possible, and adjust their relations to minimize conflict.” The most he says about this scaled-down goal is that the two sides should “attempt to elevate familiar crisis discussions into a more comprehensive framework that eliminates the underlying causes of the tensions.”

He absolutely wishes to avoid a constant state of tension and competition between America and China.  He uses the histoirical example of the mounting tensions between Wilhemine Germany and Great Britain at the beginning of the 20th century:

[H]e devotes pages to analyzing what happens when great nations compete without inhibitions. For this, he focuses on the late-nineteenth-century story of the rise of more than three dozen sovereign German states, which formed first the loosely organized German Confederation and then a powerful nation in the heart of Europe, thereby irrevocably changing a once-stable European system.

Kissinger shows that the English saw that conflict with Germany was inevitable, not so much because of Berlin’s avowed intentions but because of its growing strength. The British Foreign Office, therefore, viewed formal German assurances as meaningless. As early as 1907, diplomacy became ineffective, and war almost inevitable. “The crisis of the system was inherent in its structure,” he writes in what are the most thoughtful pages in the book.

In my view, that situation in which fear feeds belligerence which then nurtures yet more fear and then even greater belligerence has to be avoided in Sino-American relations.  It will not be easy.  There are elements within both countries, and I suspect Mr. Chang is one of them, who will insist on a hardline being taken.  Certainly there appears to be a faction (how big it is I do not know) within the Chinese leadership (using that word in its widest sense) whose aggressive tendencies can be seen in the way in which China aids enemies of America and actually undertakes large scale electronic attacks on American networks.  But also, there are forces within China who seem to understand what Wilhemine Germany never did, that they will gain more by peaceful economic means than by war.

It is a fascinating subject which will dominate the 21st century.  Mr. Chang's review of Kissinger's book is well worth reading because within it are the main strands of two entirely different approaches towards China.  However, in reading Mr. Chang's strictures concerning Kissinger's policy suggestions it is worth knowing that in 2001 he wrote a book forecasting the demise of China by 2006 because of the gross and undisclosed debts of the big four nationalised Chinese banks.  To be fair, his timing might be out but his prophecy could still come about.  By coincidence, I have just finished another article, on which I will be posting later, reporting a speech by the outgoing Chinese prime minister (bet you don't know his name - nor did I!) in which he proposed changes leading to increased privatisation of China's banking system.

I urge you, read the review and then beg, borrow, steal or even buy Kissinger's book.

 

Aren't coincidences creepy?

Just two days ago I was telling you about the mysterious death of an Englishman in China.  I mentioned that he worked on a part-time basis for a British outfit called Hakluyt & Co which had been set up by some ex(?)-MI6 officers.  I remember pausing for a milisecond over the rather odd name but then shrugged and assumed it was an amalgam of two names, probably the two main directors.

Today, exhausted after finishing the first cut of the year on my patch of the churchyard, I was relaxing and reading my latest book The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer (a 'Five Corker' read!)  Mortimer tells of the incredible voyagers of the late 16th century starting, quite rightly, with Francis Drake, the first man to captain a circumnavigation of the globe.  As these fantastic travels and explorations took place people began to write about them (my emphasis):

By far the most influential of these is Richard Hakluyt, who publishes "Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America in 1582" and the first edition of his greatest work, "The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation", in 1589.

So there you have it!  Two mentions of that odd name in two days.  Creepy or what?

 

 

I just don't know what London's coming to!

What in hell's name is going on in our capital city?  I ask because of this report of an incident near the churchyard of St. Paul's:

"Suddenly there is a great commotion near the market.  'Repent, England!' yells a man at the top of his voice.  He is dressed in black, handingout printed leaflets as he stridea along. 'Repent!' he shouts again and again, 'Christ Jesus is come with his fan in his hand to judge the earth!'  This man is no mean fool; he is a prosperous London citizen, Mr. Edmund Coppinger.  Another gentleman, also dressed in black, is following him, striding down the alley called Old Chamge in Cheapside.  He too calls out, declaring that 'Judgment Day has come upon us all!  Men will rise up and kill each other as butchers do swine, for the Lord Jesus has risen'.  The printed bills they hand out declare that they are intent on a complete reformation of the Church of England."

Well, I know the Archbishop of Canterbury has just handed in his notice and that there is likely to be a fierce competition for the job but this is going too far:

"For the illiterate majority in the crowd, they call out their message: 'The bishops must be put down!  All clergymen should be equal!  Queen Elizabeth has forfeited her crown and is worthy to be deprived of her kingdom.  Jesus Christ has come again.  The reborn Messiah is even now in London in the form of William Hacket.  Every man and woman should acknowledge him as a divine being and lord of all Christendom.'"

Of course, the whole thing is a con trick in the worst possible taste and everyone knows where these tricksters live so even the London 'plod' can find them and they are soon arrested.  From now on you will realise, in the unlikely event that you have not already guessed, that this is the London of yesteryear.  So you will not be surprised to discover that, instead of being given as is the process today, the services of a barrister free of charge, the ministrations of a psychiatrist, the tender care of a trauma counsellor and the possibility (at the most) of four weeks community service, they are charged with high treason and sentenced to death.  On 28th July [1591], Hacket is:

 "dragged on a hurdle to the gallows, hanged whilst he spits abuse at the hangman, then cut down and beheaded and butchered in the traditional manner, his headless body being cut into four parts, each with a limb attached.  Mr. Coppinger dies in prison: the authorities claim he starved himself to death. ['Yeah, yeah, sort of like, well, he fell down the prison stairs trying to escape, know wot I mean, m' Lud?']  Mr. Arthington enlists the support of powerful friends on the privy council and thereby saves his life, publishing his renunciation of all the things he has said as part of his penance."

All of this is to be found on the first two pages of the Introduction to Ian Mortimer's absolutely marvellous book, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England.  Er, actually, I have only read the first two pages before I rushed upstairs to tell you lot all about it so I really have no solid grounds for telling you that it is a terrific book - but it is - so there!  Go buy it - now!

 

The Battle of Britain

My e-pal, Dr. Richard North, has just published a book whose content, I guess because I haven't read it yet, is neatly summarised by its title: The Many Not the Few: The Stolen History of the Battle of Britain.  In it, I think, he attempts in his usual iconoclastic fashion to dismantle many of the myths that surround that particular bit of our history.  Alas, my guess is that his labours will eventually be filed under 'Gallant but Futile Effort' for I fear that nothing is so strong as the myths that swell our national pride.  Not, mind you, that everything our country did in WWII was myth because there was much that was deserved of the very highest praise and which should be set in the scales of historical judgment against that of which we should be ashamed.

However, it reminded me of the very excellent library of photos covering the whole of WWII which is available courtesy of The Atlantic.  I have published some of them and I needed a reminder that it was time for more.  These examples come from The Battle of Britain section.

This brings back memories although I cannot remember practicing this at my infant school.  However, the mother of the wonderful family who took me in as an evacuee from blitzed London used to make us sit under the kitchen table when the sirens went off.  Quite howmuch protection that would have afforded I did not ask at the time!

This might have been a safer haven but were it taking place today, with my incipient claustrophobia I think I might take my chances with the bombs!

On the other hand, I suppose I might have got over my claustrophobia!

And whatever, darlings, the show must go on, as these Windmill girls demonstrate.

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

Nah, it's yer Jesus gene wot does it!

Some more 'idle thoughts of an idle fellow' on the subject of the previous post because it is one of those topics which is inherently fascinating, well, it is to me, at any rate.  First, I think poor Ms. Chiao deserves a slight apology because, of course, her hard work was being paraphrased for a national news-sheet and was then further paraphrased by an ignorant oik like me, so the chances of her being misreported are high, certainly higher than the notion that a particular gene makes one race act differently from another.  Should a learned geneticist stumble into these columns by mistake I'm sure he or she will correct me but as I understand it, no single gene causes something else.  It requires other elements (genetic or bi0-chemical) to act with it and that combination is not a 'given', it is only a possibility, maybe a probabality, or perhaps it is merely a tendency.  We need to keep reminding ourselves that actually God does appear to play with dice despite what 'our Albert' said!

Even so, given a range of possible behaviours from 'a' to 'z' there seems to be a tendency for one group, be it racial or national, to choose one set of possibilities rather than another.  I stress "there seems to be" because, as I indicated in my previous post, one must be constantly aware that some of this perception is in the eye of the beholder, or even worse, it is simply an oft-repeated piece of folk-law which does not bear scrutiny. 

Despite that I can give you one example to which I have alluded before on this blog because I do think it is very solidly founded in historical fact, and also because it is a subject which I have studied at some length.  I refer to the North German 'tendency' to aggression.  This goes way back to the primitive tribes whose ferocity was legend.  Even the mighty Roman Empire drew a line at the Rhine and the Danube and, by and large, refused to cross over into what they considered to be an ungovernable hell-hole - the Afghanistan of their day!  The best explanation for this trait lies in geo-politics rather than genetics.  The plains of North Germany are flat and possess very little in the way of natural defensive barriers.  Consequently, they early tribes learned the advantage of 'getting your retaliation in first'!  It would be simplistic (the sort of thing you expect here at D&N!) to suggest that this idea of attack being the best form of defence was always and forever an automatic response from the North Germans, however, there is a considerable historical record covering their development from tribes into a nation state (Prussia) to support the notion that they attacked aggressively more often than defended placidly.  Von Scharnhorst in the early 19th century expressed it exactly, “Prussia should never conduct a defensive war, her geographical position and her lack of natural and artificial means of defence do not allow that option.”  Of course, their behaviour might be induced by genetics but my bet is on geography!

However, even geography is not the final arbiter because over the lat 300 years our sense of geography has been altered radically and those changes in perception have speeded up dramatically in the past 50 years with satellite observation, intercontinental air services and all the paraphenalia of this modern age.  Today, we are all looking at ourselves in a totally different geographical context from that of our predecessors of even just 4 or 5 generations ago.  What happens in Iran really does matter to us here in Britain with an immediacy not felt before!  So as circumstances alter so too will behaviour, or at least, it ought to because failure to change usually results in destruction.

Returning (at long last) to the sorts of differences that obviously fascinated Ms.Chiao and her colleagues, I would offer up a different explanation.  I will call it, only slightly joking, the Jesus gene!  The pathetic little runts who constitute what they like to call 'the revolutionary class' of today and who defiled the grounds of St. Paul's cathedral in London recently, seem to have forgotten that Jesus Christ, whoever and whatever he might have been in the spiritual sense, was far and away the greatest revolutionary in history.  I am still amazed that in a mere 300 years his teachings had toppled the ancient religions from their primacy to the point where the Roman emperor himself converted.  I would suggest that not the least of his revolutionary teachings was that all men, from kings to commoners, were equal before the eyes of God.  Suddenly, kings were no longer to be worshiped, only God.  It was only necessary to 'render unto Caesar what is Caesar's', the remainder is God's.  The knights and barons at Runnymede took the revolution a step further by ensuring that henceforth the laws of the land governed kings as well as subjects - and that reallywas revolutionary.

The Chinese (to use one example) did not have the benefit of Christianity until the late 19th century.  Until  then all power rested with whatever emperor or war-lord ruled.  There was no private space for Chinese individuals as there was for practicing Christians in Europe and without that there was no chance of change.  Today in China, I would suggest, there is a new factor which will definitely alter things forever and that is private wealth based on capitalism.  Today, the Chinese have their 'private place', it is their homes which they have bought and paid for.  There is nothing like private property as a baulk against over-mighty government.  Hence, changes will occur in Chinese behaviour and I don't suppose they will be that different from western Europe.

 

But this makes me tremble - with rage and fear!

As you regulars will know, I have just finished two histories of the Korean war which left me with my chin sagging onto my chest!  I had intended, with courage above and beyond the call of duty, to begin a history of the Vietnam war but, alas and alack, the biography of von Manstein intervened and has been followed up by David Glantz's very detailed version of Operation Barbarossa and, as I haven't even reached Moscow yet, you will understand my delay in turning to Vietnam.  Well, to be absolutely honest, I was so shocked at the revelations disclosed in my books on Korea that I was sort of looking for any excuse not to touch Vietnam because I just know that is going to be even harder to take.  Now, courtesy of Cafe Hayek, I have been pointed to a memoir printed in History News Network by Lt. Gen. Charles Cooper, USMC (Ret.)

The General describes a day in November 1965, very early in the Vietnam war, when he was on the staff of the senior admiral in the USN who was also, of course, a member of the Chiefs of Staff (CoS).  All three Joint Chiefs plus their chairman, the Head of the CoS, were extremely reluctant to follow the strategy as laid down by Sec. of Defence, McNamara, which involved a huge increase in soldiers to put as many 'boots on the ground' as possible. The CoS, in their efforts to come to a sensible and if possible an agreed strategy, turned to the CIA for help.  The General's description of the result is hilarious until you think of the blood and treasure about to be spilled:

The CIA was of little help, though it produced reams of text, executive summaries of the texts, and briefs of the executive summaries-all top secret, all extremely sensitive, and all of little use. The principal conclusion was that it was impossible to predict with any accuracy what the Chinese or Russians might do.

How much did they cost - even back in those days?  Anyway, rather than commit to a protracted land war, an end to which they could not see, the CoS agreed that a better policy was to impose a naval blockade of North Vietnam and it's ports thus severing supplies from Russia, and mount a massive air campaign against Hanoi to force the North Vietnamese government to come to terms.  (As far as I can tell from this memoir, there was no discussion on the possibility of simply walking away!)  Anyway, the CoS had been pressing McNamara for weeks for a direct meeting alone with the president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief which was their right.  After considerable delaying tactics they were eventually granted a meeting.  It was Gen. Cooper's job, he was then of much lower rank, to bring in to the meeting a large map upon which the CoS could make their points.  An easel was to be provided for this map and he would then leave this very secret and private meeting.  However:

Precisely at two o'clock President Johnson emerged from the Oval Office and greeted the chiefs. He was all charm. He was also big: at three or more inches over six feet tall and something on the order of 250 pounds, he was bigger than any of the chiefs. He personally ushered them into his office, all the while delivering gracious and solicitous comments with a Texas accent far more pronounced than the one that came through when he spoke on television. Holding the map board as the chiefs entered, I peered between them, trying to find the easel. There was none. The President looked at me, grasped the situation at once, and invited me in, adding, "You can stand right over here." I had become an easel-one with eyes and ears.

What ensued defies belief!  The Joint Chiefs, all experienced officers with active service credentials and at the very pinnacle of their various services, presented their reasoned case for a totally different approach to this war.  They might have been right or they might have been wrong but what happened then is jaw-dropping:

Normally, time dims our memories-but it hasn't dimmed this one. My memory of Lyndon Johnson on that day remains crystal clear. While General Wheeler, Admiral McDonald, and General McConnell spoke, he seemed to be listening closely, communicating only with an occasional nod. When General McConnell finished, General Wheeler asked the President if he had any questions. Johnson waited a moment or so, then turned to Generals Johnson and Greene, who had remained silent during the briefing, and asked, "Do you fully support these ideas?" He followed with the thought that it was they who were providing the ground troops, in effect acknowledging that the Army and the Marines were the services that had most to gain or lose as a result of this discussion. Both generals indicated their agreement with the proposal. Seemingly deep in thought, President Johnson turned his back on them for a minute or so, then suddenly discarding the calm, patient demeanor he had maintained throughout the meeting, whirled to face them and exploded.

I almost dropped the map. He screamed obscenities, he cursed them personally, he ridiculed them for coming to his office with their "military advice." Noting that it was he who was carrying the weight of the free world on his shoulders, he called them filthy names-shitheads, dumb shits, pompous assholes-and used "the F-word" as an adjective more freely than a Marine in boot camp would use it. He then accused them of trying to pass the buck for World War III to him. It was unnerving, degrading.

Rather as the Joint Chiefs were at the time, I am left speechless.  However, I make the same judgment against them as I do against their predecessors at the time of Korea - they should have had the guts to resign.  Men together use profane language but for the most senior officers in their country to be harangued in that fashion should have resulted in their joint resignation.  They didn't, and like Hitler's generals who were similarly treated, they must share the blame of what was to come.

 

Manstein: great general but an ordinary man

I have finished Mungo Melvin's excellent and thorough biography of Field Marshal Eric von Manstein and I am now pondering whether to award myself the Knights Grand Cross for my stamina in marching halfway across Russia and then marching back again, or just the good, old British army's Long Service and Good-ish Conduct Medal.  Yes, it has been a hard, long flog but definitely well worth it.

Melvin, in the title to his book, calls Manstein "Hitler's Greatest General"  and it would take more than the opinion of an ex-Corporal like me to argue against it.  And anyway, ex-Corporals don't come out of this book too well!  As it happens, I didn't really need Melvin's book to convince me of his claim because I had already picked up enough in general reading to realise that Manstein was a brilliant general.  None of the other German generals, not even (or perhaps, especially) the over-hyped Rommel, came near Manstein's tremendous expertise in the handling of not just armies but groups of armies.  This is mainly, but not entirely, a military history and Melvin, an ex-general himself, makes the task of following the various manouvres relatively easy although the uninitiated would do well to brush up on the very useful chart below the first map which explains the military symbols which differentiate the hierarchy of army formations from Army Group down to Brigade via Army, Corps and Division.  This will make the maps easier to understand - and talking of the maps, let me sing a chorus in praise of the publisher of the paper-back edition, Phoenix, for going to the expense of printing all the necessary maps - in colour! - and putting them all in one place so that they can be easily found.  I have lost count of the number of military histories whose maps are utterly useless!

I will not rehearse all the details of Manstein's various campaigns, apart from anything else, Melvin tells it much better than I can.  But what I do wish to dwell upon is Manstein the man, and it is in this area that Melvin's book is superb.  He takes a long, hard, cool look at his subject and hands down a very fair assessment.  Manstein was a cultivated, Christian gentleman, far removed from the bull-necked Nazis who feature in the cartoons of the time.  But, he was also a Prussian officer, born and raised in the ethos of all that being a Prussian officer entails including a profound sense of patriotic duty and obedience!  Until 1918, that unquestioning obedience was offered to the King of Prussia who eventually became the Emperor of Germany.  Whatever private doubts the officer class entertained about Hitler as being, so to speak, 'not quite a gentleman', these had to be quashed after they were forced to take a Christian oath of loyalty to the new head of state.  A man like Manstein would not, could not, easily break such a profound oath sworn over a bible.

In weighing and admiring Manstein's obvious genius as a commander, Melvin never lets his detachment be subverted.  He accuses Manstein, along with virtually the entire German officer corps, of a lack of strategic, as opposed to operational, insight which allowed him to follow Hitler into a war with Russia which was never going to be winnable.  This strategic blind spot, a characteristic shared by most of the Anglo/American high command (with the exception of Alan Brooke and, eventually, Marshall) was exacerbated by excessive hubris, and this hubris was itself inflamed by the easy, early and stunning victories of the Werhmacht in Poland and Western Europe.  What could go wrong?  Well, eventually Manstein found out, but surpisingly late in the day.  According to Melvin, the German high command perpetually under-estimated the ability of the Russians to recover and, above all, to learn from their mistakes.  Not the least of German military weaknesses lay in their constant failures in the field of Intelligence at all levels, and that surprised me.

The book goes on to cover Manstein's eventual arrest and charge as a war criminal responsible for the crimes against humanity that were carried out by the SS who, whilst not under his direct command, nevertheless operated in his area of responsibility.  Again, Melvin weighs the pros and cons, including Manstein's own very carefully worked out defence, and cooly decides that Manstein has much to answer for. 

Two things occurred to me whilst reading this book which the author does not dwell upon.  First, Manstein had an example before him of how a brave and clear-thinking Christian officer and gentleman should have behaved with a malignant creature like Hitler in charge, and that was Gen. Ludwig Beck, Chief of the German General Staff in the late '30s and Manstein's direct superior.  Beck began by falling for Hitler's promises but as time went on he saw through the pretence and sickened by Hitler's attitudes he resigned.  Later he, he joined the conspiracy against Hitler and upon its failure he commited suicide.

The second thing that occurred to me was how, in one respect at least, this 'septic Isle', as I call it rather rudely, has developed some immensely wise and prudent political structures.  Thus, our military swear allegience to the monarch, and the monarch ('Gawd bless 'er!') has virtually no political power at all.  Thus, should some Hitlerite poltroon arise in this country our military need have no moral problems in seeing him off.  (Even as I write that I can sense several of you reaching for your keyboards to hurl the name of Tony Blair at me - don't bother, there is absolutely no comparison).

Anyway, I recommend this book very highly.  Not just a tale of soldierly 'derring-do' but also an accurate portrayal of a great man with great flaw lines running through him.  Did I mention the word 'Shakespearean'?  No, I would never stoop to such a cliché, you know me!

Manstein: Hitler's Great General by Hugo Melvin and it's on Kindle for only £7.99.

 

On the cusp on the Eastern Front!

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had volunteered for the Eastern Front in order to serve with Field Marshal Eric von Manstein, arguably Hitler's finest general, courtesy of a biography written by Maj. Gen. (ret'd.) Mungo Melvin.  Little has been heard from me on this subject for some time and I expect you have all been worried, er, you have, haven't you?  Anyway, the book is enormous which is entirely in keeping with the events it is recording.  I have 'fought' my way almost, but crucially not quite, to Stalingrad.  Led by the General (and the author!) I have lost Kharkov but retaken it.  Now Kursk looms!  Anyone with even a slight knowledge of the war on the Eastern Front will know Kursk was quite simply so huge, so mammoth, so gigantic a battle that I am sure you will forgive me for taking a bit of R&R before I continue the advance.  Apart from anything else, the bloody book weighs a ton!  Tomorrow I'm back up the sharp end reading as fast as possible and hopefully I will be able to give you a detailed review next weekend.  In the meantime, if you are hesitating on buying a copy - don't!  It is excellent.

 

So what would you - yes, YOU - do in the circumstances?

Damn!  That book (see previous post) is forcing me to think.  What would you do if your country was captured, so to speak, by a criminal magalomaniac who had wooed the majority of your fellow countrymen to his support and won a free and fair election?  Bear in mind that his true criminality did not begin to show itself until after he had won the election.  It is also important that you imagine such a thing happening now - today - and that therefore you have no idea what the future holds or where this man will lead you and your country? 

What would you do?

He might threaten all sorts of extreme actions but, hey, who believes anything a politician on the make says?  And anyway, your country is at this very moment a complete economic disaster brought about, you believe (not without reason), by the current crop of useless politicians who have allowed themselves to be bullied by foreign governments.

What would you do?

You have a good job in government and this allows you to see the damage your country and your countrymen are suffering.  You have a family including young children who are depending on you as you, in turn, depend on a steady job and income.  All your friends and aquaintances are extolling the breath of fresh political air your new leader, despite his somewhat florid style of speech, is promising to breath into your nation.

What would you do?

The future for your country looks bleak but as time goes on under the new man's leadership things definitely look better and prospects for the future are improving almost month by month.  True, his government has pulled one or two strokes which are not, strictly-speaking, absolutely proper in an old-fashioned sense but the indubitable fact is that the shambles of previous governments have been swept away and things are really beginning to work again.

What would you do?

A few years later the country has been transformed.  It is now a prosperous and efficient economy with the population hard at work and earning good money.  Your armed forces have been reconstructed and are now fit for purpose.  Your nation is once again a power in global politics whose views are eagerly sought by others on various international matters.  True, there have been some unfortunate internal policy mistakes made by the government which have gone against your sense of natural justice, but there is no doubt that the country has prospered, as indeed have you and your family.

What would you do?

Now your country is being threatened.  All the media are full of the dangers surrounding your nation.  Your leader, who has worked such enormous miracles, constantly warns you  that neighbouring powers are determined to set your beloved homeland back to where it was, a second-rate, economic basket-case.  All your new-found prosperity might be taken away.  From the record of his achievements, your leader is obviously a shrewd, if ruthless, operator who knows and understands the world.  Do you know any better?  Can you see into the future? Could you commit treason?

What would you do?

Well, in somewhat simplified terms I have made the point, I think.  That was very much the dilemma facing the likes of Gen. von Manstein and millions of other Germans during the 1930s.  Some, a very rare few, did see the reality and the likely outcome and took steps.  Alas, for some of them the steps were towards an even worse outcome, and here I refer to the very brave but foolish Germans who joined the 'Red Orchestra' spy network which fed tremendously useful intelligence to the Russians - and which Stalin ignored!

So, what would you do?

 

Manstein: Hitler's greatest general?

I have placed a question mark at the end of my title but Maj. Gen. (ret'd) Mungo Melvin leaves it as a statement of fact in the title to his biography of this very enigmatic man.  I am only on p. 58 of this superb book and there are another 450-odd to go so perhaps I am pushing my luck by giving it a 'rave revue' already!  However, two things are instantly very clear.  First, von Manstein was a superb fighting general who deserves a proper biography; and second, Gen. Melvin is a very literate and highly intelligent writer more than capable of explaining and illustrating von Manstein's strengths and weaknesses.  It is also obvious from the fact that Melvin only reached the rank of Major-General that he was too intelligent for his military confreres which is why, I guess, that he went no higher in rank - intelligence, smacking of intellectualism, is not encouraged in the British army!  Knowing it as I do, I suspect that the fact that he was an engineer cannot have helped, either.  (I have some fellow-feeling because I, too, began what I laughingly call my military 'career' as a member of the Royal Engineers and it took me 9 years to reach the rank of corporal.  Mind you, I was thick!)

One fascinating point that he raises, of which hitherto I have only vaguely suspected, is that although the German officer class was superb and well above all others at the tactical and operational level, they hardly gave a thought to what I might call the geo-strategic level.  To give but two examples.  You only have to say, slowly, that in 1906 von Schlieffen's operational plan was to destroy the entire French army in six weeks to realise that, the world being the way it is, that was a rather risky idea!  Similarly, Hitler's assault on Russia broke the 1st rule of war which states that you should never invade Russia.  (The 2nd rule is that you should never attack America however soft and dopey it looks!)  The German generals religiously (and I use that word deliberately) worked out in superbly efficient detail exactly how the attack should be executed but none of them appear to have told Hitler that it was madness and that disaster would surely and inexorably follow because of geo-strategic considerations which had not been, er, considered!

I don't care, rash fellow that I am, but from the basis of having read 58 excellent and fascinating pages, if you have an interest in military history - buy this book!

 

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more"

And paraphrasing the next line:

Or close the wall up with our American dead

To say nothing of the Korean, Chinese, Commonwealth and other dead! 

Probably to your immense relief there has been a slight pause in my reading of the second book(*) I possess on the subject of the Korean war.  The reason is simple, I couldn't face any more of it and I just knew it was going to get even worse!

In my last post on the subject I left you in the winter of 1950.  McArthur, unforgivably, had ignored the mass attack by tens of thousands of Chinese troops that had taken him completely by surprise and which, after five day's fighting, had melted away back into the mountains.  Again, no-one in Washington stopped him when he went back on the offensive intent on pushing an American army up to the Yalu river and the Chinese frontier.  With the remorseless and blindingly obvious result that the Chinese attacked again and this time there was to be no pause, they smashed into the allied armies and within a matter of weeks they had pushed them back south of Seoul.  Such blind stupidity and total military ineptness should have cost MacArthur his job there and then - but still Washington, fearful of public opinion, failed to act.

At this point we touch upon the very heart of democracy and find within it a deliciously rich vein of irony.  Democratic governments are supposed to listen to the voice of 'The People' despite the very obvious fact that 'The People' are usually frequently wrong.  Here we reach one of those double-handed situations where, on the one hand, it is right for politicians to listen to the The People, but on the other hand, politicians are supposed to have the courage to lead The People even against their instincts, and even if it results in their political demise at the next election.  I would suggest that when your own (conscripted) troops are dying in huge numbers the duty of leadership is paramount.  Truman, Acheson, Marshall and the Combined Chiefs of Staff all failed in their duty and stand accused of cowardice.

In 1951, the second year of the war, the field commander of the allied armies was killed in an accident and his place was taken by Gen. Ridgeway, a good fighting general but not necessarily a great student of grand strategy.  However, he did force MacArthur to place all the troops in Korea under his command and he began a fight back which, by the summer, took the allies back to more or less where they were when the North Koreans first began the war.  It was at this point that MacArthur finally overstepped the mark and Washington plucked up its collective courage and sacked him.  Because both sides were now more or less where they started Washington began to make peace moves.  MacArthur, in an attempt to scupper them issued a bulletin, insisting that the war was yet to be won; and then he went one step further by writing a letter to a Republican Congressman, in effect, attacking Truman's policy.  Well, politicians might not understand war but they usually understand politics and MacArthur, having crossed the political Rubicon, was finally sacked.

The peace talks ensued and there then followed nearly two years of such infantile stupidity and folly, mostly on the part of the Americans, as almost to defy description.  These peace talks could have been settled in weeks but instead they dragged on and on and tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians perished needlessly.

Regular readers will know of my deep regard for America.  I am aware of their weaknesses and mistakes in WWII, but if they suffered their Pearl Harbour, we suffered our Dunkirk, too.  At any rate, together (more or less) we learned our lessons and in a partnership (of sorts) we proceeded to overthrow two great powers and win the first global war.  I think it was a remarkable partnership and one which we should look back on with pride.  That, I fear, has been my undoing in considering American policy post-WWII.  I listened to the more realistic voices of the likes of Enoch Powell who warned many times that America was a blundering child in the complex world of global strategy, but whilst I acknowledged that mistakes were made from time to time I remained steadfast in my general support.  This study of the Korean war has not so much changed my mind as shattered it.  Now, with considerable dread, I must turn to the war in Vietnam which, in my unforgiveable idleness, I have never really studied.  If anyone can recommend a really good, detached history which covers the Washington/political end as well as the actual campaign, I would be grateful.

Oh dear, 72-years old and still learning!

(*)Korea: The Lost War by Bevin Alexander

Norman Geras on the oddity, not the banality, of evil

I haven't mentioned Norman Geras for some time.  It's partly my fault and partly his!  Mine because I am idle and his because he does not allow comments, and one of the things I like most about blogs and blogging are the conversations that can ensue.  Anyway, I 'popped in' today and was immediately taken by one of his posts.  Incidentally, for those unaquainted with Norman Geras he is a man possessed of Marxist leanings but any self-respecting Marxist tyranny - and when are they anything but - would have him shot on the spot!  Apart from that he is also a cricket nut, too!

Anyway, yesterday he was quoting an article by Howard Jacobsen in The Indepedent which posed an intriguing question put to him by a survivor of Buchenwald:

"In the mornings," he said, "in Buchenwald, when the guards lined us up to count us, to see how many had survived the night, and we stood there in the cold in just our shirts and bare feet, an orchestra played, a Jewish orchestra playing classical music. It had no effect on me. I was too numb to feel anything. Now, before I am able to sleep, I have to listen to classical music. No, it doesn't bring back memories of the music the orchestra played then. I listen to classical music now because it helps me to forget. They are not connected. But this is my question – why did the Germans order that music to be played?" [My emphasis]

Why, indeed?!  Was it, perhaps, an example of what we Brits call 'a Yerman yoke' to match the one over the entrance saying "Arbeit Macht Frei"?  One should never underestimate the German capacity for absurdist humour!  It cannot have been for the enjoyment of the Germans, after all, most of the guards would have preferred some 'oom-pah-pah' Berliner songs rather than Beethoven.  Nor, as the survivor testifies above, could anyone have imagined that it would affect the prisoners since it was obvious that they spent every waking hour wondering if they would ever experience the next waking hour!

So perhaps it was just an exquisite but meaningless act of extra cruelty.  Norman suggests strongly that no reason is needed because it simply derives from the innate cruelty which lies in human nature:

There is no limit to the inventiveness of the human capacity for cruelty, and in that sense evil is bottomless. This doesn't mean either that everyone will do evil or that humans are more evil than good. It only means that people's creative talents are boundless and when they apply themselves to cruelty no moral or other barrier will restrict them from horrors or from ghastly ingenuities.

From that, certain other dangers arise which are always and forever with us:

It is also why so many well-meaning sociologies and psychologies of extreme human wrong-doing miss a certain mark. Endeavouring to find preceding causes influencing individuals to behave badly - something one can always do because no human action comes out of a causal vacuum - they have a tendency then to downplay the gravity of the evil committed, as if it proceeded by an unbroken chain from its putative causes. But what the example Howard was given here shows is that such evils always 'exceed' their causes, real or supposed. As depressing as it is to have to acknowledge this, they reflect those human sources of all that is also admirable about our species - the freedom to choose and the fertility of the human imagination.

Spot on!  Good man that Norman Geras, all we have to do is knock that Marxism out of him - ve haf vays, you know!

 

Bad news for lawyers so good for us - er, I think!

A somewhat esoteric subject arose in Der Spiegel which reported on a legal case brought by descendants of Italian citizens massacred by German troops in 1944.  The case was joined by similar litigants from a small town in Greece where a similar atrocity took place.  In both cases the claim for reparations was pursued by individuals not by their national governments.  The highest Italian court judged in favour of the litigants and allowed them to pursue a policy in which German-owned property in Italy could be seized and sold if the German government refused to pay up.  The case went higher, to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which on Friday pronounced in favour of sovereign governments and against individuals.  In effect, what they said was that whilst one government can sue another, individuals may not.  To be honest, I'm not sure what to make of this.  On the one hand, I am always and forever anti-governments; on the other hand, I am sick and tired of foreigners suing my government - or me, as I like to think of it when it comes to shelling out money!  If any of my readers have a view I would be interested to hear it.

An historical sporting fragment

I love some of the minutae of history, particularly when it concerns an event which you think you know about but, jogged into looking a little harder, you realise you had it wrong all the time.  Thus, I am obliged to Der Spiegel for raising the subject of Jesse Owens and the 'Hitler Olympics'.

Provoked by their article I went to Wiki to brush up my knowledge of this amazing athlete.  I had not realised that he won four gold medals at the 1936 games, the 100m and 200m sprints, the long jump and the 400m relay.  It was the long jump that caused the controversy because in that his closest rival was Luz Long (at right in the photo), an archetypal Aryan and exactly the sort of man Hitler expected to easily beat a 'subhuman black'.  To Hitler's intense irritation Owens won on the very last jump and to his eternal credit, Luz Long immediately approached him, offered his congratulations and embraced him - an act which earned him a reprimand from Rudolph Hess.  Subsequent talk of an eternal friendship between the two men is probably exaggerated and in any event Long was later killed whilst fighting in Sicily.

Needless to say, there is an irony of the most bitter and sardonic sort in the life story of Jesse Owens.  In Berlin he was free to eat and drink and stay in hotels with whites but back in America it was altogether different.  According to Wiki:

After a New York City ticker-tape parade of Fifth Avenue in his honor, Owens had to ride the freight elevator at the Waldorf-Astoria to reach the reception honoring him.^[4

And there is an even greater irony to be chewed upon and enjoyed - sort of - in the fact that whilst Owens received a commemorative signed photograph from Hitler, he didn't even get a 'kiss my arse' from that leading 'brotherhood of man', democrat socialist of his day, President Roosevelt, or his successor, Harry Truman.  It was only in 1955 that President Eisenhower, a Republican, bestowed the first national honour on Owens.  (To be fair to the 'Great Republic', I do think the way it gradually divested itself of its public colour prejudice is one of its very greatest achievements.)

Owens's subsequent life was one of several ups followed by several downs including bankruptcy and a conviction for tax evasion.  However, late in life the US government appointed him as a Goodwill Ambassador and he ended his life in reasonable financial comfort.  Perhaps the most bitter of all the ironies in his life is that after being a smoker for 35 years he finally died at the age of 66 of lung cancer!

 

More war - sorry!

I am finding it difficult to choose exactly the right words to express the shock ... the dismay ... the anger ... even the anguish ... I am feeling as I delve into the history of the forgotten war - Korea 1950-1953.  Also, to be honest, the guilt because I really should have studied this long ago and learned the lessons.  However, I will leave all that for later but in the meantime, for those ignoramuses like me, I will continue to tell you the highlights.

In my last post on the subject I told you of MacArthur's stroke of military genius (and enormous luck!) in undertaking the highly risky Inchon landings far to the north, and due west of Seoul, whilst the remainder of his army was bottled up in the far south east corner of the country and in danger of being swept into the sea.  Inchon was a stunning success and vindicated the psychotic old brute in his far-away HQ in Japan.  The unutterable pity of it is that at this, the very pinnacle of his success, MacArthur threw it all away!  Virtually the entire North Korean army was in the south and by landing so far north, there was nothing to oppose him except rear echelon troops.  MacArthur with his army in Seoul could have raced eastwards and cut off the entire North Korean army.  Their leadership, true to style, failed to tell their front-line units that an enemy army had appeared behind them for four days!  Not that there was much they could do anyway because now it was their turn to be pressed backwards and being a 'peasant army' they had no trucks to aid their withdrawal, and anyway, American airpower made movement during daylight almost impossible.

Map courtesy of: http://www.johndclare.net/cold_war10.htm

So there was MacArthur's golden opportunity but instead, obsessed as he was with conquering the whole of Korea, and also with placing a powerful American army on the Chinese border, he ordered an advance to the north, in fact, an advance all the way to the Yalu River.  Even a lowly ex-corporal like me could have told him that the Chinese communist regime which had just won a long and bloody civil war in which the Americans had aided their enemies, were never going to allow that to happen.  The further north the Americans went the more convinced were the junior army intelligence officers and their battalion and regimental commanders in the field that something was not right.  The geography of northern Korea is mountainous and the American army rarely if ever left what roads they could find but up in 'them thar hills' literally tens of thousands of Chinese troops were hiding.  Camouflaged or crammed into caves which they dug during the night, they were invisible during the day to ground troops or even over-flying 'planes.  The junior commanders on the ground were aware of an eerie  feeling of being watched but they could not find hard evidence, and anyway, their intelligence assessments were firmly squashed by MacArthur's ghastly Chief of Intelligence, Charles Willoughby, who sounds as though he was from 'frightfully British' stock but was actually from Prussian lineage and even affected a monocle from time to time.  Willoughby, along with every officer in MacArthur's HQ simply worked on the premise that whatever 'the General' said was right and any information that contradicted it must be ignored or altered.  Truly, reading about MacArthur and his HQ, and bearing in mind the death and destruction that would emanate from his pronouncements, is enough to almost reduce me to tears.

MacArthur absolutely dismissed any notion that the Chinese would intervene and so colossal was his reputation and his political influence, via the Republican party and the MSM of the day, that no-one in Washington, not Truman, not the Chiefs of Staff, not Acheson, the Secretary of State, no-one, despite their doubts and their uncertainties, stood up to the stupid, old brute.  It was dereliction of duty on a mammoth scale and hundreds of thousands died for it.

In the first few days of November as the American army crossed the last big river before the Yalu there took place one of the strangest operations in modern military history.  Suddenly, from the (apparently empty) mountains surrounding the triumphant American (and SouthKorean) armies as they advanced up the roads leading north, tens of thousands of hitherto completely hidden Chinese troops descended on them.  Entire South Korea formations simply disappeared as did many American forces cut off, as they were, from any support because the Chinese had infiltrated round and behind them.  It was bloody carnage but - just as it had suddenly started - so, equally suddenly, after about six days, it ended.  The Chinese simply melted back into the mountains!  The battered, bashed and bewildered Americans were left to try and sort themselves out from the dangerous shambles in which they had been left.

In effect, the Chinese, realising that their diplomatic warnings had been ignored by the Americans, had decided to administer a bloody nose on their army in order to re-inforce the fact that under no circumstances would they allow an American army to be based next to their frontier.  And yet, despite this terrific and terrifying example of Chinese fighting power, still the American establishment ignored it!  Honestly, reading the two books I have on this subject, I cannot tell you how many times I have had to put the book down because I was so shocked and upset at what I was reading.  People rail at the WWI generals because of what they see as the useless slaughter but those men were caught in a technological time-trap between the invention of the machine-gun and the very late invention of the tank.  No-one at that time could work out how to get a man made of soft tissue across 250 yards of open ground against machine-guns firing 600 rounds a minute.  But here, we have some of the best political brains in America, a General Staff made up of officers experienced from WWII and a General who had helped defeat the Japanese, and all of them, absolutely all of them, could not recognise what the Chinese were signalling when they sent the American army reeling backwards  in early November 1950!

Instead, and it almost makes me weep, that evil, old fool, MacArthur, insisted that the enemy troops involved were not regular Chinese army but only volunteers(!) and whilst it had momentarily taken them by surpise, the advance to the Yalu could now begin again.  And Washington caved in - again!  They even allowed him to bomb the bridges over the Yalu river.  Thus, a massive and this time not a temporary intervention by the Chinese was certain.

Sorry to have bored on about this subject - and there will be more - but I cannot think of any history books which have produced such an emotional response in me.  I am all too aware of the folly of political leaders, our own British history is replete with examples, but I don't think I have ever read of an entire political and military establishment, with virtually no exceptions, taking leave of all commonsense and judgment even when provided in the bloodiest way possible with hundreds of body-bags as a warning.  Suddenly, Vietnam is beginning to make a sort of horrible sense.  I'm not sure I can bring myself to read the history of that war, at least, not until I have recovered from this one.  Anyway, thank you for letting me get it off my chest.  This blog is my therapy!

 

All the news that's fit to print!

The principal object of [this blog] is to convey intelligence.  [Look, I do the jokes round here!]  It is proposed that in [Duff & Nonsense] to give this, the first and most prominent place, to a report of all the leading occurrences of the week.  In this department, the reader may always expect a summary account of every public proceeding, or a transaction of interest, whether the scene may lie at home or abroad, that has taken place within the seven days preceding the termination of our labours; which, we wish it to be remarked, close on Saturday on midnight.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

The Russians are advancing slowly in their invasion of Bulgaria: the army has crossed the Danube at several points, and thrown a bridge over the river.  The fort of Isakza has yielded and the town is burnt; but the more important fortress of Brailow, or Ibrail still resists; at least, there is no certainty that it has fallen.  The Emperor Nicholas has pitched his camp at Babadagh, a town of Bulgaria, lying between twenty and thirty miles from the south bank of the Danube.  Count Wittgenstein has issued a proclamation to the Bulgarians . . . "I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves" . . .  hang on, hang on, that's not right - stop the presses - that's another Wittgenstein, for God's sake!

Oh dear, I knew this would end in disaster so I had better explain.  In the course of the afore-mentioned (see below) 'tidy-up-your-garret-or-else' exercise insisted upon by the 'Memsahib' in which I have been engaged for what seems like days already, I came across a facsimile of the very first edition of The Spectator dated Saturday July 5th 1828, and all the above, er, with a few slight alterations, was their opening column which I thought might add a touch of much-needed class to this blog.  But then Wittgenstein, or his great grandad, had to stick his nose in and confuse me.  Typical!  Bloody philosophers!

 

Ne dites pas, "Non, ce n'est jamais arrivé".

Not bad my French considering that I had to take two goes to pass my 'O'-level.  Oh, alright, yes, I did have just a little help from mon ami, 'M. Google Translate'.  Anyway, the point of this (fairly useless) post is to ponder on the decision by the French Senate to ban the denial of genocide in general, and in particular, the genocide allegedly inflicted on the Armenians by the Turks in 1915.  I use the word "allegedly" for the simple reason that I have no idea whether or not the Turks are (or were) guilty of what is a crime under international law.  Commonsense (never a totally reliable indicator, particularly mine) indicates that a great number of Armenians perished at the hands of the Turks but whether it amounts to 'genocide' is quite beyond my pay grade, and indeed, my knowledge, to decide.  It sounds to me like the sort of squabble likely to keep lawyers busy for years, and international lawyers for decades, if not lifetimes!

So, setting aside guilt or innocence (and thus risking a hefty fine and/or imprisonment were I to say this in France), I would like to dwell on the sort of people and their mind-set that allows them to insist that other people say or unsay things.  It is a peculiarity mostly confined to those of a political persuasion and not necessarily full-time politicans only, but also the myrid bottom-feeders who swim round the arsehole of parliamentarians and nibble away at them until they take on board the message of the day.  Nor, of course, is it confined to our French neighbours.  I am still waiting in trembling fear for a knock on my door at 3.00 am because I have twice referred to Ms. Diane Abbot MP as a "fat, black clown" - and when it comes, I don't think it will be at the behest of the United Union of Clowns who are so useless that they can never carry a pail of water ten feet!

What these 'denialist deniers' fail to understand is that simply banning people from saying what they think or believe does not somehow make the beliefs go away.  In fact, I suspect that it has just the opposite effect of making the gagged believe all the more strongly that they are onto 'The Truth'.  It must be true, they say to themselves, quietly, under their breath, because otherwise why would the authorities make such an effort to silence them?  And because they have been silenced there is now no opportunity to bring to their attention certain established facts which might change their minds.  I mean, personally, I am more than willing to listen to arguments attempting to convince me that Ms. Abbot is, in fact, not fat, not black and not a clown!

 

Megalomaniac? Yes! Swine? Yes! But . . .

I was very rude about the late Gen. MacArthur recently which was quite easy given the wealth of material on his manifold weaknesses and failings but of course, as Shakespeare always demonstrates, men are complex creatures, never entirely one thing or another.  So, to counter-balance the ton of iniquity I spilled on his head the other day it is only right that I should add 'military genius' into the other scale.  Perhaps 'flawed' military genius would be a more accurate description.

For those unfamiliar with the Korean war let me explain that the North Koreans attacked over the border, the 38th parallel, on the 25th June 1950 and within a couple of months they had hurled the South Korean army and the hastily assembled American forces back into the south east corner around the port of Pusan.  A quick glance at the map shows you what a dire state the allies were in by September.

Map courtesy of: http://www.johndclare.net/cold_war10.htm

In fairness, I should make clear that where-as the North Korean communist state was highly militarised throughout its society, the South was not and, despite its president being very hawkish, the army was not in particularly good condition and was totally unable to cope with a massive onslaught from the North.  Equally, the first American army units rushed to Korea did not, on the whole, perform very well.  In fact some of them were dire and in several instances the men simply broke and ran.  However, this was not the battle-hardened army of 1945.  Most of them had long-since been demobed.  These were green troops whose only service had been in the luxoury of occupied Japan where many of them lived better than they did at home.  In the way of all democracies in peacetime, and in an American climate which thought that their sole possession of 'The Bomb' had banished war, basic military equipment and training had fallen away.  Difficult to believe for an American army but they were actually short of ammo!

In addition, the American army was trained to fight in straight lines, so to speak, that is, on a continuous front with supporting units either side.  However, so pitifully small were the numbers in these early days that there was no possibility of a continuous front and this gave the advantage to the North Koreans who were trained to avoid frontal attacks (except for the purposes of pinning an enemy in place) but always to seek an open flank and manouvre through the gap and come up behind the enemy.  Time and again this operational method wrought havoc in the hastily drawn-up plans of the Amrican commanders as they were forced back and back and finally pushed into the Pusan pocket.

But even as they were beaten, smashed and bashed backwards with local commanders fearing for a Korean 'Dunkirk', back in Tokyo that grandest Grand Panjandrum of them all, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, was already working out how he was going to utterly destroy the North Korean army and conquer their half of the country.  And he would do it with a stroke which Hannibal, victor at Cannae in 216BC, and von Schlieffen, designer of the plan that would have destroyed a French army in 6 weeks in 1914, would have applauded.  Instead of pouring yet more troops into the Pusan pocket and using the gradually accumulating American power to start pushing the North Koreans back, he would use his total command of the sea to mount an amphibious landing, not just on the flank of his enemy, but way back behind him where there would be virtually no combat troops only those working to supply their frontline troops.  He chose Inchon, the harbour that is immediately west of Seoul.

He could not have chosen a more difficult site if he had tried!  When the Navy and the Marines looked at the difficulties they were appalled.  It had a small island smack in the middle of the harbour which an attacker would have to assume would be defended vigorously.  There were no beaches to land troops on, only high beach walls like a citadel.  The currents were powerful and fast, and the tides enormous, rising or falling 30 feet.  Time was pressing because the vicious Korean winter was approaching and there was only a tiny window of opportunity of four days maximum in September in which a landing could take place.  All these genuine and enormous difficulties MacArthur simply brushed aside and told his staffs to get on with it.  He understood that precisely because of all these difficulties, his enemy would think it absurd for the Americans to try anything on the harbour at Inchon.

Well, he did it, or at least, his exceedingly brave and skilful servicemen did it and, at a stroke, suddenly the Allies had a knife at the throat of the North Korean army, or at least, a knife across their supply lines.  Thus, the North Korean army which was all in the south thinking that victory was theirs was forced to recoil backwards as fast as it could go.  It was at this triumphal point, his genius vindicated, that 'The Great Architect of Victory', Gen. Douglas MacArthur, beset with pride and hubris made a colossal error.  More of which later.

ADDITIONAL:  Further to the comments added by 'JK' and Hank I would like to pay tribute to this man leading an assault at Inchon; a superb marine, a brave soldier and an excellent leader of men.  Let his memory stand as an example of the best of America - via Wiki:

Lieutenant Baldomero Lopez of the Marine Corps is shown scaling a seawall after landing on Red Beach (September 15). Minutes after this photo was taken, Lopez was killed after covering a live grenade with his body.^[67] He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

 

A 2nd tour of duty in Korea!

Oh yes, my sense of duty to my devoted - er, you are devoted, aren't you? - readership knows no bounds and having finished one massive tome on the subject of the Korean War I felt sure that somewhere in the wreackage that constitutes my bookshelves I had another book on the subject which I had never actually read.  Sure enough, after about three days searching, lo and behold, I found it lurking somewhere beteen the Punic Wars and Austerlitz - slight error of navigation, I feel!  It is by a man called Bevin Alexander and it is called Korea: The Lost War.  It was first published in 1986 and as I am only on p.38 of nearly 500 pages it is, perhaps, a tad early to judge but so far, so good.  What I am enjoying are some of his asides, such as this fascinating passage:

Truman was following an obligatory course laid down long before.  Alexis de Toqueville in his classic study of the United States in the 1830s focussed on an American reality when he wrote: "The men who are entrusted with the direction of public affairs  in the United States . . . may frequently be faithless and frequently mistaken, but they will never systematically adopt a line of conduct hostile to the majority." [Not least, I suppose, because unlike so many other leaders they have to face their public every four years!]

De Toqueville also observed there is a propensity in the United States "to obey impulse rather than prudence, and to abondon a mature design for the gratification of a momentary passion."  De Toqueville noted that only George Washington's inflexible stand and his immense popularity kept Americans from allying themselves with France and going to war against Britain at the time of the French Revolution.

Sound fella', that Washington, I will not have a word said against him, er, despite him being a scoundrel and a rebel!

ADDITIONAL:  I only read on a few more lines and came across this:

More specifically to the point, de Toqueville also spotted another American propensity - to cloak whatever we do, however harsh or unfair or inconsistent, with a mantle of legality.

Shrewd observer, that Toqueville chap, must buy his book one of these days!

 

56–58 Am Großen Wannsee, Berlin

Last Friday, as Der Spiegel reminds me, was the 70th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference and if there is a God one would have prayed that he might have arranged a Lancaster-load of bombs to fall on that elegant villa on the 20th January 1942.  On that day, 70 years ago a collection of fanatics, intellectuals, security policemen and bureaucrats met to take the Final Decision.  There was nothing special about the meeting, it only lasted around 2 hours, and for most of the participants it was but one more meeting in a constant schedule of meetings.  The result, of course, was horrific almost beyond description.  However, it is worth emphasizing because it seems to have been forgotten, or perhaps 'buried' is a better word, that it was not the first such decision of that sort and the results, compared to other efforts in mass extermination both before and after, were paltry by comparison.  It is appropriate, and admirable, that the Germans represented by their President, remembered the anniversary.  However, if you are waiting for Russia or China to commemorate their monstrous acts of human extinction, please do not hold your breath, it could endanger your health!

Incidentally, anyone wishing to see a depiction of the conference should treat themselves to a DVD of Conspiracy, a film of the event starring Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci amongst many other very fine actors.  It is a great example of art and artifice telling truth.

 

J. Edgar Hoover: man or monster?

Clint Eastwood's film, J. Edgar, provides an opportunity, or at least a nudge, that it is perhaps time to try and judge the man fairly.  His reputation has taken some 30-odd years of calumny either by direct (and usually false) accusation or by sly hints and nudges until today he is considered to be a monster.  I have no particular view simply because I know little or nothing of the man but I do recognise a witch hunt when it is in full cry!  John Preston in yesterday's Telegraph puts up, if not a stout defence of the man, at least a plea for a fair and factual weighing of the pros and cons of his life.  Like all men, Hoover had his faults, and the 'Big Men' of any age tend to have virtues and vices to match - think Churchill, Roosevelt, and so on.  However, as Preston points out, one thing cannot be gainsayed, Hoover turned the original FBI from a gang of incompetent, corrupt rascals into a superb police force and in doing so insisted on a scientific approach to crime-fighting.  The FBI were the first to have a national fingerprint database and Hoover encouraged his newly formed forensic department to investigate the possible uses of blood type and handwriting analysis as well as wire-tapping techniques.  Undoubtedly he stayed in office for too long and thus his individual enemies became over time battalions.  Still, to be attacked by both Richard Nixon and Harry Reid is, I feel, no mean achievement!

 

As my jaw dropped, my eyes opened

First, some personal background to explain this particular post.  I have a fairly good but only a general layman's knowledge of WWII, although that tends to be concentrated on the European side of the conflict.  In any event, my specialist reading more or less stopped from the summer of 1945.  I know virtually nothing of the next 20 to 30 years other than what I read in the papers at the time - yes, quite!  I must have been dimly aware of the gap in my knowledge because I can think of no other reason to explain why I purchased David Halberstam's book The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.  Anyway, I did and I read it and, as my title above suggests, I was both shocked and educated.  This is a first class history book but it is also part-horror story and an almost un-put-downable thriller.  I stress "almost" because there were places where I was so moved by pity or anger that I simply could not read any more for a while.  What Halberstam describes is the best of America and the worst of America!

Let me sketch in the background for those, like me, who are woefully ignorant of the situation between 1945 to 1950.  At the end of WWII in the Far East, the Russians and the Americans agreed to divide Korea, hitherto a Japanese colony, with the northern half given to Stalin's tender mercies, and the southern under the stewardship of Washington.  Frankly, the USA was not particularly enamoured with the country and in their first policy mistake they failed even to include it in their defence strategy plans because they did not consider it important enough.  The north was run by the first of the Kim family, a megalomaniac, the first of a dynasty as we are now finding out.  From the very beginning Kim was agitating to be allowed to attack the south which he was convinced would rise up in support of his communist faith.  However, he was restrained by Stalin, the most cautious of careful dictators.  The south was run by Syngman Rhee whose latent dictatorial tendencies were only just held in check by the Americans.  He, too, needless to say, was eager to march his (mostly useless) army north in order to re-unite his country.

During those five years most attention in the Far East was directed towards China and the mammoth struggle going on in the civil war between Mao and Chiang, the nationalist leader.  The USA, under the generally wise leadership of Harry Truman refused (thank God!) to commit American troops to the war but under pressure from the vociferous (and Republican) China lobby he did spend huge amounts of treasure in the form of money and military equipment.  This was despite growing proof on the ground, and the confirmed suspicions of some smart young men in the State Department, that Chiang’s nationalists were so corrupt, so cowardly and so ineffective that it was all a colossal waste of time and effort.  During this period, as we all know, Mao finally won and Chiang was forced to flee to Taiwan (Formosa, as it was called then).  However, Chiang’s clever, smooth, corrupt and corrupting operators in Washington continued to provide political ammunition to the Republicans which they in turn fired at Truman’s Democrat administration.  They were aided in this by the despicable Henry Luce who owned most of the influential papers and magazines.

Meanwhile, sitting in Tokyo like a latter-day Roman consul, was General Douglas MacArthur.  There are almost no words to describe this man but here are few to give you the flavour of the man - boastful, preening, lying, cheating, insubordinate, delusional psychopath.  It is understandable, but not necessarily forgivable, that Truman took so very long to sack this monster who, primus inter pares, was most responsible for the dreadful casualties amongst American (and allied) lives during the first part of the war.  His two principal ‘cohorts-in-crime’, Ned Almond (Chief of Staff)and Charles Willoughby (Intelligence Chief), should, in my opinion, have been put up against a wall with MacArthur between them and all three shot dead!

Again and again in this tragic tale we see the Janus-like aspects of this war, which was to be repeated ad nauseum in Vietnam, in which all reasonable and intelligent observers on the ground could see what was the truth of the matter but none of it filtered to the top with sufficient strength to correct the picture in the minds of their leaders.

Halberstam’s book moves effortlessly between the freezing fox-holes of the Chosin Reservoir to the air-conditioned offices in the White House and the Congress.  He makes clear that all the leaders involved made major miscalculations.  Stalin let Kim mount his attack confident that America would not intervene.  MacArthur advanced to the Yalu River equally convinced that China would not intervene.  Mao ordered his armies across absolutely confident that with their communist faith to inspire them they would overcome advanced technology and sweep the soft Americans into the sea.  MacArthur was insistent that the Chinese would never attack an American army and when they did exactly that, he and his cohorts, steeped as they were in their racist estimation of the “laundrymen” they were fighting, boasted that they would not only defeat them in Korea but given the chance, they and Chiang’s forces in Taiwan would invade and conquer China itself.

It is a fascinating if appalling story, well told, and, above all, invaluable as a guide to how the American system works, or, as in this case, failed to work.

 

Because I'm feeling idle - right?!

Yes, it's one of those somnolent days where energy is waning fast and I feel the inexorable draw of my armchair acting like gravity but tinged with the anticipation, although not entirely unalloyed anticipation,  of reading further chapters in one of the most jaw-dropping history books I have ever read - more of which later!  In the meantime, and without even a blush of shame, I hereby present you with a stolen extract from Adam Smith's The Theory Of Moral Sentiments which Russ Roberts of the excellent Cafe Hayek re-published today.  I will even nick his title which, as you would expect from Cafe Hayek, is entirely appropriate:

Adam Smith on the the self-deception of politicians

Amidst the turbulence and disorder of faction, a certain spirit of system is apt to mix itself with that public spirit which is founded upon the love of humanity, upon a real fellow-feeling with the inconveniencies and distresses to which some of our fellow-citizens may be exposed. This spirit of system commonly takes the direction of that more gentle public spirit; always animates it, and often inflames it even to the madness of fanaticism. The leaders of the discontented party seldom fail to hold out some plausible plan of reformation which, they pretend, will not only remove the inconveniencies and relieve the distresses immediately complained of, but will prevent, in all time coming, any return of the like inconveniencies and distresses. They often propose, upon this account, to new-model the constitution, and to alter, in some of its most essential parts, that system of government under which the subjects of a great empire have enjoyed, perhaps, peace, security, and even glory, during the course of several centuries together. The great body of the party are commonly intoxicated with the imaginary beauty of this ideal system, of which they have no experience, but which has been represented to them in all the most dazzling colours in which the eloquence of their leaders could paint it. Those leaders themselves, though they originally may have meant nothing but their own aggrandisement, become many of them in time the dupes of their own sophistry, and are as eager for this great reformation as the weakest and foolishest of their followers. Even though the leaders should have preserved their own heads, as indeed they commonly do, free from this fanaticism, yet they dare not always disappoint the expectation of their followers; but are often obliged, though contrary to their principle and their conscience, to act as if they were under the common delusion. The violence of the party, refusing all palliatives, all temperaments, all reasonable accommodations, by requiring too much frequently obtains nothing; and those inconveniencies and distresses which, with a little moderation, might in a great measure have been removed and relieved, are left altogether without the hope of a remedy.

Mr. Roberts wanted one passage emphasised which I have done and hope, thereby, to escape a charge of literary larceny.  It is an irony of considerable bitterness that Scotland could produce such a superb philosopher of economic theory and then, over the centuries, sink into such a socialist slough of despond as exists there today.

 

"The Iron Lady"

Much against my will I went to see this film.  From what I had read in various reviews I thought the idea of filming a bio-pic of a lady, still alive today, suffering with dementia and seeing her past life through flashes of remembrance was likely to be very distasteful.  However, 'SoD' talked me into going because he thought it was brilliant.  Well, not for the first time, he was right and I was wrong!

First let me say that I understand those who knew Lady Thatcher personally and who have been affronted by what they think is bad taste on the part of the film-makers.  However, I saw and heard nothing that could be taken in the smallest way as a sneer or a gloat at her current condition.  Quite the contrary, because of her suffering she shone through as an even greater heroine than her reputation indicates.  In fact the film was positively tender in its portrayal of her and her marriage to and love for Dennis Thatcher.  It was acutely accurate but painful, I think, in the way it showed the disintegrating relationship between her and her children, the unfortunate collateral damage of a successful career in politics.  Above all it showed the sheer guts and determination of a woman who fought her way up through the massed ranks of Tory men and seized the leadership from under their silly noses.  Sorry to trot out the usual old Dickensian cliché but really, "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times" and the film shows it fairly, by which I mean neutrally, if not absolutely accurately to the last tiny detail.

Putting it as simply as I can, Meryl Streep, an actress I have not hitherto admired overmuch, gave a master-class in acting.  Drama students from now on should be forced to watch her performance as part of their training.  Every single detail was thought out, worked on, practiced and then given over to a performance of stunning and seemingly effortless quality.  I have tried to think of another performance by an actress of equal worth and the only one that springs to mind is Lisa Minnelli in Cabaret - maybe I will think of others tomorrow.  Suffice to say that Meryl Streep is truly excellent in every respect.  At this point I would like to add my hope that if they give an Oscar to make-up artists then those who worked their magic on Ms. Streep's face in her aged scenes definitely deserve to take the prize.

I will confess now that at certain moments in this film I was blinking rather furiously to keep back the tears.  The film is an astonishing achievement and far from being in any way an insult to the Lady in question - it is her monument.

 

Alan Turing: crushed by conformity

I have mentioned before the fact that that very nice old man, 'Rupe', sent me a devilish clever 'magi-recording-playback-thingie' which has only taken me several months to master.  Needless to say, having mastered it and recorded numerous items on it I hardly ever watch any of them!  It must drive poor rich old 'Rupe' potty.  However, today, having been robbed of watching an exciting 'footie' match between the two Manchester teams (and hoping thereby to see a full scale inter-Manchester riot to follow) because the ref sent off one of the players in the first ten minutes - pillock! - I decided to try and watch one of the programmes I had recorded.  I chose a 'dramatised documentary' by Channel4 on the life and early death of Alan Turing.  It is an irony of the gloomiest sort that the technology behind 'Rupe's 'magi-thingie' could be traced back, in whole or part, to the genius of Alan Turing, himself.

With countries as with people there are 'different strokes for different folks'.  Thus, in most countries of the world, if you step out of line they shoot you.  Here, in this "scepter'd Isle", we 'conform' you out of existence, and at no time did we do it better than the 1950s.  Honesty impels me to confess that, personally, looking back to the '50s and my teenage years, I think of it as almost a lost golden age of safety and security.  But then, I wasn't an outsider.  I was a conformist.  Turing's tale, which is too well known for me to retell here, shows what happened if you failed to conform.  No need for the lead-filled cosh, water-boarding, Gulags or any of that, just steady, constant, unrelenting pressure by the authorities - who never failed to call you 'Sir' - until you fell back into line.  This is what Turing suffered.  They crushed the spirit and then the genius and finally the life out of arguably the greatest British genius of the 20th century.

The film kept repeating that Turing was the man who did more than any other to win the war.  Nonsense, of course, there were others equally deserving of that sort of praise, but he was certainly up there with them.  Nor, to be accurate, can the surreptitious pressures of the security services be entirely blamed.  By any standards, unless you knew the man intimately, Turing was a walking, talking security risk, not just because of his homosexuality but more because of his other-worldly innocence.  Alas, government bureaucracies, especiallyif they have the word 'Intelligence' in their title are often short of that very ingredient.

However, none of that excuses the lack of proper action by contemporary governments.  As far as I know there are only two 'memorials' to this English genius.  The first is the 'Alan Turing Way', a ghastly dual-carriageway on the outskirts of Manchester where he worked at the University.  The second, set up by private funds, is a statue in a Manchester park set, appropriately, between the Univerity and a 'Gay Village'.   In my view it really is time that the nation, through the government, set up a suitable memorial in central London to his lasting memory.

 

America, oh, America!

Sometimes my ignorance appalls me.  I don't expect to know everything about everything, nor even a little about everything, but occasionally (well, quite often, actually) I stumble into the wide open space of total ignorance on a subject about which I really ought to know something.  This confessional has been prompted by an excellent book to which I referred in an earlier post, David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.  For an amateur, general interest 'student' I have a fairly good knowledge of WWII but it all ends at 1945.  There-after, up until, say, the last 25 years, I know nothing.  Not that I 'know' that much of these recent years either because until the history books are written none of us do but I actually lived through the late '40s to the early '60s and it is all a blank.  However, Mr. Halberstam's book is putting that right but only at teh cost to me of a series of constant shocks.  I am only halfway through and already I am sitting in my armchair, shaking my head, unsure whether to laugh or cry, and instead plaintively wailing "America, oh, America!"

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times".  America had won a world war defeating, with a little help from her friends, two powerful enemies on opposite sides of the globe.  The decidely dodgy Roosevelt was dead and to everyone's surprise a farmer turned (failed) haberdasher with no college degree became president.  Harry Truman belied his background because he was both shrewd and tough.  He was also, by Washingtonian standards, dead straight.  He ordered that the priority for the nation was to ensure the future prosperity and safety of war-shattered Europe.  This displeased many parts of the Republican party and the American public who were under two baleful influences.  First, the Anglophobia of middle-America which was determined to return to the isolationism they preferred before those wily Brits tricked them, for a second time, into a war they didn't want.  Secondly, and even more malignantly, the China lobby, led by the smooth, corrupt and corrupting Chinese ambassador, Wellington Koo, and a bevy of Chiang Kai-shek's American-based relatives, plus the almost mad, fanatical campaigns of Henry Luce, the publisher of the then influential Time and Life magazines.  Truman and Acheson, his Secretary of State, plus a coterie of smart young men in the State Department known as the 'China Gang', knew that all was lost in China and that it was only a matter of time before the communists took over ... and yet ... and yet ... under the pressure of constant and virulent attacks led by Luce the administration was forced to keep supporting the insupportable Chiang and his rotten-to-the-core regime.

That America did this once is, I suppose, forgivable but to do it twice, as they did later in Vietnam, is not!  As I write those words, believe me, I am all too aware of the fact that we Brits are now fighting the Third Afghan War which is proving as unwinnable as the previous two - is that stupid or what?   Anyway, in the late '40s, with Chiang (and his gold) now esconced in Formosa (Taiwan) the stage was set in 1950 for the two madmen in North and South Korea to wage war with each other.  Here, entering stage right with his villainous demeanor, comes General Douglas MacArthur, a man verging on clinical insanity.  I intend to write more on him later.  In the meantime, again, I can only mutter with genuine emotion, "America, oh, America!"

 

Well, if I was as ugly as that . . .

. . . then I suppose I, too, would have become an apologist, Marxist historian if only to emulate the tactics of the even uglier Jean Paul Sartre who was thus, from his, er, distinguished intellectual heights, able to remove the knickers from some equally ugly but awfully willing and grateful, female, Marxist students - the old goat!

Mr. Eric Hobsbawm (he is probably 'Professor' or at least 'Doctor' but I refuse to use his misbegotten titles) is, according to Richard North at EU Referendum:

He is a Marxist and was a long-standing member of the now defunct Communist Party of Great Britain and the associated Communist Party Historians Group. As such, he has been (and still is) an apologist for one of the most vile regimes this earth has ever spawned, openly justifying a system responsible for the death of 15-20 million people (at the very least), and denying the extent of its crimes against humanity.

Now I am not one to criticise 'Her Maj', not least because my forthcoming knighthood might be placed in jeapardy - sorry, did I just say something funny? - but her decision to appoint this despicable, old Stalin arse-licker as a Companion of Honour was a dreadful mistake.  I am delighted, via Wiki, to quote my old e-pal, Oliver Kamm, who has, alas, long since disappeared behind Rupe's paywall at The Times:

 "Hobsbawm has rarely missed an opportunity even after communism’s demise to obfuscate its record".

In addition, Kamm reminded us that:

In 1994, [Hobsbawm] answered "yes" in a BBC interview to the question, "What (your view) comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?"

What can Her Majesty have been thinking of to award this dreadful, ugly, old Stalinist with a high honour?  Even more important, why on earth didn't she ask me for my opinion?

 

Consider Korea!

Go on, just for a few minutes, I have!  Well, I have had to because I am in the process of reading David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.  I am only partly in to it but already I can recommend it highly not just as an excellent introduction to a forgotten war but also for they way it sets both the war and its principle actors in a historical setting.  I confess now that I know virtually nothing of this war despite having lived through it as a child.  The only totally useless piece of knowledge I have is that Michael Caine served up the very sharp end of it as a private in the Royal Fusiliers which has always served to make me view him with some respect.  However, back to Korea ...

One might say, 'alas, poor Korea, the Belgium of south east Asia'.  It has, just like Belgium, been seen as strategically important by various great powers in the near vicinity - China, Japan and - I needed nudging to remember of this - Russia with whom it shares a common frontier!  Hence it has been constantly marched through and conquered by whomsoever was strongest at any particular time.  The Japanese quite literally colonised the place from around the beginning of the 20th century until they lost the war in 1945.  Any of those Left-wing dafties who constantly inveigh against British colonisation should read up on how it was done Japanese-style.  Horrific does not do it justice!  There was resistance of sorts and two men became leaders in exile.  One was Kim Il Sung who was pushed out northwards into the waiting arms of Stalin's politbureau.  Not that he needed pushing because he was a fanatical Communist and nationalist whose only aim in life was to re-unite his country which had been divided by Russia and America along the 38th parallel.  In the south, Syngman Rhee, another fanatical nationalist ended up in the USA where he devoted himself to ingrationating himself into American political circles before his return to South Korea where his aim, like his North Korean counterpart, was to unite the country.  Both these men achieved their political positions in 1945 at the end of WWII.

Hovering  over this potential powder-keg with a slow-burning fuse was Gen. McArthur, the 'Grand Panjandrum' of Japan who, with rather surprising intelligence, was guiding that country from the Deity-worshiping traditions of its former era into a modern democracy.  His knowledge of, and/or interest in, the two Koreas and the highly dangerous and mounting pressures there was virtually nil.  Even more disgraceful was his nonchalent disregard of the blindingly obvious run-down condition of his own American troops who had long since lost their equipment and war-ready status of 1945.  In this book, Halberstam devotes some time filling in a portrait of McArthur, his loathsome, stupid father and, even worse, his ghastly mother.  It is both fascinating and repellant.

All of this is doubly interesting given that our TV screens have been filled recently with images of what can only be described as the Orwellian society that has developed in North Korea.  Have you ever, even compared to the old Soviet thugs, seen such a collection of hideously ugly, dessicated. old mass-murderers as those North Korean generals and apparatchiks lined up during the recent funeral of their 'Dear Leader'?  I do just hope that the American leadership is more engaged with the dreadful possibilites in Korea than they were back in 1950.

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam

 

What goes around, comes around!

Snarky, I know, but sometimes, m'Lud, I just can't help myself! 

A German soldier stands in the tower of the cathedral, gazing down upon the captured French city of Strasbourg on July 15, 1940. Adolf Hitler visited the city in June of 1940, declaring plans for the Strasbourg Cathedral, stating that it should become a "national sanctuary of the German people." (AP Photo)

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/07/world-war-ii-axis-invasions-and-the-fall-of-france/100098/

So, not too much change there, then!

 

The red mist that never clears

First of all, yes, I enjoyed a super Christmas with 'SoD' and his 'bouncing Czech', thank you for asking, and, yes, I am now in strict training to ready myself for New Year's Eve which, more and more as I get older, takes on the characteristics of a marathon!  But now to more curious matters.

I have remarked before on the oddity of coincidence.  Just before Christmas I was involved in some knockabout stuff with the mouth-breathing 'Trot-lot' brigade who inhabit the comments box at David Osler's (interesting) site.  The subject was the putative idea of a State funeral for Lady Thatcher when she dies.  It reduced them all to paroxysms of fury.  I could understand it if we were arguing 25 years ago when the shot and shell of battle were still flying about but at this late date how could anyone look back and say that the Thatcher medicine was anything other than absolutely necessary for a desperately sick country and which, on the whole, was beneficial.  Before any Trot brave enough to enter these hallowed columns starts to froth at the mouth, I do not mean that everything was perfect - nothing ever is - however, it is obvious beyond any argument that for the mass of 'the people' (dread words!) prosperity increased and the country was fortified accordingly.

So why, I have been asking myself, do the 'Trot-lot' continue against all available evidence before their eyes to fester in a visceral hatred of 'that woman' which almost amounts to a phobia!  I realise that most of them were in their youth during those turbulent times and generally speaking the young always tend to rebelliousness but they are all middle-aged now and there can be no excuse for failing to acknowledge that is was "A Good Thing" for governments to stop making motor cars, running telephone services and producing iron and steel.  It was an even better thing to sell off council houses and make tenants home-owners.  And it was a truly great thing for a government to recognise and act upon the truth that money supply is the critical ingredient of inflation.  The fact that this tiny rump of political detritus clings so fiercely to their teen-age dreams is surely an indication of the essentially religious nature of their beliefs.  Nobody expects total rationality from the deeply religious who continue to carry their burden of beliefs despite all the contradictory evidence that swells the tide against which they are wading.

Then I came across a piece by Alex Massie at The Coffee House who had picked up (whilst wearing gloves, I hope) some droppings from Simon Winchester not, as one might suppose, from The Guardian but from The Times (which is behind a paywall so I will not link).  Winchester was writing on the subject of Kim Jong-il's long-overdue death and in the course of his essay he wrote this:

The State’s founder, Kim Il Sung, claimed that all he wanted for North Korea was to be socialist, and to be left alone. In that regard, the national philosophy of self-reliance known in North Korea as “Juche” is little different from India’s Gandhian version known as “swadeshi”. Just let us get on with it, they said, and without interference, please. 

India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out — its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.

Sometimes the crass stupidity of well-educated men leaves me open-mouthed with astonishment.  According to Winchester, then, South Korea which is prosperous and free (well, their members of Parliament are free to constantly indulge in fist fights with each other!) is to be despised because - SHLOCK-HORROR - their way of life has been Americanised.  But North Korea is to be provided with a pat on the back by the ineffably superior, British-born Simon Winchester, who chose to become an American citizen, because they have maintained their Korean culture.  I need hardly add that Mr. Winchester chooses to live in the USA!  The totalitarian brutalities of the Kim family's regimes in which millions perished needlessly are simply flicked away by Mr. Winchester's limp wrist under a generalised expression: "North Korea, for all its faults".  Someone pass a sickbag, quick!

Is Winchester, I wonder, in any way related to the late and utterly despicable, Hewlet Johnson - I refuse to give him his clerical title, suffice to say that he was known from before the war as 'the Red Dean'.  I ask, because again in yet another coincidence just before Christmas, Charles Moore in The Telegraph was reviewing a new biography of this old Marxist 'criminal' who spent his entire life as an advocate for Joseph Stalin.  Now, I use the word 'criminal' deliberately and after some thought because, whilst it is possible for some people to be fooled some of the time, to continue in an advocacy of a regime that had been proven to have indulged in mass murder places you on their platform.  When, in addition, you take their money, as Hewlet Johnson did, that should place you in the dock with them.  I see no difference between the high-ranking Church of England prelate and, say, Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's not-so-secret Torturer-in-Chief.  Johnson did not die until 1966 by which time there was more than sufficient proof of the fact that Stalin out-murdered Hitler by a (rough) factor of ten.  Never once did Johnson admit the possibility that Stalin had been other than a 'saint'!

So there you have it.  Three examples of wilful and deliberate avoidance of the facts.  We have all done it from time to time, but eventually, truth will out, and somethat shame-facedly we own up to having been wrong.  But for some people, for some reason, this never happens.  "What a piece of work is a man".

More poetry: George Herbert

Yes, sorry and all that (well, I'm not in the least sorry, really) but you must blame my e-pal 'DM' who sent me a simply stunning link to a 'virtual tour' of King's College Chapel, Cambridge which must rank as one of the most elegant buildings in the world.  As I told 'DM', it is nearly as good as Sherborne Abbey which is just down the road from me!  I would urge you all to take a few minutes and enjoy the 'tour' and do take a look at the tracery ceiling.

Now, as you will have gathered over the years, I am not a believer; I remain firmly astride the fence of agnosticism, uncomfortable though it be at times.  Even so, with or without the presence of God the inherent wisdom of Christianity as a means of conducting one's life is obvious, or should be, to everyone.  Above and beyond all else it is both civilised and civilising.  Even as I write those words I can sense the atheists readying themselves to hurl at me an enormous list of crimes and misdemeanors carried out by Christians.  Thus, would they demonstrate their grunt-snuffling stupidity by failing to recognise that those very actions went against the teachings of Christ, or in other words, the perps were human beings not saints whatever labels they attached to themselves.

To me, there is one man who typifies, in his wisdom and in his humility, the very best of Christian values.  He was, amongst other things a poet, and was thus enabled to bare himself as a weak man, beset with sin, and yet always striving, with help from his God, to try, try and try again to live up to his ideals.  That man was George Herbert (1593-1633):

He was a Cambridge man and would have known King's College Chapel intimately, although I am not suggesting that this poem is based on his recollection.

 

THE CHURCH-FLOORE

 

MARK you the floore? that square & speckled stone,
Which looks so firm and strong,
Is Patience:
And th' other black and grave, wherewith each one
Is checker'd all along,	5
Humilitie:
The gentle rising, which on either hand
Leads to the Quire above,
Is Confidence:
But the sweet cement, which in one sure band	10
Ties the whole frame, is Love
And Charitie.
Hither sometimes Sinne steals, and stains
The marbles neat and curious veins:
But all is cleansed when the marble weeps.	15
Sometimes Death, puffing at the doore,
Blows all the dust about the floore:
But while he thinks to spoil the room, he sweeps.
Blest be the Architect, whose art
Could build so strong in a weak heart.

Miracle at Midway

At the moment I'm up to my armpits in the mid-Pacific as I begin work on my new 'bore-a-thon' entitled How the Japanese Lost WWII in the First Six Months.  Reading about the battle I find myself with a stiff neck from the constant shaking of my head in disbelief.  I have studied a fair number of battles in my time but Midway is far and away the most extraordinary.  'Never in the field of human conflict' have so many flukes, chances, coincidences and mistakes occurred in the course of just a few hours.  Several massive naval task forces blundered about mostly completely unaware of the others. If there is a God he was at Midway on 4th June 1942.

Perhaps the most famous evidence of divine providence was the fact that one of the Japanese recce 'planes due to be launched before dawn had an engine problem which delayed it by 30 minutes.  If it had taken off on time it would have flown right over the American carriers lurking to the north east of the Islands, in which case, Adm. Nagumo, commander of the Japanese carrier fleet, containing four big Japanese carriers, would have disposed of his attack and defence aircraft very differently.  If he had, then given the disparity in comabt experience between both sets of aircrews, plus the qualitative superiority of Japanese aircraft, it is almost certain that the three American carriers would have been sunk.  In that event, Midway would have been taken and opened up a corridor pointing directly towards Hawaii, or, the Japanese could have moved south east to take the Solomon Islands and New Caledonia and thus cut Australia off from all American aid.

As it was, Nagumo had despatched half of his 'planes to attack Midway prior to the planned invasion.  He kept the other half back, loaded with anti-maritime ordnance in case the American carriers were spotted.  (He was being ultra-cautious because very poor Japanese intelligence had assured him that they were almost certainly still in Hawaii, or down in the south east following the inconclusive battle of the Coral Sea.)  His Midway attack squadrons reported that a second attack was needed to completely finish off the Island's defences and so Nagumo ordered his reserve formation to change from anti-ship to ground attack ordnance.  This was about half complete when the first very garbled reports came in from his air recce 'planes indicating that in fact the American carriers were on his flank.  To add to his troubles the Midway attack force was streaming in and needing to land.  So far his carriers had suffered several attacks from American Midway-based 'planes but had swatted them all away like irritating flies without sustaining any hits.

Nagumo ordered that the reserve air force be re-armed yet again, this time from land attack ordnance to anti-ship ordance so that they could attack the American carriers which by now had been definitely identified.  One can imagine the language amongst the carrier ground crews as they struggled with order and counter-order and counter-counter-order!  Unfortunately, in their haste they had no time to store the loose armaments safely and simply left them at the sides of the hangers.  The Midway attack force had landed and was being re-armed and re-fueled and it was at that moment that the American carrier 'planes attacked.  The first in were the torpedo aircraft who, given the nature of their weapon system had to come in at low level and fly straight and true at their target.  The Japanese Zeros flying high above as a defensive air patrol came screaming in like hawks hitting a flock of sparrows.  Many of the American torpedo 'planes were shot down and those that escaped the Zeros were take out by massive and deadly accurate anti-aircraft fire.  In one of the most tremendous examples of human courage under fire, none of the American flinched from their duty.  One by one they flew in, slow and steady, and one by one they were destroyed.  To add bitter salt to the wound, none of their torpedoes had any effect.

At this point the Japanese were celebrating.  They were unharmed and were well on their way to re-arming their 'planes which, within a very short time, would be off to take out the entire American carrier force.  And at that point retribution hit them.  A final attack force from the American carriers had found them and this time they were dive bombers not torpedo 'planes.  Also, the Zeros who should have been cruising on high as a defence patrol, were either down at sea level where they had been chasing the torpedo attackers, or they were on deck being re-armed and re-fueled.  Thus, the gallant torpedo 'plane crews, whilst they scored no hits, did actually bring about the circumstances that would allow victory to come.  The American dive bombers had a clear run and the phrase 'shooting fish in a barrel' comes to mind.  Three of the Japanese carriers were hit by bombs, usually no more than two or three but all the fuel and ordnance lying around was enough to set off huge explosions and conflagrations.  The fourth carrier was caught later in the day and it, too, was sunk.   The Japanese did manage to send an attack force to hit the American carriers and the Yorktown was eventually sunk but that was all they had by way of consolation.

To use the current argot, this was a 'tipping point', although neither side really appreciated it at the time.  By sinking four carriers the Americans had ripped the claws out of the Japanese dragon.  Even worse though, was the loss of hundreds of experienced aircrews who the Japanese simply could not be replaced fast enough.  Also, from this point on, both sides realised that the other 'tipping point' was that big battleships with big guns were no longer the Queen on the naval chessboard and from now on the aircraft carrier had taken over.  Adm. Yamamoto, the prime mover behind the Midway attack, was dimly aware of this before the battle but it must have been a bitter truth to learn in such a hard way as he sailed for home in the Yamato, the biggest battleship in the world!

 

In a palace of tits, he is one of the biggest!

I would always hesitate before picking a fight with an ex-SAS man but Andrew Robathan MP is an exception.  This particular tit also happens to be a Tory defence minister and given his military background he should at least have had the wit and intelligence to bow his head in respect to the memory of men who, arguably, fought in one of the most ferocious campaigns of the entire war - the arctic convoys to Russia.

 

But according to the report in The Daily Mail, this Tory tit replied to a question from a fellow Tory asking for urgent action to be taken to mint a medal for the last few survivors of the Arctic Convoy Campaign by insisting this country did not "'throw around' honours like the Libyan tyrant and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein".  Someone should remind this arrogant prick that even the bloody Russians gave our chaps medals for their service, and quite right, too, considering:

More than 3,000 UK sailors, who faced treacherous seas where temperatures plunged as low as -60c, died to keep the Soviet Union supplied and fighting on the Eastern Front.

I believe your survival chance was about a minute if you found yourself in the water, and 85 merchant vessels and 16 Royal Navy ships went down during the campaign.  There are only about 200 living veterans left, and this prize tit, no doubt reading a brief provided for him by some ignoramus in the Civil Service with a Third Class degree in Flower Arranging went on to say:

The intention post-war was not to cover everybody in medals. Medals in the UK mean something.  ‘Authoritarian regimes and dictators often throw around a lot of medals.  One can look, for instance, at North Korean generals who are covered in medal ribbon, or Gaddafi, or Saddam Hussein.  We have taken the view in this country, traditionally, that medals will only be awarded for campaigns that show risk and rigour.

"Campaigns that show risk and rigour"!  You unbelievable, pig-ignorant, sanctimonious prat, there was never a campaign in WWII that showed more "risk and rigour" than running convoys into Archangel.  No wonder the Tories are known as the 'Stupid Party'!

 

Courage of a different order

I am grateful to my e-pal, JK, for pointing me to this site which adds to my knowledge of the events leading up to Pearl Harbour and highlights the moral courage of a truly remarkable officer in the USN:

Admiral J. O. Richardson was placed in command of the Pacific fleet in late 1939 on the personal diktat of Roosevelt, himself.  However, Richardson was obviously a man remarkable not only for his shrewd judgment in naval matters but also for his absolute honesty and his sense of duty in reporting his doubts and concerns to the highest in the land.

It is important to understand that prior to 1941 the entire American leadership knew, but refused to face up to the knowledge, that the Philippines were a lost cause.  The Pacific fleet was so run down that it was incapable of mounting any sort of major initiative across to the western Pacific.  And yet, the plan was that when war broke out the fleet would immediately sail west into battle against the Japanese fleet which, it was assumed, would be leading and protecting its invasion forces.  No-one dared "speak truth to power", except Adm. Richardson:

Almost from the start, Richardson clashed with his superiors over their plans for the Pacific Fleet. In January 1940, Admiral Richardson advised the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold Stark, that existing plans for war with Japan were unrealistic [...]

Richardson personally informed the then Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) that, in effect, the entire American strategy was moonshine.  Later, the CNO recalled the conversation:

"Pointing out the lack of advanced bases, the the slow pace of updating the fleet's offensive and defensive characteristics, the fact there were fatal shortages in ammunition replacements and backup stocks of fuel, spare parts and essential supplies and the tenders and logistical ships needed to support an advanced-positioned fleet--he was saying, in plain and understandable language, that the Navy wasn't ready for war. Step by step, he dismantled my confident belief that the U.S. Navy could win a quick decision. Instead, proceeding from our deficiencies, he foresaw the United States hanging on for a couple of years while the country and the service built the strength necessary for an offensive campaign, then a hard fight of a year or two before victory could be won."

 

 Unfortunately for him, and American servicemen, particularly those tasked to defend the indefensible Philippines under the blustering leadership of the appalling Gen. MacArthur, Richardson kept repeating his doubts whilst at the same time:



[M]embers of Roosevelt's inner circle (including Navy Secretary Frank Knox) were asserting that the U.S. fleet could finish off the Japanese in only three months.



Suddenly he was out of favour with the president and his cronies and his tenure as CINCPAC was abruptly ended after little more than a year.  Let these words be a suitable testament to an officer who put duty above career and reputation:





Sadly, only World War II buffs and naval historians are familiar with the courageous stand of J.O. Richardson. At the cost of his own career, Admiral Richardson stood on principle, trying to avert a military disaster that he believed could be averted, by returning the fleet to San Diego and engaging in the preparations needed to ready the Navy for war.

 

Richardson's integrity and candor offer an important lesson for military leaders--or anyone in a position to advise decision-makers. Even in that rarefied air, it is essential to tell "the boss" what they need to hear--not what they want to hear. Admirlal Richardson did just that, realizing his advice might fall on deaf ears and result in his dismissal. It's regrettable that so many of his peers failed to follow his shining example in the days before Pearl Harbor.

 

I'll drink to that!

 

 

"A date which will live in infamy"

At 07.02 this morning (but 70 years ago!) a young American trainee-operator using adapted British radar equipment spotted some unidentified planes approaching from a distance of 137 miles.  In fact he should have switched his machine off at 07.00 hours because there was a considerable infighting between the Signal Corps who were responsible for introducing this new equipment and the Army Air Corps who were to operate it.  It had been agreed that the machine would only be switched on between 04.00 and 07.00.  The young operator immediately telephoned his Duty Officer to report the sighting. Lt. Tyler was alone with only a telephone switchboard operator for company.  He told the radar-man not worry because they were expecting a flight of B-17s due in this morning.  Lt. Tyler was blameless,not least because there were no liaison officers present from the navy, the Marines or the Army Bomber Command.  Lt. Tyler was himself a fighter pilot with absolutely no experience of handling a control room.

It was Sunday on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, and despite the fact that the news for the last few months had been concentrated on the mounting tension between Japan and the USA, both the Navy C-in-C and the Army C-in-C on the Island had stood everybody down for the weekend.  No special measures had been taken to defend the fleet or the massed aircaft.

In fact a second alarm had been raised at 06.53 via the navy, but since none of the services spoke to each other, the warning failed to spread.  Navy Lt. Kaminski was the Duty Officer at the Harbour Control Post when he received a report from the destroyer, USS Ward, which had attacked what it thought was an an unknown submarine close by the entrance to Pearl Harbour.  Kaminski, like his Air Corps comrade, Tyler, was alone with just one telephone operator.  However, he had a checklist of over half a dozen senior officers to contact should any alarm be raised.  At 07.00 he began calling.  He reached various senior officers but they all decided to wait until USS Ward reported again and definitely confirmed the details.  Everything then settled back down to just another peaceful Sunday in Hawaii.

At 07.53, Commander Fuchida, the Japanese officer in command of the entire attack force radioed from his aircraft as he approached Oahu the message the Japanese naval command had waited to hear: "Tora! Tora! Tora!"  Arguably the greatest surprise attack in the history of the world had been launched - and caught their enemy completely unawares.  More than that, however, the American forces actually made the job even easier by laying out their ships and aircraft as though for sacrifice.  As Fuchida reported later, "I had seen all German warships assembled in Kiel Harbour, I have also seen the French battleships in Brest.  And finally, I have seen our own warships assembled for review before the Emperor, but I have never seen ships, even in the deepest peace, anchored at a distance less than 500 to a 1,000 yards from each other . . ."  Not only that but no anti-torpedo nets had been deployed round the ships, and the aircraft were lined up in neat rows to make strafing and bombing them all the easier.

Incredibly during the middle of this first wave attack the B-17s made their  scheduled appearance, short of fuel and attacked by the Japanese - and their own nervous AA gunners - nevertheless they made it down safely.  There was a short respite at 08.30 as the first wave departed but at 09.00 the second wave appeared.  This was met with a much more spirited defence as the Americans gathered their wits and fought back with whatever they had - which was not much!  By 10.00 the skies cleared and the stunned Americans were left alone to look at the damage.  Six battleships sunk or sinking; two other battleships, three cruisers and three destroyers damaged.  Almost 3,600 men either killed or wounded.  On the airfields all was death and destruction. One hundred and eighty planes had been destroyed and 128 others damaged.  At the Marine air base and also at the Navy air base there was not a single plane able to fly.

At noon on the following day, President Roosevelt broadcast to his nation, "Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of Japan".  Within the hour the Congress, with one dissenting vote, approved the declaration of war against Japan.  It is worth remembering the owner of that one dissenting vote because she stands as a practical example, as well as a shining beacon, for the very essence of democracy and liberty.

 

She was Miss Jeannette Pickering Rankin, a Republican but a lifetime pacifist.  Needless to say, her Republican party leaders put her under tremendous pressure to change her vote but she stood her ground.  A foolish woman, obviously, but I raise a glass to her memory!

(My post is based heavily on Ronald H. Spector's book Eagle Against the Sun)

And they didn't even send me a food parcel during the war!

Look, I'm not one to complain, as you know well, and also, when it comes to our American 'cousins' I am the first in line to express my admiration and liking for them but, to be honest, I could do with a bit of gratitude in return for all we have given them.  I mean, they owe us - big time!  And no less a personage than H. W. Crocker III says so.  Who he?  Well, I'm not too sure, there is no Wiki entry for him but I like the cut of his jib especially as the author of a book entitled The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War in which the first section is entitled 'Why the South Was Right'.  I like his 'jib' (what the hell is a 'jib' anyway?) even better given his most recent book reviewed in The American Spectator by himself and entitled The Politically Incorrect History of the British Empire.

Written for Thanksgiving a few days ago he reminds his fellow Americans that the thanks they should be giving is to the British Empire:

As we Americans celebrate on this day of gluttony, football, and prayer (not necessarily in that order), we might offer up thanks for the institution that gave us our glorious traditions of liberty and prosperity. That institution would be the British Empire, which not only put us here, but gave us Christianity, limited government, and a system of rights founded in British common law. Somehow many of us tend to overlook that -- something to do with 1776, most likely, and the idea that we rebelled against the tyranny of effete, toffee-nosed British snobs.

He's quite right in suggesting that the myths of the American War of Independence are now deeply ingrained in the American psyche but, even so, efforts should be made to reveal some home truths to go along with the home cooking on Thanksgiving Day:

As every American schoolboy should know, but probably doesn't, the British colonies of North America were the lightest taxed, most liberally governed (in the classical small government sense), freest, most prosperous, and most equitable portions of the eighteenth century world. The very rights the colonists believed they were fighting to defend were the traditional rights of Englishmen.

Indeed, many of the British generals assigned to put down the rebels agreed with them, and only parted ways with the colonists, and then reluctantly, when rebellious Americans took up arms against representatives of British authority.

Of course, some Britons -- equally devoted to British ideals of freedom and limited government -- scoffed at talk of "oppression" and mocked colonial hypocrisy. Samuel Johnson famously quipped in his essay Taxation No Tyranny, "how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"  (My emphasis)

Rudyard Kipling had it about right, too, and even old King George III wasn't as mad as they made out:

"Our American colonies, having no French to fear any longer [after the French and Indian War], wanted to be free from our control altogether. They utterly refused to pay a penny of the two hundred million pounds the war had cost us; and they equally refused to maintain a garrison of British soldiers…. When our Parliament proposed in 1764 to make them pay a small fraction of the cost of the late war, they called it 'oppression,' and prepared to rebel."

In this view, the War of American Independence was actually the War of American Ingratitude. King George III saw things as they were: "The rebellious war now levied [in 1775]… is manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire."

With mischievous ease scholastic exactitude, Mr. Crocker III, reminds his American readers how tempting the notion of an American Empire was to the grandees of the, er, 'revolution':

George Washington referred to America as "our rising Empire." Thomas Jefferson wrote of America as an "empire of liberty." Alexander Hamilton in Federalist One called America "an empire, in many respects the most interesting in the world." And John Adams and Benjamin Franklin both envisaged that the United States -- because of its potential wealth, size, and resources -- would become the seat of a greater empire than the British. The Founders were not opposed to "empire." They merely wanted an empire of their own, and were in fact appalled at British attempts to limit the colonists' expansion west across the Appalachians, which the British had designated as Indian territory in the hope of avoiding costly Indian wars.

And they haven't stopped trying for an American Empire ever since, until now, that is, because suddenly they are realising, as we were beginning to learn in 1766, that Empire is awfully good for the ego, old boy, but disasterous for the purse!  I should add, as yet another duplicitous Brit, that I am all in favour of an American Empire, the bigger the better, just so long as I don't have to pay for it.  Cynical? - of course.  French, even? - mais ouis!  But that's the way of the world, as those miserly, tight-fisted settlers demonstrated back in 1766!

Anyway, as Mr. Crocker III, points out, the 'cousins' did very well out of us so if any of them see fit to send me the food parcel I never received during the war I'd be very grateful, no, honestly, I would!

 

I'm trapped in this horror story!

I have what looks like a cracking good thriller next to my armchair, written by Jo Nesbo, the Norwegian writer but, for a change, this is not one of his police procedurals.  I have just started it and it looks as though it's going to be a corker, and I really do want to finish it, but . . . but . . .

Although it's hard work, although I keep erupting in either fury or anguish, although it's bloody heavy to hold, although it runs to nearly a thousand dense pages, I just cannot tear myself away from Allies of a Kind by Christopher Thorne.  It tells the history of the war with Japan.  I'm only on the first few chapters which describe the run up to war and I don't know whether to burst into tears or hurl the book out of the window!  Here is crass stupidity piled upon blind folly with more than enough to go round all the nations involved and their principal actors.  Roosevelt, and some of the crafty dunderheads around him, come out as small-town politicians, not fit for purpose.  To be fair to the president, he never lost sight of the fact that the American public were acting as one almighty sheet-anchor against anything he might try but his lack of clarity and purpose was almost criminal.  Equally, Churchill comes out of it as an antidiluvian, romantic imperialist stuck somewhere in the early Kiplingesque era of the 19th century.  Most of those who surrounded him, at home, or even worse, out in Singapore, were brain-dead from the arse both ways!

And so, slowly but inexorably the great wheel turns, the ratchets meet the cogs, and war looms and no-one is prepared, no one has a plan, all is left to chance.  "Oh the horror, the horror!"

 

Oh God, I wish I'd never begun . . .

I'm really depressed and it's all my own fault!  I have decided to design another of my military history PowerPoint talks.  It is some time since I created the last one and I have forgotten most of the ins and outs of PowerPoint - but that's not the reason for my depression.  Before I can begin to lay down the outlines of the talk I have to re-read the history, and when I tell you that the title is How the Japanese Lost WWII in the First Six Months some of you will guess from whence my misery springs.

My first source is Ronald H. Spector's book Eagle Against the Sun.  For those Brits, and there are many of them, already wired for maximum, lip-curling disdain for American stupidity, Spector provides plenty of it.  Indeed, it is precisely his ice-cold gaze at the follies of his own country's military and political leadership prior to Pearl Harbour which makes me trust him as a historian.  However, no sooner has he finished with the self-flagellation than he turns his whips onto the Japanese leadership and its very own, not very inscrutable, blind ambition, arrogance and stupidity worthy of comparison to pre-1914 Prussia-Germany.

Happily, in the early chapters at least, we Brits, not being the main subject of the book, are allowed to escape.  But then I had to turn to Christopher Thorne's  book Allies of a Kind which takes a much wider but also deeper look at the whole period leading up to the war with Japan, at which point, British idiocy of the very worst kind is all too toe-curlingly apparent.  Perhaps summed up by Churchill's romantic but delusional decision to send HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse out to Singapore to stem the probable Japanese attack.  Suffice to say, that on one grim day whilst serving myself in Singapore, I flew over the hulks lying on the sea-bed but plainly visible from the air.  I think they come under the heading of a 'gallant but futile gesture', the sort of thing we Brits do so awfully well!

I will almost certainly return to this subject because apart from its inherent historical interest, it also produces contemporary vibrations in a world with an apparently weakened America and a rising power in the east - this time China.  Here are three quotations chosen by Thorne to open his book:

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT:  I do not want to be unkind or rude to the British, but in 1841, when you aquired Hong Kong, you did not aquire it by purchase.

OLIVER STANLEY (Colonial Sec.):  Let me see, Mr. President, that was about the time of the Mexican War, wasn't it?

...........................................................................................................................

WINSTON CHURCHILL:  Why be apologetic about Anglo-Saxon superiority [to other races].   We are superior.

............................................................................................................................

Each of our friends has his defects so markedly that to continue to love him we are obliged to seek consolation for those defects - in the thought of his talent, his goodness, his affection for ourself - or rather to leave them out of account, and for that we need to display all out goodwill.  Unfortunately our obliging honesty in refusing to see the defect in our friend is surpassed by the obstinacy with which he persists in that defect ...

Marcel Proust: A la recherche du Temps Perdu

.............................................................................................................................

I had no idea that Proust was such a witty fellow, he almost cheered me up!

 

The 'Hoover Dam' gives way!

Honestly my headline 'jokes' are getting worse!  I had better explain this one away before my American readers take to their rafts.  Tom Bethell in The American Spectator has brought to our attention a book that has quite literally been hidden from sight for 50-odd years written by a man who himself is what we might call today 'a blast from the past' - Herbert Hoover, the 31st president of the USA from 1929 to 1933.  The fact that he was a one-term president is a confirmation, of sorts, of the generally held opinion that his was a failed presidency.  Personally, I know very little of the man, not least because he was over-shadowed by the 'giant' who replaced him, Franklin Roosevelt.

Be that as it may, I had no idea that he went on to live into his 90s and died as late as 1964.  Also, I had no idea that later in life he had written a book, which he constantly revised, on what he considered to be the colossal strategic errors of both Roosevelt and Chamberlain, amongst others, in the lead up to, and the waging of, WWII.  For reasons not explained, his heirs did not publish the book until now*.

Perhaps his most intriguing charge is against the Anglo/French decision to issue a guarantee to Poland, thus making WWII inevitable.  This is a tricky one and I would need to read his arguments carefully, not least, to ensure that he was not writing with the benefit of hindsight not given to the actors at the time.  He also attacks Roosevelt for offering, in 1933, diplomatic recognition to the communist government in the USSR.  In Hoover's view, apparently, both America and Britain should have stayed well clear and allowed the two monstrous regimes of Germany and Russia to destroy each other as they were bound to do.  Similarly, he is highly critical of Roosevelt's handling of the Japanese problem and his "contemptuous refusal" to consider the peace proposals of the Japanese prime minister which made war inevitable.

Tom Bethel's review is well worth reading and I think perhaps I must drop a few hints concerning the book as Xmas approaches!

* Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath
Edited by George H. Nash
(Hoover Institution Press, 920 pages, $49.95)

This is written through gritted teeth!

I am quick enough to quote Kevin Myers when, in his usual attack-dog style, he writes something which comfirms my prejudices so, although I had to sleep on it before I decided, I am duty-bound to reprint this from his column in the Irish Indpendent despite my loyalty:

FIRST things first: 40 years ago, the Parachute Regiment had become state-authorised killers in Northern Ireland. According to David McKittrick’s indispensable volume ‘Lost Lives’, the Paras killed 39 people between 1971 and 1976. Only seven of these were paramilitaries: but one of those, Joe McCann, the Official IRA leader, was gunned down, unarmed, on a May Saturday afternoon.

The death toll of 33 unarmed victims killed by the three battalions of the Parachute Regiment is more than that for hundreds of battalions of the rest of the British army and Royal Marines combined.

That’s the bloodied tip of the iceberg; what these figures don’t show were the Paras’ regimes of terror and brutality within the areas they governed.

Young men were routinely beaten by Para patrols. Hundreds of working-class houses were wrecked in random retaliatory raids.

They were a disgrace to the British army and a joy and a delight to the Provisional IRA, for which they were a major recruiting sergeant.

I didn't serve in Northern Ireland (thank God!) and I simply do not have the facts to dispute Myers's (and McKittrick's) assertions and before doing so I would need to read all the details of each and every event.  However, from my general knowledge, and it galls me to write this, I would not be surprised if much of what he says is true.  I remember trying to explain to my son at the time of the notorious 'Bloody Sunday' incident that the Paras should never have been deployed in that situation.  Urban peace-keeping is simply not something that is suited to their ethos and their training.  They should have been deployed out in the countryside in what would have been more of a soldiering activity rather than acting as 'peace-keepers'.  Indeed, the very use of a such a word applied to them is an oxymoron!  It is at places like Goose Green that you need their particular 'qualities', not in the centre of a highly sensitive civilian/military hot-spot requiring tact and discretion.  Neither of those words figure highly amongst Paras, certainly not amongst the 'Toms' and not even amongst the officers who are, if anything, more gung-ho than anyone.

However, whilst there is undoubtedly some truth in what Myers writes you will find a visit to this particular site will set the balance more evenly, particularly the very first entry describing the selfless bravery of Sgt. Michael Willets, 3 Para, who was awarded a posthumous George Cross for saving civilians from death and injury:

 http://www.palacebarracksmemorialgarden.org/Northern%20Ireland.htm

 ADDITIONAL:  Don't miss Lawrence's 'swing the lamp' tale in the comments below!