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I Guess He Didn’t Like Cheltenham

RRCoverSThe Warwickshire Avon falls into the Severn here, and on the sides of both, for many miles back, there are the finest meadows that ever were seen. In looking over them, and beholding the endless flocks and herds, one wonders what can become of all the meat! By riding on about eight or nine miles farther, however, this wonder is a little diminished; for here we come to one of the devouring Wens; namely, Cheltenham, which is what they call a “watering place;” that is to say, a place, to which East India plunderers, West India floggers, English tax-gorgers, together with gluttons, drunkards, and debauchees of all descriptions, female as well as male, resort, at the suggestion of silently laughing quacks, in the hope of getting rid of the bodily consequences of their manifold sins and iniquities. When I enter a place like this, I always feel disposed to squeeze up my nose with my fingers. It is nonsense, to be sure; but I conceit that every two-legged creature, that I see coming near me, is about to cover me with the poisonous proceeds of its impurities. To places like this come all that is knavish and all that is foolish and all that is base; gamesters, pickpockets, and harlots; young wife-hunters in search of rich and ugly and old women, and young husband-hunters in search of rich and wrinkled or half-rotten men, the former resolutely bent, be the means what they may, to give the latter heirs to their lands and tenements. These things are notorious; and Sir William Scott, in his speech of 1802, in favour of the non-residence of the Clergy, expressly said, that they and their families ought to appear at watering places, and that this was amongst the means of making them respected by their flocks! Memorandum: he was a member for Oxford when he said this!—William Cobbett, Rural Rides

 

A B-17 Collision

B-17 in the Air

B-17 in the Air

This B-17 met a head-on attack by three Focke Wulf Fw 190 fighters. The gunners exploded two of them, and the top turret poured a stream of shells into the cockpit of the third. With a dead man at the controls, the fighter screamed in, and at a closing speed of 550 miles per hour smashed head-on into the number-three engine.

The tremendous impact of the crash tore off the propeller. It knocked the heavy bomber completely out of formation as though a giant hand has swatted a fly. The fighter cartwheeled crazily over the B-17.

It cut halfway through the wing, and then sliced a third of the way through the horizontal stabilizer. The top and ball turrets immediately jammed, the radio equipment was smashed to wreckage, and all the instruments “went crazy.” Pieces of metal from the exploding, disintegrating Focke Wulf tore through the fuselage, and a German gun barrel buried itself in the wall between the radio room and the bomb bay.

Crews of nearby bombers watched the collision. They saw a tremendous explosion, and the bomber hurtling helplessly out of control, tumbling as she fell. They reported when they returned to base that the Flying Fortress had blown up, and that the crew must be considered dead.

The old Queen hadn’t blown up, and the crew was far from dead. The pilots struggled wildly in the cockpit, and somehow between them, managed to bring their careening bomber back under control. The gunners shot down a fourth fighter that had closed in to watch the proceedings.

And then they brought her all the way back to England, and scraped her down for a belly landing on the runway.

Postscript: not a man was injured.—Martin Caidin, Black Thursday

Hugging the Enemy

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General Vasily Chuikov, Commander of the 62nd Army at Stalingrad

General Vasily Chuikov, Commander of the 62nd Army at Stalingrad

We know a whole lot more about Field Marshal Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus, who commanded the German 6th Army besieging Stalingrad, than we know about General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, who fought the German war machine to a draw by his creative leadership of the Soviet 62nd Army. Part of the reason is that we have letters from Paulus and his staff describing the horrors of the siege of Stalingrad, letters that were to give Hitler and Goebbels fits as they tried to devise their own myth as to what really happened on the banks of the Volga.

What really happened was one of Stalin’s generals, who lived in a society where candid comments in private letters were used by the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) as evidence of disloyalty to Stalin. Whatever Chuikov may have thought, it was what he did that made him one of Stalin’s favorite generals.

Both Hitler and Stalin had issued contradictory clear-cut orders regarding Stalingrad. Hitler insisted that the Wehrmacht capture the city at all cost, and that surrender was not an option. Stalin, on the other hand, issued equally clear-cut orders that the city must be held at all costs, and that surrender was not an option.

For almost six months, Chuikov invented a new kind of urban warfare in which the idea was to “hug the enemy.” By staying close to the Germans, Chuikov prevented the aerial bombardment by the Luftwaffe in that it turned out to be as dangerous to the Nazis as to the Red Army. By this time, much of the city was rubble. Chuikov ingeniously hid artillery and tanks in the ruins, and used small squads of six to eight men, supplemented by sharpshooters, to attack pockets of Wehrmacht troops. Extensive use was made of hand grenades and Molotov Cocktails.

Frequently, burnt-out tanks became bases for these squads, as the men were protected by the wrecked tank above their heads. The following is a quote from Chuikov:

The Germans underestimated our artillery. And they underestimated the effectiveness of our infantry against their tanks. This battle showed that tanks forced to operate in narrow quarters are of limited value; they’re just guns without mobility. In such conditions nothing can take the place of small groups of infantry, properly armed, and fighting with utmost determination. I don’t mean barricade street fighting—there was little of that—but groups converting every building into a fortress and fighting for it floor by floor and even room by room. Such defenders cannot be driven out either by tanks or planes. The Germans dropped over a million bombs on us but they did not dislodge our infantry from its decisive positions. On the other hand, tanks can be destroyed from buildings used as fortresses.

For five months, Chuikov fought the Germans to a draw. During this time, Marshal Georgi Zhukov formulated his Operation Uranus, which led to the encirclement and surrender of Paulus’s 6th Army.

Even as his men were out of ammunition and close to starving to death and being eaten alive by lice and other vermin, Hitler prevented them from surrendering. As it became obvious to the Fuehrer that Stalingrad was lost to him, he preferred the German people to think that the 6th Army committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Russians. In the end, the 90,000 men who remained did surrender. Total German casualties were between 500,000 and 850,000 killed, wounded or captured.

Chuikov later led one of the armies converging on Berlin, where he accepted surrender of the city from General Helmuth Weidling. After the war, in 1955, he was made a Field Marshal by Khrushchev and eventually served as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Even under a tyrant such as Stalin, it is possible to find heroism and innovation such as Chuikov’s. Because we tend to see World War Two as mostly a Anglo-American alliance, we have suppressed any knowledge of the awful 3,000-mile front that was the war in Russia, called by them the Great Patriotic War. They earned their victory … the hard way.

The Hamfisted Military of America

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Infantry in Viet Nam

Infantry in Viet Nam

The United States has probably the most powerful military in the world—provided, of course, that it is used to fight the battles of the Second World War over again. You know what I mean: Those large set-piece battles with penetrations, encirclements, flanking maneuvers, the whole West Point 101 ball of wax.

Too bad that the wars we have gotten entangled in since the Second World War do not play to our strengths. One doesn’t need a college degree in military science to appreciate the following factors:

  1. Whereas the people of the United States know nothing about foreign languages and cultures, all cultures know a great deal more about us than we know about them.
  2. Because our news media blares all around the world, guerrilla fighters know when the American people are tired of a war and want to end it.
  3. If the “bad guys” a.k.a. “freedom fighters” want to win, they just have to blow up one or two Americans to smithereens every day or so. Just so long as every news cycle has some bad news in it.
  4. The nationals who have allied themselves with the American forces are highly suspect as to their allegiance. The ARVN (Army of the Republic of Viet Nam), for instance, acted as intelligence for the North Vietnamese. (Guess why so many incidents of “terror” in Afghanistan are committed by fighters wearing the uniforms of Karzai’s army and police.)
  5. Before long, the American forces will be confined to “Green Zones” or “strategic hamlets” or other fortified places where they could be picked off at will—usually just one or two at a time.

The thought keeps hitting me between the eyes: If we’re so stupid about it all and keep making the same mistakes over and over again, why do we even bother? What do we accomplish?

Infamy as a Way of Life

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Israel’s Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu

Israel has a right to exist. The Palestinians have a right to exist—though no one but a few die-hard Arabs say that Palestine as a nation has a right to exist. I am not sure now that Bibi Netanyahu and his Likud Party, however, have a right to exist.

The path taken by Netanyahu’s Israel is a dangerous one. You could be hyper-aggressive and murderous to the maximum extent, but only insofar as the people are backing your every play. Eventually, you could cross a line where not only the world at large but your own people are tired of infamy as a way of life. What happens then? Can you continue to do the same sort of thing and continue to get away with it? Probably not.

Crusader States

The Arabs see Israel as just another “crusader state.” After the wildly successful First Crusade (1096-1099), much of the Holy Land was divided into a series of feudal states run by the Crusaders. These included the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch, and the County of Edessa. Some of them lasted a surprisingly long time. And they might still be around today if the Arabs were not united under a powerful new leader like Saladin (from Kurdistan of all places), and the Crusaders became ever more disunited and fragmented over the next couple hundred years.

Who is to say that Israel’s continued aggression against the Palestinians and other Arabs will not result in a unified alliance to wipe it off the map? What will our attitude be in such a case? Will we have to send in our army to protect Israel’s right to exist? That would be good for another five hundred years of hatred in the Middle East.

I think the Western World had to keep a tight leash on Israel and do everything it can to stymie the right wing politicians who have been in the ascendant there since the days of Menachem Begin. (At the same, our own right wing will continue to support Israeli aggression and confuse the issue.)

 

 

 

The General Who Came Back from the Dead

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Field Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky of the Soviet Union

Stalin was one of the great paranoids of history. Beginning in 1937, he purged a large percentage of the top officers in his military—just before Hitler invaded Russia and caught the army and Stalin flat-footed. Gone were three of the five marshals of the Red Army, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky (a brilliant strategist who has influenced warfare to this day), Vasily Blyukher, and Aleksandr Yegorov; thirteen out of the fifteen army commanders; eight out of nine of the admirals; fifty of fifty-seven army corps commanders; 154 out of 186 division commanders, 16 of 16 army commissars; and 25 of 28 army corps commissars.

Did he not think he would be needing his military commanders to fight off the coming Nazi onslaught? It’s hard to tell, but when Operation Barbarossa kicked off in 1941, the Russians had 3.3 million men under arms, 2.1 million of whom were dead or missing in the third quarter of 1941 alone!

Somehow Stalin had to find generals to replace those whom he had shot or imprisoned. In fact, he had to release about 30% of the purged generals and admirals who were festering in various of his Gulags.

One of them was General Konstantin Rokossovsky, who was half-Polish and half-Russian. Under interrogation by Stalin’s NKVD (the predecessor of the KGB), the General had eight was his teeth knocked out (which is why you don’t find too many pictures of him smiling). Yet, Rokossovsky was the go-to guy for such operations as the victory at Stalingrad, where he all but wiped out a whole German army. For this, he was promoted to Field Marshal and, later, promoted to command one of the three Russian armies converging on Berlin.

After the war, he was made one of the leaders of the Polish Peoples’ Republic and returned to Russia to serve in several key defense posts under Khrushchev. He died in 1968 at the age of seventy-one and is buried in Red Square.

Apparently, once he returned to active service after being tortured and accused of false crimes—mostly for being an adherent of the brilliant Marshal Tukhachevsky—there was no longer any question of his loyalty, which he proved time and time again by clipping the wings of the Nazi war machine.

Here in the United States, we don’t know much about the men who had more to do with Hitler’s defeat than anyone on the Western Allies’ side, including Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, and Montgomery. Rokossovsky was just one of those immortal heroes, along with others such as Zhukov, Konev, Vasilevsky, Cherniakhovsky, and other men whose names we can’t pronounce but who helped change the course of history.

The Time magazine cover shown above was for the issue of August 23, 1943.

 

The Bludgeon

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German POW Surrendering to Russian Defender at Stalingrad

For us, it was the last “Good War.” For the Russians, it was “The Great Patriotic War,” in which 20-30 million soldiers and civilians died defending the Rodina, or Fatherland. I am currently reading David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House’s When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler.

I’m not going to say we had it easy on the Western Front: There’s a lot we don’t know and perhaps never will know about some of the horrors of the Sicilian and Italian campaigns, as well as D-Day and its aftermath in France, Belgium, and Germany. (If you can, see John Huston’s WW2 documentaries, especially The Battle of San Pietro.) But there was something particularly horrible in the way that the two great 20th century dictators, Hitler and Stalin, moved great numbers of men and materiel across the Russian steppe as if it were a chessboard:

The superb German fighting machine was defeated by more than distance. The German rapier, designed to end conflict cleanly and efficiently, was dulled by repeated and often clumsy blows from a simple, dull, but very large Soviet bludgeon. That bludgeon took the form of successive waves of newly mobilized armies, each taking its toll of the invaders before shattering and being replaced by the next wave.

Stalin had a huge supply of manpower at his beck and call. Once the Nazis invaded Russia during Operation Barbarossa, their forces kept getting farther and farther from their source of supply, while, at the same time, the Russian supply lines were getting shorter and shorter as the battle zone neared Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad.

It was not just a matter of manpower, however.The Russians were developing new tanks that could take on the best that the Panzer divisions could throw against them, new fighters and bombers that harassed the rapidly dwindling Luftwaffe, and bringing terrifying new weapons such as the Katyusha rocket launchers that helped to turn the tide against the hapless Germans, who were stuck fighting a two-front war once the Americans and British invaded North Africa, Italy, and France.

We don’t think much about the Eastern Front. After all, we weren’t there. And we were taught that the real show was in Western Europe. The Germans knew, though, that it was in Russia that the coffin nails were pounded into the Thousand-Year Reich. Hitler wound up blowing his brains out, while Stalin died in bed.

No, we don’t like to credit the Russians for their victory; but they deserved it. They certainly gave up enough to achieve it.

 

 

The Dancing Plague of 1518

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Engraving by Hendrik Hondius of Three Women Affected by the Plague

History is full of strange byways and seemingly unsolvable mysteries. Why is it that, for a period of hundreds of years during the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and into the Renaissance, there were outbreaks of dancing fever. During these outbreaks people started dancing and kept dancing until they dropped dead, some of them from strokes and heart attacks, others from sheer exhaustion.

The worst outbreak is recorded in Strasbourg, Alsace, during the year 1518. The city fathers even hired musicians in hopes that the dancers would dance until they got tired and just stop. But many did not stop, and these died. Although I do not have the mortality figures from the Strasbourg incident, one source indicates that up to 400 people were involved in the frenzy.

According to Edward Waller, a Professor at Michigan State University, and author of a book entitled A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518, has examined all the evidence and, according to Discovery.Com, concluded as follows:

A series of famines, resulting from bitter cold winters, scorching summers, sudden crop frosts and terrifying hailstorms, preceded the maniacal dancing, Waller said. Waves of deaths followed from malnutrition. People who survived were often forced to slaughter all of their farm animals, secure loans and finally, take to the streets begging.

Smallpox, syphilis, leprosy and even a new disease known as “the English sweat” swept through the area.

“Anxiety and false fears gripped the region,” Waller said.

One of these fears, originating from a Christian church legend, was that if anyone provoked the wrath of Saint Vitus, a Sicilian martyred in 303 A.D., he would send down plagues of compulsive dancing.

Waller therefore believes a phenomenon known as “mass psychogenic illness,” a form of mass hysteria usually preceded by intolerable levels of psychological distress, caused the dancing epidemic.

If there is a scientific reason, why have there been no outbreaks in Europe dating from the time that the Christian religion ceased to play such an important part in the lives of the people? The anxiety and fears are still present to some degree. (Isn’t that why some people vote Republican?) But the religious trigger is absent.

According to the Discover.Com website cited above, there have been similar outbreaks in Africa as recently as the twentieth century, and even a strange reaction in Belgium involving hysteria over soft-drink consumption.

Now I know that, if Romney is somehow elected President, the ultimate cause will be a mass psychogenic illness caused by Karl Rove, Faux News, and Republican spin doctors.

Tories or Loyalists?

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Loyalist Reenactors at Kings Landing, New Brunswick

Back in the days before the Cretaceous Extinction, when I was in high school learning the history of the American Revolution, we heard a lot of nasty things about the so-called Tories. These were American colonists who would have no part of the Revolution and who wanted to remain loyal to King George III.

We did not treat these Americans particularly well. We destroyed their property, threatened their lives, and keyed their carriages. The result was that many, if not most, of them fled to Canada or back to Britain.

When one is in Canada, there is an entirely different point of view. The Tories here are called Loyalists. And the United States is seen, particularly from the point of view of the 18th and 19th centuries, as the enemy. After all, we sent Benedict Arnold to invade Canada during the Revolution; but he failed, as he himself was conflicted over his loyalties. Then, during the War of 1812, we invaded twice and were beaten back twice.

In New Brunswick, one of Canada’s Maritime Provinces, there is an open-air park near Fredericton called Kings Landing Historical Settlement, which honors the Loyalist settlers. When the Saint John River was dammed near Fredericton, many old 19th century buildings were moved to Kings Landing and re-assembled as an outstanding museum, complete with costumed reenactors in the houses and shops who were able to explain the details of farming, cooking, printing, milling grains, sawmills, furniture manufacture, and other typical activities of the time.

Martine and I spent a whole day here, from opening time to closing. We even had an excellent lunch at the King’s Head Inn. I don’t suppose we were disloyal Americans for sympathizing with these Tories who, after all, were for the most part decent people who contributed greatly to Canada’s growth in the early days after the English occupied the country after the French and Indian War (1754-1763).

In general, it was interesting during our vacation to see so many of the populations that make up Eastern Canada, from the Loyalists to the French Canadians of Quebec to the Acadians of the Maritime Provinces (who are very distinct from the Quebecers) to the so-called First Nations tribes.

We Americans joke about the Canadians lacking a national identity. We did not find that to be so. It’s just that most Americans don’t bother to see for themselves, or else they just won’t open their eyes.

 

 

At Kuruvungna Springs

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The Oasis at Kuruvungna Springs

Today was the “Life Before Columbus” Festival of the Gabrielino-Tongva Indian Tribe. (Appropriate, as tomorrow is Columbus Day, one of America’s more uncelebrated holidays—except by banks and the Civil Service).

About half a mile from our apartment is a site sacred to the Gabrielinos, who once occupied Southern California between Catalina Island and Cajon Pass, between Santa Barbara and Orange County. I am speaking of what is variously called Kuruvungna Springs, Tongva Sacred Springs, and Serra Springs. It is tucked into the Southeast corner of the University High School campus in West Los Angeles.

The Gabrielinos are not one of the better-known Indian tribes, but as Professor Paul Apodaca of Chapman University remarked at the festival, there are two hundred separate Indian tribes in the State of California, and something like a hundred Indian reservations. The tribes belong to some eight language families. My guess is that the Gabrielinos, like other smallish tribes, have not been able to gather the political support to have their own reservation or casino. And, in fact, many political entities do not recognize them. I can understand their budgetary collywobbles to some extent, but I recognize them, as does the City of Los Angeles. (The little Tongva cultural center at Kuruvungna Springs has a series of official scrolls attesting to their status by various governmental entities.)

That does not hide the fact that, when Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast landed in L.A. in the mid-1830s, it was the Gabrielinos he encountered. They were named by their affiliation with Mission San Gabriel, which they helped to build. They were one of the few maritime bands in California, rowing in their plank canoes to Santa Catalina and the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara.

The little oasis around the springs (which form part of the water supply of the City of Santa Monica) is a serene and peaceful place in the great wen that is Los Angeles—which, by the way, is called Yangna in the Gabrielino tongue.