Bench Grass

The Electric City, I: The First Trip

2012-03-13T12:13:00.001-07:00

This post is not about Vienna, but Vienna could hardly not be central to it.For a young graduate student, too over-conscious of his own budget to travel elsewhere in Europe, it was a sole encounter with the built environment of a great European city, and one of his all-too-few chances to get to know a strange city by getting on public transit, riding the line until he was as lost as he could get, and then riding it back. (Spoiler alert: that graduate student was me! Had you going there for a minute, didn't I?)

I lived at a youth hostel near the Hutteldorf-Hietzing station of the U4 Unterbahn line, built on the hill above the valley that the Vienna River cuts as it winds south of the heights of the Kahlenberg towards the city whose wet ditch it fills. The estate proper was the grounds of a bishop's palace, with an Augustinian monastery and a parochial school still near and over an old Imperial hunting reserve, and the U4 follows the course of the river and the old Linz road on its way to town. If you've taken the subway to see the Schönbrunn Palace, you've taken the U4.

Hey, I know! Let's try not valorising the physical tells of borderline personality disorder and enable a descent into morbid substance abuse!*

Every day that the new Staatsarchiv was open, I took the U4 to its intersection with the U3 line in the Landstrasse, one of a number of multilevel subway stations somehow existing under massive inner city buildings (in this case a rail station) in some nether realm between the properly underground and the aboveground worlds.

Which I wouldn't recognise, because in the interim they've done this on the site. Wikipedia.

It was always a marvel to me the way that inner Vienna was linked and tunnelled and built. This is perhaps because the U4-U3 axis is a little eccentric by tourist standards. It was he Landestrasse that Metternich was looking down when he said that the Balkans ended a few blocks down, and the neighbourhood earns its reputation by virtue of being a bit of a backwater. The river meets the Danube Canal around here in (of course), marshy low-lying ground. There tends to be a bit of an off-taste in the air, the architecture is unexplaining, and looking down the shopping district, by guide recalled the Metternich comment, although different strokes for different folks, because the sight of all the Asian touristgirls just reminded me of home!

The regular tourist gets off the U4 at Karlsplatz, and then either takes the U2 a few blocks more, or ascends to the surface, and, ignoring Karl VI's roccoco masterpiece of a commemorative cathedral, heads out along what was once the great enceinte of the fortress on the great Ringstrasse that was built on the filled-in wet ditch once fed by the Vienna River (I presume through a sluice contained within the works?) That's the way to go to see the Hofburg and its unerwhelming Roman ruins, followed by the local and federal parliament, stateand popular operas; museums of art and science, and the newuniversity buildings. It's all quite ideologically numinous, and I could make some strained point about state-building knowledge literally replacing earthwork fortifications, were it not for the fact that the ring road eventually reaches the an entire campus of the University of Vienna devoted to training civil engineers, reminding us that at the same time that the Ringstrasse was built, the Danube was being tamed. Between 1870 and 1875, a new, concrete-bound main bed, 900ft wide and 10ftdeep was excavated, with a sacrificial zone 1500ft deep on the left bank forflooding, and fully 2400 acres on the right bank won forconstruction of a greater Vienna, much of it in the hip Thirteenth District. The point? Well, that would be fifteen hundred acres of flooding ground astride the main Berlin road. Not that the K (u.) K. Heer was planning to lose another battle in the lands between Prussia and Austria. But even so.

I saw a great deal of this area, thanks to setting out to find the site of Wagram without the aid of a map. I never got there, but, in the long run, I think seeing the inner suburbs and the recreational boating areas on the Danube were more inspiring. This is a tamed landscape. It's part of a change that took place in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century that the majority of people who live in heavily built landscapes don't even realise has occurred (ask a libertarian intellectual about what happens to books in floods, if you don't believe me), and that those who don't hardly even realise needed to be done. If you do live in flooding ground, you probably think that it happens in Mississippi or Port Alice because of where they're built, and that Vienna and London were built somewhere where it just doesn't flood. It ain't true. It just looks that way because of all the concrete and iron that was buried between about 1872 and 1914.

Underground means London. London is big and central, so the first railway age ended with there being 7 major trunklines radiated from London and London not being the great rail node. National network integrationmeant building in London, and once people seriously undertook to tunnel the Thames, the future lay, obviously, underground. At the same time, the quarter-century before the onset of the great agricultural depression in 1872 sawthe highpoint of British drainage schemes, with cheap cast iron used inbridges, sluices, pipes and viaducts on an unprecedented scale. The capability was there, indeed, massively overdeveloped. By 1900, it seemed self-evident that London needed to be completelypenetrated by rail, that that could only be accomplished underground, and that electricity was the only way to accomplish that.

I could wave now in the direction of high theory, talk about making the city visible to the state, or explore the gendered vision I invoked the moment I chose to use "penetration" as a verb. (Because cities are girls!) But never mind that, because I live in Kitsilano, and you'd better believe that it's real estate that concerns me. Without rail, commuters could not reach the city from thesuburbs, and there was money to be made in the London suburbs, hence myemphasis on the political connections of the great real estatedeveloper/newspaper barons. In short, if you're a party baron, and you have an estate near London, you're aligned with electricity, because electricity is going to deliver upper middle class commuters to the garden estates you're building on old wheat land.

No wonder we hear people cherrypicking the most unfavourable foreign comparison possible. Ninety percent of American trams were electrified in 1900! Hardly any British ones were! Therefore, London must have 230 miles of electrified track by 1904, and 276 by 1906, and 4000 miles of line in the United Kingdom. That's what you might call overbuilding, and the appearance of a consolidated public London Underground authority covers the usual socialising of losses. Hopefully one day we'll sell of the subways and we can do it again, too. ⁱ

I know I play this riff of astonishing development a great deall, but that's because it's astonishing. It also draws, you will be surprised to hear, on personal experience. The first draft of this post was written as a much longer and even more hopelessly digressive chapter, during the crash of the globaloptical networks running each night by a brand new Spanish Banks mansion that was occupied and then moved out of in a few short weeks. I don't know that that had anything to do with 360Networks, but that's the story I told myself as I panted up that hill.

My explanation? Well, I’m noeconomist, but a first pass on the data delivers a compellingly Boserupian story. Between 1850 and 1900, the European population (including Russia) rose from 266 to 400 millions, and twenty-three million Americans increased to 76 millions. That being said, we need to understand howcapital formation kept up, and howthis population growth was achieved. When I fire up Steam and play some Civilization, it’s just a matter ofimproving farm land, but in real human demographics,rising life expectancy seems to count for more, and on the already heavily-urbanised North Sea littoral, that seems to demand accounting for the urban population replacement deficit, and, in turn, on improvements to public health. Soap and bleach aside, I'm about to get veryrecursive, because I need to talk about more, earlier, penetrations of the urban body, by watermains, sewers, and the gas industry. (I’d say gas lines, given their importance for establishing the legal context of electrification, but the need todeliver coal to gasification plants probably made canals more important.)

Or is it even more recursivethan that? Omnibusses started making suburban living convenient in the eighteenth century, back when suburban meant "more than twelve blocks from the cathedral. That is, in part, a story about Early Modern hydraulic control, and about incremental technological change, as there are some pretty pressing urban health issues with horse-drawn vehicles. It is hardlysurprising that the tramway entrepeneurs were looking for new solutions in the1860s, or that there was a piggy-backing effect. Canalside steam generators could burn the slack coal building up aroundgasification plants and coal markets, and a low-voltage direct-currentground-line didn't have to penetrate urban infrastructure very far to run tram motors on canalside lines. The synergy here is most obvious in the early history of Chicago Edison, but we only care about that if we're engaged in the silly argument that "American Nineteenth Century technological development is teh r0xx0rs because of democracy/property/minarchy/Protestantism." Which, if I were going to argue the point, would lead me to talk about more of history's underapppreciated patent trolls. (Hint, two names, rhymes if you leave off the "s," think early telecom: "Horseshit sells.")

It’samazing to think that at the very same time that philosophers were trying tofind a “modern” theory that would explain the crazy things that telegraphs and telephones were already doing that aninternational network of dockland refrigerated warehouses and reefer ships was springing up to serve the just-invented supermarket with Australian and Argentinian frozen meat. This is the 1880s we're talking about (source, 45). Telephone line cross-talk was so bizarrely incomprehensible that mainstream researchers were trying to use it to talk to the dead! This is starting before industrial bicycling!

So electriclines were no novelties in the1880s. Full penetration of the urban core does require new electrical engineering technologies, but they are on their way. I'm just not satisfied that I'm telling the story in the richness of detail that it needs. It's easy to theorise about what happened between 1860 and 1914. I've already waved at Boserup's version, and I began researching this in reaction to Mokyr's. It's precisely in the richness of the details that I sense that we'll find a satisfying explanation, one that might help our poor species do it again instead of wallowing in our savings glut and incipient deflation.

So what is the map of my trip going to look like? I have a starting point, the early modern city as hydraulic control apparatus. (If you'll allow me a generous definition of what that might be so as to include towns simply built on high ground.) Perhaps less universally applicable, but still important in Britain, is the cast iron/gas nexus.

Where I'm trying to get is clear enough, too. No-one is hiding the concrete-built, electrically pumped sub-basements of the modern electrical city. We just don't go out of our way to look for it. Usually. The problem is in the middle. We have a transformation that goes to completion between 1850 and 1914 that implicates population growth, rising life expectancies, and the colonisation of the bonanza wheat lands. We have public education, social change, all that stuff. Is this a simple story of population growth driven by cheap wheat or public health. That has huge implications. Right now, I like the hypothesis that the Columbian Exchange was history's great free lunch. That implies that population growth is driving technological change rather than technological change driving population growth, which, if I could establish it from a historian of technology's point of view, would have huge implications for the economists that are in charge of actually running the engines.

Now, I think even this first trip into the electric city starts to justify the claim. I've followed broad boulevards of easy access (die, metaphor, die!) These are, apparently, easy technologies to develop, low-hanging fruit to be harvested pretty much at random, compared to the slow pace of modern technological development. But if they're so easy, why is history so long? What's going on? Is something (fashion? Demand? National security concerns?) driving unprecedented levels of available human energy into new fields? Yes. Or that's my current story. It's hopscotch and episodic because rising populations opened up new possibilities that were exploited somewhat adventitiously. So I'm repudiating the idea of Malthusian limits to growth? Wow. I sure do feel precarious out on this limb! (At least I find support in unexpected places for claiming that human demographic growth is much more fragile than Malthus supposed. But then I have to explain why the Columbian Exchange changed that.)

Next up in tales of the electric city: Polo and Bicycles.

*I spent enough time looking for a remix of the Trolley Song to feel a certain need to scold. Mental illness isn't a tragic flaw. It's a treatable condition. The victims want help, hard as it can be to deliver. Here's Rich Burlew offering what might be, if you squint, a call out.

iLeslie Hannah, Electricity BeforeNationalisation: A Study in the Development of the British Electrical SupplyIndustry to 1948 (London: Macmillan, 1979): 18—9; Calvin C. Burwell, “Transportation:Electricity's Changing Importance Over Time,” in Electricity in the AmericanEconomy: Agent of Technological Progress. ed. Sam Schurr, 209--232(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1990): 210; “Progress in the Use of Electricity,” Engineering,4 March 1904, 334.

Dreaming of Cavalry, IV: Death Ride of the Battlecruisers

2012-03-08T18:11:00.000-08:00

Wait. Jutland? What does a naval battle have to do with the Battle of France? Or the Somme, for that matter. And for such an anticlimactic battle on top of it? (Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan? Hopefully you won't miss the point of the reference, like these guys did.)

It gets worse, though. I've babbled about London as a fortress/electric city, about the location of RFC/RAF bases on commuter lines, about broaching and forging shells. I see a connection. Can I communicated it? Probably not. The sand bars have piled too high on the eastern shore of the North Sea, and this post will ship too much water to get across and home safe to haven.

The obvious connection between Jutland and the Somme is that they happened close to each other. The German guns opened on the ring forts of Verdun on 21 February, 1916 as the forlorn hopes of the Crown Prince of Prussia's army left their trenches. The Trommelfeuer opened on the Somme on Midsummer's Day, a week before the general assault on Dominion Day, 1 July 1916, although the Canadians were still on their way, and it was left for the Newfoundland Regiment to represent the modern nation in the Passion of Empire, their past as well as their future. (Link to an odd bit of Newfoundland history that deserves more attention.) Between them, on 31 May 1916, came that oddly unsatisfying battle.

Since so much has been written about the Battle of Jutland, I'll start by laying out what matters to me about the battle.

Concept: Both navies held to an attritional concept of gunnery action. Warships fired, hit, and smashed each other's hulls. Water got in. The first ship to get more water in it than it had buoyancy, sank. Putting armour on ships slowed this process down, but never prevented it, not even if all the armour was thick enough to defeat all the shells that hit. Being hit by shells is bad for ships, and even small shells will sink big ships eventually. (Ignore the part about aerial torpedoes; they were just the coup de grace. Unsurprisingly, the sixty-year-old book that goes on and on about battleship designers worrying about this is not available online.) So armour's main advantage is that it keeps a warship in the fight longer. If you sacrificed armour for other ship functions such as speed, it was because these virtues were more important than staying power, not because you seriously intended to build a warship that couldn't fight. The caveat here is that you might want to reorganise armour and other aspects of ship architecture to keep key systems such as propellant magazines and machinery under increased armour protection. As of 1914, it had not occurred to designers that main gun mountings such as turrets could be protected in this manner. Instead, they attempted to distribute guns in the largest possible number of widely distributed turrets. I won't dwell on the error, just point out that designers expected turrets to be penetrated.

German Operational Plan: the German CinC, Admiral Scheer, decided to take his fleet out because it now looked like the Germans were going to have to take the full brunt of an offensive by the Kitchener armies. The navy would do its best to take the pressure off the army by looking for the British, fighting them, and giving them a bloody nose. After all, at the very least, if British industry was busy making replacement shells and fixing battleships, it would be making fewer shells for the land battle!

It was Scheer's plan, and requires some consideration. His fleet was smaller, so why did he think that he could win? He could hardly win a stand-up battle. Some people (usual suspect) have come close to convincing themselves that German technology was so much better than British that it was actually a near run thing, but Scheer's subordinate and rival, Franz v. Hipper, thought that German naval materiel was inferior to British, so that he would be at an even greater disadvantage (esp. 19ff.) Blah blah procurement politics/who gets a job at Krupp when he retires. The point of this is that those disposed to be critical are always inclined to think that their national technology is inferior.

So why did Scheer come out? He had the advantage of choosing his time and seizing the initiative, and those could be huge force multipliers in naval battles. Specifically, Scheer might catch the British fleet in detachments, and would certainly have a gunnery advantage. That was because he could choose the time of the battle. An afternoon battle in prevailing westerlies would silhouette the British against the setting sun and blow their smoke in front of them. The Germans would score many more hits than the British, and then they could escape after dark.

British Operational Plan: The assumption is that the British will have the advantage and that they will engage "an enemy then flying." So the British had to hunt the enemy down and then shoot them a lot to take advantage of a fleeting opportunity. It would be well-advised to focus on ships with lots of guns at the expense of armour, and to make them fast, for better scouting: hence ...the armoured cruisers. Although because we hate Admiral Fisher, we sometimes pretend that he invented the idea and that he was stupid and wrong.

The Battle:

Scheer came out. Despite radio silence, stray wireless intercepts told the British about it. Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty led a fast division of battlecruisers, plus a division of fast battleships, out to find the Germans. He found Vice-Admiral Hipper's fast division. This had happened before. Last time, Hipper was out on his own, and Beatty didn't sink anywhere near as many ships as he thought that he could have, because for various reasons the pursuit wasn't pressed as hard as it could have been. People learn from their mistakes. Beatty's subordinate commanding the 2nd Cruiser Squadron, Rear-Admiral Goodenough, had been criticised in the last battle for not sending in prompt sighting responses. This time around, he would press his reconnaissance and practically sit on his radio, virtually the only commander to do so. As this example suggests, Beatty was eager to learn his lesson, and pressed the pursuit hard. John Brooks suggests, too hard. Also, mistakes were made. Then Beatty found the rest of the Germans. He turned round and ran towards the main body of the British fleet, commanded by Admiral Jellicoe. Scheer followed. He ran into Jellicoe. The battleships of the German van got a bit of a pounding, but fortunately, and not surprisingly, this not exactly being a hard to foresee outcome, they were the most heavily armoured German ships, and could take it. Some jigging about occurred, at the end of which Scheer sent off his fast division of battlecruisers, cruisers and destroyers on a "Death Ride" against the British. The link is especially romantic and everything considering that some of the German battlecruisers were named after famous Prussian cavalry commanders. He broke contact. The Germans went home.

The Reckoning:

For the Germans, the attritional model was reality. It's a little hard to make out total number of hits per ship in these sources, but naval technology historian John Campbell's exhaustive analysis of damage inflicted on the German fleet during the battle shows that battlecruisers Lützow took 24 heavy caliber hits and sank on the way home; Seydlitz took 21 hits and a relatively ineffective torpedo, and had trouble getting home; Derfflinger took 17 hits and was out of action for a while; heavily armoured van division battleship Großer Kurfürst was in a similar state after taking 8 hits; battlecruisers Von der Tann and Moltke were both hit four times and took serious but impairing but not ultimately serious damage. Battleships Kӧnig and Markgraf took 4 hits each and were moderately damaged. The threshold of at least 24 heavy caliber hits being required to sink a modern capital ship is vindicated by the example of several British ships that took more than 20 hits without being seriously endangered. The model breaks down a little in that Kӧnig was in a serious situation at the end of the battle, but this was because it shipped 1800 tons of water after a 15" shell hit it in the main belt and sprang the plate without penetrating. This is either a bit of a naval architectural booboo or the expected result of being hit by a 15" shell. It's certainly not reasonable to expect a 15" shell to penetrate 14" armour at almost 20,000 yards.

For the British, the attritional model did not work. No fewer than three of the battlecruisers engaged were destroyed by between 5 and 7 hits from 11" and 12" shells. And so British commentators dived into their navels and are apparently still down there looking for their pens . (Obligatory Community link.)

Which is crazy. The lost battlecruisers were all sunk by magazine fires. Shell propellant is by design quite flammable, and the risk of magazine fires has been known for centuries. In a steel ship with good firefighting capabilities the risk is that the fire will evolve so much gas that venting provisions are overwhelmed and a build up of pressure will break a main structural member, causing the hull to disintegrate with a consequent spectacular release of flaming gas. (That is, the ship will "explode.") As I say, the risk was perfectly well understood. There have been many magazine fires in warships over the years. Most don't sink ships. Capital ships tend to be more at risk because of the amount of propellant stored within particularly well-armoured, hence ill-vent, ships.

But that's not really an explanation. The postmortem carried out at Scapa Flow over the next few weeks provided one. Under institutional pressure to develop the most rapid rate of fire possible, the Grand Fleet had developed an appalling institutional neglect of safe handling protocols. There was far too much ammunition in the turrets and the working chambers below the turrets; cans of primer were opened in the magazines and then manhandled to the turrets, leaving trails for flash to follow; and in at least two of the destroyed ships, anti-flash flaps probably had been removed. It's an old story that will be familiar to anyone who has ever worked in an industrial setting.

Only, sometimes the employer gets caught out, and it's very embarrassing. Now, it's not like this is a secret. The results of the inquiry were published in the official history, although for whatever reason the "outcome" section of the Battle of Jutland narrative was published in the next volume after the account of the battle itself, a particularly boring volume. (Contrary to myth, the Germans came out twice in the summer of 1916, and the Grand Fleet failed to intercept them both times, so this one is devoted to explaining why nothing happened. If I recall correctly, the volume was also by poet Henry Newbolt, rather than naval strategist Julian Corbett, ,and so lacks name appeal.) And if that weren't enough, Andrew Lambert republished the findings in1998, basically because everyone had been ignoring them for 70 years.

There's something going on here. In Campbell's analysis of the damage, he sums up every description of every German magazine fire at Jutland (there were a fair number) by asserting that had German charges been like British, the German ship would have been lost. Now, this might have been true, since masses of exposed German charges were, in the aggregate, less likely to catch fire than British because some of the charge was in a brass case that inhibited flash ignition better than the silk bags used for all British charges and some German. No-one is helped by generations of chemical ignorance that posits that British cordite was somehow "explosive" in a sense in which German was not, or that it became "explosive" as it became unstable, these being two different concepts. Still, I think the frequency of repetition suggests Campbell's discomfort. Campbell is in the tank for the British naval-industrial complex, just like me, and this is a distinctly embarrassing institutional failure.

But it's nothing compared to this nonsense, lifted directly from Wikipedia (because it's okay when I do it):

"The official British Admiralty examination of the Grand Fleet's performance recognised [a major problem]: British armour-piercing shells exploded outside the German armour rather than penetrating and exploding within. As a result, some German ships with only 8 in (20 cm)-thick armour survived hits from 15-inch (381 mm) shells. Had these shells penetrated through the armour and then exploded, German losses would probably have been far greater."

Now, this isn't nonsense in the sense that some British shells performed badly. It's hard to have 100% compliance with single-use munitions intended to perform under conditions quite this extreme. Remember, that's being stopped dead or nearly so from an initial velocity of over 2000 feet/second, this deceleration causing the ignition of a fuze that in turn detonates an explosive filler either before the shell breaks up on encountering impenetrable armour or after piercing the armour and fully entering the protected compartment. It's nonsense in the sense that there were any German ships that could have been sunk by better shell performance except for Seydlitz.

One can see where such nonsense would originate. In the immediate aftermath of the battle, the British thought that their guns had hit many more times than they, in fact, had. That's a reasonable impression to have, and the battlecruisers in particular had no idea just how bad their shooting had been, probably because of poor visibility more than lack of recent refresher training. Then they heard from Admiral Scheer. Here's an extract of the first paragraph of the "aftermath" chapter from his 1920 memoirs, which I take to be a version of his preliminary report. I've highlighted his claims that the battleships suffered no significant damage. A reasonable direction to take at the time, rather less defensible to republish in 1920:

Though they had been under such heavy fire, very little external damage on the ships was apparent; none keeled over or showed an increased draught. On a closer inspection, however, considerable damage was disclosed, but the armour-plating had so thoroughly served its purpose of protecting the vital parts of the ships that their navigating capabilities had not suffered. The König and Grosser Kurfürst went into dock as their anchor cables had been shot away. .

I've deliberately omitted the comments in the same section alleging that the picric-acid charged British shells blew up unimpressively and prematurely. Again, it's not necessarily wrong in the sense that many of the shells that did hit could have done more damage, even if it is overstated. It's just wrong in the sense that it contradicts the attritional story. At this late date, after two world wars and a Russo-Japanese conflict, there is no particular reason to doubt the attritional account except for the British battlecruisers. The virtually unarmoured 10,000 ton heavy cruiser San Francisco took 45 hits, including 14" shells from Kirishima, and survived the Battle of Guadalcanal. HMS Exeter, similar to San Francisco but even smaller, took 7 11" shells at the Battle of the River Plate, more damage than any of the battlecruisers blown up at Jutland. I could go on. The reason is simple. Shells tend to hit above water, so the resulting holes don't let much water in. They're not useless, being very good at inflicting mission kill, but the sinking rate is going to be disappointing if the victim ships manage to escape action under their own power.

But look what Scheer did accomplish: "A preliminary fight between cruisers lasting about two hours, which proved the superiority of our guns." If you've read the technical chapters that Brassey's Naval Annual published before the world war, you will be up to date with the technical argument about whether German or British guns were better, and, in particular, the spectacularly disingenuous way in which it was argued that the German 11"/50 and 12"/50 were better than the British 13.5"/45 that armed Lion, Tiger, Princess Royal, and Queen Mary. The authors are unsparing in their dissection of the argument, which, of course, official German sources offered rather than admit that Tirpitz had decided not to spend the money needed to build ships around these larger guns, before capitulating with the advent of the 15". (You'll also be a witness to the ...eclectic... way that Corelli Barnett handles his technical sources.) British shells don't work. Scheer is as much in the tank for Tirpitz as Hipper is a critic, for obvious political reasons.

Yet there's something more going on here. As framed, this is a failure of British artillery technology two months before the Kitchener Armies are to be launched into the attack. I'm not accusing Admiral Scheer of spinning the Battle of Jutland as a reassurance that the army will survive the Somme. I'm claiming that we're seeing a bit of the old epistemic closure. Which, for no reason whatsoever, brings me back to Correlli Barnett's chapter on the Battle of Jutland in Swordbearers. Barnett offers such an extensive list of alleged British technical failures leaving Jellicoe in a bad position that it's almost unfair to single any particular one out. But there are links to be made and arguments to be had in focussing on one in particular, so I'm going to move on from metallurgy and physical chemistry and look at "inferior British optics."

Now, on one thing, Barnett was not wrong. The British optical industry was in retreat in the first decade of the Twentieth century, and had been for almost twenty years. Chance Brothers of Manchester was one of the world's pre-eminent optical glass makers in the early 1880s. By 1900, it had almost conceded the field to Zeiss of Jena. This perhaps had something to do with the rapid development of improved forms of window glass that attracted capital away from optics, but that is not to take anything away from the remarkable research effort at Zeiss. By hiring two physicists, including Ernst Abbe, early pioneer of optical computing (to go all out for anachromism), Carl Zeiss was able that expanded its catalogue of specialised optical glass during the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century. As Dr. Stephen Sambrook has established (and huge Internet credit to Dr. Sambrook for making the core of his research available for anyone interested in the British optical munitions industry), this very catalogue played a huge role in Zeiss's rise to near monopoly. Optical instrument makers were understandably not inclined to recompute complex optical devices for new glasses, while the extensive Zeiss catalogue made it likely that designers would turn to Zeiss glass in the first place.

Hey, Corelli! The "inferior optics" of the British fleet were made with German glass! I know that you can pivot on that point and make a new argument, but maybe you want to rethink the part about Jutland? But there's more. Amongst the instrument makers who used Zeiss glass were William Stroud and Archibald Barr, two British professors at Yorkshire College of Science. Hearing in 1884 of the Army's new-fangled desire for "rangefinders," mainly to shoot guns at things that they couldn't see, the two of them perhaps saw a road out of Leeds, and proceeded to build the army a rangefinder in their garage. The army didn't want it, but the Navy did, and the two professors soon had a part-time business. As the Admiralty increasingly went in for the technology, others followed suit. Barr and Stroud nipped out Zeiss for the German patent for the rangefinder concept, and had a practical worldwide monopoly before they had a decent factory, which they built at Glasgow in consideration of the University giving Barr tenure at a real school.** Here's a great summary by Iain Russell for the University archives, highlighting Barr and Stroud's progress in the allied fields of technology, business, and PR. One of the more intriguing sidelights (apart from the patent trolling for and against Zeiss) is the way that Barr unashamedly played the anti-Semitic and anti-German cards as he acted to move first lens design and then glassmaking in house, cutting out his old (German Jewish) partners in the process. As the "National Efficiency" debate took hold in 1909, Barr and Stroud were well-positioned to represent a British response to the evils of supposedly superior German engineering (about which, in vast detail) and finally secure the army contracts that had eluded them in the past. Barr and Stroud thus manufactured and supplied the same general species of extensions of old-fashioned tacheometry that equipped British battleships at Jutland.

In my roundabout way, I've assembled a pretty long list of new industries implicated at the Somme. Pollen, of British Linotype, and also Thomas Cook and Sons of York, were involved in trying to build a complete computed gunnery control system for the Royal Navy. They have their personal historian in Jon Sumida, who seems, according to Brooks, to have been taken in by (sigh) another patent troll. Jutland proved a disappointment to those who hoped that technology had overcome the problem of hitting the target often enough to sink it. It was not, however, a disappointment for the iron and steel industry, notwithstanding much deceptive comment.

Brooks, in opposition to Sumida (we all remember the scandal when Journal of Military History got Sumida to review Brooks, right?) champions the much more mannered Elliott Brothers, an instrument maker in London in the midst of evolving into a computer giant. Elliott Brothers actually made much of the gunnery control equipment used at Jutland, working with the future Admiral Dreyer, brother of one of the army's gun design specialists at Woolwich, and son of an Anglo-Danish astronomer. We have Barr and Stroud, gone from a hobby project by two professors in 1885 to a Glasgow-area factory employing thousands of people in 1914. Rangefinders were only a component of the more complicated gunnery systems of Jutland, but, conceptually, at Elliott, they had emerged as tacheometers, devices designed to compute range and direction finding problems in surveying. "Computing," in this sense, is something done by lenses (and lens systems), as well as by people designing the devices. Chance Brothers, out of the industry virtually entirely in 1910, would follow Barr and Stroud's path, leveraging support from the Ministry of Munitions into a full-blown return into the optical glass industry in the course of WWI, before being bought out by Pilkington and emerging as the modern Thale Optronics. The development of an "optical munitions industry" meant that Britain no longer had the luxury of withholding public support for a British firm interested in pursuing the field.

I come back, then, to the failure of the Somme --and of Sedan. In both cases, the ministries concerned failed in a pretty dramatic way. At the Somme, there were not enough shells, they were not fired quickly enough, and, even if they had been, they could not be aimed accurately enough. At Sedan, the French could have used a heavier and more modern gun, but the basic failure, I've argued, was a lack of redundancy in the control system that was required to actually use the huge French superiority in barrels to effect. In both cases, we've seen that, for political reasons, failure was recast. Lloyd George, having argued for more heavy guns in exactly the same way that his successors would argue for more heavy bombers, presented the failure at the Somme in terms of the 18 pounder's inability to penetrate bunkers. The problem here was British industry. The French would, more grandly, present defeat at Sedan in terms of a loss of national morale.

This has been a great deal of writing and rather too much time sunk in a blog posting going out on the day I received my copy of the first season of "Game of Thrones" if the lesson is going to be that one should never let a good crisis go to waste, that there are always vague and gassy Profound Lessons to be learned from am embarrassing failure of public policy. I would prefer to focus on the evolution of technology in its social context. What really happened? The answer, I think, is simple. After 2000 years, horse cavalry had abruptly become obsolete*** and the world hadn't really kept up.

This isn't a profound insight or anything. Colonel Maude was a deeply dumb guy, but when he gestured at technology as the only possible solution to the problem in 1909, he was basically pointing us at the future. As we know now, the solution that we can single out from the midst of Maude's laundry list of concerns is air power. Again, the brutally simple observation that the Battle of Sedan came out the way it did because the Germans had air superiority. The reason that I've wandered all this way is that I want to get past the bombs-falling aspect of the defeat at Sedan to the not-seeing-the-enemy part. Air power needs to be understood in terms of information warfare. And bombing is part of information warfare. This is the old secret of siege warfare. The defenders, whether in a modern fort around Verdun, a slightly older ring fort at Antwerp, or an improvised fortification at Sedan, can kill what they can see. At least, as long as they can ring up the guns on their field telephones, they can. So you use the violence of bombs and shells to drive the observers under cover, and they respond by substituting technology for human eyes. We've come to live in a world understood synthetically, in which the mind's eye rides the terrain technologically rather than in the saddle. The Third Republic was caught in the middle of that change, on the wrong side of things, perhaps for no better reason than having adopted a bad monetary policy in the early 30s. And so twenty million died.

Is this a plea for good policy? I guess that it is. Choose your advisors, the Kangxi Emperor would say, wisely. Don't be convinced by loud-mouthed patent trolls. For every Barr and Stroud, there's a Pollen, after all. Go for your Elliott Brothers. Pay them well, and let them build a new factory on the outskirts of London, make it accessible to young people, just starting out in life. By the time that factory has a monopoly on the instruments you need to see the future, it will be full of quiet competence. Or is it a plea for good fortresses, Fighter Command bases linked in to the Air Defence of Great Britain? Or is it both? Are the best fortresses good policy, and is the best policy a good fortress? I'd say that that's a crazy formulation if Janis Langins had not made it first.

Now, I believe I hear a DVD calling me.

*HenryNewbolt, NavalOperations Vol.5(London:Longmans, Green, 1928): 7—15; Nicholas A. Lambert, "Our Bloody Ships" or "Our Bloody System? Jutland and the Loss of the Battle Cruisers 1916." The Journal of Military History 61, (January 1998): 29–55. Shame on Conservapedia and New World Encyclopedia for lifting the text of the Wikipedia "Battle of Jutland" article, by the way. There's this thing called "Google" now, guys. Double shame on the online essay mill that reproduces the text of Lambert as an "example essay."
**I know, I really am ragging on Yorkshire and Leeds, here. I can't help it, because being all snobbish about small schools doing their best is funny.
***To force Jutland into this easy answer, I'd have to come up with some definition of cruisers/frigates as the cavalry of the sea. Let's pretend I did, okay?

Dreaming of Cavalry, III: Seeing Death

2012-02-29T15:50:00.002-08:00

Cavalry, again. Specifically, what the Encyclopedia Britannica's designated expert thought it was going to be doing in the next war, as of 1909. Interestingly, it's not (operational level) reconnaissance. Today I'm going to pursue the point, and lay some groundwork for talking about Jutland next week.

A professor emeritus at Toronto reported conceived an interesting, if self-indulgent project when I was a graduate student there. He assessed the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, once considered an epitome of knowledge and latterly, if I may put it politely, an artefact of its times. His conclusion was that the latter reputation was somewhat overstated. The past was not a safety school.

As an owner of a copy of the Eleventh Edition, I basically agree, but then there's Frederic Natusch Maude, editor of an awful translation of Clausewitz, as well as tracts more fully explicating his social Darwinist creed, and, of course, the Eleventh Edition's article on "Cavalry." (Lifted from here, corrected, without too much guilt after I noted that the author didn't edit out Maude's explanation of why Catholic cavalry is inherently inferior to Protestant)*:

Imagine an army of 300,000 men advancing by five parallel roads on a front of 50 m., each column (60,000 men, 2 army corps) being covered by a strong advance guard, coming in contact with a similarly constituted army moving in an opposite direction. A series of engagements will ensue, in each of which the object of the local commander will be to paralyse his opponent's will-power by a most vigorous attack, so that his superior officer following him on the same road will be free to act as he chooses. The front of the two armies will now be defined by a line of combats localized- each about a comparatively small area, and between them will be wide gaps which it will be the chief business of the directing minds on either side to close by other troops as soon as possible. Generally the call will be made upon the artillery for this purpose, since they can cover the required distances far more rapidly than infantry. Now, as artillery is powerless when limbered up and always very vulnerable on the flanks of the long lines, a strong cavalry escort will have to be assigned to them which, trotting forward to screen the march will either come in contact with the enemy's cavalry advancing with a similar object, or themselves find an opportunity to catch the enemy's guns at a disadvantage. These are opportunities for the cavalry, and if necessary it must sacrifice itself to turn them to the best account. The whole course of the battle depends on success or failure in the early formation of great lines of guns, for ultimately the victor in the artillery duel finds himself in command of the necessary balance of guns which are needed to prepare the way for his final decisive infantry attack. If this latter succeeds, then any mounted men who can gallop and shoot will suffice for pursuit. If it fails, no cavalry, however gallant, has any hope of definitely restoring the combat, for against victorious infantry, cavalry, now as in the past, can but gain a little time. This time may indeed be worth the price at which it can be bought, but it will always be more economical to concentrate all efforts to prevent the emergency arising. After the Franco-German War 'much was written about the possibility of vast cavalry encounters to be fought far in advance of the main armies, for the purpose of obtaining information, and ideas were freely mooted of wide-flung raids traversing the enemy's communications, breaking up his depots, reserve formations, &c. But riper consideration has relegated these suggestions to the background, for it is now evident that such expeditions involve the dissemination of force, not its concentration. Austria and France for example would scarcely throw their numerically inferior cavalry against the Germans, and nothing would suit them better than that the latter should hurl their squadrons against the frontier guards, advanced posts, and, generally, against unbeaten infantry; nor indeed would the Germans stultify their whole strategic teaching by weakening themselves for the decisive struggle. It follows therefore that cavalry reconnaissance duties will be strictly local and tactical, and that arrangements will be made for procuring strategical information by wireless telegraphy, balloons, motor cars, bicycles, &c.,

So you thought that cavalry was for reconnaissance? That's silly. That technology stuff will rise to its steampunk occasion. Or, at least, it had better rise. The cavalry is needed for its real work: charging, if necessary, "great lines of artillery."

This is, I think that we can agree, bugnuts.

Photograph by Dan Alex, hosted at www.militaryfactory.com

Again, this is the M.1897, the French field gun, adopted by the United States Army, thanks to which rootwebs, of all places, hosts the service manual. Also, Craig Swain's discussion.

This is transformational technology. If I could just communicate the importance I sense in the incredible range of technological developments from the 1870-1895 generation that you are seeing here in field operational condition, you'd probably mistake me for Ray Kurzweil's grandpa. You've got your nitrated cellulose, ancestor of all modern plastics, albeit still a little more flammable than might prefer; nitroglycerine, the first true explosive, by the technical definition of having the brisance needed to shatter rock and thus make the Suez and Panama Canals possible; the first forged-steel made in industrial processes on Siemens hearths; a little revolution in precision engineering (in the recoil system) that will lead in short order to the machine age. The result? A fully recoil-compensated gun that fires a 16lb round charged with 290 shrapnel balls (actual shrapnell, not shell fragments) out to 7500 yards. A good crew can get off two rounds a second. But I'm not going to argue that the "pre-Singularity" (work with me here, I'm playing with a trope) happened because of the incredible culmination of multiple strands of technological development that is the Soixante-Quinze. I'm arguing that it was the reaction to it that made some vital bit of modernity real.

The sheer magnitude of technological change inherent in this weapon is, however, Colonel Maude's excuse. He might be a bit of a second-rater (search the name if you want to find out why he's "already accepted"), but if he'd really assimilated what this gun could do, he would surely have realised that he'd just come up with a tactical solution to the problem of there being too many horses in the world.

Why? I'm going to focus on two other aspects of the Modele 1897 that rise to my attention: the aiming telescope, and wooden wheels. I'm not going to be able to put them together as smoothly as I'd like below, but they both represent, in different ways, a revolution in our relationship with the landscape, our understanding of what information might be. It's all at once, a great leap into the dark. We'll do it in the context of the state's full-throated preparation for a great power war a little more than a decade away, where we will test our understanding of the synthesis by throwing a few million lives away. And then we'll stand back and wonder what we've done, and how we've changed the world, when it's already changed and we don't even quite know how.

Notice why Maude thinks that the fronts of the opposing armies will thicken up along great lines of artillery. It's because the horsedrawn artillery is so much faster than the infantry. This is vital, and, in its own way, consequential. Notice how the discussion of the British QF, 18 Pounder starts with the design issue of its trail. This is the part of the gun that has to be hooked up (quickly) to a team of 6 horses. Incidentally, the resulting pole trail restricts the range of the gun to an absolute maximum of 9,300 yards, which no-one cared about in 1905, because they thought that even less range was perfectly acceptable. A new 18-pounder with a splayed-out trail to allow the breech to depress further didn't come into service until well after the Battle of The Somme. But don't think of that as an oversight. Think of it as a transformation of our relationship with the landscape, and it will make more sense: wooden wheels and telescopes.

The first part is the wheels. This goes to roads, which, when I started on this line of thought led me to an old civil engineering textbook by the simple expedient of pulling the most useful volume off the shelf in the general neighbourhood where Civil Engineering was shelved. Those halcyon days are gone, but Wikipedia on John Macadam will do well enough for these purposes. Cut through the stuff about camber and drainage and foundation. What matters here is the concept of "metalling" the road by paving it with a layer of crushed rock. That's why the chain gang breaks big rocks into little rocks, and where we get the "Russian steamroller." Crush rock, once it has had the heck rolled out of it and been washed down with water, forms a level, flat, water-impermeable, smooth surface. We call it "pavement," just as we call modern asphalt-on-concrete roads "macadamised." It's not true. The roads that people were building at a flat out rate in the last half of the Nineteenth Century with steam tractors and steam rollers were much harder than modern roads.

This is where Whig history serves us badly. This wasn't a new invention of the Eighteenth Century, on the contrary, roadbuilders had been working towards this kind of surface for a long time, restricted mainly by the limits of labour. As a result, wagon wheels, at least on the main roads had been getting narrower and narrower, eventually acquiring first an iron "tyre" and eventually coming to be made of solid steel. The thinner the surface in contact with the road, the less the friction, and the greater the freight that the horses could haul. I've recommended Dorian Gerhold's books on the Transportation Revolution before, and I'll do it again. The rapid pace of economic development in the Eighteenth Century is over-explained by one revolution too many in my mind, but as long as we're taking cognisance of dubious monocausal explanations for a global phenomena that's clearly in fact caused by the Columbian Exchange, we should notice this rather important one. New and better roads, narrower, harder wheels, and more stuff transported overland at less cost.

So why the change to asphalt? Because of those nasty bicyclists, of course. Long before our modern culture wars, the first pneumatic-tyred bicycles took to the road and proceeded to start vacuuming up the water-repellent rock-dust pavements that made these roads possible. The problem really took off with the coming of the automobile, and the First World War was fought in the midst of the self-unravelling of our land transport infrastructure.

That being said, the M. 1897 had neither a steel tyre nor a rubber one, but rather wood. That was to reduce the ground pressure and allow the guns to run freely off road. It also made them lighter, so that horses could haul them and men could manhandle them, and it get the riggers in a job. We live in a world where pavements are perfect. It's easy to write, say, Roman history, and forget that in the winter, the Po Valley and the Pannonian plain between Vienna and the Iron Gates, or the Fens that cut Anglia off from the rest of the Low Countries, or so many other places, were inland seas. But they were. That's a world that we're cut off from, and we moved from that world to the one where the ground is always firm beneath our feet, literally under fire, as we sought to bring ammunition up to the guns in 1914--18.

That's the wheels: now the telescope. See, it's not enough to be able to fire a "storm" of shrapnel at the enemy, whether cavalry obligingly charging in the open, or, more plausibly, enemy infantry hiding in holes in the ground and taking pot shots at you with their notoriously smokeless rifles. You need to be able to aim at them, and very quickly, too. The M.1897 had a gun-free sighting mechanism that allowed the gun to be aimed without disturbing the view of the gun-aimer through his telescope. That was a good start on matters, but you also need to have a range so that you can elevate the gun. And, in fact, you even need to be able to take into account the gun's variation from level across the axle. It's all quite complicated. Actually, it's more complicated than is really feasible under the Oh-My-God-People-Are-Shooting-At-Me conditions.

Fortunately, this had already been taken into account. Not my artillerists, mind you, as they were still of the opinion that the gun was the best ranging tool, and not, science notwithstanding, entirely without reason. It was, rather, the professional field of land surveying that had been thinking about this problem for about a century now, and come up with a wide range of gadgets to speed up, and thereby encheapen (because imitation is the sincerest form of-), surveying. It's right there in my Eleventh Edition, (v. 26: 341ff of the compact edition): Tacheometry: the art of rapid surveying. The Wikipedia article even lifts the first few paragraphs of the article. Unfortunately, it thereby misses the key point in the rather beside-the-point technical issues of, you know, actually surveying real estate. Which is that, far more than the other origins of the concept of which I've been made aware by the fine folks at the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, the surveyors were the first guys to really, seriously try to solve and simplify computing problems by designing machines to do it for them.

Consider this beautiful little piece in the Smithsonian's collection of surveying and geodesy instruments.

It's an example of Eckhold's patent omnimeter, explained by the Smithsonian curators here (I'm trying to drive traffic to the Institution because I'm guilty about image leeching off them). It has a little level, rangefinder-type gizmo, and actual theodolite, allowing the surveyor to "accomplish the work of theodolite, level, and Chain," without actually having those. Or paying guys to do the Chain readings, of course. Cheapskates.

One more thing: this particular example of a computing/surveying instrument is by a firm that, if you've read your computing history, you may have heard of: Elliott Bros. You will not, unfortunately, read much about the company's prehistory as an optical surveying instrument maker in the official company history. That stuff is before our ken, back in the misty prehistory that so often claims history of technology before we realise that it's important. Suffice it to say here that the transition is no accident. As John Brooks documents, Elliott Bros. was brought into the naval fire control problem precisely the need for optical instrument makers in the field, and gradually transitioned from instrument-maker to computer pioneer because of the close connection between computing optical instruments and computing fire control solutions.

But that's for next week. This week I want to talk about moving guns and seeing death. If a gun can fire 30 shells a minute, each containing 280 balls to a reliable point in space anywhere within 7500 yards and within the admittedly limited traverse of the gun, or, with a little more delay, after moving the gun, then being visible to any point within that range is no longer an option.

Now, you can cheat here, and use a gunshield. In fact, everyone cheated. Gunshields allowed guns to approach enemy rifles, and even cannons, much more closely. Fit a gunshield-and-gun with some kind of auto-propulsion, and you might even have a new tactical concept. Actually, it's not really new. People have been barnstorming tanks since the beginning of time. The truly novel concept is hiding the gun.

After struggling for years to produce a gun that could move faster and shoot straighter and more devastatingly, people are suddenly confronted with the serious proposition that they have to fire from out of line of sight. It's not a new idea, in that the siege, coastal, and even howitzer batteries had been doing it for years. The difference is that field guns are intended to bring massive and rapid fire on moving targets at unknown range. How do you even do that? Someone can stand out in the open and tell you where you should shoot; but how do you convert that information, quickly and accurately, into gunlaying instructions? More importantly, what do you do when the observer gets shot, or, at least, has to move out of earshot?

With tacheometry. Here's a discussion of the rapidly evolving technology of what I'm going to call computed firing solutions. All kinds of factors are taken into account with remarkably complicated instruments, considering that they're meant to be used in the field and that some of them are mounted on a gun barrel.

And it's all predicated on a landscape that the eye can no longer view. What can see, can be shot. We need to be able to build a synthetic landscape, based on information acquired by other means --Maude's "&c." And we need to communicate that information to the gun battery, and to turn that information into gun-aiming instructions. We're going to need aeroplanes, and electrical communications, and cameras, all of which seem a great deal more important, and, to be fair, are more important (for now) than the tacheometric devices that compute the aiming instructions.

I'm going to come right out and call this a virtual landscape. It basically consists of data that has to be captured and processed tacheometrically. It has to be computed. It is an information-technology landscape, and it has been created in less than twenty years since the first M. 1897 soixante-quinze rolled past the reviewing stand at the Bastille Day parade. We've gone from a world encompassed and imagined by hunting-and-shooting folks riding by in mad pursuit of a fox to a virtual world. We haven't even managed to invent the heuristic that will explain what we're working with, and won't for another three generations. And you think that the pace of technological change is fast today.

*"It is to the growth of Protestantism that cavalry owes its next great forward leap. To sweep the battlefield, it was absolutely essential that men should be ready to subordinate selfish con siderations to the triumph of their cause. The Roman Catholicism of the day gave many loopholes for the evasion of clear duty, but from these the reformed faith was free, and it is to the reawakened sense of duty that Gustavus Adoiphus appealed." I told you that the Nineteenth Century was nuts about this religion thing. I'm just happy that we're past it now.

Dreaming of Cavalry, II: Riding the Land

2012-02-22T14:38:00.002-08:00

So this is about the question, raised elsewhere, about whether the cavalry are a useful weapon of war or the lifestyle of the landed elite. The answer, as it always turns out to be, is "Both!" Which you may have heard framed in terms of the aristocracy treating war like a fox hunt. Which it did.

And now I'm going to try to rehabilitate that way of thinking, and also let another corner of the profession (and the Eurasian continent) be heard from, in my own feeble way.

First, though, an apology. Sometimes I really envy my colleagues who have built up awesome databases of notes and references. Then I remind myself about all the effort that they sank into climbing the learning curve of dead software. Then I go back to envying them when I realise that I've failed to source some key anecdote. Such a time is this.

The point here is that I'm pretty sure that the following anecdote comes from Joanna Waley-Cohen, highlighting material to be published in The Sextants of Beijing. I don't know, because I didn't note the work I encountered it in, and Sextants is understandably on permanent one hour loan from the course reserve at the University of British Columbia library. (Though this might be an argument for buying a copy.) This is my excuse for flying free.

The anecdote goes like this: one day, the Kangxi Emperor (1654-1722) went out on a ride with his squabbling advisors. The emperor was known for riding his advisors hard during frequent inspection trips, although I do not find this criticism in the Wikipedia article, so take it for what it is worth. In this case, though, he had larger problems. The dynamics of court relations often pitted the proponents of various wisdom-teachings against each other. (Cf. Rites Controversy.) The Kangxi Emperor, who had a country to rule, was prone to getting impatient with this crap. So, as I say, he went for a ride with advisors, probably including a member of the Jesuit Mission to the Qing court.

They reached an open field on the outskirts of Beijing, where the Kangxi Emperor posed a series of questions to his advisors. This is where memory fails me, because I don't remember how Professor Waley-Cohen formulated them, if, indeed, it was she. That being said, maybe my version clarifies my point better. Anyway, the fundamental question: how much rent could this field yield under the benevolent rule of the emperor?

The classic way in which the story would then be related would have the Emperor going around his circle. What does Confucius say about this? Buddhism? Taoism? What of the Jesuits? Here, however, the emperor did not pose his questions. Rather, he pulled out the astronomical sextant that symbolised the Jesuit learning. However, instead of training it on the stars, the Emperor rode around the field, taking sitings on various landmarks. He measured the area of the field, its distance from the city gate, its elevation with respect to the nearby river, and the height of the hill between it and the river. From these, the Emperor was able to calculate whether the land could be irrigated, and what its yield might be under various arable crops.

So there's my obsession with hydraulic control creeping into my version of the anecdote. It goes with older obsessions: about China's relationship with science; about the Jesuits' relation with science; about the Jesuits' relationship with Eastern religion; about the Jesuits' relationship with Christianity. Or we could go another direction and highlight the way that this episode reinterprets the classic notion that astronomy belongs in the quadrivium because of that whole "great chain of being" thing where "as above, so below."* In the Emperor Kangxi's example, studying astronomy doesn't make you a better landlord because it elevates your mind with the contemplation of the higher things. It's because once you've learned astronomical technique, you can guess the rent of the land you're riding across by taking sightings on landmarks and doing approximate trigonometry in your head. Which is something, I think, that anyone who agree with the whole "great chain of being" model of the universe would take as self-evident, but which kinda makes my head explode.

But here, according to a smart person is where we should really go.

The actual question ought to be "What's this 'China' you're talking about?" Avoiding that fascinating but off-topic question, I will come back to the the picture, and a very small portion of Crossley's supporting argument.

It's Giuseppe Castiglione's Qianlong Reviewing The Troops. The Qianlong Emperor was the Kangxi's grandson, and Father Castiglione was a member of the Jesuit Mission at the Qing court. With that, the context and intention of the canvas falls into place, although if by chance you haven't seen it, I refer you to Titian's Charles V at the Muhlberg, here.

There are lots of interesting similarities and differences in these two takes on a mounted man as iconic emblem of rulership in the Western tradition of the painting as an eye of the lens. I'll confine myself (having already narrowed Crossley's sweeping thesis to a minor point) to a minor element of the composition: the choice of weapon: bow and arrow versus lance. Again, the (Holy) lance pretty much explains itself. So, on to the bow and arrows: Why does the Kangxi's grandson, wishing to express rulership in the realm of ideas** in the idiom associated with the Jesuit learning,** do so with a bow and arrow? Because they're a classic inner Eurasian expression of rulership. The arrows sweep the scene, signifying the rider/ruler as hunter, possessor of the land, the agency that shoots volition.

Gaze, venery and control; geeze, I'm talking like some Nineties feminist thinker. (That being said, I maintain my right to an uncomplicated masculinity with that old chestnut about the ambiguity of the hunter/hunted roles.) The anecdote turns out to be about surveillance, real estate, hunting and seeing. Now I shall return to the Abendland home of the Jesuit wu jen and see where these themes take me.

("Spear and magic helmet?" For the second time today, I ask, "srsly?" And not just because it reminds me of a girl and a vanilla latte.)

So here's the blurb for Richard Blome's The Gentleman's Recreation (1689):

The gentleman's recreation:

in two parts : the first being an encyclopedy of the arts and sciences ... the second part treats of horsmanship, hawking, hunting, fowling, fishing, and agriculture : with a short treatise of cock-fighting ... : all which are collected from the most authentick authors, and the many gross errors therein corrected, with great enlargements ... : and for the better explanation thereof, great variety of useful sculptures, as nets, traps, engines, &c. are added for the taking of beasts, fowl and fish : not hitherto published by any : the whole illustrated with about an hundred ornamental and useful sculptures engraven in copper, relating to the several subjects

Blome is a book that I spam about the Internet a great deal, precisely because of his format. What, exactly, is the conceptual unity between the two volumes? How can a general cyclopedia of the arts and sciences lead to something as specific as an extended discussion of horse care and field sports, plus a Popular Mechanics' eye-view of hunting gadgets at the end? It sounds like a mess, linked by nothing more than a vague flail at a theme, "these are two things that gentlemen like." Or, more accurately, here is one thing that gentlemen like, and another thing that they should like if they were more interested in improving themselves and less interested in chasing foxes. Right?

Wrong. Unfortunately, Blome is only available through Early English Texts Online, and the skies would fall and the Heavens darken if that curated digital garden were ever opened to the hoi polloi. So you may be expecting a semi-random stream-of-conscious jog such as Howlett, here, opening with a discussion of the different kinds of deer and arriving by p. 42 at a primer of infantry tactics on its way to music followed by fowling. It's not. It's a classic attempt to move on from the global to the specific, such as these endless examples that I string out here, here or even here and here. My point being that it is more common than not to start by framing the problem with the appropriate kind of general knowledge before moving on to the specifics, that manyof these authors invoked or at least pointed to "science" as a means of gaining fuller understanding of the joys of hunting, fishing and gardening, and that my search techniques have yet to turn up an equivalent to Blome. Drat!

So why do I think that Blome's approach is important? Because his "cyclopedia" starts out with the big sciences, including astronomy. This is the same trick as the Kangxi Emperor, with much the same import. You can learn a great deal about a piece of terrain using "astronomical" techniques of survey. The thing is that Blome than moves on to hunting. Which is when you --ride across the terrain. As I've framed the imperial anecdote, the point of doing all these observations on the landscape of the kind that you learn to do with the planets is so that you can learn about the economic value of this particular landscape.

Now put yourself in the place of a young country gentleman tally-hoing across a field in pursuit of a fox. Do you want to know what rent this particular field or copse or meadow brings in? Of course you do! You're a real estate speculator. That is as close to the definition of "gentleman" as you're going to get from any utilitarian economic analysis of what a "country gentleman" is. Hunting is fun, sure. But it is also an opportunity to see the country and take cognisance of investment opportunities.

Now put yourself in the place of this same gentleman, only one who has gone to war, as Howlett's stream of consciousness correctly assumes that you will end up doing. You're riding across the countryside, now in pursuit of enemies rather than the inedible. Do you want to know what rent this particular field or copse or meadow brings in? Actually, you do. The rent is a reasonable proxy for the amount of forage that the field will bring in, and knowing about forage is the basics of logistics in early modern war, and we all know who studies military logistics....

I'm on record as seeing cavalry as vital because it takes on the reconnaissance and screening missions. What I want to make clear is just how much of these roles flow from the cavalry simply in terms of riding the land. It's not just being there and seeing. It is the cultural and epistemic basis upon which what is seen is made legible, economically, militarily, and to the state. The equestrian class used to be trained to ride, see, and shoot. To turn the view of the hunter into useful information. (I shall also talk about Washington-the-surveyor eventually.) That's important. Very important, it seems to me.

What I've so far kind of dropped is the instrument-assisted aspect of this. I've left it mysterious as to how I intend to get to the standard British fieldpieces of WWI, Jutland, and Fourier optics. That's because blog postings ought only be so long. (Yes, I do, in fact, know that.) It's also because I have to retrace the steps of some research again, and if I can't find the paper/site I want to reference next week, boy, will there be egg on my face!

*Here's the Google Books version of the most-gestured-at book in intellectual history. Click on it for the cover, at least. Or maybe I'm being mean, but what I remember about Lovejoy's (srsly) Great Chain of Being is being told by Stephen Straker that I should "probably" read it one day. And that so should he.

**Crossley 234-8, 243-4, 275.

**I couldn't find a self-explanatory link, although the one pointed to here is interesting. So I'll amplify. The Kangxi Emperor's main military challenger in Inner Eurasia was the Dzungar leader, Galdan Khan. The crucial military confrontation between the two was the Battle of Jao Modo, where Jesuit-cast artillery played an important role. some books in which to follow up are this and this.

A Dream of Cavalry, I: Galloping

2012-02-16T14:24:00.000-08:00

People dream of flying, and of going fast. In childhood, there were those golden days when we could just run on the green, or pedal our bikes as fast as we could as we coasted down hills towards improvised jumps. As teenagers, we got to do the same thing with roaring gas engines, enjoying their incredible responsiveness on the twisting curves.

And everyone who is reading this now actually survived that pleasure. I know, amazing, right? The exhilarating feeling that comes from going as fast or faster than the ground will support is pretty universal.

I have, for example, a clear image in my mind of what the turn-of-the-century "electric city" was like, one that might bring home my mangled analogy between Antwerp and its ring fortresses, and London with its ring airbases. I just so want to write about it in a way that brings together the sayettries of Lille and siege of 1708 and the gaslit age and the Battle of Jutland* and Fourier transforms and the Breech Loader, 18 Pounder. There's a reason that the manuscript that I've (mostly) written about these subjects runs to over 2000 pages, and it's not because that's what I think the readers want. It's because I'm going too fast. Discipline, Erik, discipline.

Or maybe there's too much discipline, sometimes. Sieges may be won by the triumph of method, but there are times when plodding is its own form of deception. That's my main point in this posting, which is caught schizophrenically between a case of someone being wrong on the Internet** and my desire to get into a discussion of cavalry, speed, and the landscape. I've done some research in the lesser point, and need to dig up my work on the second, which will take some time. So in the interest of economising my own time, I'm going to try to segue from one to the other. I gather that it's not so much whether you clear the fence as that you're willing to try.

Now, I'm not saying that the Birthers were appalling, mind you, So apologies to Erik Loomis if he notices or cares but in the interest of getting all historical about Birtherism, he links to this the site, which lets an expert (Philip Payne) execute misdirection by plodding. Consider that none of us disagree that Amos Harding (b. 1764-d. 1841) was Black, because all of us are black per the ridiculous One Drop Rule, or that he went ethnogenesis as an American in this little episode that I like to call "the American Revolution." And I'm not waving my hand at probabilities either, since Warren G. Freaking Harding conceded the point of his non-White physiognomy himself. (So did the GOP, when it used the accepted "Romanesque" codeword for Indian ancestry, but that's by the by, and check this link out.) The salience of the matter is solely that Amos Harding's particular great-grandson, Warren, had the non-issue emerge as an election issue in 1920. Election. You know, when swift-boating happens. And yet Professor Payne manages to write an entire post on the accusations that manages to avoid mentioning the Committee to Elect James M. Cox.*** Instead, the whole thing becomes horrid ooze from beneath the foundation pavings of American civilisation dug up and flung at us by a single crazy professor.

Sorry, but that ain't gonna fly. Check out a good book on the subject if you're interested in the question of Warren Harding's race and the election of 1920. In fact, it could even be a longer book, but it leaves out key details like a prize fight booked for the slightly-down-at-heels town of Toledo, Ohio on the 4th of July long weekend of 1919.

See, the thing is, boxing was in the doldrums in 1919. College football, now that was a sport. Harvard was on top, having seen off the challenge of Jim Thorpe and his Carlisle Indians. Sure, to some, the Crimson Tide had a few too many vicious giants inclined to intimidate their way to victory, but if a good big (White) guy beats a good little (Indian) guy, that's just the way the ball bounces. It's going to be a few years yet before Harvard gets such a heaping serving of karma that it retreats from competition entirely.**** Still, I'd call football the Republican sport and boxing the Democratic one. No wonder that Governor Cox decided to let the Toledo fight go ahead.

(Don't blink. Kid Blackie lands the decisive punch at 0:04

Oops! That's a guy who happens to be "Cherokee on both sides" dishing out one of the most vicious beatings in boxing's history to the guy who beat Jack Johnson in a fixed fight. Just as Warren Harding is about to inflict an epic electoral beatdown on his cross-state rival. There's all kinds of stories about how Jack Dempsey soaked his fists in lye to "harden" them, but, as far as I can tell, they just made him even more popular. Hugely more popular. Jack Dempsey saved American boxing, and perhaps the American star system, and he did so by beating the original "Great White Hope." Bizarre.

It's bizarre. When Johnson won the title in 1912, Representative Seaborn Roddenberry of Georgia responded by proposing an anti-miscegenation amendment to the United States Constitution. I don't which part is more eye-popping: someone proposing a "one drop" anti-miscegenation constitutional amendment (oops; you can't get married, because your great-great-grandfather fooled around!), or the contrast between Seaborn and the only other Rodenberry who must spring to mind when you read that. Eight years later, as far as I can parse the electoral returns, Governor Cox's swiftboating campaign left Senator Harding more popular in the border states.

Either sports are colour-blind and the Wilson Administration's unpopularity broke the "solid South," both of which I doubt, or there's something more than meets the eye to the culture of Jim Crow. And that's all I'm going to be saying about that. I'm not nearly the social critic I'd need to be to take that on. I'm just galloping through the internet this week, hot on the scent of something that's probably going to turn out to be inedible to start with.

My favourite seventeenth century manual on fox hunting stresses that it is a scientific sport. You can't just ride through the countryside pell-mell after a fox, leaping every obstacle as you go. You have to ride pell-mell and be constantly aware of the lay of the land and subtle signs that the scent track isn't going where you expect it to go. Science tells us that spider webs are an indication of damp ground that won't hold a scent; so watch your hounds closely. If they back and hesitate for a second, before following the ridge between the hollows, look for spider webs downslope. That's a sign that the fox has thrown the hounds off the scent by going down into the damp.You can't catch a fox without speed and attention to detail.

That's the cavalry spirit: charge recklessly, and mindfully. You have to master the terrain. Sometimes, you have to put aside your diffidence and claim your authority. I'll leave it there for this week, and come back next week and talk about the Kangxi Emperor, optics, surveying the land, artillery and horses.

*Down to forty bucks on Amazon, so I bought a copy. And then, since I was there, I bought this and this and this. I think it might be time to admit that I have a problem.
**Woops. per Internet tradition, I was supposed to link here.
***Worse, if you check the link out, you will see that Governor Cox is one of those notorious press barons that we often leave to shape their own personal history at our own risk. Just fight the power, Professor Payne.
****You were expecting a reference to Jeremy Lin there, right? Done. Now, about a midwestern Catholic Irish university that actually predates American Catholic Irish and which is dedicated to the Corn Maiden. Er, I mean, Virgin Mother....

Fall of France, V: The French, V: Building Security for the Electric City

2012-02-10T14:54:00.000-08:00

I'm a little groggy this Wednesday afternoon as I begin to type (but not finish), for various reasons,* but Robert Farley has restored my drive to write! Blah blah A-10s are awesome, sending airplanes to shoot at tanks is a good idea. The USAF is wrong a bunch of stupidheads to think otherwise. (Not a stupidhead. This is what a stupidhead on this subject might look like, if he were actually a dumb historian, as opposed to an excellent scholar who just happens to be wrong about this one thing.) So I am going to talk about sieges, and fortresses and how technology changed them in the age of the electric city until air power became the only substitute for human waves.

So the argument, in the end, is that the German Air Force of 1940 just precisely was a siege train, and not a "close air support" arm. But I have a great deal of material to work with, so I can afford to meander my way towards that conclusion. Today, I am going to try to link urban development to the Somme. We'll see if I can do it.

Sure, that's just another apology in advance for meandering. I'm going to need it, because this trip towards the debacle on the Meuse begins with an anecdote about David Lloyd George, and not a funny or an interesting one, either. It just goes like this: one day, while preparing for his son's marriage to an heir of the large British construction/civil engineering firm Sir Robert McAlpine, Limited, he hid from the press at a newly built home owned by one of his supporters, who specialised in turning farm estates around London into mixed-used residential/golf course developments. (This might be the golf course in question, although, if so, it doesn't mention the related housing development or the developer.)

One might take as rather gauche an investigation of the way in which big money backers affected the policies of the great politicians of old. I've already trod on FDR's feet by gesturing to the odd conjunction between a family interest in a naval technology firm and major military purchases of their less-than-fully-proven boilers, and I certainly don't want to get into the question of whether Lloyd George was a lying liar here (but more below!). That being so, the triple conjunction of modern civil engineering, urban development and public policy pretty much defined the way that we live today. If I point out the conjunction between "Concrete Bob" McAlpine and the national security apparatus, it's to make some kind of point for the purposes of my inquiry.

As far as London and McAlpine go, that point is pretty basic. Garden suburbs, aircraft factories, and air fields sprang up together along the major new commuter rail lines being built to serve Greater London during the Edwardian era. Hatfield is going to be my first example here. Twenty miles from King's Cross on the East Coast Main Line of the Great Northern, later the London and North Eastern Railway, Hatfield's station served as the collector point of two minor radial lines. The town grew up around the nucleus of the Marquess of Salisbury's country house and was De Havilland's home from 1930 into the 1960s. That doesn't quite take us back to Lloyd George's time, but the line also served Enfield, and the Oakleigh Park Estate (an 1866((!)) suburban housing play). Still no air base, so how about Brooklands, the "motor raceway" turned WWI airbase turned interwar airport near Weybridge on the London and Southwestern Railway? LSWR is the line that famously delivered the BEF to Southampton Docks with a troop train running like clockwork every six minutes.** The enthusiast's Wikipedia article manages to turn a company that was ever-so-slightly a laggard in branch electrification into a pioneer, but the point remains that they were electrifying even as the war began, with work beginning in 1913, and the first electrically-powered train running in 1915. That's Edwardian industrial progress, for you. Weybridge still has two feeder lines so that commuters from even deeper in suburbia could reach their places of employment in Kingston-upon-Thames, notably Hawker-Siddeley. I'll talk about Halton below.

All of this, of course, is about an electric city that was never really fortified. I could talk about British politics and odd fortification projects,

or I could make a case that the air-and-factory complex around London is what a modern fortress, circa 1940, looks like. But to get there, I will start with another great electric city, the last true fortress city to actually stand siege: Antwerp, the place of the hand-taking. It's a bloody and sinister legend for a town with a sometimes dark and sinister past, although that's not the worst that I think of when I think of the Red Hand.

More funny than sinister until used by marching thugs to justify violence in the name of prejudice. That being said, it is time to bring tired and frightened Prussian reservists marching on Louvain, and carry things forward through a foggy dew settling over Dublin till dispersed by long range guns.

Antwerp stands on a low-lying floodplain on the right bank of an eastward meander of the Escaut/Scheldt. Doomed to be a major strategic centre in both world wars, Belgian planners also had to accommodate the end of a centuries-long passive blockade of its great port by the Dutch, or possibly the Zeelanders, if my speculative hypothesis that the blockade had something to do with downstream flood control as well as with taking away Antwerp's trade.

In the early 1870s, the city was just beginning itsgrowth as a major port. The inhabitants drew their water from wells,and the city depended on its ancient enceinte and citadel for protection. The siege of Paris demonstrated that siege guns could engage fortifications from distances of up to 7 miles, and, underthe direction of General Brialmont, protection was displaced outwardsto isolated concrete forts. The invention of barbed wire in the 1870s allowed engineers tolay convenient barriers in the intervals between the forts. It was covering these barriers with fire that was a problem. The whole Belgian army mightbe too small to prevent enemies from infiltrating between forts placed far enough out to cover Antwerp.Fortunately, this was only part of the work of modernising Antwerp, and great inundations were also possible. For at the heart of the new city, massive docks were being dug in a backwater of the river. Cast steel gates, a triumph of industry in both creation and transportation, impounded 30 feet of water. This allowed the city tohandle up to 6000 ships a year, but clearing them required an enormousconcentration of railways. This would have been a problem with all of the flooding ground around the city even were it not for the huge head of water in the midst of it all. Meanwhile, health questions were raised about watering 275,000 people who lived in a location where all of the necessary industrial water washeld above the natural water line. The answer was a massive filtration, settling and “purifying” farm (with associated water quality laboratories) feeding a huge pumping station that provided all water for domestic use. The idea of pumping water for urban use is so straightforward today that the implications of centralising pumping within the fortifications needs underlining. The pumps required a very large amount of energy from a very modern power station. The new Antwerp of 1905 was an electric city to its core,You can tell that I'm quoting an article from Engineering (“The Antwerp Waterworks, Ibid, 27 May, 1904: 727; 10 June: 868) when I move right on to point to a heroic example of all of this planning and building being promptly vindicated, in this case, by a major oil tank farm fire in 1904.

Then, tragedy. Geography and hydrography defined positions that had to be held, but the guns-versus-armour race had spun out of Belgium's reach. The concrete and steel of the Brialmont works had been superseded by great masses of reinforced concrete at places such as Fort Douaumont , and this in turn provoked the construction of ever larger siege guns, the Gamma and M-Devices of the last post. It's a remarkably understudied subject: a quick search reveals that Google Scholar knows nothing of any conjunction of the concepts of "history" and "reinforced concrete," although no doubt I'm doing it wrong.

Still, I don't want to talk about the strength of the ouvrage. I want to talk about its capacity to control space. Antwerp is a particularly obvious case, in that the city had vast amounts of water to deploy on low-lying ground. Verdun is a less obvious one, because it is a hilly topography where a system of forts channel movement in a way that requires much squinting at maps to even begin to understand. London is even less obvious, in that its siege, when it finally came, was waged entirely from the air, and its ouvrages were grassy fields in (mostly) garden suburbs. And if space, rather than strength, is the issue, than are we perhaps missing the point when we talk about the size of the guns? Douaumont did not fall to being smashed by a 420mm bombardment; but, first, to a coup de main, and, second, when a demoralised German garrison evacuated it ahead of the Moroccans, attacking under the cover of a 16" railway gun bombardment. Or so says Wikipedia. I can't find anyone talking about a weapon in this calibre, although enough heavy iron was improvised that I expect that it's just a matter of this particular monster not having attracted a fan boy yet.

Heroic as the gun and the arrangements used to deploy it were, there is a certain sense of futility here. Forts are not meant to be invincible. They are human machines, vulnerable in all kinds of ways. Controlling space is an issue of weapon ranges, not penetrating power. The Austro-Hungarians, who took to heavy metal in a way that no other power did, was aiming for range rather than penetration in its final iteration of wartime siege artillery. Britain entered the war without much in the way of a heavy siege artillery. An improved copy of a Skoda 240mm bought for South Africa was just entering service at the outbreak of the war, with the prototype firing its first round in anger in October, 1914. On 24 June, 1916, General Birch, the man who was about to take the Royal Artillery into its greatest battle yet, asked for 15,000 yards range, a full mile over what the existing apparatus could achieve. At the same time, the army was receiving a 12" howitzer giving just over 11,000 yards range (to be improved to 13,500), and a 15" howitzer that weighed a hundred tons all up, throwing a 1500lb round to, again, 11,000 yards.

Let's take this in a different direction; to the Somme, the (British) battle of 1916.Theyear opened badly. 1915 had been hard for the Allies. In both western countries, war ministers came under heavypressure. Asquith had made what I think was the perfectly sensible and constitutionalappointment of Lord Kitchener as Secretary of State for War. The last of the old military intellectual ascendancy of Woolwich enginering graduates in the British army before the brief interregnum of the cavalry, he had a first-class technical and military educationand vast experience in running national war efforts. His basic decision to accept the enormous flood ofvolunteers and organise them into the basis of a British army of 50divisions was proven right by events. Unfortunately, this thrust himinto national politics and attracted Lloyd George's animosity, not without reason, because procurement crises opened up a new political front within weeks of the beginning of the war. It was the ministers, not the generals for whom Kitchener spoke, who were on the hook for heavyartillery, rifles, aeroplanes and above all, shells.

Forthe French, the shell shortage was tied to the whole course of thewar. The Germans had taken the bulk ofFrance's iron mines and coalfields. In a larger sense, French heavyindustry was crippled. In 1793, the Republic had (supposedly) saved itself by a combination ofscience and patriotic republicanism. If will, science and industry couldmake up the loss of the Lorraine fields, the Third Republic did not deserve to survive. France's large, albeit late-developing industrial base, including thelargest automotive industry in Europe, had to save the nation.

Only it couldn't. France was a robust, resilient society. It had massiveresources of organisation and ingenuity, but industries are designedto serve specific needs. The endothermic steel industry had servedthe needs of rail and construction, The few open hearth plants that made a much smaller amount of high grade steel for modern shells were gone, and they couldn't be replaced overnight. France would replace them. It would build new electric hearths, and the hydroelectric plants to power them. It would be something to celebrate in decades to come. Right now, it was a matter of replacing good steel, and even a country that produced moreengines than Britain and Germany combined could not do that. Good weapons would be made up with bad. The artillery would lose hitting power and range, and men would be sacrificed in lieu of materiel.It was vitally important that this implication not be drawn out, and the appointment of Albert Thomas as Director-Generalof Munitions proved politically productive. No wonder Asquith copied it immediately, making Lloyd George Minister of Munition. A good decision, except in so far as it shapes the way we still see the Battle of the Somme today.

Kitchenerhad not wanted to fight in France in 1915. His men could not attack at night; that year, or, for that matter, next. He wanted to save his men for 1916, surely the last year of the war, since German farmers would never slaughter their pigs, as they must do in the fall of 1916. Though, first, the French would have to hold. If Verdun did not decide it, Kitchener would. And Verdun did not. In spite of steel helmets, grenades, trench mortars, flame throwers, specially lightened machine guns, and élite Pioneer stormtroopers, Verdun held, not least because the French truck fleet proved able to provide enough logistic lift to keep its army in the battle; another sign of a changing world.ⁱⁱⁱ

Andyet France was bleeding. Where were the Kitchener armies? Wherewas Britain's industrial might? For a while, lit looked like Asquith had won one battle. David Lloyd George had toanswer the questions that he had fostered when he was aiming at Kitchener. He could answer that output rose quickly through 1915. He could answer that he was a political genius who could find new sources of labour in Ireland and amongst women, as only a Radical could do. As a Radical, he could stand against the trade unions and call for “dilution,” saving the day while killing the Liberal Party. (For the first time. It's starting to look like a slow learner.) He could build a political coalition of "men of push and go,"(1, 2) He could use a “war of engineers” and use that formula to finally define engineers as middle classprofessionals rather than machine operatives.^iv

Take the example of shell bursters, where Britain had followed the Frenchlead by adopting a dinitrotoluene composition in the 1890s.In its Lyddite form, this former industrial dye had good stability,reliability, high internal energy and good brisance. Unfortunately,during the South African War, British gunners noticed that theirnewly-issued Lyddite shells tended to explode on first graze ratherthan rebounding up and then down into Boer trenches. Given that theyhad been shipped all the way through the tropics, this is hardlysurprising., but critics preferred vast muddy social issues to the tedious details of condensation contamination. And it got better. When the dual-base TNT/nitrocellulose/nitroglycerine propellants andbursters that replaced Lyddite proved difficultto produce in industrial quantities in wartime. Two Liberal Members of Parliament, FrankBrunner and Albert Mond stepped forward to explain that the shortage was a deep national failure. Didn't Germans go to rigorously academic, state-supported schools where they solved partial differential equations for fun? Weren't their British equivalents being taught to decline Greek verbs by Anglo-Catholic schoolmasters? (If you can't already guess who and what you'll find when you look up the founders of Imperial ChemicalIndustries, go ahead and wiki them now.) rich with wartime profits from following the trail blazed by the impecunious Austro-Hungarians, who were first to mix in cheaper but less powerful ammonium nitrate to create Amatol. On the one hand, the Ministry of Munitions did not have to admit to issuing inferior ammunition. On the other, the soon-to-be Premier's alliances with British industry were going ever deeper.^v

Thiswas exactly the kind of magic that Asquith was looking for when hemade Lloyd George Minister of Munitions. Technology was another place where Lloyd George could maneouvre. We have all heard about machine guns and tanks, but he also took ownership of the heavy siege artillery. At the same time that the Minister promulgated ever grander alphabetic schemes of artillery expansion by numbers (Scheme “A” through “C,”), he pushed up calibres. If in the real world the 15” siege howitzerexisted for the sole purpose of digging up hardened fortifications, in the world that mattered, it was an indicator of political success.^vi

SinceLloyd George was successful, the inevitable consequences of political success followed. But before that came a series of political crises in an entirely new strategic dimension, as airpower that he did not weather anywhere near so well. First there were zeppelins. Then there was the failure of various Royal Aircraft Factory designs. Then, there was the EastHertfordshire byelection on 9 March 1916, won by epic-scale grifter-cum-lunatic Noel PembertonBilling as "the Member for the Air." Formerly a remote London suburb, barely won in the Liberal landslide of 1906 and lost to the Conservatives 1911, Hendon saw the future in Pemberton Billing's lunacy. Where Edwardian mansions had once sprinkled green fields, now an Underground terminus at Hendon just across the border in Middlesexwas fed by commuter trains stopping at Radlett. A 220 acre estate was sold near Hendon to George HoltThomas, whose Airco employed 2000 workers by1916. Airpower wasn't just a strategic issue. It was a political issue, and an issue of political finance. Unless the Liberal Party wanted to be relegated to Tyneside, it had to take the lead here. The Minister of Munitions let it slide, and, if he ever had a chance, failed to take the London suburbs from the Conservative party. In his defence, there was a war on, and the hammer blows came thick and fast. Even if France didn't collapse, Ireland might, or Russia. When the Royal Navy failed to win a decisive battle at Jutland, the pressure got worse, with the notion taking root that defeat had been the result of the failure of British shells. It was a story that the Germans liked. British shells were about to fall on German boys in far greater numbers than even at Jutland. Even the Germans knew it. Stories about shells failing to burst, or bursting with no force, were a consolation against imminent nightmare.^xiv^xv^xvi^x^xi^xii

It was a nightmare, all right. On 1 July 1916, when the initial British offensive in theSomme river valley cost 20,000 Commonwealth troops werekilled, another 40,000 wounded. Writing the next year, novelist JohnBuchan would describe the men of the Commonwealth marching forward inbrave human waves of voluntary sacrifice. This was the poetry ofa man shaped by the wars of previous decades, whether taken straight up or ironically, the harsh truth was that many of them were killed by enemy artillery and machine guns before they even left their own trenches, while most of the remainder were caught in prepared killing zones by those same guns, and it didn't matter whether they advanced in waves, kicked soccer balls ahead of them, or bloody well Highland Flung themselves across No Man's Land. The battle went on another two months and cost perhaps a million casualties betweenBritish, French and German participants. The first day slaughter was never repeated, because no-one launched another attack into the teeth ofunsuppressed German artillery.

How did it happen? How had the massivelogistical effort that dumped 2 million shells for the weeklong preparatorybombardment failed? We like to blame Haig, and, Lord knows, with reason. Yet, at the cabinet meeting where the attack was approved on 21 June, the Premier-cum-Minister of Munitions put on a dazzling statistical show, telling the Cabinet that Haig would have all the guns and ammunition he needed. When the lesson of the Somme was finally reaped at El Alamein 26 years later, the generals who had manned guns in 1916 fired 2 million shells in 2 hours instead of a week. And they did so with guns with a range at least 40% greater than the siege guns at the Somme, in spite of firing 25 and 100lbs.^xxii

Whathappened? Lloyd George explained that it took 1400lbshells to destroy bunkers 40 feet deep. There had been enough shells, but they were too small, or, worse, were useless shrapnel rounds. That requirements, fortunately, could be put back to Kitchener's day. Lloyd George's schemes would not deliver enough heavy guns for --well, for just long enough for it not to be his fault. But that was not the point; that was never the point. You can't suppress guns if you can't reach them with your fire. And you can't mass guns in defence of a threatened part of your front and still bury them 40 feet deep. Plot a pattern of fragment sweep, and it is not hard to see that you can beat the effect of a 1400lb HE shell with far fewer than 14 100lb (roughly a 5.5" or 6") shells.^xxiii

Shells-as-big-as-cars were never the economic solution to the problem. Nor were they the sane solution. Extracting range from a gun is a matter of putting more propellant in it. More propellant means more hot, corrosive gas. That means replacement barrels, and, at this point, one can see why you want to fire at a target 15,000 yards out with a 5.5" rather than a 12" gun. It's just so much cheaper to replace the barrels. Why didn't anyone see that? Because as small as the field guns of WWII were, they were too heavy to be towed by horses. Siege guns throwing 9.2” shells did not have to be towed, or, at least, did not have to be towed like field artillery. Other technical means, in reach by 1914, could move them, whether by railway or by steam tractor. That they were needed for range rather than penetrating power was not clear until the first shell hit the first reinforced concrete position. That the solution was to found in the air was first implied in that very fall of 1916, when poor flying weather meant shutting down the attack.^xxivWe'd learned.

Turnip winter was upon the Central Powers. Austro-Hungary wouldn't survive it, not really. In 1912, the formal context of a siege were the works around a city, and it seemed far from clear that the Belgian army could defend a fortress built in the context of artillery that reached out to 10,000 yards. In 1916, it was a continent under siege. The siege train had to contest control of space across hundreds of miles. London, the electric city itself was the fortress of the new age. France, on its way to becoming the electric nation, would be another.

********************

The numbered footnotes are the residue of extracting and editing this post from a longer manuscript that doesn't really deserve to see the light of day. I've fiddled with them a bit and cut the irrelevant ones, but there is no automatic renumbering function on the blog editor. The moral of the story is that I should probably have done it in Word, but I'm hoping the savaged remains will rise to the standard of a blog posting at least. You certainly aren't missing (many) relevant citations after the editing, and the irrelevant ones are gone, except from the pocket bibliography of Jutland below. We'll get to that.

iiiA great deal has been written about Verdun from the French and German perspectives, too little of any great value in English. For the German planning process, see Foley, 90ff; for splendid illustrations and modern synthesis straight from the files of the French army's historical branch, see Allain Bernède, Verdun 1916: Le point de vue française (Le Mans: Éditions Cénomane, [2002]): 57—9, 86ff; the contemporary apology for the German side can be followed month by month in Mellenthin's articles in Current History; Weltkrieg, 4: 31.

ivPearce and Stewart, 211—14; see further Broadberry and Harrison; Broadberry and Harrison cover the strike comparison in S. N. Broadberry, The Productivity Race: British Manufacturing in International Perspective, 1850-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 177, 248.

vEncyclopedia of Chemical Technology, s.v. “Explosives;” P. R. Courtney-Green, Ammunition for the Land Battle (London: Brassey’s, 1991): 1–11; J. Akhavan, The Chemistry of Explosives (Cambridge, U.K.; Royal Society of Chemistry, [1998]): 9–11, 36, 171; E. Freeman, “Thermodynamic Properties of Military Gun Propellants,” 103–32 in Stiefel, ed. 122–27; Constance M. Green,, H. Thomson, and P. Root, The United States Army in World War II: The Technical Services: The Ordnance Services: Planning Munitions for War (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1953), 354; John Campbell, Naval Weapons of World War II (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994; Originally published London: Conway, 1985): 5, 172.

vi I used Gilbert's biography, typically over-sympathetic to Lloyd George on the Ministry; R. J. Q. Adams, Arms and the Wizard: Lloyd George and the Ministrry of Munitions (London: Cassell, 1978) seems to be the most recent on the subject. I honestly can't remember a thing he said.

xiiEarly history of Rolls-Royce in Ian Lloyd, Rolls-Royce 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1978): 1; for PB, see Penrose.

xixJutland has generated an enormous literature. N. J. M Campbell's dispassionate discussion of what actually happened is enormously welcome (Jutland: An Analysis of the Fighting [London: Conway Maritime Press, 1986]); but much less attended than the more readable G. A. H. Gordon's The Rules of the Game : Jutland and the British Naval Command (London : John Murray, 1996); Samuel Brooks, Dreadnought Gunnery and the Battle of Jutland [NB] represents a significant step forward in analysis of events; for a conveniently accessible version of Scheer's account, see Reinhard Scheer, Germany's High Seas Fleet in the World War (London and New York: Cassell, 1920): 174ff.

xxiiRobin Prior and Trevor Wilson, The Somme (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005): 90—110.

xxiiiMalcolm Ian Brown, British Logistics on the Western Front, 1914—1919 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998): 116—23, 140—3;Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, The Somme (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005): 24—34 and ff.; Niall Barr, Pendulum of War: The Three Battles of El Alamein (London: Pimlico, 2005): 290—3; Robert B. Asprey, The German High Command at War: Hindenburg and Ludendorff Conduct World War I (New York: William Morrow, 1991): 250—2, 257, 266, 281—2; Martin Kitchen, A History of Modern Germany, 1800—2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006): 206—7;

xxivGeneric airpower thingie, RAF official history; J. A. Chamier, “Co-operation of Aircraft with Artillery,” Army Quarterly 4 (April 1922): 46–62.

*A lead like that and no explanation? It's this. I'm four days into a three week stint as night manager at the store. Four-to-hell should be for a kid living on Red Bull and ambition. I'm hoping that it'll be three weeks, and I can go back to having vanilla lattes with the morning gang. All we need is a bright kid who wants to be a "Management Trainee." A little seasoning, some experience, and they'll be promoted to store manager and make, oh, more money than a full professor. (Woo-hoo!).

So, you're probably wondering: track record in our store? Of the last 20 night managers, more have been fired than promoted (2). An by more, I mean "a lot more." And by "promoted," I mean that they were hired at the rung below "Management Trainee" and are now M.T.s. Did you think that I meant promoted to manager? Silly reader. We have lots of store managers in their 40s. (Baby Boom, etc.) The kind of guy who was trained by a store manager who wore Italian loafers and retired at 55 back in 1998 or so. The kind of guy who dreads getting the latest memo from the company pension plan. The kind of guy who bought a house and had a kid on the expectation that their income would keep up with the cost of housing, No wonder that they're looking at proposals to raise the retirement age to 67 with mixed feelings.

So, anyway, we need to find a smart, ambitious kid who wants to work a killer shift in the hopes of being a grocery store manager sometime in the flying-cars-and-moon-base 2030s. I'm cautiously optimistic. Hey, why should marketing have all the fun of living in its own constructed reality?

**Or twenty minutes or somesuch. Anyway, the dual points are that troop trains are small, and that the number is impressively smaller than some other number that's large.

Fall of France, V, The French, III: The Emperor's Daughters

2012-01-31T13:39:00.000-08:00

(Edit: I'd let this stand, as I have other things to write, but it's just too darn rough to go without a little polishing.)

It's amazing how quickly a day at the library goes. There's a lot of things that I'd like to talk about. Some of the sillier notions of pre-war aviation history got aired again last week in the even sillier context of a call for a lunar colony. I'm still circling the problem of getting a handle on the transatlantic horse trade. (This book looks like it needs a look.) In the end, though, I went with trying to draw out a picture that I've already formed from books that I've already read.

This is one doesn't start chronologically. Eugenia Kiesling's purpose here is pretty clearly spelled out. How much can you plan for future wars? It's an interesting question, but not a big concern for me. I like her Arming Against Hitler for its explication of the obstacles between planning and implementation. And by that I don't mean all of the debates over periods of service or frequency of cohort uptake or the problems of dealing with politically unreliable conscripts. What I mean begins with a little story about mobilisation centres.

Kiesling (88) notes the ideal of 509^thTank Regiment, whose depot was Mobilisation Centre 509 in Maubeuge, with a backup Mobilization Centre 513 at Rouen, which had no indigenousregiment. So every new conscript inducted at Maubeuge who meets the 509th's requirements (of which more below) goes to that regiment. If that wasn't enough, MC 513 could send along a few more men. The 509 is staffed from a coherent region. At the end of their service, the men go back to Maubeuge or Rouen, ready to be called up to serve in "their" regiment when the balloon goes up. But consider the more common case of Mobilisation Centre 503, which sentmen to the 507^th, 508^th and 510^th TankRegiments, while the 503^rd Tank Regiment received men from rear Mobilisation Centres in yet another four regions. How did things get so confused? I'm sure that there is a complicated, amusing bureaucratic story to be told, because we are talking about complicated bureaucracies that do amusing things. I would say that it is no way to run an army, except that pretty much all armies are run this way, which is why my eyes glaze over at so much of Kiesling's heroic research. Prove that things weren't equally screwed up on the German side, and she'd have a case.

That being said, another of her examples is just awesome (89ff). She has looked at the papers for the Lille Mobilisation Centre. Obviously the old fortress-and-sayettrie centre turned grimy industrial town didn't send men to a single tank regiment. It sent men to the infantry, chasseurs àpied, Zouaves, Tiralleurs algeriens, Tirallieurs tunisiens, armoured units, "mechanicalsupport units" for armour, horse cavalry (again, resident Africans were segregated into the chasseurs d’Afrique),motorised cavalry units, horse-drawn artillery, mechanised artillery, railway artillery, fortress infantry, AA troops, chemicalweapons units,* training establishments, engineer units including sappers,mechanics, electromechanical engineers, and telegraphists, supply companies,horse-drawn and motorised, clerical and other administrative units, medical,balloon detachments, the navy and the air force. Clearly the preference forregions of recruitment conflicted heavily with the need for specialists. This is because, to an extent, Lille was just big, but there's more to it.

For example, armoured regiments didn't take just anyone. They required that 15% of theirinductees to be skilled metal workers and 10% to be woodworkers (this is Kiesling's translation, and I suspect that if I were writing about the British army of the period, I would say "fitters and riggers," and be just as mysterious). Twenty percent must havedriver’s licenses.

The tankers go on. They want Radio operators and painters. They also want bootmakers and saddle makers. Now this seems a little strange, but they go on to specify "other suitable candidates for training as drivers." So having a militarily useful trade makes you a better potential candidate driver? Maybe it has something to do with recruiting within pay rates? Meanwhile the cavalry remount depots also wanted the boot and saddle makers, with more reason. More specifically, they accepted only these trades, plus accountants,blacksmiths, tailors, and, once again, woodworkers. Tradesmen withother certificates across a wide range of other skills were certified by theiremployers and distributed with regard to need (riding, driving, music,mechanics, nursing, piloting, navigation are noted). Bakers, butchers,cooks, masons, painters, and so forth were distributed according to TOEs.

At the other extreme, there were unwanted men. Les Joyeux, illiterates and non-Francophones were supposed to be sprinkled around tomaximum targets. The cavalry wanted no more than 5% illiterates, but when, say, 22.5% of the inductees in the Limoge, for example, were functionallyilliterate, this was a challenge. Kiesling notes that somemounted units in western France had 50% illiterates.

Now, the theory of the nationin arms is that each man (parliament argued about conscripting women, and concluded that it, like a national labour registry was impractical in peace) goes to camp, is trained, and returns to civilian life. Every once in a while, he gets a refresher, and as his cohort ages, it graduates into newer, lower effectiveness reserve units. So 1^stInfantry of Ville Ordinaire is backed by the 101^st, 201^st,301^st and Too-Old-For-This1st that garrisons the citadel. But if a man goes away from town to be a tanker in the 509th, and comes back to Ville Ordinaire. His unit is supposed to be the 1509^th, all the way across the country, which is not very practical to start with, and raises the further problem that there have to be tanks for him. If there is no 1509^th, for lack oftanks or whatever, the old soldier is sent to the local infantry –with noinfantry training! (94). In theory, 20 armoured regiments that train 1000 menevery year have encumbered the country with 200,000 veterans with no infantrytraining after 10 years!

I wouldn't overstress this problem taken in isolation. Maybe if the awesome Nazi war machine crossed the border hours after mobilisation in a vast attaque brusque, it would be important. If it's an "iron spearhead on a wooden shaft" that does so eight months after the declaration of war, not so much. Yet the same circumstance can apply to anything from thecavalry to the railway service and I do see a more subtle problem.

Consider: how many eighteen year old inductees are skilled mechanics? Bootmakers? Accountants? Butchers? Very few: the system is based on the premise that these eighteen year olds can be turned into riflemen quite as good as anyone's, but the armed forces' are only 39% infantry, a figure that the British Army Council could only look at with envy, hampered as it was by the India garrison) In a shooting war, the riflemen will die a lot, and there will be need of a large cohort of replacements, but that's not the point. The point is to staff the regular units that will train everybody. This is easily accomplished with rifle companies, but not so much with units that are presumably looking for eighteen-year-old mechanics. Not that the army can afford to be the trade school for the nation, even if one can imagine how it might be accomplished. (Are surplus Grande Ecole men going to be kidnapped and forced to study a trade?)

The point of the requirements of the cavalry depot is that this isn't exactly a new problem. There's probably a transition point where the main issue goes from horses being relatively scarce to war being all new fangled and stuff. But, heck. Let's not sweat the "probably." Let's look at other books.

So one way to start here is with the myth of decisive warfare. My buddy Jamal Ostwald says that we can go back to the eighteenth century and earlier and find people agitating for wars that consist of individual decisive battles, and critics who think that the problem is that war is just not being prosecuted "vigorously" enough. Fair enough, but the conventional picture is that the old regime was all about avoiding battle because armies were too expensive to risk, and sieges didn't kill lots of soldiers. Which is completely wrong, but never mind. The purpose of fighting wars was to capture provinces willy-nilly, because monarchies had no concept of the longing for authentic national community that burned in the hearts of men. Then came the French Revolution, with Napoleon blasting the crumbling citadels of old Europe with his brassy, beautiful daughters. (Stick around through 3:00. It's meta-ironic. Oh. Also, serious link. Gotta look at this some day.)

The idea is that liberal-bourgeois national armies, for various reasons having to do with the awesomeness of the end of history, had unleashed the power of decisive battle. This is sort of free-floating historiography. Military-historical literature treats it as a fact made apparent by the Napoleonic wars, so if there reaction away from conscript armies in many countries, it's part of the Counter-Revolution's effort to put the genie of nationalism back in the bottle. This makes it a little hard to account for Jomini, and allegedly leads to an impoverished reading of Clausewitz. Whatever. I don't care, and trying to write the intellectual history of the first half of the Nineteenth Century in broad strokes so that you can get to the First World War in one blog posting sounds like an unsound endeavour to me, so I'm just going to skip ahead to 1870.

Why 1870? Because of the Franco-Prussian War. I'd hoped to be able to blog about David Stone's First Reich, a book about that conflict, but the UBC Library copy is out on loan. I hope the reader, no doubt attracted by the hideously mistaken title, appreciates what he has: proof that historians are doing it wrong! (Waiting...Hey! Where's my job at Slate? )** The Franco-Prussian War is not much written about, and, predictably as a war featuring Germans, tends to be written from the German perspective. It's nice that the big book that we have is by Sir Michael Howard, but bad that it's so old. So a bright young thing did what academic historians are supposed to do and piled into an archive to do it again, and came out with this disappointment. Then David Stone came along and basically wrote a book out of the contemporary newspaper coverage and blew both Howard and Wawro away, because the information readily available in the public record, because that record is so much deeper than anything a scholar could haul out of an archive in a research trip. (An even better book would begin with Stone's sources and then dive into the archives, but that would be too much reading for a dissertation. It's the kind of thing a tenured historian would write, and now I'm tempted to say a bad and envious and ill-spirited thing about the typical tenured member of my profession.)

I praise David Stone because he was the first author to explain how it was that the French declared war in July and yet couldn't invade Germany until August, by which time it was too late, and why the French, despite their superior firepower and the Prusso-German tendency to kill their own men with French bullets still lost. It wasn't because Catholic Latins are cowardly and lazy and Protestant Germanics aren't, fossilised remnants of which explanation still lurk in the Very Serious Books I just noted. It's because the the French ran out of bullets before the Prussians ran out of breasts. The ammunition wagons hadn't come up in time. .

Thomas Adriance explains why in the kind of book that you are supposed to write for your dissertation before expanding your view to write a history of the entire war. (I'll let his biography say the rest.) It was because the French depots couldn't find enough accountants, woodworkers, bootmakers, and saddlemakers in time. This had never been a problem before. Napoleon III declared war, the army got its act together, and then it was off to stage a farce. (Now with more dead people!) The army consisted of medium-service men, the idea being that you saved money by holding onto men while they were vigorous and young until the last moment before the general compensation climate would require you to offer them a pension, at which point you kick them out into the non-pension-earning reserve. Except that if you pull that trick on men who've learned to be saddlemakers, they will separate, too. So since there's no downside to keeping them on, and there's the sunk cost of training to consider, you keep the saddlemakers for another decade or so. So the reserve has a lower ratio of regular soldiers to saddlemakers, and when you mobilise, you have to go out and recruit saddlemakers somehow before you can march. The Prussians, who had everyone in the reserve (in theory) could pull in the saddlemakers and get going a bit faster. And that's how you end up with the medium-service French Imperial army being slower to get going than the short-service Prussian army because of different modes of allocation of scarce skilled labour assets.

Anyway, take my summary of David Stone with a grain of salt on account of my not being able to check it out. And, come to think of it, brings me to Eric Dorn Brose's The Kaiser's Army: The Politics of Military Technology in the Machine Age, 1870--1918, which is just as interesting as it sounds.

Despite the title, Brose begins with the cavalry exercises at 1881, before looking back at the decisive cavalry actions of Mars-la-Tour. (Hohenfriedberger March, for mood music.) Mars-la-Tour actually signals something of a division between the three arms going forward. The mounted arm hadn't done much in 1866, but Mars-la-Tour was arguably decided by the sabre. For forty years afterwards, the cavalry arm wanted to do it again, and made public gestures in this direction while people laughed at them. Meanwhile, the infantry entered the war on a high note due to the whole needle gun thing and was promptly schooled by the French, who used Science on them.

The artillery, on the other hand, had under-performed at Königgratz,and consequently, like the cavalry, was neglected in the early actions of the Franco-Prussian War. The cavalry had to thrust itself forward for suspect attention, but things worked out much better for the beautiful daughters of the Emperor. Just to drive this metaphor into the ground, by the end ( cue mood music again), the lovesick infantry was beseeching the love of the guns, and got it, with 540 steel-barreled Krupp field guns softening up the French at Sedan.

Lessons had beenlearned, and, better yet, the guns were all worn out, requiring their complete replacement.

So, what kind of toys? Well, as various people have told us over the years, the Prussian Great Generalquartermaster's Staff's historical section was in the midst of a raging argument with Hans Delbrück over whether Frederick the Great was into decisive battle (the Staff's position), or "the double-poled strategy of Clausewitz, (Delbrück), a phrase that implied that the Staff were not only bad historians, but bad intepreters of Clausewitz. Burn! The artillery wanted to on the GGQM-Staff's side, and went with light mobile guns that could be wheeled up and used at thefront in great, heroically-advancing lines of batteries, like Frederick the Great’s horse artillery. The artillery had caught the spirit of decisive battle, or the cavalry spirit, you take your choice.

Then, at Plevna in 1877, the Russian artillery failed dreadfully tobreak up the Turkish field fortifications and the assaulting infantry columns were massacred by Turkish fire. This looked like exactly the kind of thing that the new German field artillery would do. What was the solution? Light field artillery armed withblack-powder HE shells (“grenades,” to be less anachronistic but perhaps lessthan accurately translated), on the assumption that there were just not enough used at Plevna? A revived shrapnel round that could be fired over the attacking infantry to to increase volume of fire and suppress the defenders?

Oh, oh! The "foot," or garrison, or static artillery knew! With the new nitrated explosives, big shells could just plain blow up not only field fortifications such as Plevna but actual fortresses. In 1883trials, Moltke watched a 210mm loaded with the new-fangled "gun cotton" demolish a fake fort with a singleround. Instead of light field guns, why not take big mortars and howitzers to war? If that idea were endorsed, it would have both technical and strategic implications. The Germans could just walk through the French fortress belt in the next war to get at the French.

As it happened, more earth, reinforced concrete, and steel armour got in the way of the simplicity of this. Permanent fortress builders might have found a solution, although it was not clear. (You could even write an entertaining story about spies stealing each others' plans for ever bigger shells, ever thicker armour as a technological race pit artillery makers against fortress builders and naval architects. Or you could read this.) It was less obvious that the idea of the field fortification could survive.

Meanwhile, the politics of the Reich were getting poisonous. As we all know, the Prussians ended up with an army not responsible to Parliament and thus an effectively emasculated War Ministry. Still, someone had to run the army, and that left the Military Cabinet, in which the chief of the military cabinet chaired a committee of service branch chiefs plus the chief of the GGQM-Staff, each with direct access to the emperor. While the French built new railways, forts, telegraphs and introduced first the Lebel rifle and then the Model 1897 and finally the heavier-than-aircraft, all the while experimenting with the bicycle, the German service chiefs competed to present a vision of the future to a new Kaiser who, in spite of being something of a nerd, couldn't get the Germans onto the French wavelength.***

So while the infantry and cavalry struggled over the tactics and operational missions of the future, the artillery branch struggled over technology and the way that it would determine tactics. Some wanted field guns to thrust forward aggressively. Others wanted howitzers to blow up field fortifications. The foot artillerists, meanwhile, elided the difference between field howitzers and heavy batteries that could smash fortresses. But if the Germans were equipped to smash fortresses, might that mean that they should attack where fortresses were? 9 305mm mortars were ordered in 1896. Did that mean going through Lorraine and battering away at Verdun? Did light guns mean pressing through the Ardennes? Could lighter heavy guns break the aging Belgian forts and open the roads through flat country? It didn't help that steelmaking technology was in transition, too. Steam hammers? Steam diffuser presses? Hydraulic presses? What was up with this "nickel" stuff?

Meanwhile, the war minister, on the outside looking in, fought for more forts, which would allow Germany to fight on the defensive in the west or east, and more really heavy artillery to keep up with Russian forts in Poland. He also wanted to hold backmanpower for industry to support a long war.

This, then, would be a war in which the general staff's expertise in rapid mobilisation would be less important. Instead of a heroic advance into France (or Russia, depending on the day of the week) leading to a decisive victory, there would be national military-industrial attrition, lasting at least a year or two. Or, as a retired Moltke mordantly predicted, a new Thirty Year's War. Meanwhile, Alfred v. Schlieffen, the most important interwar Chief of Staff, had a plan. It would need perhaps30 corps. People talk about this as strategy, but I suspect that we could get further by looking at the politics. After all, this would mean drafting the entire working class. (Cue an image of two Colonel Blimps fighting: "this will teach them military discipline! Awesome!" "No! it will load the army up with Red revolutionaries!")

Meanwhile, machine guns. If there's one thing that I don't like about Brose, it's that he's more interested in machine guns and Spion Kop than the impact of the M. 1897, perhaps because the way that France led in military technology almost to the outbreak of WWI is in such profound conflict with the whole "superiority of German science" narrative. And there was empire building; when one of the leading military intellectuals, Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, became head of the Corps ofEngineers in 1899 he tried to turn the corp's pet labour force, the Pioneers, into assault infantry. Now, in some sense, that is what the 32 battalions of pioneers already were. The real implication of his scheme was that regular infantry battalions would rotate through pioneer brigades, creating a mass of infantry trained to dig Germany to victory against France. He even proposed (and got) a Military TechnicalAcademy that was supposed to compete with the Staff's War Academy for the cream of the military intellectuals of the German army. As you'll see below, I think that both of these are Big Things.

And then there was Schlieffen’s 1903-04 wargame, the offensive into Francebecame a slaughter. There was a flanking move through Belgium, but of only 12 divisions. The mass of German troops tried to fight their way into France through Lorraine in a desperately one-sided battle. The anew Frenchrapid-fire artillery massacred the infantry, and when the guns went forward, they were butchered, too, due to their lack of gunshields. I can't emphasise enough the importance of gunshields, literally the reappearance of anti-ballistic armour on the battlefield after centuries of absence, with direct implications not only for tactics, but for the army's deployment of national equine resources. Heavier guns meant bigger teams. More horses for guns meant fewer horses for sabres. But was horse cavalry still relevant? Had the army reached some kind of material limit beyond which it could not advance with enough infantry, enough screen, and enough artillery? If so, what could possibly be a solution that retained the General Staff's primacy? And if it wasn't, what would take its place? Cars? Bicycles? Zeppelins? Fast-marching infantry, powered by advances in the science of nutrition?

Famously, in his 1905 game, Schlieffen answered the question by postulating the 30 corps I've already noted as possibly a political desiderata. The Germans used theirsuperiority of manpower in the open field to push everyone into Belgium to outflank the French with their superior firepower and win a cauldron battle. When Einem, the Prussian war minister 1903—09, declaredthat the German artillery was perfectly adequate, meaning there wasn't money to re-equip it again, he implicitly endorsed Schlieffen: and thus the politics of army expansion.

This led to all out attack in parliament. The new Chancellor, v. Bulow, seeing a chance to get more control over the military establishment, took aim. Seriously? Wherewere the machine guns, the zeppelins, the steam-powered giant robots? In fact, the main victims were the cavalry, who had to give up Mars-la-Tour. Even so, there was a grand rearguard action, as people, notably in the popular conservative press, conjured Russians unleashing a veritable horde of Tatar-Cossack cavalry on Europe, just like Genghis and Attila and those dudes. Seriously. At one point, the Kaiser had to abandon a hunting vacation in east Prussia because a Russian cavalry division was suddenly redeployed there. Oh noes! The Tatars are going to steal our Emperor! Again, I repeat: seriously. (Though I'll have to find my cite.)

Into such an environment, the foot artillery thrust bravely. In 1909, Krupp, probably at the behest of a politician/journalist/artillerist named Max Bauer, demonstrated a 420mm howitzer, the Gamma Device capable of throwing a2000lb shell 14km. (This kind of stuff didn't start yesterday.) It very much impressed the bourgeois military intellectual Ludendorff, now a department head at the GQM-Staff, who briefly dabbled with the idea of smashing through the French fortress wall before reverting to the staff's orthodoxy.

Briefly, because saner elements within the foot artillery noted that it would require an army that was ready to lay railways forward into battle. Not that this was impossible, but a “mobile” solution was preferred, and forthcoming. A 420mm howitzer that would only weigh "only" 44 tons. Of course, the resulting M-Device onlythrew a 1700lb shell 9 km, but that seemed adequate. That this was less than twice the range of an M. 1897 would have been important if anyone had thought things through, but they didn't. They were thinking in the soon-to-be-obsolete terms of penetration through steel-and-reinforced-concrete, and the M-Device's performance seemed adequate. Two Ms and 4 Gammas werein service in 1914. That's a lot of deployment infrastructure, mobile or not.

Ultimately, as we know, the war plan was for the big manoeuvre. There's a big argument about how real the "Schlieffen Plan" was, but what is not in doubt is that a flurry of new army bills made 81 divisions available. This included masses of reserve infantry that could not be equipped with adequate artillery, but also five cavalry divisions and 10 Jäger battalions so that no-one could accusethe GQM Staff of neglecting the couverture. Hopefully, the reservists' main job would be to march around the French.

What one could accuse the Staff of being, was crazy. Having 81 divisions, it still needed a place to put them. The solution, as so often intimated, was the Belgian plain, and to accomplish this in time for it to make a difference, that is, before the French could react, practically the whole German army was going to have to funnel through the vital rail centre of Liege, which would need to be open within 5 days of mobilisation. That is, the forts of Liege would have to be taken by then. How?

The answer? Bullets against breasts! And the men required for the coup de main against the ring forts of that city would have to be on their way within hours of the call to arms. None of this could be achieved without mobilisation and march planning of incredible complexity. Planning that justified the steady growth and preeminence of the Staff and gave it the appointments that allowed the War Academy to cut off the supply of brains to the War Technical Academy. And since the demand for men who knew march tables went well beyond what either Academy could supply, cavalry officers began to feed it, drawing off the head of steam in the cavalry officer corps.

So what happened? The Coup de main against Liege failed. All the mobile (very) heavy artillery that was actually available –2 M-Devices and 6 305mmmortars, including Austro-Hungarian loaners, were brought into action on 12 August,8 days after 4^th Cavalry Division crossed the border. It took until16 August to finally reduce all of Liege’s ring forts, although the road blockwas cleared on the 13^th. As the army pressed ahead, 5000 horses hauledthe road-mobile guns off towards Namur. Liege had bought between 4and 5 days for the Allies as the armies marched forward. Far to the south, in the last vestige of the "engineer/artillery" plan to fight France, the Bavarians supported the Gamma-Devices against the French forts, with suprising success. But that didn't matter any more, because behind the armies of the far right wing, ever more heavy guns were piling up to reduce one fort after another, culminating in the Belgian National Redoubt of Antwerp, at which point Robert Foley takes up the story.

Foley's German Strategy on the Road to Verdun is an apology for Field Marshal von Falkenhayn, a controversial figure in the history of World War I who, in my opinion, needs fewer apologists and more sympathy. He was not wrong, but Verdun was a mistake, if that makes sense.

Foley notes, correctly, the way that the need to deploy so many men into Belgium redounded on the authority of the staff even as it assumed siege warfare capabilities. Falkenhayn,chief of the Miltary Cabinet, was a prewar fan of the idea of national industrial war. As we know now, when Papa Joffre, the engineer turned chief of staff, beat Moltke on the Marne, that kind of war was in the cards. However, it also meant that Moltke, the chief of staff had to go. Falkenhayn, whose intimate relationship with the Kaiser earned him enemies within the army before he even opened his mouth, was slotted in to replace him, and tasked with completing his job. (See, there was a point to my footnoted childishness!)

Up to this point, Falkenhayn's vision had been vindicated. In the specifics of his new role, he was not quite so insightful.Moltke might have been a broken man by 14 September, but he thought that the French were on the verge of breaking, and he was wrong, and so was Falkenhayn in thinking the same.

From that mistake, everything else proceeds. Falkenhayn believed that one last push would beat the French, so he improvised that effort, combining an ill-armed new army of outbreak-of-war volunteers with the only firepower available, the heavy artillery just released from Antwerp, and threw it into Flanders. For the regrettable sequel, see Ian Beckett.

And yet, it seemed to almost work. Meanwhile, things were going even worse in the east. Germany needed to find more reserves. So GM von Wrisberg came up with the idea of taking the fourth regiment of eachexisting division and replacing them with 2400 recruits. It was desperate. with no reserves to back this new 11^th Army, operations would have to be cautious and casualty-conscious, yet the field artillery that might substitute for men were just not available, even though the long range medium and heavy artillery was not taking the kind of casualties that the infantry were. The upshot? While the Germans found 11th Army 466 “light” guns, fully 156 “heavy” guns were available. The even more savagely hit Austro-Hungarians, precisely because they were savagely hit, could spare 453 pieces and the men to man them.

Eleventh Army was a battering ram. The new commander, Mackensen, stressed the reliance on artillery fire in his new command. Harassingfire deep into the Russian rear would paralyse reinforcements and prevent counterattack. High velocity guns would breakfield fortifications. A barrage would inflict attritional casualties and suppress defensive fire. It was so effective that the Russians talked about a Mackensen-Phalanx that ground forward in operation after operation until, finally, in the summer of 1915, Mackensen’s force, by now an “army group," as success accumulated ever more manpower, had reduced the Russian situation in the east, driving them back, and, apparently, finishing them.

Falkenhayn looked west. First, he had to weather an Allied offensive. That done, he could go on the offensive himself at last in the winter of 1916. His target was Fortress Verdun, his plan, "positional warfare." The guns would get another workout, but so would Colmar von der Goltz's pioneers-as-assault-troops concept. From this, I'm convinced, we get our "stormtroopers," as we have called them ever since. I leave Foley at this point. He has embraced what I regard as the hopeless task of demonstrating that Falkenhayn really totally didn't want to capture the position, and that this wasn't an after-the- fact-rationalisation. The explanation of what I'm talking about that came up at the top of my Google search is this.)

So, okay, what is the point of all of this discussion? I've opposed an "engineer way of war" against a "staff way of war." Dig your way forward, or timetable your way around? I think that the contretemps around Liege, and, more importantly, at the Marne, demonstrate that the engineers were right, and that the military intellectuals squabbling over their readings of Clausewitz were wrong.

But that's opinion. Enough with intellectuals. What I want to point out here is the hidden history of the saddlemakers. There is a story is one in which we go from having not enough saddlemakers at the beginning of a war to eventually having an army that is all saddlemakers. This might even go so far as to change an army's strategic options as the war goes on. If we go to war with the army we have, what happens when the army we have changes as the war goes on? And what does this process do to the peace that comes after? Conversely, what if technology changes the capabilities of the army that you have?

My argument is that we are seeing a process that drives historical change here in my story about saddlemakers. But then, I've got this hugely self-important "substructural history of strategy" thing to talk about. Maybe I'm forcing everything into a conceptual mold.

*Who, in every army, ended up being mortar men. Is there a more glaring example of the limits of military foresight that every WWII army ended up with supporting batteries of 4.2" or 120mm mortars based on scaled up trench mortars, while not a single one of them deployed such a weapon in 1939? Or am I missing something here?

**Just to let you know, I signed up for MySlate to search for that link. Predictably, I still couldn't find earlier "You're Doing it Wrong" articles conveniently with the nonexistent, at least so far as I could tell in the time I committed, search tools. But they have one of my emails now. I hope you appreciate the sacrifice.

***Nerd but also gay. Hilarious! I outed Kaiser Wilhelm! Now I'm going to go make Youtube comments!

Plantation of the Atlantic XVI: Nantucket Later: Or, if you have to ask to see it, you probably know the answer

2012-01-24T13:57:00.000-08:00

There was a young man from Nantucket/....It's as though I started with "Nantucket Origins," but the other way round. That's because we're starting with a very famous early American, who kept his cards close to his chest. We've been straining to pretend that he had nothing to hide for two centuries now, because that's kind of what politics does to you.

It's funny that as I wrote the title of this piece, I had to reflect on the President's birth certificate instead of the hapless Mormon dude and his tax returns. That's the thing with secrets. They're secrets. Even when we make them up in our head. The proof of the conspiracy is that there's no proof. So what if the scales fall away, and we still pretend that there's a mystery? Sometimes, things have to stay secret even when we know that they're not.

Honestly? I searched Youtube looking for a better clip about secrets than this one, but it's got a guy with a secret identity, a prank, and a mysterious envelope, so it's at least vaguely relevant. The real point of today's audiovisual aid is that I've become a Community fan of late. I have no secrets from you. Well, maybe one.

Let's talk about a young man of the Eighteenth Century, with a Nantucket connection. He is handsome and smart, tall, and, in spite of his later denials, clearly well educated.

So if he's a real world figure of the early eighteenth century, what we really care about first thing is his class, and you will already have drawn your conclusions. Unfortunately, this is a tricky one. Our man made quite a bit of noise about his father's low station in life, and he is our only source. Otherwise we have only formal evidence.By this I mean that we know quite well that he was a tradesman of Boston, and that his son uses this as evidence of his own claim to humble birth. It's just that this exact fact is so notoriously misleading. Guildsmen can be very rich and very well born indeed, and not just in London.

Besides, we have to go up both sides of the family tree. There's a reason that they call it "nepotism," and not "I got my son a jobism." Your sister's children may be some of your closest relatives, but they have a different last name from you! Tricky!

And it's on his mother's side that our man has a Nantucket connection. There were 20 full shares at Nantucket and 14 half shares, and our man's grandfather is one of the half-share men. I'd call him, oh, "lower-upper" class if he weren't also an Indian translator, surveyor, and miller. That'd be clues, there. Nantucket records being fairly complete, we can also catch a glimpse of the grandfather's business over in Boston, and there we find our man's father acting as his father-in-law's business agent. Oh, Eighteenth Century, how you sometimes fail to surprise me.

A little extra trickiness here, by the way: according to the records, our man's mother was born in her mother's 47th year, eight years after her older brother, but only a year before her younger sister (at least per Wikipedia; Rootwebs sows doubts.) Again, secrets: there's probably another woman in the picture here.

So, taking our man as an unreliable narrator off the top --no mention of his grandfather when he makes so much of his father's middling status-- we attend the facts. Which are that at the age of 16 he was thoroughly engaged in a pamphleteering war under his brother and father's unconvincingly denied aegis. A look at the pamphlets produced, which have a certain fame, suffice to give the lie to our man's later picture of his father as a poor tradesman who could not afford to give his youngest son an education. But it's not our first lie, and it won't be the last.

At 17, our young man found it best to seek a new clime, specifically, Philadelphia, with a stop in New York to meet the governor, as runaway printer's devils are wont to do. Not unexpectedly, within a few months, the young man had made the acquaintance of the daughter of a distinguished Philadelphian and also the governor of Pennsylvania, who entrusted the young man with a confidential mission to London. More specifically, the young man's story has it that he was to buy a printing press for himself (this being the kind of thing that governors did for runaway printer's devils, to recycle some heavy irony) or for the governor's interest, which seems more likely. Our young man's story is that the governor reneged on his promise and failed to provide the necessary funds. It is thus somewhat surprising that he remained in London for three years, meeting famous people and even publishing a scurrilous pamphlet. Perhaps London was less expensive in those days.

It should, however, not be surprising that there are murky politics here. The proprietor of the colony, who appointed the governor in question, died in 1718. The proprietor left sons by two wives to dispute his inheritances Old World and New, and the governor is thought to have aligned himself with the older, granting him a large tax-free estate in the immediate interior of the colony. Thus when the two branches of the proprietal family came to an agreement in 1725 that granted the colony to the younger, the governor was rather exposed politically, and fell soon afterwards. Our young man returned to the colony in 1726 at about the same time as the new governor, although specifically in the train of a wealthy merchant gentleman of the colony.

In 1728, the young man finally set up his own printing house. It immediately received exclusive contracts to print the journals of the colonial assembly and its Indian treaties, which were in those days quite sumptuous editions. This point is omitted in our man's account of his life, which prefers to dwell on an anecdote of the young man inviting his established, prospective competitors around to his home to see him eating a single daily meal of porridge. The inference is that they immediately realised that they could not compete with a young man of such industrious habits. One might wonder where this industry had been during the London years if meeting the competition over dinner didn't arouse other associations in me.

Five years later, our young man began publishing an almanac, a rather more popular genre. The popularity of this issue, he would vaguely intimate in later years, was the root of his fortune. This would be a great deal more convincing were it not for what we know about his real estate speculations; indeed, what we know of how real wealth worked in the Eighteenth Century in general. Twelve years after that, he placed his son in the Pennsylvania Line, to serve his King in the current war.

Oh. The son? Quite the fetching boy, by all accounts; even taller than his father, born to the saddle and the canoe, with a commanding presence and an easy manner --"condescending," as they would say back in the day, in a particularly meaningful bit of language change. Too bad his father wasn't married. Oh, he was in a common law relationship with that girl that I mentioned. The story is that she had married before, and that the scoundrel had made off and vanished, and nothing was to be done. Because it would have been impossible for her wealthy father to have him declared dead by a Philadelphia court.

Oh, that hilarious irony again. What I meant to say was that in this particular scenario, the one thing that didn't have to come up was anyone's baptismal certificate.

In any case, our man's son served in this war and the early part of the next before going off to London to attend the Inns of Court, where, in September, 1762, married well. In 1763, Junior returned as Governor of New Jersey, aged perhaps 36. He still held that office at the time of the Revolution, in which he was loyal to the crown, while his father joined the patriots. This, we are told, caused a rift between father and son. Because when aristocratic families end up with members on both sides of a civil war, it is always because of deep ideological division. Further evidence of the hard feelings; all of the sons' lands in America were deeded over to his father after the Revolution in payment for various unspecified debts incurred, resulting in (some of those) lands passing on to his son, our man's grandson and not being confiscated, as victorious state governments were wont to do. No documents survive

I could fill in further details of our man's life. I could talk about how this famous workhorse retired at 41 to a life of leisure; of how he was prominent in Pennsylvania, American and even British politics. I could dig up all sorts of entangled shenanigans and speculative traces. Except two things: first, the father's long and contentious relationship with war, the fur trade, and the west, from which I intend only to extract the single detail of the thousands of Pennsylvania horses that trade and war consumed. Where did these horses come from? Sure, Pennsylvania had a stud, but, although I haven't the numbers, I am going to guess that it was pretty tiny in the 1750s. It would have needed imports.

Second, there's the grandson. Born in February of 1762. You will note the dates.

Now, William Franklin was the heir of Benjamin, and William Temple Franklin was heir to both. Indeed, William was only legitimated as his father's heir after the birth of William Temple. It could hardly have been otherwise for a Royal Governor and the husband of the woman he married. Contrary to myth, we do know who William's mother was: a "useful servant" named Barbara. Our source is a little tainted, in that it is (another) partisan pamphlet from a 1763 election fight, but that doesn't give us much reason to doubt it. The reason that this fact has been repeatedly buried and resurrected over the years is often represented as an implication that Barbara wasn't White.

Oh. The shock of it all. I mean, seriously. I'd say that the real concern is that Barbara was the boss' daughter, that Ben has picked up someone's loose ends. I'd say that that's the story of William and William Temple, too. I mean, "useful?" What else does that mean when it is delivered as a sly insinuation?

Okay, the big leap here: what family's loose ends could the Franklins have been attending to, here? Whose marriages and descents were so vitally important that they had to be kept so privy, that birth certificates and marriage licenses and parish registers could never come out? We're not talking scandal here; families can withstand scandals. We're talking the kind of families where unfortunate births are issues of state. Royal families, or, to take it down a notch, proprietary families. The Penns.

So this isn't a story of certainties, save only the certainty that the myth of old Ben Franklin is so much patriotic rubbish. The story of Barbara, so often recovered from the library stacks and as often politely suppressed, tells us that. But go with the speculation. That's the pivot of this post. What plausible story am I going to spin to explain how Peter Folger's grandson has come to be aimed at William Penn's granddaughter?

Horses. That's my story. Nantucket, before it became a whaling town, was established for a reason. The full shares and half-shares that I mentioned above were to "winter grass."* Here, in the softening embrace of the sea, was a place on the New England shore where there was year round grazing. It was used, of course, by sheep and cattle; but the deeds that Peter Folger translated, witnessed, and deposited for the leading Indian men of New England refer specifically to "horse commons." That was the big deal.

So. Shadowy intimations of a business in horses. Where, one wonders, did colonial America get its horses? The same place it got its slaves, which is to say, the most economical place. There happens to be a country with a substantial equine industry in the same latitude as colonial America. That same coast has good winds. A shorter trip means lower costs and less attrition. Overall, a good place to buy horses and mules for the American market, because the need to buy and carry less fodder.

The place? Today, we know it by the name of its old imperial capital, Marrakech, as butchered by the Frankish tongue: Morocco. That being said, Old Marrakech is situated to command the passes of the High Atlas and the grass of the Tensif River, so that the sultan's followers from the high desert can graze their kine while they attend divan. It is not situated to command the Atlantic shore, and that can be an issue. In 1636, it was an issue. Sallee, as the old Knickerbockers called the suburb of Rabat that also gave its name to the pirate Republic of Salé, was so situated. (On account of having the 'van Salleys,' descendants of Jan Janszoon, amongst them). You will not be surprised to hear that anarchist historian Peter Lamborn Wilson has a high opinion of this "pirate utopia," or that real history is more complicated and that it was probably the chief saint of the Dilaites who had really got in Marrakech's face. I don't know much Maghrebi history, but I do know to look to the saints for my answers.

Whichever be the case, an agent was soon in London, agitating for an English naval expedition against the corsairs of Salé. This was in the midst of the trouble over the Ships Money, and not for the last time, it seemed politically expedient to use Barbary to demonstrate that tax moneys for naval armament were not wasted. A naval expedition set off under Thomas Rainsborough, admiral, religious agitator, Leveller, and associate of the Massachusetts Bay colony. It was successful, and rewards abounded. For example, the ambiguous inspiration behind the expedition was made English consul in Salé, with the right to appoint delegates at Fez and Marrakech, while Rainsborough's father got the even riper plum of the ambassadorship.

Why so rich? Besides the trade, there is a legend, supported or not, that the corsair captains of Barbary were always looking for offshore havens for the money they earned from condemned cargos, ships, and ransoms, and the French certainly didn't find all the gold paid to Barbary when they took Algiers in 1830, although they were most definitely looking (20). What with all the ambiguities of religion, crime, and crusade, with Maghrebis being accused of going Christian and Europeans of going renegade, it might have been best that some things stay legend. For example, there is one Joshua Gee who was for seven years ship's carpenter aboard a corsair of Algiers (1680--7). According to his captivity narrative, he was redeemed in 1687, came to Boston, and was the father of the Reverend Gee, eulogist to Cotton Mather. Again, connections that lead me to suspect higher social status than the facts at first suggest. But the point is, by amazing coincidence, a Joshua Gee was William Penn's secretary and a colonial trade promoter well known to Benjamin Franklin? Coincidence? Probably. It's not exactly a unique name. It's like the fact that there was also a merchant named Robert Blake mixed up in the Penn-Rainsborough business. There were lots of Robert Blakes. (152--62.) You'd go crazy if you attended every weird coincidental "connection."

What I do know is the name of our indefatigable agent and advocate, become English consul at Salé: Giles Penn. According to family historians, Giles died in Fez in 1641 This proved too early in life for Giles to oversee his son William's career, but it comes as no surprise that William was married middling well to the daughter of a Dutch merchant and made his career in the Parliamentary fleet. Enough of the style of his father's connections rubbed off on William that he made the deftly political move to side of the incoming king in 1660. Fighting at the future King James II's side in 1666, he earned what any man who takes that place must earn; a fiefdom for his son. That William Penn's province was in America is another story.

Or is it? The wind that carries ships from Barbary to America, and the fishing fleets of Newfoundland back past Barbary to England must carry horses to good winter grazing if they are going to recruit their strength after the hard voyage from the Eastern Hemisphere, and take their place on the horse trails of Pennsylvania, or at the traces of a Conestoga wagon. Call it a hypothesis: a consortium of family interests, inward-turned by marriages that dared not be made public; outward-turned to profit from piracy and horses between America and Barbary.

* (My cite isn't here; 72, I think, in the hard copy. Here's something interesting, if not directly relevant.)

Fall of France, V: The French, II: Why "Manoeuvre" Instead of "Maneuver," apart from me trying to hit you over the head with how Canadian I am?

2012-01-18T12:51:00.000-08:00

I'm going to double down on this whole "[Prussian*-]German way of war" thing today. Two contexts, the historiographic being Robert Citino's recent book, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to the Third Reich and the historic one Pappa Joffre kicking Potsdam United's butt in a test match held between the 5th and 12th of September, 1914. If you've read Citino, you know that his argument is that Prussia-Germany, as an often weak, central power, sought the rapid resolution of its wars in pre-emptive, decisive battles, an argument not to be rejected solely because it suffers from being advanced by morons (context; more context). This is pretty deep military historiography that could get us talking about Clausewitz (j/k!), even if the immediate callback is to good old Jomini.

Citino, however, takes it at a different level. The pursuit of decisive battle determines the conduct of the "operational" level of war, as well: seeking decisive battle, Prussian-German armies specialised in the war of manoeuvre, Bewegungskrieg, using daringly swift and fluid operations to set up decisive battles that ended wars before they started. Attention to the "operational" level of battle is something else altogether. I would, for the moment, trace it to Mellenthin's Panzer Battles, a 1948/1955 book that celebrated the nimble, outnumbered Germans in their victories over their stolid Russian (and British, if you want to talk about the DAK) enemies.

I've used some links here that suggest that I don't take all of this too seriously. It's true that my sympathies lie with Joffre, and that the whole "I'm more anti-Nazi than you" thing is an easy out when you're talking about the Wehrmacht, but I present these concerns upfront because I think that there are very real problems with the Citino thesis. It's not that the masters of Bewegungskrieg kept losing wars of manoeuvre, or that we really do glamourise Nazis, or that Mellenthin often overstates the Russian numerical superiority in bog-standard callbacks to the worst of Orientalising military history.

It's that things are more complicated, and that by pursuing the complicated, we go delicious places. I see the "German way of war" is a heuristic. It is simply not-self evident that the Prussian-German armies were about manoeuvre. They conducted sieges, fought colonial wars, conducted amphibious operations, and served as corps within larger coalitions, and fought many other kinds of wars, as well. One can findexamples of Prussian-German armies conducting daring manoeuvres, and examples where steady and stolid battle discipline was so much their forte that their Habsburg enemies had to resort to their superiority in ...the war of manoeuvre. (Also.)

You don't however, argue against a heuristic with counter-examples. It is not to be preferred logically. It is an analytical tool that allows us to say something more relevant. Citino wants to explain how the Germans won the battles they did win without making an essentialist argument. I want to explain the same victories with my "substructural history of strategy" approach. So I say that, "on the contrary, it was the French, with their fortresses and their railways and their guns, who were, of the two armies facing each other on the Marne, the true masters of manoeuvre war," So I'm making a claim, too.

And since this is my blog, I'm going to go historiographic on Citino, and then get historical on my claim.

Well, historiographic by a very generous stretch going back to the fall of 1987, and a young man's encounter with

Courtesy of Boardgamegeek

Back in the day, before it dissolved in 1996, after what I am sure was one final, cathartic, soul-satisfying group atomic wedgie,* Game Designer's Workshop was one of the leading marquees in table top boardgaming, and in 1983, it released Assault, Frank Chadwick's game of platoon-level tactical combat in modern Europe. Like the better-known Squad Leader before it, Assault used isomorphic hex maps, standard orders of battle, and lovingly detailed weapon effect charts to allow players to pit onrushing Soviet Red Army forces against Americans, and latterly German, British and Dutch (whatever) forces in "typical" central German terrain. As long as you could handle autobahns and rivers going in circles, it was a lot of fun. Unlike Squad Leader, Assault is a historical curiosity nowadays, on account of that whole World-War-III-Not-Happening thing. (I know. I'm as disappointed as you are, and I don't think that the Gulf Wars were a satisfactory substitute.)

On the other hand, the platoon level action allows for less tortuous detailed counters and tables while still giving a good impression of what Frank Chadwick thought a war with Abrams, Challengers, Leopards and T-80s would be like. That's Assault, and we'll leave it be, because I'm talking about Boots & Saddles.

The second module in the series introduced rules for rotary wing aviation and provided a new set of counters. Division 86, the paradigm ("doctrine," whatever; I'm linking to the 1993 revision, anyway) with which the United States Army entered the 1980s, puts a lot of rotary wing combat aviation into the standard United States Army corps, and that's what this game supplies. The concept overlaps that of providing the "cavalry" formations of the main American army, because there were supposed to be two squadrons of attack helicopters in the divisional cavalry regiment plus two attack aviation regiments to form a full divisional cavalry brigade, plus a corps-level armoured cavalry brigade to screen American mechanised corps, each with an attack aviation regiment as one of its four manouevre elements, plus one full attack aviation brigade allotted per corps, although these units did not have "cavalry" traditions. That's a lot of attack helicopters --and a lot of "cavalry."

Tradition isn't destiny. These guys don't dig many saps these days. It's some kind of metaphor, but the cover art for the game took the implicit metaphor to town. And so did I. Cavalry, the game and the doctrine suggested, existed for a reason. Cavalry has a mission, or rather, missions. It screens, reconnoiters, and provides flank security. A general may throw masses of cavalry at the decisive point, and, it's a lot more exciting to throw a regiment of AH-64s at a Red Army column on the move than to try to plot an artillery stonk on them. Mobility, perhaps to a jaunty cavalry air, has its appeal. I know that some guys think that Everything Went Wrong with armoured warfare once we start thinking of tanks as "cavalry," but for that Pole, I can always cite another who thinks that the problem with Allied tankers in WWII was that they didn't have enough cavalry spirit. Richard, meet Roman. Fight now!

The next module in the series was

Boardgamegeek

The basic concept of the series was that each module added significant new units and important new rules, with a little editorial to add fluff. Taking these in reverse order, Chadwick's introduction introduced this young blogger to the concept of Bewegungskrieg. I think it might have mentioned Auftragstaktik, too. If he'd just brought up Trevor Dupuy and James Hittle, he would have pushed arguments for (Prussian)-German military excellence back to 1914, and we'd hit the trackless jungle of the Nineteenth Century's "Protestants Rule!!1!" argument. Which association is intended as a driveby smear of Dupuy and Hittle, by the way.

So the next part of the module is the actual Bundeswehr, taking the equipment-centric perspective essential to the project. Looking at fire effect tables and vehicle ratings does not illuminate "doctrine" as much as one might think. Still, once the hugely disappointing Chieftain*** appeared, you could make certain comparisons. Chadwick's editorial comment characterised the BAOR's doctrine as stolid and slow, and at least implicitly criticised it by comparison to the fluidity and imagination of German manoeuvre war. Then he presented statistics and orders of battle that suggested that the British, if anything, were better equipped for fire-and-manoeuvre tactics than the Germans. While both fell hugely short of the American standard. As a Soviet commander, I would be bolder in breaking cover and moving in the face of Germans than of the British, though that may just be an artefact of the high rating given the RARDEN cannon.

Blah blah, you don't care: the key point here is that the British and Germans are pretty much of a piece, while the Americans are swimming in Apaches. Any Red Army commander facing an American formation would be well advised to fort up and tunnel forward. Trying to move aboveground is just going to get you Hellfired to death. It took a while for me to formalise this insight, but it ain't rocket science. Rich armies beat poor armies in manoeuvre, because I mean rich in the sense of having better access to chariots/horses/light infantry/tanks/air power/helicopters or whatever might be the recce, screen, and security technology of the day. That, I think, neatly covers the Germans versus the French in 1870, in 1914 during the Battle of the Frontiers, and 1940 at Sedan. That doesn't explain the Miracle of the Marne, though. And no repurposed "sunken road of Waterloo" crap, either.

But that's only the first two elements of this module. Drawn on by the concept of the series, Chadwick wrote new rules for a crucially important aspect of modern operations, added them to Bundeswehr, and inadvertently dressed "Bewegungskrieg" and "Division 86" up in clown shoes and a big red nose and then sent them out onto the stage. To wit: he gave us perhaps the most comprehensive, seriously-intended-to-be-used combat engineering rules that I have ever seen in a tactical war game. They're neat rules, although one aspect of their simplicity (you have to prepare the banks of a river with bulldozers, but they generate "earthmoving points" that you can also use to dig trenches, build bunkers, and whatnot) is that no-one had ever done it before. NATO units --all NATO units-- include organic bridging assets, and just by giving us the counters and including a few rules, Chadwick allowed us to use them to launch military bridges of all kinds, in all sorts of places.

This really was a novelty, but for reasons that helped spell the doom of the series. Wargamers tend to ignore the problem: go watch miniature gamers play anywhere that you know that they gather, and you will see that their terrains, when they include water barriers at all, provide convenient bridges. Many tactical game rule sets ignore bridge building rules. When they're included, the players ignore them. They are a pain in the ass. No-one uses them. The great ruleset sank like a mid-80s IFV trying to use its nominal amphibious capacity.

In real life, or at least real military history (and, gosh, I wish I could remember where I get these points from, so they wouldn't be just factoids), the British army found pursuing the Germans to the Hindenburg Line a purgatory because they couldn't get their 9.2" guns across their prewar bridging sets, and therefore had to advance without counterbattery assets, illustrating the weaknesses of both their bridging sets and their counterbattery artillery. Worse, at least for the Germans, the "Mackensen-Phalanx's" advance through Russian Poland was delayed a whole year when the Russians blew up the bridges over the Vistula. This combination of scratch infantry units and the entire German siege artillery could roll up the Russians wherever they found them (range for counter-battery, not weight of fire, again), but the pieces were too big to get across the rivers. NATO has learned that lesson. The old Red Army learned that lesson. Everyone has learned that lesson. It's why the guns of 1940 had so much more range than the guns of 1914, in spite of often being pretty much the same guns, and it's why all those river-crossing units exist that Chadwick included in Bundeswehr. who hasn't learned this lesson?

Oh, right. Military historians. And here's the specific thing that I think that we've forgotten. I haven't been spelling "maneuver" as "manoeuvre" out of some weird Canadian pretentiousness here. Well, not entirely out of weird Canadian pretentiousness. Mostly out of weird Canadian pretentiousness. But my residual point is the mightily-well-buried point of this post: "manoeuvre"= "main d'oeuvre."

Manoeuvre is the work of the hand. We think of manoeuvre as this, the triumph of technique over brute force:

In reality, the noble knight can`t just deliver a boot to the head. To win Belgrade for the emperor, he must launch a bridge, and bring guns and wagons across the Danube flood.****

There is as much, if not more, technique in building a floating bridge than in booting someone in the head. But it's the antithesis of the idea that mobility is just an exciting cavalry ride over a congenial terrain. Armies do make free on the land; but they do so on the back of vast amounts of technique. It isn't enough for your tanks to go fast, or for your infantry to attack relentlessly. You have to be able to get your counterbattery artillery across the river.

What has this to do with Robert Citino? This is still the historiographic bit, even if I've wandered into drawing conclusions that are only implicit in these old war games that I liked. The history will have to wait, so you won't get your Clausewitz till next time. That doesn't mean that I've come to the end of the discussion, however, because historiography has yet to make the single most damning point about the whole Bewegungskrieg-as-(Prussian)-German-way-of-war camp. (Which is to say, I disagree with Citino on the strength of this great book that someone else wrote.)

No-one in the real world forgets that armies have to cross rivers. If they're led places they don't want to go, it is, above all, by huge procurement programmes that gain a life of their own. (Recommended.) In his absolutely brilliant book, The Tank Debate, John Stone follows the ongoing conversation in the Anglo-American world that has led us to veer from light armour to heavy armour and back to light over the last century, from Elles to tankettes to the Main Battle Tank to Eric Shinseki and back. Stone offers us a brilliant example of how historians should talk about tanks and modern warfare. He covers a lot of ground in the process, most notably NATO's annual Reforger Exercises, and the way that these annual fall wargames influenced the American/German convergence on the M1/Leopard II generation of huge, fast, heavily-armoured, heavily-gunned tanks. Paradoxically, he notes, these tanks originated in a paradigm of reactive anti-armour warfare, in which small packets of very big tanks, operating in much the same way as the Germans operated their Tigers in Normandy, stopped Red Army offensives. The idea was the antithesis of "fluid" manoeuvre or Bewegungskrieg, because big tanks make for slow-deploying columns. You can't launch sudden, daring cavalry charges if your cavalry takes forever to form up. Your daring charge becomes the counteroffensive at Avranche, in which four German armoured divisions fell on American units that didn't know they were being attacked because, given how long it takes to funnel that many Tigers down a single approach road, they actually weren't. (Some exaggeration for effect possible.)

Arguably this is exactly what Reforger began to show when the Americans and the Bundeswehr began to field their new tanks. Doctrine had moved in the opposite direction from weapons. Were the two armies crazy? No: it was all window dressing. The real NATO doctrine has always been "the defence of built-up localities." Rich countries that face long-anticipated attacks by numerous enemies built fortresses on the line of advance. You can't do that in the nuclear era, but, fortunately, modern, heavily-built-up urban areas make great improvised fortresses once they've been blown up a bit. (At the risk that the Reds will, in fact, end up using tactical nukes against German cities to break up the defences.) NATO prefers not to explain this in lingering detail to German public opinion, and Bewegungskrieg, which is important as the way in which the mobile elements of the German army will wear down the Red Army as it makes its way through fortress zones defended by the national guards of Europe, makes a great cover story as an account of the whole of NATO operational warfare.

Eh. It's a theory, anyway. I'm throwing it out here to make clear the contrast between the idea of a light-footed army moving quickly on the terrain and a heavy army moving through it. Because I think that unpacking this contrast and understanding how it came about will help us understand the way that Joffre (a military engineer!) beat Moltke the Younger and the different outcome of 1940. I'm tempted to say that there's a military engineer approach to mobility and a cavalry approach to mobility, and that the former is the French way, the latter the German, that neither is more about "manoeuvre" than the other; that building fortresses, moving guns, launching bridges is just as much "manoeuvre" as a beau sabreur at the gallop, or a regiment of AH-64s cresting the rise. It's just that that wouldn't do proper justice to the Germans. As I've already suggested, Germans were just as much about forts and bridges and guns as they were about cavalry. Indeed, more so, I think. What not nearly enough people have asked is: "What did German engineers think about the war plan of 1914?" Eric Dorn Bose has an answer. It's awesomely intriguing and surprising, and it will point us directly at 1940.

*"There are more Hessians than almost any other ethnic group in the European Union," the Hessian graduate student complained into his beer. "No one cares. We just aren't glamorous."

I helpfully pointed out the Hessian mercenaries in the American Revolution, and did a little goose step for him. (Hard to do when you're sitting at benches in the beer cellar under the Palais Esterhazy.) He brightened for a second, then sighed. "That's just the Prussian stereotype transported to Hesse." I had to agree. What did Hessians do that was so special, I asked? He said, "I could tell you, but you wouldn't care. No-one cares."

He was right. At least with Swabians and Bavarians you can make fun of the accent. Rhinelanders aren't real Germans. Lower Saxony? The accent again. But Hessians? I got nothing. There's a whole book about the wars of the Frankische Reichskreis in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. You can read it, if you deeply, profoundly, care about the fate of the Imperial fortresses along the Rhine. Unfortunately, a second's attention to Montecuccoli versus Turenne aside, you don't. Germany: it's a big, complicated place. But you can ignore that, and focus on Frederick the Great, instead!

**I don't want this to be understood as a general endorsement of atomic wedgies. It's an endorsement of giving Marc Miller an atomic wedgie.

***Still waiting for my errata, dudes.

****It makes for a mighty weird WWI-era patriotic postcard when you see the painting of the fresh-faced k.u.k officer launching himself, sabre in hand, into the Russians singing, `he launched a bridge/he brought the wagons..."

Fall of France, 5: Yeah. About the French? They were involved, too.

2012-01-11T13:09:00.000-08:00

So here's the latest in a continuing series that I was thinking was maybe played out. But away on a blog that I read all the time, by a great, natural teacher from whom I've learned a lot (who, just to get this out of the way, I admit is not without his quirks) chooses to revisit himself (original here, "hoisted from the archives" here:

Ernest May's Strange Victory is an excellent book, a wonderful book. [Link mine, since you can do that now.] However, I'm not sure that it gets the story of the Fall of France right. I finished it thinking that since Ernest May is a historian of intelligence, he blames the collapse predominantly on intelligence failures--but that another historian who focused on something else could equally well and with equal evidence blame the collapse on other key factors.

Even after the misjudgment that was the French initial deployment. . . .[should not have been fatal.] . . . Meuse was a strong position. And once it was clear that there was a major attack through the Ardennes, the French Army was not that slow to respond.

From Strange Victory and from William Shirer's The Collapse of the Third Republic, we can track the French reaction to the Nazi attack across the Meuse starting on May 10, 1940. The first thing to note is that the Nazi lead elements took up to 70% casualties and kept coming--indicative of extraordinary ideological commitment. In a world in which any "normal" unit breaks at 25% casualties or so, it's hard to beat people who keep coming at you: you can only hope that the enemy doesn't have that many of them. Had the Nazi soldiers been "normal," the initial attack by the seven panzer divisions would probably have failed, and the French would have had time to redeploy. [Itals. mine.]

. . . .[And they did] . . . . three divisions from the general reserve were fed into the southern end of the Ardennees on the 13th of May. The French high command clearly knew it was a trouble spot.

By May 15, the French First Armored division had been switched from the Belgian plain to the Ninth Army Ardennes sector, infantry formations had ben ordered to assemble behind the Ninth Army to form a new Sixth Army, and the Second Armored division as well had been ordered to assemble in the Sixth Army sector. . . . Fourth Armored division [was] . . .told to attack the southern flank of the Nazis as their tanks broke through.

So what happened to all these forces . . . [?]

By May 16, as Shirer puts it:

(689): The three heavy [armored divisions] the French had, all of which in May 10 had been stationed... within 50 miles of the Meuse at Sedan and Mezieres, which they could have reached by road overnight, had thus been squandered.... Not one had been properly deployed.... By now, May 16, they no longer counted. There remained only the newly formed 4th [armored division], commanded by de Gaulle, which was below strength and without divisional training..."

. . . . The French high command of Gamelin and Georges saw the situation developing and threw 800 tanks in four armored divisions plus between six and ten infantry divisions from their strategic reserve in front of the Nazi breakthrough in plenty of time: the Nazis, after all, had only 1000 tanks in their breakthrough seven panzer division. Yet . . . it did no good.

With such an extremely low level of performance in a running battle, it seems likely that the French in 1940 would have been decisively defeated no matter how good their intelligence and operational leadership had been.. . .

The most important thing to note: the French were not unique. This happened to everybody: to the Poles, to the Dutch, to the Belgians, to the French, to the British, to the Yugoslavs, to the Greeks, to the Russians, and to the Americans at Kasserine Pass. In every case, the initial encounter with the Nazi army is a catastrophe.

It was only those who had enormous strategic depth who had the time to figure out what was going on and how to fight it.

I italicise something I find particularly problematic. It is, of course, wrong to assert that 70% casualties in spearhead units somehow break a law of war. But if it did, could we really comfortably turn to the "ideology" of the fighting men? Even without having a theoretical apparatus to turn to, I am profoundly suspicious of the claim that an ideology makes you a better soldier, while the implicit failure of "democratic" ideology to successfullly oppose "Nazi" leads us to draw unfortunate conclusions. Which is precisely why these claims get made.

Here's another explanation for what happened on the Meuse that spring of 1940:

That's the Red Army trying to fake being an entire heavy cavalry corps charging at the same time. It's magnificent, but it's not.... Oh, you know the rest. The claim is that it could have worked, if Ney had just given a better speech before he launched the charge:

But he didn't, and that's that.

Having referenced Theoden King's death ride, I find that at the end of this post, I've come back round to it in an unexpected way. It's really unfortunate. This whole "Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors" thing keeps coming back round to haunt us in our latter days, including in LOTR. That's what makes it so dangerous, and worth committing a blog post to countering, even when it is not being consciously put forward.

So can we get rid of Nazi Supermen in this argument? We can. There are clues to this mystery that point to another culprit and another solution.

So here's the general picture:

Sedan:

Rhineland-Sedan-Abbeville:

I kind of hate it that the Meuse/Maaß disappears into the details even in the satellite view. It's not an inconsequential river by any means, and, incidentally, besides being horribly pedantic, my dual name convention is trying to get at the way that it, and its kissing cousin, the Escaut/Scheldt, sometimes disappear from historical geography because of linguistic confusion. What we're supposed to get out of this is the way that the river forms the drainage ditch along the foot of the uplands. It's a naturally defensible river on the edge of the French state -- a feature, not a bug.

Potential defences need to be realised. You can line an army up along them, or you can line fortresses along them. The latter are a capital-intensive substitute for the former, and this is why the story of the fortress is the story of the French state. Robert Citino would have us believe, not without reason, that cavalry is the story of the German state. I know, he doesn't put it that way. He talks about "operational warfare;" I just think that forts have their place to play in operational warfare; and, anyway, that Prussian-Germany is a particular slice of Germany, and far from the tastiest. (Seriously: the Austrian Staatsarchiv cafeteria used to do a mean schnitzel. The less said of its "chili" the better --it literally used the same recipe as their "Chinese stew," substitute bean sprouts for kidney beans-- but the schnitzel was great.)

In May of 1940, that was 77 infantry divisions, including 3 "motorised" by the French definition, 3 cavalry, 3 Divisions légères mechanisée (DLMs), and 3, increased to 4 Divisions cuiraséedu reserve (DCRs). If the last phrase calls to mind video clips like the ones I introduced this post with, well, you're a romantic like me. That's not what it means; they're armoured divisions of the reserve mobilisation. And that's not the only confusing aspect of the names here. The DLMs were anything but "light." They were born from light cavalry formations and directly transposed onto French strategic resources in the same role of couverture, but, the divisions they replaced were intended to apply the arme blanche if occasion arose, and that's pretty much where the DLMs got to in the end. In material terms, DLMs were supposed to be units of Somua S-35s, while DCRs were supposed to be units of Char Bs. In practice, as I'm sure you know, they had great lashings of less impressive tanks instead, because the French couldn't afford to build all the first class machines they wanted. Any more than anyone else could, of course. Now go follow those links and drink in how awesomely grognardish Wikipedia articles have become. There was a day when this kind of data was just plain not available to historians. The days when Shirer was writing, for example; not that it affects his arguments any, although I can think of others that are obsolete. (Oh, Audit of War; what would I have to occupy my burning hate if you weren't around?)

So the instant takeaway here is that the "four armoured divisions" to which Brad Delong refers are actually "tank circusses." Now, this isn't quite true. The French decided that they wanted their heavy armoured assault asset pools to be capable of ensemble manoeuvre, and so gave them infantry, artillery, and subordinate headquarters. This made the DCRs potent units with 4 battalions of heavy tanks, 2 battalions of infantry, and a regiment of artillery; it did not, however, given them anything like enough infantry, artillery, or, crucially, a reconnaissance regiment.* DCRs were assumed to operate under couverture. Will they run out of gas? Char Bs have 280hp engines driving 28 ton hulls. They're not designed for long road marches. Of course they'll run out of gas if you try throwing them around as though they were.

So, as I've noted before, the final Allied plan called for the two DLMs of Prioux's Cavalry Corps to lunge into the Gembloux Gap , while 1st DLM, best prepared and best equipped of the three, was switched from forming the key element of the couverture in the Ardennes to a lunge northwards to link up with the Dutch for various reasons that sounded good at the time. And, contra the implicit apology for the American debacle at Kasserine/obviously-not-fully-thought-out-"God's-On-Our-Side"-implicit-argument-for-Fascism, the DLMs did just fine where they were used. Indeed, from Erich Hoeppner's apparent perspective, Prioux wasn't covering a defensive deployment, but rather threatening the flank of the German main effort.

Which, as we've been told many times, was coming through the Ardennes directly for Sedan. Now, as practically everyone who has written seriously on the subject will note at some point or another, the French knew that it was perfectly possible that the Germans would show up in front of Sedan within sixty hours and attempt to launch an assault crossing.

If we can take anything away from the way that two platoons of the Chasseurs ardennais managed to hold up Guderian's core for six hours at Bodelange, this wasn't a matter of Nazi supermen being our superiors. It was a matter of a thin road network restricting movements. The flip side of that was that blocking positions were easily outflanked, however. So you pull out a march table, figure out how many blocking positions a unit will have time to take up, add in enough time for the poor bloody infantry to struggle through the Ardennes bush to enfilading positions, and you get how many hours it will take the enemy's van to reach the Meuse. Are we then surprised that the best blocking features are along the Belgian frontier? No, that would another case of "feature, not a bug."

So the Germans have reached the Meuse, pretty much on schedule. What happens now? If you're the French High Command, you think, "a buildup of forces." Why do you think that? Because of the roads, that's why. Again, you turn to your march tables. Every unit takes up some space. Once you've estimated column march speed, you have a pretty clear idea of how many feet of units are going to be on your front on the morning of May 13. You won't necessarily know what kind of units, but if you've ever driven a mountain road, you know that the basic parameters of choice balance lots of sports cars against a much smaller number of semis. In the military paradigm of 1940, twenty ton tanks are sports cars, and artillery are semis. Panzergruppe von Kleist will have available on the shores of the Meuse on the morning of 13 May Guderian's 19th Armoured Corps. (Follow along with Florian K. Rothbrust's Guderian's XIXth Panzer Corps And the Battle of France if you can get it.)

It consists of 2nd, 1st and 10th Armoured** Divisions from right to left. 1st Panzer is reinforced with Infantry Regiment Großdeutchsland, giving it four armoured regiments organised into two Regimente grouped into a brigade, plus an infantry brigade of three rifle battalions plus two weapons companies, plus, outside the division, an infantry regiment of three rifle and one heavy weapon battalions. Plus, besides the embarrassing excess of infantry guns, a mere 36 105mm gun-howitzers in a single field artillery regiment. Besides this, 1st Panzer has a single reinforced artillery regiment from corps assets and has poached a battery of 12 105s from the divisions to either side. Notice, the next time you're in a wearying "Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors/their armoured doctrine was teh awesome" debate, that the Germans are putting their motorised infantry under separate headquarters from their armour. Guderian is going to be spending a wearying amount of time over the next few days separating his armour and infantry when they start to get intermingled.

On the defence, the logic is very simple: fortresses save men. Now, the Maginot Line ends twenty miles east of Sedan, as extending it along the Belgian frontier would have been expensive and have Sent the Wrong Message, but the natural strength of the Meuse line is such that it is easily reinforced by field fortifications. Right? Right. So that's what the second-echelon reservists stationed around Sedan have been up to for the last eight months. Except for when the ground was frozen, or soaked by the spring freshette. Which was most of the time. And to the limits of their available materials, which were not what they could have been. (For which see Eugenia Kiesling's much more boring but more important book that people could have been reading instead of May. Sixty-one bunkers have been completed in this key sector, to free men up for action elsewhere; but many more are in an incomplete state this morning of the 13th. (Hans Frieser's Blitzkrieg-Legende, now in translation.)

So the defences weren't very strong. It's too bad that the French couldn't have relied on the old works at Sedan. Dunquerque's works were far more obsolete than Sedan, but they worked brilliantly in 1940, after all. But that's the thing. What works at Dunquerque works because of immemorial geography. It was very old civil engineering that pierced the North Sea barriers to let the standing water and ships out, but sluices that can be opened can be closed, no matter how old they are. Forts that depend on the commanding heights being out of artillery distance of the works become obsolete when artillery ranges increase. The army of Napoleon is hoist on its own petard. That's Sedan. But, on the other hand, the Germans are trying to attack into Sedan. Aren't they just as much under the threat of guns concentrated on the far bank of the Meuse? Aren't they attacking a loop of the river? That means that, while the infantry defenders are stretched, the artillery within the loop are, by the same token, concentrated. This is not a point that the French have missed. The series B 55th Infantry Division defending Sedan had two march and one fortress infantry brigade, which may or may not have been as mishandled and disorganised as some think; but it had 171 guns, where a Commonwealth division was otherwise the envy of its counterparts with 72. Guderian's entire corps was allocated, including all available army level assets, only 180 tubes. (Though you can play some games with the numbers.)

Shorter Sichelschnitt: bring a sabre to a gunfight. This is exactly the scenario in my two clips, playing out.

So how is Guderian's 19th Armoured Corps expected to win this one? Give an awesome speech and watch the orcs run away? Well, that doesn't seem so plausible. And, in fact, 2nd and 10th Armoured Divisions were both repulsed by stout French resistance and withering artillery fire. Matters are different on 1st Panzer's front in the centre, however. It is here that the crucial penetration is made, and that Colonel Balck's relentless infantry demonstrates the superiority of the Ideal to the grossly materialistic conceptions of the bourgeois West. I wouldn't call this the decisive moment in the campaign: other elements of the armoured group make it across the Meuse, including its single horsed cavalry formation, and there's still the question of the handling of the reserves to consider (not that I'm going to do that today. As usual, my ambition exceeds my attention span.) But it takes some explaining.

So what happened? The short answer is that 1500 German aircraft happened. Six hundred bombers, 250 dive bombers, 500 single-engined fighters and 120 twins. I have no idea whether that's a count of sorties, actual aircraft, or even nominal squadron strengths, but it's a lot of planes by the standards of 1940. Of course, it's also not a lot of planes at all by the standards of the carpet bombings of 1944 that didn't generate a decisive breakthrough. Now, it's also a tactical situation such as air commanders could only dream of, with the river clearly demarcating the opposing lines on a bright, still day, the kind of day and circumstance on which even the primitive combat air control technology of 1940 could flourish. Even so, are we back to Nazi Supermen Being Our Superiors?

In a word, no; just as in the carpet bombings of 1944, the actual physical damage done by all of these bombs was fairly slight. Bunkers weren't busted, guns weren't smashed, and men who duck-and-covered in time were fine. Yes two infantry regiments got across the Meuse in the centre just fine, even as single infantry regiments attacking on either flank were brought to a standstill by infantry resistance and artillery fire. It's the artillery that's missing in the centre.

Artillery fire. Robert Doughty is, in my opinion, far too interested in "doctrine" for his own good. Again, I can't point to a theoretical apparatus to back up my intuition, but I can tell an over-extended heuristic when I see one. But he's also written a close and detailed study of the defeat at Sedan, and, sometimes, details are crucial. The issue at Sedan was that the French army's artillery was still under the dedicated control of battery-level forward observers. There was, as yet, no forward observer net. There couldn't be, because radio technology wasn't sophisticated enough yet. The British, rich in everything except units on the ground, have lately supplied their field artillery regiment forward observers with radios, so that the guns can be brought into action on the march by a single observer riding with the advance guard. It's an awesome advance in operational flexibility, so, really, boo to the penny pinchers who vetoed the "long range" 25 pounder design.

Unfortunately, even this revolutionary new radio is so big that it has to be carted around in what my informer describes as a "sedan car." If the observer doesn't want to sit in his car in full view of the enemy calling in fire, he has a couple hundred yards of relay cable that he can play out between a less conspicuous observing position and his sedan car. (I'm sorry, I know that is a perfectly acceptable Britishism, but I still think it's hilarious.)

The French? They're stuck with telephones. Telephones with cables. Cables that they have to play out on the ground between observer and battery headquarters. If you want to protect these cables against counterbattery fire, you have to bury them. Which is something that mostly hasn't been done in this sector, because, after all, we're expecting a mobile war, and having to wait to move until you've dug up all your cables is the antithesis of mobility. Now, if there were more cables... but, unfortunately, there aren't. Shortages, you know.

Doughty notes that the German bombs cut the cables, before moving on to Important Things, but, this is the important thing. All of those bombers have succeeded in their role --the bog standard, key artillery role of counterbattery fire. The asset that the French relied upon has been successfully countered. The next battle will be the mobile one, in the rear of the Sedan position.

Now the question is whether the Germans can defeat the elephants. If this were intended as an exhaustively organised and polished bit of writing, I would now be cutting-and-pasting my earlier discussion of the DCRs down here and fixing all the loose ends. But it is a beautiful day here in Vancouver that I've already wasted all too much of. I shall probably use up the rest of it vacuuming my apartment, but it is sorely needed, and, thanks to having advanced to the coveted status of "full time" employee at the day job, I have to work a great deal less, so that I have a full day off still to come tomorrow. I mention this because I'm ready to start it now, even if it won't officially begin until I hit Starbucks tomorrow morning. And with that in prospect, I feel the strongest desire to hit "Publish" and be done.

I still need a conclusion, however, and my conscience is niggling at me. "Enjoy a vanilla latte at sunrise" is fine for me, it's perhaps not as good a conclusion to this post.

Fine: the answer to the mystery is this: it was the Luftwaffe, with a shallow-penetrating fragmentation bomb, at Sedan. So what the French needed in 1940 was more fighters. Wow! Supreme revisionism, or what?

*Look, I'm a Canadian. To me, infantry comes in battalions, and tanks, armour, artillery and recce in regiments, with companies, squadrons and batteries below and brigades above.You may think in terms of regiments as base units. Or you may think of demi-brigades, tank corps, or motor rifle armies or artillery battalions. Whatever. It's not any less confusing, it's just the way that you choose to do it. You've got to choose some scheme and be consistent, or be constantly spellling out unhelpful details. You see where I'm going with this.
**Given that we're not making a useful distinction, I'm incined to regard the use of "Panzer Division" as an affectation that, given our continuing cultural tendency to glamourise the Nazi regime, ought be avoided. But that's just me.

Plantation of the Atlantic, XV: Halfway Where?

2012-01-01T15:24:00.000-08:00

It's time to talk about catechism, slavery, identity, and another Seventeenth-Century-New-England-Dog-in-the-Nighttime: the Halfway Covenant. But first, because this is, as far as I can tell so far, a sad story about the imposition of service upon the less powerful,I'm going to meditate on the way that power can be countered by self-invention.

About slavery: the traditional story is that medieval Europe had slaves, but that the winds of freedom, or perhaps the Black Plague, blew slavery away until Henry the Navigator brought it back, importing slaves from his African frontier of navigation for sale into Europe. Except that we really shouldn't blame him, because the Castilians had been slave raiding in the Canaries for two centuries by this time. Which is a good start at collapsing an argument into incoherence. Anyone want to go back to the Vikings? Saracens? Barbary? Romans?

And then there's the Slavs. And the Irish. Above all, there is the lurking suspicion that just maybe, medieval Europe wasn't the place where humanity first breathed the air of freedom.

Since slavery is kind of important to modern American history, we do need a place to start, though, and perhaps this need for origins explains why we start with C. S. L. Davie's 1966 Economic History Review article. For here is a much more basic and brutal revelation. Slavery was so conceivable at the origins of the American experiment, so far in the air, that, in the mid-1500s, the Lord Protector could find "two years slavery" to be a reasonable remedy to unemployment. The disabled poor were allowed to beg for alms, while the sturdy beggar was to be enslaved.

Now, I think I can see why the historiography might have seized upon this article and made it the prime ingredient of some delicious historical sausage. It comes four hears before the Lord Protector's fall, but as part of a trajectory that leads through his power struggle with his brother to the creeping coup d'etat that brought him down. And the coup proper seems to have begun with the anti-enclosure/anti-Reformation risings of 1549. It's the perfect conjuncture. The Protector was pro-Reformation, anti-enclosure, it appears. So his government was torn apart when the "commons" embraced both causes together. Or was there a deeper game in play? Why were some of the members of the future junta so closely associated with rebel leader Robert Kett? Was Kett a cat's-paw? Was this whole thing even deeper and darker and Machiavellian than it seems at first glance. (These conspiratorial mutterings come out of Skidmore's recent biography of Edward VI.) Blood! Treachery! Religion! Class war! Slavery is the one last thing you need to add to make reallly good sausage.

Mentioning Skidmore, into whom I just dipped in pursuit of a discussion of the vagrancy act of 1547, is a gesture in the direction of my own ignorance. I just don't know the literature as I ought. That's because I got on the track --the chain of links, as it were-- at the far end. It is now a commonplace that the early years of slavery in the New World can be reasonably informed by the Protector's legislation. (For instance here.) Even some cursory reading, however, leads to the usual problem with sausages. How could legislation that was repealed as unenforceable and overreaching after only two years really be so influential? The book to which I just linked has its strengths elsewhere, so I hope that the author doesn't mind (in the event that he notices) some criticism here. It's really not going to do to jump from a discussion of More's Utopia to actual practice on the ground. Books that are easy to read today don't make a valid intellectual tradition way back then; and intellectual tradition is weak tea compared with understanding how slavery worked as a social institution on the ground.

Because, back to Henry the Navigator for a moment, and notice how he manned his ships, or, for that matter, how the Admiral of the Ocean Seas manned his. Or, for Heaven's sake, how Nelson manned his ships: with slavery. Sure, you can call it "impressment." You can attend to Mainwaring's insistence that pirates often "pressed" men who were genuinely willing to volunteer, or N. A. M. Rodger's warning that pressed men could be made to volunteer later. The fact is that Columbus was asked to take prisoners and convicts with him. So was Henry. He didn't send the able-bodied poor to Ceuta on a whim, but because the communes of Portugal were desperate to get rid of them. That, in fact, was why the Lord Protector passed his legislation. The previous provision for the able-bodied poor was that each jurisdiction was to hurry them on their way.

Now, I know the feeling. I was store bouncer last night. Once the drunk and disorderly are out of your place of business, they're someone else's problem. The police can deal with them. Hence Somerset's desperation. He was the police. Drunk, belligerent men (his perception; desperate, homeless people, their perception) were his problem. The economy was throwing up idle men and women, and there was nothing to put their hands to do. In Roman times, Britain was an exporter of slaves, but you couldn't do that any more, because Britons were Christians. A particular kind of Christians, in fact. You had to provide for their spiritual succour, and where, exactly, were you going to do that? New England?

You'd think: but over there, in 1662, the Reverend Solomon Stoddard felt compelled to introduce a heroic liberalising of the requirements for communion at the Northampton Church, just outside Springfield, that anomalous nucleus of early settlement that so upsets our conventional impression of a westward-moving frontier of settlement. Stoddard's "Halfway Covenant" allowed people to come to the table of the Lord's Supper under greatly reduced catechal and other rules. Or is that what's really going on? I ask because there's controversy. Oh, boy, is there controversy, beginning from convention to ingenious explanation to the good old historiographic neutron bomb that leaves data intact while killing all the heuristics.

But, Jeez. Step back from the fighting for a moment and think about this. The problem that Stoddard faced here is that there was, apparently, a billion people running about the Connecticut Valley who don't qualify to be members in good standing of a Christian church. Let me put this as clearly as I can: This. Would. Not. Happen. In. Europe. It couldn't even be conceived in Europe. This is Puritan New England we're talking about. You know? Scarlet Letter? Blue Laws? Witch trials? This is the guy that his Mather in-laws called, "The Pope of the Connecticut Valley" because of his absolute power in this notoriously feudal country. If we write American religious history as genealogy (and people do), Stoddard is the grandfather of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." This guy has a better claim to being a Founding Father than three quarters of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. And yet his problem was that he was surrounded by people that the Puritans couldn't make go to church.

The ingenious explanation that I referred to above in my half-parenthetical self-interruption is the idea that the Puritans were just so damned scrupulous that there were hordes of good Christians about who felt so ambivalent about their state of grace that they couldn't bear to offend God by taking communion. This is, admittedly, bad theology even by the standards of hardcore evangelism, but the Puritans, they were crazy, so it all makes sense.* Right? Right?

Nuh-unh. Back up a minute to those slaves that Henry the Navigator was bringing back to Lisbon, in suspicious counterflow to the poor men that he was abandoning on the coast of Africa in the hope that they would come back to him as translators and men of substance in the native communities that took them in. (If I called this a "trade" of, er, something, would I be awful?) You can't be a Christian slave, of course, so a purchase on the Lisbon docks is a bad buy, right?

Well, no, as a matter of fact. You just have to constrain the new slave's entry into the Christian communion. You know, throw some restrictions on the time they're allowed to take between provisional entrance into the church and their admission to Communion. That's the whole point of Confirmation, after all. Keep postulants from full participation in the life of the church until they have adopted Christian identity.

Now back up, again, to the violence and intrigue and local risings and petty civil wars that make the regency of Edward VI such a stirring read. Of course, eventually novitiates become Christians; so, still, a bad bet, in the same way that the two-year slavery of Somerset's legislation is a bad bet, right? On the contrary; on the day, it matters how many men are willing to follow Dudley, and how many men will follow the Lord Protector. Quite possibly, it will matter that an obscure gentleman named Robert Kett will accept a secret commission from his landlord, one that will lead him to an agonising death on the gallows, in the understanding that his son will eventually, quietly, receive a forty-pound-a-year pension from at least one member of the Junta.

The point? That the communion table of the parish church, whether in Northampton, Massachusetts, or Lisbon, or anywhere else, is the place of entry into the community. Those who guard the door --your future godfather in a literal sense, can charge a tariff, and that tariff will be, well, by now you know exactly where I'm going. No more needs to be said for the moment about the Halfway Covenant. People have been ducking this question for far too long now. It's not as though the power of religion to normalise American political participation is entirely irrelevant to us, even today.

*Of course, I don't buy that. I'd prefer to go with the answer implied by the pastoral inquiry directed by the Bishop of London to the Reverend Johnson of Stratford, Connecticut, who informs His Grace that in 1723 the town had between 250 and 300 families, of whom 50 were members of the Church of England, an unspecified number were Independents, and 200 (possibly not included in the former totals) were Indians, for whom no provision had been made for church services. Notice, by the way, that the Narragansett Indians are not included in this last total. They have their own church and communion service, although they lack a priest. Look, by the way! Even more evidence of Indians living alongside Yankees late into the pre-Revolutionary period!

Patent Trolls Again: High Temperature Steam, Boilers, and World War II.

2011-12-20T09:42:00.000-08:00

If you follow the Admiralty's technological progress from Naval Estimate to Naval Estimate through the Nineteenth Century in the popular press, it's easy to end up making jokes about April Fool's Day and drunkard's walks. The Admiralty was always backwards, always conservative, always wrong. The forward looking inventor, like Galileo, can see what no-one else can see. And the Press, unlike the establishment, can see his point.

If you're a contrarian like me (and perhaps only like me), you end up itching to take the establishment's side. Because the innovators can be wrong. If you set up a process where the only way to escape the criticism is to indulge the critic's every whim until something goes transparently wrong, you get the capsizing of the HMS Captain. Who wants to pay a battleship and 500 lives to shut up one obstreperous inventor, much less sacrifice the eldest son of his main institutional patron to shut that man up? And yet, even after Captain went down, people continued to argue. No less a person than Baron Kelvin was called at the inquest, and proved Captain's recklessly dangerous design with numbers. And yet the matter continued to be controversial as long as anyone cared.

You think, you wish, that the gobs end up stopped. Two decades ago, the province of British Columbia dropped a godawful amount of money in a local shipyard for aluminum-hulled high speed catamaran motor ferries. It was a transparent disaster in the making, complete with the provincial premier suing detractors. (Wikipedia article.) By 2003, "the fast cats" were a bad memory. Yet a certain major national publisher, bought a piece of high concept nonsense of the 1421 variety from one of the advisors that sold the premier on the fastcats and flogged it onto the market with great lashings of positive press. The press made a lot of money, the professionally-wrong author made a lot of money. A century from now, historians will have to listen to earnestly crazy people telling them that Francis Drake built a secret English colony on the inshore coast of Vancouver Island.

The professionally wrong can, and do, go on and on.

I know. My outrage fails to move you. These things happen. It's just that when Nathan Myhrvold raised his head in public again to babble about how we should respect innovators more, I can at least present a test case to refute the meta-argument.

Galileo?

This is about a guy that you've never heard of: Vice-Admiral Harold G. Bowen. Not famous enough for Wikipedia, his book not prominent enough for Google Books. If you've heard of him, it's through footnotes in books that are almost as iffy. And yet, from such sources, comes an enduring myth that was first propounded to me by a smugly-knowing naval wargamer in the early 1980s.

So. One of the reasons that Captain capsized is that it had sails. That was because the steam engines that it also had weren't particularly efficient. Efficiency is basically determined by how much of the energy released by burning coal reaches the water as thrust, and early steam engines lost a great deal of the heat energy along the way. It wasn't until the triple-expansion compound steam engine came along in the 1880s that warships and liners could do without sails.

In the tradition of motor engines that actually work, as opposed to ideal ones, triple expansion steam engines are a work of the baroque imagination, and they were done away with by Jackie Fisher for reasons of labour efficiency that I've discussed before. Sir Charles Parson's turbine, which replaced it, had from the first all the marks of a successful engine. Which is to say, it was obviously, intuitively, wrong. Expanding steam was blown through aerofoils, causing them to spin a shaft that in turn spins something attached to it: propeller, alternator, egg beater, I don't know. Since engine efficiency is theoretically determined by the difference between the temperature of the motor and the heat sink into which you're dumping your spent heat, you want to use very hot, hence very high pressure steam. This expands quickly, causing the shaft to spin quickly, causing the thingie to which it is attached to spin equally quickly. Heaven help you if you want to run in reverse or even vary the speed of the output.This is fine if you want very high-frequency AC electrical current or to boil water with your propeller. If you don't, you end up inserting intermediate gearing to step down the rotation speed for most purposes. Imagine, for a second, gears grinding when they're taking a hundred thousand horsepower.

Fisher, who had a fine grasp of how the game is played, basically shifted the Navy over to turbines ahead of the development of that gearing. Crazy as Dreadnought's machinery was, it was a good prototype for what would come later, and actually work. That came in during World War I in a climate of crazed improvisation. As did another innovation; for, if you want your steam to be absolutely as hot as possible, you can take it off the boiler, put it through steam tubes, and "superheat" it further. HMS Nelson, the first battleship built after World War I, introduced superheat into the Navy, so that its mechanical guts worked at 400○F, 600 lb/sq in steam pressure.

At this point, remembering that it was supposed to be conservative about these things, the Admiralty decided that the next experiment should use a destroyer instead of its new flagship. HMS Acheron thus hit the water at 500lb/sq in and 750○F, with a mechanical efficiency at 0.608, compared with Nelson's .79i . Unfortunately, Acheron proved well-named. Superheated steam is crazy stuff to be playing around with if you're not sure what you're doing, and the Engineering Branch decided to back off at this point,as there were a great many other things to experiment with.

This is why British destroyers and cruisers laid down in 1928 mostly operated at 300 lb/sq in, 625○F. Even by 1939 larger RN ships had not reached the "advanced" steam conditions tested in Acheron, operating at 400lb/sq in and 700○F.

Many within the Engineering Branch were dissatisfied with this. On land, the electrical engineering industry was experimenting with power plants that pushed the temperature of steam up near the melting point of steel, and the big American names (GE and Westinghouse) jumped into marine plants, working with 850○F steam.ii

This is where Admiral Bowen comes in. As chief of the United States Navy's Experimental Boiler Facility in the late 1930s, he certified these plants for naval use and pushed through their use in the fleet.

It was another of those extraordinary moments in the history of technology. As the reader will remember from tedious arguments with Truthers five years ago, while steel doesn't melt at 850 degrees, it begins to undergo a decline in mechanical strength. Chromium high-tensile steel, the standard product in use, shows particularly unfortunate symptoms. This wasn't a problem in land installations, because you can just use more steel, more firebrick, and more space. at sea, you you can do none of this. In particular, you have to bend and fold the pipes in heroic ways. No problem, said Admiral Bowen, we'll just weld the pipes together. If it was pointed out to Admiral Bowen that welding didn't work very well on high-tensile alloy steels, the point was not taken up.

Fortunately, according to Admiral Bowen's 1955 autobiographical account of events, Ships, Machinery, and Mossbacks, there was no problem whatsoever. The whole thing was the most awesome success ever!

Except, well, no. Steel pieces exposed to high temperatures and stresses will eventually elongate in the direction of greatest stress. On a microscopic scale, the carbon in a piece flows in the direction of stress, congregating in areas of dislocation to maximise entropy. Or, in engineering terms,“graphitisation" occurs at alumina inclusions created in some killed steels. In December 1943, the annual meeting of the American Association of Mechanical Engineers was told of the failure of two recent Westinghouse/GE extreme steam condition power plants due to graphitisation at the weld points. (This is in the actual history of the ASME, if I recall correctly. So, big deal.) Although this result had already been detected and published in an experimental test (you'd think, considering how proud I was of tracking the citation down in the Journal of the Iron and Steel Institute, that I would have written the citation down somewhere), it was apparently only at this point that it was realised that any post-1937 United States Navy warship whose steam tubes were built of graphitisation-prone special service steels could be expected to have its steampipe welds unzip at some point in the near future.

That being said, hardly any USN ships with such plants had more than 18 months of operational service at VJ Day. There were no, or few, such events. The problem was basically restricted to some steels, perhaps (although I find this unlikely) even only those made in a few problem plants. Whatever, the FRAM refits, necessary on noise issues alone, nipped the problem in the bud. Yet, in retrospect, it really does look like Admiral Bowen walked into this with his eyes deliberately closed to the facts. Postwar investigation even poured salt on the wounds by demonstrating that high steam conditions failed to deliver on their promise. While American ships were, as Bowen pointed out, more fuel efficient than British, the advantage was provided by economisers. These had been left off the version generation of superheat-equipped ships for various technical reasons. The Admiralty had just cleared economisers for installation when the onset of the emergency building programme caused them to be set aside. The Americans, able to delay their building for a little while longer, adopted them.(iv)

So we've got Admiral Bowen kinda, sorta fibbing about a mistaken policy that he backed. Which is what you expect in memoirs. The facts are out there. But here's where the whole inventor narrative comes in. We listen to the inventor, and fail to check his facts.

See, there was a charming young British officer in the engineering branch who sailed aboard Naiad and Duke of York when it was the flagship of the British Pacific Fleet, and a brutal disappointment to its sailors for its extremely short legs. (Not only lacking economisers, the King George Vs were designed at great expense in range to cruise at high speeds in order to better shadow German raiders.) He heard a great deal of lower decks grousing about very real problems with their machinery, and took it back to a postwar career in the engineering branch that kept rising to the penultimate ranks before being turned back. (The links are intended to imply that this might have something to do with the RN's move away from steam turbines to gas turbines, but I don't know what I'm talking about, so I'm leaving it as a speculation.) In 1967, Rear-Admiral LeBailly was laterally transferred to the intelligence branch, from which vantage point he became someone that even the Daily Telegraph's obituarist could describe as "iconoclastic." And in 1990, he wrote a memoir, The Man Around The Engine: A Life Below the Waterline that, when I tracked it down, struck me as being as undisciplined as any late-life memoir, full of ill-sourced and oddly-remembered anecdotes.

Not that anyone would care, because it is a rare edition, and the only place that you're likely to find it, like Bowen's door-stopper, is in the footnotes to books like this.

Oh, dear. That's a beautiful edition, isn't it? David K. Brown was a prominent warship designer and equally prominent naval author. Read Nelson to Vanguard, or any of his many other books on these subjects, as histories of naval designs, and you know at once that you're in the presence of an expert. And then you get to this. A two-piece summary of Bowen's opinions about how awesome the destroyer machinery he created was.

The antidote is here, by the way. Do I have to spell out the point that it turns out to be an inside job by the Gibbs of New York, as a way around the Parsons license? Although some people I greatly respect should avoid reading Sumrall's discussion, which drags in a Former Naval Person and Gibbs relative. Bowen's blather, it turns out, is suspiciously in aid of a bunch of patent trolls. Sigh.

That's not the whole of it, though, because I'm not done with Brown. In another place, Brown actually publishes an abstract drawing of what he calls an "Admiralty boiler," and compares it to one of its competitors. The "Admiralty boiler" drawing has less doodads on it. Clearly, the Admiralty didn't know what it was doing! What? What the hell? (Possibly somewhere in here.)

The fact is that once he moves away from naval architecture, Brown is often just plain unserious. And it's so hard to pick and choose from Brown's work, as I want to do, to pronounce that this bit is weak and this part is fundamental and solid. What if it's actually confirmation bias speaking? That is, I love the part where Brown demolishes the idea that British shipyards were less productive than American because I agree with it a priori, and take issue with the bit about boilers because it conflicts with my anti-declinist stance?

Never mind that bit of soul-searching, because I think that history of technology has a real problem here. I've found an author who needs to be treated more carefully than perhaps some have, and revealed (or, rather, pointed out that Robert Sumrall has revealed) some patent trolls who've been pulling the "look over there" game. Not bad results for another negative research project. (In other words, Corelli Barnett made me do it.)

Still, I'm left with some troubling thoughts. In the process of the investigation, I found scattered discussions of major technological changes that actually did come in during the war. They include significant progress in boiler control, fuel vapourisers, and reheat. Reheat's best known, although that's not saying much.

So let me double down on the first two. These aren't just technologies of some interest to naval warship geeks. We're talking about the places where 90% of the world's electrical power are generated. How these places changed is clearly hugely important to our society. Moreover, I'm talking about developments that are key to the progress of boiler automation. In other words, that go to the origins of modern industrial automation. Knowing more about them will probably tell us a great deal about how we backed into the computer age. Someone should research this stuff.

At the moment, no-one has. These are things that happened that history knows nothing about. And that's the kind of thing that will continue to be closed to us as long as we keep chasing inventors, as opposed to innovations.

That's why it's a good idea to do some research, and read the technical papers, and evaluate the claims on the merits and... Hey? Where's everyone going? No, don't listen to that slick salesman guy! Heck, half of his amusing anecdotes are recycled! Listen to my mumble-mouthed, muddled explanations of metallurgy and thermodynamics instead. And, by the way, don't be too alarmed if my explanations have technical errors because I'm stretching myself so thin. Trust me. My heart's in the right place. Not like that other guy's!

Damn. I'm seeing a problem here.

Totally Messed Up Endnotes That Illustrate That I Did a Lot of Work That I May Never Get To Publish Anywhere Else At the Rate Things Are Going.

iT. W. F. Brown, “A Marine Engineering Review: Past, Present and Future.” Transactions of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects 102 (1960): 391—425; Tables.

iiSir John Kingcome, “Marine Engineering in the Royal Navy: A Review of Progress during the last Twenty-Five Years,” in Proc. Inst. Mech. Eng. 160 (1949): 174; Robert F. Sumrall, Sumner-Gearing-Class Destroyers: Their Design, Weapons, and Equipment (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1995); for overweight problems in American destroyer plants, see M. J. Whitley, Destroyers of the World War II: An International Encyclopedia (London and Sydney: Arms and Armour, 1988): 263, 265; for the panicked reduction in steam conditions in subsequent classes see Ibid, 290; and M. J. Whitley, Cruisers of World War II: An International Encyclopedia (London and Sydney: Arms and Armour, 1995): 270; for the culmination of experiments with superheat, see the inglorious story of the Mitschers in Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships, 1947-1995 (London: Conway Maritime, 1997, 2nd. Rev. Ed.); on Acheron see Rear Admiral (E)John E. Cooke, wartime Engineer-in-charge ofPortsmouth Dockyard, “The Changing Pattern of Maintenance andRepair of the Machinery of the Fleet,” in Proc.Inst. Mech. Eng.169 (1955): 935; and Admiral I. G. Maclean in discussion of Cooke’spaper, 955.

iv. F. W. Harbord and J. W. Hill, The Metallurgy of Steel (London: Charles Griffin and Company, 1918): 383–394; Edgar P. Trask, “the Use of High Elastic Steel in Ship Construction,” Trans. Soc. Nav. Arch. Mar. Eng. 43 (1942): 145; Ireland,M. L. H. W. Semar, and N. L. Mochel, “Higher Steam Conditions forShip’s Machinery: Problems in the Selection and Application ofCycle Components and High Temperature Materials,” in InternationalConference of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers,58–100 in Transactionsof the Royal Institute of Naval Architects93, 1951; Preece,Sir George. “Naval Machinery: Some Factors Influencing ItsDesign.” Proc. Inst. Mech. Eng. 151 (1944): 62-9..

Plantation of the Atlantic, XIV: Praying For a Pale

2011-12-13T06:41:00.000-08:00

So Nathan Myhrvold is in the news again. (Well, Slate, anyway.) And this time the patent troll is arguing about how America just isn't nice enough to inventors. Mad? I'm mad. This happens when you scare governments into "pro-inventor" positions. Now, I'm not going to blog about Cowper Coles, now or next week. At least he had the grace to go down with the ship, and, more importantly, David McGee has already covered it. And if you can't get a copy of his unpublished dissertation, well, a little light on those who've neglected their responsibilities never hurts. I'll talk about something else next week.

First, Praying Towns.

If I had to summarise the conventional wisdom on "King Philip's War," the 1675--6 conflict memorialised by Increase Mather and Daniel Gookin, amongst others, it would be with something like this cut-and-paste from "Links: The International Journal of Socialist Renewal," on the theme of why Thanksgiving is actually bad, and you should feel guilty:

When this war ended, 600 European men, one-eleventh of the adult men of the New England Colonies, had been killed in battle. Hundreds of homes and 13 settlements had been wiped out. But the colonists won.

In their victory, the settlers launched an all-out genocide against the remaining Native people. The Massachusetts government offered 20 shillings bounty for every Indian scalp, and 40 shillings for every prisoner who could be sold into slavery. Soldiers were allowed to enslave any Indian woman or child under 14 they could capture. The “Praying Indians” who had converted to Christianity and fought on the side of the European troops were accused of shooting into the treetops during battles with “hostiles.” They were enslaved or killed. Other “peaceful” Indians of Dartmouth and Dover were invited to negotiate or seek refuge at trading posts–and were sold onto slave ships.

It is not known how many Indians were sold into slavery, but in this campaign, 500 enslaved Indians were shipped from Plymouth alone. Of the 12,000 Indians in the surrounding tribes, probably about half died from battle, massacre and starvation.

After King Philip’s War, there were almost no Indians left free in the northern British colonies. A colonist wrote from Manhattan’s New York colony: “There is now but few Indians upon the island and those few no ways hurtful. It is to be admired how strangely they have decreased by the hand of God, since the English first settled in these parts.”

In Massachusetts, the colonists declared a “day of public thanksgiving” in 1676, saying, “there now scarce remains a name or family of them [the Indians] but are either slain, captivated or fled. [emph. mine.]I

The poor guys at Links are cited because they placed high on my Google Search. They're reporting statistics they have from reliable sources on good faith, and the worse sin committed here is the passive one of confirmation bias. If you want to make King Philip's War a defining moment in America's fall from grace, it would be as well for it have been the worst war ever.

The only problem being that the numbers are pure crazy town. "One-eleventh of the adult men" implies a New-England "colonist" population in the outside range of 20,000. Our baseline statistic for New England's population growth is 100,000 in 1710.

You see the head scratcher here. That's why the "Plymouth Rock" school historical demographers put the number of immigrants to New England during the 1630--1640 timeframe at 40,000. Anything less is a problem.

It's also a great example of selection bias. f you type "600 eleventh King Phillip's War" into the Google search window, you get:

i) Someone's amateur website of every massacre ever.

ii) Wikipedia, which is pretty sound and sensible on the subject, as it usually is these days. (I donated a twenty again this month!)

And,

iii) Mayflowerfamilies.com: " The horrors and devastation of Philip's war have no parallel in our history. The Revolution was a struggle for freedom; the contest with Philip was for existence. The war lasted only about fourteen months; and yet the towns of Brookfield, Lancaster, Marlborough, Medfield, Sudbury, Groton, Deerfield, Hatfield, Hadley, Northfield, Sprigfield, Weymouth, Chelmsford, Andover, Scituate, Bridgewater, Playmouth, and several other places were wholly or partially destroyed, and many of the inhabitants were massacred or carried into captivity. During this short period, six hundred of our brave men, the flower and strength of the Colony, had fallen, and six hundred dwelling houses were consumed. Every eleventh family was houseless, and every eleventh soldier had sunk to his grave." Charles Hudson: A History of Marlborough

This is some guy writing back in the 1840s. I have my doubts about his numbers, which are very.symmetrical, but they aren't the modern, accepted numbers. You can see where the error comes in, and that, again, theory is driving the facts.

Now, the last thing I want to do is deny that King Philip's War happened, or that it was pretty traumatic event. I just want to suggest that there's an agenda here, and it's not a subtle one, either. To repeat the quote bloc:

You'd have to think that someone, somewhere, would be a little shy about reporting genocidal ethnic cleansing, that it would be some kind of secret with a bodyguard of lies, at least until Rutger Hauer discovers the horrifying truth. (That Neo-Nazi Youtube commenters will sit through very boring trailers).

I'm no Rutger Hauer, but I'll give it a whirl. Short version farmed out to Gene Autry. Sorry 'bout the cows.

(Going into the file of secrets that can be shared in state songs.)*

The long version starts in the moment. And that moment needs some attention, on account of the approach that treats the war as some crazy thing that happened, whereas on the contrary, it occurs at the beginning of a trajectory leading from Edmund Andros' arrival as first proprietal governor of New York, through the Dominion of New England to the dissolution of Plymouth Colony. Parallel is the rising trajectory of Boston, New Haven, Uncas and the Mohegans.

In other words, it's the old conjuring trick. Focus the audience's attention on the tragic losers, while the winners exit, stage modernity. Jill Lepore notes in her history of the war, (more on the search that got me there in a moment) that when Increase Mather of Boston came out with his history of the war in 1676, the Reverend William Hubbard of Ipswich blasted back that there had been no war, but only "troubles." Lepore disagrees with Hubbard, and also a more recent critic, Haraold Lonkhuyzen, who points in the direction of Uncas, the resurgent Pequots, and the Praying Indians. Far from being expunged from "Britain's northern colonies," these groups all did very well out of the war. With respect especially to the decision to attack the secret fortress capital of the Narragansetts, deep within the Great Swamp, Lonkhuyzen makes the case for an "Indian Civil War."

Why do the Praying Indians get included here as winners when they all got sold into slavery? The short answer is that they didn't. We know this for the Cape Cod and island Praying Indians, but sort of ignore this, so the issue is the mainly Nipmuc Praying Indians of the towns established by John Eliot. And here I can only point you to Kenneth Moynihan's recent splendid local history of one former praying town, Worcester. As a local historian does, he pays attention to the details, and the result is a deconstruction of Daniel Gookin's won't-melt-in-your-mouth collective hagiography of the suffering Christian Indians.

Gookin, of course, wasn't just the superintendent of Indian affairs for the Bay Colony. He was also deeply involved, along with the Reverend John Eliot, in the creation of the new town of Worcester on a site adjacent to Lake Quinsigamond, around which were three Nipmuc settlements. Eliot, having already created 7 Indian praying towns for the Nipmuc, intended that Worcester/Quinsigamond would incorporate the next. Oddly enough, though, then, the legal apparatus was in the context of a grant of land by Gookin to Indians; but this was the usual way in which Praying Towns were created, and raises questions that really need to be asked about Eliot and Gookin. Above all, it was vital to Eliot that Indians of status lead his Praying Towns. The point of the whole process was the conversion of Indian gentry. Their dependents would follow. Moynihan has established from archival sources that Gookin had made several earlier trips to Quinsigamond and made treaties extinguishing the land rights of two of the local communities. He had not extinguished that of a third, and would not until after the war. (Which is to say, a Nipmuc community survived the entire war hard by modern Worcester without evidently attracting any attention, positive or negative. But this is hardly unique to the patchwork of violence that characterised "King Philip's War" and which leans me to accepting Hubbard's "troubles" usage.

So things are starting to get complicated. And potentially icky. Gookin and Eliot made further agreements extinguishing pre-existing rights at Quinsigamond, including those of European settlers, another township, as well as Nipmuc claims by various sachems of existing Praying Towns. Now the town could be surveyed, in the immediate run-up to the outbreak of hostilities, a platt was produced whereby Daniel Gookin got 50 acres, his son, Samuel, got 25. Their very appropriately named assistant, Daniel Henchman of Boston, got 25.

Now, these allotments, even at the centre of a settlement, may not seem like much. However, Moynihan has discovered that in the postwar resurvey, allocations to the original founders would come with preferential political rights in the town meeting, and, perhaps more importantly, would be tax-free. This status was justified by reference to the support of churches and of Harvard College, but we have wandered far into prebendary territory. Now, I don't know if this reflects a harsher and more self-consciously oligopolic post war spirit, or a better understanding of the actual scheme. The answer might actually be in Moynihan, and I've just not read far enough in. That being said, what I do know is that it was Matoonas, Gookin's constable at the praying town of Pakachoag, who organised first the looting of the trading post at Quingisamond. The Quingisamond deal was not the specific trigger of the Troubles, because Philip was already in arms by this time. But it does seem to be the reason that disorder spread amongst the Nipimucs. And if these stunts over prebendaries were widespread, I think it may prove possible to formulate a new perspective on both the Troubles and Shay's Rebellion in the next century. Speculation aside, it was the crackdown on the Nipmucs after Matoonas' attack that forced many to join the Wampanoag in arms.

It was this split within the Nipmuc community that led to the infamous detention of the Praying Indians on Deer Island and the sale of some, but not by any means all, as slaves. Gookin and Eliot acquire considerable credibility as advocates for Indian rights with their protests against these actions; but, then, they also retained their ample plots at the heart of the future Worcester --and elsewhere. So it all comes out in the wash.

So that's the moment. It's also the story of one of Eliot's Praying Towns among many. Here's a list, per Wikipedia. Note that it excludes Praying Towns not established by Eliot, including Mashpee on Cape Cod, the Nantucket and Martha's Vinyard settlements, everything in Connecticut, and anything that might have been established much north of Boston, excepting Lowell/Wamesit.

"Littleton (Nashoba), Lowell (Wamesit, initially incorporated as part of Chelmsford), Grafton(Hassanamessit), Marlborough (Okommakamesit), a portion of Hopkinton that is now in the Town of Ashland (Makunkokoag), Canton(Punkapoag), Mendon-Uxbridge (Wacentug), and Natick.")

Of these, only two (I think) were actually ethnically cleansed in 1676. Others were "destroyed" in the 1676 attacks. But let's notice the stakes here. Mendon/Uxbridge (Wacentug), was granted as a Praying Town in 1660, burned during the Troubles and resettled in 1680 as a English town, by, amongst others, one Robert Taft. However, if we go by General Court records rather than family genealogy, we can trace the American Tafts in Wacentug back to the mid-1660s. Marlborough, too, was "destroyed by fire" in 1676, but the cleansing flames did not take an affidavit of the previous year listing the Praying Indians with property in town, including, per Wikipedia, "Old Nequenit, Robin, Benjamin Wuttanamitt, Great James, Mary, the widow of Peter Naskonit, on behalf of her child David Moses, Assoake, the widow of James Norwell "On behalf of my children," Sarah Conomy, 'sole executrix of my late husband Oomonog,' Elizebeth, 'the only daughter and sole heir of Solomon, deceased,' and James Spence 'on behalf of his wife.'".

There's nothing more obviously Indian about the last names "Norwell" and "Spence" than of Taft.

What of towns not cleansed, ethnically or by fire? In his history of Natick (here on JSTOR, also summarised here), Harold W. Lonkhuyzen concluded that it was not. A local history of the community extending from the war through the 1720s shows, rather, a gradual de-Indianising. It's a great piece of research, and commentary enough on the status of academic history that it hasn't been followed up, because Lonkhuyzen went back to school to get his MD, and apparently works as a psychiatrist these days. It's left to others to publish articles with provocative titles like "They were here all along." Grafton, which actually now has a Nipmuc reservation, rediscovered its Indian past as long ago as the 1850s, although the reservation was only erected in the last piece of Nipmuc-owned land in the township in the 1930s.

More smoking guns needed? Mashpee, on Cape Cod, received one group of Praying Indians not detained or deported. In spite of its historically Indian status, the town gradually lost its status by degrees, not withstanding the famous Mashpee revolt of 1830. Finally, in 1870, it was incorporated as a town, the last community on Cape Cod to have incorporation imposed save for Bourne. Today, Mashpee survives on tourist traffic driven by its self-consciously Indian (Wampanoag rather than Nipmuc or Nasuet) history. Bourne's Wikipedia article lacks a historical section. On Mashpee, here, here.. Also, have you heard of this guy?

I could say a great deal more about Nantucket, where the official history claims that all of the Indians died of "the sickness" in the not-entirely-insignificant year of 1763, but I'm going south to the islands later. Right now I want to take a cruise northwards up the coast to Reverend Hubbard's country.

It's important to note that in spite of its reputation as an apocalyptic race war, King Philip's Troubles touched many parts of New-England very lightly, if at all. That certainly includes Ipswich and the surrounding country in the peculiar little protrusion that Massachusetts makes into New Hampshire, but also places with listed Praying Towns including Salem and the former town of Dorchester. Salem's affiliated Praying Town of Shawshinock doesn't appear on the list of Eliot's Praying Towns because it wasn't one. However, he was a witness to the deed establishing the town, and modern local historians reconstructing its boundaries have used (tax-free?) deeds of land within it to Gookin, Eliot, Harvard College, and other "Puritan" leading lights.

Dorchester does appear on the list, but as "Canton," because the actual Praying Town, on the summer range of the resident Punkapoags in the Blue Hills, was incorporated as Canton in 1797. Just when the "Punkapoag" usage lapsed is unclear to me. William Dana Orcutt noted in his local history of the town that as long as there were "pure-blooded Indians" in Dorchester, they made an annual summer pilgrimage out to Punkapoag Plantation. The Taunton River Stewardship Council. notes a document listing a 1746 grant by Praying Indians James Thomas (5 acres), Stephen David (18 ¾ acres) and Job Ahanton (15 acres) for "a meeting house (church), burying place (old section of the cemetery), training field (green), parsonage" [and grebe?] The remaining Praying Indians joined the new meeting house in 1755, and per the Stewardship Council, "over the next 70 years, disappeared into history." Albeit, not, evidently, into the pauper's section of history.

Finally, there is Ipswich. But for this story, I have to take it back a bit and, again, sail up the coast. Dorchester was founded in 1630 whenthe Maryand John arrivedfrom Dorset and ten men rowed ashore at Mattapan, a neck highlysuited for raising cattle. They found there Thomas Walford, WilliamTrevour and David Thompson. These were all Englishmen, traders, and interpreters, although I abstract their names from slightly different sections of Orcutt's account. Orcutt notes that nothing is known of their origins or subsequent movements, so that it is hard to make them the first citizens ofDorchester. I believe that Anderson throws up his hands as well. Just three more emissions of the leaky pump, their role certainly important and interesting, if we just knew something about it. (Again, wait 'till I get to Ipswich.)

Salem, founded at the mouth of Naumkeag, was what the settlers of Dorchester hoped to find: a rivermouth haven, easily dominated by guns planted onshore according to Mainwaring's prescription of a good port, dominated by guns to ensure peace and comity. As such, it was actually established by Thomas Gardiner, perhaps in the name of the Dorchester Company, one of the more obscure sidelights of early New England history, in 1624. Next year, Roger Conant, definitely acting for the company, took over. Roger Conant's descendants used to trace him back to one of the early immigrant ships to Patuxet/Plymouth, but we now know that only his brother emigrated at that time. Roger, presumably, was part of the leaky pump. Conant in turn was displaced in 1628 by the newly arrived Roger Endicott, yet another man of obscure origins, although in his case we at least know that he arrived on the Abigail in June with 50 settlers, under the aegis of the Earl of Warwick, then enjoying his turn at the head of New England-related activities back in London. Endicott aligned himself in timely fashion with John Winthrop, when he arrived with his fleet to establish Boston. In spite of, or because of this, there would be continuing friction between Salem and Boston for many years thereafter. The friction perhaps explains why the Troubles didn't reach Salem, although Salem troops fought in the war, and also started the earlier Pequot War.

It would be too neat, however, to draw a line across the coast separating a "Salem" and a "Boston" sphere of interest. When John Winthrop's flagship, the Arabella, arrived off the coast, Sachem Masconnonet of Agawam (Ipswich, not Springfield) rowed out to meet him with a retinue and was entertained by the new Governor for the day. In 1633, John Winthrop's eldest son, John, removed to Agawam, where he lived for several years as part of his career as a trans-Atlantic eminence that reached its climax when he became Governor of Connecticut, and where his eldest son was born.

Ipswich, it happens, intrudes into the Hampshire grant sought by Captain Mason, the author of that letter that I misattributed to Ferdinando Gorges in my last post. (Ah, the perils of overhasty reading.) Consequently, in the 1640s, in a heated controversy over the ownership of Plum Island and its associated fishery, Masconnonet's original deed was entered into the public record. Per Wikipedia, citing a 1912 compendium of Indian land grants of Essex County:

Although he could not read or write at the time of the deed, Masconomet understood that he was effecting a union of the remnant of the tribe after decimation by disease (probably smallpox) with the English colonists. He testified to that effect before the General Court of Massachusetts, which was questioning the legality of the younger Winthrop's transactions. He and his heirs were seeking public reimbursement of the 20 pounds. The tribal members did not take up residence in distinct villages of "praying Indians" as did the other tribes but remained distributed on individual farms adjoining those of the English and integrated into the settlements. Giving up their native language and other marks and affiliations of native identity they soon vanished into Essex County. Masconomet, henceforward "John the Sagamore", gave his children English names. Memory of their ancestry persisted throughout the 17th century, a few generations after Masconomet's death in 1658. A memorial stone on Sagamore Hill in southeastern Hamilton marks where Mosconomet was buried with his gun and tomahawk.

I'd take this as a smoking gun if I hadn't seen other charters of Yankee ethnogenesis in Praying Indian contexts that didn't work out nearly so well. What I find astonishing is this: the life of John Winthrop the Younger's eldest son, named John per the tradition of the day, but called "Fitz-John." I was so flabbergasted by the blatant use of a nickname indicating natural birth that I'm still struggling to make heads or tales of the Connecticut State Library's explanation that it is because people were confused by the fact that he had the same name as his father. Ingenuous? Sly? Accurate? I do notice, however, that Fitz-John was the long-term governor of Connecticut after his father, in spite of contracting a common law marriage with the wealthy heiress of a New Haven innkeeping family. (Colonial and early post-Colonial America and its socially prominent innkeepers. Dissertation-worthy or dissertation-worthy?) It does occur to me that even Puritans might be a little more forgiving of a bastard son who couldn't contract a legal marriage. Benjamin Franklin, ahem.

So I'm thinking that Masconnonet did very well by one of his daughters. Is it a surprise that it was only when the Plum Island litigation reached court that the Winthrops reluctantly disgorged the original Masconnonet deed from their family archives?

Speaking of which, here's one interesting fact about the disquieting end of (some) Praying Towns at the end of the Troubles. Many Praying Indians were, as we know, sold into slavery, either in the West Indies or domestically. Others, however, were "bound out" until their majority. They're listed here, and, not surprisingly, the favoured children appear to be the heirs of prominent Indian landowners.

Now, if this were medieval German history, I could make sense of this. Of course the children of defeated rebels are taken as wards by the victors. They're the heirs, and they're pretty much expected to marry into the families of their masters, bringing their lands with them. Of course, if this were medieval history, I would expect skulduggery over tax-exempt church land, and a commune righteously trying to prove that a grotesque little internecine conflict over land was actually the commune suppressing an overmighty rebel against the Emperor's great, but remote justice. And I would expect (kaisertrue sentimentalist that I am) that, eventually, the Emperor's judges would arrive and dispense true justice by revoking the commune's charter.

Oh, wait... Of course, I shouldn't be looking to medieval history to enlighten the early history of New England. New England is on a teleological path to modernity.

*Perhaps not surprisingly, the "Sweetest rose of colour" line is omitted from Roy and Dale's utterly fabulous version. (Who knew that singing cowboy TV shows were where the gay people went in the 1950s?) The line is included in this painfully-missing-the-point Neo-Confederate monstrosity, though. Head-scratcher, that.

Plantation of the Atlantic, XIII: What the "Leaky Pump" Means

2011-12-08T11:40:00.001-08:00

I know that I promised to reconstruct and post my research on Praying Towns here. That basically means that I'm going to run down some Internet-accessible research on these self-governing communities of Christian Indians established on the recommendation of John Eliot between 1661 and 1675, as well as parallel communities in Connecticut and discuss what the dreadfully-neglected Alltagsgeschichte of these communities shows in the case of some excellent, web-accessible PhD theses, or at least summaries thereof.

But that sounds like work, and I get to be substitute store manager this week,* and consequently am a little out of it. Instead, I'm going to trot some concrete research data about the makeup of mid-Seventeenth Century New England communities out just to put some methodological depth to my gestures to the Newfoundland fishery's "leaking pump" of transatlantic labour migration flows and allegedly consequential claims about the actual composition of those communities.

First, though, I'll rehearse some historiographic reflections. Remember Bishop Samuel Wilberforce's comments about how there were in New England in 1640 supposedly 4,000 Puritans, who “are said infifty years to have multiplied to 100,000” (59)? Sure, Soapy Sam is an unlikely authority. After all, he's the guy that opposed Darwinism in that famous session with Huxley in the summer 1860 meeting of the BAAS and gave rise to the "better an ape as an ancestor than a bishop." On the one hand, that establishes a historical vector connecting the Plymouth Rock myth to Creationism. That's got to lead to some interesting reflections on where those ideas have gone in American politics since. On the other hand, it leaves Wilberforce a pretty unlikely martyr of truth. His defenders try to make his nickname refer to his obsessive-compulsive hand-wringing, but pretty much everyone else thinks that it's an accurate reflection on his somewhat casual approach to the truth.

That means that while Wilberforce, the man who rediscovered Bradford’s OfPlymouth Plantation in the library of the bishop of London and used it in this book, may have been working with the facts about migration to New England that were certainly at hand in London in the late 1830s. If so, someone had synthesised those facts and made the conclusions available, and other people, or at least the Bishop of London, was willing to gloss them in print in a book highly critical of American society in other contexts. But it might also mean that he's seen the "40,000" figure often cited for the Great Migration and lost a zero in his enthusiasm for Yank-bashing. Still, it's interesting that he went there. and used it,unlike any other modern reader, for its list of civil marriages in the back aswell as Bradford’s narrative.

Second, much of this information, and my original inspiration, started with an exchange with my buddy Charleycarp over at the lately-lamented-but-now-back Edge of the American West. I'm not going to go out on a limb on the accuracy of the claim that Elizabeth Cable, wife of Jehu Burr and thus great-grandmother of the Aaron Burr was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1600, but there it is, sourced to some old family records in the hands of the Latter Day Saints. Charley challenged it, and I went to Robert Charles Anderson, and here's what I found in that synthetic summary of two centuries of genealogical research:

Or something like that, anyway.

So, the original question, per Anderson. Who isJehu Burr? A migrant on the 1630 Winthrop Fleet that established Boston, who came to the satellite town of Roxbury, where he was admitted asmember#12 of the church. He married (llegible) in 1631 member 26 of Roxburychurch, likewise indicating membership in the first induction. They had 5 childrenin 11 years, and he died before 1655. The eldest daughter was named Elizabeth,eldest son Jehu. Jacobus supposes that Mrs. Burr was the sister of John Cable, another Winthrop migrant of unknown English origin,listed by occupation (sawyer). So he is a millwright, a prestigious skillset to have, and perhaps it is no surprise to find him a few years later at a mill at the point where the Connecticut crosses the Fall Line. Cable's 1682 will identifies Jehu and John Burr ashis beloved kinsmen and executors, and names Ann Cable as his wife. Samuel Betts, in an addendum to thewill, says that he will take care of his “dear mother,” Ann Cable in a context thought to imply that Ann is Bett's stepmother-in-law, in which case John Cable's firstwife may have been a woman named Sarah, while his second wife, identified only by the probate record above, is AnnBetts, previously married to Roger Betts, a man for whom no other documentary evidence survives.

Nothing here is exactly probative. (Hah!) I'm sure not putting much faith on the "Tales of My Grandmother" approach. We have Anderson, though, and we can certainly see if some facts emerge from taking a representative data set of his several thousand documented migrants. As is my habit with honking data sets like this, I opened it up to a random page in the middleish, and began looking for whatever I could find.

Because of the way I compiled this, there are large blocks of Anderson's prose here, interpolated with my own. Assume that whatever's snarky and inelegant is mine, and whatever is lapidary and insightful is Anderson's.

Overarching, it will be seen that therein marked contrast to marriage records for England, in virtually no case do weknow the names, much less the parents` names, of women married in New England.In spite of Anderson, we have relatively few individuals who can be traced to aspecific ship. There are a group of maidservants entered in the Boston churchin a group in 1633, but otherwise church membership lists are surprisingly poorsources for women's names. Note that because so much ofthe information comes from wills, poor folk are going to be underrepresented.

DAVY JOHNSON probably migrated in Mary and John in 1630, died by 1636. His widow, un-named, takes hisplace in a lawsuit. No other information known.

EDWARD JOHNSON (2:1096) migrated in 1622. Born about 1593,he died in 1675. He married Priscilla, no maiden name known, born about 1618,and had a son and a daughter born in 1646 and 1653. He was brought before a JPin 1665 on charges of marrying outside the law, and in 1644, “the wife of oneCornish” confessed to have lived in adultery with Johnson among others.Priscilla was presented for adultery in 1658, and for failing to attend publicmeeting on the Lord’s Day in 1667, replying that she had been in “Saco” forabout three months. Both were called to testify on what seems to have been thecommon law relationship of Mrs. Ann Mesant, alias Godfrey, and Mr. GeorgeBurdett, than minister of Agamenticus. (1099).

FRANCIS JOHNSON(2:1101) migrated in 1630, and was a trader. He died in1690/1, intestate. He married Joan by 1636, no maiden name known, and she diedbefore he remarried Hannah Hanbury, widow of William Hanbury , in 1656. He had 7 children by his first wife.Naomi, eldest daughter, born 1638. She was baptised, but had to come into theSalem church by the Halfway Covenant in 1665 (in other words, was not previously a communicant) so that her son could be baptised.Eldest son was of course named Francis, youngest daughter, Joan. Discrepancies in the records show the possibilityof another wife (1103).

ISAAC JOHNSON migrated/died in 1630, along with his wife,Lady Arabellla.

JOHN JOHNSON (2:1105). Quartermaster, ie. Military officer. Migrated in 1630. Died 1659. One of his earlycommissions was to apportion land for Indians living in the Massachusettssettlement. (This document is usually cited by those interested in demonstrating that Indians lived alongside Whites in the first century of settlement.) Johnson was in the First induction at Roxbury. One of the richest men in the Bay. Also, surveyor-general, etc. Married (second time, first in New England),Margery, no maiden name known. Marriedthird Grace (Negus) Fawer. No children in New England, although his firstmarriage was extraordinarily fruitful and the kids came over.

PETER JOHNSON (2:1110) Migrated in 1632. Went on toVirginia.

RICHARD JOHNSON (2:1110) Mentioned as an admitted inhabitantof Charleston in 1630. No other information known.

BERTHIA JONES (2:1111) Admitted as #87 of Boston church,perhaps in 1630/1, then went on to Salem. We find only Berthia Raye and Jones' friend, Isabell Robbinson, admitted to the Salem church in 1637, suggesting that either or both married Salem men prior to this record being made.

EDWARD JONES (2:1111) Migrated 1630, died about 1644.Married Anna by 1636, no maiden name known, who was admitted to the Charlestownchurch in 1638. Daughters Mary and Elizabeth, no records. Anna has been fallaciously claimed as thedaughter of George Griggs of Boston.

HENRY JOSSELYN (2:1113) migrated 1630, died 1682. Stewardand Justice. Married Margaret, widow ofCaptain Thomas Cammock, no maiden name known. His niece(?) was accused later ofliving in adultery.

L. KEDBY (2:1117) attested only in a letter of JohnWinthrop. Perhaps a retainer who came out.

WILLIAM KELSEY migrated 1633, died 1676. His will andinventory were presented to New London county court, but do not survive. Hemarried an unknown woman who may have had the Christian name Hester by 1634.They had 8 children between, say, 1634 and 1650.

MANASSEH KEMPTON migrated 1623 on Anne. Died 1665. Married Juliana (Carpenter) Morton, widow ofGeorge Morton, who died 1664/5. No children recorded.

RICHARD KETTLE (2:1124) migrated 1633, died 1680. Cooper. Veryrich. Married “Esther Ward, our brother Atherton Haulghe’s maid servant” in 1637.Hester or Esther was not the daughter ofSamuel Ward, contrary to family myth that has gotten into mainline history due to one of the children being implicated in a famous Indian raid and consequent captivity narrative.

ROBERT KEYES (2:1128) migrated 1633, died 1647, MarriedSarah, no maiden name given, by 1633, and perhaps as early as 1631. Sarahremarried JOHN GAGE and died 1681. 8 children are known. Two sons, including aneldest improbably named Solomon, are not attested in birth records and thus areinterpolated from later records. Thewhole family record is highly irregular. (That's genealogist talk for people faking ancestors who were on the Mayflower. Not that that ever happens. Have I mentioned that I'm a direct descendant of ~~Charlemagne~~ Julius Caesar?)

STEPHEN KIDDER (2:1131) mentioned in a document of 1633,otherwise unknown.

HENRY KINGSBURY (2:1131) migrated 1630 with wife Margaret,first induction into Boston church, nothing further known, surprising sincethey were Winthrop retainers.

JOHN KIRMAN (2:1133) migrated 1631 aboard Plough. Died in 1640 or returned toEngland, like all other “migrants” from this ship.

NICHOLAS KNAPP (2:1135) migrated 1630, died 1670. Married Elinor, no maiden name known, by 1631.She died 1658. Remarried Unica (Bruxton) Brown, widow of Clement and Petersuccessively. She died by 1670 and is not mentioned in Knapp’s will. Had 9children between 1631 and 1647. No son named Nicholas or daughter named Elinor (genealogist talk for "someone is fibbing").The size of their Remove Meadows grant suggests the possibility that there wereothers in the household, but not necessarily children.

JOHN KNIGHT (2:1137), migration assumed, first documentedrecord 1632/3. He was a bachelor, and a link between him and a Mrs. Knight ispossible, but there are no later records.

ROGER KNIGHT (2:1138) Migrated 1630, died by March 1672,Innkeeper. Married Anne, no maiden namerecorded, by 1630. She died 1662. No children recorded. He is not the mother ofthe Mary who married John Brewster. The record has been altered. (That's Anderson calling a spade a spade, BTW.)

WALTER KNIGHT (2:1139) Migrated by 1626. Married by 1642,since that is when he was first arraigned for living apart from hisunidentified wife. Knight is one of the murky followers of Thomas Gray of theDorchester Merchant’s Company that planted at Nantusket in the mid-1620s. Afrequent litigant. No children known.

CHARLES KNILL (2:1142) attested as serving at the plantationof Pascattaquack in 1633 in return for pay and passage back to England in March1634. Knill was a solid man who witnessed many papers, got his pay, andreturned to England on schedule.

WILLIAM KNOPP (2:1143) migrated 1630, died 1659. Carpenter.Rich. Invalid will. Brought out wife Judith Tue. She died by 1651, and hemarried Priscilla Akers. Seven childrenby his first wife, all born in England.

GEORGE KNOWER (2:1146) migrated 1631, died 1674/5. His willnames his wife Elizabeth Knower, no maiden name known. Rich. 3 children known, but one’s name is unknown.As is much else about this enigmatic man, who did not serve in public office,was never called before the courts, was not a church member or a freeman. Just in case you were still under the illusion that the Pilgrim fathers were models of churchgoing public men.

THOMAS KNOWER (2:1148) migrated 1630. Died 1641. No wife ordaughter appears in New England records, but Thomas Noll and Sara Knore appearin the ship’s passenger lists for Abigail of 1635, from which a scenario isconstructed of Knower returning to England to fetch his wife and daughter.

EDWARD LAMB (2:1151) Migrated 1633, died 1648/50. MarriedMargaret, no maiden name known. 7—9 children.

THOMAS LAMB (2:1153) migrated 1630, died 1646. Brought outElizabeth, no maiden name known, with him. Remarried Dorothy Harbeetle, who wasadmitted to the Roxbury Church in 1638/9. 7 children by first wife, 4 by second.

RICHARD LANCKFORD (2:1156) attested in a tax record forPlymouth of 1633. Died 1633.

JOHN LANGMORE (2:1156). Servant of Christopher Martin,migrated in 1620, died 1620.

HENRY LANGSTAFF (2:1156): Migrated 1631, died 1705. Marriedan unidentified woman by 1640. 4 children. Late in life, Langstaff deposed thathe came to New England in the company of Captain Henry Mason in 1635 as abachelor servant. However, the details of his deposition are incorrect andimply knowledge of events w. respect to land disputes involving his patron c. 1631.

WILLIAM LATHAM (2:1160) migrated 1620 as bachelor servant ofJohn Carver. He is recorded as leaving Plymouth after 20 years residence forthe Caribbean, and starving to death there.

LAWRENCE LEACH (2:1161) migrated 1629. Died 1662. Miller andSalem Church member. Married Elizabeth in 1615, or by 1636 if he had two wives.

William Learned (2:1164) migrated 1630, died 1645/6. MarriedGoodith Gilman in 1606. No maiden name known, as Gilman is second given name?Remarried Jane, or perhaps Sarah, who died 1660/1. 5 children.

JOHN LEGGE (2:1166) migrated 1631, died 1672/4. Mason. Rich.Married Elizabeth, no maiden name known, by 1638. 3 children. Elizabeth wasfrequently the subject of nuisance complaints.

EDWARD LEISTER (2:1168) migrated 1620, servant of JohnCarver. Left for Virginia.

WILLIAM LETHERLAND (2:1169) migrated 1630, died 1684.Carpenter. Admitted to Boston church in 1633. Kicked out in 1645 for fatheringa bastard child. Readmitted in 1661. Excommunicated again in 1671 fordrunkenness. In spite of the record,general recorder of the Rhode Island General Court for various sessions,1638—60. Married Margaret, no familyname known, but she may not be the mother of son, Zebulon, who marriedElizabeth, but this relationship must have been common law.

JOHN LEVENS (2:1173) Migrated 1632. Died 1647. Carpenter.Came out with invalid wife, Elizabeth, who died 1632. Remarried Rachel White,maidservant,” had 5 children.

THOMAS LEVERETT (2:1175): Migrated 1633. Elder and Recorderof Boston Church. Rich. Married Anne Rich in Boston, Lincolnshire, and broughther out. Fourteen children, of whom 13born in Boston, but I find it a little suspicious (that is, suggesting adoptionrather than anything else) that the eldest daughter was named Jane rather than Anne.)

WILLIAM LEVERICH (2:1178) migrated 1633. Migrated 1633, died1677. Educated Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Married unknown woman, not seen in any record. Two sons.

CHRISTOPHER LEVETT (2:1180) Traveller, visited twice, wroteabout it, got into a court order of 1631, by which time he had already sailed backto England, dying on the way.

THOMAS LEWIS (2:1181) Migrated 1628, died 1637. Vintner.Married Elizabeth Marshall, daughter of Roger and Elizabeth (Mytton)Marshall in 1618. 7 children.

WILLIAM LEWIS (2:1184) migrated 1632 on Lyon. Died 1683. Distinguished. Married Felix, no family nameknown, by 1620.

THOMAS LINCOLN (2_1187) migrated 1633. Died 1675. Weaver.Rich. Married Susannah, no family name known, between 1633 and 1641. Nochildren known.

RICHARD LINTON (2:1188) A witness in a 1630 inquiry. Atransient, No further information.

THOMAS LITTLE (2:1189) Migration 1632, died 1671. MarriedPlymouth 19 April 1633 Ann Warren, daughter of Richard Warren. 9 children.

EDMUND LOCKWOOD (2:1192). Migrated 1630, died 1632/5. Marriedan unknown woman in England, and second, Elizabeth Masters, daughter of JohnMasters, who remarried Cary Latham. Two children by first marriage, 1 bysecond.

GRACE LODGE (2:1194). Pastor John Wilson’s maidservant wasadmitted to Boston church in 1633. She is one of two Graces so distinguished,and GAMALIEL WAIT’s wife, Grace, while a member, was never admitted under hermarried name. Note that if we have traced Grace Wait, this is the only case in Anderson of a single woman admitted to a congregation who then became one of the otherwise-undocumented wives of the Pilgrim/Puritan Fathers.

THOMAS LOMBARD (2:1194) Migrated 1630, died 1663. Innkeeper.Twice married in England to unknown women, once in New England, and a 4^thtime to Joyce Wallen, widow of Ralph Wallen, maiden name unknown. 10 childrenby first 3 wives.

ROBERT LONG (2:1198) Migrated 1623 in Anne. Bachelor servant, dead or removed by 1627.

RICHARD LORD (2:1198) Migrated 1633. Died 1662. Rich.Married Sarah, no maiden name known, in 1636. Two children.

THOMAS LOTHROP Migrated 1633. Died 1676. Soldier. Prominentman who died in `the wars betwixt the English and the heathen,' specificallyKing Philip`s War in 1676. Married Bethia Ray, daughter of DANIEL REY after1637. No children, although he brought out a sister and fostered several kin.

RICHARD LOUGE (2:1206) Mentioned in court records of 1630-1.He appears again in court in 1635. No other records known.

WILLIAM LOVELL (2:1206) Migration, 1633. Removed to Englandby 1637. Mariner. The records broadly suggest that a son who did not carry hisname (or son-in-law) remained in Dorchester.

GEORGE LUDLOW (2:1206) Migrated 1630 in Mary and John , soon removed to Virginia.

ROGER LUDLOW (2:1211) Migrated 1630 in Mary and John. Oxford man, sometime Governor of Massachusetts Bay.Married Mary Cogan. 5 children.

MARY LUKAS (2:1214) Mary, maidservant of Anne Newgate, wasadmitted to Boston Church in December 1633. Nothing else is known.

JOHN LYFORD (2:1214)Migrated 1624, perhaps in Charity. Irish.Died 1628 after tangling with Bradford and removing to Virginia. Bradford relates that this short-term minister was accused of havingstood father to a bastard born to his wife before their marriage, perhapsObadiah.

The "representative sample" here hammers home the fact that we don't know who the wives of the Pilgrim/Puritan Fathers were. It also turns up numerous emended documents and fanciful stories. Not that I'm alleging anything particularly sinister here. Genealogy is the province of faked ancestries, and the fraud occurs on multiple vectors of "wishing to make it so." Far more of the error in the archives will consist of interpolating Mayflower ancestry than of obscuring the existence of Indian grandmothers because most genealogical researchers are too naive to think the latter an issue (as evidenced by the wide-eyed naivete of the "Elizabeth Cable was born in Massachusetts in 1610" cite above). And to give the genealogical researchers their due credit, I suspect that for at least the last generation they have been more likely to be pleased than upset to find an "Indian princess" in their ancestry.

But never mind that: the entries that I've highlighted here aren't suspicious in that sense. The men that I've noted are the transients, the "mariners" and the men who "removed" back to England. Charles Knill is a particularly solid example:

This present writing testifieth that Charles Knill doth covenant, wth Capt. Walter Neale, Governor of Pascattaquack, in New-England, in the behalf of Capt. John Mason of London, Esqr. and company, that the said Charles Knill shall serve at the plantation of Pascattaquack, for the use and benefitt of the said Capt. John Mason and company, from the date of this present writing until the first of March next ensuing, during wch said time, the said Charles Knill doth promise to doe all saithful service to the said Capt. John Mason or his assignes. And the said Capt. Walter Neale doth promise in the behalfe of the said Capt. John Mason, that the said Charles Knill shall well and truely be paid for his service during the said time, the somme of sixe poundes, either here in New-England or in any other place

where where the said Charles Knill shall conveniently appoynt, and the said Walter Neale doth further promise in the behalfe of the said John Mason, Esq. and company, that the said Charles Knill shall have passage into England the next yeare after the said terme expires, in any such shipp as shall be sent hither for this plantation, provided that the said Charles Knill shall serve in the aforesaid plantation untill the shipps departure (if it shall be soe required) after the rate aforesaid. In testimony whereof the said Charles Knill hath here unto subscribed, this first of Julie, 1633.

This is the true coppie of the covenant between Capt. Walter Neale and Charles Knill in the behalfe of the company.

Given the bias in the data, men like Charles Knill and his co-workers at the Pascattaquack Plantation are, if anything, underrepresented in Anderson. They're in New-England to do a job, get rich, and impress the ladies. Not to live a Godly life under a reformed church. What kind of job?

To Herbert Herbert and Mr. Vaughan:

For my settlement at Sanders Point, and the further good you intend me, I humbly thank you; I shall do the best I can to be grateful. I have taken into my hands all the trade goods that remains of John Raymone's and Mr. Vaughan's, and wil, with what convenience I may, put them of. You complain of your returnes; you take the coorse to have little. A plantation must be furnished with cattle and good hire-hands, and necessaries for them, and not thinke the great lookes of men and many words will be a means to raise a plantation. Those that have bin heare this three year, som of them have nether meat, money nor cloathes — a great disparagement. I shall not need to speak of this; you shal heare of it by others. For myself, my wife and child and 4 men, we have but \ a bb. of corne; beefe and porke I have not had, but on peese this 3 months, nor beare this four monthes, for I have for two and twenty months had but two barrels of beare and two barrels and four booshel of malt; our number commonly hath bin ten. I nor the servants have nether mony nor clothes. I have bin as spare as I could, but it wil not doe. These 4 men with me is Charles Knel, Thomas Clarke, Steven Kidder and Thomas Crockit. 3 of them is to have for their wages, until the first of March, 4/ per peese, and the other, for the yeare, 61, which, in your behalf, I have promised to satisfy in money, or beaver at icw per pound. If there were necessarys for them for clothing, there would not bee much for them to receave. You may, perhaps, thinke that fewer men would serve me; but I have sometimes on C or more Indians, and sar from neybers. These that I have I can set to pale in ground for corne and garden. I have diged a wel within the palizado, where is good water; I have that to close with timber. More men I could have, and more imploy, but I rest thus until I heare from you. The vines that were planted will come to little. They prosper not in the ground they were set. Them that groo natural are veri good, of divers sorts. I have sent you a note of the beaver taken by me at Newichawanicke, and how it hath gon from me. George Vaughan hath a note of all the trade goodes in my custody of the old store, John Raimon's and George Vaughan's acomtes; but the beaver being disposed of before I could make the divident, I cannot see but it must be all onpackt and be divided by you. The Governor departed from the plantation the 15th of July,332 in the morning. So sor this time I end, committing

As usual in letters to head office, everyone is terribly underpaid, neglected, and there's a terrible need for more labour, notwithstanding the as-man-as "C" Indians that sometimes come by for employment as casual labour. It will all be paid off in beaver pelts, which can be had in plenty, if only.... All that's required is the blood-drained face and twitching features of a man who is expecting to hear ~~the refrigeration alarm for the third time that evening~~ that the pelts have rotted.

Oh, by the way, since I tossed off my disagreement with Creatures of Empire all too casually last time, here's our man on the scene on business, including animal husbandry:

Sir:

Yor Wor'shp have donne well in setting forward your Plantacon, and for your milles they will prove beneficial unto you, by God's assistance. I would you had taken this coorse sooner, for the merchants I shall be very cautylous how I deale wth any of them while I live. But God's will be done, I and the world doth judge that I could not in these my dayes have spent my time for noe thinge, for there sending trade and support I desire it not. I have supported but now sunke under my burthen; the more I thinke on this, the more is my griese. I have recd the hogd of mault that you sent me giveing you humble thankes for the same. The servants that were wt h me are discharged and payd there wages for the year past, and I have delivered unto Mr. Warnerton, 43 Ib. of beaver to pay those that were wth him for the year past, for the paying of the servants there old wages, or the dividing of the goods, I expect a general letter, if not then to heare further from your wor5", yor carpenters are with me and I will further them the best I can. Capt. Neale appoynted me two

of of your goates to keepe at his departinge. I praise God they are 4. Of the goods that Mr. Bright left I only recd of Capt. Neale 4 bush'lls of mault and at sevrall times 8 gallons of sack, and from Mr. Warnerton 7 bush'lls and 1 peck of mault, 5 lb. and £ of sugar, and 3 pr. of children stockings, and 97 lb. of beefe wch was of an old cow that Mr. Warnerton killed, being doubtful that shee would not live all the winter, for these I will pay Mr. Joselin for you. I prceive you have a great mynd for the lakes and I as great a will to assist you, if I had 2 horses and 3 men wth me, I would by God's helpe soone resolve you of the cituation of it, but not to live there myself.839 The Pide-cow arrived the 8th of Julie; the 13th day she cast ankor some halfe a mile from the falle; the 18th day the shippe unladen; the 19th sell downe the river; the 22d day the carpenters began about the mill; the 5 th of August the iron stone taken in the mi pp; there is of 3 soartes, on fort that the myne doth cast forth as the tree doth gum, w" * is sent in a rundit, on of the other soartes we take to be very rich. There is great stoare of it, for the other I know not; but may it please you to take notice of the waight and measure of every sort before it goith into the furnace, and wt the stone of such waight and measure will yield in iron. This that wee take to be the best stone is 1 mile to the southward of the great house, it is some 200 rods in length, 6 foot wide, the depth we know not; for want of tooles for that purpose we tooke only the surface of the mine. I have paled in a peice of ground and planted it. If it please God to send us a drie time, I hope there will be 8 or 10 quarters of corne, you have at the greate house 9 cowes, 1 bull, 4 calves of the last year, and 9 of this yeare; the prove very well, farre better than ever was expected, they are as good as your ordinary cattle in England, and they goates prove some of them very well both for milk and breed. If you did send a shippe for the Westerne Islands of 6 scoare tunne or there abouts for cowes and goates, it would be profitable for you. A stock of iron worke to put away wth your boardes from the mill will be good. Nayles, spikes, lockes, hinges, iron worke for boates....

[/sgn/]

Ambrose Gibbins

If anything, however, Gibbons is too pessimistic. The 1635 inventory shows "31 Cows, 3 Bulls, 15 Steers & Heifers, 12 Calves, 63 Sheep, 29 Lambs, 52 Goats, 67 Hogs, old & young, 19 Mares, Horses & Colts."

From the point of the great and the good, the issue was not the establishment of plantations and towns on the New-England coast, but of a vice-admiralty to regulate a process in full swing. We need more law out there, and, coincidentally, it will make a great deal of money for Ferdinando Gorges. From the ever-reliable Knill's perspective, it was building up an enterprise with multiple dimensions of profitability. There was beaver to be had inland, if it could be hauled out. A carriage trade would imply money in raising horses. There was fish on the coast, which meant fish to be sold back home, but also ships to be reprovisioned for the homewards voyage. There were falls everywhere, untapped by modern millpower, and unlimited quantities of ironstone and timber. Bizarre as it is to place ourselves in the mindset where industrial activities are best relegated to the margins of civilisation, that was how these men were thinking, and they were not wrong. New England was already building ships and feeding them back into the Atlantic trade. That, of course, meant, a need for free labour on the New England coast.

The romantic take on this is that it has been going on for a while, that there was a semi-English community at Springfield in 1610, born of leaking labour. But we don't have to go that far down the rabbit hole. What the evidence suffices to demonstrate is that our neat and tidy schema of two emigrations made up of thin-lipped religious zealots, anachronistically dedicated to theocracy and racial purity is simply fantasy. This was a rough-and-tumble, anarchistic coast, and its beating heart is the labour pump. And to understand the labour pump, we have to read the interpolated documents about renovations of the new fort at Plymouth, Gorges' campaign for the vice-admiralty, fort building in New-England. And this:

...[July 11, 1635] The only newes is that the Dunkerckers sloopes have and doe daily take many of the ffrench banckers & other small Shipps. One of their Sloopes sent into this harbor about 14 Dayes since a prize of 60 Tonns w* 1400 banckfish hir owner was the Bishopp of Newhaven; and the same sloope as is Reported hath taken & sould 5 other prizes, one at ye Cowes to Rob. Newland, a fflemish bottom of about 160 Tonns & 4 others at Waymouth poole & to the westward. They speake of above 150 sayle of ffrench brought into Dunkercke Ostend & Gravelinge. Sr I pray you be pleased to move the [?] when you fynde a convenient tyme for a warrant sor my viceadmiraltie in New England; That which I had from the Councell of that Corporation, when I shewed it, you thought it littell ptine" to the viceadmiraltie, fforasmuch as it cheifly concerned the suppressinge of pyratts & planters & Traders y' should insest ye coast or come there wthout licence; much of the same nature was that Cofnission granted by my lo: Duke sor Newfoundland ; New England is lardge & spatious & the plantations doe extend alreddy 300 miles vppon the Seacoast; The English Inhabitants are supposed about 13000 & 6 sayle of Shipps at least if not more belonginge to the plantations, besydes Resorters sor fishinge & Trade & such as carye people and Cattell yerelie amount to above 40 sayle.

The facts swirl about, but I come back to those 1500 fish belonging to the Bishop of Nieuport. We're in Henry Mainwaring's territory here. The men that crew this bankker are men like Charles Knill. They have skills that the great and good dearly need, that Gibbons thinks he can turn into pure profits if given their labour for a year. Yet they don't have "cloathes" to cover their backs. Can Gorges pay them? It's hardly clear. Here's a letter that's pure grifting. Is it an accident that he moves from the swirling chaos supposedly engulfing the returning French Newfoundland fleet as seen from the harbours of southwest England, where fish and sail are being sold under in the vice-admiral's courts under the governors' castles?

Gorges reminds my lord duke of George Calvert, who has already won the vice-admiralty of Newfoundland. The issue, again, is control of the plantations, not their establishment. Mainwaring, for his part, doesn't even bother to distinguish the use of "pirate" into separate valences of social control and social reality. Men go away to sea and return either not at all, much as before, or much, much richer. Words like "pirate" and "Puritan" see, much as anything, to function as attempts to control just how rich. Isn't that what we expect when we encounter men (and women) with useful skills, and would-be employers scrambling for the resources to pay them? You might, indeed, be inclined to use words that are meant to constrain themselves to enter a specific congregation and marry under direction. As our Dunkirker friend might have said to the Bishop of Nieuport, "Good luck with that."

*It's even less prestigious than it sounds, the industry lacking the depth of labour resources to do anything more with retail outlets generating more than half a million in turnover a week than let them run themselves. Although the logic may be on target, because there's probably more people with PhDs or in doctoral programmes on the floor of my store than in management. And, your humble correspondent excepted, there's some pretty smart ones, too.

**in History of the Episcopalian Church inAmerica (New York:Sanford and Swords, 1843). Considering that there was an American edition, it's a little bizarre that I haven't found a review in the Cornell Library online collection. I'd be the first to admit that that isn't exactly a thorough search of sources, but the fact that there's no review in the North American Review, is telling enough.