Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
This post should be "Postblogging Technology, April 1947, I;" but my rotation off night shift was marked by a spell of 11 days working out of 13 (some of them in particularly grueling duties), and I was not feeling the motivation over my last two days off. Arguably, I should have just shook it off
Maybe this will help. Although a weekend in might help more.
but that's not how fatigue works. On the other, hand, I did do some things with my weekend, and while I am perhaps reading too much into my random consumption of popular culture.
it might be that the time has come for a meditation on fatigue, responsibility, especially managerial responsibility, and diligence.
World War II's longest and most grinding campaign was Grand Admirals Raeder and Doenitz's attempt to choke off the domestic economy of the United Kingdom by the somewhat indirect expedient of stopping the rest of the (free) world, and, ultimately, they were defeated by the world's middle managers, at a terrific cost paid, above all, by the people of Bengal. HMS Bronington, meanwhile, turns out to have a bit of history, having been the WWII-era minesweeper chosen as the Prince of Wales' command in 1976. While the flaws of Prince Charles' character do not strike me as falling along the axis of irresponsibility, I can think of other leaders and potential leaders of the Free World who might have benefited from a youthful spell in command of a fishing troller.
It's been a long time since I wrote an addition to "The Electric City" series, and they're all old and crappy and digressive Also, this "tag" thing was then foreign to me. (1,2,3, 4). The intent, however, was from the first to build to this. Not the biggest and most important of electric cities, but the one that counted for the most at the critical turn towards modernity: Antwerp, and specifically, Royers Lock.
GRAY Bridge over the Seine at Elbeuf. (Sources, 1, Curated by Michael Sabarly)
Are you tired of picturesque Ocean Falls, British Columbia? I know I'm not. This is Kimsquit Lodge, the women's dorm.
City of Vancouver Archives
Let us say it's 195-- Okay, I've already used "194Q," so, let's say, "195R." That is, this the year that the future begins, so you are never actually there. You've been in Ocean Falls, man and boy, since before 1924, and you're thinking about next year, or the year after that. The year things start to move in this hick town. (The only Simpsons clip this could possibly link.)
So you're not overly impeded by reality, is what I'm saying. You can see the future. The company brings in unattached women to do women's work. (You know: staff the cafeteria, type, clean up. Obviously you don't put the nurses and teachers and head secretaries here. Obviously.) They meet millwrights, they marry, they buy a home in Martin Valley. They get a car. By that time, the road is through. Their kids go through the class-enhancing magic of high school, and drive the 600km or so to Williams Lake, the 1200 or so to university to Vancouver. The 2500 or so to golden California and the kind of magical, middle-class jobs that people have been lighting out of the coast for since time immemorial --but now they can come back! No more people complaining about the isolation! Before you can turn around, there'll be one of those new-fangled "shopping malls" in town!
So what's a "Kimsquit?" A small town in B.C. This is what it looked like in 1913.
I don't want to make some German Indianer cosplayer squee himself to death or anything, but the burden of the picture is that Kimsquit was abandoned years ago. (Almost. James Sirois still lives there.) It's not the forest primeval. There's been some logging, and there's an air strip to accommodate fly in anglers.
If you can get away from that kind of thinking, you will notice that that's the Dean River issuing into the head of Dean Channel at 52 degrees 13 minutes North, and you will appreciate that this is nice farmland at the mouth of one of only three rivers that punch through the Coastal Range: the Fraser, the Skeena and the Dean. The first two host major seaports. (Prince Rupert has a container terminal now. That qualifies as "major," right?) So why not a third?
Because, we say now, in our diminished world where 195R never happened, because. It's just impossible. Not even worth bothering about. No-one's going to farm way out there, or build a railway connection. Or a town. We don't do that sort of thing any more. Better to leave the Dean River as a veritable Mecca of anglers, the place that makes every fly fisher's eye gleam at the mention, because of the superlative quality of the super-steelhead trout which inhabit this best of all possible rivers.*
Our booster/dreamer can be spared for not thinking that way, for naming the women's dorm "Kimsquit Lodge" as a step on the inevitable progress that leads to the moment (soon now!) when the road that links Ocean Falls to the world, the road that has to pass through Kimsquit anyway, climbs the Dean River valley to Anahim Lake.
From this distance, we can see the absurdity of this road that descends the Dean Canyon and climbs passes between four watersheds on its way from Kimsquit to Ocean Falls. Looked at from the other side, the fact that the road goes through four heavily forested watersheds is an advantage. All of that fibre, tied to Ocean Falls forever!
This will be 195R.
Perspective: here's work on Wong Chee's Corner, the turn around the bluff that takes Ocean Falls Road from the townsite to Martin Valley in 1924, per the Ocean Falls Museum.
We're not even building interstates yet, but a bit of a change in methods, don't you think? 195R is the year when roadbuilding gets this easy on the road to Ocean Falls. It's year that never comes, a year as imaginary as flying cars.
In the imagination of Walther Model, briefing his Fuehrer on the evening of 25th August, the question was one of managing the withdrawal of Army Group B behind the Somme-Marne line in the respite given by The Allied halt and regrouping on the Seine. The Somme line would not hold forever, but it would provide a place on which to reconstitute the battered remnants of his command. Walther Model does not believe in 195R. But he is still wrong.
Terry Copp summarises: "After a successful assault on a defended coast, General Eisenhower's naval, air and ground forces destroyed two powerful German armies in just seventy-six days. Enemy losses of close to half a million men included the combat elements of thirty-seven divisions deployed in Normandy as well as another six left behind to delay Allied access to ports. Other large fragments of Army Group B --about 25,000 men from twenty different divisions-- were encircled at Mons on 4 September." Allied operational researchers counted more than 8000 damaged, destroyed or abandoned vehicles, including 456 tanks and self-propelled guns and 367 other AFVs. An estimate of uncounted vehicles suggests that the actual total was 12,000. Twenty thousand vehicles, including 250 tanks and self-propelled guns, escaped across the Seine to continue the fight."
For those inclined to think graphically, we have Terry Copp's research in the OR group's files to thank.
That's one sense of a "Grand Finale," although the one embedded above for the sake of the thumbnail is of the end of a shindig thrown for the Canadian gunners by the highways folks. The Gunners have a sweet deal with the Federal Highways department where they send guns up into the passes in the winter to shoot at snow. The idea is to start an avalanche before the snow pack builds up to the point where a slip can climb up the other side of the valley and bury the road.
Sometimes, the deal means that you get a party thrown in your honour. Other times, it means setting up a gun position in Rogers Pass in February, which is not as nice as you'd think.
The metaphor here gets highways, mountains and guns in it, but I am leading with it because it is an anthropogenic intervention that transforms the steady state of a resting snow slope into a chaotic transformation-of-state. The gunners choose to fire the shell. What happens to, say, a log caught in the avalanche a moment later is utterly beyond their control. In this comparison, "log" means just about everyone and everything involved in World War II. Wikipedia's "Battle for Caen" framing article lists eight named, corps-level operations between PERCH (9 June) and GOODWOOD (18-20 July), better than a major operation a week. With the weight of 2nd British Army shifted west for BLUECOATand a first, jarring encounter with the Jagdpanther (sometimes confused with the Jagdtiger (link; better link), 1st Canadian Army was left to fight SPRING (25 July). intended to capture the social changes enacted by World War II. They were not chosen; indeed, were beyond intervention. All one could do was fire the shell, and see what happened. The metaphor also serves because it has semis and guns in it. The great changes launched byand coming to their culmination with TOTALISE (7 August), and TRACTABLE (14 August).
Put this on a calendar. Imagine it in your life. There is a two week delay between SPRING and TOTALISE. That is very, unusually long by the standards of planning and preparation for one of the major Normandy operations. It was long because it allowed the Canadians to reconstitute the abused infantry battalions of 2nd and 3rd Canadian infantry divisions and establish 4th Canadian Armoured and 1st Polish Armoured Division in the staging areas freed by GOODWOOD. The length suggests an usually well-planned operation. GOODWOOD, recall, matured over about 10 days. Fourteen implies another four to think and prepare! But, again, put this in perspective of your own life and remember that it is nineteen days from GOODWOOD to TOTALISE. Do not expect revolutions in human thought in that length of time. There is change here: great change. But it is the change of the avalanche, carring all before it.
Etc. Etc: I do not mean to be vague here. The change I am thinking about is very specific. The men who fought TOTALISE came from farms where horses still pulled things. They went home and erected the awesome (and awesomely ugly) reinforced concrete pillars that allowed the original Park Royal shopping mall of my childhood to park cars on its roof less than thirty years later. This is our modern built environment. At its best, at least, the brightly lit urban caves that you guide your vehicle through in Lego Racers. (Not that I could find footage of those levels on Youtube, but you know what I'm talking about. I hope.) Our idealised modernity is a a LEGO world made in 100 ton blocks.
Time seems to have gotten away from us here in California, which is my way of apologising that this is so late. It would be later still if it were left to your cousin, who has been in New York for several weeks now, lately avoiding the telephone and telegraph, so that we are behind on news here. (Although it appears from the entertainment news that his main mission has been successful.) We are expecting him, and Wong Lee, in company with the westbound courier, who will turn around for Montreal without so much as a night's rest with this package, and so on to you.
You will no doubt be amused by the latest steps in Uncle's campaign for financial freedom of maneuver. You know your cousin's stubbornness and pride! Needless to say, the recent gains on the NYSE are a problem for him as Uncle's main objective is to remain free to buy what he wants to buy, although I beg you not to be so frank with the Earl. With Time trumpeting the success of Wilys-Overland, Uncle has to argue that it is all froth. Who in their right mind would put their money behind Sorensen at this point in his career? On the other hand, IBM and Honeywell are up nicely since his purchase. A stopped clock is right twice a day and all of that.
You will be pleased to know that Uncle has set his best people to work on answering the question put by the Earl. (Or, rather, that he tasked the household. But good people are we!) We came up with a curve of the discount on expected returns on housing units per year that I append. Now I have to explain why it is nonsense and should be disregarded, even though to complete it I ended up in that library in Palo Alto where one is pretty much obligated to call upon the Engineer. I must say that the more that I see of him socially, the more I fancy that I detect the man that the electorate rejected twelve years ago, matters not being eased by a lunch date with his eldest, at which fulsome were the complaints about the injustice of the Engineer's illegitimate son being to all appearances his "true" heir. What can I say? Once his grandfather decided to divert investor's money into the subterranean stream that is his little college, it could hardly emerge into the sun except to bubble up and water hidden roots, and that is all. As for favoritism, what counts for the Engineer is politics, and all of his sons, on whichever side of the blanket (how me must have struggled to do his duty!) are disappointments on that score. Imagine an actor in that office! Especially one who likes to tattle to the Feds about his enemies. You will be pleased to heart hat I held my tongue.
So: the research. "Miss V.C.," has had some practice in this matter, and was willing to be persuaded to divert herself from her little family history. (Especially as she realizes that her trip to Monterrey can only be authorized by wheedling an indulgent Uncle, and he is not around right now.) To reinforce the troops, your youngest offered his eager assistance, and we also got something out of Uncle's housekeeper, and rather more from Lieutenant A., who turns out to have some grip on staff work. (I was beginning to wonder.) More usefully, Suzie Wong is available, now that school is out. In short, we compiled what poor numbers we have, both on housing stocks and the science of "demography," put our best statistical acumen to work, and came up with a curve of discounts on expected returns on housing investments in the United Kingdom 1944--1975, although James likens it to reinforcing concrete with rust-flavored gelatin. (Because rust is iron; never mind, it is funnier when James delivers it with his best BBC pronunciation.)
Now I have to tell you why it is all rubbish, and that the Earl should disregard it and go all in for housing. The long and the short of it is that while a more careful reader would no doubt deliver more nuance, it seems to me that demographers are absolutely mad! Some of the finer details of the lunacy are rather indelicate for a letter from a daughter-in-law. I asked James to append something about "neo-Malthusianism," but he seems scarcely more comfortable talking about it with you than I! The argument, as I synthesize it, is that for a very long time, the human population of the Earth scarcely grew at all. Then, in the Great Prosperity of Ch'ien Lung-Ti, and in England as well, population began to grow quite quickly. The gentlemen scholars explained that in terms of proper rulership unlocking the fecundity of the Earth, but in England a clergyman named Malthus pronounced that it was "scientific," and a bad thing, since unchecked population growth must eventually overrun the Earth. by scientific, he vaguely meant a fedback process, although he perceived strictly negative feedback, and distinguished two kinds. These were "positive checks" by which Protestants restricted population growth through late marriages from the "negative checks" of poverty that afflicted themselves upon the superstitious poor of various places. The latter not actually being checks, as they did not work. The Reverend Malthus was no great engineer, although he is more highly regarded as an economist, and his point about "positive checks" was prescient.
Then, in the course of the Nineteenth Century, while population growth slowed under the late and vicious Ch'ing, that of England redoubled, to be followed in its turn by other Protestant nations such as Germany, but not, conspicuously, France and Ireland. So a new explanation was needed, which was generally given in terms of a fall in the death rate due to improving health. Then, about 1890, population growth in England and America began to fall, and yet a new one was required. Civilization had advanced, there had been a "demographic transition," and Malthus' positive checks were in general practice.
A farrago of arguments followed that seemed to evade this obvious point, mainly by pointing at other countries where population expansion continued, such as Germany, Italy and Japan. Population expansion happened on its own, and caused war, or migration, or poverty, or checked itself by the sufficient cause of population density itself. Races might or might not flourish in various parts of the world, and some races might be committing "racial suicide" by reducing their birth rate below the death rate. Mr. Thompson, whom Uncle ridicules, somehow came up with the argument that the Japanese were entitled to the lands of Manchuria, or of New Guinea on the other hand. (His views of whether the Japanese are best suited to Siberian or jungle airs have developed, much like civilization, over time.) The rather more obvious resort of California was ruled out by the fact that California, with thrice the land mass of Britain, was full up by his calculation of "optimum population density" at less than 6 million people! An English socialist and scientist calculated that the English are on their way to racial extinction. This is the view, refracted through the Luce press, which panicked Uncle. This reading allows that the solution is socialism. Australians think that Australia is underpopulated and needs vastly more people, but for some reason these must be only White persons. Their solution is "neo-natalist" policies to promote the native birth rate. Mr. Thompson whimsically offers the Chinese Australia, or Australia the Chinese, and an Indian replies by offering them British Columbia and California.
Is it unfair to notice that while we as a family like to complain about how unfair the Exclusion Act was, it has been a source of great profit to us? Continuing, my eyes began to roll even before I discovered the Icelandic Canadian explorer who thinks the high islands of the Arctic to be an unexploited frontier destined for populations in the millions.
I am sometimes inclined to roll my eyes at Uncle's belief that racial passing is the secret key to American public life. He is so smug sometimes! But when I stare into the eyes of Vijhalmur Stefansson, I ask myself, "Mad? Or insecure?"
OK. The 6 pounder comes on the scene in early 1942 with a plain AP and a HE ammo nature. The AP round keeps getting upgraded. Sabot comes along in March 1944, well in time to be used in Normandy. That takes the maximum armour penetration from a baseline of 88mm up to 142mm. The US also buys the six-gun, but it doesn't do the ammo upgrades and as a result doesn't get value from the weapon except when units beg APDS rounds off the Brits, which they do whenever they can because they don't want to die.
The six-gun is installed in a variety of British tanks. As you have discussed, Shermans start to flow into the RAC, to begin with in the Middle East. They bring with them the US 75mm. The combination of US pushing of Sherman, and after-action reports wanting a better direct fire support weapon, leads the UK to accept Sherman and also to introduce the ROQF 75. The important point here is that the ROQF 75 uses the same ammo natures as the US M2/4/6.
Per Wikipedia, there is never a decent AP round for the M2/4/6 or therefore the ROQF, while there most certainly is for the six gun and the 17. In fact, the M61 AP shells were even delivered without the burster fill, so their ballistics may also have been screwy if the weight in the tail wasn't replaced with something.
So. HEAT or whatever doesn't turn up in time to be relevant, but sabot certainly does. In fact, run the tape back to Villers Bocage.
Wittmann kills a Sherman, another gets stuck across the road due to its shitty drivetrain so the rest of the squadron can't gang tackle him. He rips into the RHQ squadron, and then...well, Bill Cotton and a handful of Jackets scrabbling about like untermenschen get a mobility kill and he wanders off leaving his crew. The point here is that the Jackets' AT platoon are loaded for bear or rather tiger with 6 pdr APDS while the CLY tanks have nothing like it. Cotton pulls this off again and again through the day. It happens again in EPSOM - German armour smashes everything until it hits an infantry AT platoon and then it, er, doesn't.
Question. Why wasn't there a sabot round for the 75? A 75 round weighs about as much as a 6, so the energetics ought to be OK. The Americans never got it for their own 6s - couldn't their industry manage it? In which case, why did ROF not make one as they obviously could? The British were clearly aware they were short on tank killing capability, hence the effort to upgun Shermans and M10s.
Further question. The requirement for better suppressive fires out of a tank wasn't bullshit - engaging German anti-tank guns was something all armour that fought them needed to do. It turned up as a requirement from Tunisia and AFAIK Sicily - is there some really fascinating deep history of the landscape you're going to tell me about? Or is it more that 1st Army's artillery fire control and forward air control was a bit wank compared to 8th, which after all had learned the hard way?
Sabot. Wouldn't have noticed. It's a gendered thing. Who would want a shoe that slips off so easily? It's not really until you see what you can accomplish working within the limitations that you can see and advantage.
Apropos of not very much, Nineties club music before the break, technology (and the secret history of tanks and the Norman landscape) after the break.
(This one is a day late, so I'm throwing in a freebie: my old notes on the British institutional tank design process. Which may or may not be so heavily plagiarised that Zizek would blush, since I originally intended to rewrite them before publishing them. But, hey, blog!)
Oh, the link. The "green fields beyond" is apparently not just a tag that is supposed to bring to mind fake-Faulkner's rendition of "Old Black Joe" in Barton Fink. (For a given value of "supposed.") It is also supposed to remind us of the Battle of Cambrai. I say that it can do both.
It turns out that "Through the blood and mud to the green fields beyond" is the "unofficial motto" of the Royal Tank Regiment.Someone doesn't make the association that I make. Truth to tell, the story of the Royal Tank Regiment is not exactly full of triumphant breakthroughs onto the green fields beyond. It is mostly about terrific blows of the armoured fist that the Germans contain with sacrifice and courage in a bad cause. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. The Regiment has achieved its objectives. This is not a "dark future where there is only war."
Goodwood was not an unprecedented operation in kind. Sedan saw the use of (two) entirely armoured corps in a break-in operation. It also featured a main effort by the heavy bombing force of the attackers. At Sedan this was only heavy by the standards of 1940, but decisive, in my view, because it cut enough cable to paralyse the defending French artillery. Alexander McKee, on the other hand, has characterised the preliminary bombing at Caen as the "heaviest air raid" in history. I doubt that it will qualify for this record when the B-52 carpet bombings of Vietnam and Desert Storm are taking into account, but that's only because B-52s can lift so much weight. By scale of effort, Goodwood really was the heaviest bombing in history.
The point of this post is that however we justify this in operational terms, it makes sense from a logistical one because the aircraft could carry bombs over from England, whereas conventional artillery (of which a little more at the tail of the article) had to bring their munitions in through the bottleneck of the beaches.
This suggests that I need to talk about that bottleneck.
Why Goodwood? I could begin on the start line, with the first light of dawn on August 8, 1944, with Hamilton, Ontario's "Rileys" and the Essex Scottish, the Lake Superior Regiment and the South Saskatchewans, the Fusiliers Mont-Royals and the Camerons of Canada, the South Albertas and the British Columbia Regiment and the Algonquins, lining up for TOTALISE. With I Canadian Corps, having learned the lessons of GOODWOOD, about to do it right. But that would be a bit bombastic. A small country shows the big powers how it is done, just like another August 8th, another black day for the German army. (The link you were expecting the first time.)
And, true, it would be bombastic. It would also have an essential truth to it. The crux of the matter, the point (I repeat), is that the battlefield dialectic of resources and means is pushing the world forward into technological modernity. A small country, at the frontier of a built and of a curated landscape is not unreasonably the place where these things might be focussed. If the men of the BCR come out of woods where things are done one way
Let's keep our eyes on the prize. It's not a car. It's the Luv Bandit. And by that I mean that if a war of choice is fought, not by the army you want, but the army you have, then a war of total social mobilisation is fought, not by the army you want, but the army that society will give you. It is an army that, however imperfectly, sees the future: and that future is cruising with your buddies in the Luv Bandit.
Please forgive this poor letter. I know how hard it must be for Sister to read, but we are confined to our camps and all outgoing mail is being impounded. So I write it on this stuff and out it goes in the laundry, just like a Republic serial! Mother's aunt's grand-daughter is going to take it up to the Wing Commander, and, from him, America. Queenie is one swell girl! She and her mother even took me around the town last week to see the sights! Keyham is a very small place, all English and sad. Not at all what I pictured.
If Sister has to give up on this, I hope it sets your heart at ease that since it was made from a ditto, there is a fair copy in the Wing Commander's papers. If anything happens, you will have it after the war.
Since my letter before this was all about my afternoon out with the Chungs, I shan't repeat myself, as the English say, although you may not have received that letter yet, so I am not really repeating myself! Instead, Father will surely want to know that I shall have my own ship for the Invasion! Well, not really a ship, an LCT, and it will not carry my name on D-Day, though, I hope, soon after.
It happened this way. Commander Stump of the 510th Port Battalion, who I mentioned, has been staffing his unit by the old-fashioned method. White officers are no good for Coloured troops, but the Navy gets upset about commissioned Coloureds, so the Commander arranges Mess Chiefs to be transferred to the Battalion, then has a friend in Washington lose their jackets. No fuss, no muss, another "White" Officer who is good with Coloureds --at least until he gets it in his head that he can be promoted.
Well, now that we're shut down, it is hard to play this game, so he has been looking further afield, since Admiral Hall is desperate to get some decent management on the ground. I mentioned Harry Sullivan, the Ojibway highliner from Grand Island? I set up an LCI whose ramp won't drop with some radios and one of the new LORAN sets, and he'll be a breach guide, talking boats through the obstacles and mines and marshalling the rear echelon landings. I'll take over his LCT. From the look the flag gave me in the minute he spent approving it, I have a feeling that Hall's minded to wink at something a little irregular. (I knew I would make it into a frat some day, Sis!)
The scuttlebut around the fleet is that the swimming tanks are useless. The Admiralty Instructions say that there's a cross-current off the beach, and the tank drivers have no idea how to keep from being swamped by it, but the Army major who is in charge won't hear of any changes. Well, Dad, I hope that the next you hear of me won't be court-martial charges!
Mom, once again, I can't thank you enough for introducing me to Gracie. She just knocks my socks off. Can't wait to see you guys again, even you Sis, and you see I didn't mention Douggie? Hah! Did you read that aloud?
With All My Love, Tommy
My Dearest Reggie:
Not much of a note for you this time around. I should love to fill you in on the hijinks of the young and careless ("Miss V.C." has now conceived the idea that the university archives will reveal the secret of her "McKees." I cannot help but think that someone is pulling her leg. It is close enough to the story of Judith's people that I have actually mentioned it to her, but she denies it.)
Well, that is already more than I intended to write. I really need to be going, and I think I linger at home because of the unpleasantness of my task, which is to somehow chivvy our mutual friend's young associate out of hospital, where he has booked in on pretext of tonsilitis in an attempt to escape a European tour. If I can. I fear that I have no leverage on him at all! In all likelihood, any chivvying to be done will be of our mutual friend, who is spooked of talk about "Section 60" in his contract, with much ominous shading to suggest that it will be the death of him if he breaks his contract.
I hope that I am not flying between equally awful outposts on the continental lines when the invasion is announced.
To put things out of the way first, one of them is not Canada Day. I mean, let's all celebrate up Canada way
but as a country we seem to have taken this year's festival-of-celebrating-finding-a-way-to-be-a-binational-nation as a day of relaxation. Or I have. (Strange way to relax, I admit, but otherwise guilt would have driven me to write something more ambitious.)
The things that weigh on me are, first, a generalised fog of exhaustion. Curse split days off. Second, many, many defeats in solitaire Titan matches with my iPad. Which are both cause and effect here, but whatever. It's going to take a great many matches at sound mind to push my effectiveness rating up to where I had it.
Speaking of holes, there's a lot to cover this summer, and not posting is a way to not get it done. Time, then, to do something both unambitious and needful.
So, seventy years ago today, Operation EPSOM is closing down. Three days ago, General Sir Richard O'Connor, star a few World War II counterfactuals,* launched 15th Scottish Division across the River Odon as the first echelon of newly-arrived XXX Corps' first attack in the Battle of Caen, with 11th Armoured Division, 43rd (Wessex) Infantry Division, with 31st Army Tank Brigade attached to the !5th Scottish, and 4th Armoured Brigade attached to 11th Armoured for the operation.
So, obviously a blog about technology and society and war and grass should start an entry about the day after the Great Channel Storm with this, right?
This is a lot more frightening than it looks. Surf tries to roll you over. It takes some getting used to, and DUKWs are not particularly safe vehicles.
Nah. Instead, I'm going to lift some classic material. (Art by Carl Barks and Don Rosas. Buy this! Or don't, because it seems to be out of print. How could that happen?)
The English pirate, El Draque (he's a duck!), has captured a "lost library" from the Spanish on the Pacific. On an unexplored shore, he builds a fort to store this treasure. (If you care about the imaginarium, this is the source of the Junior Woodchuck Manual.)
By 1818, El Draque's old fort is occupied by the British (who are Beagles), who are being attacked by the Spanish. Because reasons. Cornelius Coot ends up with the deed to the fort and 10 acre hill. Which, as far as early West Coast landgrabbing goes, is pretty unambitious, but whatever. And while this may not sound like history of California the way you learned it in school, but don't worry, we're talking about Calisota, not California. You also don't have to worry about the JWM. It's safe underground.
So Scrooge McDuck has come to little Duckberg on the Calisota coast, intending to build the world headquarters of his (mostly) mining empire on the site of the old fort on the hill, now known as "Killmule Hill," and soon as "Killmotor." And the Beagle Boys get wind of it, and then Teddy Roosevelt, who is also a Beagle, gets upset, and so on. I'd call it a "long story," but comic book writers hadn't invented "decompression" yet, so it's actually pretty short. A lot shorter than this introduction is turning out to be
It all gets sorted out, and Scrooge McDuck builds what you obviously need for a global corporate headquarters (a giant bin of money), and promises to build industries such as railroads to make Duckburg a might city. The blonde girl duck is his sister. Not the one who becomes Scooge's nephew, Donald Duck's, mom. That one has anger management issues, because bipolar disorder is always hilarious. Donald Duck's Dad is a duck, too. But not a Scottish Duck, so his last name is "Duck," as opposed to "McDuck." Which you were always wondering about.
"Based on the geographical short distance to Silicon Valley and that most modern duck-stories (even though they're not Carl Barks or Don Rosa stories) show a very modern and high-tech city, we may assume that Duckburg is one of the leading cities in the world within electronics and hi-tech at the dawn of the new millennium.."
You will notice that I link to a chapter of Grøsfjeld's fan site. That's because of a shortage of internal HTML links in an otherwise awesome fansite, which is well worth wasting your time on.
Speaking of which, I do have a reason for exploring the funny book version of the folk version of California history here, which is, of course, to bring out the funny book version of racial essentialism here. You will notice that it has been thoroughly deracialised and classless. Both criminals and Presidents are beagles, and both beagles and ducks come from any number of countries. The point is that in Calisota society, ducks marry ducks, and beagles marry beagles. To do otherwise would be a zoological absurdity, one that we do even need to think about.
Just like we do not have to think about the transition from "El Draque" to 1818, or allow for a Spanish interlude. History goes, as someone much smarter than I once put it, through tunnels that link two eras that need to be linked, avoiding the messy stuff in between.
Also, I do not notice many working class ducks. Which is odd, because if there is one thing that a DUKW was, it was working class.
Seventy years ago today, the wind is picking up. Hitler weather is coming, the worst spring storm in the Channel in more than sixty years, one last chance to "gather together to greet the storm." The world could hardly be more perverse.
The story of the fiasco of the first V-1 salvo is not in Michael Neufeld's Rocket and the Reich. What is, is a horror story. The Germans are good people, their academy as good as any other. And yet there came a day when, in squalid underground factories, good German Weltburgherrn found themselves the masters of slaves, and behaving like masters of slaves, not only to the slaves, but to each other. It was a moral degradation that came not because ballistic missiles had even the remotest hope of "saving the Fatherland," already past saving by anything short of unconditional surrender but because the state had given them a chance to make rockets.
Perhaps not surprisingly, when they are given a chance to make rockets again, and do so, the ones that get to the Moon and back are made by well-paid, free labour.
This is not, however, a meditation on the V-2, but, rather, its proper rival. The technologically utopianism of the Third Reich is a proper counterpoint to the totalising inhumanity of its genocidal vision. So what do we say about the fruit of the mulberry tree?
Yes, it is a little facetious. Three V-1 flying bombs will strike the Borough of Beckingham, two in Southwark, one in Lambeth, one in Lewisham, and one in Wandsworth, but the two that struck Deptford in the early morning, killing 24, would have been more on the minds of parliamentarians than the dribble of bombs that came in through the rest of the day. Deptford Dockyard is a major staging area for the Invasion, and an area a quarter mile square around the dockyard will be struck by 7 V-1s and a V-2 during the campaign, doing significant military damage as well as pretty much wrecking the local housing stock. The rain and damp of a dismal summer (not to mention the coal-less winter to follow), penetrating through opened building envelopes, will complete the work of the high explosive blasts.
On the other hand, with the techno-utopians arguing that NOW is the moment of the robot revolution, it is as well to remind ourselves that they have been with us for a very long time indeed, and General Sir Frederick Pile told the Chiefs of Staff what Google is telling us now: A “robot defence” was needed against a “robot target.” (Dobinson, 423.)
Or, given, seventy years ago today, 6000 ton concrete caissons are being towed across the Channel at a stately 4 knots, a more appropriate soundtrack.
@
Today is the big day. This morning, the first LST will dock in Mulberry A, the artificial port built off Omaha Beach to support the invasion of France. Paradoxically, haste has been urged on its commander again and again, for it is not certain how well, or how long the Mulberries will work. Cherbourg must fall, and it must fall quickly. This is not something that just happens to a fortress of a century's standing, long built under the assumption that it must hold against invaders across the Channel. By controlling the port, the French deny the British the ability to land the battering train that can take the port. The chicken-and-egg problem offers France a measure of protection against a British bolt form the blue as the army does various very important and necessary things in Spain, Italy or Germany. Or Mexico, because if there's one country that needs a Habsburg monarch...
See? They wear funny hats when they're annihilating our forces. Not a real country. Wiki.
France's civilising mission is conserved by the genius of its engineers. Too bad about those Germans.
For whatever reason, the Allies have not been deterred, and the situation has developed as long anticipated. An amphibious assault has been made on the beaches to the south of Cherbourg, and an army has advanced inland, cutting off the fortress and presenting its garrison with a contravallation, while defending its own flanks with a circumvallation. The latter is, unfortunately, naturally strong. The inundations of the Douve River, which the Allies have had to cross in the first place, strengthen the line and allow them to resist counterattack with the glamorous, hard-fighting parachute troops of 17th Corps, while three plebeian infantry divisions face north towards the fortress city with the task of reducing the fortress before the Germans can organise a relief. (A fourth division is in reserve.)
Within the besieged fortress are elements of four German divisions: 920th and 921st Regiments of the 243d Division; 1049th and 1050th Regiments of the 77th Division; fragments of the 1049th Regiment as well as elements of the 1057th Regiment (91st Division; elements of all three regiments of the 243d Division, Sturm Battalion AOK 7, all three regiments of the 709th Division, and artillery and antiaircraft batteries.* Some of these units had suffered heavy casualties in the past thirteen days and all were understrength. Sturm Battalion AOK 7, for example, was whittled down to a strength of about one hundred men. This intelligence appreciation omits the fortress units of the Cherbourg garrison, including the coastal artillery, above all the key batteries on Cap de la Hogue, whose importance to the whole port situation will soon become clear.
The composition of the American force is strikingly different from the one facing the Germans in the east, around Caen. There are no armoured divisions, not even any independent armoured brigades/regiments. That does not, however, mean that there is no heavy metal slated for the Cherbourg front. Unlike the British, who have skipped a second round of intensive ordnance development, the United States artillery has invested in a new generation of siege guns. They are not quite the colossal monsters that reduced Sevastapol, but the 240mm M1 Howitzer is a 29 ton monster, pulled in two parts by 38 ton tractors, twelve-and-a-half ton barrel on one trailer, 20 ton carriage on the other. It can loft a 360lb shell with a muzzle velocity of 2300ft/second, something that proved surprisingly hard to correlate with reinforced concrete penetration in a swan around the Internet this afternoon, but this may perhaps be beside the point. The Brialmont works at Liege used 4 meters of unreinforced concrete, and were reduced by Austrian 8.4" howitzers. The higher velocity American 9.2" howitzer was specifically designed to better that performance, and was not going to be left out of the battle, any more than the somewhat lighter 6" and 8" guns, however little discussed the performance of the corps-level heavy artillery. (1,2, 3, 4)
It was also not going to be unloaded from an LST onto a beach, which brings us back to the port. Unimpressed with the British schedule, the Americans have pressed their port ahead by all possible shortcuts. Captain Augustus Dayton Clark, a constant, unsleeping presence directing the American effort for months, has responded by completing his port three days ahead of schedule. Last night, an unresisting, mute, nervously fidgeting Captain Augustus Dayton Clark, USN (Class of '22) was led off his bridge. In a cynical, upper-addled age, we recognise the symptoms. Captain Clark will die at 90: he is no meth-head; but he has clearly been indulging more than is good for him.**
Nor twelve youth, or a goddess-borne hero will be enough for the Mulberries,
So the modern age settles for a man's career.
The image here is pretty staggering. That's why I lifted it from the Beckett Rankine Archives. Beckett Rankine is the firm which originated as Brigadier Sir Bruce White's civil engineering partnership, Sir Bruce White, Wolfe Barry & Partners, and after seventy postwar years of building and improving ports, it has every right to be proud of the wartime accomplishments of its founder, and of Trn.5 more generally. There is, however, far more to it than this. Enough so that a little context and a bit of history is more than enough for a single post. The context, obviously, is the siege of Cherbourg. The history is, well, interesting. As I have suggested, we are lingering over a moment in British history, when peopl who were good at something (civil engineering in general, building ports specifically), picked the country up by the scruff of its neck and set it on a new course. We may suppose that offshore oil was a natural thing for Britain to develop in the postwar era, but there are plenty of petrochemical resources still in the ground (not least among them a great deal of Britain's coal) because it is "not technically feasible" to exploit them. It has to become technically feasible before something like North Sea oil can be brought to market. I do not think that anyone disagrees that this is the way that it became feasible. Conscious intent, or "failing forward?" More likely the latter.
Anyway, enough speculation: time for more history.
On the outskirts of the New Forest, on the estuarine banks of the River Test, across from Southampton in Hampshire, the New Forest tapers to a halt. Erected out of an old wilderness, William the Conqueror's hunting reserve lies on bad soil suitable for pannage the practice of fattening the annual hog herd on fall acorns. That, in turn, requires land in which to hold the hogs, and at the estuarine banks, the problem turns from poor soil to too m uch water. Here lies the old manor of Marchwood Romsey, and, as the Nineteenth Century expanded its mastery over the landscape, manor turned to suburb. By the time World War I came along, it had acquired four churches, a power plant, railway station, and a powder magazine.
World War I presented Britain with novel problems. Dover, its traditional gate to the continent, is a tiny port. That is why the railway connection developed through Devonport instead. Then, the BEF set up shop right across the narrow seas. The solution was the "secret" military port of Richborough: pretty much the same kind of thing, for the same reason, and in the same location as the old Roman base of Reculver.
For the railway units of the British Army, this was a revelation. To support the army in siege operations, the RE had developed the capacity to build and operate railways on a limited basis. Now the corps came to realise that it would have to be able to conduct rail operations on a much larger scale in order to support a major modern military campaign. Moreover, unlike its continental rivals, it would have to operate rail ports, as well. Veterans of the effort went on to redevelop Dover as a "ro-ro" port in the interwar era, which could take trains across the Channel as trains. (Here is a planning document with more details than you would ever need, although not necessarily a historical focus.)
Jump through World War II, and we get the Marchwood Military Port, the Sea Mounting Centre, today the home of 17 Port and Maritime Regiment, Royal Logistics Corps. That is, the British Army has a specialised unit for conducting port operations, with its own private port. Originally developed during World War I as a support area for the Richborough Port, it came into its own as the site where the Mulberries were developed --although certainly not built.
It is, it seems, on its own face, utterly normal,utterly modern, utterly quotidian.*** The British Army has a regiment -two regiments, in fact-- of port builders and operators. They descend from 931 Port Repair and Construction Regiment of the Royal Engineers (Transportation). This is the unit that has accreted around projects, beginning with the port at Richborough and culminating with an organisation that proposes to repair and even build new ports with the equipment developed for replacing roads and railway bridges with modular equipment.
If you can build a new railway bridge in a hurry with modular equipment, why can you not build a new port with the same? It will, admittedly, have to be quite a big port if it is to be sited off the Normandy coast. If ships drawing 21 feet are to unload at it, the pier heads must be four miles off the beach. A jetty that long is unthinkable, and the Prime Minister is hardly the first to note that one that "rises and falls with the tide" will be required. That insight is to be had in the official history of the Gallipoli campaign, I am assured by some review or another writing in the interwar Army Quarrterly. Not that I can check this claim, now that the copyright trolls have squatted the book (seriously, Australian National Archives? Seriously?) but I think it's in there somewhere.
So that's the project: build a modular port that contains 1400 acres of harbour space --bigger than the Dover port!-- at high water, tow it across to Normandy, install it under fire, and operate it until winter, and perhaps longer. Or, no, build two ports, and give one to the American, considering that it's not going to be possible to find the necessary manpower and tugs without American help. Notice that the whole "railway-Mulberry" thing is pretty organic. There is no way of getting the heavy construction supplies needed to rebuild Cherbourg as a rail port except through the Mulberries. The Mulberries cannot be a substitute for Cherbourg in the long run, because they cannot be rail ports. That does not mean that the Allies do not have plans for an artificial rail port on or near the invasion beaches of France --but that plan is going to have to wait for another post, even if I have highlighted its crucial failing already.
So: transportable, modular port. It's just a bit of civil engineering. How hard can it be? This is probably the place for the only semi-facetious observation that since all major civil engineering projects are today impossible, wrong, too expensive, evil, and surely not worth it in the end, why even try?
@A moment here: Sure, I cite Elgin. Who wouldn't at a moment like this? But there's an actual "Neptune's Triumph" in the all-too-short British classical play list. It lacks the hook that has made Elgin famous, but it's supposed to be quite good, in a Twentieth-Century-Classical-Music sort of way. Take it away, Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners:
*Ruppenthal, Utah Beach to Cherbourg, 150. Hyperwar link here; bibliographic information for the US Army official histories is too easily discoverable to be worth including here. **Details from Stanford. *** No playlist, regrettably. If that seems obscure, for the sake of those who do not click on links, I will just observe that it goes to 17 Regiment's Territorial component's Youtube Channel. Because it has one, is my point.
.JPG)
