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 cover is credited to Richard M. Powers, and is so beautiful that I decided that I couldn't just stick the credit in a subtitle. Cat's Eye is a 1961 Andre Norton novel, relatively early in Norton's career, and the first appearance of The Dipple, the sprawling refugee camp from which many of Norton's socially alienated protagonists originate. It has been a very long time since I read the novel, but as far as my limited recollection go, the title isn't a reference to cat's night vision, but the cover art is another matter.
The crucial thing about cat's eye vision is that, in contrast to the night vision equipment of the 1950s that turned infrared input into visible-light images, cat's eyes work by focussing ambient visible-spectrum radiation to give better imaging, at the expense of loss of losing the kinds of visual information that are less relevant to crepuscular predators. People like cats, so there are lots of explanations and reconstructions on Youtube. Here's an older one that doesn't have AI narration.
My familiarity with all of this begins with vignettes in Charles Stross novels in which Concordes and the like demonstrate that there's something to high Elizabethan British aviation technology by penetrating American air defences. Since sourcing pastiche science fiction novels is no basis for a system of historiography, I remained agnostic until I arrived at OPERATION SAGE BRUSH, which I find pretty fully summarised online here with respect to land operations, and with respect to air superiority operations by Not A Pound For Air to Ground at Youtube.
SAGE BRUSH opened with 9 Aggressor B-57s crossing the Exercise's "Truce Zone." The Canberras of the attacking force easily evading defending interceptors and nuked 18 air bases as far north as Tennessee. Our narrator summarises the lesson of the Exercise as the one about the bomber always getting through and goes on to talk about the upcoming generation of American fighter bombers, blaming the Great Mistake of the Vietnam War on an excessive emphasis on atomic warfare (275 simulated atomic bombs with 15 simulated megatons was used by Aggressor forces alone in an exercise area consisting basically of Louisiana, a rather smaller area than, say, West Germany). This being a judicious combination of strategic velleities and hobby horses, I will defer to Newsweek, which focussed on the transient technological aspects, successful jamming and the unstoppable speed of the B-57. I mean, general atomic war is a bad thing, but they actually built F-111s and Buccaneers, and tried to build TSR-2s, so in some sense this part is more important. No-one, apparently, gives a shit about backward-wave oscillator, aka the "carcinotron," for reasons unknown to the author
Just kidding. Let's talk about Latin grammar next! But Concordes dropping James Bond pastiches on Cthulhu-occupied Washington (spoilers I guess) is a bit more graspable than analogue electronic circuits. Just one aspect of all this is tactical reconnaissance to find atom bomb targets, which you don't want to waste, there being only 300 of them to spare. (On the bright side, the defending side in SAGE BRUSH had twenty-five bombs to spare for not-Louisiana at the end of the exercise.) The line is very pithy: The TSR-2 was to carry sidescanning "line scan" optics, which previously had gone into a pod on the Buccaneer. So what was that thing they did with the lines and the scanning?
Lady and the Trampis that movie with the spaghetti. Per the proffered selection of Youtube shorts, people also remember the Siamese cats. According to the Wikipedia summary, they're the villains. Also, the movie's plot sounds like everything wrong with Disney in the Fifties, but that can't be news to anyone who hasn't been catatonic since before Steamboat Willie. (Ooh, bed sores!) It turns out that it was a technical achievement, though, the first animated movie made with CinemaScope, which is a significant part of why the movie is so well loved today. The plot might be insensitive, sentimental, and shallow, but the whole thing is gorgeous. Gorgeous is what CinemaScope is all about!
Did anyone else reading this frequent Young and Bloor in the early Nineties? Remember the giant poster of Pamela Anderson as Barbed Wire? There's something about comic book movies about girl characters where a dyke director (I assume) gets hold of the property and makes a movie with an aesthetic that says, "Hey, straight guys, we're just not going to apologise for not being for you," and then the straight guys don't go to see it and everybody looks at the box office and is, like, "What happened?' I mean, I don't want to be the culture warrior here. I liked Birds of Prey well enough. But "we're going to shoot Ella Jay Bosco like she's chunky (she's not!) because you should be ashamed of your male gaze" is quite a message to swallow to enjoy me some movie. While I am determined to validate the artistic choice, I am wondering how you get to spend eight figures on a movie when your head is that far up your ass. It's not like you got the MoD (MoS) to pay for it!
By MigMigXII - Animated from CAD drawing, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24337752
Speaking of which, this cool animation adorns the Wikipedia article about the Napier Deltic, an 18-cylinder opposed-piston diesel engine consisting of six layers of cylinders arranged in a stack of equilateral triangles. Beginning as Napier's visionary submission to an Admiralty requirement for a diesel engine suitable for Coastal Forces, as of January of 1954 it has been at sea in a proving boat for almost two years, and is about to go into service on 18 "Dark" class 50t patrol boat, as noted in The Engineer for 5 January 1954, which covers the current state of the Royal Navy (which absolutely needs 60 cruisers and its battleships, but which can afford to cut the size of its new aircraft carriers from the excessive 37,000t displacement of Eagle and Ark Royal.) The article also notes that the Deltic has "been covered fully in these pages." But in the first half of whatever month the article ran in, damn it! Apart from the "Darks," Deltics went into a number of subsequent large coastal classes and several classes of British railways locomotives, Especially the Class 55, which made an indelible impression on the trainspotting public running 100mph services and hitting 125mph descending Stoke Bank with its distinctive noise. (Did I mention that this high speed, high power diesel was noisy? And smoky? I know. Next thing I'll be saying that it rattled!) Boring and conventional engines rule the diesel engine world today since given the costs involved in high speed rail infrastructure they might as well be electrified. The Deltic isn't precisely forgotten, but it is a curiosity of a bygone age, and not the only one in this post.
As the adrenaline leaks out of the Korean crisis, the technology question in June of 1951 is more clearly about boy toys than ever. The United States is in a full-bore Fokker panic over the MiG-15, and the first discussion of the JS-3 threat in the popular press suggests that the European theatre might actually be taking hold in the public consciousness in the way that Marshall Plan/Atlantic Pact enthusiasts have long hoped it would. It is, however, a strange crisis. It is going to be thirty years yet before anyone entertains the thought that the United States plus West Germany plus the United Kingdom plus France plus Italy plus various "show willing" powers might be expected to win a conventional war in central Europe; and, of course,
There is something unreal about the very idea of a conventional war between two nuclear-armed blocs. While we know from seventy years of political practice that the arms gap in central Europe is a pretext for a seemingly permanent argument over the size of the NATO partners' defence budgets, there is the curious fact that the United Kingdom is going to slowly decline from being a positive example of high defence spending to the much less credible status of defence moocher over this period.
I say curious because the nominal explanation for Europe's predilection for neglecting arms spending is its metrosexual leftism, but since when does that include Churchill's Conservatives? With four months to go to the British 1951 general election, it might be too early to make a partisan case, but it is certainly time to get the facts are in order; and in this case the facts also have some interesting things to say about the way we talk about technological praxis and racism.
(Because there weren't any big Christmas songs charting in December of 1950, although see below)
Whenever I put a hyphen after "Techno" in the titles to these appendices, I'm afraid that I will be too ambitious and ride of in all directions. But, c'mon. It's the Korean War. It'sMASHand the war that Chuck Cunningham must have died in to traumatise his family so much they never even mentioned him again. It's a rich text!
According to Wikipedia, John Clarence Woods was born in Wichita in 1911, enlisted in the US Navy the year he turned 18, went AWOL within months, was found too crazy for the navy, then worked as a general labourer until he was inducted into the army in August of 1943. Soon after he was allowed to volunteer as a hangman on the basis of a claim to have assisted at four hangings in Oklahoma and Texas that could have been disproved by even the slightest research. Sergeant Wood went on to botch at least 11 of the hangings he carried out for the Army (out of only 60 to 7) before he arrived in Nuremberg to add some Nazi war criminals to his list of the slowly strangulated. The Nuremberg trials! I have no words.
But some anonymous US Army poets do (as reported by Janet Valentine):
Hear the patter of running feet
It's the old First Cav in full retreat
They're moving on; they'll soon be gone
They're haulin' ass, not savin' gas
They'll soon be gone.
Over on that hill there's a Russian
tank
A million Chinks are on my flank
(Chorus)
I'm movin' on, I'll soon be gone
With my M-1 broke, it ain't no joke
I'll soon be gone
Million Chinks comin' through the pass
Playin' burp-gun boogie all over my
ass
(Chorus)
Standin' in a rice paddy up to my belly
From then on, they called me "Smelly"
(Chorus)
I sung this song for the very last time
Gonna get Korea off my mind
I'm moving on; I'll soon be gone
I done my time in the shit and slime
I'm movin' on.
("Well, if they go fast enough, maybe some of them will be home by Christmas" --General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, in unintentional irony)
The particular ordeal of the Ch'ongch'on River was a run through a "gauntlet" of enemy harassing fire through a highway cut where the Japanese-built road leaves the valley of the Ch'ongch'on to climb and then descend a bench before arriving in the town of Kunu-ri. Lacking any anti-armour weapons or even much artillery, PVA blocking forces couldn't lay down anything more than a harassing fire, but over the length of the roadblock, casualties were heavy, and broken-down soft-skinned vehicles blocked passage for artillery and heavy engineering equipment that was eventually abandoned to the enemy. Not for the first or last time in the Korean War, US troops suffered heavily for lack of armoured personnel carriers to move infantry and engineering troops, which brings me to my final and actually significant bit of US Army incompetence:
Before I get into anything else, I should mention the Overlord's conclusion, which was that "plastic armour" might disappear from British archives at the end of the war because of a Top Secret rating stamped over it leading into the Burlington/Chobham armours of the 1960s that are such a fascinating and unwritten story of postwar materials science development, with its applications well beyond militariana, to include, for example, semiconductors. The problem with this fascinating thesis that mention of plastic armour stops in 1945, while the first applique composite armours following the Burlington/Chobham scheme do not appear until the 1950s. One would expect some kind of accommodation to applique schemes on, for example, the later marks of Centurion, but the cast armour turret really doesn't seem designed to take an applique plate.
Ahem. Let's put that dangling, tantalising thought from our minds for a moment and follow the other lead, the Korean police action.
If you're wondering about the relevance of my vacation to this, I went to see my Mom, and, in my hurry to pack up and leave on Sunday morning, continued to fail to find a book that I had stocked my library with many years ago and ignored ever since: Bruce Cummings' Korea's Place in the Sun. *As a result, I couldn't read it over the week, although I got well into Kim Stanley Robinson's 2150 AD, and there was also a distracting election in a neighbouring third world nation.
Upon return, in the bright morning sun, Cummings of course practically jumped into my hands, which is just as well considering that the Robinson book has disappeared into the jumble. (Or I lost it on the bus. I hope I lost it on the bus.) I've been feasting on it all morning instead of running various important errands, and it makes a very useful corrective to Halberstam's Coldest Winter, a history of the Korean War that could easily be retitled Kim Il Sung: My Part In His Downfall, by Averill Harriman.
The upshot of contemplating the history of the Korean War from the perspective of a historian of Korea rather than that of a historian of Washington office politics is that the way that the Korean War emerged from an ongoing Korean civil war turns out to be in a way that's a lot less easy to understand.
The received account, according to Halberstam, filtered through a lot of contemporary Time magazine reporting, is that the Inmun gun (that's how we professionals say "Korean People's Army") invaded the South in a concerted blitz that massively outnumbered the southern army.
In fact, it would appear after having to tolerate provocations from the Rhee regime through 1949, the return of the large Korean contingent fighting with the PLA had given Kim Il Sung the capacity to respond to the next provocation with a counterattack. The regime wished to capture the Ongjin peninsula and the holy city of Kaesong, which apart from generalised nationalist aspirations, threatened Pyongyang with a "pincer attack," at least in the professionally paranoid minds of the northern military leadership. Generalised counterattacks along the front were envisioned, since Kim was in no position to deny any of his generals their share of glory, and, in any case, what was the worst that could happen? In particular, the 3rd and 4th Infantry Divisions and 105th Armoured Brigade of the Inmum gun was set to pitch in to the South Korean 1st and 7th Divisions, guarding the direct approach to the capital.
At this point, Cummings, although no friend of the regime, becomes downright elliptical, completely evading, for example, the notorious prison massacres carried out by the Rhee regime while speaking of the "some" who believe that there "was an element of fifth column" activity in the defending South Korean force. It is more commonly asserted, as Time proposes, that the defenders were outnumbered and lacked any antitank assets. About antitank assets it is hard to speak clearly, considering the random assortment of equipment that the occupying Americans had left in Korea --the southerners wer certainly not short of artillery, for example; but it seems clear that the Inmun gun was outnumbered. On the other hand, it had air supremacy, something of which modern military historians attached to land forces never seem to be quick to comment upon.
The way in which mid-century land forces without air superiority consistently collapse for mysterious reasons of morale and leadership really is quite striking. But, of course, we're not here to hear about boring old Yak fighters and Ilyushin light bombers that only exist because mad air marshals want to strategically bomb nations into oblivion. (Not that that isn't a thing by Korea, but anyway.) We're here to hear about Panzer panic! American generals reduced to leading tank-hunting parties because their soft and undertrained troops have lost faith in their bazookas!
And, as the hitherto uncommented-upon marginal pictures suggest, the absolute wig-out conducted by the American armoured forces during the 1950s. I'm not going to delve too deeply into the industrial side of this story. The short design histories of the American tanks of the era discuss the manufacturers, factories, Congressional hearings and scandals that flowed from the tank panic. In instantiated terms, we have the M26 Pershing; the M41 Walker light tank; three tank designs named for General Patton, the M46, M47, M48 (Pattons); the M103 heavy tank, which never got named after anyone; and the T69,
which seems to be the only one of three different T-series prototypes to get its picture in the news. That is a lot of new tank designs for a half-decade or so! From these we get a pretty clear view of what armoured forces designers considered important in the mid-Fifties, and alas for Overlord's blog, it is not unconventional armoured schemes.
Well, that's not entirely true, at least of the Americans. A composite fused silica armour applique was proposed for the M48. It was mainly favoured for protection against HEAT and HEP, that is, against thermal gas jet penetration modalities rather than kinetic, but at least the turret was to be manufactured of the new material, so there was considerable faith in its ability to withstand 85mm penetration. (The main Red Army kinetic-kill antitank weapons being still thought to be the 76 and 85mm guns, with the monstrous 122mm of the JS-series intended to defeat thick German wartime armours by throwing a giant blob of shell at them.) This was shelved because the contractors, "OTAC and Carnegie Institute of Technology" were hopelessly behind, and not by revelations about the existence of the T54/55's 100mm and succeeding 114mm guns. However, the fused silica armour remained in development until 1958, and might well have been dropped due to word out of Beddington/Chobham. I don't know!
Unfortunately for Overlord, this work started in 1952, still leaving a seven year gap in which there is no particular reason for Plastic Armour to be secret. You can see the traces of a conceptual line, but I suspect that, if it were secret, it doesn't run through tank stuff, but rather the main line of Big Secrets that the military industrial complex was worrying itself over at the time.
Boom! Like this, only with more radiation.
So the problem that's facing the Plastic Armour guys in the mid-war years is that Plastic Armour gets more effective the faster the projectile that is fired at it; but, also, it seems unreasonably effective against the jets of high energy plasma produced by directed-explosion weapons like your bazooka: The High Explosive Anti Tank round. This raises fascinating questions of material science. The traditional explanation for how armour works is that materials can be hard but brittle; or soft but tough. Hard armour is resistant to penetration and may shatter projectiles. It is particularly good at stopping fast shells. Tough but soft materials give way before shells, but in elastic deformation --they snap back. They are good against heavy but slower-moving penetrators. Nathan Okun's much-frequented arms and armour pages give a good overview of how this traditional approach to material science. This approach breaks down as we get microscopic. The real explanation of materials resistance to impact turns out to be all quantum mechanical (n and p crystal holes dislocating, electrons moving about). Insofar as we have a model for understanding penetration --or, for that the piston rod hitting the crankshaft-- it is all about thermal energy and conductance.
The reason you don't go ahead and put plastic armour on tanks is probably that it degrades quickly when it is hit. It stops the first round, but is used up in doing it, probably because the shell ends up melting the the hard bits out of the tarry matric. (To explain for those who don't care to follow the link, plastic armour is chunks of road gravel embedded in a solid coal tar matrix. The gravel defeats the penetrant instead of sproinging out of the way because it is held in place by the gluey mass of the tar. the energy of penetration heats the gravel up to a zillion degrees, and the armour melts.)
If you're going to use this scheme, you need to understand how it works, and, in particular, understand the instantaneous physics of energy conductance through these materials. Given that we're dealing with semi-conducting crystallines, I think you can see why I think that there was eventually a crossover to computing science. In the short term, however, understanding the instantaneous consequences of an explosive jet impinging on material has the more militarily important implication of allowing the design of better atom bombs. The Mark 5 atom bomb was the weapon that really made WWIII practicable, and the improvement over WWII's cumbersome makes was entirely in terms of a more efficient arrangement of the explosives that compressed the core. The levitated pit design, first tested in 1948 and independently discovered by the British and Soviets, is often described in homely terms as giving the explosion a rolling start at compressing the core, or some such; but we need to beware of homely analogies because they often mislead us in the realm of the quantum mechanical. I'm not going to try to explain what I think is going on, because I'm frankly working mostly from intuition here, but I am going to suggest that it is science derived from HEAT penetrations of armour.
And that, I think, is where all the thinking about armour and armour penetration has disappeared to between 1945 and 1950, only to come crashing back into the mainstream as a "peasant army" defeats the mighty Americans.
Which, by the way, now that we understand that the Inmun gun was totally unprepared for Seoul to actually fall, and had to take a good long two weeks to reorganise and mobilise for the drive south, could easily not have happened in the first place. As it is, SCAP --and Washington-- had just enough time to organise a response that could be humiliatingly brushed aside in the drive south before securing Pusan and making a fight of it. It's also something of a comedown for us MacArthur haters --pretty much the whole world at this point, I think-- that the American Shogun actually had a pretty good handle on the situation. Perhaps accidentally, but something about generals having to be lucky before they can be smart something.
And speaking of American narcissists, I guess Floating Tom Hutter really has taken his last dive. Now I should probably be realistic and go buy another copy of 2150AD.
____
*My copy of Cumming's is a Book Warehouse remaindered copy of the 2005 edition that I probably picked up before 2010, the Book Warehouse having been pretty much gone for at least that long. We're all getting old, and apparently cribbing a book out of Averill Harriman's memoirs gets you a lot more sales than carefully researching the history of Korea for an entire career.
Two things from last month that are obviously much more interesting than Standard Telephone and Cable's version of that new American gizmo, the "transistor."* They are mercerisation, which is one of the more common, yet mysterious, ways of treating cotton textiles, and a complicated Barr and Stroud optical gadget that no-one would call a household device, but which is still interesting from the point of view of trying to understand how a machine can do what it does. I tell you, these "robots" and "automatic machinery" today!
(STC led to Alam Blumlein, "inventor of stereo," commemorated at "historic Abbey Roads Studio)
There was a thing on Twitter, the other day to the effect that the Allies won World War II because Britain provided the time; the Soviet Union, the blood; and America, the treasure. I don't disagree, but I've been looking at various things of late. One is the shambles of the postwar British economy; the other, the M4 Sherman tank. The latter has treated me to a strong dose of the idea of American mass production. And while the M4 is a piss poor standard bearer for this argument given the collapse of production rates in 1944 after the completion of the capacity build out [pdf], the other corollary to the idea that mass production is that the Allies defeated better German tanks with human wave tactics, and, well, that's acceptable. And yet. It might be supposed that the Allies had an opportunity to end WWII in the fall of 1944 instead of the spring of 1945 by closing down the Normandy campaign with an even more complete victory than they, in fact, achieved. The larger consequences might or might not follow, but substitute a sufficiently good tank for the Shermans actually used in operations TOTALISE and TRACTABLE , and the larger operational victory was certainly in reach. Even in the final days of chaotic fighting around the Polish blocking positions outside of Falaise, a better tank might have made a difference. I've suggested before that Britain's last wartime cruiser tank, the Comet, would have made the decisive difference. But it seems at leasst worth arguing that the older Cromwell which would have replaced the Shermans of August in the absence of the 1943 production agreement would have sufficed. "Good enough" is NOT good enough.
This is a side profile view of the Sherman's precursor, the M3 Lee/Grant. It's intended to make you scratch your head at the weird machine and draw the inference that the US Army's Ordnance Service didn't know what it was doing in 1940.
As for the larger consequences, the official historians seem to think that ending the war a few months earlier would have had a salutary effect on the British economy. It would certainly have saved a great many lives. Is there a lesson about mass production here? Sure. Why not? It'll do for a subject this week, but I want to motivate this post a little more, so I'll briefly talk about counterfactuals, and the last stand of the BCRs, often written about in that way that demonstrates that historians do counterfactuals even when they think they don't.
Why would historians do counterfactuals? Because we do them all the time. At the end of OPERATION TOTALISE, a battlegroup consisting of an armoured regiment and mechanised infantry battalion, under the command of the BCRs' Lt. Col. Donald Worthington ended up stranded, deep in the German position, where it was destroyed during the daylight hours of 8 August 1944. The official history says that Worthington made an indefensible error of navigation on the difficult night march towards his actual objective, ending up six km away. He compounded this initial mistake by failing to acknowledge it, depriving his command of reinforcement and artillery support. This versin of events ought to motivate Vancouerites quite strongly, since Colonel Worthington was a scion of Vancouver elites (who lived two blocks from me), and the British Columbia Regiment is one of the city's two militia regiments. That disastrous last stand cost this city, and ought to have been a matter for the ballot box. See? There is a reason for counterfactuals! They tell us not to vote for the NPA. (Not actually a disendorsement.)
There is, however, another version, in which Worthington was a gallant beau sabreur, who made an understandable mistake that ended with his command being in an excellent, if unforeseen position, from which, better supported, he could have led 2nd Canadian Corps to the closing of the Falaise Gap. Exactly why this support was not forthcoming is not clear, but David Bechtold very strongly implies that circumstantial evidence points up the chain of command. then we need to look to higher headquarters, and have at the sacred cows of the Canadian army.
Whatever be the case, there is an interesting technical question here. I know, I know. No-one wants to hear some git prattling on about how, if the RAF had developed the Windsor,Whirlwind and Henley instead of the Halifax, Typhoon and Battle, Britain could have won World War II more! But when we can frame it as "Cromwells instead of Shermans SAVE THE WORLD," then the argument is motivated. (Becaue it's a critique of narrative tropes of mass production, you see.) If Worthington had better tanks, then TOTALISE might have accomplished what TRACTABLE set out to do. (Or, on the other hand, if all of 1st Polish had Cromwells, and not just the armoured reconnaissance regiment.) I'm narrowing donw the claim. Just the Cromwell, so close, in so many ways, to the M4.
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.
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.
