A Technical, But Not At All Technological, Appendix to Postblogging Technology, March 1952: Pound Sterling But Also Energy

 

That was weird.

So much for more talk about the Comet this week! (After a planned week off from work collapsed due to labour churn, before which it was going to be April, 1952, I, possibly with Flight and Fortune.)

Promoted from the comments:

ChrisM: So, I need some clarification on the "in 1947, sterling represented 87% of global foreign exchange reserves" (noting from the paper that this means that roughly half of the world's reserves outside of the US in practice, because gold was still the actual dominant reserve) because I'm not understanding what it means. Does this basically mean that India, Pakistan, semi-demi-hemi colonies like Egypt and the White Dominions, and heck even the colonies themselves, mostly stored their foreign currency reserves in Sterling (and outside of Latin America I would expect the colonial mainland currency to be the dominant exchange reserve, so mostly Sterling, with some Franc or Peseta or whatever for their colonies).

Basically, is the argument that these countries turned all of the dollars they earned into steel or wheat or whatever, and sat on the Pounds because they couldn't buy cool things like the Comet, in practice? And that is replacing the previous "they continued to save Sterling because of affinity for the old country" theory?

I'm just very confused here, tried reading the source paper, and still didn't understand.

With you 100%, Chris. I was brought up with opinions about economists, that, well, when I went searching for the appropriate Bloom County cartoon, I found that, first, Bloom County cartoons are not well indexed; and, second, that lots of people want to explain the joke on the Internet:

"One of the first references to economics I ever saw was in a “Bloom County” strip when I was about nine. Binkley’s anxiety closet had opened, and two balding white guys wearing suits had come out to sit on his bed. “Who are you?” Binkley asked nervously. “Why, we’re economists,” one of them answered. “Economists!” Binkley said in horror. “Well, for God’s sake, don’t talk about the economy!” “The economy?” said the first. “Why, it’s improving.” “Improving?” said the second. “Poppycock!”

At which point Binkley started drooling and eating his blanket."

Economists talk funny and never agree about anything, so you can probably just ignore them and watch Demi Moore do a full-bikini strip tease to the Eurythmics, "Money Can't Buy It," instead. If only the real world worked like that. It's kind of like how no-one explores what impact the tens of thousands of British military in the Canal Zone might have had on the citizens of Cairo in discussing the events of 1952. Apparently all that rioting and guerilla warfare was motivated by "nationalism" and "fanaticism," and the fact that the Sweet Water/Ismaili Canal, in spite of being the main source of drinking water for Canal Zone cities, was deemed to polluted to drink, isn't worth having a serious conversation about. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, May 1950: Jetliner Dreams

 

Early jets tended to lack a bit of oomph coming off the runway.

I've covered the outline of the early passenger jet here before. The De Havilland Comet seemed to have the market to itself at first, but then was pinched out by the Boeing 707, which was developed from a jet-powered tanker that the USAF eventually decided it needed to support its B-47 fleet. The Comet plays an important part in the British narrative that says that Britain's postwar aviation subsidy programme was a big waste of money. Meanwhile, the USAF order for 250 KC-135 Stratotankers cushioned Boeing's 707 project and suggests that Cold War military spending played an important role in the transition to jet transports. 

But is there more to say about this? In a quiet week before, hopefully, the UBC Library reopens, I take my inspiration where I find it, and Brad DeLong has posted a lecture online suggesting that the historic expansion of the British economy through 1870 might have run up against a renewed Malthusian world but for a bunch of exogenous factors that accelerated "innovation." 

It's modern economics latest surrender to the implacable grasp of the "free lunch" school of technological progress, according to which "innovation" comes from outside the economic process, and that the human species is forever vulnerable to a return to a Malthusian world of subsistence economics at any arbitrary level of technological achievement if we ever fail in our continuing propitiation of the mad gods of invention. 

As, away back in May of 1950, the American aviation industry plays with the idea that a transition to jets is impossible, barring some kind of "socialist" intervention to pay the costs of developing a jetliner out of the taxpayers' pocket, I'm inclined to stop and meditate on exogeneity.

A Technological But Also Pure Science Appendix to Postblogging Technology, January, 1944, II: The Secret Life of Stars

I was not quite 19 when Ronald Reagan made his "Star Wars" speech on 23 March 1983, perfectly prepared by far too much libertarian science fiction to be convinced by his case that it was about time that scientists stopped working on MAD and started working on ABM, on defending civilisation against the atomic horror instead of exacerbating it.  In its immediate wake, the argument against "Star Wars" that got the most attention, seemed ludicrously pessimistic. Computer scientists emerged to argue that it was just too hard to programme ABM guidance  software. 

It turns out, as we saw in February, that ABM wasn't something that people just thought of in 1983 after seeing Star Wars IV. The first ABM proposal was put on the table before WWII even ended, and involved shooting down V2s with antiaircraft guns. This week, it turns out that ABM efforts are intimately tied to the H-bomb debate. If the Communists are going to shoot down a large proportion of the atomic bombs aimed at them, the ones that get through should be corkers, and also much cheaper. 

This is why, as January comes to an end, President Truman is hearing conflicting advice from his experts. Some believe, correctly as it turns out, that the H-bomb will be significantly cheaper, in bangs for the buck, than atom bombs. This argument does not, however, get anywhere near as public play as the "corker" argument. It is, admittedly, in part because the arguments are related. if only one in ten weapons get through, better that Moscow be targeted with 10 H-bombs, so that one can level it, than with 100 atom bombs, etc. 

For the scientists that object to this second argument, it was mostly to the grotesque barbarism of aiming to hit "Moscow" with a 10 megaton bomb, in order to destroy all Moscow-related strategic targets, but  also, of course, well, Moscow. The fact that, in the background, there are some goulish rumblings about bombs of unlimited yield --the gigaton bomb-- underlines this. But there's a reason that Edward Teller is talking about a gigaton bomb that, it seems to me, gets obscured in the rearview mirror. Nuclear physicists had a lot to learn about atomic physics in 1950.

The January 1950 argument flows from the fact that Teller is still arguing for his "classical super" H-bomb. Others believe that the classical super is highly problematic. We have two accounts. One is that the difficulty is economic and industrial. There is not enough tritium for the classical super. The other is that the classical super is seen as physically impossible. It is here that we have to ask ourselves how so many physicists are ranging themselves against one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the day. The usual explanation is that Teller was a colossal, raging asshole. And this is true! Moreover, he is quite likely being driven by all kinds of motivated reasoning. But that doesn't mean that he can't defend the classical super, however weak his argument actually is! So what is going on, in January of 1950, months before the Teller-Ulam design surfaces?  This is a very interesting question, because it invites us to peer through telescopes and into cloud chambers with Bit Science, and investigate the way that "pure science" is wrapped up with big booms. 

A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February 1949: I Heard An Owl

That was earnest.

I've been fascinated by Vice-Admiral (E) Sir John Kingcome (1890--1950) since I first encountered him in the Proceedings of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers article summarised by Engineering in the 26 February 1949 number. Part of that is the fact that his title is "Engineer-Vice Admiral of the Fleet." I'm just plain partial to that neat old English wordsmithing.

Part of that has to do with the local connection with Kingcome Inlet, and my youthful interest in Lisa Halliday, of the town of that name. I bring this  up because I find that this post is just better if I dive into my earliest, callow youth; not so much because of Lisa as because, a little later in 1982, when I arrived at UBC, I fell into the company of the UBC Wargamers, much to the detriment of my first year grades, and had various profound and difficult naval matters explained to me in an extremely glib way by the participants in that club's then-thriving naval miniatures set. To the extent that they still wargame, they've been playing rail games for years now, but, back in the day, they collected naval miniatures and crawled around the tables at the old Student Union Building of a Sunday, blowing up Montana with Kitakami.  

Pursuant to this fascinating diversion, someone explained to me that British warships of WWII sucked because they lacked "locked train double reduction geared turbines" that would have allowed them to use "high pressure steam." This was consequent to some generalised failure of British science and engineering which had lost the Empire, doomed the Royal Navy, and occasioned Margaret Thatcher. (One could not be so optimistic as to hope that Thatcher would fix this, but any damage she did to British society would be fit punishment for a country that allowed Two Cultures to  get in the way of the Social Role of Science. Notice that this is four years before the publication of Correlli Barnett's Audit of War, which took this argument up to varsity. I think by this time I'd already read a biography of Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Fisher, and been introduced to the Fisher Scheme,  the controversy over which, culminating in the 1923 cancellation, further overdetermined the end of British engineering culture. (Also, Jutland's in there, somehow.)

It's interesting to come back to this, thirty years on, to see how things came to this pass, with a little distance.

Postblogging Technology, March 1949, I: When Roosevelt Bombed Pearl Harbour

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

Thank you so much for putting Mr. Sutter on the case! It turns out that this was a particular bit of research for which he was well suited. Not as a distinguished member of the California bar, as you would think, but as a man. It turns out that the archives were withholding a file because they thought it would give me the vapours or something. 

Just to review, I've been trying to find out why Horace Stevens didn't show up for Binger Hermann's trial in Portland in January of 1910. It's a bit of a puzzler, and for three years I thought I was going to ask either Stevens or his family, but I couldn't find the man! It seems hard to believe that he just disappeared, but last year, after one too many detective movies, I finally decided to look at the obvious other avenue --"Unidentified corpses of 1910." It was a pretty long shot, but Mr. V. has some friends who write detective novels, which is just as good as actually being a detective, if you ask me. They disabused me of the idea of some desperado shooting Stevens on the train to Portland and heaving the body out of the windows. Dramatic, I know, but reading the biographies of the men of the Land Scandal puts you in the way of thinking of these things. Anyway, it turns out that it's harder than it seems, and the body usually ends up on the tracks, attracting attention. Better, I was told, to pack a big, empty trunk. 

Bodies showing up in trunks, you say? Well, yes. Specifically, in Los Angeles, in early February. Said trunk was weighted with some dumb-bell plates and wrapped in a terrycloth Turkish bath towel, and thrown in Buena Vista Lake, but floated to the surface. a Los Angeles detective took charge (I'm not sure why, since the body was turned over to state troopers out of Bakersfield) and proceeded to generate a thick, thick file by going around every boxing gym in Los Angeles looking for the man's supposed homosexual lover, on the basis of a violent murder in a fit of jealous rage, etc, etc. The file included many pictures of a decayed, naked male body, since the detective had to prove a violent death, and there was evidence of a beating and death by asphyxiation. Hence the womanly vapours. 

Since I requested the file the week before the attempted "hit," and was, in fact, there to see it, not knowing that the clerks were going to claim that it had been lost, it'll do as a movie-plot explanation that I was ordered rubbed-out because it is a vital clue. Well, it or one of the other 132 files in the fasicle, but this is the biggest and most interesting one, so there's that. 

(Who else is surprised to hear a moderate Republican attributing defeat in 1948 to the party refusing to repudiate conspiracy theorists who claimed that "Roosevelt bombed Pearl Harbour"?

Yours Sincerely, Ronnie

A Technical Appendix to January, 1949, II: Machine Tools, 1943 and 1949

According to Ibis World, the British machine tool industry had a projected revenue of £1.1bn, an annual growth rate for the period 2014--2019 of -5.4%, employed 15,181, and involved 1,027 businesses, compared with £30 million and 42,700 in 1948. (And £8.9 million and 22,400 in 1935). The negative growth rate is due to the downturn in commodities (so oil and mining dominate the British scene, I guess.) To frame these numbers, the "red-hot" American scene is projected to buy $8 billion in machine tools in 2019. (Note that I am not adjusting for inflation.)

That reminds me of last week, when I took my bike into the shop for the first time in over two years, and got the usual mechanic's litany of "We had to replace this, and this, and this, and then we discovered that this had to go. Then there was labour, and the GST, but we cut you a little break on that, so," with a pause and an apologetic look, he ended up, "It'll be $450."

If you drive a car, that's the punchline. If you don't, I'm not sure what I can do. My instinct is that bikes are getting cheaper, although some time spent noodling around looking at historic cost of living figures isn't exactly confirming that. The idea here is that, while the machine tool industry has lower employment than in  1949, it's just about as big as it ever was. It's just a bit irrelevant, because making things isn't such a big deal any more.

A Technological Preface to Postblogging Technology, August 1948, I: Certain Grand Schemes of Improvement

For reasons having to do with layout and marketing, customers have difficulty finding the "breakfast aisle" at the store at which I usually work. The particular arrangement means that this aisle, adjacent to the bakery at one end of an irregular lozenge, actually contains pancake mix, pancake syrup, diabetic candy (no, I don't know, either), and pretty much every kind of spread. But as far as it goes, when I am working in the high traffic central aisles, I might as well wear a t-shirt that reads, "The peanut butter is in Aisle 13." No other item is so often sought for, and so hard to discover. I have no idea what that says, but I do know that the 3 August, 1948 Engineering covered the same talk on the theme of "How We Are Overcoming the Unexpected Difficulties of the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme" as did The Engineer, along with several other subjects that, it seems to me, deepen and enrich our understanding of the absolutely bonkers issue of Fortune that  I cannot talk about this week for the usual reasons of schedules-altered-on-the-fly. (And, to be fair, my failure to think through the implications of a day-to-night swing that has essentially cost me a weekend day this week, and given me an extra one next week.)

I hope I'm building up anticipation for the August, 1940 issue of Fortune. Bonkers. I promise you. In the mean time, this is pretty much a peanut-butter-and-jelly technological appendix, except it comes before the subject. 

It's also a little timely, given that I am talking about the Tanganyika Groundnuts Scheme, which we're going to need in the next few years as the Tanzania Biofuels Scheme, if we're serious about long term survival as a species.

A Meta-Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, December 1947: Capital Cuts and Lost Triumphs

Pivot to video!

There are better renditions of Jerusalem on the web, but the Flying Circus crowd are amazingly good.

. . . And:

  

The idea here is that capital cuts in service of the Labour Government's pursuit of the New Jerusalem in the 1940s led to bad motorcycles in the 1970s. That is, to the collapse of the British motorcycle industry, and, more specifically, the bankruptcy of BSA in November of 1972.

Well, okay, that's the vulgar read, which I would attribute to Correlli Barnett if I could be bothered to read Lost Victory and find out whether he is even aware of the 1947 capital cuts. For now, I'm going to satisfy myself with David Edgerton's review in the London Review of Books, which is pretty boss, and the fact that Barnett showed up in the comments to whine is priceless. That David allows the concession that the Brits could have reduced their calorie intake to German levels to squeeze out some more capital also allows me to go on for a bit about food and health at the bottom of this post.

I probably shouldn't be promising more on food and health than I can deliver. My hunch is that there is a huge issue here, but what I've got right now is a silly and tendentious man on RT. As for whether the 1947 capital cuts had any real effect, much less knocking on to the failure of BSA and Norton Villiers Triumph in the mid-70s, it all turns out a bit anticlimactic.  Non-vulgar economic historians don't think that the cuts even happened.Since this is an appendix to a postblogging entry, and not a definitive statement about the effects of these capital cuts, I am going to feel out the extent to which it is possible to push back against that consensus.

Not nearly as sunny the day in 1986 when, for what seemed like good reasons at the time, I crossed this ranch on a street motorcycle. They're really not designed for mud, you know. By The Interior - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59231308

Postblogging Technology, October 1947, I: The Farmer Feeds Them All

R_. C_.
Vancouver,
Canada

Dearest Uncle:

You write to ask how I am settling in here in the Tall Trees, and to inquire after my fiance. I'm sure that you've heard that A. was in town to escort me at Homecoming, and make a show for my friends: the tall and handsome, red-headed Navy hero turned international man of mystery and all, but then the tipped punch bowl told the story of the same old A., however. I'm afraid that I stormed off in some anger and left poor B. to help him clean up. 

B., if you were wondering, was in town because she and I  went up to San Francisco for some shopping earlier in the day. The Lincoln is acting up, and so I was most grateful for the ride. We met Mrs. C. and had quite an enjoyable afternoon doing girl's stuff, before she had to dash home to relieve the babysitter. Queenie wasn't up for joining us, but we had lunch with her in Chinatown.

DIM SUM! How could I live to see "21," and not know about this? In my family! Who is responsible for this horrible neglect? Who? Then, as is my all-too common habit, I dashed into the "morgue" far too close to closing, so I can't be sure there is an obituary I didn't find, but "Puter" is not a common name. Now I wonder where else I should look. Oregon? Canada?

Yours Sincerely,
Ronnie.

P.S. Just heard about Reggie being invited to the course at London! So exciting! I've asked him not to fly over --New Years is just far too late in the year for Atlantic flying-- but it wouldn't hurt for him to hear it from his father, as well.  

Nimrod Was The First Of Those Who Were Mighty On the Earth: The 77mm HV, Technological Progress, And the 1940 Counterfactual

History is, as I never tire of saying, a floating referent. It's never entirely clear where to start, and, in the case of a counterfactual, it is even harder. Hypothetical questions about historical counterfactuals are happening right now, over on Quora.Com, so they are very much questions of 2017. (Just to remind you, the framing counterfactual for this occasional series is,  "What if the Commonwealth armed forces of 1940 were armed like the 21st Army Group on 11 May 1945?") (Also.)

On the other hand, the response is very much to Correlli Barnett's Audit of War, a book that came out in March of 1986, per Paul Addison's review, much linked to from here as an explanation of that book, which the reader may  have forgotten about, or never known. On the other hand again, Audit signifies around here as a programmatic manifesto of Thatcherism, and Dame Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, seven years before Audit was published. On the other hand again, Thatcher was famously "a research chemist before she became a barrister," while Barnett had been a military historian/media pundit since the 1960s. Although you'll have to take my word for this, since I am not going to engage the ideas behind Audit in any more detail than is necessary to trace its impact, Audit was exactly what an English research-chemist-turned-barrister born in 1924 in the Midlands would have produced had she turned into an ancestral voice prophesying war, as opposed to, say, a Prime Minister. 

 Finally, just to throw on one more guiding metaphor onto an already unwieldy mass, I have talked about the idea of "Technology Levels," as used in the classic 1977 tabletop roleplaying game, Traveller. I'll come back to "Tech Levels" at the end of this discussion. For now, suffice it to say that they were originally intended to be descriptive. Your party lands on a planet; do the natives, who know you Pappenheimers, shoot back with bows and arrows, or hand-carried fusion blasters? A single number in the planet's descriptor tells you! However, they tend to become prescriptive. A blender from a Tech Level 9 world will be 1/16th (don't ask) more effective at blending than one from a Tech Level 8 world. 

The Zhodani are alien humans (don't ask some more) who are very advanced and psionic and stuff; but they're assholes, for RPG balance. Anyway, they invade the Imperium with their high tech ships, which are just better on account of being higher tech level than Imperium ships. 

Traveller comes before Audit, but Barnett's treatment of World War II is a lot like this. Brits used to say (I take Barnett as saying) that they fought World War II at Tech Level, oh, say, 6.5, compared to Germany's 6. In reality, it was 5.5 versus 6.5, Barnett says. He then adds that, had WWII been fought in 1850, instead, it would have been Britain at Tech Level 5 versus Germany at Tech Level 4, and Britain would have won the war even more than it did. 

So, Britain has gone from a Tech Level advantage of 1, to a disadvantage of 0.5 --in my interpretation, of course. Audit purports to show that this is actually the case, while at the same time fingering the culprits. It's a very ambitious book --far too ambitious, in fact. But it does give us a way to think about technological change. My 1940 counterfactual seems, at least to me, like an elegant way to test this idea about technological change.

And by "test," I mean, stuff the demolition chamber with enough RDX to blow up a planet. (Which, by a wacky coincidence, is more-or-less what we're doing.)

The Fall of Rome, VII: Bread, Circusses

Those are some happy elephants, because Tirupati deluxe bran is the best bran. 

iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli / uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim / imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se / continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, / panem et circenses

--Juvenal, Satire X. (Note that like any Nineteenth Century parliamentarian on his feet to deliver a zinger on the Balkan Question, I've cut and pasted out of Wikipedia.)

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."

- Elmer T. Peterson.

In this week of so much going astray down south, the fact that the nominee for American Secretary of Labour has riffed on the idea that democracies are destroyed by social welfare benefits ("bread and circusses") might easily take a back seat to more pressing concerns about his boss. 

But! I'll start with the attribution, which is a spanking new, modern thing for which we can thank Google, even if my store of gratitude to Google is being drawn down by the gradual disintegration of Google Books, although that's a rant for another day. Traditinally, we see this quote attributed to much more famous people than Elmer T. Peterson, and he himself began this tradition by attributing it to a  a minor Nineteenth Century thinker with a funny name. He did so in a 1951 letter to the editor published in a minor Oklahoman paper, which raises the question of how it entered the public record so quickly. Peterson himself was a writer, but his literary record [pdf] is pretty second rate, and it would be surprising if many people took him very seriously. "Alexander Fraser Tyttle," on the other hand, is someone to reckon with! I suppose.

Perhaps Peterson noticed the general shortage of actual examples of welfare payments destroying democracies. After all, he may have had the Juvenal "bread and circusses" line in mind, and perhaps even has some recollection of being rather brusquely informed that Juvenal came a full century after the Republic. Perhaps, although this is asking a lot of the basically optimistic mind of the early 1950s, which feared only communist roentgens,  someone even pointed out that rich tax evaders have a better record of destroying regimes than poor handout beneficiaries.

This is what makes the Roman example so handy, in that rich people might evade taxes and even attend gladiatorial games, but they certainly do not stand in bread lines. Not that Peterson needed to explore things very deeply. Everyone knows that the ancient Romans gave out a corn dole to the urban poor of Rome. 

But!

Cheesecake Factory.

A Crowning Glory of a Technical Appendix: Sanford-Humoller, Hand Looms and Min Chueh Chang

Since Halloween has been held over an extra week-and-a-half this year, how about something scary? 

Boo! It's a strong woman! (I don't think I can defend the semiotics except to say that the Bride of Frankenstein was too on the nose.)

Nimrod Was a Mighty Hunter: The 1940 Land Warfare Counterfactual

The substance of this counterfactual is pretty simple. If I adopt one simple rule: that the BEF is equipped with standard 1945-era equipment and tables of organisation, I get to replace the 50th (Northumbrian) Division, the only designated mobile division in the BEF in 1940, with the only kind of mobile division that existed in the British army in 1945, which is to say, an armoured divisions. 

Let the BEF's march to contact on 10/11 May be led by four regiments of  these, and it is hard to imagine Army Group B not being in a world of hurt. I wouldn't want to overstate the likely influence of a single armoured division, but there is simply no way that the Germans could win an encounter battle with a force of effectively invincible tanks.  

Hugely fun series of "walkaround" videos of the Comet

What would have happened next is left to the imagination of the reader, but had I been in Bock's place, I would have pulled Army Group B back to the West Wall, exposing the flank of Army Group A and ending the offensive in the west.*

This counterfactual is an answer to Correlli Barnett, of course, all of thirty years, less one month, late. (Which makes Audit of War a "beach read." Time to set the scene!)

To this you may object that this is a pretty anodyne counterfactual. Perhaps I could punch it up with a protagonist who finds time out from designing future tanks to introduce double-entry bookkeeping, journalism and cheap brandy?

Who else learned the history of the Gothic Wars from this?

Or I could talk about the problems with the theory --something that actually matters.

Shadow Pasts: Another Anti-Correllian 1940 With Meditations on the Debacle

"Posterity will hear of these Battles," said the most unfortunate Flight title ever.

The British Air Force in France, 10 May 1940*

Air ComponentThe 

Air Component Headquarters
Unit	Aircraft	Total	Avail.	Base	Commander
HQ Air Component	-	-	-		Air Vice-Marshall C.H.B. Blount

No 14 Group

Unit	Aircraft	Total	Avail.	Base	Commander
HQ No. 14 Group	-	-	-		Group Captain P.F. Fullard

60 (Fighter) Wing
Unit	Aircraft	Total	Avail.	Base	Commander
HQ 60 Wing					Wing Commander J.A. Boret
85 Squadron	Hurricane Mk I			Lille-Seclin
87 Squadron	Hurricane Mk I			Senon

61 (Fighter) Wing
Unit	Aircraft	Total	Avail.	Base	Commander
HQ 61 Wing					Wing Commander R.Y. Eccles
607 Squadron	Hurricane Mk I Gladiator			Vitry-en-Artois
615 Squadron	Hurricane Mk I Gladiator			A flight : Le Touquet B flight : Abbeville

63 (Fighter) Wing - created on 10 May 1940
Unit	Aircraft	Total	Avail.	Base	Commander	Notes
HQ 63 Wing					?	only mentioned in source (2)
3 Squadron	Hurricane Mk I			Merville
79 Squadron	Hurricane Mk I			Merville

70 (Bomber Reconnaissance) Wing
Unit	Aircraft	Total	Avail.	Base	Commander
HQ 70 Wing					Wing Commander W.A. Opie
18 Squadron	Blenheim Mk V
57 Squadron	Blenheim Mk V

52 (Bomber) Wing
Unit	Aircraft	Total	Avail.	Base	Commander	Notes
HQ 52 Wing					Wing Commander A.F. Hutton
53 Squadron	Blenheim Mk IV
55 (?) Squadron						source (2) says 59 Squadron

50 (Army Co-operation) Wing
Unit	Aircraft	Total	Avail.	Base	Commander
HQ 50 Wing					Group Captain A.R. Churchman
4 Squadron	Lysander
13 Squadron	Lysander
16 Squadron	Lysander

51 (Army Co-operation) Wing
Unit	Aircraft	Total	Avail.	Base	Commander	Notes
HQ 51 Wing					Wing Commander A.H. Flower
2 Squadron	Lysander
26 Squadron	Lysander
81 (C) Squadron	Dragon					Communications Squadron

Advanced Air Striking Force

Advanced Air Striking Force Headquarters
Unit	Aircraft	Total	Avail.	Base	Commander
HQ Air Component	-	-	-		Air Vice-Marshall P.H.L. Playfair

67 (Fighter) Wing
Unit	Aircraft	Total	Avail.	Base	Commander	Notes
HQ 67 Wing					Wing Co. C. Walter
1 Squadron	Hurricane Mk I	12		Wassincourt
73 Squadron	Hurricane Mk I	12		Rouvre
212 Squadron						Photographic Recce Squadron. Only mentioned in source (1)
501 Squadron	Hurricane Mk I	12		Bethenville		Arrived 10 May 1940. Only mentioned in source (2)

No. 71 (Bomber) Wing
Unit	Aircraft	Total	Avail.	Base	Commander
HQ 71 Wing					Air Commodore R.M. Field
105 Squadron	Fairey Battle	16		Villeneuve
114 Squadron	Blenheim Mk IV	16		Condé
139 Squadron	Blenheim Mk IV	16		Plivot
150 Squadron	Fairey Battle	16		Ecury

75 (Bomber) Wing
Unit	Aircraft	Total	Avail.	Base	Commander	Notes
HQ 75 Wing					Group Captain A.H. Wann
88 Squadron	Fairey Battle	16		Mourmelon
103 Squadron	Fairey Battle	16		Betheniville
208 Squadron	Fairey Battle	16		Auberive		source (2) gives 218 Squadron instead

76 (Bomber) Wing
Unit	Aircraft	Total	Avail.	Base	Commander
HQ 76 Wing					Group Captain H.S. Kerby
12 Squadron	Fairey Battle	16		Amifontaine
142 Squadron	Fairey Battle	16		Berry-au-Bac
226 Squadron	Fairey Battle	16		Reims

Unit	Aircraft	Total	Avail.	Base	Commander	Notes
98 Squadron	Fairey Battle			Nantes		Acted as a reserve for Fairey Battle squadrons. Only mentioned in source (2)

Sour

• (1) The War in France and Flanders, L.F. ELLIS, London : Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1953. SO Code : No. 63-111-2-2*
• (2) La campagne de France (1e partie) : La bataille du Nord, Batailles Aériennes no. 7 Jan-Feb-Mar 1999

The Great Siege: PLUNDER, VARSITY, Gotterdamerung

OPERATION PLUNDER; OPERATION VARSITY; The Twilight of the Gods. Three things, naturally linked.

Except that PLUNDER and VARSITY were real things that happened. The "Twilight of the Gods" turned out to be grandiose fantasy. 

We don't write much about the combined assault on the Rhine by 21st Army Group (including US 9th Army), which led to the greatest opposed river crossings in historys. (In the interests of accuracy i hyperbole, it should be noted that any given assault crossing the Yangzi was probably a bigger deal in terms of water work, but the Mandate of Heaven has not yet been transferred by a modern mechanised army.) That a vast army, supported by enormous logistical preparations, closed the world's eleventh-largest river and fought its way across against the resistance of the army of the world's second largest economy, should be a big deal.

The problem was that it was dead easy, so no-one cares about it, which is why this post is two weeks late. (Apart from yours truly having to deal with a congenital lack of labour in the Canadian economy that somehow does not show up as a "labour shortage.") This is because, as it turns out, "Gotterdamerung" springs from Snorri Sturlusson's head. Gods and heroes heroes may go down in glorious last stands, but the spear carriers have made a discrete departure. 

Germany, ever so quietly, was going from this to this. Germans, actual living Germans, had learned a lesson that the rest of us could stand to remember. "Blood and nation" are not things immanent in us, unalterable and compelling. Trapped by an idea? Defect in your head,  hollow out your will to be a German landser, drag your feet until the tail of the column turns the corner ahead, leave your rifle by the side of the road.

Congratulations: you're a "straggler." Keep it up for eight weeks more, and you'll be a live straggler. It's nothing to be proud of later. Lost causes flourish in romantic legend; not the men who kept their heads down and came home to their families --or made new ones. Spring is coming, the world needs to be renewed, and the glorious dead will make no babies. 

For those who cling to lost causes, the first week of April is bitter. One-hundred fifty years ago, the Confederate States of America collapsed; 75 years ago, the Wehrmacht was vanishing, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of men simply not on the rolls.

That's  the German Fifteenth Army under watch below. 

On the other hand, OPERATION KIKUSUI was 75 years ago. Another of the horrifying moral aporia of the world war, the attack of the floating crysanthenums is not easy for me to parse. The young men who piloted the suicide bombers do not seem to have been particularly traditionalist, nationalist or right wing. It is certainly not very helpful to focus on the supposedly fixed essentials of Japanese character to explain them, and it certainly is possible to frame a narrative around inescapable social pressure to commit suicide, which is pretty horrible in its own right.

The kamikazes flew while the German and Confederate armies were disintegrating. I'm not going to present a half-baked explanation for this, only point to it as a problem. The "national character" thing usually invoked does not convince. I grew up on the Pacific shore, after all, surrounded by Japanese Canadians and German Canadians, and on and on, so I can claim some experiential credibility for my skepticism. So could Californians, which I think might explain why the actual response to the kamikazes proved so ambiguous in the end. 

 I would gesture out at the Pacific and conjure up Owen Chase's arrival in San Francisco on the whaleship Winslow sometime between 1825 and 1827, and notice that while whalers and sealers are already ranging from the Japan Grounds to Alaska and down past the Bass Strait, where "sea rats" and "pirates" took seals for the China trade in cockleshell boats ranging all the way to Middle Island off Western Australia. 

That is, twenty years before San Francisco became American, it looked out on a Pacific where there were already sealing plantations and offshore fisheries off multiple future Australian and American states, one Canadian province, New Zealand, various pelagic nations and "overseas territories," The Empire of Japan and the Kingdom of Hawaii. The process by which the only autochhthonous state formation in a non-state ordered society became the American territory of Hawaii, while New Zealand became a resolutely British nation. How? It's all so slippery. But disintegrating armies have to fit in here somehow..

This is an introduction to a discussion of floating and other temporary bridges.

The Flowers of Edo: The Firebombing of Tokyo, Franklin and the R-3350

The seventieth anniversary of the firebombing of Tokyo comes with the first darkness of March 10th, and the burning of Franklin not for another nine days. So this is not a perfect anniversary post. It is certainly not a useful 70th anniversary of the Wright Duplex Cyclone, the 55 litre engine which, at this point in the war, had a habit of catching fire in mid-air. Close enough, I'll say, and leave it at that.

The  connection between the three is death by fire, but I will leave the burning men and cities below the fold. Here's a more hopeful intimation of a new world order to come. Like a phoenix from the ashes, etc, etc.

The Siege: Cold Ashes

From childhood, I remember some ancient bit of literary British domestic detail from that decade when the whole country, as I understood it, looked like an episode of On the Buses. That thing, a coin-operated space heater in a lodger's room seemed bad enough. The Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole exposed it as ann arcane joke about small horizons and diminished expectations behind it, akin to the notion of seaside holidays in Britain. The island of Britain is the largest fragment of the Old Red Sandstone Continent of the Devonian forests, and yet we are to imagine it as permanently damp and cold. No fires warmed its people, though it is green verdure stretched over a submerged mountain of coal. As I say, a vague age.  I had no idea what was going on. I though, instinctively, of the 1950s. That is a drear and dingy age, at least in Britain, right? But On the Buses and Doctors in the House, the shows that formed that impression, actually ran from 1969. There's still a story of a distressed island behind it, I suspect. The CBC picked the shows up and ran them in after-school slots because they were cheap. (And not-American.) Whatever. At least it saved us from the Mother Corp's smothering desire to make us better people, or, worse an even heavier rotation of King of Kensington. 

Second-rate, diminished, small, dark, close. Cold. That's what I want to dwell on at the head. It's an age with origins in war, the last small victory of the Wehrmacht. Welcome to the winter of 1945.

Arnhem:To Make Free On the Land

The title announces Arnhem, the Dutch city where, seventy years ago today, the "Red Devils" of the 1st Airborne Division is slowly being ground down in close combat with 9th and 10th SS Armoured Divisions of II SS Armoured Corps, last encountered in its massive train convoy attempting a Frederican grand operational manoeuvre across the continent of Europe to counterattack and drive the Allies into the sea before the Russians notice that they are gone. The months intervening have not been kind to II SS Armoured Corps. They are currently taking out their frustrations on 1st Airborne.

The title lies: I am talking about XXX Corps' advance down a road, specifically, "Hell's Highway," the old Route 69, now Netherlands Motorway A50, and the post that this one looks back on is rather this very considerable "Technical Appendix." You may or may not notice that I cleaned up some typos this morning, but I also added a video to that post. And also here, so that Faye Wong can help us keep our feet on the dharma-path. (Remember that wisdom is like an orange. You cannot have juice unless you squeeze it.)

Kohima: Boulders Lush with Moss

The mighty son of Brahama is not to be tamed.

The Brahamaputra does not get the respect it deserves. Like Rhine, Adige and Danube (more accurately, the Iller), the great rivers of India rise close to each other, at the fault between the Himalayan fold and the Tibetan plateau. the Indus at first flows north by northwest, the Ganges plunges through a water gap, and the Brahmaputra cuts what might be the deepest and longest canyons on Earth on its way long and circuitous path to the sea, ultimately cutting its way through the Himalayas and entering Arunachal Pradesh state on its way to Assam, Bengal, and a humiliating juncture with the Ganges that makes it, in a technical sense, a tributary of the Mother of India.  

I had supposed that the proximity of the sources of the three great rivers had been made some kind of metaphysical point by romantic Indian nationalists, but thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that the upper course of the Brahamputra had long been a mystery, due to its cutting the impenetrable Yarlang Tsanpo Canyon.

This lack of respect for a mighty river leads to lack of respect for the soldiers of Japan, of India and of Britain, who were dying, seventy years ago today, above the valley of the river in the heights of Manipur, around the town of Imphal and north of it at Kohima. It also obscures the overarching failure of the Roosevelt Administration's attempt to support the Nationalist Chinese regime, and the sheer magnitude of the failure of this episode in the persistent fantasy of "foreign policy as mission." 

The Fall of France, XI (And Books That I Have Read): The Foresight War

Look! It's a postcard image. Probably of a different Agneaux than the one in the "Norman Switzerland," but think of it as signifying the relationship of 'foresight' with the two battles of France, anyway.  Uploaded to Google Maps by user ch'caf, if I am understanding the Panoramio credit properly.

In 2004, Anthony G. Williams, "military technology historian," could stand the psychic pressure of words and ideas no longer. So he wrote a book. 

It is a self-published book, and has some weaknesses, but considering this "if-you-liked-The-Foresight War-you-might-like-this" book was brought out by Random House,  I am going to cut Anthony G. Williams. His focus on military technology is no secret (his website), and the conventions of the genre dictate that you can only write a book about how a modern day person mysteriously transported back in time Changes Everything if you put in a novel format, with the classic of the genre, Lest Darkness Fall suggesting that you can go light on what in other subgenres can detract from the meat of the story. (You know, kissing and fashion and girl-cootie stuff.) 

So it's not like I am going to pick on Williams because his characterisation is weak. Nor am I going to pick nits about the story. (A junior academic wakes up in a semi-furnished flat one morning with his clothes and laptop. He gets up, sees the Crystal Palace, and realises that he has mysteriously travelled in time to 1934. Naturally, he heads off to see Henry Tizard and convinces the Government's official scientific advisor of his bona fides with his digital watch --as opposed to everything he's wearing-- and toute de suite we're on to re-fighting WWII. 

I am going to pick on him for something else. The Battle of France is kind of highlighted here, but the Blog Author is reaching for one of those Hey-Look-At-The-Important Issues-This-Book-Inadvertently-Raises posts. Which will hopefully be done in time for him to spend some time in the library. I hope I get there, and that the psychic pressure of ideas does not lead me too far astray.