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.
So let this be a lesson to everyone. If you're ever tempted to make friends with a nice admiral that nobody loves, you might just live to regret it if he gets promoted after all. Considering that Felix is Ray Spruance's man through and through, I guess it's no surprise that he doesn't get along with Radford. Unfortunately, Wild Bill is in Washington, and Felix is out here managing the Straits, as far as Chiang will let him. There are rumours of a split between Radford and the President, but he still has Dulles' ear, and what they're talking about is a preventive nuclear war against China. Churchill has been able to impress on Ike just how crazy this is, but there's no talking to the Dulles brothers. (I'm told there was a long lecture about Marlborough, Queen Anne, and the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in general, to the effect of not letting ideology get in the way of diplomacy --the sort of thing that Churchill would never dare say in public, which is unfortunate because Tony seems to have taken the public Churchill to heart, but now I'm just passing on the rumours I hear to make myself look important.)
So the gist of it is that Chiang, and many of his subordinates, are ready to start a war in a hot minute if he gets the chance. That's the reason he sent those troops to Quemoy in the first place --that and to get their officers out of his nonexistent hair. If Felix doesn't stop them from crossing over to the mainland, he completely undermines the United States' argument for being in the Strait to start with. If he does, he has to shoot at Nationalists. The obvious way out of this is to let the Reds shoot the Nationalists --Oopsie doopsie, silly me, must have been looking in the wrong direction. The problem is that this has to be made clear not to Chiang, but all the rambunctious types underneath of him, especially the ones unhappy with the Koumintang, and it sure as heck can't go through State because the leak will be on Knowland's deck before it even clears the cable office.
So who can do that? How about a fluent American naval aviator with inside connections and his incredibly beautiful young wife? Which is why this letter is coming to you from Taipei and why I had to give my notice. Your country calls, and all of that. James hasn't been formally transferred because that would raise all sorts of red flags. So James is here on leave to do something because something, and unless someone backs down soon, he will continue to be on leave here in Taipei through the end of next summer, and hopefully not longer than that, because I will be off to take the bar in San Francisco.
Unless we're fighting giant ants in the radioactive rubble of civilisation, I mean.
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
PS: Lots of talk about "capital goods" in the press this time around. I honestly had no idea that economic theory could be so sophisticated and nuanced, and in spite of my education, this is the first time I've heard the field discussed in such a way that I feel like I need to understand WHY Karl Marx thought he had to write Das Kapital. I don't think I did the Fortune article on the subject justice, never mind the field, but it is definitely something that I will be turning over in my head as I burble on about "technology" here.
Genocide with weapons of mass destruction is the only answer to Comm ---Ants. Ants.
Scraped from an ad: https://snapklik.com/en-ca/product/tinkertoy-30-model-200-piece-super-building-set-preschool-learning-educational-toy- for-girls-and-boys-3/05DL4PL73XTV5
I've been assiduously avoiding talking about "Project Tinkertoy" since the Bureau of Standards/Industrial Planning Division, USN/Kaiser Electronics Division, Wilys Motor Company pilot factory in Arlington, Virginia, hit the news, well before September of 1953, where Blogspot search turns up my earliest reference to it. The thing is that Project Tinkertoy's press people are most impressed by the ceramic wafers that the Project Tinkertoy modular components are mounted on, and that is the part of the technology that most obviously has no future. Integrated circuits most definitely do, but that's a story that doesn't really get going until 1957, and apparently we're still one cycle of abortive precursors away from that, with the Army's 1957 Micromodule programme. On the other hand, the actual technology of the integrated circuit has a prehistory which is not well integrated into that of the various abortive precursors. So I'm going to take a rainy laundry day Saturday to look at that!
Thank you again for your hospitality, which I am sorry I am so late, but things in London have been hectic. You may have noticed from the calendar that we flew out of Montreal the day of the Comet grounding, and London was an absolute zoo when we got there. On the other hand the Azores are BEAUTIFUL, which is just as well because renting a car and touring made up for spending a week there. Or almost did, because why did there have to be an entire class of children aboard that plane? Why?
All this bad enough before the Britannia accident. And, yes, this should have been in the mail long before the first week of February, but what can I say? I've been touring James around because we've only the one car and I've had business in the counties, too trying to get the business of assorted people who were trying to move sterling into dollars ahead of the Crash of '54 and don't hold with old-fashioned surface shipping any more.
Someone once said that J. H. Hexter would have been a better known historian if he hadn't been like the horse that only ran when it had a burr under its saddle, in his case this being historians with an excessive bent for synthesis, particularly Marxists. I understand, Jack, I understand. For me, it's Correlli Barnett. Audit of War comes out of an era of intense British self-loathing, building on Fordism, with all its Fascist tendencies. Practically everything American is better, and there's a neat convergence between supporter and critic, where the American factory is better for Barnett, while his critics defend laggard British per-person productivity by pointing to the vast floor space possible for American factories.
At your very strong suggestion, we have decided to go away from the major port city for the summer and the duration of all the emergencies,but we haven't ended up in Campbell River, as for various reasons the house in Nakusp was in need of a tenant. So here we are, gorging on cherries and trout, waiting on corn and enjoying the difference between fresh turnips and onions and the ones from the grocery. The house has not had a tenant in two years, and one gets the sense that Nils is too old to do proper caretaking, so we have a contractor up from Nelson to put a new roof on and central heating and air conditioning while he is on it. Which makes for a much-interrupted summer idyll far from the madding crowds and atom bombs, but what do I know, I have two babies in tow!
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
So you see, Ethel Rosenberg had to die to protect VENONA and not because she was Jewish and public opinion was screaming for blood
Here's a simple question with a very frustrating lack of answer: When was the carcinotron deployed? Technically a carcinotron is a backward-wave oscilloscope in which an electron beam was passed through a strong radio frequency field. The upshot is a strong output radio frequency emission, which can be in the frequency range of a microwave rada. Altering the modifying rf field allows the output emission to be rapidly "swept" across the entire emission band of a given radar, permitting what looks like universal jamming.
I honestly don't know much about the subject, and I am very glad that radio engineering enthusiasts continue to update the relevant Wikipedia articles. We thus now know that one kind of backward wave oscilloscope, also called, or a variant, of the so-called travelling-wave tube, which was invented at and by, among other people and places (the patent wars are strong with this one), in 1943, by Austrian Jewish emigre Rudolf Kompfner, then working at the Admiralty Research Laboratory. Kompfner's patents were gazetted starting in 1957, while the first published work on the backward wave oscilloscope was published in 1953, and the Wiki article on the TWT points us at the Hughes Aircraft Electron Tube Laboratory, or Microwave Tube Division in Culver City, California, a research facility that is new to me as of right now, and which has been recently folded into Stellant Systems along with many other ancestors. All that institutional history, gone, like tears in the rain.
The upshot is that, in Britain or in America, the carcinotron specifically, the revolutionary airborne radar jamming device that, in the Thomson incarnation above, weighed no less than 25kg, went into production/service in "the 1950s."
This is, I have to say, an unsatisfyingly vague dating for what seems to have been a very quite technological panic over the future of air defence radars. It seems like a reasonable guess that its appearance is linked to the very substantial "ECM suite" on the V-bombers, upon which so much faith was, apparently, justifiably placed. One assumes that it went into the Canberra, B-47, and B-52, as well. One infers that it might have been a problem for the SAGE rollout and for the upgrading of Britain's radar defences. One wonders what the implications of the new technology were for the radar station at CFS Holberg, up the road from my small hometown and something of a big deal in our sparsely populated region, in which every rationale for the existence of a community was to be celebrated. There's not much to be said about it beyond that except that evidently there's a crisis in air defence radar going on behind the scenes right now in March of 1953, but shh, because it is a secret, wilderness of mirrors and all of that stuff. If you hide how flustered you are from the Reds, maybe they won't notice the carcinotron before some counter-measures emerge!
Remember when Americans took the train? I don't, either. I'm only 58, and too young for that stuff. The title's historic, too. No-one likes it hot any more. We've got enough heat, amiright?
So, anyway, about that Fortune article about the year of the transistor . . . .
If this letter gives you the sense that I am feeling a bit out of sorts for reasons that do not need to be spelled out, well, you are right to think that. I am told that all law students cannot wait to be done with third year, so I am normal, even if my situation definitely isn't, and if one more preppy Stanford man offers to open a door for me I shall --! I have shot men before! Several times! (Twice.)
Speaking of shots heard around the world, no-one is allowed to say anything about the hydrogen bomb test, which went ahead before the election --but why am I telling you this? You hear better Service rumours than I do!
Speaking of rumours, I hear that Mr. Hoover has recently taken out subscriptions to Engineering, Fortune and The Economist. I wonder if he thinks that this is some kind of revenge on me? Shot men for less!
I hope this finds you well and in the hands of Fat Chow in Trail, and not still taking the waters. I am couriering this from Paris so I can report on our banquet with the captains and Our Man on "Poverty Row" in Le Havre last Saturday. The captains seemed content with their gratuities, so hopefully there will be no leaks like the ones that some of our competition have suffered. (It helps that none of our boats sprang a leak off Ireland.) On the downside, there's going to be some bad movies. As our man says, there will be no more trucks of silver nitrate arriving at the studio, and "Every time a truckload of film pulls up, the neighbours just say that we're getting ready to do another stinker."
Before our meeting with Fat Chow, we at least got to do some sightseeing and general tourist things in Normandy, and EAT! I haven't had FOOD since we left Formosa, and how I've missed it! California has a lot of things, but it could really do with some good restaurants. The rest of my impressions of France, including a decent chance to see parts of Paris that aren't mainly for intrigue and smuggling, are going to be delayed until I actually do them, so, starting tomorrow, and coming to you by the surface mail.
This is my delayed last, since in spite of the Siam Air Lines crash I am still flying to Macao next week for my confinement. My mother will be there the week after, and has telegrammed ahead with some words about Alyce that just about curled off the page.
I don't honestly know what to feel. We all know that Uncle Henry is a cad. He was obviously carrying on with Alyce before Aunt Bess left us in the body, but who knows whether it started before her mind left us? One thing is for sure, Uncle Henry has badly needed a woman to keep him in check. I don't think he appreciates just how many enemies he has made in the aviation business. Sherman Fairchild has amply proven his talents as a boardroom intriguer, and he is going to swoop in the moment Uncle Henry slips up, which we both know he will.
Reggie is over the moon about the news about the Chase Mission. He has already been to a private meeting in Taipei where he has been assured that he and his fellow "Yankee Air Piratets" will have official status with the mission and probably some consideration with respect to promotion. Quite frankly, it is time for the Navy to step up, considering the sheer number of "Engineers Wanted" ads in recent numbers of Aviation Week.
As I leave for the plane comes the news of the Battle of the Imjin and the fate of the Glosters. For me, it all blurs together in the sorrows and horror of war, but could you please check with your cousin? Uncle George will, I think, be taking it badly, especially as it seems to have pushed HMS Affray out of the Hong Kong press.
"Sabre Dance" is a movement of the final act of Khachaturian's Gayane (1942), crossing over to mainstream popularity in 1948, and a perennial favourite of figure skaters and, more recently, "sexy violinists" ever since. I'm not 100% sold on "sexy violinist" Youtube videos, but it's pretty hard to make money in classical music these days, so whatever. Subsequently, "Sabre Dance" was a bit of low-hanging fruit when the various aeronautical eccentricities of the North American F-86 Sabre became apparent at the height of its technological, pop-cultural, and, yes, political fame over MIG Alley three years later. It's not quite in the moment. These things often aren't. I've also referenced Chuck Berry's Run, Rudolph, Run in connection with the F-86, and it came out in 1958. It's hard to keep things historically grounded. The things you might imagine, happened together, are actually off a few, critical years.
On the other hand, politics makes and unmakes connections as it will:
Between 1959 and 1969, old time science fiction writers Frederick Pohl and Jack Williamson collaborated on three loosely-connected novels set in Hoyle's steady state universe, eventually collected as The Starchild Trilogy. Here's a review that characterises them as bad books, but "odd . . . [and] offer[ing] a remarkable level of wacky fun." The conceit is that all of that hydrogen spontaneously appearing out of nothing in interstellar space is food for space-coral called "fusorians," which are the basis of a deep-space pyramid of life sustained by biologically-mediated nuclear fusion. By which I am probably being too kind to the amount of handwaving involved in Pohl and Willliamson's "science." Still, this was my first exposure to the steady state universe, and Pohl and Williamson incidentally put a lot more emphasis on the Hoyle/Chandrekesar theory's potential for explaining the synthesis of the heavy elements than most accounts of their cosmology do. The synthesis of the heavy elements is a bit of a problem in most cosmological models. It is ascribed to the more esoteric kinds of deep space collisions these days, which is certainly more likely than monocellular space-life synthesising plutonium out of spontaneously-generated protons, given that neutron stars actually exist. That being said, it might actually be more plausible than the notion that the universe's entire supply of heavy elements was produced in as many neutron star collisions as a fifteen-billion-year-old universe has had time for.
Time's coverage of Steady State cosmology in the 23 November issue is a better jumping off point here than strange science fiction novels, but Steady State is, we now know, drawing dead. On the other hand, Bruno Pontecorvo's September 1950 defection, gets into the 6 November issue, brings in the neutrino. Not only that, we have the veiled announcement of the Savannah River Plant. It was at this just-opened nuclear reactor site that Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines would confirm the existence of the elusive beast in the 1954 Cowan-Reines experiment, published in Science in July of 1956.
In the sincerest hope that you haven't been shot by Puerto Rican nationalists, I write to report that I haven't been shot by any Red Communist forces, either. Would that the 8th Cavalry were so lucky! Formosa is of course in a tizzy over the news of CCF forces fighting in Korea and is keen to see WWIII break out this very minute. It makes a change from the Reds being on the march in Indo-China and Central Asia.
You will be glad to know that I am in perfect health and not experimenting with herbal medicine and in general taking good care of myself. The food situation has improved since Mrs. T. arrived to cook for us and now my only problem is finding someone willing to take collect calls! What? Us young couples have to watch our dimes!
I expect this one to reach you in Washington, but I imagine you will be returning to Vancouver since there's no way of forestalling a war with China over Korea now that it is actually happening. We can probably rule out an Indian diplomatic intervention, too. The only question remains whether the war will spread to the South China Sea. My father has written several times to let me know that everything is ready should I need to return to Chicago. I've written back to say that as long as there's a Democrat in the White House he has nothing to fear, which is just my way of being the same old Ronnie, alas.
Well here is the latest missive from the "unstable Pacific Rim." I'm a bit ahead of the news again, so you're getting this after the route on Colonial Route 4. Looks like we're going to have a Communist Indo-China soon unless de Lattre de Tassigny can stabilise the front, and I imagine that'll be the end of the Fourth Republic. Exciting times! And if that's not enough, there's talk of the Seventh Fleet enforcing the blockade. I can't even begin to express the absurdity of it, but apparently Arleigh "Thirty Knot" Burke says that the British will fold if we push it, and he's definitely the leader of the Navy's Young Turks.
I hope --I hope!-- this will all blow over, but as a matter of simple self preservation I wonder if we need to reach out to the Reds?
Three of the biggest pseudo-scientific books of the Twentieth Century were published (in English) 1950. For example, Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision was published in April; L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics was published in May; while Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki came out in an English edition late in the year, having been first published in Norwegian in 1948. I'm not an expert on Fortean bullshit, but off hand only von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods (1971) and Berlitz's Bermuda Triangle (1974) really engaged the public imagination to the same degree as 1950s' trinity of absurdity.
These three books were not, of course, the only ones. I was finally driven to write this post by a Time reviewer calling our attention to the sales success of Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers and telling me, as the self-appointed voice of posterity, that there was something going on. Behind the Flying Saucers doesn't even come close to being in the same league as the first three titles, but, as the reviewer points out, it was making money hand over fist for Scully and his "conservative" publisher, Henry Holt, and that makes it significant in its own right.
Finally, the University of Washington signed up for a single go in the Ivy League Nude Portraiture Scandal in the fall of 1950. Although definitely pseudo-science, the ILNPS seems like a pretty different kind of phenomena. But was it? The answer is that it might not be.
September rolls to its end, and with it the peasants' attempt to challenge the mighty United States. I almost feel sorry for them, as though in another world and time it might have been an underdog story. But, in the end, a country of 10 million people couldn't resist the power, and especially air power, of the most powerful country in the world.
Fortunately for those who like to worry about things, we have the ongoing Menace of Red China, which brings you to your loving daughter-in-law, rusticating in Formosa while we wait for America to do whatever it is going to do here. Besides overfly us and deploy a few hush-hush squadron detachments, that is. With British troops in Korea, it is hard to believe that we're not going to come to some kind of agreement over piracy soon, and then I'll have nothing to do except keep house and write these letters.
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
PS I honestly hope that I get The Economist back soon. I know that I've missed an entire cycle of overtaken predictions of doom, but I'm sure I'll be back in the swing of things in no time.
Here's your friendly letter from the frontlines of the war-to-come, the land of camphor and oolong tea! If Mao builds a navy, that is. Or needs one, because the Koumintang stops surrendering to the first Red soldier they see. You will be glad to know that we are doing our part. Reggie is pretending to atom bomb China, in hopes that the Reds . . . I don't know. What are we hoping? That the Reds bomb us first? Meanwhile, I'm a little ahead of the news again, so I've heard of Inchon, which definitely means that America has pulled it out and managed to defeat mighty North Korea. I feel so patriotic!
Considering some of the things said about Koreans and "Orientals" in the press these last two weeks, I wonder about whether it is some kind of cosmic coincdence that The Black Rose is out, featuring the long ago English hero who brought compasses, gunpowder, and paper to the backwards West. What goes around comes around? Or is this an even more subtle way of belittling Asia? Ronnie has her doubts!
Oh, and you're wondering what I'm doing. Besides doubting, I mean! Learning to cook on a wok and getting to the point where I actually want to see my subscription to The Economist catch up with me. As for yours, I am glad to think that you are already looking ahead to the arrangements for me to resume law school next fall. I've had rumblings from Chicago that my Dad wants to pay for our nanny, and if he wants to be involved, he should be. If not, I will gladly take you up on your offer, although it is early days yet to make plans, tempting fate and all.
Thank you for stepping in with the Junior College. I return my completed application for a year's medical leave enclosed, and make pious offering to the gods that someday my mail will follow me here to my bungalow by the sea. I also enclose Polaroids of our spacious new home for the impatient, who know who they are. It turns out that the squadron will remain on Okinawa, with only the advanced detachment here. but that still gives us some domestic security for the next year or so, fingers crossed, salt tossed, wood knocked. You will see that we have plenty of space for events foreseen and not. Everyone around knows that one tempts the gods by talking about such things, but talk there is, to the point where people show me cribs and the like just, you know, matter of interest. Grr!
In the mean time, and while I still can, I have given the Goose a bit of a work out. Flying into this or that flyspeck island fifty feet above the drink will never get old, but there are lots of people to talk to and we cannot leave it all to Big Deng or we will lose face. The piracy/embargo/blockade situation is a precious chance to make friends and offer favours with Hong Kong shipowners, and they need to know who they owe. Which I tell them. And will continue to tell them while I can still fly!
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.
I take the liberty of including your thank you note. It's one of these little pains that society has decided that newlyweds should suffer through. I shudder to think about how much the brides who are lucky enough to plan their weddings suffer through. As is, with just two weeks to put this together, I still have to write seventy more of these things, and mostly in my shaky calligraphy, at that. (Maybe the High Court of Inter-Cultural Affairs could rule that I don't have to? I didn't think so.)
Again and again, thank you for being here, and thank you for arranging for my parents' flight. You were half right, by the way. Dad was the picture of charm at the reception afterwards. Mom, though, made it clear that her prodigal daughter is not yet forgiven by the old-fashioned trick of not talking to me. (Auntie Bess --or more likely Mary, writing for her-- says that Mom was very clear that she only cacme to be there for Dad, and she didn't care "who knew." That's me. "Who.")
The honeymoon is wonderful. Reggie is almost back to normal after a week away from the runaround in Formosa getting the field ready for his squadron. In a way, it's a good thing that the ceremony was so quick. If we'd waited until his brother officers were in the East, we'd have had to invite them and maybe even explain exactly where we're honeymooning. Hmm. No need to be mysterious. Just say Cam Ranh Bay and stick to it. It is a bay, it is on the South China Sea. Good enough. The real trick would have been explaining the guests. "Oh, yes, this is my real Dad, not the guy I pay to pretend to be him." Oh what a tangled web we weave, etc.
I am,
Your Daughter,
Ronnie (Reminding herself again not to show off her clever college girl references in front of engineers)
I could get to love Hong Kong eventually! If it ever cools down. Best of all, my father threw an absolute fit over my refusing to book a ticket east the day after the war started. ("It's not safe," and "It's that boy!") Well, yes, Dad. It is the boy. You know, my fiance. Who has interests that need looking after whilst he is busy flying in the war. If "snooper" missions over the Straits of Formosa count as war, which I think they do! In fact, I'd like to be in Formosa, but apparently it's no place for an American girl. Of course, you don't want to know what the kind of people who say that, think of Hong Kong. Well, a big raspberry to them. Where else can you go out to a dim sum lunch with movie stars? And admittedly also pay for it, because Hong Kong movie stars can't afford dim sum.
Yes, these reports will continue to be written out of Time and Aviation Week for the foresseable future, as the sad days of normality from B.D, "Before Diphtheria," seem like they will never return.
Yours Sincerely,
Ronnie
PS: If you like your science with extra science-fiction check out the Air Force's call for bids for the interceptor-escort fighter, which requires a provision for "automatic control via radio link with the automatic pilot" by the time it becomes practical in 1955.
