The Plantation of the Atlantic, XX: A Crisis of Growth?

So, today, because I did not realise that I had missed the 75th anniversary of the foundation of 100 Group RAF last Saturday (looks like your card is going to be about a month late. I blame Canada Post) during my enormously restful vacation, we will be talking about Alex's challenge.* Why did things get better after Rome fell?

"So perhaps you've got a Marxist explanation here: the social relations of production, i.e. the Roman political economy, are holding back the material relations of production, i.e. the productive potential of the Roman periphery, by forcing it to produce grain inefficiently to serve the interests of the elite, when it could be doing something more like classic British mixed farming or just a shit load of livestock. As a dialectical materialist, the Marxist would say that the material forces of technology always prevail in the end. And then a revolution happens. This is basically a Latin American dependencia historian's view.

There's a passage somewhere, about how in the summer the young folk of the village would go up to the high places, the boys to shepherd the cattle, the girls to milk them and make the cheese (gender essentialism!), about how the milkmaids would have skin like the Milky Way, and that they  would lie out under the stars on a summer night, their elders a thousand feet below.

...As it turns out, "sexy milkmaid" is not a very useful Google search.

Anyway, Heidi Klum, everybody. (Important safety note: Do not wear open-toes around cows.) Also, The Silencers.

There's a passage somewhere, about how in the summer the young folk of the village would go up to the high places, the boys to shepherd the cattle, the girls to milk them and make the cheese (gender essentialism!), about how the milkmaids would have skin like the Milky Way, and that they  would lie out under the stars on a summer night, their elders a thousand feet below.

...As it turns out, "sexy milkmaid" is not a very useful Google search.

Anyway, Heidi Klum, everybody. (Important safety note: Do not wear open-toes around cows.) Also, The Silencers.

I call this an investigation, by the way, because I want to hang a great, big epistemic caution on it. A blog post is not the place for a turgid, thesis-style "historiography and methods" chapter, but this is a subject that calls forth grand explanatory structures that float well clear of the facts.

The Fall of Rome, VI: Under the Green Cover

Yum.

Cold buckwheat noodle soup is the number one summertime dish in Korea, per aeriskitchen.com. I'm sure it's better than it looks, and that Koreans have fond childhood memories.

But. . .

How to make sausages eggplant and buckwheat "sandwiches."

Words fail me. 

One of the ways that we write about technology in an "I never thought of that" vein is to conjure up existential crises out of our dinner plates. Supposedly, in an era where in much of the world the total cultivated acreage is in decline, we are on the verge of a subsistence crisis by virtue of running out of inputs such as water or artificially fixed nitrogen, as though in two hundred thousand years of experimentation with landscape curation the human race has not developed a pretty extensive set of solutions to those problems, that the real problem is the very limited amount of buckwheat (and peas, vetch, millet, etc) that people can be persuaded to eat. 

As I have blogged before, Fagopyrum esculentum, is one of three species collectively known as "buckwheat" in genus Fagopyrum of family Polygonaceae which also contains sorrel, rhubarb and sea grape, as well as some of the nastiest and most persistent field weeds, such as the various knotweeds. With a short growing season, the heat-tolerant buckwheat fits into a larger family of plants that the poet tells us that we should sow on the wheat fields in June, "when all hope is gone."

 In other words, it is a food crop that you can plant after it is clear that your wheat or barley has failed. By the end of August, the field will be covered by purple flowers overshadowing black seed clusters. While harvesting a crop of buckwheat risks establishing it in the soil as a weed, buckwheat is tolerant of high nitrogen content, while using little of it or of residual soil moisture. It draws up other ions into the soil. In the tradition, it grows on "the moors," or is grown by "Moors," which in this context I take to be dirty poor folk on the fringes of civilised life in a parish-ordered Early Modern Europe. Buckwheat may not pay the tax bills of highly-capitalised farmers, but having food, however awful it looks, is better than not.

The complication here is that buckwheat's attributes also make it a good "green cover" crop. "Green cover," like "green manure," is one of those complications of agriculture-as-it-is-actually done that make our simple stories about it so unhelpful. Basically, if you sow buckwheat on a ruined field in June, you might be intending to take a food crop off it. If you are the landlord of tenants who do this, you might reasonably be concerned about that because of the whole establishing-a-field-weed-that-makes-bad-hay thing. However, you might also intend to plough the buckwheat right back into the soil. The point of planting the buckwheat in the first place was to conserve the soil moisture, vegetable fibre and nitrogenous material that would be lost otherwise. A vain crop of buckwheat this year means far more market grain next. 

Again, I am focussing on buckwheat because it is Heidenkorn, and I am playing to the whole "Moor" angle where it is (very arguably) the crop of the marginalised and the illegible. There are plenty of plantings that will do what buckwheat does, and it is quite possible that if I actually were an off-the-grid peasant in late medieval Europe trying to eat without drawing attention to myself, I would plant one of them. Buckwheat is not a good "green manure." You want vetch for that. If the soil is already nitrogen rich, you might want a better haying crop. Pearl millet is recommended by the Australian Northern Territory Government website. Interestingly,  I learned this by following up on the traditional recipe for couscous. This signature North African staple used to be made of pearl millet before semolina took its place. This at least suggests that if the original Moors needed a crop that was illegible to the state, they looked to pearl millet rather than buckwheat. The angle that I am aiming for, obviously, is the metaphor. How better to concretise this analogy than with the image of someone pulling a green cover over the landscape, and what better crop than Heidenkorn? And with that I am going to leave off making fun of earnest foodies. In the post-Apocalyptic future, we may all be eating buckwheat groats.

So. On to the green cover I have detected this week. 376, the Emperor Valens was defeated at Adrianople by an army of Goths. After a brief interregnum, the Spanish general Theodosius supplanted the dynasty of Valentinian and Valens, marrying into the family to heal wounds, fought a civil war, had the first recorded Canossa moment with Augustine's patron, Ambrose of Milan, and died, leaving two boys, Honorius and Arcadius, to be imperial colleagues. Arcadius died young in 408 in Istanbul, while Honorius made it to 423, pepetuating his dynasty. In a moment of turmoil during the reign of Honorius, there was a mass barbarian invasion, famously crossing the frozen Rhine at Main on New Year's Even, 405. From this eruption we trace the ultimate establishment of the "successor" kingdoms: Vandals in Africa, Visigoths in Spain; Burgundians in . . . Burgundy, Franks in France, Ostrogoths in Italy, Isaurians in Anatolia.

I throw that last one in as a bit of a joke. Attentive readers will already know that the Goths, Burgundians and Franks did not cross the frozen Rhine in 405, and once we reach the point of discussing an alleged barbarian invasion that originates in the Hittite heartland, we see that, in the famous words of every academic historian everywhere and in every time, "something more complicated is going on."

One attempt to solve this mystery has focussed, amazingly enough, on what the Romans said about it, which was that the barbarian armies were, in general, welcomed as, or subjected to, the status of foederati and settled on abandoned land. This has been formulated as everything from barbarians seizing land to farm to a version of "quartering" troops to, most controversially in the writings of Walter Goffart, to the pure allocation of tax farms to the support of units of the Roman army. 

Obviously, I intend my prolonged discussion of green cover and green manure crops to problematise the idea of "abandoned land." You may suspect by  now that I am likely to bring back horses. And, of course, I am going to make a big deal of The Amazing Thing I Learned On Wikipedia This Week. After the break, of course.

Postblogging October 1943: An Artificially Aged Technological Appendix

It turns out that I'm not the first person of our Modern Intertubes Era to be struck by the Bohn Aluminium and Brass Company's futuristic ads of the 1940s. Jim Edwards, of Business Insider, pointed out back in 2010 that "These Magnificent Paintings Of 'The Future' From 70 Years Ago Got Everything Hopelessly Wrong." That might be a little snarky. Lawnmowers are made of aluminum these days, and it's not the biggest mistake in the world to imagine them designed with an art deco touch back when art deco was still cool. 

Edwards should have substituted the aluminum high rise with button-adjustable room sizes for the lawnmower. Again, the vision is  not completely wrong, in that aluminum houses many North Americans today, and they are fairly modular and easily adjusted. As a young high school dropout at my employer pointed out the day that she was qualified as a cake decorator, "Now I can afford some class and get a double-wide." Which was not her exact phrasing, and, believe me, ex-con boyfriend, fake fingernails and all, she still had her tongue in cheek. No-one is so confused as to think that trailer parks are classy. As temporary housing, the old building codes here in British Columbia used to let you build them on the flood plains on the far side of the dykes. Hint hint, insert tornado joke here. Aluminum may have been cool once, but, like plastics, it has been "deglamorized."

After the jump, though, back with plane porn!

Postblogging Technological History: October, 1943: Labour at the Limit: Martha's Burden Is Lightened By Speed

Welcome to Yorkshire!

My Dearest Wing Commander:

Congratulations on your promotion, Reggie! As you will suspect from the arrival of the familiar courier and the heft of the package, this correspondence is a response to the Earl's anxious inquiries. Resuming my practice from the spring of 1939, I provide commentary at the head before financials in the hopes that this will help him understand the choices we have made with the money he dare not own. 

As I look back at the older letters, I marvel at how much has changed in four short years. Then, you were lying low in Vancouver in disgrace. Now you are back in RCAF uniform in dear old Blighty, putting your experience to the benefit of Brittania. Or Canadia? It does not quite seem to roll off the tongue, and I remain in exile amongst the orange groves of Santa Clara County, under standing invitation from Scotland Yard to assist them in inquiries. 

Being that your son now wears his Captain's rings, and can expect his broad pennant in due time (although not, alas, the Vice-Admiralship, thanks in no small part to his just-ended South Pacific 'exile'), it stands to reason that the family that you disgraced so long ago is no longer inclined to press the issue.  Meanwhile, so long as our cousin refuses correspondence with his daughter, I stand suspect of the most lurid imaginable crimes. You will find enclosed, by the way, another package from Chungking with photographs of the grandchildren.  Now that you and he are near-colleagues in war billets, I can even dream of you somehow persuading him to look at them. If not, film footage might be more compelling. It is expected, although unfortunately not soon, for our courier has chosen to reach civilisation via the wilds of Central Asia. What the Red Fort and the NKVD do not know, cannot hurt us.  

Speaking of your son, he arrived on the West Coast at the beginning of the month. One may infer goings-on at Scapa Flow if his services are no longer required in New Caledonia. I will be his host while he pokes about some nooks and crannies for the Admiralty. Amusingly, your boy, who currently rejoices in his after-school status as a Navy dispatch rider, picked him up at the wharf. I was in Seattle at the time, and somehow, someone (and by this I mean Grandfather, who at 103 has not entirely lost his sense of humour) got the idea that a man who had just flown across the Pacific in a PBY might enjoy being harried through the streets of San Francisco like Dundee's bonnet by a seventeen year old on his monstrous American motorcyle. Although, diplomatically, "Captain (E)  J. C." only emphasises that he enjoyed his first opportunity to meet his half-brother.  Had he only been delayed another day, and I could probably have arranged for his wife to do so in something more closely approaching a satisfactory number of wheels, but she was on a train somewhere west of Denver due to bad flying weather in the Rockies. 

Borrowed from Bucksindian.com/Buck's_bikes

Having, at least obliquely, reintroduced our familiar cast from 1939 (yes, it is Fat Chow who is trying to move those documents from Kashgar to Kabul right now), I should close this ramble and get on with . . . Well, my only slightly more on-topic ramble. Forgive me, I am aging, and garrulous.

Running Away to the Air, 8: Planes for Ships. A Dialogue

I start with an apology. This is a response to an argument that ChrisM put forward in an email. I'll cite below, but there is a pretty severe power imbalance between a correspondent and a Big Giant Blog Writer. On the other hand, I've got long-mouldering Evidence to put out there. So there's that.

So. You say you want to grow up to be First Sea Lord.

I'm listening. I certainly don't want to be the nay-sayer. It's a colourful title that comes with a peerage, a nice pension, and the prospect of interlocking directorates in profitable publicly-traded corporations. What's not to like? A young naval officer should aim for the title. (Unless he is a doctor, accountant, or instructor. Or an engineer? I'm not sure about the last. Have we decided whether they're supposed to aspire to be Engineer Vice-Admiral, First Sea Lord, or both. Will we change our minds?)

And you did such a splendid job of picking your parents, too! Famous, influential at court, an uncle who is an admiral himself, carefully edited out of your Wikipedia biography to avoid clouding the issues. But there's one small roadblock and one huge. The first roadblock is that you've decided against the gunnery specialisation. You've been at Dartmouth long enough to see the numbers that every young man crunches. Your chances are better in Gunnery. That being said, we all know that it is a small roadblock, because if you are good at a valuable specialisation, you will quite likely advance against a weaker set of competitors. Deciding that you are stronger than, say, your Torpedo rivals is harder, although not so much now that they've been handed electrics.  If you are doing your fellows' homework, as opposed to the reverse, you have as good a chance as any other young man who has an uncle for an admiral. We'll strike that last part if you go for the Torpedo branch.

 Oh? Aviation? Hmm. Well, I can see that. You came of age during the war. You were bred up on the romance of the knights of the air, especially the ones who come in navy blue: Bowhill, Collishaw, Dickson, Bell-Davies, Longmore.

But here's the big roadblock. Fancy their fame? Too bad. You see, you were born in 1903. The war to end all wars ended before you were ready to end all wars yourself. Those knights of the air? You will never be one of them. Combat piloting is a young man's game, and there is almost exactly zero chance of a shooting war while you are young enough to fly the fleet planes of your generation. You will lust to get into a Nightjar,

and beat up fields or harbours or flight decks or launch rails, or whatever we end up using, on one of these

You'll be the "old man" of a squadron of these

 and you could lead your young men into battle in it. I do not think that likely, however. There will be another war. This peace is a weeping wound on the international body politic, but the nature of the wound will be to require a long half-healing before we are ready for war again. I will say twenty years, less two months, of course, so that the young men and horses can finish the harvest. As long as I am letting the past be the guide to my predictions, I will guess that the next war will go one year longer than the last, because men are getting madder in these latter days. In September of 1938, you will be 35 and a commander. In September of 1944, you will be a captain, looking for your flag. I hope for your sake that you will win your way through the mean trench fighting of postwar retrenchment to three more promotions, but I do not give you long odds.

So that's my cautionary. I'll leave it to this historian of the next century who has just popped by in his Collingwoodian time machine to give you some more solid retrospective insight.

First Parallel: A Technical Appendix: The Thermodynamics of High Altitude Air-to-Air Combat in the Propeller Age

The "funny" way of talking about the science of aeroengines --thermodynamics-- is to say that "you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game." That's three laws, and I only propose to talk about one today: the Second Law. It is one of those hard-to-teach rules, and I am going to throw the "ideal heat engine" formulation up and call it a day: Efficiency=1-Temperature(reaction)/T(sink). The efficiency of the best possible heat engine is less than one hundred percent, and it is less than one hundred percent by the ratio of the temperature in the engine with that of the sink into which it is rejected. You think that engines are about power? I tell you that they are about rejecting waste heat. (Or, amateurs study brake effective horsepower. Professionals study calories rejected.)

If I wanted to turn the laws of thermodynamics into cod philosophy (call me, TV! I will!) then I'd call this the diminishing returns rule. Which reminds me.

Photoshop 1939! From Flight Global Archives for 2/2/39, the first official Air Ministry publicity still of the Boulton Paul Defiant. How many guns in the turret? Ha! We're not telling!

Flight, amplifying what the Air Ministry has to say, points out that sometimes official secrecy makes people nervous. "For the past year or two," the paper tells us, people have been writing in to ask what has been happening on the two-man fighter front. The Hawker Demon has been the RAF's frontline two seat fighter since 1930, and is overdue for replacement. Now, at last, the Air Ministry responds. The Defiant, we are told, is a stressed-skin fighter of all-metal, mainly light alloy construction (so much for the patent Boulton Paul construction system) with flush rivets for an exceptionally smooth surface. The feature of main interest is the compact, power-driven turret, armed with a still-undisclosed number of guns. It is presumed that the Defiant's main mode of use will be to fly slightly ahead of, and below enemy bombers, where they are typically ill-protected, as has been demonstrated by later-model "turret" Demons. Given, the paper speculates, equipment with a Merlin I engine, the Defiant will have a top speed of slightly above 300mph, lower than the Hurricane or Spitfire due to the encumbrance of the turret and because of its slightly larger size. Fitted with a Merlin II, it should be as fast as any comparable aircraft in enemy service, while with a Merline RM2SM, giving 1145hp at 16,500 feet when fuelled with 100 octane, it would have an even higher performance. The airscrew is a 3 bladed variable pitch de Havilland, and the exhaust is of the new ejector stub (i.e. turn your exhaust into rocket fuel) type.

But the point, now that I have buried the lede so thoroughly, is this:

It is October, 1943. The Home Front is bracing for defeat in the air, an ignominious retreat to night bombing that will delay the strategic air offensive by months. Meanwhile the United States Army Eighth Air Force is getting ready to win the most extraordinary victory in the history of air warfare. It will, flying from expeditionary air fields in the United Kingdom, win complete air superiority over the home skies of the world's second largest industrial economy before the first tide of summer.

Some people will say that it did not matter, that the only bombing that counts is the kind done in visual range of a foxhole. Some people apparently cannot wait to see the United States Army hump off its entire artillery arm on the USAF (or turn the USAF into the army's artillery replacement). Despite my frustration with them, I cannot say that they deserve to live in America whose only army is light infantry. No-one deserves to live in Breaking Bad America. 

The P-51 is said to have saved, by itself, the whole of America's industrial strategy. It is the classic example of Joel Mokyr's formulation of technology as a "free lunch," an exogenous input to the economic process, unpredictable and unplanned. One can only lay out a welcome mat on the doorstep, as meritocratic America and miltarist-racial Germany do, and class-ridden Britain does not. I have taken aim at the P-51's status as a magic aeroplane before, and yet its origins were almost entirely serendipitous. North American Aviation had established a relationship with the Air Ministry by selling it the Harvard, so when Sir Henry Self of the British Purchasing Commission approached it about licensing production of the P-40, company president Kindelburger was listened to when he proposed a new fighter, instead. A four gun machine using the Allison engine was proposed. The design was commissioned in March, 1940, and the prototype flew first on 26 October 1941. This is a short development period rather than an unprecedented one, and speaks, as much as anything, to the extent of underemployment in the Los Angeles basin in the spring of 1940. Yet it is also one of the most historically important of all successful rushed technological development programmes.

I have in the past featured the P-51 as a "magic aeroplane," basically as a means of launching into the transformation of the refining industry during World War II. As the cars of 2013 crawl through Vancouver's morning fog this morning, they are carried by the invisible tides of history. But no-one knows about them because they're invisible! Today I shall take another tack, all appropriately autumny, about how we're all trapped in a cellar while the entropic level rises around us ineluctably. 

Second year physics emo is so lame. In ten billion years, we'll all be dead! In your workplace, you might have noticed that a single missed shift has the potential to raise entropy to the eleventy-millionth power. Perhaps you have thought about the war, and imagined a bomb piercing the roof, and either said to yourself, "how could they possibly cope?" Or, alternatively, "How could it have made things worse?"

Or maybe you asked yourself how Erik could possibly have got from the Defiant to the P-51.

From Now On, No More Defeats: First Parallel

I'm mixing my metaphors. The artillerie du place opening up on the fortress from the first parallel is the opposite of the Charge of the Light Brigade. "Half a league, half a league, half a league onward." (Of many images available on the Net, I take this from a History of Surgery and Anaesthesia page.) Let's compromise on themes. Seventy years ago today, two groups (divisions in 1940s USAAF parlance) of B-17s raided the ball bearing plants of Schweinfurt, the swine ford, in Franconia. Fortresses charging.

It's a juxtaposition that works better with cavalry charges, anyway. Forts are (in our imaginations, anyway), the definition of far sighted, deliberate warmaking. Cavalry charges are the epitome of rash decisions. Blow the horn, and you're stuck with what comes next. If it comes home ugly, you are left to live with yourself. Even someone no worse than a cheerleader might get a little shrill as they try to find a way of blaming the other guy for fighting back. Since I am gesturing to Tennyson, here's Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, admittedly not talking about cavalry charges. (No, tell us how you really feel, Elizabeth.)   

I sense a guilty conscience, is what I am trying say, some way that it might be the universe's fault, that you did the best you could, that it had to happen that way. That's how you get 

 Weird, weird, weird, weird. Oh, and thanks to the Drifting Cowboy, by the way. And that's how I get to Schweinfurt: guilty consciences and thin rationalisations.

By the way, can I just say how awesome is is when there are still things on open shelves for browsing, such as the entire run of The Economist? Pull down a volume, and you can find out how, on 14th October, 1943, Seventy years ago today, 29 B-24s of 2nd Bomber Division, 8th Air Force, and 291 B-17s of 1st and 3rd Bomber Division set out from their British bases, to conduct a "Flying Fortress raid" on the important ball and roller-bearing plants of Kugel Fischer AG and Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken AG, the large German subsidiary of the Swedish SKF. Photos show that at least half the facilities were destroyed, and Brigadier General Anderson of the USAAF suggests that the plants had been knocked out of production, and that a  restoration of 25% of production is the most that one could hope for in the immediate future. The Economist is not so sanguine. Ball bearings are a pretty quotidian product, and SKF's subsidiaries serve pretty much every national industry. Germany can import from Switzerland and France, as well as from Sweden.(The point of British attempts to tamper with the Swedish ball bearing industry are to keep the most valuable and difficult-to-manufacture types out of German hands.) The Economist does not know the numbers, but there are 524 American heavy bombers serviceable on the fields of Britain this day. It will later be established that there are 964 German single-engined fighters on charge within the borders of the Reich this day, although Richard G. Davis does not make it clear whether these are all serviceable, and I cannot check his source right now. (Hinsley, British Intelligence, III, 1, 296.)

A little further on in the same number of the legendary weekly newspaper for the economically-minded, editorial asks the question we long to hear answered in this October, when flame-red things flutter from the sky. "How is it that journey’s end may not yet be in sight even though most of the mileposts have been passed? Will the war be over in three months, in six, in twelve?" Do we not have threefold air superiority? Are we not bombing relentlessly?