Postblogging 1939, July, II: "A guy could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff"

My Dearest Reggie:

Secrets do sometimes travel fast. Or, sometimes, they take a year or more to emerge.

Postblogging 1939, July, 1, Technical Appendix: The Sky's the Limit

Not the Nemean Lion: A Napier Sea Lion, posted at Enginehistory.org by New Zealand's own Bill Bishop

And just by way of contrast,

The Sabre has appeared on these pages before. That's because it's arguably the most complicated production piston aereoengine of World War II. (Talk about running prototypes, though, and the sky's the limit.) Although I've already thrown up this contrast once before in this series, it is still worth a reflective pause to think about the company that was still representing itself to the world through the Napier Sea Lion, above, while it was running a prototype Sabre in its workshop. Also, for reasons that I will not get into, because I'm a little ashamed at how slow has been my progress, I need to acknowledge the assistance of Dr. Stephen Miller of Berkeley, and he has asked for a plug for the effort to revive the Nemean Games at Athens.

Here it is:
www.nemeangames.org.

Now it's time to talk about planes and engines.

Postblogging 1939: July, 1939, I: Two Speeds

Per Wikipedia

My Dearest Reggie:

I am heartily glad to hear by wire that this letter will find you home and healthy in Vancouver. This gives me an opportunity to share what I have learned this month, which is a great deal. I have learned this month that there are speeds for the old and speeds for the young, speeds for one political economy, and, more specifically, low-altitude speeds for an aeroengine supercharger or a wing flap-slat, and, with another gear or setting, a high-altitude speed as well. I rather poke fun below, and I am told that, had I been paying attention, I would know about the Rolls-Royce "two speed superchargers" by now. The point, however, your son says, is brought out by an indiscreet cartoon published in the first week of the month by The Aeroplane. Even if the technology originates with Farman in France, the implications of the metallurgy of the new Farman-Rolls-Royce supercharger and of the Youngman Flap, also indiscreetly revealed by that paper, is of a combustion-turbine airliner, perhaps while we are still  young enough to fly. As for political economies,  one is ever more pressed to ask whether or not this is a direct consequence of just how large a national defence loan the government is willing to take out. (Yes, I did see Maynard socially this month, but, rest assured that he did not lecture us. On the contrary, a copy of The Economist in hand, I drew him out for the enlightenment of my young Cambridge art historian friend.)

Speaking of speeds for the old --I shall leave you hanging for a bit about what I mean by that, and well you deserve it, you scoundrel-- as much as we share those happy boyhood memories of summers by the Arrow Lake, we can also share memories of being summoned away to Grandfather's side in our first war. Another war is very clearly on the horizon. we can hope, and we can work towards the end of seeing it reverse the verdict of the first. It must have been frustrating to be rusticated in its earliest stages. It would be even more frustrating for me if you derail our family's efforts with your signature rashness

As you may have been informed, Grandfather called Cousin Easton down from San Francisco to Chi'a Ta-wan to upbrade him for his overly familiar relations with "Miss J.C." The rather obvious point was made that until such time as we can schedule earthquakes to our needs, we must beware that side of our family that will profit if secrets come to light. In his customarily indirect (or, to be literary, "insidious") fashion, Grandfather has scotched the romance by ordering Cousin Easton to Hongkong to take over operations as from the end of manoeuvres in Europe. 

Old Europe: God Speed the Plough

From blueridgegenealogy.com. 

The question being, when did Americans decide that "going down in the river to pray" was a Christian thing? We don't know. Here's a source to very tentatively suggest that it might have "American Indian" roots.

Well, duh. How do we make sense of Pontiac's Rebellion "facing east from Indian country?' Gregory Evan Dowd even has his warrior going down to the river. To pray?

He suggests that we take seriously all those dream visions of warriors diving into the river and coming out at the lodge of the Master of Life. Dow also thinks that it is important that we are getting these anecdotes through intermediaries linked to Connecticut's New Light movement. I agree. My problem is only that Dowd follows the unfortunate trend to make these things strange, "in order to recapture the Indian's poiunt of view," where I would suggest just listening to Alison Krause and encountering the numinous. That the New Light influenced the divers of Pontiac's rebellion is obvious. That the connection is syncretism in the sense spelled out by Richard White is clear. I'm just asking that we understand that dult full-immersion baptism in the running waters of the local creek is not a weird thing born of the weird American proclivity to break up into small sects. It's whispers reaching across two continents coming down from Aztlan, of the sacredness of corn hoed from the thick river soil, and of paths through the bramble, cleared by fire, that lead the buffalo onto the prairie. I ask for that because this morning at dawn, the sachem came out of the sky house on the top of the pyramid, blew smoke to the four directions, and told us to celebrate the Green Corn. 

I choose archaic terms. In no way is the President a sachem, and in no way is the pyramid on the Great Seal a reference to the great mounds. Summer idylls are not the Green Corn festival. To be sure, a comb drawn down a cob of (Chilliwack) corn will draw milky white, and everyone who has the time will go away to the lake. The point is that we will then float over deep waters like a historian over history.

That's an analogy I like. History is down there in the blue water, in the weeds. But the historians slide over the surface, going where they list, from wharf to the shore buoy to the beach and back. The weeds obsess us. Harmless as they are, they are frightening, reaching up to brush our legs no matter where we are. In our imaginations, anyway. The point is that we don't have to be above the weeds to imagine that they're there. The historical fact of the weeds can slip between the ages as easily as we slide across the surface of the water. It means what we need it to mean.

Now, I mark a different agricultural calendar here on the western shore of North American than in Old Europe. There, matters are a bit different. Wheat is a spring crop, not a summer one. The wheat is long since gathered in, and the great work of summer is ploughing. The ploughshare will turn the dark Earth up as many times as there is labour to do it.

 It is something that people have been doing . . . . a long time. As long as there's been worked iron, maybe? That iron ploughshare was like a patch of weeds at the bottom of the lake, wherever you need it to be as you swim across the surface. Or we could take it seriously. It should be a big deal, if you take the idea that you build history from the bottom up seriously. The first iron ploughs. Ought they not have changed everything? According to another of those awesome studies coming out of the flowering of the Turkish academy, on the Upper Tigris about 3500 years ago, it did. (For those who read Turkish, or Google Translate gibberish.)

Postblogging June, 1939, II: Safety Turned Out to be a Hollow Promise

A Handley Page Gugnunc demonstrates the Handley Page automatic slot. Per Wikipedia, the name comes via the Pip, Squeak and Wilfred "newspaper comic strip."

And now we're elucidated. Via Retro Stu's Flickr page.

From Now On, No More Defeats: Sicily, Or, The Beginning of the End

When northern Italians face south towards Sicily, Africa gets in their eye.

Palermo, looking north:

Seventy years ago today, Commando Supremo sat down to digest the situation reports from the day before, and learned that the war was over. Action orders for the Italian air force this day are to evacuate airfields in Sicily and Calabria. The air war over Sicily is over. Why?

Combat aircraft sorties by Axis power*

11 July: 198 Italian sorties, 283 German

12 July: 171 Italian sorties, 202 German

13 197 Italian, 164 German

14 88 Italian, 156 German

15 76 Italian, 85 German

The air war over Sicily is already over. Wikipedia helpfully adds that the Italians have lost 150 aircraft over 5 days. Which, looking at loss rates in, say, the Battle of Britain, might lead one to suggest that the Italians need to suck it up.

Only here's some perspective on this, shamelessly copied from the tireless work of Richard Overy:**

Number of Aircraft
	1939	1940	1941	1942	1943	1944	1945
USA	5,856	12,804	26,277	47,836	85,898	96,318	49,761
USSR	10,382	10,565	15,735	25,426	34,900	40,300	20,900
Britain	7,940	15,049	20,094	23,672	26,623	26,461	12,070
Germany	8,295	10,247	11,776	15,409	24,807	39,802	7,540
Japan	4467	4,768	5,088	8,861	16,693	28,180	11,066
Italy	1800	1800	2400	2400	1600

Italy's military aircraft production, over the whole war, was less than Japan's in the single year of 1943. Yes, Italy had a population of 43 million to Japan's 73, and 2.7% of world manufacturing share to Japan's 3.5.  And the United Kingdom had 48 million people and 9.2% of world manufacturing, at least by the statistical synthesis used by Overy, which I do not mean to unreservedly endorse here. "Produce" is not the same thing as "manufacture." A forged chromium steel angle is not a cast Bessemer steel bar. 

So this is my point here: We're looking south from Napoli at Palermo.

Gather the Bones, XVIII: God Speed the Plow! Grame Barker on the Origins of Agriculture

In the summer heat, raise a pint and toast the plow, turning up dark earth and the white bones of ancient battles.

Not so much with the summer heat:

  



Some context:

Here's the Google Maps screenshot of Enon, Ohio, home to "Ohio's second largest conical Indian burial mound." I've left the advertising layer on and pulled back far enough for you to see just how close the mound is to Brandie's Hair & Tanning Salon, which judging from the website, is a great deal classier than the name would immediately suggest. While our slightly creeping peek-over-the-backyard-fence view of Enon might suggest that it is just another of semi-rural North America's half-finished communities, in fact it boasts a corporate headquarters, a healthy median income, virtually no poor people, and a 96.6% White population. (The largest minority is Asian, at 1.4%.)

The "back yard" comment is a call-back to my post on Gnadenhutten. Enon is organised around the Dayton-Springfield Road, renamed Main Street as it passes through town one block northwest of the Mound, which is surrounded by a ring road (and a no-trespassing fence, as we've seen) that is connected to East Main by, amongst other, Green Valley Drive and Countryside Drive. If there's some slight, American Gods-level sense of religious dread and fascination coming off the mound, it is not without reason. As far as archaeology can tell, it is Adena-era, thus more than two-thousand years old. Adena is a precursor to the Hopewell Horizon, allowing us to infer (the mound has never been excavated) that it is a built-up structure composed of layers of "secondary burials," in which human remains recovered from other processes are housed in "mortuary structures" that were then set on fire before being buried with a level of carefully-selected soil. At 28 feet high and 110 feet in diameter, that's a great many "secondary burials"  over a very long time.

One last thing about this whole "aura of superstitious dread." The story of the Gnadenhutten massacre is that the Pennsylvania militia penned 96 Moravian Indians into a hall on an edge of the property, killed them by first stunning them with blows to the head and then scalping them, and then set fire to the hall. At a later date, a mound of earth was erected over the remains. To quote Wikipedia's summary of the formal archaeological report on the excavation of the northwest mound at Aztalan State Park, Wisconsin, which was probably erected around around 1300AD:

The northwestern mound, used for formal burial, was also built in three stages. A special structure, approximately 4 metres (13 ft) by 2 metres (6.6 ft), with its long axis towards the northeast/southwest, was built on the west side of the mound. Its doorway was in its southwest corner, and the structure was covered with a mixture of clay, willow branches, and grass. The floor was covered with a mat of what may have been cattails. The bodies of ten people were placed side by side on this, with their heads toward the doorway. The bones of another person were bundled together with cord and placed near them. Once this construction was complete, and the bodies were inside, the building was burned.

It seems tolerably likely that ritual murder by blunt trauma to the head accompanied with scalping is not just a common Neolithic practice that shows up well osteologically. It is a ritually significant form of murder for Eastern Woodland Indians in the peri-contact phases of the Southern Ceremonial Complex and subsequent  "the rise of local traditions." The Gnadenhutten massacre, notwithstanding being committed by ostensibly Euro-American militiamen, is a call back to a form of publicly enacted violence that we see in its "pristine" form at places such as Aztalan. 

Now, I am not saying that the Enon Mound conceals a prehistoric massacre. On the contrary, I am suggesting that the modern enactments, both at Aztalan, Wisconsin and Gnadenhutten were reappropriations of older practices that, while probably not all sunshine and rainbows, were also probably not acts of ostentatious public violence.  Adena monuments could, and, in the case of Eron, are used as signifiers of community by subsequent populations. So what better a way to reframe reality and create a new community than by appropriating this technique of immanentising the idea of community, with a salutary dose of public violence to render it unquestionable?  Creating new "conical burial mounds" was a method of ideological fashioning, in other words, and invites us to think about fixed versus migratory lifestyles and the relationship between human and settlement hierarchies.

Which is a long way of getting to my point in today's posting, which is not in my 'ostensibly Euro-American' throwaway phrase, for a change, but rather a book report on "Books that I like because I thought they were good:" Graeme Barker's The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why Did Foragers Become Farmers? Short answer: for ideological reasons, in some defensible version of the Marxian sense.  If you want a longer answer that tries to get more seriously scholarly by bringing in a few more points of view, stick around after the cut.