The Siege: Victory of the German Maidens

So there was a thing at the Modern Languages Association annual conference this year. It was about adjunct teaching blah tenure lines blah interviewing blah. Blah. My take is that, strip the precious specificity of academia away, and you're seeing a fairly typical problem of the politics of skilled labour.

Wait? You don't consider professors teaching English at a university  to be "skilled labour" in the same sense as the honest hands of toil making cool things with Very Big Machine Tools? 

A photo essay on cognitive dissonance: 

1: Cause:

2: Effect.

The "Help!!" sign is just about the definition of a shortage of skilled labour, and the skill in question is close reading. True, it is shelf schematics, as opposed to Beowulf, and it is so that buyers will know what is going to be on the shelves when they make their purchase. SAMS work doesn't have as much social capital as lecturing the children of judges and doctors on Point Grey -to put it mildly!-- but any adjunct in this country would kill for the lifestyle of our company's roving SAMS expert. 

In the face of the triple crisis of higher education, employment and demographics in this country and on this continent, it is worth contemplating the intractable mystery of skilled labour in our modern economy. Somehow, we got the story of skilled labour radically wrong. Our story is that an increased supply of skilled labour will drive the economy forward. When in fact, it just...

Oh. Wait. That's not a mystery at all.

Seventy years ago, labour worked differently. Voracious factories absorbed every hand they could, and then some more, and the Flak batteries in the park were crewed (in part) by the League of German Maidens. 

And in Belfast.. . In Belfast. . 

"In the county Tyrone, in the town of Dungannon

Where many a ruckus meself had a hand in

Bob Williamson lived there, a weaver by trade

And all of us thought him a stout-hearted blade.

On the twelfth of July as it yearly did come

Bob played on the flute to the sound of the drum

You can talk of your fiddles, your harp or your lute

But there's nothing could sound like the Old Orange Flute.

But the treacherous scoundrel, he took us all in

For he married a Papish named Bridget McGinn

Turned Papish himself and forsook the Old Cause

That gave us our freedom, religion and laws.

And the boys in the county made such a stir on it

They forced Bob to flee to the province of Connaught;

(The Clancy Brothers???)

Anyway, in the land of anger and hate, there was this:

Wikipedia (also below)

Postblogging December 1943, II: Towards A Cold War

Wing Commander R__. C__., RCAFVR, O.C.
L__. House,
Isle of Axholme,
Lincolnshire, U. K.

My Dear Sir:

Father of my Beloved: I take up the brush in my feminine hand on no occasion of sad news, but rather because fortunate winds are blowing. That friend of whom you have been previously advised, had an acrimonious dispute with his employer over a New Year's engagement. It was the breaking point in their relationship, and he is now definitive that he wants out of his contract. He  appealed to us, as we were warned  he might, on the basis of blood and obligation incurred so many years ago. Because our friend is so much in the public eye, he can scarcely be seen visiting lawyers, or even have lawyers visit his hotel room. Your beloved cousin, my Uncle, has gone East to arrange meetings with H. C.'s lawyers and plot our next step, but it will take some time. 

 Uncle remains intent on resuming his correspondence in February, naturally enough. Indeed, he is attempting to draw our friend into his beloved electrical engineering investment scheme, and may have more news on this in his next.

Let me also assure you that James and I are also well. Your wife may have informed you that she summoned Judith back from Pasadena instant upon her arrival in Santa Clara, and she certainly did not leave California until I was under a watchful matron's eye. It seems like rather a fuss to me, but she and Judith are so stern, and so motherly, that I cannot bear to defy them. Nevertheless, Judith and I did accompany James on his trip to Tacoma, which, by the way, went very well indeed. I shall append an amusing story about it once I have finished doing secretary's service to Uncle.

We do, however, have news that may yet cast a shadow over your heart if the war winds on too long. While James is here on the West Coast for the duration of his assignment only, we have resolved that I will not be crossing the Atlantic again this war, and we have begun to prepare a residence en famille. The old house, unfortunately, is far beyond the available resources of material and labour. Moreover, even if we could repair it, it would only distress Great-Uncle's last days. Fortunately, the old coach-house will do quite well enough for three (for now), at least once the stables have been converted into something more domestic.

The only drawback is that the work is quite visible from the road. The locals are understandably curious about what the owners of 'Arcadia' intend, and less understandably opinionated about how matters should proceed. One of my contractors has amused himself by setting up a hand-lettered "Suggestion Box" at the gate. Oh, the rural round....

One final familial note. Let me see: I need a coining from Uncle's rather threadbare pseudonym system. Will it suffice to say that Miss "V.C." is the daughter of Mr. "N.C." of Chicago for you to know a young lady whom you last saw in pigtails? Well, pigtails no longer, and her father is wide awake to the implications of the high rejection rate of his product by the Army.

From Miss Ewe's Holiday

Chicago may continue to be windy and broad-shouldered, but this is one branch of butchering-to-the-world that is well past time to be retired into a shadowy investment trust. So now he reconsiders his social-climbing choice not to send his daughter to the Poor Clares, and I have the rather large charge of teaching her proper literary accomplishments. This is rather much to pack into a senior year, but the thought is that we might enroll her in Stanford, as I shall be Santa Clara for at least another year, war or no war. The agreement is that Miss V. C. will be allowed to believe that she is being prepared for missionary work unless and until she deduces the family secrets for herself.

Now, as I have mentioned, filial duty requires that I continue to prosecute Uncle's campaign to persuade the Earl, through you, that it would be a mistake to sink money into poor Cousin H. C.'s steel plant and "prefabricated house" schemes.

Postblogging December, 1943, Technical Appendix, II

Edit: Bulwark seems to have been lost due to spontaneous detonation of ammunition, not propellant.

To this day I remember Chris Friedrichs (warning: UBC's security certificate for this site has expired) telling us that now that we were graduate students, we would appreciate being able to be in the library right up to Christmas, while undergraduates scattered off to home and hearth. 

Nowadays, the UBC libraries are closed during Saturnalia. 

Which is why the second technical appendix for December postblogging appears first. It has nothing to do with my losing precious research time exploring the 40 or so "Esquisse pour servire a l'histoire du Rome" inserted, apparently randomly and by an unknown hand, into the map pocket at the back of the library's 1876 Desjardins. In the spirit of the season....

That said, even without having covered the Fortune article yet, it is pretty clear that refrigeration needs a post, especially as I am going to link it to the Battle of North Cape. And by "needs a post," I mean, "needs multiple doctoral dissertations in economic, social, cultural and gender history." But that ain't gonna happen. So instead here is a discussion of the history of explosives, which is important because the transition to modern explosives required storage in temperature and humidity-controlled conditions that, in turn, led to state security-related investment in HVAC technology ahead of the rise of the cold chain logistics that has so clearly transformed our lives without being much investigated, although Jonathan Reese's book looks like an interesting first step.

So: the link to the Battle of North Cape? North Cape is the somewhat grandiose title for Bruce Fraser's successful mousetrapping of the battlecruiser KMS Scharnhorst on 26 December 1943. By keeping fast capital ships in Norwegian ports threatening the Russian convoys, the Germans were able to stretch Allied naval resources, with knock-on effects extending from the Eastern Front to the Pacific, until, as must inevitably happen, they ran out of capital ships.  Losing Scharnhorst --somehow-- was both inevitable and painful for the Germans, and an incremental step towards victory for the Allies. 

That's the top down view. Bottom up, it comes down to steam conditions, fire control solutions (1,2,3), volume of fire and progress in organic chemistry. (Noting that I got Robert Neville confused with James H. McGraw, Jr.)

The steam condition thing is interesting. Scharnhorst was very fast for its size due to operating with 850F steam, and, like its heavy cruiser contemporaries, suffered repeated machinery breakdowns because of it. So is it possible that the fatal blow that slowed it down at North Cape was inflicted internally, by steel failing in the wet blast? It's a wild-assed theory that I raise because of its salience to issues that do matter.  (Here's Antonio Bonomi promoting it.)

For fire control, we can notice that it was Bruce Fraser who  headed the team that designed the Admiralty Fire Control Table, and Bruce Fraser who won the Battle of North Cape. There's a lot going on here in the nascent history of computing, and I am not going to dissent from the common analysis that the radar stuff matters more than a weird little pneumatic computer, but there it is.

For volume of fire, I link to my posting on Jutland, the battle that the Royal Navy lost by letting institutional imperatives trump safety considerations, and the historical profession muffed by missing the well-publicised cause of the battlecruiser losses in favour of talking about "technological decline." Take what you will from that. The point is that Duke of York's ammunition chain was designed to make it mechanically impossible for a deflagration to propagate unchecked from the turret to the magazines. This was the right thing to do: even the most vigorous lip service to safety is still lip service. It is unfortunate that the resulting loss of fire opportunities keeps getting laid off on "unreliability," as though safety precautions were unmanly or something. Slow we are to learn.

So, ammunition storage is the previously-mentioned entre to the issue of the extremely rapid propagation of powered HVAC up and down the cold chain and of air conditioning on parallel lines. This takes us back to the introduction of the first 'modern,' artificial explosive, nitrocellulose, the explosive that was also a plastic!   I have talked about modern explosives, indirectly before. Specifically, I notice that I supplied the footnote, but not the discussion! As I move towards the climax of the munitions war, so it is time to get that stuff on the internet.

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.

Technical Appendix: Postblogging December 1943: The Owl of Minerva Flies At Dusk

December is the darkest month. You either set the Yule log alight, or celebrate the darkness. This could just as easily have been the title of my birthday posting for modern electronic warfare, but, if you were young when I was (and, statistically speaking, it is likely that you were: welcome to roughly the biggest birth cohort ever, he said, 49 years too late!), you remember this:

Spy stories were just tired enough for gentle network parody. I was too young to get that it was gentle parody. To nine-year-old me, that clip was as mysterious as The Prisoner still is. With the difference that the point of the mysteries of The Prisoner is that they are mysteries, while Get Smart was mysterious because I was too young to get it. The Prisoner isn't meant to be solved. Get Smart is just another network parody. 

Where, not to push the epistemic point too far while my original point likes fallow, funny spies run around saying pompous things like, "The owl of Minerva flies at dusk." Which is why I went with a hotlink to Kim Carnes' Crazy in the Night instead.

The epistemic point is not going away, though. A big book in the blogosphere right now is Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's The Second Machine Age. As a Boseruppian, I am predisposed to dislike this book --which I may or may not eventually get around to reading. My basic thesis is that we are hitting the bottom of a long downhill, the end of a storing-up of technological capital centering on the era of the last world war. If this is true, absolutely the last thing we have to worry about is robots taking our jobs. The robots (and slaves) will be doing the work because the (relatively few) people who could be doing it have all gone Croatan (1,2). 

Never mind  crazy theorising, though. If I am to offer anything to the conversation, it is going to be history of technology. Brynjolfsson and McAfee do start with history of technology, of course. The introductions to their book that I have read focus on the "delayed" start of the Steam Age. The fact that there were steam engines in 1712 gives anyone who loves him some Vernor Vinge since the 1990s and is waiting for the Singularity like some characters in a Beckett play --and Oh God in the New Year's eve morning darkness I see nightmares of first year English again --- where was I? 

Oh, yeah. All the over--produced American lawyers of the last few years are making a living doing doc review and are worried that the Google is coming to take away their jobs. And if first them, moments later it'll be all the knowledge workers. It will be like when slide rules got rid of all the engineers, or when printing got rid of the historians by making all the old scrolls and codices available to everyone so that some idle English gentleman could produce a bigger and better history of ancient times than Herodotus, who was actually able to travel and cultivate the owners of all those scrolls in ancient times and become a real historian. 

That's sarcasm, there, of course. The job of the historian did not go away with printing, or with the railroads and the telegrams and such that allowed Ranke to outdo Gibbon, or with the ---but I am going to try not to get ahead of myself again, here. This is supposed to be a technical appendix, and I will get to the technology that rises to the surface in December of 1943 in a moment. First, though, some historical nuance, because that is what you look for from a historian.

I have objected to the basic thesis before. An usurpation took place in Britain in 1688, placing an uneasy dynasty on the throne of England. Thereafter, it would be fair to call every war of the Eighteenth Century down to the Napoleonic wars a "war of the English Succession." That made the regime willing to spend to win, and one of the things that they had to do in the 1700--1715 round was maintain an army in the low Countries, which meant earning foreign exchange in the Low Countries. To do that, they had to export to that market, and to do that, they had to subsidise export industries such as coal. As the price of coal went up, it became feasible to cut coal at the bottom of flooded colleries by pumping out the water with steam engines. Of course the Savery and Newcomen engines were inefficient! One of the big problems of operating them was that they had to be securely seated in the midst of great mounds of highly flammable coal slack at the bottom of pits! Because while coal slack cannot be sold on the market, it is a dangerous, highly flammable material that gets in the way of mining operations and has to be got rid of somehow. For example, you can burn it. In a contained stove, of course, for safety reasons. Not that those safety reasons are met by using a stove in isolation, but you can always cool it by putting a pot of water on top. Which then evolves lots of steam. You see where I am going, here? With all due respect to them, Savery and Newcomen were patent trolls, taking credit for a technology that circumstances essentially forced our way.

Now let's move ahead sixty years. Somehow, in spite of having a massive public debt hanging over it, the British economy manages to expand like topsy. There's a "navigation" craze. Basically, canals thread the countryside, taking products such as, for example, coal, to market. Their locks are pumped by water mills in one of those operations that pretty much forces a person to think about the laws of conservation of energy. At this point, the limit on the economy is becoming the amount of water that can be pumped back up the runs by "engines." It is limiting the amount of coal that can be brought to market. So now we want to pump the water back up into the mill pond using the minimum amount of coal. . . 

Let me now quote myself, a paragraph gone: "Somehow, in spite of having a massive public debt hanging over it, the British economy manages to expand like topsy." That's your lede: not James Watt inventing the condensor. Ask yourself: what endogenous trends within the economy are driving technological adoption? Do not look around for heroic innovation to change it from outside. 

But, but, what about knowledge work, you ask yourself. What about those lawyers, whose research is now being done by "brilliant machines?"

Now it's technological appendix time.

Postblogging Technology, December 19443: I'll Be Home For Christmas

Happy Christmas from Santa Clara!

I apologise for including snapshots of the neighbours, but the pictures that I include are a great deal easier to parse than the family writing!

My Dearest Reggie:

I know that it is my invariable practice to wrap up the family news with an overlong restatement of my investment strategy, buttressed with the last month's news in scientific progress ("research and development" as we are saying now) and such economic, military and political news as seems relevant. You will find, as far as precendent goes, that this is a somewhat truncated entry due to my having left my copies of Fortune, Aviation and the month's run of The Economist in a certain library just to our north in a state of high dudgeon a week ago, but there is more than enough material for the boring parts, as you shall see.

As for habits, they are made to be broken. After a long and difficult month, I am finally in the Christmas spirit this holiday eve, and with a variegated feathered flock a-roast in the back under the supervision of your wife (Bill and David are most grateful for their Christmas gift), I shall endeavour to share the celebrations with you.

All of this was inspired in part by Mrs. J. C.'s blessed event, in part by potentially more dispiriting war news, which I think I will reserve a few weeks in the hopes that it will blow over. The long and the short of it is that we will have the Captain and Mrs. here with us on the West Coast for an indefinite extension, as the Engineer Vice-Admiral has conceived a lively concern about his newest pets that will only be assuaged by investigations on the ground. I am torn between rejoicing and trepidations, but I repeat myself, and I really should finish this letter. The indomitable mother-to-be has led the youngsters on a hike up the mountain. I have begged off with the excuse of fearing a recurrence of gout.

But it is only an excuse, as you will have realised by my mention of that certain library, it being you who forwarded the Earl's instructions to seek the Engineer's guidance concerning Cousin H. C.'s persistent requests for investment in his steel plant. See how I nickname him so respectfully? You, who know me so well, will seek out the irony and suspect that I imply that this honour is as empty as every other "achievement" of the life of his (real) father's son.

The Earl, of course, thinks that the son of the man whose oh-so-successful American life we helped launch will owe us dispassionate advice. I dissent on two grounds. First, gratitude is an odd thing, and in the Engineer's father's heart, I suspect that events in Batavia came long ago to be seen not as Great-Great-Grandfather sweeping a hanging crime under the rug, but rather as an excuse for Great-Grandfather's imposture: that the Engineer has aligned himself with our cousins across the divide of 1823.

So much for the incestuous concerns of our house, because, much more importantly, the Engineer is certainly bitter about this Administration, and dear Cousin H. C. owes virtually everything to it. This, at least, is my excuse for maintaining my side in our difficult interview, in which he did his best to encourage me to invest in the steel enterprise before dismissing me on the grounds that he was "busy" With his memoirs, or with coupon clipping, or with what other vital enterprise having to do with his legacy, I do not know. In any case, Wong Lee, whom I took as my driver on some mad impulse, had to lead me to the car by the shoulder, or I think that I should have burst back into the Engineer's study with some "wisdom of the staircase" that might have descended into fisticuffs.

In many ways, Wong Lee is a wiser man than I, hard as it is to tell when one's eyes go first to that kris scar. A more unlikely male nurse it is harder to imagine: but that is why Grandfather kept him around, I suspect, back when Grandfather was still making decisions. And his boy, who accompanied him, is smart as a whip, always with a "Number One Son" quip on his lips, as big as his father and as fair of face as his mother. (You remember Chang Wei, do you not? I believe that we had to make her a Peruvian to get her into the country. . . .)   I suspect that I am meant to conceive a desire to do a favour for the young man, which will be vouchsafed to me at the right moment. I shall not require much persuading.

Enough of this, then, especially as I owe you a month's worth of the "big" magazines yet. I shall even be able to cover the end of the month, in the unlikely event that major war news troubles the week between Christmas and New Years.

From Now On, No More Defeats: Crazy in the Night

(Now with brutal editorial clarity.)

Fur meine Eltern

Seventy years ago tonight, Bomber Command made its third major raid on the German capital city. 483 Lancasters (and 15 Mosquitos) were despatched. It was a brutally effective raid. The Wikipedia article reports that 1000 wagons (50 trains) bound for the Eastern Front were held up around Berlin for 6 days. It is the kind of blow to the German war effort that the USSBS did not even try to assess, but important for all that military historians do not often try to take such things into account.

On the other hand, this is the raid in which the old Prussian military archives were destroyed. That you will hear about. (Much more, for example, than someone pointing out that the Austrian military archives are fine, and just waiting for someone to use them.)

Petty chiding then falls away at the stark catastrophe so coolly summarised next. Twenty-five Lancasters were lost operationally, and another 28 in recovery due to unexpected low-level cloud over airfields in Britain. It is routine at this point to observe that, above about a 5% loss rate, only a statistically negligible number of bomber crews will survive their tour and go on to train the next generation. This constitutes the great tipping point of air warfare first discovered in WWI, where an air force bleeds experience faster than it can build it up.* Well, the losses over Berlin alone add up to 5.2%.

What is less often observed is that Bomber Command was not just suffering from a human catastrophe. Heavy bombers stand at the apex of industrial effort. The target for  the English Electric and Avro Manchester plants that delivered the Halifax and Lancaster, a target, not often achieved, was 250 planes a month. In January, only 160 would be received, winter being a slack time for industrial deliveries.(1) Bomber Command had just expended over a fifth of that total on a single night. Even given that it did not fly every night, the reason that it did not fly every night was mainly weather. Bomber Command was, in brief,  losing. And the men and women of the Reichsverteidigung were winning. High Wycomb had taken on a job that was beyond the technological capacity of the so-far mobilised work force. One that had to be done, if the Western Front were to be cracked. 

And seventy years and a little less than a month ago, with fully appreciating it, without, certainly, seeing that it had given birth to technological modernity, the Air Staff put the answer in place: 100 Group, Bomber Command.