Postblogging Technology, February 1943, II: To The Gates of the Pure Land

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Wing Commander R_. C_. Q.C., D.F.C.

L_ House, Isle of Axholme, Lincolnshire.

My Dear Father:

I hope you will forgive my impertinence in taking over your correspondence with your cousin again, dear Father-(Out-of)-Law. Uncle is travelling in the East with the redoubtable Wong Lee, and someone here must congratulate you, as I am told that your decoration must otherwise go unpublicised  for now. Uncle is also frantic to continue his campaign on the Earl's patience in respect to electrical engineering versus "little steel." And he has, perhaps, noticed that confinement is wearing on me and that I would welcome this opportunity to make myself useful.

More on Uncle's itnerary. He will be touring facilities in Buffalo on the Boeing matter, but I do not think anyone takes that seriously. The real meat of the trip, it turns out, is a visit to some Heaven-forsaken suburb of Detroit. There is talk of Uncle Henry taking over a white elephant that one of his business partners ran up for an Army contract and cannot now "make go." Fortunately, his son will have the last say in that matter, and Uncle and Edgar have an understanding. Uncle will be returning via Chicago and Vancouver, so you can expect to hear more of our mutual friend, as well as from the yards, on the subject of a mad owner,  dictating minute changes to the refit of Sparrow. 

Needless to say, Uncle is quite beside himself at the prospect of going to war. He will not admit it, but he is jealous of your DFC! I should probably slip and say something about boys being boys if I went on about it. You and he are now definitively pencilled in as guests of honour in Santa Clara for the holiday season of 1946, amongst our family heroes from the wars returning. I hope that you shall be available, as, Heaven willing, your grandchildren will be there.

Postblogging February 1943, I, Technical Appendix: One-Adam-Twelve, Where Are You?

This is sad.

Illustration from an eBay auction

This is cool, even if they are French, notwithstanding the DAK-suggestive shorts and forage caps. The Brits had them, (Northumberlanders, no less) but quietly gave the idea up after 1940. Stupid Brits. Here is relief for all of your "Nazi Superman are our superiors" needs.

Source. Guy seriously likes his German war-motorcycles, but that doesn't make him a Nazi.

  Vroom! Vroom! You can also clothespeg an old hockey card to the spokes of your bike for a taste of the good old stuff. You probably want to do that before you've ridden a heavily-laden motorcycle down a road like this. (Also, important safety tip: do not ride a motorcycle across rough ground in shorts.Also, important safety-related fashion tip: do not buy your leather pants for motorcycle use from non-motorcycle related paraphernalia retailers unless you are very comfortable with your sexuality. Word to the wise.) 

Here's one more  look at the machine that I am implicitly contrasting with  the motorcycles. 

It's so tiny! This is one of the Daimler Dingoes brought ashore at Dieppe by Second Canadian Division. That would encapsulate it were it not for the even more stinging account in Beale's Death by Design. It's an armoured car with no turret, not even a weapon! (Unless you count a Bren Gun, but, seriously, by WWII an LMG is basically a decorative element. Heck, they put them on Matador variants! ) Beale even has some timely quotes from stakeholders who thought that it was grotesquely underarmed, and a tart word or two for the men, apparently cavalry officers, who insisted on features like low height, equal-speed reverse gears and front-and-back steering, all at the expense of proper firepower. The same quotes even show up in Richard Meade's recent biography of Richard McCreery. 

You'll note, though, that the NPOV Wikipedia article has no difficulty in describing the Dingo as "perhaps the best British AFV of World War II." 

Now, this might seem crazy. Here's a thought experiment. Recon units are all supposed to be up at the front looking for things for the artillery to shoot at. So if an armoured car spots something worth an artillery shot, why doesn't the recon unit shoot it? Because it doesn't have a gun? Well, that was stupid. Give the next one a gun!

So here you have the Guy Armoured Car, originally the "Tank, (Light), Wheeled, Mark I." Like the tracked light tanks of the 1940 campaign, it can mount either a Vickers .303 and .50 or a Besa 7.92 and 15mm. (Don't worry, though, as 37mm and even a 6 pounder/75mm model are coming.)

Step back for a second here, though, and consider the figure of merit that I have not handed out yet. The Guy Armoured Car was 7ft, 6 inches high. The AEC Armoured Car was 8ft 4 inches.

The Daimler Dingo was 4ft 11". That makes it good at hiding. I know, I know, there's nothing manly about hiding. Well, unless you're playing in stealth mode, but even then you expect to be able to stab people. The Dingo doesn't stab people. It goes up, it looks around, and then it tells command what it sees, and none the wiser. 

There is nothing more important to proper management than timely intelligence. My whimsical photoessay deserves some caveats, since armoured cars have other roles than reconnaissance, but taking into account the crucial importance of the reconnaissance role, you can see that the constant temptation to shut the crew up in a turret and lumber them with a Very Big Gun represents a tendency to lose the plot. 

There's probably some kind of commentary on the human condition here. I do know that as a middle manager, one of the constant fights within our echelon is over access to timely, useful intelligence, and a never-ending deluge of process intended to extract it, process that is inevitably gamed.

Which is probably why the hugely important subject of military communications in World War II is not better understood. Attempts to study it sidle up to the subject, look it over, bounce off it in sheer boredom, and wander on to tangents. People exchange intelligence on radio? Let's talk about SIGINT! Forward air controllers direct close air support? Let's talk about air war doctrine! Tanks have to talk to infantry, and infantry to tanks? Let's talk about armoured warfare doctrine! Army communications go over cable and telephone lines via switchboards... Actually, you know what? There's no way to make that interesting. Let's pretend its happening in the background and move on to more interesting stuff, like what makes British generals drool, and German generals rule.  

From the perspective of this blog, it's crazy. Radio was arguably the most important thing in people's lives in 1938, and the only reason it got less important after the war was that, I've been told, video killed the radio star.  World War II, you might think, might have had something to do with that. And that, in turn, might have some bearing on this world that we live in.

Anyway...

Postblogging Technology, February 1944, I: A Dwindling Race

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My Dearest Reggie:

The house, or rather houses, are a-whirl with the energy of youth this month. Our distant relative, the actor-turned-Signals-Corps-Captain (you know who I mean) has turned in a handsome apology for his behaviour over the last few months, admitting that he paid far too close attention to "Miss V.C.," and blaming marital troubles, now resolved, for the fact that he "was not himself." He will not, he told me, be making further domestic visits.

I was pleased to accept this resolution. For all of "Mrs. J. C.'s" suspicions --some confirmed, I will ashamedly own-- he is a winning young man with a bright future in politics, if he chooses to pursue it. This affair, if successfully prosecuted, would quite ruin those hopes, and make his father's old age even bleaker than otherwise. (It is odd, or, rather, telling that a divorce should be seen as fatal to one's electoral prospects, while the press will decline to press closely the investigation into any candidate's even most obviously questionable ancestry, but the precedent was set long before our time.) As little as I like the Engineer, I will not deny him the pleasure of seeing his son succeed in a field in which he so resoundingly failed.

But this did not resolve the matter of suitors pressing round "Miss V.C.," because apart from your younger son's obvious interest (speaks the wisdom of age) there is the matter of "Lieutenant A.," who now seems determined to press his own suit. As he is young, single, handsome, born to wealth and well-connected, I see no reason to object if he wishes to insert himself in our social whirl for as long as his Admiral's business keeps him in San Francisco. I have, however, intimated to him that Wong Lee's vigilance is not to be underestimated.

 I also rather hope that he manages to obtain a slightly more modern auto for use social calling soon, however. 

As for "Miss V. C.," and Wong Lee, for that matter, I am pleased, even if I must pretend otherwise, to report that he caught her in the main hall of Chi Wei Tao Wan the other night, trying to enter the west wing. As this would have involved removing the tarpaulin covering the Whale Man, it is rather a serious matter. Your wife still has not found anyone she deems competent to restore it. It may have stood too many seasons of Pacific storms since the Founder's son and daughter were carried through it to be introduced to their grandfather. In any case, I had to explain to "Miss V.C." that Grandfather is being kept isolated out of concerns for his health, and that she might be allowed to visit him by prearranged appointment if properly gowned, and that due to the condition of the main wing of the mansion and the state of preservation of the art in it, the covers must on no account be removed.

None of this was convincing, of course. Indeed, I was as unconvincing as I dared to be, hoping that she would realise that the "appointment" would be a ruse, giving us time to make Grandfather up, while pointing her curiosity towards the furnishings of the main hall.  I have, however, given an undertaking to her parents not to lead her curiosity. When she asked me about the Chinese practice of giving out monetary presents at the Lunar New Year, I had to suppress my temptation to dwell on the significance of red envelopes and the like, and instead claim entire ignorance. 

I could add to this picture of domesticity by painting your youngest and Wong Lee's son posing in their cadet uniforms and of your daughter-in-law in all of her radiance, but since I include photographs, words will not be needed, and I do not, after considering the last number of Fortune, trust myself not to descend into autumnal despair. I could also make some technical comments, but will refrain for a few paragraphs yet, though I will get them out of the way in the first section, as the second section is devoted to investment prospects in insurance, and will, I expect, bore all and sundry.

Postblogging January, 1944, II: Technical Appendix: Mad Science For A Better Tomorrow*

Electrical installation at Consolidated-Vultee's Tucson, Arizona modification centre, some time late in 1943.

Up to the moment I hit "Publish," I share her with one other male gaze. My eye is on the past. His is on the future. Praise the goddess-descended daughter of Elysium. I just hope for his sake that she doesn't freeze him out, that there's a spark there.

Bazinga!

The Siege: Big Week

This week is the seventieth anniversary of Big Week, five days of bombing, 20--5 February 1944, the greatest single victory in the history of the USAF. 

But, first, some introductory remarks, because Big Week had an introduction, too. One will encounter persons, who will remain nameless here, who imagine that the strategic air campaign against Germany as the vain and futile culmination of a virtually entirely theoretical approach to war, or perhaps a cult, or perhaps some kind of self-interested pursuit of institutional (that is) air force interests.

But Big Week had an introduction, and I shall introduce it.

For a few months after I graduated for the last time and had occasion to understand just how much society actually valued the skills that it had so generously subsidised my acquiring, I lived in the kind of flop house that a kind-hearted person will run, in a house on a property worth far more than what was left of the carpentry on it. Buildings fall down on their own if they are neglected, except in a magic world where effort and result are decoupled in whatever way we will, just so that it supports whatever thesis we propose.

Not this, but like it. (It's much nicer now.) Huffington Post

Which is not to say that houses can't be helped to fall down. I lived there with assorted persons and a sweet-tempered Golden Retriever. One of the persons in and out of that house did not like dogs, so when he was around he put the dog in her little kennel. He was glad to be shut of her, and she was perfectly content in her kennel.

Anderson bomb shelter, via Wikipedia.

Close spaces make us feel safe. We dream. We dig, imagining that in depth there is safety.

Subterranea Brittanica

We are wrong. The sign points us to the way out. What humans build, humans can destroy.

This is a postwar picture of the Siemens Schukert works at Nuremberg (credit via Crown), although the corporate identity had been subsumed into their "Bramo" trademark, and then been subsumed again as Bramo's early jet turbines were taken over by BMW.

The raid that destroyed this plant was probably the one of 01/01/1945, of which one website proposes that

"Nürnberg was famous for producing toys and gingerbread cookies, not war materials; it was the ideological center of Nazi Germany and Hitler's favorite city. Nürnberg was regarded as the "most German" of all the cities in Germany, which made it a target for vindictive Allied bombing." 

 This plant was not building gingerbread confections, although the bomb that destroyed it was probably a 4000lb HC "cookie."

Back up a moment, though, to the bomb shelters of Brooklands, which were only effective if people were actually in them. On 4 September, 1940, they were not, as 14 Messerschmitt Bf-110s swept overhead at 1:24pm. A single 250lb bomb punched through the roof of a machine tool shop and detonated on top of a heavy press. A moment later, 83 machinists were dead and 419 were injured. John Terraine's Right of the Line frames this as a raid that "virtually stopped the production of Wellingtons for four days." 

I doubt that the survivors framed it that way. On 24 September, a similar low-level raid Bf 109s hit Vickers-Supermarine Southampton, killing 42, injuring 161, and cutting off municipal services. In the bloodless words of the US Strategic Bombing Survey, this would count as the "loss of a day's production." It was also pretty much the Germans using up the opportunity that a change in tactics always presented. Once barrage balloons were shifted from previous priority targets and proper precautions against splinter damage had been taken, these plants would be very difficult to attack so effectively with low-level tip-and-runs.

This had not escaped the attention of the German Air Staff. On 26 September, 1940, 76 Heinkel He 111s and Ju 88s, "accompanied by 60 Me[sic] 110 twin-engined fighters" managed to drop 70 tons of bombs on a one-square-mile area around the works.Vivid eyewitness testimony describes how a loft where completed wings above a bomb shelter was hit, and how a "blazing tide" of wing ribs followed by burning dope and paint poured into the darkness of the shelter." Most of the 55 killed, although not of the 92 injured, would have been in that shelter (251). 

That was the end for Vickers-Supermarine Southampton, as the works were dispersed. All production at the home of the Spitfire was lost for several months, although fortunately by this time Castle Bromwich was in full production. Even after dispersed manufacture was in full swing, it was calculated in another context that there would have been a loss of 20% of labour on fighter manufacture. (February 1944, 75.) It would have been worse for bomber manufacture, although, fortunately for the RAF, the great Midlands bomber plants that made the Halifax and Lancaster did not have to be dispersed. The German Air Force was never strong enough to make precision daylight attacks into the Midlands, and had instead to resort to area night-bombing campaigns that strove, as second-best to paralyze the general industrial life of a city.

In Big Week, the USAAF did that. (Also, Bomber Command did a fine job of coordinating its night attacks on the "Big Week" targets. But it wasn't beating the German Air Force. It was trying to avoid it, and had not yet come to terms with the fact that it could not do that any longer. a new technological paradigm was needed, but that toybox was going to be kept locked until the night of June 5/6, for fairly obvious reasons.)

Postblogging Technology, January, 1944, II: Best Wishes and Good Fortune in 1944!

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My Dearest Reggie:

The dates have aligned, and I hope we shall have a most auspicious year. "Mrs. J. C."  returned from her specialist's appointment in San Francisco at the beginning of the week in a gay mood, and now there are to be two cribs in the new nursery at the carriage house. Even the endless sound of hammering and nailing in the back as boxes of oranges are sealed and as quickly sent off to Chinese groceries in time for the Lunar New Year celebrations did not affect her feelings.

The arrival of your wife in advance of our Robbie Burns Supper was not, as I feared, a greater test. She and Judith bore the Inspector-Generaltrix's visit with the most magnificent aplomb. All is in order, and "Mrs. J. C." was the most gracious host. We were honoured by "Cousin H. C." and by Cousin Bess, lured out of the sanctuary of her home by the prospect of family, and a chance to spoil her beloved (half-)nephew and niece. We were also honoured, I am pleased to report, by our film star-Signals Corp relative's wife, who attended at the sharp insistence of "Mrs. J.C." Less happily, he brought along a friend, a member of Admiral Halsey's official family, quite handsome, notwithstanding his unfortunate red hair, in naval whites. 

I say "unfortunate" because "Mrs. J.C" believes him to be a stalking horse for his friend's adventuring ways. This strikes me as taking her personal dislike for the young man rather into the realm of the paranoid, but one must make allowances for woman in her condition. And, that said, I have to admit that for all his avuncularity, our patriotic actor relation rather rubs me the wrong way, as you Colonials say.

For example, we had as our guest once again the Provost of Santa Clara University, a clever man, as you have often noted, even amongst the Jesuits, andof long years in these parts and deep understanding of the value of the Poor Clares to our family. He watched without comment as I gave the traditional gifts to the young folk. 

But when "Miss "V.C" opened up her copy of the red-leather bound volume  of the Immortal Poet of Ayrshire's verse, and found within a crisp, new, $100 bill, she was somewhat taken aback. The Provost, as is his wont in other circumstances (have you ever seen him do this at a lunch for the parents of prospective students?) pulled out his old, ivory dog whistle, and told the story of how his grandfather used to be a "redeemer," pursuing fugitive slaves on the shores of the Ohio, and how there was often a crush of redeemers after some well-remunerated refugee, and how, on those occasions, when his dogs found the scent, he would pull out that old whistle, retrieved from a Mound-Builder tomb. "For it is a curious property of this whistle that it can only be heard by mongrel dogs, and none other. Grandfather was careful to keep a mongrel kennel, whereas the other redeemers used the finest bloodhounds for this remunerative work. Thus, Grandfather could call in his dogs without alerting the other redeemers, and many a bounty he took that otherwise would have gone to another."

Then, of course, the Provost held that long pause of his, before adding, as he always does, "Grandfather was an evil, evil man. But he did establish the family fortune that way. A curious thing, though: he never took a fugitive but was dark as deepest Africa, though we all know that slaves come in many colours betwixt coal and milk coffee. Perhaps the mongrels of other species can hear Grandfather's dog whistle, too."  

When I saw our young relation's eyes rise, I saw that, once again, someone had heard the dog whistle. My problem is that there was a hint of malice in the smile he gave then. I do not always approve of the message that the Provost gives when he goes on to talk to parents about how congenial their children will find Santa Clara while fiddling with his whistle. There are many children, however thinly their final coat of white overlies a primer  of coal, or sage, or even vermilion, who would do well at Harvard or Yale, and whose parents do not need to be frightened into sending them to Santa Clara, instead. 

But that hint of malice suggests that quite another message entirely was being heard, and noted.       

Postblogging January 1943: The Most Inevitable Technical Appendix Of All

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Remember those housing start numbers from last time time. The reason I went and looked them up is that I made the mistake of skimming The Economist from the summer of 1947, and was about ready to slit my wrists in the bath. (Fortunately,  my CAD 1000/month one bedroom in Kitsilano doesn't have a bathtub. So yay for high rents through artificial scarcity.) Here's a Trotskyite, of all things, giving us the low down. The fact that The Economist was not known for its Trotskyite sympathies did not prevent its "American Survey" feature from confidently announcing through the whole of the summer of 1947 that by the time that next week's number came out, the bubble would have burst, and that stagflation would be upon us. And they  hadn't even invented "stagflation" yet! The author would just go, oh, there's something fundamentally wrong with the American economy, it's about to crash. Oh, and by the way, the cost of living is out of control! Recession+inflation, just around the corner!

So, yeah, the inevitable technical appendix. It's about jets, of course. 

The trope is that when an old scientist-technician-guy sits down to write his memoirs, there has got to be a bit where the Olds tell him that whatever he's working on will never actually work. There's places and times where I can see that conversation happening, but when you hear it in the context of aviation in the late 1930s, it's ....weird, is what it is. Computers are about the freshest technological progress there is, and I'm 49, and I do not remember a time when there were not computers --right down to predictions of self-driving cars** and artificial intelligence taking our jobs. If I were a 49 year old project manager in 1939, I would very distinctly remember the day that the first heavier-than-air plane flew. And I'm telling Frank Whittle/Hans Ohain that jets will never work? Seriously?

And, yet, jets did not work in 1939--45. Sure, Me 262s and even Gloster Meteors shot some stuff down. As with most of the technological developments of World War II that we notice and care about, the turbojet revolution was mostly in the pipeline when the war ended. 

There's probably some law of human nature here. Plenty of technologies were developed, field-tested and used during the war, but they tend to get the "But what have you done for me lately?" Treatment. Oh, sure, penicillin saved millions of lives, and the technology for mass producing it led directly to the massive postwar orange juice concentrate industry (seriously), apparently via the first experiments with Tang, but does anyone even remember that it was the production of penicillin, and not its "invention," that was the issue? On the other hand, if the technology was still on the way, its proponents had a fairly obvious reason for talking it up: it needed all the help it could get to win funding in the newly constrained postwar environment. All you have to do is look at the helicopter. The folk memory of 1944 is that everyone was promising that we would all be commuting in helicopters real soon.*** There were plenty of articles that said that, of course, but there were also plenty of "Let's be realistic about helicopters" articles. As it happens, it was the semi-trailer, reefer and shipping container that transformed postwar logistics, and while the shipping container has hired a publicist, the rest of it is all lost history.

So what would you have said if you were writing a "Let's be serious about jets" article in February of 1944?