In Key West "Remember the Maine"

Key West "Maine" Memorial

As I huddle indoors enduring the latest polar vortex that has brought record sub-zero temperatures to the Great Lakes, I warmly recall that I began this month in the Florida Keys.  Specifically in Key West, which isn’t all just sun and fun, boats, beaches, and bars.  There are some serious sights to see.

One notable place is the military section of the Key West cemetery.  It’s easy to get to, a moderate walk from most parts of the western, tourist side of the island.  Servicemen from many wars rest there, and not all American, but the prominent memorial is to the 19 sailors buried there after the explosion of the American Navy cruiser Maine in Havana harbor (most of the Maine dead were buried at Arlington National Cemetery).

The Maine was one of the very first American ironclad battleships, still featuring masts in case the steam engines failed.  Because of the nine years between design and completion, and the rapid advance of naval technology, Maine was obsolete when it entered service in 1895.  In January of 1898, it steamed from Key West to Havana to protect U.S. interests during the Cuban uprising against Spanish rule.  Just three weeks later, on February 15, an explosion sunk the ship in Havana harbor.  Over 266 American servicemen men died, while 89 survived.  In March, the U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry, sitting in Key West, declared that a naval mine had caused the blast.  This conclusion has been challenged, and it seems from my reading that most knowledgeable observers today think that a spontaneous internal coal fire ignited the magazines (the Navy brain trust had the Maine using, for ships, a non-standard type of coal, which burned hotter but was prone to producing combustible gases).  

At the time, the sinking of Maine became a rallying cry ("Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!") of those who wanted the US to declare war on Spain.  The warmongers soon got their wish, and after a short war the US emerged victorious and the new ruler of Puerto Rico and the Philippines (and some other places like Wake Island and Guam).  The Spanish-American War at the time was viewed as a great American victory, but actually it is one of the great American misadventures.

Maine sat on the harbor floor until 1911, when the US built a temporary dam around it and patched up the hull.  What was left of the ship was then floated, towed out to sea, and re-sunk some miles off the Cuban coast.  It was a sad ending to a misbegotten ship that was poorly-designed and poorly operated in its power plant, leading to the deaths of nearly 300 young American men in the bloom of youth.  To compound the tragedy, Maine’s destruction was used to start a war absurdly costly in blood and treasure, and whose sequelae burden the United States to this very day. 

And far from tropical Havana, in north-central Illinois, there is this:

A memorial to those who died in the Spanish-American War, in Ottawa, a town in north-central Illinois.
The second body of text begins with "USS Maine seaman Carlton H Jencks." 

The filaments of war reach far and wide.

R Balsamo

The Lufthansa Heist at 40

Today is the 40th anniversary of the incredibly-successful, infamous Lufthansa heist by New York City mobsters.  It paradoxically led, through greed and stupidity, to the destruction of many, if not most, of the men who pulled it off.  Moral of the story — be careful what you wish for.  Martin Scorsese, though, got a great movie out of it, Goodfellas, and he may be one of the few who really profited from it all.

R Balsamo

One Hundred Years After the Armistice That Paused the Carnage

This day marks the one hundredth anniversary of the armistice that paused, for about twenty years, the senseless slaughter of World War One.  It was called “the War to End All Wars,” and would that only to have been true, it might have been worth it all – but it did not and so it was not.  The most prosperous culture in the world, one that certainly should have known better, descended into madness and almost destroyed itself in quick time.  Scores of millions died, all over the world, in the two-part war that only ended in 1945 and whose effects are very much with us today.

As I wrote last year, in the primitive film of 1914 we can clearly see the pompous, murderously-incompetent, half-decrepit generals and the effete, smarmy, oily politicos all parading about in herky-jerky motion, full of themselves, festooned like peacocks with their gaudy European plumes and sashes, leading the world into war for their own petty, obscure, and erratic purposes.  It was all so absurd, so comical if not so unspeakably sad, so utterly infuriating, so unimaginably tragic.

When the war began in 1914, certainly few, if any, however foolish they might have been, could have imagined the horrific carnage that was about to come.  But soon they suffered full well the harsh reality of it all and no doubt most, if they could go back in time, would have none of it.  Yet after almost three years of this madness, revealed to the world in newspapers, in film, in photographs, and in letters, in June of 1917 the Americans crossed an ocean to join in.  They disembarked in France to cheering crowds, smiling while shouting back, it is said, “Lafayette we are here.”  Then over one hundred thousand of them died, and to this day we don’t really know why.

For years afterward mothers and fathers roamed battlefields looking for sons who never returned.  Nonpareil writer Jan Morris evokes the profound sadness of inconsolable loss: 

In one of the lonely cemeteries in which, buried where they died, the Anzacs lay lost among the Gallipoli ravines, the parents of one young soldier wrote their own epitaph to their son, killed so far away, so bravely we need not doubt, in so obscure a purpose: “God Took Our Norman, It Was His Will, Forget Him, No, We Never Will.”

Canadian physician John McCrae, serving as a front-line field surgeon in France, wrote a short poem after the burial of one of his friends killed in battle.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row, [....]
We are the dead, short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

McCrae never returned home either, dying himself later in the war.  He was buried near where he fell.

Western culture paused in the slow suicide it had begun just a few years earlier, one hundred years ago today, and we still bring out the poppies to pretend it all stopped just then.

R Balsamo

Lincoln's Birthday

Today is the anniversary of the birth, in 1809, of Abraham Lincoln.  My small collection of books specifically on his life include the first edition of the one-volume edition of Carl Sandburg’s monumental six-volume biography Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years;  Stephen B. Oates With Malice Toward None – A Life of Abraham Lincoln; the Library of America’s two-volume Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings; James McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution; Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg; and Jan Morris’s Lincoln: A Foreigner’s Quest.  Some of these I’ve read fully, and some in part. 

Interestingly, the only one I’ve hardly touched is perhaps the most famous of all – Sandburg’s biography.  I have a general bias toward more recent scholarship, and I’ve always been suspicious, unfairly no doubt, that Sandburg was too close in time to the actual man, and did not have the benefit of more fulsome scholarship and basic research yet to come.  But it’s on my long get-to list!

Among his many qualities was his sometimes-droll great sense of humor.  One example I enjoy, from Anthony Gross’s The Wit and Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln: 

While walking along a dusty road in Illinois in his circuit days, Lincoln was overtaken by a stranger driving to town.  “Will you have the goodness to take my overcoat to town for me?” asked Lincoln.  “With pleasure, but how will you get it again?” came the response.  Lincoln promptly replied “Oh, very readily.  I intend to remain in it.”

R Balsamo

Allenby and Trump Enter Jerusalem

One hundred years ago today the British World War One Near East offensive against the Ottoman Turks reached Jerusalem on its way north.  General Edmund Allenby famously dismounted and with his officers modestly entered the holy city on foot through the Jaffa Gate, the entry way of the pilgrims of past centuries.  During this military campaign Allenby commanded T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), who was the British liaison to and motivator of the Arab desert fighters against their common enemy, the Turks.    

Allenby Entering Jerusalem on December 11, 1917

In one of those small but telling coincidences of history, President Donald Trump has just announced that the United States is formally recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, which it is in fact, and will move the US embassy there.  This move comports with the previously-stated positions of Presidents William Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, and also of the United States Senate, which in 1995 passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act by massive majorities in the Senate (93-5) and House (374-37) and which just this past June passed a resolution 90-0 reaffirming the American position that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.  President Trump continues to move forward, in a show of strength that will improve the chances of peace, in stark contrast to his recent predecessors who were all talk and no action, and whose fecklessness only led to more strife in a part of the world where, in the end, one can only gain peace through strength.

R Balsamo

American Doughboys Land in France to Join the Madness of World War One, 100 Years On

One hundred years ago today the first American troops landed in France to fight with the Allies in the Great War, as it was later called.  The Yanks were “coming, over there,” as everyone stateside would soon be singing.

They found madness, wrapped in carnage, dripping in disillusionment.  In World War One alone, says a Wikipedia entry, 17 million soldiers and civilians died from wounds and disease, including over one hundred thousand Americans.  And in the Second World War, a direct continuation of the unfinished First, many times more than that would suffer and perish.   

In his masterful treatment The First World War, historian John Keegan writes:  “…the First World War is a mystery.  Its origins are mysterious.  So is its course.  Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of the peaks of its intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict?  Why … did the combatants persist in their military effort … and eventually commit the totality of their young manhood [and much of their civilian populations, I would add here] to mutual and pointless slaughter? …. How did the anonymous millions, indistinguishably drab, find the resolution to sustain the struggle and to believe in [the war’s] purpose?” 

We have film.  We can see the pompous, murderously-incompetent, half-decrepit generals and the effete, smarmy, oily politicos all parading about in herky-jerky motion, full of themselves, festooned like peacocks with their gaudy European plumes and sashes, leading the world into war for their own petty, obscure, and erratic purposes.  It was all so absurd, so comical if not so unspeakably sad, so utterly infuriating, so unimaginably tragic. 

After almost three years of this madness, revealed to the world in newspapers, in film, in photographs, and in letters, in June of 1917 the Americans crossed an ocean to join in. 

R Balsamo

The Battle of Midway, 75 Years On

Lt. Commander John C. Waldron

Today is the 75^th anniversary of the Battle of Midway, in which the American navy defeated a superior Japanese force and turned the trajectory of World War Two in the Pacific. 

After their strategic loss at the Battle of the Coral Sea a month earlier in May, 1942, the Japanese were determined to win a decisive victory over the Americans in one final, massive naval engagement.  Their hope was that the Americans would sue for peace after the destruction of the naval force that served to protect their west coast from invasion.  The Japanese plan was to invade Midway Island, which lies at the far end of the Hawaiian Island chain, over one thousand miles west of the American naval base at Pearl Harbor.

Rather than concentrate their forces, the Japanese, fortunately for the Americans, divided them into multiple prongs of attack.  The spearhead, and most important part, was a strike force of four aircraft carriers and some escort ships that provided the guns to defend against air attack.  Those Japanese carriers did not benefit from the considerable additional defensive firepower the Japanese could have deployed around them had they not split their forces.  The American naval force, the heart of which consisted of the aircraft carriers Yorktown, Hornet, and Enterprise, knew via superior intelligence the overall arrangement of the Japanese strike forces but not their location.  The Americans took a position to the northeast of Midway and waited for the Japanese to arrive.  The American air forces on Midway Island itself took part in the battle and served, in a sense, as a fourth carrier, although their planes were not as effective as those carrier-based.  The battle, once begun, turned on many factors, including American personal initiative and some good fortune in timing. 

A pivotal element of the battle was the courageous role played by a small squadron of the effectively-obsolete, slow and cumbersome Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bombers and the history-changing personal initiative displayed by its commander John Waldron of South Dakota.  From Wikipedia:

[On] June 4, the 15 Douglas TBD-1 Devastators of [squadron] VT-8 launched from Hornet's flight deck in search of the enemy.  Before takeoff, [Lieutenant Commander John Charles] Waldron, [VT-8’s commander,] had a dispute with the Hornet's Commander, Air Group, Stanhope C. Ring, and Hornet CO Marc Mitscher about where the Japanese carriers would be found.  Despite having a contact report showing the Japanese southwest of Hornet, Mitscher and Ring ordered the flight to take a course due west, in the hopes of spotting a possible trailing group of carriers.  Waldron argued for a course based on the contact report, but was overruled. Once in the air, Waldron attempted to take control of the Hornet strike group by radio.  Failing that, he soon split his squadron off and led his unit directly to the Japanese carrier group.  Leading the first [American] carrier planes to approach the Japanese carriers [in the entire battle,] Waldron was grimly aware of the lack of fighter protection [as those fighters had run out of fuel,] but true to his plan of attack committed Torpedo 8 [squadron] to battle.  Without fighter escort, underpowered, with limited defensive armament, and forced by the unreliability of their own torpedoes to fly low and slow directly at their targets, the Hornet torpedo planes received the undivided attention of the enemy's … Zero fighters.  All 15 planes were shot down.  Of the 30 men who set out that morning, only one – [pilot] Ensign George H. Gay, Jr. – survived.  

Their sacrifice, however, had not been in vain.  Torpedo 8 had drawn down the fighter cover over the Japanese carriers, and also forced the carriers to maneuver radically, delaying the aircraft relaunching to which the Japanese were committed.  After further separate attacks by the remaining [later-arriving] two torpedo squadrons over the next hour, Japanese fighter cover and air defense coordination had become focused on low-altitude defense.  This left the Japanese carriers exposed to the late-arriving SBD Dauntless dive bombers from Yorktown and Enterprise, which attacked from high altitude.  The dive bombers fatally damaged three of the four Japanese carriers, changing the course of the battle.

American dive bombers returned early the next day to sink the fourth Japanese carrier, but not before that carrier sent off waves of its own planes that attacked and severely damaged the American carrier Yorktown, which was soon thereafter sunk by a torpedo from a Japanese submarine.  Having lost all four carriers of their strike force, the Japanese turned back toward Japan.  It was a great though costly American victory.

Ensign Gay, whose plane was the first of his squadron to take off from the Hornet that morning of battle, continued to serve after Midway.  From Wikipedia:

Gay [later] took part in the Guadalcanal Campaign with Torpedo Squadron 11, and he later became a Navy flight instructor.  He was awarded the Navy Cross, Purple Heart and Presidential Unit Citation for his actions in combat at Midway. He was also later awarded the Air Medal.  After World War II, he spent over 30 years as a pilot for Trans-World Airlines.  He often lectured on his Midway experiences, and authored the book Sole Survivor.…  [In] 1994, Gay died of a heart attack [at age 77]….  His body was cremated and his ashes spread at the place that his squadron had launched its ill-fated attack.

Churchill’s words after the Battle of El Alamein are just as apposite for Midway and the Pacific War – “This is not the end.  It is not even the beginning of the end.  But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."  The pivotal Battle of Midway, 75 years ago today.

R Balsamo

Related link:

El Alamein at 70 –“The End of the Beginning"

The Battle of the Coral Sea, 75 Years On

Douglas SBD Dauntless Dive Bomber

These few days, May 3-8, mark the 75th anniversary of the pivotal Battle of the Coral Sea, off the northeast coast of Australia, in which the American military, for the first time since the outbreak of the war with Japan five months earlier, checked the Japanese advance in the South Pacific.  It was the first major engagement for American forces since the attack at Pearl Harbor.  Although considered a naval battle, for the first time in history the opposing warships never saw one another or even fired on one another – all the attacking was done by airplanes.

In the Solomon Island chain far northeast of Australia, the Japanese had advanced further south and had just invaded Tulagi with the intention of building an airbase there (and they would soon expand onto the larger, neighboring island of Guadalcanal).  From there land-based Japanese airplanes could attack supply and troop ships traveling from the United States to Australia.  Having broken the Japanese naval code, the American Navy knew that a Japanese fleet was planning to enter the Coral Sea, protected on its flanks by airbases on Tulagi and the north coast of New Guinea, and invade the southern coast of New Guinea at Port Moresby, just north of Australia.  If successful, the Japanese would have a base close to Australia from which they could stage air attacks and even an invasion.

The American Navy responded by sending a force of its own.  American carrier-based planes first attacked the Japanese ships around Tulagi.  Then the two fleets engaged in a fierce, running air battle.  The American attack planes were the well-regarded Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber and the effectively-obsolete Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bomber; some large, land-based American B-17 bombers, flying out of Australia, also took part.  The American fighter was the Grumman F4F Wildcat.  The fleets initially had such trouble finding each other that later one American admiral called it “the most confused battle area in world history.”  The Americans inflicted heavy damage, but suffered the same as well, including the devastating loss of the Lexington, then one of only a handful of aircraft carriers in the entire American Navy.  The Lexington, converted from the hull of a battlecruiser, was slower and less-maneuverable than the purpose-built Yorktown, the other American carrier in the battle.

The USS Lexington under attack at the Battle of the Coral Sea (from Wikipedia)

In a weighing of ships, planes, and men lost, it was a tactical victory for the Japanese.  But after a feint by the American carriers Hornet and Enterprise, which had arrived in the Coral Sea just after the battle, it was the Japanese who withdrew and abandoned the invasion of the southern coast of New Guinea.  So in the end the slugging match was a significant strategic American victory.  Though badly damaged, the Yorktown was able to limp off to Pearl Harbor and be trussed up in a flurry of repairs, just in time to sail off and help win, a month later, the tide-turning great Battle of Midway.

R Balsamo

Off the Bookshelf: Sloan’s My Years with General Motors

I’ll never get through the many books I’ve been saving up to read if I keep revisiting old favorites.  I’ve just finished my third time cruising through My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan, the man who steered General Motors into the giant, influential corporation it is today.  I bought my copy in May of 1995 and first read it then; I know that because I've used the folded receipt as a bookmark.  The book is partly a history of the General Motors company and partly a history of the early automobile industry.  It is also a case study on developing an organizational structure that can properly manage and lead a growing company, and evolve with it.

Sloan was a young MIT-educated engineer who in 1898 at the tender age of 23 seized a risky opportunity to take over a failing company that made bearings used in machinery.  He and a partner slowly built it up through hard work, attention to cost-effective manufacturing, technological advancement, and responsiveness to customers.  Eventually in 1916 he sold the company to the fledgling General Motors, which then was a holding company of a hodge-podge of automobile manufacturers and related parts producers patched together by wheeler-dealer Billy Durant.  At that point Sloan took the second big risk in his life, trading his large stake in his company for mostly stock in General Motors, whose future, especially given Durant’s inattention to sound business administration, was uncertain.  Sloan survived many trying times as a senior executive under Durant’s erratic leadership, given that almost all of his net worth was tied up in the company stock.  But Sloan’s high risk, high reward gamble paid off in time.  By the early 1920s Durant was deep in a financial crisis, and eventually Sloan emerged as the chief executive.  He righted the ship by further developing the management techniques which had made him a successful businessman, methods that became the foundation of modern business management.

Although there are some dry parts when Sloan gets to discussing organizational structure and finances, most of the book is a very engaging read for someone with a general interest in the history of the American automobile industry.  The narrative covers a wealth of topics from the early days of the automobile, including:  Durant’s wheeling and dealing from his original base in Buick to buy the group of automobile companies that would become GM; the engineering and manufacturing issues presented by resident engineering genius Charles Kettering’s attempt to develop a competitive air-cooled engine; the success of GM’s consumer-focused business model – “a car for every purse and purpose” – against Ford’s failed “any color as long as it’s black” approach; the development of leaded-gasoline and high-compression engines; GM’s groundbreaking role in the development of the diesel-electric motors that would supplant steam power in railroad locomotives; the company’s struggles to survive the Depression; the challenges of shifting to production of military vehicles and war materiel during the Second World War; and the styling revolution led by the legendary Harley Earl.        

My Years with General Motors seems to be regarded as one of the seminal books on business management.  In an introduction, business administration guru Peter Drucker calls it “a must read.”  The cover of my paperback edition quotes Bill Gates saying that Sloan’s book “is probably the best book to read if you want to read only one book about business.”  I certainly cannot gainsay this sentiment.  But I read the book mostly for its narrative history and stories of engineering challenges encountered and solved.  Sloan’s book is a great read even for non-MBA types interested in how the great vehicles of today came to pass.

R Balsamo 

Illinois River Ride & War Memorials

Ottawa Civil War Monument

On a beautiful, unusually warm Indian Summer day, we decided to take a long and leisurely drive along a stretch of the Illinois River and see the beginning of the fall colors.  We were a bit early for the colors but it was a wonderful tour just the same.  I hoped to visit the war memorials in Ottawa and Marseilles.

Ottawa is a small Illinois city which sits at the confluence of the Illinois and Fox Rivers, near the historic Starved Rock.  The old Illinois and Michigan Canal pathway runs through town on its way to its terminus a short way to the west in the town of LaSalle.  The Canal ran parallel to the river, connecting Lake Michigan, via the Chicago River, with the Illinois at the point where the latter became sufficiently navigable for larger cargo ships.  From the Illinois River a ship can travel to the Mississippi River and down to the Gulf of Mexico.  The Canal is no longer operable and many sections are dried up, but its path can still be seen. 

Statues of Lincoln & Douglas Debating

Ottawa was the home of the founder of the Boy Scouts, and there is a Scouting Museum now open.  The town was also one of the sites of the infamous Radium Girls tragedy, in which clock-making workers licked radioactive paintbrushes only later to suffer radiation illness.  And perhaps most famously, Ottawa was the site of the first of seven Lincoln-Douglas debates, held in 1858 between the two men to promote their candidacies for the United States Senate.  Lincoln famously lost, of course, but was so impressive that he was nominated two years later as the second Republican Party candidate for the Presidency.

Plaque at the Site of the First Lincoln-Douglas Debate

In the center of town, near old stately courthouses, is the large Washington Square Park, the site of that famous debate and now of two touching war memorials.  The larger is a tall obelisk dedicated in 1873 to the fallen of the Civil War.  Names were etched at the base but are mostly eroded now from wind and rain.  

Recently, stone panels were laid nearby with the names etched once again, of the fallen in the Civil War and the Spanish American War.  I didn’t see it, but no doubt present is the name of General W. H. L. Wallace, an Ottawa resident and one of the heroes of the critical Hornet’s Nest valiant hold out at the battle of Shiloh, which allowed the rest of the Union Army to survive and bought time for Grant to regroup his forces and eventually win the battle; Wallace was mortally wounded there and died three days later in his wife’s arms, saying in his last breath "We meet in heaven."  

Ottawa Memorial to the fallen of WWI, WWII, Korea, & Vietnam 

A second, later monument in Washington Square Park is dedicated to the fallen of World Wars One and Two and of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, all of whose names are once again etched in stone. 

East of Ottawa, also along the Illinois River, is the small town of Marseilles and the site of the Middle East Conflicts War Memorial.  It’s a bitterly sad and haunting place, with tall, granite sections of wall crammed with the names of the fallen, sitting high on the river bank where one can see and hear the rapids below.  As the water churns one contemplates the heroic but tragic loss of brave and sweet life, nobly sacrificed on people so often filled with rage and hate and for a confused and misguided purpose of such fleeting effect.

The Marseilles Memorial to the Fallen of Middle East Wars

R Balsamo

Saint Nicholas, the Christian Bishop Who Became Santa Claus, & Turkish Chutzpah

Desubleo: Saint Nicholas

Knowing that today is the feast day of Saint Nicholas, the fourth century Greek Christian bishop in Anatolia upon whom the character Santa Claus is based, I took a few minutes to read up a bit on him.  And, as the saying goes, you learn something every day.

This I already knew:  That Nicholas was known to freely give gifts, often in secret, to the needy, and his practice became the basis for the Christian custom of gift-giving at Christmastime; That somehow the practice of gift-giving was moved, for most Christians, to Christmas Day; That the name Santa Claus comes from the Dutch name “Sinterklaas,” which is some sort of linguistic corruption of “Saint Nicholas.”    

What I did not know was that Nicholas was one of the bishops at the First Council of Nicaea and was such an ardent defender of the “orthodox” Christian position on a point of Christology against that of Arius that, according to legend, he punched Arius in the face.  Nicholas was one of the signatories to the Nicene Creed, a variation of which is still recited in many Christian churches today.

Most art work on St Nicholas seems to be in the Orthodox tradition, two-dimensional and unrealistic, but I came across an appealing painting on the subject by the 17^th Century Flemish painter Michele Desubleo, who spent his career in Italy: “Saint Nicholas with the three school children and a Carthusian monk.”

Nicholas died in 343 and was buried in southern Anatolia.  His tomb became a popular religious site to visit.  About 700 years later, the area was threatened by the invasion of the Muslim Turks.  To protect the relics of St Nicholas, some of his remains were whisked off to Bari in the heel of Italy.  The rest were soon carried off to Venice, a maritime culture especially drawn to the patron saint of sailors, where a church in honor of Nicholas was built on the Lido, one of the islands in the lagoon. 

Church of San Nicolò al Lido, Venetian Lagoon

An amusing epilogue:  According to Wikipedia, in 2009 “the Turkish Government announced that it would be formally requesting the return of St. Nicholas's skeletal remains to Turkey from the Italian government” on the grounds that Nicholas’s remains “were illegally removed from his homeland.”

So here we have it:  the Muslim Turks, increasingly becoming more religiously fundamental and even less-hospitable toward Christians, and not all that long after slaughtering the Christian Armenians, and who as a people were not even living in Anatolia at the time of Nicholas, now are demanding the seventeen hundred-year old remains of a Christian man who once lived in Anatolia hundreds of years before Muhammad was even born.  There’s a Yiddish word for this – chutzpah.  St Nicholas was part of a Christian culture in Anatolia that the Turks purposefully destroyed, but now the Muslim Turks want his dusty bones back presumably to promote Christian tourism.  I suspect the Turks will be waiting a long time, but if they are really serious about the principle of returning old stuff to rightful owners they could start with a show of their bona fides by returning to Christians Hagia Sophia, once the greatest church in Christendom, and whatever holy artifacts survived the centuries of their wanton destruction.  And, while they’re at it, why not return the entire city of Constantinople?  Now that would be a real show of good faith.

R Balsamo

Veterans on Film

Today is Veterans' Day, and it seems worthwhile to list some of my favorite film portrayals of the valor and sacrifices and successes of American servicemen.

American Sniper – the story of brave and dedicated American soldiers fighting against vicious, fanatical, nihilistic Islamist warriors during the Iraq War.

Tears of the Sun – a team of Navy Seals undertakes a dangerous goodwill rescue mission in Africa.

We Were Soldiers – the harrowing account of one of the early battles in the American Vietnam War.

Go Tell the Spartans – Bert Lancaster leads a small force holding out against the Viet Cong.

Platoon – American soldiers fight to survive in Vietnam.

Pork Chop Hill – A brave American unit fighting the Chinese communists in the Korean War.

Band of Brothers – The masterpiece 11-hour treatment of the Stephen Ambrose book about a unit of the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles, in the European Theater of WW2, made pre-911 by Spielberg before he later devolved into the anti-American moral equivalency state-of-mind.  

A Bridge Too Far – Epic treatment of the Allies' failed Operation Market Garden initiative in 1944 Europe, aimed at penetrating into Germany itself.  

The Bridge at Remagen – War-weary American soldiers fight toward the Rhine River in early 1945 and ultimately capture the last remaining bridge into Germany.

Saving Private Ryan – The story of a special mission behind German lines in northern France in the days immediately after D-Day.

The Big Red One – The story of a squad of the 1st Infantry Division as it fights across North Africa, Sicily, and France in WW2.

The Battle of the Bulge – Epic adaptation of the American resilience in the face of the German Army's last gasp in the West during WW2.

Miracle at St. Anna – The story of four black American soldiers caught behind German lines in northern Italy late in WW2 fighting to keep themselves and local villagers alive, a story not over until it explodes into a modern murder mystery.

Fury – A recent film about an American tank crew late in WW2, very good until its unrealistic and contrived grand finale shootout.

Sahara – An isolated motley group of Allied soldiers with a single Sherman tank led by Bogart battle thirst, heat, and the Germans in the North African desert during WW2.

The Enemy Below – An American destroyer chases a crafty German submarine in the North Atlantic in WW2.

U-571 – An American submarine crew fights to save themselves, the German submarine they captured and are stuck in, and a secret decoding machine in the North Atlantic in WW2.  

Memphis Belle – A B-17 crew's harrowing bombing missions over Germany.

The Bridge On the River Kwai – A lone cynical American serviceman witnesses the descent into madness and treason by British officers in a Japanese prison camp, escapes, and reluctantly returns to set things right.

Midway – The story of the great naval air battle six months after Pearl Harbor that spelled the beginning of the drawn-out end of the Japanese navy in WW2.  

Objective Burma – American soldiers create havoc behind Japanese lines in Burma.

The Pacific – The Spielberg-Hanks treatment of Americans in the Pacific Theater in WW2, that remains compelling viewing despite its lapses at times into the Anti-American moral equivalency point of view.

The Great Raid – Army Rangers on a mission to rescue American prisoners in a brutal Japanese POW camp in the Philippines late in the War.

The Lost Battalion – A outnumbered group of American soldiers trapped behind enemy lines fights off waves of German soldiers in the closing days of WW1.

What Price Glory – Ford directs Cagney and Dailey, not to mention Corrine Calvet, in a rousing story of an American infantry unit on the Western Front in WW1.

Gettysburg – The superbly told story of the greatest battle of the American Civil War.  The portrayal of the heroic 20th Maine and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain at Little Round Top is special.

Patrick O’Brian at 100 – Remembering His Remarkable Aubrey-Maturin Series of Historical Fiction

Today would have been the 100^th birthday of Patrick O'Brian, author of a remarkable feat of historical fiction – a story spanning 20 and one-half books of the particular friendship and adventures of English naval captain, expert navigator, and amateur mathematician Jack Aubrey and Irish/Catalan noted physician, spy, and naturalist Stephen Maturin.  At first drawn together by their love of music, they become fast and somewhat improbable friends and serve together in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, through battles and intrigue, loves and losses, sickness and injury, and wealth and impoverishment, all while fighting the French, their allies, and their spies across the globe on both land and sea.   

O’Brian was not only a great storyteller but was as well a meticulous researcher.  The series is a treasure for its complexity of plot, depth of characterizations, and fascinating period detail about flora, fauna, food, drink, and sailing ships.  His use of authentic language and nautical terms is impressive, though it takes some getting used to (but I now know quite a bit about the weather gauge, slipping one’s anchor, and the danger of a lee shore).  And there’s plenty of history and geography, music and mores, and of course battle strategy and tactics. 

Patrick O'Brian

Humor abounds, usually subtle and dry but sometimes broad (the dog watches being curtailed and choosing the lesser of two weevils come quickly to mind).  The writing style, the depth of slowly-drawn detail, takes no small measure of perseverance at first.  In that regard the story is like a fine tawny port – strong and an acquired taste, but once hooked, exquisite and sublime. 

Fame and fortune came late to O’Brian, when he was more than half-way through the series whose first volume, Master and Commander, was published in 1969.  Living modestly and reclusively with his beloved wife, he wrote for decades in a small house in a French Catalan village on the Mediterranean coast near the Spanish border.  When he passed away in January of 2000 he was partway through the 21^st book, which has been published as-is up to the point he left off the last time at his desk, with alternating pages of a photocopy of a single hand-written page paired with a typed transcription. 

In 2003, director Peter Weir premiered a beautiful, richly-layered film which drew on a number of story elements from different parts of the series – “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.”  And of note, the handwritten manuscripts for eighteen of the Aubrey-Maturin novels, as well some first editions and other pieces from O’Brian’s body of work, were acquired by the special collections Lilly Library at Indiana University, where I was fortunate to see them all displayed at the 2008 exhibition “Blue at the Mizzen” (which is the title of the last full volume in the series).

For well over 15 years I have been enjoying this long tale; whenever I get through the last volume I just start all over at the beginning.  I always have a book going, and I find I read it sporadically in fits and starts, daily for stretches, and then maybe not at all for a few weeks while consumed by other books; but I am never very long away from the story.  If the joy has not yet been yours, by all means get the helpful lexicon and the geography guide, start at the beginning, and stick with it in the first three volumes and let O'Brian hit his stride.  As Lucky Jack Aubrey is wont to say, there is not a moment to lose.

R Balsamo

Remembering Churchill, at 140

Today is the 140^th anniversary of the birth of Winston Churchill.  I don’t remember when my particular interest in him began.  No doubt I was aware early on, through all those WWII movies and books I voraciously consumed.  But there was certainly much more to his life than his war days, and over time that came into focus for me.  I now own over 40 books by or about the man, and I have read most of them.  My first perhaps was the one-volume biography by Martin Gilbert, a condensation of his much longer treatment.  My favorite is the two-volume The Last Lion by William Manchester, and for an emphasis on his personal life and habits I like The Private Lives of Winston Churchill by John Pearson.  Of Churchill’s own work I have especially enjoyed My Early Life, The River War, and The History of the English Speaking Peoples.  There was much to find and much to learn in studying the life of this most remarkable of men.

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born on November 30, 1874, into a life of privilege and wealth.  He was the grandson of a duke and the son a rich American heiress.  He was born premature, so it was said, in the coat room of his grandfather the Duke of Marlborough’s majestic Blenheim Palace.  He had a very confident, perhaps overconfident, independent nature; and surprisingly, for a great speaker, he also had a lisp, which he worked hard all his life to mask and overcome.  After a much neglected childhood, with indifferent and self-absorbed parents, he attended Sandhurst, the British military academy analogous to the American West Point, from which he graduated a cavalry officer.  His mother, quite the socialite, often pulled strings with her many friends and lovers to secure advantages for her son. 

As a young man he had a remarkable career as an army officer, war correspondent, and writer, often all simultaneously.  He sought out military action wherever then it was, and often at the same wrote dispatches to newspapers back home for pay.  Then shortly thereafter he would write a book about it all.  He always had a lifestyle that required plenty of cash, more than he was earning as an officer even when supplemented by an allowance from his mother.  So he wrote, and wrote well.

He was an observer and correspondent during the Cuban revolution of 1895 while on a leave from the army.  He was posted to India, where he was a skilled polo player.  While there in 1897 he joined a unit in northwest India fighting a local tribe and served with distinction, and also was well paid for his reporting from the front.  The following year, through his mother’s influence he secured a choice position in Kitchener’s punitive expedition up the Nile to confront an army of frenzied Islamic militants.  The march to the Sudan was in part to avenge the murder there of the popular British official Charles "Chinese" Gordon, of whom Churchill wrote "a man careless alike of the frown of men or the smiles of women, of life or comfort, wealth or fame."  In that campaign at the Battle of Omdurman he was part of the last cavalry charge of the British Army. 

In 1899 Churchill left the Army, lost an election for Parliament, and headed off to South Africa to cover the Boer War as a newspaper correspondent.  While an observer on a British scouting mission in an armored train car, he bravely, though illegally, took charge while under fire at a critical moment during a Boer attack and saved many, though he was captured.  He famously escaped from a prison camp in Pretoria and found his way to safety in British territory, where he was hailed as a hero.  Though he continued as a war correspondent, he then rejoined the Army for its ultimately victorious campaign.  He eventually returned to Britain, left the Army once again, and won the first of many elections to Parliament. 

Churchill was an influential political leader right from the start, joining a group of young reform-minded Conservatives. In 1904, he left the party in a fight over free trade, which he supported, and joined the Liberals.  With them he held many important leadership positions, culminating in being appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, the head of the British navy, a post he held for over three years extending into the start of WWI.  While there he upgraded, modernized, and developed new technologies (such as the tank, despite his being in charge of the navy, not the army).  After the disaster of the Gallipoli campaign which he had helped formulate, he took much of the blame, unfairly in my opinion, and resigned.  He then reactivated in the Army and served as a front line senior officer on the brutal Western Front.  

His reputation quickly recovered and he returned to a series of government leadership positions.  He led the British support for military action in the Russian Civil War and the Irish War of Independence.  Then in 1924 he left the Liberals and rejoined the Conservative Party, saying at the time that "anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat."  He became Chancellor of the Exchequer (akin to Treasury Secretary in the US) and led the country’s return to the gold standard, which turned out to be an economic disaster.

The Conservative government was defeated in the 1929 general election.  Churchill remained a Member of Parliament, but fought with others in his party over free trade, which he still supported, and home rule for India, which he did not.  With no leadership position and his party out of office, Churchill became a backbencher in Parliament in what he described as his “wilderness years.”  He spent that time writing books and articles, painting, traveling on speaking tours (including a long one through the United States), enjoying his country estate Chartwell, and, most importantly, increasingly warning the near-heedless free world of the growing danger of Nazi Germany. 

Melding wisdom with wit, Churchill is said to be the third most quoted source in the English language, after the Bible and Shakespeare.  Once when asked about a fancy London dinner he had just attended, he said "it would have been splendid, if the wine had been as cold as the soup, the beef as rare as the service, the brandy as old as the fish, and the maid as willing as the Duchess."  He was a truly prodigious drinker all of his adult life, yet he lived past 90, explaining that “I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me.”  He described Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”  Although an excellent writer, Churchill once remarked that the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition is "the sort of English up with which I will not put."  He described the socialist Labour politician Clement Attlee as "a modest man with much to be modest about."  He said that "the vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings, whereas the virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery."  He averred that "communism was a religion – Jesuits without Jesus."  Finally, in a story perhaps apocryphal, Churchill's perennial political sparring partner Lady Astor once said to him that if he were her husband she would poison his coffee, to which he replied that if she were his wife he would drink it.   
 

When war broke out again in 1939, at two months shy of his 65th birthday Churchill was returned to power and the rest, as they say, is better known history of this most remarkable man.

In the last volume of the Pax Britannica trilogy, his near-poetic, masterly, pointillist history of the events and ethos of the British Empire, James Morris wrote of Churchill at the time of his death on January 24, 1965:

He had become the living exemplar of British glory.... and the most universally honoured man on earth.... [N]ot only his own nation, but half the world paused wondering and reverent to mourn him.  It was like that moment of antiquity when, the wild god Pan having died, strange music sounded and spirits moved from one end to the other of the classical world.  Churchill had gone, and a sigh, part regret, part wry, part sentimental, went round the nations.

R Balsamo

Remembering the Liberal Lie of the Kitty Genovese Murder -- 50 Years Later

Catherine "Kitty" Genovese

Today is the 50th anniversary of the horrible murder in New York City of a young woman named Kitty Genovese. Amidst hundreds of murders that year, in NYC and elsewhere, that particular one became famous because of the New York Times coverage. As the published story went, a young woman returning home late at night was attacked on the street in front of her large apartment building, and her screams were ignored by scores of her neighbors, who, as the narrative went, did nothing out of fear and apathy. The story made national news as a sign of a developing social pathology.

I remember the event. I was in 6th grade at the time, in a Chicago suburb. My teacher told us students the story and led many discussions about it, and the topic came up in later classes for some years. It is one of the very few single events I can remember being discussed in those early years of mine, that’s how big a national story it was.

Now, years later, we know the media narrative was a lie. In fact, only a few people heard her screams, which were hard to differentiate from the background din of raucous city life in a rough neighborhood.  And in fact, at least one resident did call the police and at least one yelled out the window. The real story is one of a young woman walking alone late at night to her apartment building who was attacked by a mentally ill psychopath on the prowl for a victim. The murderer was, in fact, initially scared off by shouts from the apartment building but only hid nearby, returning to the still-alive victim when the police failed to arrive. The New York Times needed a sensational story to sell papers, and then as now loved a story angle that put average Americans in a bad light.

Thus the myth of the 38 apathetic bystanders was born. And it was all a lie, from the same NY Times that some years earlier suppressed the truth about Stalin’s mass starvation of millions of farmers in the Soviet Union out of sympathy for his socialistic intentions, a disgrace which the newspaper to this day has not even acknowledged let alone apologized for. Among the many real truths of the Kitty Genovese story is that the liberal media in general and the New York Times in particular cannot be trusted to tell the truth.

J Greco

One revisionist look:
http://nypost.com/2014/02/16/book-reveals-real-story-behind-the-kitty-genovese-murder/

Remembering Banjo Patterson and Waltzing Matilda

Today is the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Andrew Barton "Banjo" Patterson (link), the man who in 1895 wrote the lyrics to Waltzing Matilda, a song often regarded as the unofficial national anthem of Australia.  I first heard it as a boy in the early 1960s at the Boy Scout Camp Shin-Go-Beek in central Wisconsin.  There were a few hundred of us at a time at those annual summer camps, and I think we sang this song, and a few others, every day at lunch and dinner; interestingly though, Waltzing Matilda is the only one I can specifically remember.  Of course, I had no idea then what any of the nouns meant – swagman, billabong, coolibah tree, billy, jumbuck, tucker-bag – they seemed borrowed from a foreign language.  As it turns out, they were – Australian!

Patterson was quite a fellow.  He grew up in the Australian outback and, although becoming a lawyer, is best known as a writer – he wrote lyrics, penning the words to Waltzing Matilda; poetry, including The Man from Snowy River (which was later twice made into a movie); novels; sports reports; and finally dispatches from the front, serving as a war correspondent during the Second Boer War in southern Africa and the Boxer Rebellion in China.  He also served in WWI first as an ambulance driver and later as an officer in the Australian Army, with which he was wounded in France.  He eventually settled down as a farmer in later years and died in 1941, during WWII, at age 76. 

I’ve heard many versions of Waltzing Matilda over the years, but perhaps the best (despite omitting the third verse), slowly paced with a wistful, melancholy air, is one by the late Tom Dundee, from a town far from Down Under – Chicago.  I’ll almost certainly never learn if he first heard the song deep in the Wisconsin woods, but his version is available on iTunes, where I discovered it and bought it some years ago.

R Balsamo

Islam Intimidates the West – the Rushdie Murder Contract 25 Years Ago Today

Award-winning "Piss Christ" "artwork"

Twenty five years ago today Islamic Iran’s top religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini ordered (link) Muslims to kill Muslim author Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, a recently-published novel that Khomeini and many other Muslims felt insulted Islam.  This murder order, a type of “fatwa”, sent Rushdie into hiding and split the Western world into those who condemned the murder order outright and those who, while not explicitly endorsing it, criticized Rushdie for hurting the sensitive feelings of Muslims.  Muslims all over the world took notice of the response in the West, in the Judeo-Christian world.  This public, world-wide murder contract served to put the Western world on notice that death, any place at any time, might be the penalty for any perceived insult to Islam, and served as a very successful preemptive gag order on public Western thought.

Those moderns apologetic about Western culture, known as liberals in America, generally give Muslims a pass on behaviors they, the liberals, claim to care deeply about, such as women’s rights (but wearing a full body bag is liberating, and it’s not really genital mutilation but rather a ritual, symbolic “nick”), freedom of speech (but we need to be especially sensitive when we talk about religion, except for Christianity of course), freedom of religion (but we need to be culturally sensitive when Muslims kill Muslims who want to leave Islam for another religion), freedom of sexual expression (but we really need to be culturally sensitive when Muslims kill homosexuals), and freedom to not be blown up (but we must look inward to understand why we have made them so angry at us, and then change ourselves).  These practices not uncommon in the Muslim world are not really problems, and to the extent they might be it’s really all our fault, but damn those troglodyte, medieval American Christians who want to ban third trimester abortions!   

Liberals working in movies, TV, theater, on stage, and in the arts make fun of Christianity and Christian religious figures all the time.  Christianity is fair game for attacks by haters – the award-winning piece of "art" called “Piss Christ” (link) is a perfect case in point, consisting of a crucifix, a representation of the crucified Jesus Christ, placed in a jar of the “artist’s” urine, funded by American taxpayers and defended and celebrated by liberals everywhere (freedom of speech!).  Academics also love to whack Christianity  – remember the "Stomp on Jesus" college class exercise (link)?; I'm still waiting for the "Stomp on Muhammad", but not holding my breath.  But in a rare, unplanned candid moment, an entertainer or artist may admit that Islam is off limits because, after all, who wants to be killed for a novel or a joke or a movie or a picture of Muhammad in a jar of urine; and anyways, Christians are such soft targets since they turn the other cheek, but those Muslims, well, better not mess with them.          

Even Jimmy Carter, a Democrat American president, urged a show of sensitivity to the hurt feelings of Muslims over Rushdie’s book and held Rushdie partially responsible (in a variation of the long-recognized "Blame America First" mind-set).  Per Wikipedia (link): 

Former United States president Jimmy Carter, while condemning the threats and fatwā against Rushdie, stated, "we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence the added embarrassment of the Ayatollah's irresponsibility".  He also held that Rushdie must have been aware of the response his book would evoke: "The author, a well-versed analyst of Moslem beliefs, must have anticipated a horrified reaction throughout the Islamic world".  He saw a need to be "sensitive to the concern and anger" of Muslims....

"Sensitive to the anger of Muslims" – an endorsement of the heckler's veto (link; incidentally, a term coined by a UChicago professor).  Well, I'm offended by "Piss Christ" and its funding by the American government, but so far I haven't heard Jimmy Carter express concern about my feelings and chastise the "artist".  Carter’s public spinelessness, and that of so many others in the West, communicated a lot to the Muslim world (to wit, Osama bin Laden’s obliquely calling America and the West a “weak horse” [link]) and encouraged many true believers in it to continue to test limits against Western values.  Such testing continues today, and although it arguably started with the Suez crisis it gathered steam with the seizure of the American Embassy in Iran and long mistreatment of the Americans captured there, two events which then-President Carter was too weak and too conflicted to handle.  As wags have suggested somewhat tongue-in-cheek, perhaps if Christians took a cue from their Muslim fellow humans and occasionally set off a bomb or lopped off a head, they would be accorded some of the respect and deference Western liberals have long given Muslims.  Can Popes issue murder fatwas?