News from Thermopylae

Four years ago, when I started this blog, I was much taken by the poem at the bottom of the page. I found it while searching for something else in the King's College London database; I wrote down the excerpt as you see them below, but stupidly forgot to note the poet's name. (It was in an academic journal.) I searched for it again but couldn't find it, so it has been anonymous all this time.

Thanks to Wesley Moore and the Harvard University alumni magazine, the omission has now been made good. (The magazine has a "Chapter and Verse" column where readers can ask for help in such matters. This one will appear in the March-April issue.) The poet is Howard Lachtman. A tip of the virtual hat to him, to Mr Moore, and the erudite readers of Harvard Magazine. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Good luck to Egypt!

At the gym this morning, I caught a rather sweet moment on CNN: Egyptian soldiers holding hands as they formed a cordon in Cairo. The great thing about having soldiers hold hands is that they can't simultaneously unsling rifles and club the citizens, or use the pointy end to stab or shoot.

Then I noticed something else: inside that cordon was another of civilians, likewise holding hands. These must have been self-appointed monitors, whose purpose was to keep soldiers and demonstrators apart. What's more, pedestrians were strolling between the military and civilian lines, as if the intervening space were a sidewalk.

I think there's real hope for a people who can behave so sanely in the middle of a revolution. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The cleaning lady did it

The chart shows how internet traffic more or less came to a halt in Egypt yesterday, presumably to shut down discussion of the street demonstrations shaking that country and others in the Islamic world. The enterprising souls at MicroScope.co.uk rang up the Egyptian embassy and asked what was going on. "We're not sure who we talked to," says blogger Nick Booth, "but they said that possibly a cleaner might have unplugged the Internet by mistake." Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On dealing with the leaky Wiki

Bill Keller, who appears to be the Executive Editor of the New York Times (and they call him Bill?--how the Gray Lady has changed!), is peddling an e-book about his semi-coup in obtaining the Wikileaks information dump for the NYT. You can read the gist of it in the magazine section this Sunday or online now.

It does not seem to occur to Mr Keller that Julian Assange's motive in dumping this stuff was to damage the standing of the United States in the world. (Or perhaps it does, and that suits Mr Keller just fine. What the hey? It's not his end of the boat that's leaking!) Even more despicable is the way that the Gray Lady, the Guardian, and Wikileaks have imperiled the lives and freedom of people around the world who trusted in the security of their dealings with the United States. Perhaps they'd like to see all those Afghan interpreters kidnapped and murdered. But what about Morgan Tsvangirai, the duly elected prime minister of Zimbabwe, who is likely to be tried and executed for treason because of Mr Assange, Mr Keller, and their various collaborators? Mr Assange dismisses such tragedies as "collateral damage." How does the New York Times justify them? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Escape from the Gulag

Sally and I drove down to Salisbury MA yesterday, to the nearest 'plex that is screening The Way Back. This is a must-see film, especially for the increasing number of Americans who feel apologetic about our role in the Cold War. It's a long movie, and most of it, as Anthony Lane complains in this week's The New Yorker magazine, is a picaresque yarn of five men and a girl trekking across Siberia and Mongolia in their quest to escape the Soviet Union. Like all picaresque yarns, it's largely one damned thing after another, though some of it (especially the girl, who is supposed to be thirteen, and who is played by the wonderfully named Saoirse Ronan) is quite affecting.

But what must be seen, and soaked into memory, is the movie's first half hour, in which our hero, a Polish officer named Januscz (Colin Farrell) is battered by the NKVD, betrayed by his tortured wife, and dispatched to a slave labor camp in northern Siberia, where he first hews out logs from the forest, then hews out ore from a mine. (Sally kept her face covered through most of this.)

What's necessary to bear in mind is that this is all true. This happened to millions of men and women--Poles, Russians, Americans, anyone who fell afoul of that foul despotism in Moscow--and millions of them died in Stalin's Gulag. This may be difficult for a Good Person like Anthony Lane to accept, but it is true, and a virtual tip of the hat to Peter Weir for making a film of it. (The Way Back DVD will be released in April. If you prefer to wait, you can watch Katyn meanwhile.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The big bell at Sacre Coeur

Isn't that the most hypnotic, most gorgeous sound you've ever heard? It rings between my cheekbones and my heart. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

$160 million here, $160 million there, pretty soon it adds up to real money

Barney Frank famously wanted to "roll the dice" a bit more with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the taxpayers are still cleaning up the mess from that particular crap game. Today the New York Times reports that we've picked up a $160,000,000 bill for defending the mortgage agencies' former executives in their various trials for fraud. That's right: one government agency investigates crooks, and another pays their legal expenses. But cheer up: we won a victory of sorts: three of the crooks returned $31,400,000! It would have been cheaper to buy them each a retirement home. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

I have seen the future, and it has tiny wheels

 

 

Just when you stopped laughing from your first view of the Smart4Two, here's the latest thing from Mitsubishi. It will debut in the US before the year is out. Gosh, makes the Fiat 500 look like an urban assault vehicle, doesn't it? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

A tale of two Nobel winners

As pointed out by Rush Limbaugh on his radio show the other day:

Now, some of you may not know the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner hosted a state dinner last night for Hu Jintao of China. Hu Jintao is holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison in China. Not making it up. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner hosted a dinner for the guy holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison, and the media does not get the irony of this at all. They're too busy running around chasing Sarah Palin and radio talk show hosts over "civility." 

(Sorry I'm late! I don't list to talk radio, so had to wait for it to be printed in the Wall Street Journal.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Collectible Beetle

The VW Beetle was the first new car I ever bought, for $1672 including an AM radio and the side vent-windows, which were what we had at the time instead of air conditioning. Among other expeditions, I drove the thing to New Orleans, Tucson, Long Beach, Aspen, and over Loveland Pass to New Hampshire again, sleeping in the car while on the road. (I'd modified the back of the passenger seat to lie flat.) I loved the car, but really, it was the most dangerous thing on the road, with an under-steer so serious that in snow I regularly found myself skidding off the road.

Now the New York Times tells me that the Beetle is a collector's item! The 1964 model above is expected to sell in the range of $12,000-$14,000. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

In Iran, the worm turned

Well, the New York Times has paused from exploiting the Tucson shooting long enough to report some real news: confirmation (more or less) that it was indeed an American-Israeli computer "worm" that that infiltrated Iran's nuclear bomb program some months ago and set it back by years.

It seems that the Israelis cloned the Persian effort at a facility in the Negev desert, while a German-American program identified the weaknesses in the Siemens computers that the company had sold to Iran. That enabled the Idaho National Laboratory to develop the target Stuxnet worm, which sent the centrifuges spinning out of control while sending normal readings back to the Iranian technicians.

Launched by the Bush administration, the effort was speeded up after President Obama took office. Bipartisanship we can believe in!

The worm was apparently distributed fairly widely, but was so brilliantly contrived that it would only damage the centrifuges that were its intended target. A pleasing irony in the whole program is that the centrifuges (from the Netherlands to Pakistan to Iran) were so crude that the Americans, when they tried to clone the Iranian plant, had a terrible time getting them to work. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Not directly linked to Republicans

I've refrained from commenting on the Tucson Shooter, so as not to add to the sorry flood of crocodile tears, as people who live and die by their ratings exploit him for their own purposes. But the New York Times has really crossed the line. Here is what the Gray Lady wrote about Mr Loughner, after first admitting that he appears to be just another nutter: "But he is very much a part of a widespread squall of fear, anger and intolerance that has produced violent threats against scores of politicians and infected the political mainstream with violent imagery." How is he a part of the squall? Is there the slightest connection between Mr Loughner and, say, Sarah Palin? (I assume it is only squalling Republicans who upset the NYT, not squalling Democrats, like the candidate who bragged in 2008: "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.")

The editors then walk back their smarmy insinuation while managing to reinforce it in the process: "It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge." Love that "directly"! Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Manchester, 1954

      We were probably introduced in Caf, the cavernous student cafeteria where we assembled at ten o'clock for cigarettes and coffee, though I don't remember our meeting. I was one of a very few Americans at the redbrick University of Manchester, a Fulbright scholar dismayed to learn that Modern European History, in the English version, had ended in 1898, toward the end of Victoria's reign. (It often seemed that everything in Manchester had come to a close with the Widow at Windsor. Picadilly Gardens uptown, where the 2A bus originated, was overseen by a grand gray statue of the seated queen, holding the world in her hand like an anarchist's bomb. A block or two distant lay Victoria Street, Victoria Square, Victoria Station, and the Victoria and Albert Hotel. And now I find that in 1954 the formal name of my institution of higher learning was Victoria University of Manchester.) Worse, the professor leading the seminar on Edmund Burke believed that a proper reading list comprised the complete writings of my favorite philosopher-politician, and these were not insubstantial. Further, our classrooms weren't heated, at least not by American standards. I was always cold in England, but never colder than in class. In the Burke seminar, we lads developed the habit of leaving the table and perching instead on the radiators beneath the tall, drafty windows, streaked on the outside with sooty raindrops, for the sake of the tepid warmth that gurgled through them from time to time.
      By November, I had stopped going to class. Instead I worked on a short novel whose central character was named--improbably but I suppose inevitably--Stephen Faust, in honor of the young hero of James Joyce's imagination and Goethe's elderly alchemist who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for unbridled experience. I read both Ulysses and Faust that year--read voraciously, whatever I could find in a Penguin paperback for two shillings sixpence the copy. I also wrote for the student newspaper, where Frank the editor had assured me that it was quite all right, perhaps even desirable, if I retained American spelling and usage in my stories. The English were much puzzled by my way of rendering their language. I was variously asked, "Do all Yanks speak as strangely as you?" and "When Yanks put on a play of Shakespeare, do you do it with an American accent?"      I also drank great quantities of room-temperature beer, attended many French and Italian movies dubbed into English, joined the Student Union debates on one side or another--it didn't matter; the debate was the thing--and drank coffee at Caf at ten o'clock each morning. The coffee was dreary, like most things in postwar England: slippery stuff, no doubt adulterated with chicory. (I am being strictly correct when I say England. In 1954, Britain was merely the island comprising the nations of England, Scotland, Wales, and to a lesser extent Cornwell. As for the now popular United Kingdom, that was just a theoretical construct, to enable London to lay claim to Ulster, Antrim, Down, Fermanagh, Tyrone, and Londonderry, the six Irish counties that constituted its last colony, as my father never tired of reminding me in his letters, though he always shortened the last of them to Derry.)
      Somewhere in that cavernous cafeteria there would be a table of journalists manque, most of us drawn from the student newspaper. The group always included the tall Liverpudlian and veteran of the Royal Air Force, Malcolm Hopson, with his mop of black hair and his quiet girlfriend, Sheila, who I never remember speaking. She loved Malcolm and put up with the rest of us because we were his friends. Less often, the editor was there as well. Frank was an army veteran who had served in the Gloucestershire Regiment during the Korean War. I don't remember his last name, though we were pals enough to have hiked through the Lake District together, staying at a youth hostel in an astonishingly deep fall of snow. On our circuitous way back to Manchester, we stopped overnight at his home. Frank gave me the options of sleeping on the floor or sharing the double bed with him; I took the bed, and soon enough I realized that he was massaging my right foot with both of his. "Bloody hell, Frank, what are you doing?" "Oh bloody hell," he said himself. "I thought it was the hot water bottle!" I thought no more about it, for he'd been with Glosters at the Imjin River, when they held the line against a mass of Chinese troops and saved Seoul from recapture. I couldn't reconcile heroism with the homosexuals I had known at the University of New Hampshire, all of them forthrightly effeminate. Anyhow, there were plenty of effeminate lads at the Hotel Wilmslow, and to a man--or boy--they were intensely interested in my seminars on sex and the single woman.
      Oh, and usually Antony Bolcover was at Caf, if I spell his name correctly, a Jewish lad who reminded me of the privileged Oxonians in Brideshead Revisited. The following July I would be hitchhiking north from Bellizona, and making heavy weather of it--unlike the Italians, the Swiss had not yet grasped the concept of sharing their automobiles with young vagabonds--when a Ford Anglia stopped a little distance down the road. The driver stuck his head out the window and said in a wondering voice: "Dan?" He was Antony Bolcover, on a European tour with some friends, none of whom I'd met before. They gave me a lift over the St. Gotthard Pass, on whose Christmas-candy road the Ford's engine vapor-locked, so we had to turn the litle car around and let it roll back toward Italy in gear until the engine farted into life again. We got out at the height-of-land to take one another's photograph: Antony's portrait of me shows a very serious young man with a high forehead and a handsome beard, streaked with blond from the Italian sun. I rode with them to Luzern, where they dropped me at the youth hostel.
      I also have a photo of the gang in Caf: heavy-faced Antony, bushy-haired Malcolm, quiet Sheila, and a bright lad named Ian who lived in the same digs as I did, on Mauldeth Road in the suburb of Withington. This was a four-penny ride on the upper deck of the 2A bus, which ran from London Road railway station, past the gothic University buildings fronting on Oxford Road--a scaled-down House of Parliament, without the gold leaf and with oddly flat-roofed towers, a bit like the Chateau Chenonceau--and down Wilmslow Road to Withington, where I dined too often on fish and chips served in a cone of yesterday's newspaper. "Food for the body and food for the mind!" the vendor cried, handing me sixpence worth of fat-fried codfish, white, flaky, and steaming, together with fourpence worth of fat-fried potato slices, which the English called chips. The chips were heavily salted and flavored with vinegar which the vendor liberally dispensed from a round-bottomed bottle, like a barber with his hair tonic.
      So an evening out in Withington cost tenpence for dinner and sixpence for a seat in the front stalls of the Scala cinema, for a grand total of nineteen U.S. cents at the exchange rate then prevailing. Cheaper, indeed, to go out for dinner and a movie than to stay home and feed shillings into the gas meter.
      The Scala was supposed to be one of the oldest cinemas in England. The building was on a corner and half-timbered behind the marquee, which generally promised Dirk Bogard as a war hero or Alec Guinness dressed up as a woman, transvetism being a rich vein of English humor. Ah, the glow of the projection beam through the shifting veil of cigarette smoke! At the Scala, or indeed any English cinema, one was constantly reminded that a movie was in progress, as we smoked the skinny cigarettes that were jocularly known as coffin nails: each seat was supplied with a tiny ashtray, on the left armrest. In later years the Scala was chopped into three smaller theaters under the name of Cine City, and smoking no doubt was banned, while our fish and chips shop became an Indian restaurant called the Moon. And in this century, both succumbed to more sophisticated competition--a multiplex, a McDonald's--and were boarded up.
      Cigarette smoke was the least of our pollutants. Though Ted and I had a gas fire in our room on Mauldeth Road, most of Manchester depended on coal for its heat, and the coal smoke mixed with the fog to produce what were known as "pea soupers." On one occasion, walking from our digs to Withington, the fog was so thick that I could not see the sidewalk beneath me, and I missed the curb and fell into the street.
      Each morning I bought the Manchester Guardian, as the newspaper was then known, and wrote the previous day's statistics in my diary. Temperature: 55 high, 40 low. Rain: trace. Sunshine: nil.
      Ian's room was on the second story front of Number Two, Mauldeth Road West; he shared it with a room-mate I didn't know. My room-mate was an undergraduate majoring in the sciences; we lived at the back of the house, on the third story. Ted was from Yorkshire, and he spiced my vocabulary with sayings like "N'er shed a clout till May is out" and "If once naught's naught, twice naught must be sommat." We'd met at the Wilmslow Hotel, a rooming house where I had lodged during the autumn term, two meals a day and three on Sunday, consisting mostly of brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, and pot roast, with a pastry smothered in a sweet white semi-liquid called custard. The clientele was entirely male, and all the lads were virgins except for me. I felt quite the Cary Grant at the Wilmslow Hotel.
      If I'm not mistaken, Ted later emigrated to Rhodesia. I recognized his face in a Time magazine photo of white settlers lining up to buy guns, as Rhodesia began a painful transformation into Zimbabwe. I hope that turned out all right for you, Ted. (Oh, what was your last name?)
      Back to Caf! Unlike most spaces in Manchester, it was well heated, mostly no doubt by the body heat of several hundred undergraduates, and the lads at table would often grow uncomfortable in their blazers or tweed jackets, ties, and long university scarves, which tradition required to be one's only garments for the English winter. English shirts, by the way, had detachable collars and cuffs, so that one could get a full week's service out of one garment. And the undershirts were sleeveless. Strangely enough, I don't remember that the lads smelled. Perhaps the temperature never climbed high enough.
      It could be warm in Caf, however--probably that's why we gravitated to it. One morning Ian joked that he was warm enough that he might take off his blazer. This met with no protest, so, looking uneasily around the table, Ian actually did shed the jacket, and sat there rather proud in his shirtsleeves. (Off-the-rack English shirts were sold only by neck size, with sleeves that were too long; the excess was taken up by a sort of garter worn around one's bicep.) One or two others followed his good example, but not Antony Bolcover, in whom gentility ran strong. Antony was also, I think, one of the few students at Manchester not receiving a government grant of forty pounds a month. My own stipend as a Fulbright Fellow was fifty pounds, so for the first time in my life I was just about the wealthiest person of my acquaintance. Fifty quid ($140) bought more beer than a twenty-two-year old could drink, if he knew what was good for him--but who does know what's good for him, at twenty-two? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

A new journal of the Flying Tigers

Here is a great find in a rather unfortunate package. Though the book is credited to Jennifer Holik-Urban, the better part of it consists of the war journal of Robert Brouk of the AVG 3rd Squadron "Hell's Angels." Though riddled with spelling errors (some committed by the diarist himself, others introduced by a misreading of the handwritten original), it's very much worth obtaining for its entirely new account of the events from August 1941 to the spring of 1942, and especially Brouk's account of being strafed by the 64th Sentai as he landed at Namsang on April 21. Amazing that his journal has never surfaced before now!

Though introduced as a diary, it isn't quite that. Rather, Brouk seems to have acquired a blank day-book and jotted down his recollections at intervals of a week or so. They are headed by the month, though it's unclear if Brouk himself did this, or whether the headings were added by Holik-Urban. And Brouk often has a nice touch for what is so seldom remarked--the strange beauty that war can present. This is how he described his first combat, the December 23 raid on Rangoon: "Although the bombing was terrible and devastating, but it was a picturesque sight to see the large [Japanese] bombing formations of 21 and then another of 18 that came in a second wave. They held a beautiful close formation and you could see the black particles of smoke [as] their bombs hit Rangoon. The spots were scattered, and about 10 or 12 fires were started, bellowing smoke straight up and forming a mushroom about 3000 feet." I love that bellowing smoke!

It's a pity the journal wasn't published in a more professional manner--something on the order of Charlie Bond's A Flying Tiger's Diary, with the names straightened out and some context provided. It would be good to know, for example, that the AVG doctor who cared for him in Kunming was Sam Prevo, not "Prino" as it is spelled in the book. And I for one could have done without the Mitsubishi Zero being shot down on the cover! For all that, I recommend it to any AVG buff. At the present time, the hardcover is available only from the print-on-demand firm of Lulu.com for about $31 including postage. That's too rich for my blood, so I bought the $9.99 digital edition for Amazon's Kindle e-book reader. You don't need to own a Kindle to read these digital books; just download the appropriate software application for your computer, iPad, or smartphone. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Better late than never

The New York Times has a wonderfully hilarious headline:

Obama Shifts Economic Team to Focus on a Recovery

The Gray Lady of course thinks this is a wise and admirable step, and indeed there's much to be said for it. A pity, though, that it comes in 2011 instead of 2009. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Fighter planes no, engines yes

While the F-22 air-superiority fighter has been capped at a miserly 187 aircraft, Congress is busily added a requirement for a second engine for the F-35 program (see below). The aircraft's manufacturer doesn't want a second engine. The Department of Defense doesn't want a second engine. Only the pork-barrel queens in Congress want the danged thing, because it will funnel money into their home districts and help them get reelected. The immediate price tag for this bit of redundancy is $450,000,000, but of course that's only the up-front money. By the time it's delivered, it will cost closer to $3,000,000,000, as in three billion dollars. That's about $21 from each American taxpayer, for an engine nobody wants. Perhaps more to the point, it would buy the Air Force 18 more F-22s, an acquisition that might really come in handy some day, unlike a substitute engine from a different manufacturer. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

An air-superiority fighter for China?

These images appeared in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, showing what looks very much like a worthy rival to the F-22 air-superiority fighter, recently chopped back in favor of the smaller, cheaper F-35.

The United States hasn't had to fight a serious enemy air force since the Vietnam War, and the last time an American fighter pilot anywhere shot down an enemy aircraft was during the Yugoslav fracas of 1999. Worthy of note: that "kill," by Lt Col Michael Geczy, was made by an F-15, an air-superiority fighter like the F-22. When you need such a plane, nothing else will do. Smaller, cheaper warplanes are all very well, but they can't stand up to a muscular airplane killer, and that seems to be what China is attempting to build. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Forward to the past!

This blog began as a class assignment four years ago when I began an MA "programme" in War in the Modern World. The army that I served as a draftee in 1956-1958, and even the one I accompanied for a few months in Vietnam, was essentially the same as the one that fought Germany and Japan in World War II. It was a whole new military that invaded Iraq in March 2003, and I wanted to know more about it. But now I am going from what is certainly the best book about that campaign--Nate Fick's wonderfully engrossing One Bullet Away--all the way back to 1939, when a much more important war began.

World War II has been described as the worst thing that ever happened in the history of man. It didn't affect me that way, because I was quartered safe in various corners of New England, but others were not nearly so fortunate. So what I am reading at this moment is Wladyslaw Anders's Army in Exile, the story of the Polish army corps that was recruited out of the prison camps of the Soviet Union, and that won a strange sort of glory on the heights of Monte Cassino in 1944, breaking the German line and opening the way to Rome. Most of these men, of course, would never go home, because Stalin (with the reluctant agreement of Churchill and Roosevelt) took their home away from them. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford