That’s the title of a four-pronged historical examination by Barbara Tuchman: an examination of four specific episodes in history (or in the case of Troy and their gift horse, possibly mythical history) where the leadership of a political entity decided – against all good advice and reasoned opposition – to go full out in idiocy counter to their best interests, the pursuit of which left them very much in a worse situation than before. Pride, stubbornness, stupid devotion to a set of principles which wound up biting them in the nether regions and supposedly serving a warning and example to the rest of us. Yet – as MS Tuchman notes – political bodies kept on doing it, over and over again. (Although I and others do have some serious beefs about how she categorized the saga of US in Vietnam.) It’s a readable overview, a quick skim of what happen in four separate eras when four different entities decide against all good advice, interests and viable alternatives, to go ahead and pee on that electric fence; a reminder – as if we really do need another one, that self-interested stupidity is a human constant.
Military Affairs
Lighter than Air: Balloons and Dirigibles in Warfare
It may seem weird, at our present level of technology, to think of a balloon as an international issue and a possible security threat. Balloons and dirigibles, though, have a long history in warfare and national security.
The first military use of balloons was by the French revolutionary army, which used tethered balloons for observation purposes, notably at the Battle of Fleurus (1794), where a hydrogen-filled balloon was employed. Balloons were used by both sides in the American Civil War; by this time, telegraph equipment was available to facilitate the transmission of messages back to officers on the ground.
In the First World War, balloons were used for observation, and were important in accurate targeting of the longer-range artillery that had become available, but the war also saw the first military use of lighter-than-air craft that could maneuver under their own power–dirigibles. Prior to the war, the German Zeppelin company had conducted extensive development of dirigibles and had even employed them for scheduled passenger trips within Germany. The LZ 10 Schwaben, built in 1911, was 460 feet long and could carry 20 passengers. Powered by three engines of 145hp each, it could reach a maximum speed of 47mph.
When war broke out, it was inevitable that Zeppelins would be use for military purposes. In the first raid on London, a Zeppelin dropped 3000 pounds of bombs, including incendiaries which started 40 fires. Seven people were killed. Airships became larger with heavier bomb loads, and fleets of up to 11 ships attacked the British capital city. The Zeppelins were vulnerable, though, to incendiary bullets and rockets. Climbing to higher altitudes offered some protection, as did a clever tactic in which the ship would cruise in or above the clouds, with observers situated in a basket lowered as much as a mile below its Zeppelin. But losses among the attackers were high and growing. More of these bombing missions here.
A pioneering airborne logistics mission was also attempted, with a resupply mission to the German force in East Africa which was commanded by General von Lettow-Vorbeck. The airship L-59, seven hundred and fifty feet long, was loaded with fifty tons of equipment and departed on a journey of over 3000 miles. The intent was that the airship would be cannibalized when it reached its destination with the envelope used for tents and the engines employed to power generators. Just a few hundred miles from its destination, though, the airship received a message stating that General Lettow-Vorbeck had been decisively defeated, there was no longer any point in the mission, and they should return to Germany. Which they did. It turned out that the message had been based on a British deception operation.
In the run-up to WWII, the Graf Zeppelin was used to gather signals intelligence on British radio and radar systems. Large rigid airships were not used in the war itself, the US Navy’s ships having all come to bad ends…but blimps were used extensively for antisubmarine work: 168 of them were built for this purpose. They were primarily intended as observation platforms, being eventually equipped with radar and with magnetic anomaly detectors, as well as being great visual platforms, but were also armed with depth charge bombs and machine guns. They were apparently quite effective in helping to combat the submarine menace, and only one of them was lost to enemy action.
Since 1980, tethered aerostats have been used for border surveillance and have also been employed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Stratospheric balloons, such as the Chinese balloon that was just shot down, are used for aerial imagery, telecommunications, and weather forecasting. They have been improved in recent years, and some of them have at least some ability to navigate in desired directions by changing altitude to find winds going the right way. More here
Movie Review: Devotion
Jesse Brown, a black man, became a US Navy pilot in 1946. As one might expect at that time, he faced plenty of race-based obstacles in addition to the inherent difficulties involved in becoming a Naval Aviator. Nevertheless, he prevailed, and flew a Corsair piston-engined fighter from the carrier Leyte, in missions to support US ground troops in the Korean War. On one mission, supporting Marines at the battle of Chosin Reservoir as a member of the VF-32 squadron, he was shot down in rugged terrain. His (white) wingman, Thomas Hudner, observed that Brown had not exited the airplane–which was starting to burn–and landed his Corsair near Brown’s wrecked one with the intent of getting Brown out of the plane and waiting with him until a rescue helicopter could (hopefully) be dispatched before Chinese or North Korean troops showed up.
Oh, and by the way, while Leyte was in the Mediterranean, prior to being dispatched to Korea, several of the aviators met actress Elizabeth Taylor while on shore leave.
Definitely sounds like fiction, doesn’t it? But it really happened. While the film indeed took some liberties with the historical truth, the events cited in the above summary are in accord with the factual history.
Race does play a significant role in this movie, of course…since his childhood, Brown had maintained a notebook in which he recorded the various race-based insults he had received over time, especially those telling him all the things he would never have the ability to do. Sometimes he would recite these as a way of giving himself extra inspiration for high performance. But I don’t think the racial angle was overemphasized, given the era and Brown’s apparent actual experiences.
The flying scenes were well-done…real airplanes, not CGI…an actual MiG-15 even made an appearance. (The scene in which a MiG is shot down by a Corsair did not actually happen on this mission, but there was historically an engagement in which a Corsair did manage to shoot down a MiG.) The movie also includes scenes of the ground combat at Chosin Reservoir.
Despite Hudner’s effort, Brown could not be pulled from the wrecked airplane, and died there. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Purple Heart medal, and the Air Medal. Tom Hudner received the Medal of Honor from President Truman. The frigate Jesse L Brown, FF-1089, was named after Brown in 1973, and an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer was named after Hudner in 2012.
The movie draws on the book Devotion by Adam Makos, which I haven’t read but apparently goes into considerable detail on the Chosin Revenue ground battle as well as the stories of Brown and Hudner and the experiences of other VF-32 members.
Recommended. I thought it was better than Top Gun: Maverick. A little slower, but more sense of realism and character development.
Reprise Post; At the Tomb of Couperin – Thoughts on a Centenary
(For Veteran’s Day – a reprise post from 2018)
There is a lovely little classical piece by Maurice Ravel – Le Tombeau de Couperin, composed shortly after the end of the war, five of the six movements dedicated to the memory of an individual, and one for a pair of brothers, all close friends of the composer, every one of them fallen in a war of such ghastliness that it not only put paid to a century of optimistic progress, but barely twenty years later it birthed another and hardly less ghastly war. Maurice Ravel himself was over-age, under-tall and not in the most robust of health, but such was the sense of national emergency that he volunteered for the military anyway, eventually serving as a driver – frequently under fire and in danger. Not the usual place to find one of France’s contemporarily-famous composers, but they did things differently at the end of the 19th Century and heading all wide-eyed and optimistic into the 20th. Citizens of the intellectual and artistic ilk were not ashamed of their country, or feel obliged to apologize for a patriotic attachment, or make a show of sullen ingratitude for having been favored by the public in displaying their talents.
Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, Et Cetera
“There are known knowns, things we know that we know;
and there are known unknowns, things that we know we don’t know.
But there are also unknown unknowns, things we do not know we don’t know.”
– Donald Rumsfeld
So last week’s post regarding the paucity of lefty anti-war protesters regarding the Ukrainian war is still going strong with comments, reminding me once again of the great sage, Donald Rumsfeld, regarding what we know, and what we know that we don’t know … and what we really don’t know that we don’t know.
What do I know for sure about the war? I know that both sides are … parsimonious with the truth about everything that is happening in the zone of conflict, to the point where a truckload of salt is necessary when reading the headlines, no matter if it’s the established print media, or blogs. What to believe? Practically nothing, save that yes, indeed, there is a war and a pretty hot one, too.
I am pretty certain that Ukraine served basically as the Biden family’s ATM. Corrupt government – yeah, that I do believe. But as corrupt than Russia itself, Nigeria, Pakistan, Belarus, South Sudan, Somalia, Burundi, Venezuela, and other frequent fliers on ‘most corrupt evah!’ list?
I do believe that Putin’s Russia apparently went into the Ukraine believing that it would be a one-two punch and settled to the advantage of Russia within a fortnight. That the war has been going on without a resolution since February of this year argues that Putin and his generals did indeed bite off more than they could chew, seriously overestimating their own capabilities and the Ukrainian will to resist.
The modern Ukrainians are descended from the Cossacks, in culture if not in blood, who had for centuries a tradition of making war … enthusiastically. They also, if I read my history right, still hold a grudge for being subjected to the Holodomor, the mass starvation under Stalin’s harsh rule in the 1930s. And that has to cast a very long shadow, among survivors of that state-instituted horror and their descendants.