War and Peace

Flashy Himself – A Literary Diversion

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So it took a link on Powerline last week to bring to my attention that George McDonald Fraser’s first Flashman book came out fifty years ago.

My, I don’t know how the time flies but it does. I must have read the first couple of Flashy’s adventures sometime in college, shortly thereafter, and being quite the history nerd even then, they were rowdy enough, and amusing enough that I read most of the rest of them when they came out, even if I had to order them from an English book catalog when I was stationed overseas. I do remember very well reading The General Danced at Dawn, in the back of one of my more boring lecture classes at CSUN and nearly self-strangulating in trying to not laugh uproariously out loud. The professor lecturer would not have been amused he was a medieval history expert with a thoroughly tedious interest in the most comprehensively boring of early dark age church confabulations and absent any detectable sense of humor.

My main regret as far as the Flashman series goes is that GMF never wrote of Flashy’s adventures in our own Civil War, which sounded from references in other books, as if Flashman conducted himself in the manner which we came to expect of him that is, purely and basely devoted to the preservation of his own skin, while dodging, lying, fornicating and back-stabbing on battlefields spread across three continents, as well as hob-nobbing socially or sexually with all sorts of likely participants. As one early reviewer put it, Flashy saw 19th century history briefly over his shoulder as he fled down the corridors of power at high speed. His adventures in our very own Civil War would have been … interesting, although when I touched on this matter before, a reader pointed out that a) Flashy was a British officer and hardly gave a toss as to what we recalcitrant ex-Colonials got up to, and that b) that all our native ACW experts, amateur and professional alike would have made passionate objection to any error or omission, fancied or with historical backing that GMF might have worked into the plot. So, the effort wouldn’t have been worth the candle to him … although I and most of his fans would have loved to read it anyway. Just to see the process by how Flashy got suckered into participation by Abraham Lincoln, fought on both sides, and wound up being pals with George Armstrong Custer and well-acquainted with General Grant, and how many other Civil War notables.

I myself would have loved to see Flashy entangled in some kind of partnership with Elizabeth Van Lew, the Richmond spy queen, or perhaps a much deeper entanglement with Allan Pinkerton, of the national detective agency … it all would have been great reading, no matter how contentious the fallout might have been with Civil War historians. His take on Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals would have been interesting, as well. Because GMF had the eye, an absolute gift for writing 19th century dialog, and loved history enough to go into the deep weeds about it all … and most of all, make it interesting to the reader. Pop media is not downhill from culture, it’s in a symbiotic relationship with it. One shapes the other, mutually.

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Pres. Trump Sends Iran’s “Red Napoleon” to Meet The Reaper

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On Friday night Jan 3, 2020, President Trump directed a successful strike killing IRGC Commander Gen. Qassem Soleiman at the Baghdad International Airport.   Four AGM-114N Metal Augmented Charge (MAC) Thermobaric Hellfire missiles launched from an General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper turned Soleiman’s SUV and his accompanying   security SUV into funeral pyres. [1]

IRGC Commander Gen. Qassem Soleiman meets three AGM-114N Metal Augmented Charge (MAC) Thermobaric Hellfire missiles launched from a a MQ-9 Reaper Drone
IRGC Commander Gen. Qassem Soleiman meets three AGM-114N Metal Augmented Charge (MAC) Thermobaric Hellfire missiles launched from an MQ-9 Reaper Drone.   Graphic Source: UK Daily Mail

See full story at this Daily Mail link:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7848729/Trump-taunts-Iran-saying-never-won-war-ordering-strike-killed-Soleimani.html

Some in the media have compared this strike to Operation Vengeance, the American military operation to kill Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto of the Imperial Japanese Navy on April 18, 1943.

The Trump Administration drone strike was in fact far more consequential than Operation Vengeance. If only because of how much more of the IRGC Quds force senior chain of command were eliminated compared to the Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto strike.   And how much more important Gen. Qassem Soleiman was to Iran than Yamamoto was to Imperial Japan.

Also killed in the strike were Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis also known as Jamal Jafaar Mohammed Ali Ä€l Ebrahim, the commander of the Iraqi Shia Kata’ib Hezbollah militia and mastermind behind the December 1983 bomb attacks on U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait.

In additional to Soleiman and al-Muhandis/Ä€l Ebrahim, also killed were IRGC Brigadier General Hussein Jafari Nia, Major-General Hadi Taremi, LTC. Shahroud Mozaffari Nia and Captain Waheed Zamanian. Nor does the list end there as senior pro-Iranian Iraqi Shia PMF militia leaders Heydar Ali, Muhammed Reza al-Jaberi and Hassan Abdul Hadi, were in the second SUV struck by one of four AGM-114N Hellfire guided missiles fired by the MQ-9 Reaper.

IRAN’S RED NAPOLEON

IRGC Commander Gen. Qassem Soleiman was to Iran what Heinrich Himmler, Gen Oberst Kurt Daluege, Gen Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Gen Sepp Dietrich were to Nazi Germany, all rolled into one.

In many ways Gen. Qassem Soleiman ran Iran’s foreign policy and strategy as principal adviser to the theocratic leadership. Soleiman made his bones in the 1990’s suppressing Iranian student riots in the style of Belisarius and the Nika riots. Post 9/11/2001, he has been orchestrating the killings of US service personnel, is the architect Iran’s proxy forces in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yeman and ran covert ops forces world wide.

In fact, Gen. Qassem Soleiman was Iran’s “Red Napoleon.”

The idea of “The Red Napoleon” came from the 1929 novel of that name by Floyd Gibbons predicting a Soviet conquest of Europe and invasion of America by The Red Napoleon’s massive multi-racial army. Written as a screed against white racial supremacy, the concept in the Western Left of a 3rd World military leader who could routinely defeat the West over and over again the same way that General and later French Emperor Bonaparte Napoleon did to the leaders of Western Europe in the late 18th and early 19th century has hung on in the Left’s Noosphere [2] in the decades since.

If anyone was a “Red Napoleon” in the 21st century,   Gen. Qassem Soleiman was that man.

On January 12, 2016, two United States Navy riverine command boats were seized by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy after they entered Iranian territorial waters near Iran's Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf. The subsiquent release was hailed by the Obama administration as an unintended benefit of the new diplomatic relationship.
On January 12, 2016, two United States Navy riverine command boats were seized by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy after they entered Iranian territorial waters near Iran’s Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf. The subsequent release was hailed by the Obama administration as an unintended benefit of the new diplomatic relationship. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_U.S.%E2%80%93Iran_naval_incident

Gen. Qassem Soleiman was a man from the 3rd World. One who had created and lead a team in the form of the Quds Force that had killed American servicemen in their hundreds, for decades, got a pair of US Navy riverine command  boat crews to surrender in humiliation to support Pres. Obama’s “Opening to Iran” and executed   both the Benghazi, Libya and Baghdad, Iraq embassy assaults.

And Pres. Trump just sent Iran’s “Red Napoleon” to “…meet the Reaper.”

IRGC Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani. He was the Iranian government’s “Red Napoleon” and was killed by a thermobaric Hellfire missile launched from a MQ-9 Reaper at the orders of President Trump on 3 Jan 2020.

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A Christmas Reading From Thomas Pynchon

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I’ve always liked this passage from Thomas Pynchon’s great novel  Gravity’s Rainbow.

The setting: it is the grim winter of 1944, just before Christmas. The military situation in Europe is not good, and WWII seems as if it will never end. London is under attack by V-2 rockets and V-1 cruise missiles (as they would be called today.) Roger and Jessica, two of the main characters, are driving in a rural area in England and come upon a church where carols are being sung. They decide to go inside.

They walked through the tracks of all the others in the snow, she gravely on his arm, wind blowing her hair to snarls, heels slipping once on ice. “To hear the music,” he explained.

Tonight’s scratch choir was all male, epauletted shoulders visible under the wide necks of white robes, and many faces nearly as white with the exhaustion of soaked and muddy fields, midwatches, cables strummed by the nervous balloons sunfishing in the clouds, tents whose lights inside shone nuclear at twilight, soullike, through the cross-hatched walls, turning canvas to fine gauze, while the wind drummed there…..The children are away dreaming, but the Empire has no place for dreams and it’s Adults Only in here tonight, here in this refuge with the lamps burning deep, in pre-Cambrian exhalation, savory as food cooking, heavy as soot. And 60 miles up the rockets hanging the measureless instant over the black North Sea before the fall, ever faster, to orange heat, Christmas star, in helpless plunge to Earth. Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too, roaring like the Adversary, seeking whom they may devour. It’s a long walk home tonight. Listen to this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at least in listening, even if they are not spokesmen for your exact hopes, your exact, darkest terror, listen. There must have been evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights bad as this one–something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too frail, there’s too much shit in these streets, camels and other beasts stir heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out…….But on the way home tonight, you wish you’d picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, somehow, save him. For the moment not caring who you’re supposed to be registered as. For the moment, anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are.

O Jesu parvule
Nach dir is mir so weh…

So this pickup group, these exiles and horny kids, sullen civilians called up in their middle age…….give you this evensong, climaxing now with its rising fragment of some ancient scale, voices overlapping three and fourfold, filling the entire hollow of the church–no counterfeit baby, no announcement of the Kingdom, not even a try at warming or lighting this terrible night, only, damn us, our scruffy obligatory little cry, our maximum reach outward–praise be to God!–for you to take back to your war-address, your war-identity, across the snow’s footprints and tire tracks finally to the path you must create by yourself, alone in the dark. Whether you want it or not, whatever seas you have crossed, the way home…

The Old Navy, by Daniel Pratt Mannix III

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Admiral Mannix served in the Spanish-American War, the conflicts in Cuba and the Philippines, and the First World War.   His career spanned the years of America’s emergence as a major player on the world stage, and this book offers memorable portraits of the Navy and of America…and of much of the world…during this period.

After spending his childhood in China (his father was a torpedo expert working for the Chinese government), Mannix entered the US Naval Academy in 1885. When the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor and the Spanish-American war erupted in 1898, he requested permission to leave the Academy early, and joined the battleship USS Indianapolis.

The war resulted in a rapid American victory, despite some serious deficiencies in the American conduct of operations (such as the failure to use smokeless powder), and Mannix observed the sad passage of the Spanish admiral into American captivity, in an open boat, wearing civilian clothes loaned to him by an American captain and with his head lowered in deep dejection: “I was never so sorry for anyone in my life.”   He was impressed by the exquisite courtesy of a badly-wounded Spanish officer who had lost a leg:

As though making his adieux after an enjoyable evening, he thanked us for our “hospitality” (no, he wasn’t being sarcastic) and expressed his profound regret for the annoyance that his unfortunate arrival had caused…I have met men of all nationalities during my years in the Navy; in “good breeding” none of them could equal the upper-class Spaniards.

After returning to Annapolis, Mannix graduated in 1900, and he sketches what life was like in America at the turn of the last century: some of the popular songs and comedy acts, the Gibson Girl (“the loveliest of all feminine ideas”, in his view), but also the fear of riots and attempted revolution when President McKinley was assassinated in 1901…New York’s ‘streetcar rowdies’, who molested women and beat up any man who tried to stop them…and a riot in Pensacola’s red-light district which involved civilians, soldiers, and sailors (“a far rougher lot than today’s bluejackets”) and which Mannix led a landing party to suppress.

In 1903, Mannix was assigned to a “friendly mission” of four warships to German ports, as ordered by Theodore Roosevelt.   “These ‘friendship tours’ were quite common in those days and paradoxically served a dual purpose:   they reminded the foreign power that we had a powerful Navy that could reach their home waters while at the same time allowed the people to meet Americans and learn that we were not all strange, uncivilized barbarians.”

Assigned as an aide on the Admiral’s staff, aboard the battleship Kearsage, he met many German officers and found them mostly friendly.   The Kaiser also visited Kearsage, and Mannix was impressed that he chatted with the enlisted men as well the officers.   “Much to my surprise, he showed a sense of humor.”

One potentially-disastrous incident involved a collision between a German (or at least Prussian) custom:   civilians on the street were supposed to give way to any uniform-wearing officer…and an American naval custom:   officers generally did not wear their uniforms when ashore.   This collision of customs lead to a physical collision, followed by the use of fists by the American officer, and a challenge to a duel.   The situation could have led to a serious diplomatic incident had it not been defused.

Throughout his travels, Mannix enjoyed meeting people from other countries…a view that he says was far from universal.   Speaking of a luncheon given by the Lord Mayor of London, he says, “To my astonishment, most of the junior officers were reluctant to attend the luncheon and would far   rather have spent their time playing cards together or chatting in the wardroom mess.”

Some of the officers he met at the luncheon were members of the First Life Guards, an “elite” regiment that was open only to the wealthy and titled…”Kipling referred to them contemptuously as the “fatted flunkies of the Army.”   But:

Twenty years later I was in Constantinople and the Household Brigade of the British Army was stationed there.   I looked over the list to see if I could recognize any old acquaintances.   Among all those names there were only two or three who had titles…Where were all those young earls and baronets and honorables?   They were dead.   Most of them had died in August 1914 during the terrible retreat from Mons when the old British Regular Army virtually ceased to exist.   They were not “fatted flunkies” there.”

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Business Stories

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We’ve talked before here about the point that most fiction seems to be about people who are lawyers, policemen, criminals, soldiers, spies, students, politicians, and noble but struggling writers. But there are indeed some works of fiction, and some vivid personal memoirs, in which business plays a central role without being portrayed simplistically or as stereotypically evil. Here are some that I like…please add your own favorites in the comments.   (I posted this at Ricochet, in slightly different form, about a week ago)

The Current War, a recent movie about the late-1800s power struggle to determine which technology…AC or DC…will dominate America’s electrical distribution system. Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla are the key characters, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Shannon, and Nicholas Hoult respectively. My review is  here.

The Big Short, a 2015 film about the 2007-2008 financial crisis, based on Michael Lewis’s book. A hedge fund manager concludes that the subprime-loan market is not sustainable, and makes a billion-dollar bet against the relevant mortgage-backed securities. Based on real events. I thought it was very well done.

God is an Englishman, R F Delderfield. Following his return to England from the Crimean War, Adam Swann identifies a business opportunity: although railroads are being built throughout the country, there will always be sources and destinations of freight which are not on the tracks. Hence, the potential for a nationwide gap-filling road haulage business based on the systematic use of horse-drawn wagons. (This is the first book of a three-book series called the Swann Family Saga.)   Reviewed here.

Oil for the Lamps of China, Alice Tisdale Hobart. This 1933 novel is about a young American working as a sales rep in China, focused on selling oil for his employer (unnamed, but clearly based on Standard Oil) and increasing volumes by promoting the kerosene lamp as a better alternative to traditional lighting methods. The book was the basis for a 1935 movie of the same name…the film has its moments, but overall is not worthy of the book.

Father, Son, and Company, by Thomas Watson Jr. This is the best business autobiography I’ve read. It’s about Watson Jr (the long-time CEO of IBM), his difficult relationship with his father, the company they built, and the emergence of the computing industry. It is an emotional, reflective, and self-critical book, without the kind of “here’s how brilliant I was” tone that afflicts too many executive autobiographies. I reviewed it  here.

A Man in Full, by Tom Wolfe. The central character of this 1988 novel is Charlie Croker, an Atlanta real-estate developer who has gotten himself into way too much debt. Other characters include Charlie’s current and former wives, the Black mayor of Atlanta, the bankers who must deal with the debt problem, and a warehouse worker at one of the Croker enterprises. The book also casts a not-very-complimentary light on the Atlanta society/arts scene.

Trial by Fire, Stephen Buck. The adventures of a Honeywell field engineer in the early days of process-control computing. The book’s title reflects the point that the industrial processes being controlled frequently involved combustion, sometimes in scary circumstances. Much of the author’s work took place outside the US, in countries ranging from Poland to Brazil.

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