Showing posts with label 1950. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1950. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 15, 2023

Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyoming Federal Reservation, Germans retake Kharkiv

Today In Wyoming's History: March 151943  Franklin Roosevelt used executive authority to proclaim 221,000 acres as the Jackson Hole National Monument, the predecessor to today's Grand Teton National Park.  Governor Hunt threatened to use the Highway Patrol to prevent Federal authority on its grounds.  Congress, for its part, refused to appropriate money for the monument. 

Demonstrating how Wyoming really hasn't changed much, the move was hugely unpopular in Wyoming, or at least was politically unpopular.  

The history of the reservation dated back to 1924 when John D. Rockefeller, Jr. purchased a collection of ranches and amassed 37, 117 acres in the valley. The area was always spectacularly beautiful, but ranching conditions were generally poor.  Rockefeller's intended purpose from the onset was to donate the land to the Federal Government, something which of course appealed to him but much less to locals who were scraping by in industries derived from the region's natural resources.  In 1929 Rockefeller's initial donation of land went forward on a reduced basis, with only the Grand Teton National Park coming into existence.  The donation was smaller as Wyoming's Congressional representation opposed the larger donation, leaving Rockefeller with 32,000 acres and an annual tax bill of $13,000.

In 1942 Rockefeller informed Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes that if the project did not go forwad, he would sell the land.  This resulted in President Roosevelt's Federal reservation.

On March 19, Wyoming's Congressman Frank A. Barret introduced a bill to return the land to National Forest status.  In Congress, he based his argument on preserving the grazing permits in the former Federal domain that was part of the reservation.  Teton County Commissioner Clifford Hansen, who would later become Governor, and whose Mead family contributed a later Governor and other significant state politicians, also spoke against, although he was directly impacted, holding grazing permits in the area.

The bill passed both houses of Congress, but Roosevelt issued a pocket veto that contained a memorandum stating:
The effect of this bill would be to deprive the people of the United States of the benefits of an area of national significance from the standpoint of naturalistic, historic, scientific, and recreational values,
Campaigning by conservationist deterred any further legal effort to abolish the reservation, and its being opened to grazing in 1945 due to wartime conditions somewhat allayed local fears.  In 1950 the controversy was resolved through S. 3409 which merged the monument and neighboring national park, but also provided: no further extension or establishment of national parks or monuments in Wyoming may be undertaken except by express authorization of the Congress."  This did not prevent later wilderness designations, which have continued to be opposed in ways that can be argued to be short-sighted.


The Third Battle of Kharkiv resulted in a German victory.

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J22454 / Zschäckel, Friedrich / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5434453

The heavily photographed German victory saw German troops reenter and take the city, including a spearhead featuring the SS.

By JonCatalán(Talk) - Own work (Original text: I created this work entirely by myself.), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6646109

The Red Army lost 45,219 men as killed, or missing, in action and another 41,250 were wounded.  The Germans lost 4,500 killed or missing from the SS Panzer Corps, and 7,000 wounded.  The Soviets could afford to lose more, of course, but the battle demonstrated that even at this mid-point in the war, the Germans could afflict outsized casualties upon the Soviets and still make significant advances.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 101III-Zschaeckel-189-13 / Zschäckel, Friedrich / CC-BY-SA

The German victory set the stage for the Battle of Kursk, which exhaustion precluded them from advancing on at this time.

The 517th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which was sometimes attached to the 82nd Airborne and the 11th Airborne, but which was often an independent combat team, was formed.  The unit fought in Italy, southern France, and Belgium during the war, and was slated to be deployed against Japan when the war ended.

Today In Wyoming's History: March 151943  The French Line ship Wyoming sunk by the U-524.

The submarine USS Triton was sunk by the Japanese off of Kairiru,

Saturday, February 11, 2023

Thusday, February 11, 1943. Eisenhower becomes a General

Dwight Eisenhower war promoted to the rank of General, i.e, "four stars".


The rank had been really introduced during the Civil War, and posthumously awarded to George Washington in recognition of his importance in the Continental Army, and U.S. history, with Washington posthumously, and somewhat absurdly, appointed to higher ranks to retain his precedence over time.

During the Revolution, Washington was "Commander In Chief", which was a rank that bore three stars, and in fact demonstrated its superiority to the two other general officer ranks that then existed, Brigadier General and Major General.  After the Revolution, this rank became that of "General", retaining the three star insignia, and occupied by Washington, and then oddly enough Lt. General, which was also occupied by Washington after his time in the White House, something that's pretty much completely forgotten.  Other pre Civil War commanders of the U.S. Army, including those that came before Washington's appointment to Lt. Gen., were Major Generals (two stars) at the highest, until Winfield Scott was brevetted to Lt. Gen. during the Civil War.

During the Civil War, a "four star" rank was created called General of the Army.  U.S. Grant, William Sherman, and Phil Sheridan came to occupy that position, the last Army officers to do so, under that title, until World War Two.  A new insignia was designed for it after the war, but nobody who had not ascended to that position was promoted to it.  Other officers were appointed to the rank of "General", however, during World War One, those being:

Tasker H. Bliss:  6 Oct 1917 

John J. Pershing:  6 Oct 1917 

Peyton C. March: 20 May 1918 

Pershing, of course, was made General of the Armies, a rank intended to be equivalent to Field Marshall.

After World War One, rank inflation began to set in, and new Generals were created, those being:

Charles P. Summerall: 23 Feb 1929 

Douglas MacArthur: 21 Nov 1930 

Malin Craig: 2 Oct 1935 

George C. Marshall Jr.: 1 Sep 1939 

John L. Hines: 15 Jun 1940 

231 officers have been assigned that grade since Eisenhower, which is frankly absurd.

Eisenhower would go on to be General of the Army, but not General of the Armies, during the war, the rare five-star rank, although he's not the only one during World War Two to obtain that grade. Today, some municipal police forces actually award a five-star rank to their chief, which is insulting, as is awarding a four star, or even one star, rank to the chief.

General, the four star rank, really ought to be seriously restricted, perhaps to the Chief of Staff level, during peacetime.

There have only been five officers to obtain the rank of General of the Army, with only one, Omar Bradley, receiving that rank after World War Two.  He was promoted to that grade in 1950.  The list is:

General of the Army George C. Marshall:  16 December 1944

General of the Army Douglas MacArthur:  18 December 1944

General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower:  20 December 1944

General of the Air Force Hap Arnold:  21 December 1944

General of the Army Omar Bradley:  22 September 1950


Gen. Pershing, holding the rank of General of the Armies, was the highest ranking officer during World War Two, although he was not on active service.


For silly reasons, Grant and Washington were accorded this rank well after their deaths.

On this date, Winston Churchill made a speech in Parliament in which he noted Eisenhower's appointment and his elevation to theater commander.  He stated:

The Prime Minister (Mr. Churchill) The dominating aim which we set before ourselves at the Conference at Casablanca was to engage the enemy's forces on land, sea, and in the air on the largest possible scale and at the earliest possible moment. The importance of coming to ever closer grips with the enemy and intensifying the struggle outweighs a number of other considerations which ordinarily would be decisive in themselves. We have to make the enemy burn and bleed in every way that is physically and reasonably possible, in the same way as he is being made to burn and bleed along the vast Russian front from the White Sea to the Black Sea. But this is not so simple as it sounds. Great Britain and the United States were formerly peaceful countries, ill-armed and unprepared. They are now warrior nations, walking in the fear of the Lord, very heavily armed, and with an increasingly clear view of their salvation. We are actually possessed of very powerful and growing forces, with great masses of munitions coming along. The problem is to bring these forces into action. The United States has vast oceans to cross in order to close with her enemies. We also have seas or oceans to cross in the first instance, and then for both of us there is the daring and complicated enterprise of landing on defended coasts and also the building-up of all the supplies and communications necessary for vigorous campaigning when once a landing has been made.
It is because of this that the U-boat warfare takes the first place in our thoughts. There is no need to exaggerate the danger of the U-boats or to worry our merchant seamen by harping upon it unduly, because the British and American Governments have known for some time past that there were these U-boats about and have given the task of overcoming them the first priority in all their plans. This was reaffirmed most explicitly by the Combined Staffs at Casablanca. The losses we suffer at sea are very heavy, and they hamper us and delay our operations. They prevent us from coming info action with our full strength, and thus they prolong the war, with its certain 1469waste and loss and all its unknowable hazards.

Progress is being made in the war against the U-boats. We are holding our own, and more than holding our own. Before the United States came into the war, we made our calculations on the basis of British building and guaranteed Lend-Lease, which assured us of a steady and moderate improvement in our position by the end of 1943 on a very high scale of losses. There never was a moment in which we did not see our way through, provided that what the United States promised us was made good.

Since then various things have happened. The United States have entered the war, and their shipbuilding has been stepped up to the present prodigious levels, amounting for the year 1943 to over 13,000,000 gross tons, or, as they would express it in American nomenclature, 18,000,000 or 19,000,000 dead weight tons. When the United States entered the war she brought with her a Mercantile Marine, American and American-controlled, of perhaps 10,000,000 gross tons, as compared with our then existing tonnage, British and British-controlled, of about—I am purposely not being precise—twice as much. On the other hand, the two Powers had more routes to guard, more jobs to do, and they therefore of course presented more numerous targets to the U-boats. Very serious depredations were committed by the U-boats off the East coast of America until the convoy system was put into proper order by the exertions of Admiral King. Heavy losses in the Far East were also incurred at the outset of the war against Japan when the Japanese pounced upon large quantities of British and United States shipping there. The great operation of landing in North Africa and maintaining the armies ashore naturally exposed the Anglo-American fleets to further losses, though there is a compensation for that which I will refer to later; and the Arctic convoys to Russia have also imposed a heavy toll, the main part of both these operational losses having fallen upon the British.

In all these circumstances it was inevitable that the joint American and British, losses in the past 15 months should exceed the limits for which we British ourselves, in the days when we were 1470alone, had budgeted. However, when the vast expansion in the United States shipbuilding is added to the credit side, the position is very definitely improved. It is in my opinion desirable to leave the enemy guessing at our real figures, to let him be the victim of his own lies, and to deprive him of every means of checking the exaggerations of his U-boat captains or of associating particular losses with particular forms and occasions of attack. I therefore do not propose to give any exact figures. This, however, I may say, that in the last six months, which included some of those heavy operations which I have mentioned, the Anglo-American and the important Canadian new building, all taken together, exceeded all the losses of the United Nations by over 1,250,000 gross tons. That is to say, our joint fleet is 1,250,000 tons bigger to-day than it was six months ago. That is not much, but it is something, and something very important.

But that statement by no means does justice to the achievement of the two countries, because the great American flow of shipbuilding is leaping up month by month, and the losses in the last two months are the lowest sustained for over a year. The number of U-boats is increasing, but so are their losses, and so also are the means of attacking them and protecting the convoys. It is, however, a horrible thing to plan ahead in cold blood on the basis of losing hundreds of thousands of tons a month, even if you can show a favourable balance at the end of a year. The waste of precious cargoes, the destruction of so many noble ships, the loss of heroic crews, all combine to constitute a repulsive and sombre panorama. We cannot possibly rest content with losses on this scale, even though they are outweighed by new building, even if they are not for that reason mortal in their character. Nothing is more clearly proved than that well-escorted convoys, especially when protected by long-distance aircraft, beat the U-boats. I do not say that they are a complete protection, but they are an enormous mitigation of losses. We have had hardly any losses at sea in our heavily escorted troop convoys. Out of about 3,000,000 soldiers who have been moved under the protection of the British Navy about the world, to and fro across the seas and 1471oceans, about 1,348 have been killed or drowned, including missing. It is about 2,200 to one against your being drowned if you travel in British troop convoys in this present war.

Even if the U-boats increase in number, there is no doubt that a superior proportionate increase in the naval and air escort will be a remedy. A ship not sunk is better than a new ship built. Therefore, in order to reduce the waste in the merchant shipping convoys, we have decided, by successive steps during the last six months, to throw the emphasis rather more on the production of escort vessels, even though it means some impingement on new building. Very great numbers of escort vessels are being constructed in Great Britain and the United States, equipped with every new device of anti-U-boat warfare in all its latest refinements. We pool our resources with the United States, and we have been promised, and the promise is being executed in due course, our fair allocation of American-built escort vessels.

There is another point. Everyone sees how much better it is to have fast ships than slow. This is also true of racehorses, as the Noble Lady was well aware in her unregenerate days. However, speed is a costly luxury. The most careful calculations are made and are repeatedly revised as between having fewer fast ships or more slow ones. The choice, however, is not entirely a free one. The moment you come into the sphere of fast ships, engine competition enters a new phase. It starts with the escort vessels but in other directions and also in the materials for the higher speed engines there come other complicated factors. I should strongly advise the House to have confidence in the extremely capable people who, with full knowledge of all the facts, are working day in day out on all these aspects and who would be delighted to fit an additional line of fast ships, even at some loss in aggregate tonnage, provided they could be sure that the engines would not clash with other even more urgent needs. In all these matters I should like the House to realise that we do have to aim at an optimum rather than at a maximum, which is not quite the same thing.

On the offensive side the rate of killing U-boats has steadily improved. From 1472January to October, 1942, inclusive, a period of 10 months, the rate of sinkings, certain and probable, was the best we have seen so far in this war, but from November to the present day, a period of three months, that rate has improved more than half as much again.

At the same time, the destructive power of the U-boat has undergone a steady diminution since the beginning of the war. In the first year, each operational U-boat that was at work accounted for an average of 19 ships; in the second year, for an average of 12, and in the third year for an average of 7½. These figures, I think, are, in themselves, a tribute to the Admiralty and to all others concerned.

It is quite true that at the present time, as I said in answer to an inquiry by my hon. Friend the Member for Seaham (Mr. Shinwell) the other day, we are making inroads upon the reserves of food and raw materials which we prudently built up in the earlier years of the war. We are doing this for the sake of the military operations in Africa and Asia and in the Far Pacific. We are doing it for the sake of the Russian convoys, and for the sake of giving aid and supplies to India and to Persia and other Middle Eastern countries. We are doing this on the faith of President Roosevelt's promise to me of large allocations of shipping coming to us, as the floods of American new building come upon the seas. Risks have to be run, but I can assure the House that these needs are not left to chance and to sudden and belated panic spurts. Provided that the present intense efforts are kept up here and in the United States, and that anti-U-boat warfare continues to hold first place in our thoughts and energies, I take the responsibility of assuring the House—and I have not misled them so far—that we shall be definitely better off, so far as shipping is concerned, at the end of 1943 than we are now, and while it is imprudent to try to peer so far ahead, all the tendencies show that unless something entirely new and unexpected happens in this well-explored field, we shall be still better off at the end of 1944, assuming that the war continues until then. It may be disappointing to Hitler to learn that we are upon a rising tide of tonnage and not upon an ebb or shrinkage, but it is the governing fact of the situation. Therefore, let everyone engaged in this sphere of operations bend to 1473his or her task and try to get the losses down and try to get the launchings up; and let them do this, not under the spur of fear or gloom, or patriotic jitters, but in the sure and exhilarating consciousness of a gigantic task which is forging steadily forward to successful accomplishment. The more the sinkings are reduced, the more vehement our Anglo-American war effort can be. The margin, improving and widening, means the power to strike heavier blows against the enemy. The greater the weight we can take off Russia, the quicker the war will come to an end. All depends upon the margin of new building forging ahead over the losses, which, although improving, are still, as I have said, a lamentable and grievous fact to meditate upon. Meanwhile, let the enemy if he will, nurse his Vain hopes of averting his doom by U-boat warfare. He cannot avert it, but he may delay it, and it is for us to shorten that delay by every conceivable effort we can make.

It was only after full, cold, sober and mature consideration of all these facts, on which our lives and liberties certainly depend, that the President, with my full concurrence as agent of the War Cabinet, decided that the note of the Casablanca Conference should be the unconditional surrender of all our foes. But our inflexible insistence upon unconditional surrender does not mean that we shall stain our victorious arms by wrong and cruel treatment of whole populations. But justice must be done upon the wicked and the guilty, and, within her proper bounds, justice must be stern and implacable. No vestige of the Nazi or Fascist power, no vestige of the Japanese war-plotting machine, will be left by us when the work is done, as done it certainly will be.

That disposes, I think, of two important features of the Casablanca Conference, the recognition that the defeat of the U-boat and the improvement of the margin of shipbuilding resources is the prelude to all effective aggressive operations, and, secondly, after considering all those facts, the statement which the President wished to be made on the subject of unconditional surrender. But the Casablanca Conference was, in my not inconsiderable experience of these functions, in various ways unparalleled. There never has been, in all the inter-Allied Conferences I have known, anything like the prolonged professional 1474examination of the whole scene of the world war in its military, its armament production and its economic aspects. This examination was conducted through the whole day, and far into the night, by the military, naval and air experts, sitting by themselves, without political influence thrust upon them, although general guidance was given by the President and by myself. But they were sitting by themselves talking all these matters out as experts and professionals. Some of these conferences in the last war, I remember, lasted a day or two days, but this was 11 days. If I speak of decisions taken, I can assure the House that they are based upon professional opinion and advice in their integrity. There never has been anything like that.

When you have half a dozen theatres of war open in various parts of the globe there are bound to be divergences of view when the problem is studied from different angles. There were many divergences of view before we came together, and it was for that reason, that I had been pressing for so many months for the meeting of as many of the great Allies as possible. These divergences are of emphasis and priority rather than of principle. They can only be removed by the prolonged association of consenting and instructed minds. Human judgment is fallible. We may have taken decisions which will prove to be less good than we hoped, but at any rate anything is better than not having a plan. You must be able to answer every question in these matters of war and have a good, clear, plain answer to the question: what is your plan, what is your policy? But it does not follow that we always give the answer. It would be foolish.

We have now a complete plan of action, which comprises the apportionment of forces as well as their direction, and the weight of the particular movements which have been decided upon; and this plan we are going to carry out according to our ability during the next nine months, before the end of which we shall certainly make efforts to meet again. I feel justified in asking the House to believe that their business is being conducted according to a definite design and, although there will surely be disappointments and failures—many disappointments and serious failures and frustrations—there is no question of drifting or indecision, 1475or being unable to form a scheme or waiting for something to turn up. For good or for ill, we know exactly what it is that we wish to do. We have the united and agreed advice of our experts behind it, and there is nothing now to be done but to work these plans out in their detail and put them into execution one after the other.

I believe it was Bismarck—I have not been able to verify it, but I expect I shall be able to find out now—who said in the closing years of his life that the dominating fact in the modern world was that the people of Britain and of the United States both spoke the same language. If so, it was certainly a much more sensible remark than some of those that we have heard from those who now fill high positions in Germany. Certainly the British and American experts and their political chiefs gain an enormous advantage by the fact that they can interchange their thoughts so easily and freely and so frankly by a common medium of speech.

This, however, did not in any way diminish our great regret that Premier Stalin and some of his distinguished generals could not be with us. The President, in spite of the physical disability which he has so heroically surmounted, was willing to go as far East as Khartoum in the hope that we could have a tripartite meeting. Premier Stalin is, however, the supreme director of the whole vast Russian offensive, which was already then in full swing and which is still rolling remorselessly and triumphantly forward. He could not leave his post, as he told us, even for a single day. But I can assure the House that, although he was absent, our duty to aid to the utmost in our power the magnificent, tremendous effort of Russia and to try to draw the enemy and the enemy's air force from the Russian front was accepted as the first of our objectives once the needs of the anti-U-boat warfare were met in such a way as to enable us to act aggressively.

We have made no secret of the fact that British and American strategists and leaders are unanimous in adhering to their decision of a year ago, namely, that the defeat of Hitler and the breaking of the German power must have priority over the decisive phase of the war against Japan. I have already some two months ago indicated that the defeat of the enemy 1476in Europe may be achieved before victory is won over Japan, and I made it clear that in that event all the forces of the British Empire, land, sea and air, will be moved to the Far Eastern theatre with the greatest possible speed, and that Great Britain will continue the war by the side of the United States with the utmost vigour until unconditional surrender has been enforced upon Japan. With the authority of the War Cabinet, I renewed this declaration in our Conference at Casablanca. I offered to make it in any form which might be desired, even embodying it in a special Treaty if that were thought advantageous. The President, however, stated that the word of Great Britain was quite enough for him. We have already, of course, bound ourselves, along with all the rest of the United Nations, to go on together to the end, however long it may take or however grievous the cost may be. I therefore think it only necessary to mention the matter to the House in order to give them the opportunity of registering their assent to that obvious and very necessary declaration. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear."]

We may now congratulate our American Allies upon their decisive victory at Guadalcanal, upon the taking of which the Japanese had expanded a serious part of their limited strength and largely irreplaceable equipment. We must also express our admiration for the hard-won successes of the Australian and American Forces, who, under their brilliant commander General MacArthur, have taken Buna in New Guinea and slaughtered the last of its defenders. The ingenious use of aircraft to solve the intricate tactical problems, by the transport of reinforcements, supplies and munitions, including field guns, is a prominent feature of MacArthur's generalship and should be carefully studied in detail by all concerned in the technical conduct of the war. In the meantime, while Hitler is being destroyed in Europe, every endeavour will be made to keep Japan thoroughly occupied and force her to exhaust and expend her material strength against the far superior Allied and, above all, American resources. This war in the Pacific Ocean, although fought by both sides with comparatively small forces at the end of enormous distances, has already engaged a great part of the American resources employed overseas as well as those of Australia and New Zealand. 1477The effort to hold the dumbbell at arms length is so exhausting and costly to both sides that it would be a great mistake to try to judge the effort by the actual numbers that come into contact at particular points. It is a tremendous effort to fight at four, five and six thousand miles across the ocean under these conditions. It is the kind of effort which is most injurious to Japan, whose resources are incomparably weaker in material than those of which we dispose.

For the time being, in the war against Japan the British effort is confined to the Indian theatre. Our Asiatic war effort is confined to operations to clear Burma, to open the Burma road and to give what aid can be given to the Chinese. That is the task which we have before us. We have been in close correspondence with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, whom of course we should have been delighted to see at our Conference had it been possible for him to come. General Arnold, head of the United States Air Force, and Field-Marshal Dill are at present in Chungking concerting what we have in mind with the Chinese Generalissimo. We have already received from him an expression of his satisfaction about the strong additional help that will be provided for China at this stage in her long-drawn, undaunted struggle. The Generalissimo also concurs in the plans for future action in the Far East which we have submitted to him as the result of our deliberations. A communiqué about this Conference, received only a few minutes ago, declares the complete accord between the three Powers in their plans for the co-ordination of their Forces and in their determination in all their operations against Japan to ensure continued efforts and mutual assistance. Discussions between General MacArthur and Field-Marshal Wavell will follow in due course.

So much for the Casablanca decisions and their repercussions as far as they can be made public. I must, however, add this. When I look at all that Russia is doing and the vast achievements of the Soviet Armies, I should feel myself below the level of events if I were not sure in my heart and conscience that everything in human power is being done and will be done to bring British and American Forces into action against the enemy with the utmost speed and energy and on the largest scale. This the 1478President and I have urgently and specifically enjoined upon our military advisers and experts. In approving their schemes and allocations of forces, we have asked for more weight to be put into the attacks and more speed into their dates. Intense efforts are now being made on both sides of the Atlantic for this purpose.

From the Conference at Casablanca, with the full assent of the President, I flew to Cairo and thence to Turkey. I descended upon a Turkish airfield at Adana, already well stocked with British Hurricane fighters manned by Turkish airmen, and out of the snow-capped Taurus Mountains there crawled like an enamel caterpillar the Presidential train, bearing on board the head of the Turkish Republic, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, Marshal Chakmak, and the Party Leader—in fact, the High Executive of Turkey. I have already uttered a caution against reading anything into the communiqué which has already been published on this Conference, more than the communiqué conveys. It is no part of of our policy to get Turkey into trouble. On the contrary, a disaster to Turkey would be a disaster to Britain and to all the United Nations. Hitherto, Turkey has maintained a solid barrier against aggression from any quarter and by so doing, even in the darkest days, has rendered us invaluable service in preventing the spreading of the war through Turkey into Persia and Iraq, and in preventing the menace to the oilfields of Abadan which are of vital consequence to the whole Eastern war.

It is an important interest of the United Nations and especially of Great Britain that Turkey should become well armed in all the apparatus of modem war and that her brave infantry shall not lack the essential, weapons which play a decisive part on the battlefields of to-day. These weapons we and the United States are now for the first time in a position to supply to the full capacity of the Turkish railways and other communications. We can give them as much as they are able to take, and we can give these weapons as fast as and faster than the Turkish troops can be trained to use them. At our Conference I made no request of Turkey except to get this rearmament business thoroughly well organised, and a British and Turkish Joint Military Mission is now sitting in Ankara 1479in order to press forward to the utmost the development of the general defensive strength of Turkey, the improvement of the communications and, by the reception of the new weapons, to bring its army up to the highest pitch of efficiency. I am sure it would not be possible to pry more closely into this part of our affairs. Turkey is our Ally. Turkey is our friend. We wish her well, and we wish to see her territory, rights and interests effectively preserved. We wish to see, in particular, warm and friendly relations established between Turkey and her great Russian Ally to the North-West, to whom we are bound by the 20-years Anglo-Russian Treaty. Whereas a little while ago it looked to superficial observers as if Turkey might be isolated by a German advance through the Caucasus on one side and by a German-Italian attack on Egypt on the other, a transformation scene has occurred. Turkey now finds on each side of her victorious Powers who are her friends. It will be interesting to see how the story unfolds chapter by chapter, and it would be very foolish to try to skip on too fast.

After discharging our business in Turkey I had to come home, and I naturally stopped at the interesting places on the way where I had people to see and things to do. I think that the story I have to tell follows very naturally stage by stage along my homeward journey. I have already mentioned to the House, at Question time the other day, my very pleasant stay during my return journey at Cyprus, which has played its part so well and is enjoying a period of war-time prosperity. But how different was the situation in Cairo from what I found it in the early days of last year. Then the Desert Army was bewildered and dispirited, feeling themselves better men than the enemy and wondering why they had had to retreat with heavy losses for so many hundreds of miles while Rommel pursued them on their own captured transport and with their own food, petrol and ammunition. Then the enemy was 60 miles from Alexandria, and I had to give orders for every preparation to be made to defend the line of the Nile, exactly as if we were fighting in Kent. I had also to make a number of drastic changes in the High Command. Those changes have been vindicated 1480by the results. In a week an electrifying effect was produced upon the Desert Army by General Montgomery and by orders which he issued, and upon the whole situation by the appointment of General Alexander as Commander-in-Chief, Middle East. At the same time great reinforcements, despatched many weeks and even months before round the Cape of Good Hope, were steaming up the Red Sea and pouring into the Nile Valley. The American Sherman tank, which the President gave me in Washington on that dark morning when we learned of the fall of Tobruk and the surrender of its 25,000 defenders, came into the hands of troops thirsting to have good weapons to use against the enemy. As a consequence of those events and many others which could be cited, the enemy has been decisively defeated, first in the second Battle of El Alamein, where Rommells final thrust was repulsed, and, secondly, in the great battle for El Alamein, which will do down in history as the Battle of Egypt, for by it Egypt was delivered. On arriving in Cairo I found that now the enemy, who had boasted that he would enter Cairo and Alexandria and cross and cut the Suez Canal, and had even struck a medal to commemorate the event, of which I was handed a specimen, had been rolled back 1,500 miles, and it is probably 1,600 miles by now. What an amazing feat this has been. The battle is one story, the pursuit is another. So rapid an advance by such powerful, competent, heavily equipped forces over distances so enormous is, as far as I am aware, without parallel in modern war; and the Ancients had not the advantages of locomotion which we possess, so they are out of it anyway.

Everywhere in Egypt there is a feeling that Britain has kept her word, that we have been a faithful and unfailing Ally, that we have preserved the Nile Valley and all its cities, villages and fertile lands from the horrors of invasion. It was always said that Egypt could never be invaded across the Western Desert, and certainly that historical fact has now been established upon modern and far stronger foundations.

From Cairo I proceeded on my magic carpet to Tripoli, which 10 days before was in the possession of the enemy. Here I found General Montgomery. I must confess quite frankly that I had not 1481realised how magnificent a city and harbour Tripoli has been made. It is the first Italian city to be delivered by British arms from the grip of the Huns. Naturally there was lively enthusiasm among the Italian population, and I can hardly do justice to the effusiveness of the demonstrations of which I was the fortunate object. I had the honour as your servant to review two of our forward divisions. The 51st Highland Division is the successor of that brave division that was overwhelmed on the coast of France in the tragedies of 1940. It has already more than equalised the account which Scotland had open in this matter. In the afternoon I saw a mass of 10,000 New Zealanders, who, with a comparatively small portion of their vast equipment of cannon, tanks and technical vehicles, took one-and-a-half hours to march past. On that day I saw at least 40,000 troops, and as representing His Majesty's Government I had the honour to receive their salutes and greetings. Meanwhile, of course, the front had rolled nearly another 100 miles farther to the West, and the beaten enemy were being pursued back to the new positions in Tunisia on which it is said they intend to make a stand. I do not wish to encourage the House or the country to look for any very speedy new results. They may come, or they may not come. The enemy have carried out very heavy demolitions and blockings in Tripoli harbour. Therefore, supply from the sea is greatly hampered, and I cannot tell what time will be required to clear the port and begin the building-up of a new base for supplies. It is not the slightest use being impatient with these processes. Meanwhile General Montgomery's Army is feeding itself from its base at Cairo, 1,500 miles away, through Tobruk, 1,000 miles away, and Benghazi, 750 miles away, by a prodigious mass of mechanical transport, all organised in a manner truly wonderful.

Presently we may be able to move forward again, but meanwhile the enemy may have time to consolidate his position and to bring in further reinforcements and further equipment. Let us just see how things go. But I should like to say this; I have never in my life, which from my youth up has been connected with military matters, seen troops who march with the style and air of those of the Desert Army. Talk about spit and polish. The 1482Highland and New Zealand Divisions paraded after their immense ordeal in the desert as if they had come out of Wellington Barracks. There was an air on the face of every private of that just and sober pride which comes from dear-bought victory and triumph after toil. I saw the same sort of marching smartness, and the same punctilio of saluting and discipline, in the Russian guard of honour which received me in Moscow six months ago. The fighting men of democracy feel that they are coming into their own.

Let me also pay my tribute to this vehement and formidable General Montgomery, a Cromwellian figure, austere, severe, accomplished, tireless, his life given to the study of war, who has attracted to himself in an extraordinary measure the confidence and the devotion of his Army. Let me also pay, in the name of the House, my tribute to General Alexander, on whom the over-riding responsibility lay. I read to the House on 11th November the directive which in those critical days I gave to General Alexander. I may perhaps refresh the memory of hon. Members by reading it again: 1. Your prime and main duty will be to take or destroy at the earliest opportunity the German-Italian army commanded by Field-Marshal Rommel, together with all its supplies and establishments in Egypt and Libya. 2. You will discharge, or cause to be discharged, such other duties as pertain to your Command without prejudice to the task described in paragraph 1, which must be considered paramount in His Majesty's interests. I have now received, when, as it chanced, I visited the Army again, the following official communication from General Alexander, in which General Montgomery took great pleasure, and to which it will be necessary for us to send a reply: Sir, The Orders you gave me on August 15, 1942, have been fulfilled. His Majesty's enemies, together with their impedimenta, have been completely eliminated from Egypt, Cyrenaica, Libya and Tripolitania. I now await your further instructions. Well, obviously, we shall have to think of something else, and, indeed, this was one of the more detailed matters which we discussed in the Conference at Casablanca. I did not publish the original instructions to General Alexander until some months afterwards, when the Battle of Egypt had been won, and the House will naturally grant me a similar delay before I make public the reply to him which is now required.

1483I should, however, inform the House and the country of the various changes in the High Command which the marked improvement in our affairs and the movements of the Armies have rendered suitable and necessary. This brings me to the general situation in French North-West Africa, on which I have a very few general remarks to make.

The descent upon North Africa by the British and American Forces will, I believe, be judged in the words which Premier Stalin used to me when I told him about it in August last. He said that it was "militarily correct." It certainly has altered the strategic axis of the war. By this very large-scale manœuvre, thought by many experts to be most hazardous before it was undertaken, we recovered the initiative in the West, and we recovered it at comparatively small cost of life and with less loss in shipping than we gained by what fell into our hands. Nearly half a million men have been landed successfully and safely in North-West Africa, and those fair and beautiful regions are now under the control of the United States. We agreed with the President many months ago that this should be an American enterprise, and I have gladly accepted, with the approval of the War Cabinet, the position of lieutenant in this sphere. The Americans attach the greatest importance to unity of command between Allies and to control over all these Services being in the hands of one supreme commander. We willingly and freely accepted this position, and we shall act loyally and faithfully up to it on all occasions and in every respect. Some people are busily concerned about the past records of various French functionaries whom the Americans have deemed it expedient to employ. For my part, I must confess that I am more interested in the safety of the Armies and in the success of the operations which will soon be again advancing to an important climax. I shall therefore not take up the time of the House with the tales which can be told of how these various Frenchmen acted in the forlorn and hideous situation in which they found themselves when their country collapsed. What matters to General Eisenhower and to our troops, who, in great numbers, are serving under him, and what matters throughout this vast 1484area of population of well over 16,000,000, 90 per cent. of whom are Moslems, is, first and foremost, a tranquil countryside, and, secondly, secure and unimpeded communications to the battle-front, which is now steadily developing on what I have called the Tunisian tip.

I have not seen this battle front, I am sorry to say, because it is 400 miles distant by road from Algiers, where I spent last Friday and Saturday with General Eisenhower and Admiral Cunningham, and also with our Minister-Resident, the right hon. Member for Stockton-on-Tees (Mr. Harold Macmillan), who is doing admirable work and becoming a real solver of problems—friends with everyone—and taking, with Mr. Murphy's co-operation, an increasingly heavy load off the shoulders of the Commander-in-Chief in regard to matters with which a military commander should not to be burdened. Although I did not have a chance to see this front—because one does get a number of communications from home from time to time—I can tell the House that conditions are absolutely different from those which the Desert Army has triumphantly surmounted. The Desert Army is the product of three years of trial and error and of continued perfecting of transport, communications, supplies and signals, and the rapid moving forward of airfields and the like. The Armies now fighting in Tunisia are still in a very early stage of building up their communications. The enemy opposite to them, although largely an improvised army, have something like the advantage which we had over Rommel in front of Cairo, I mean the advantage of lying 30 or 40 miles in front of your bases; while we have to go over very long, slender, tightly stretched and heavily strained approaches, in order to get at them. Very nearly did General Anderson, under General Eisenhower's orders, clear the whole province at a run. Very little more, and we might have achieved everything. It was absolutely right to try, but it failed. The Germans effected their entry, and made good their bridge-heads. We had to fall back to gather strength and to gather our resources for heavy battle. I cannot pretend not to be disappointed that the full result was not achieved at the first bound, Still, our main object is to fight the Germans, and one cannot be blind to the fact that we have made them fight us 1485in a situation extremely costly to them and by no means disadvantageous to us. Although the enemy's lines of supply on land are short, they are under constant attack by sea. Before they reach the battlefield they lose one-quarter, or one-third even, of everything they bring across the sea. Our power of reinforcement is far greater and more secure than theirs. The portentous apparition of the Desert Army, driving Rommel before them, is a new, most potent and possibly even decisive factor. Air fighting is developing on an ever-increasing scale, and this is, of course, greatly to our advantage, because it would pay us to lose two machines to one in order to wear down the German air force and draw it away from the Russian front. However, instead of losing two planes to one, the actual results are very nearly the other way round. Therefore, it seems to me that the House need not be unduly depressed because the fighting in North Africa is going to assume a very much larger scale and last a longer time than was originally anticipated and hoped. It is, indeed, quite remarkable that the Germans should have shown themselves ready to run the risk and pay the price required of them by their struggle to hold the Tunisian tip. While I always hesitate to say anything which might afterwards look like over-confidence, I cannot resist the remark that one seems to discern in this policy the touch of the master hand, the same master hand that planned the attack on Stalingrad and that has brought upon the German armies the greatest disaster they have ever suffered in all their military history. However, I am making no predictions and no promises. Very serious battles will have to be fought. Including Rommel's army, there must be nearly a quarter of a million of the enemy in the Tunisian tip, and we must not in any way under-rate the hazards we have to dare or the burdens we have to carry. It is always folly to forecast the results of great trials of strength in war before they take place. I will say no more than this: All the disadvantages are not on one side, and certainly they are not all on our side. I think that conforms to the standards of the anti-complacency opinion in this country.

French North-West Africa is, as I have said, a United States operation, under American command. We have agreed 1486that the boundary between our respective spheres shall be the existing frontier between Tripolitania and Tunisia, but the Desert Army is now crossing that frontier and driving forward on its quest, which is Rommel. Its movements must, therefore, be combined with those of the First Army and with the various powerful forces coming from the West. For some weeks past, the commanders have been in close touch with one another; these contacts must now be formalised. As the Desert Army passes into the American sphere it will naturally come under the orders of General Eisenhower. I have great confidence in General Eisenhower. I regard him as one of the finest men I have ever met. It was arranged at Casablanca that when this transfer of the Desert Army took place, General Alexander should become Deputy Commander-in-Chief under General Eisenhower. At the same time, Air Chief Marshal Tedder becomes Air Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean, responsible to General Eisenhower for all the air operations in his theatre. He will control also all the Air Forces throughout the whole of the Middle East. This is absolutely necessary, because our Air Forces of Egypt, Cyrenaica and Libya, and also our powerful Air Forces operating from Malta, are actually attacking the same targets, both by bomber and fighter aircraft, as the United States and British Air Forces now working from Algeria and Tunisia are attacking. You must have one control over all this, and that control must be exercised under the supreme command of one man—and who better, I ask, than the trusty and experienced Air Chief Marshal Tedder, for whom General Eisenhower so earnestly asked? Under him, Air Vice-Marshal Coningham, hitherto working with the Eighth Army, whose services have been so much admired, will concert the air operations in support of the British First and Eighth Armies and other troops on the Tunisian battlefield. At the same time, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cunningham, who already commands all the British and American naval forces in this theatre, will extend his command Eastward so as to comprise effectively all the cognate operations inside the Mediterranean and the present Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean will become, with his headquarters in Egypt, Commander-in-Chief of the Levant, dealing also with the Red 1487Sea and all approaches from that quarter. There is no need for me to announce exactly where the line of demarcation between those commands is drawn, but everything is arranged with precision. The vacancy in the Command of the Middle East created by General Alexander's appointment as Deputy Commander-in-Chief to General Eisenhower, will be filled by General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, now commanding in Persia and Iraq, where the Tenth Army, now become a very powerful force, is stationed. It is proposed to keep Persia and Iraq as a separate command for the present, and the new commander will shortly be appointed.

Meanwhile, General Eisenhower has already obtained the consent of General Giraud, who commands the French Army fighting on the Tunisian front, an army which is being raised by American equipment to a very powerful force and which will play its part later on in liberating the French Motherland, to this Army being placed all under the command of General Anderson, together with the strong United States Forces, which have been moved forward into Tunisia. Thus we have a hierarchy established by international arrangement completely in accord with modern ideas of unity of command between various Allies and of the closest concert of the three Services.

I make an appeal to the House, the Press and the country, that they will, I trust, be very careful not to criticise this arrangement. If they do so, I trust they will not do it on personal lines, or run one general against another, to the detriment of the smooth and harmonious relations which now prevail among this band of brothers who have got their teeth into the job. In General Eisenhower, as in General Alexander, you have two men remarkable for selflessness of character and disdain of purely personal advancement. Let them alone; give them a chance; and it is quite possible that one of these fine days the bells will have to be rung again. If not, we will address ourselves to the problem, in all loyalty and comradeship, and in the light of circumstances. [Interruption.] I have really tried to tell the House everything that I am sure the enemy knows and to tell them nothing that the enemy ought to know: [HON. MEMBERS: "Ought not to know."] There was a joke in that Still, I have been able to say something. At any rate, I appeal to all patriotic men on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean to stamp their feet on mischief-makers and sowers of tares wherever they may be found, and let the great machines roll into battle under the best possible conditions for our success. That is all I have to say at the present time.

I am most grateful for the extreme kindness with which I am treated by the House. I accept, in the fullest degree, the responsibility of Minister of Defence and as the agent of the War Cabinet, for the plans we have devised. His Majesty's Government ask no favours for themselves. We desire only to be judged by results. We await the unfolding of events with sober confidence, and we are sure that Parliament and the British nation will display in these hopeful days, which may nevertheless be clouded o'er, the same qualities of steadfastness as they did in that awful period when the life of Britain and of our Empire hung by a thread.

The British acceptance of an American commander in this role, particularly one that had not seen combat in World War One, was not only gracious, but realistic and shrewd.  British forces in the ETO still outnumbered the American ones, but that day was obviously going to end soon.

On other matters, if you wish to take a charitable view, on this day in 1943 the USSR began its nuclear weapons research program.

If you do not, and you probably ought not to, Soviet "research" was ongoing through its penetration of the U.S., and the British, government, which was extensive and had been long ongoing.  While his exact relationship to it remains unclear, for example, Robert Oppenheimer is known to have shown up in Soviet intelligence reports in a way that at least raises questions and was listed in the Venona Papers, as was his brother Frank.  The fact that the USSR, which was not anywhere as technologically advanced as the US, was able to develop an atomic weapons as quickly as it did speaks volumes about the success of its espionage efforts.

Indeed, this entire story is one that is probably still not well-developed.  When concerns really started to develop after World War Two following the Berlin Blockade and the Soviet nuclear detonation of 1949, the Truman administration made a dedicated effort to bury any suggestion that the recent Democratic Administration has been penetrated by Soviet agents, which in turn gave rise to hearings that are reminiscent of some of the type we've seen recently.  This culminated in the McCarthy hearings, which have been inaccurately reported, a fact aided by McCarthy's bullish personality in them.  By and large, the names that McCarthy named have turned out in fact to have had Soviet connections, something not really appreciated until after the names listed in the Venona Papers were released.

Thursday, September 1, 2022

Tuesday, September 1, 1942. Miscarriages of Justice.

On this 1st day of September 1942, the United States District Court in Sacramento, California ruled wartime detention of Japanese Americans to be legal.


Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Tōgō (東郷 茂徳) who had opposed war with the United States on the basis that it was unwinnable, resigned and went into retirement.  The cause of his resignation was his opposition to the creation of a special ministry for occupied territories.  He was appointed thereafter to the upper house of the Japanese Diet, but did not take an active role in it.

He returned to his former position in April 1945 and worked towards acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration.  He advocated Japanese surrender after the atomic strikes of August of that year.  

In spite of his opposition to the war, he was tried as a war criminal in 1948 and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment.  He died as a prisoner two years later at age 67.

He was an unusual man in multiple ways.  He'd studied in Germany when young and then entered the foreign ministry.  He served as ambassador to Germany in 1937 and then later was assigned to the Soviet Union, where he'd negotiated a peace settlement between the USSR and Japan following Khalkhin Gol.  He married German Carla Victoria Editha Albertina Anna de Lalande, who was a wide of was well known German architect, with Japanese marriages to Westerners being uncommon then, which remains the case today.  She survived him and died in 1967.

Tōgō's family, including his wife's daughter by her first marriage and the couple's daughter.  His descendants have continued to have diplomatic careers.

Both of the examples above provide interesting examples of the miscarriage of official justice.  Internment should have been deemed illegal, particularly as to U.S. citizens who were truly being deprived of their liberty without due process.  And while there were Japanese war criminals, Tōgō''s conviction seems to have been for simply being on the losing side of the war.

Royal Air Force Wellingtons bombed Afrika Korps supply lines at night, destroying fuel supplies, which halted Panzerarmee Afrika for most of the day.  

Wellingtons over Europe.

We don't think of Wellington bombers much in the story of the war, but they did in fact see combat service.

The Germans took the Black Sea port of Anapa.

According to the Wyoming State Historical Association, on this day in 1942 official approval was given to commence use of the Casper Air Base, which had been constructed in an incredibly small amount of time.  The existing county airport was Wardwell Field, the Casper area's second airport (the first was in what is now Evansville).  Today, what was Casper Air Base is the Natrona County International Airport, which actually uses at least one fewer runway than was constructed by the Army in 1942.  Wardwell Field's runways, in contrast, are city streets in the Town of Bar Nunn.

Sunday, June 7, 2020

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: First Lutheran Church, Watford City, North Dakota.

Churches of the West: First Lutheran Church, Watford City, North Dakota....:

First Lutheran Church, Watford City, North Dakota.



This Gothic style church is the First Lutheran Church in Watford City, North Dakota. The church was originally built in 1915, expanded in 1939, but destroyed in a fire in 1945.  The church was rebuilt in 1950.

Thursday, September 13, 2018

The M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle used in action for the first time. September 13, 1918.

2nd Lt. Val Browning, son of John Browning, the legendary firearms designer. By the wars end three out of four of the standard small arms weapons in the infantry would be Browning designs.

On this day in 1918 the Browning M1918 Automatic rifle was first used in combat.

It certainly wouldn't be the last time.  Probably nobody knows the date that occurred, if it has, but the last time the US used it in action was probably in the 1960s, as it remained in front line service in the Marine Corps well into the Vietnam War.  National Guard units were still being issued the BAR in the mid 1970s.  Armies equipped by the United States no doubt had it that long as well, and perhaps somewhere around the world its still seeing some use today.



Which is because it was such a fantastic weapon. . . or maybe it was in spite of it being an awful one.


Saying something like that, of course, really requires an explanation.  And to explain it requires a context.

The BAR was designed to be an automatic rifle. In the photos immediately above we see it as it was designed to be, a selective fire (originally) rifle that could be used as an individual weapon to put down a barrage of walking fire.  And it was very good in that role.  The role, that is, of being an "automatic rifle".  It was so good at that role, in fact, that soldiers defeated its later role as a light machinegun by reconverting it back to its original sans bipod configuration.

And, if you've kept up on this blog, or otherwise are familiar with the US's combat experience in World War One, you can see why a weapon like that would have made a lot of sense.  The US was trying to sprint over the deadly space of "No Man's Land" and take enemy trenches, ultimately at close quarter.  An automatic rifle would be really ideal for a role like that, even if it meant, in the case of the BAR, issuing one that was extremely heavy.

US infantrymen in heavy pack.  Soldier on left carries a Chauchat, by all accounts one of the worst automatic weapons any fielded to any army.  He is also wearing his garrison cap under his helmet, which can be seen near the back of his head.  The soldier on the right carries a M1903 Springfield rifle, the barrel of which is barely visible on his right.

But that role was a short one in the U.S. military, and indeed in most militaries that had a similar weapon.  And there were other weapons in that role.  Indeed one of the worst weapons of World War One, the Chauchat, was designed for the same role.  But even at that time a competing series of weapons, light machineguns, were on the battlefield and were rapidly supplanting automatic rifles.  The British, for example, never fielded an automatic rifle but rather fielded two separate light machineguns, the Lewis and the Vickers.  The Germans fielded a "light", but not very light, version of their MG08.  Those crew served weapons were better able to lay down a barrage of sustained fire than any automatic rifle.



So after World War One the U.S. Army, pleased with the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle, had the selective fire option eliminated from production and had the weapon retrofitted with a bipod.  It was re-classed, at that time, as a light machinegun, tactics having moved in the direction of a lmg being a squad support weapon.  For cavalrymen, however, a separate version, ostensibly somewhat lighter, and featuring a bipod at the muzzle and a monpod on the butt, was introduced as a "machine rifle", with it being given the designation of the M1922.  In 1937 the gun was redesigned slightly and became the M1918A1.  Improvments continued as World War Two loomed with the eye towards making the weapon a better light machinegun and it on June 30, 1938, the M1918 A2 was introduced, with there being orders to upgrade all existing stocks of the M1918 and M1918A1 to that configuration.  The M1922 was declared obsolete before World War Two began, but none the less stocks of them remained and during the war they were issued to Merrell's Marauders as light alternatives, to the M1918A2.

Soldiers of the U.S. Army training with the M1918 A2 BAR (and without hearing protection) during World War Two.

The BAR in both versions were in service when the US entered World War Two, as noted, with the M1922 on the way out.  The M1918A2 BAR as a light machinegun remained, but quite rapidly soldiers assigned to the weapon instinctively reverted it to its original role and configuration as an automatic rifle.  Typically they removed its bipod and flash hinder as weight adding unnecessary elements.  The Marine Corps, huge fans of the BAR, began to issue it two per squad as well, anticipating the latter modern issuance of the current M249 "automatic rifle".

Heavily laden Marine with BAR during World War Two.  This is almost certainly a M1918A2 but it has had its bipod and flash hinder removed.

By World War Two it was pretty obvious that the BAR was not the best light machinegun in the world.  It was hindered in ammunition capacity from being a bottom loading weapon, unlike the top loading Brno light machinegun that is arguably the best lmg ever designed.  Like most light machineguns it also had a permanently affixed barrel which is something that designers began to reconsider in that role with the German introduction of the dual purpose MG34 and MG42 machineguns.  Nonetheless, it soldiered through the war and on into the next one, the Korean War and the service found itself ordering additional supplies of them, reflecting wartime losses and post wartime disposals of existing M1918A2s.  The Royal McBee Typewriter Company supplied the last BARs to the military during this time frame.

Helmet-less U.S. Army soldier firing M1918A2 BAR in Korea.  This soldier has removed his bipod from the BAR.  He's also in distinctive Korean War era winter gear, including the L. L. Bean designed "shoe packs" that came in during World War Two.

Following the Korean War the US planned on replacing the BAR as the US went to the GPMG concept introduced by the Germans during World War Two.  The US had no plans to put the US GPMG, the M60, in the BAR's role but rather planned to place a heavy barreled M14 rifle in that role, as the M14 began to replace the M1 Garand. And in fact the Army started to do that before problems with the concept, which should have been obvious from the onset, prevented it from being completed.  That light machinegun, the M15, was practically stillborn although it was in fact adopted.

The M14 Rifle, the intended replacement for the M1 Garand which did in fact replace it in the active duty branches of the Army and Marine Corps, and the M14A1 which had already replaced the M15 and which was replacing the BAR when the Vietnam War broke out and production of M14 rifles was stopped. The M14 was an excellent rifle.  The M14A1 was a pretty bad light machinegun.

Nonetheless, when the Army deployed to Vietnam in the early 1960s it was the M14A1 that went with it, not the BAR.  BAR's, however, were supplied to the ARVN.

South Vietnamese soldiers equipped with a BAR and a M2 carbine.

And the Marines retained the BAR. They liked it so much that they kept the BAR well into the Vietnam War where it served alongside the M16A1 and the M60.  I'm not aware of whether the Marines were ever equipped with M14A1s, but if they were, they didn't use them. They liked the BAR so much they kept using it, even after the M14, which they also greatly loved, was taken from them.

In the Army, the introduction of the M60 and the M14A! did not actually mean that the BAR completely disappeared, even if the Army did not use the BAR in Vietnam (or at least not much), and instead attempted to use the M14A1 and then went to a designated M16A1 (which was particularly bad in that role).  In the Army Reserve and the National Guard the BAR continued to serve into the mid to late 1970s (it was in service at least as late as 1976 in the Guard).  This reflected the fact that small arms in the military were in a real state of flux from 1960s forward.  The M15 was never made in sufficient quantities to replace the BAR and it self was replaced by a heavy stocked version of the M14 which was never made in large quantities either.  The M14 was soon challenged in the rifle role by the M16 and the M16A1 in Vietnam, and production of the it was stopped before there were adequate numbers for the reserves. The M1 Garand therefore carried on into the early 70s when, in the Guard and Reserve, the Garand was replaced with the M16, which now existed in large quantities.  The BAR kept on until it was basically replaced, at first, with the M60 in the late 1970s.  In the early 1980s the M249 5.56 machinegun was introduced at the squad level in the Army and it ultimately supplanted the M60 in that role, making its way into the Guard in the late 1980s.

Which of course doesn't mean that the BAR disappeared everywhere overnight.  BARs were supplied to a lot of American allies and clients, and they were manufactured by other nations.  Belgium's FN, for example, introduced the last variant of it, one with a detachable barrel, some of which went to Middle Easter nations.

By that time they were well obsolete.  But maybe they were by the late 1920s for that matter. As a light machinegun, it was never ideal.  As an automatic rifle, it excelled.  Its record was quite mixed.

Friday, November 24, 2017

Shockingly young! Surprisingly old! Too young, too old! Well, nothing much actually changing at all. . . Marriage ages then. . . and now. . and what does it all mean?



 Eleanor Randolph Wilson in her wedding dress.  1914.  She was a daughter of President Wilson and would have been about 25 years old at the time this photograph was taken.

This is one of those topics that I started a really long time ago, and then it became sort of bizarrely relevant to current headlines, or maybe not.  

Anyhow, I thought of it, and determined to expand it out a bit, although perhaps I couldn't be doing so at a worse time, given that the current focus on marriage ages has turned sort of bizarre corner in the recent news. 

 Turkish bride and her attendants, 1914.

Indeed, this whole topic has been so much so much in current conversation, that an off line email conversation made me reconsider a lot of this topic, even though doing so makes a person feel a little odd and icky doing so.  But first we will start with what I originally started to start with, which is a link to this:

Median Age at Marriage–Then and Now

This really short article on A Hundred Years Ago has some really interesting information in it.  And some of that really interesting information just isn't what we'd expect.  The entry was part of a series on a century old diary, and its starts out:
 Bridesmaids, 1916.

I knew that the median age a century ago was not 18 years old, but I think that assumption is super common.  Indeed, I think that a lot of people operate under the assumption that back a century, or more, ago people married really young.

Let's take a look at that, and we'll start off with the article we linked in.
I was surprised to learn that in 1910 the median age at first marriage  was 21.6 for females and 25.1 for males.
The median marriage age steadily decreased until the middle of the 20th century. In 1950, it was 20.3 for females and 22.8 for males.
The trend then reversed and by 2007, it had increased to 25.0 for females and 26.7 for males–and preliminary estimates for 2010 suggest that it has continued to climb to about 26 for females and 28 for males.
Let's take a look at that, as I don't think that's what people expect at all.

 An early destination wedding?  A wedding, coming up on a century ago, in the Luray Caverns.

The median age for women was 21.6 in 1910. The same year, the median age for men was 25.1.

At the time the author wrote this entry, 2010, the median age for women was 25.0.  The median age for men was 26.7.  Data suggested that it had crept up a little over 1.7 years for women and 1.3 years for men.

Okay, that is a difference, but is that what you were expecting?

I doubt it, unless you are quite familiar with these statistics.

So, over century, the average age for "first marriages" has gone up a little under four years for women, and a little over 1.5 years for men.  Not that much of a climb.

 Wedding reception, 1907.  Doesn't look all that different from a lot of them you might see in a fancier wedding now.  This one is a bit unusual for the time, and was probably in a higher economic class, as the men are wearing tuxedos, which was not the standard for all weddings until relatively recently.

And that says quite a bit.

Additionally, we might note, the age differences between married couples tends not to be vast, at least for these first marriages. Early on, the men were a little over three years older than the women they married.  Now, a century later, they're almost two years older.  Not much of a change.

Particularly if we consider the vast societal, and moreover economic, changes during that century.

 Polish bride and groom, 1920.

We need, however, to first also take in mind that that these are averages. And as a median is an average, it's possible to arrive at these same results by having big swings in the numbers.  I.e., these numbers may reflect a really tight group, or they may reflect a really broad one.  The numbers themselves don't quite reveal which is which.  I'm taking them to be fairly tight, but I could be well off the mark.

But note, if this is correct, not only is the common assumption "people married so much younger" somewhat open to criticism, the assumption that "people are marrying older and older" is as well.  I suspect that both of those comments are in fact true, in context, but the numbers don't really adequately support it over the past century, and the changes, particularly after other factors are added in, may not actually be statistically significant.

 Portrait of very young Jewish bride, Ottoman Empire, 1870s.

Let's take a table that somebody else has generated and see if it changes things at all:

Year --- Men --- Women
2015 ----29.2 ----27.1
2010 --- 28.2 --- 26.1
2000 --- 26.8 --- 25.1
1990 --- 26.1 --- 23.9
1980 --- 24.7 --- 22.0
1970 --- 23.2 --- 20.8
1960 --- 22.8 --- 20.3
1950 --- 22.8 --- 20.3
1940 --- 24.3 --- 21.5
1930 --- 24.3 --- 21.3
1920 --- 24.6 --- 21.2
1910 --- 25.1 --- 21.6
1900 --- 25.9 --- 21.9
1890 --- 26.1 --- 22.0

Okay, that doesn't take us a lot further back, but it also produces some interesting results.  If we go all the way back to 1890 what we find is that the median age for men was 26.1, and that it then went down a year by 1910.  It continued to go down until 1960, at which time it was 22.8 years.  That really doesn't fit with our picture at all.  If we'd been making this same calculation mid 20th Century, we'd be noting that marriage ages were going down.  Now, if this table is correct, the age for men is 29.2, way up from 1960, and about three years up from 1890.  From 1890 on, however, it took all the way until 1990, 100 hundred years, for the age for men to rise back up to what it had been in 1890.  For that matter, it took from 1890 until 1980 for the age to rise back up to 22.0 years for women, although its climbed dramatically since then. . . maybe.

 Wedding party portrait, 1909.  Again, this couple must have been from an upper economic class, given the dress.

For women ages held fairly steady in the very early 20s, but still hit bottom in 1950 to 1960, when it was just a little over 20 years old.  It's way up to a little over 27 years old now, and that's quite a jump.

So this trend must be universal, going back, sort of kind of.

Not so much.

Let's look at 1850.

In 1850 the average marriage age for men was 28.

Um. . . 28?  Yes, we just climbed up over that in 2010.

And for women it was 26.  We got back to that in 2010 also.

It took us 130 years for the average "first" marriage age to get back to what it had been in 1850.

 Balkan wedding, 1919.  American officer is giving the bride away.

Hmm. . . . .

Now this gets harder and harder to do as you go back further and further, but let's take a look even further back.

 "Francis LeBaron and Mary Wilder during their wedding ceremony, with many guests, in a room, possibly in the magistrate's residence, officiated by a clergyman; includes two remarques, at bottom center is a bust portrait of Mary Wilder, facing left, and on the lower left is a scene with Dr. Francis LeBaron as a physician attending to a sick person."  LoC.

England, 1700s; Women: 25-26; Men: 30
New England, early 1600s; Women: Teens; Men: 26
New England, late 1600s; Women: 20; Men: 25
Pennsylvania Quakers, 1600s; Women: 22; Men: 26
Pennsylvania Quakers, 1700s; Women: 23; Men: 26
Rural South Carolina, 1700s; Women: 19; Men: 22

Wow.  None of this meets our expectations at all.

Basically, if we go back and looked at the United  States and the UK, and we take into account nothing but median ages, things have not really changed all that much.  For the most part, in North America, going back about 300 years, median ages have been in the upper half of the 20s.  Women have generally fallen in the lower half of the 20s.  Ages have climbed in recent years, but they've actually gone up and down over the years.

 Jewish wedding, Ottoman Empire, 1870s.  The families are signing a formal agreement in the context of the wedding.

So what's going on?

Well, in some ways not that much.

Truly.

The long historical data basically suggests that even over time and change, in European American culture, men tend to get married in the second half of their 20s and women in the first half.

The trend line does move, up and down, and that means that external things influence this.

So what about all the stories to the opposite?

Well, let's consider historical outliers.  But before we do that, let's consider the current outliers in our own statistics.

 Wedding at Episcopal church in Jerusalem, 1940s.

But before we do that, let's remember that when we are dealing with statistics this consistent, the outliers don't make the story.

In other words, there may truly be a lot of nothing going on in this story. Things, quite frankly, may not have changed that much.  Here's an area in which you might truly be able to look back in the past and figure that your life might have played out much the same way.  Or maybe (and at least somewhat probably) not.

Okay.  Outliers in our current statistics.

One thing we're going to have to do in this is look at economics as part of this story, as well as acceptable social conventions.  Indeed, I argued just the other day that our current social conventions are messed up, and I mean it. That taps into this story in a way.

If we look at the current stats, men at age  29.2 and women at 27.1, we have to consider that these statistics would be at least somewhat depressed if we used the 1917 definitions.

 Bedouin wedding procession, early 20th Century.

Up until after World War Two cohabitation was largely illegal in most states and extremely shameful everywhere in European American and European society. The only people you really saw cohabitate tended to be on the far edges of society.  People so down and out that the statistics didn't count for them, or so Bohemian that they didn't.  And in many instances when that occurred the presumption of the Common Law marriage was presumed to exist.

Now, Common Law marriages still exist in most states, I think, but they do not exist in mine per se (we'll recognize common law marriages that are contracted elsewhere).  Common law marriages have never been as common as presumed, but they have been widely recognized at least in societies that use English Common Law.

This matters in terms of our current statistics as quite a few instances of "cohabitation" would either be deemed common law marriages under the pre World War Two law or they'd be regarded as illegal arrangements.  Post World War Two many would still be regarded as common law marriages, at first, or would be regarded as shameful. Now it's become, and in my view its not a good thing, extremely common.

 Chinese wedding party, 1909.

It's so common in fact that what at first was an edgy behavior mostly done by middle class rebellious youth has become pretty widely accepted to the point where the old instances of the common law marriage have come to apply to them in some ways, and indeed in many ways.  Over the last ten years, for example, I knew one cohabitating couple in which at least the female in the arrangement simply introduced the male members as her "husband". That would be sufficient for a common law marriage to be recognized under the old law (they in fact later married).  Another couple I know is engaged, has a child, and have had a very long standing relationship. They're in their early 30s, but the relationship stretches back to their early 20s and would likely have been regarded as a common law marriage, if we looked at it in 1917, or they would have certainly been legally compelled to marry quite early on.  Another couple I know is in their late 30s but again has been living in such an arrangement for a decade or more.  And another one I know has been engaged in it for a shorter period but again have undertaken things that would have caused a common law marriage to have been recognized earlier on.  And to show how even the people who are engaged in such relationships are confused by what they mean, I recently heard a man in one such relationship try to describe another man in one by what he was in relation to the female object of that second union, and ended u using the word "husband".

 This photograph of a native Alaskan wedding party almost certainly depicts a party at a Russian Orthodox wedding service.

The point on this is that this is that, because marriage is a natural institution (people familiar with some bodies of law will be familiar with the term "natural marriage") people tend to re-create its incidents even when they are attempting not to.  So, if we look at the men at age  29.2 and women at 27.1, if we include common law marriages and ersatz, pseudo and near common law marriages, that number is actually lower.  Probably quite a bit lower.

Indeed, we'd have to depress these ages for every decade since the 1970s as this practice became more accepted.  If we did, my guess (and its just that) is that the ages would remain about where they were in 1980.

When we get beyond that, what we tend to find is that we have about a ten year period, from 20 to 30 years age, when "first marriages" are normally contracted for men and women, but that those ages slide around, up and down, for a variety of reasons.

 Bedouin wedding, Syria, 1940s

And I suspect that those reasons are fairly consistent.  Economic and societal reason are primary factors, over the ages, but often very different economic and societal factors.  So the forces that impact this are the same, and different, at the same time.

Currently, we've been seeing the restoration of economic forces that most people in our current era did not experience, but which are a bit of the historical norm, at least for men.  It's taking a long time for men to establish themselves economically now, and indeed due to the entry of women into the work force (which we'll deal with in a minute) its also taking a long time for women to do the same.

This has been going on longer than people recognize and I suspect that its something that can be traced at least back to the 1980s.  And in this context, its interesting to note that marriage ages for men climbed from just about 23 years of age in 1950 to just about 25 years of age in 1980, and then to 26 years of age in 1990.

In 1950 American men still lived in an era when a high school degree, which they normally acquired at age 17 or 18, could gain entry to the work force at a beginning, but real, level.  A bachelor's degree, normally obtained at that time at age 22, guaranteed entry into the white collar world.  By age 22 men had likely more often than not (but not always, these are statistics) met the woman they were likely to marry and by age 22 they were established enough to get married, more often than not.

Now, not all did.  Some married later (and we'll get to that in a moment) and some younger, but you can see how the general trend worked.

 Bride portrait, about 1910.

By the 1980s, however, this was much less the case.  Bachelors degrees that had taken four years now often took five.  And a bachelors degree was a much more dicey proposition in terms of employment.  By 1990 this was even more the case, and by 2000 many bachelors degrees did not guarantee employment at all. So this meant that men who had entered career fields at 22, in the 50s, were not entering them until 25 or 26, at the earliest, a couple of decades later, which pretty much matched the rise in marriage ages.   Now, with even advance degrees like law not offering immediate employment opportunities that stage of life is often pushed off to age 30 or even older.

The concept of somebody being young, we'd note, has also risen.  In 1930 a person who was 30 wasn't a kid.  Now, perhaps they are.

When we look back further this is all the more evident.  If we look at hard economic times, like the 1890s, men and women both pushed the age of marriage back.  When economic times were really good, like the 1950s and 1960s, the opposite was true.  Geographically this is also evident.  When we look at England of the 1700s the average age was about 30, while it was about 26 in North America.  People's prospects were generally better in North America than they were in England.

 Wartime wedding of Australian service members in Jerusalem.

When you add in women, the same is also evident, but the pressures are different.  Up until the 1930s or so, as we've written about before, most women remained in their parents households until they married.  Their labor was needed, but if you look at writings from women of that age, they often strongly desired to get married just to get out of their parents' homes.  While it would be going a ways back, the 1700s, the writings of Jane Austen, who of course was herself a late 18th Century and early 19th Century figure, and an unmarried woman, this comes across well.  In Pride and Prejudice, for example, one figure marries simply because she's a burden on her parents, past the average marriage age (late 20s in the case of the figure in the novel), and wants to keep her own home.  The marriage prospects of all of the Bennet sisters in the novel are of utmost concern to her parents as they will not inherit an estate and will be subject to economic disaster if they do not marry.   The portrayal is dramatic, but not really greatly different from contemporary writings of the time involving people in similar situations.

What this tended to mean is that women always married a bit younger than men, but never as young as some seem to think.  As a rule, prior to mid century, and even some time after that, the fact that their husband was established and they were moving from one domestic employment to another operated in regards to that.  That is, for example, if we look at 1920, they tend to average just over 21 years of age and were marrying men who were just under 25, which would mean that by that time they'd been living as adult women at home, as a rule, for several years and were marrying men who were a couple of years at least into what would likely be their lifetime employment.  Situations vary, but that would have been relatively stable.

 Wedding of officer of the German fighting ship Emden.  The ship grounded early in World War One so I don't know what happened to the subjects.

Figuring out what was going on in 1970, when women hit the floor age, wise at just under 21 is a little harder to figure. Their spouses averaged at just over 23.  So it would seem that some of the same factors were at work, but that women, who were no longer needed at home for domestic employment, but who hadn't yet been subject to the pressure of "must have a career" were marrying fairly young in relative terms.  Women may have actually hit the height of their freedom in real terms about that time.

After 1970s a new era increasingly took over in which women were now subject to increased expectations that they had to have a "career" just like men.  As that developed, they same pressure that they establish themselves in that career really built. Today that pressure is full on.  With that in mind, that "first marriage" age for women is now up to 27 is no surprise, they're enduring the same thing that men are.

So what's that leave us with? Well, for most people, marriage ages haven't changed as much as we commonly think, as first marriages are generally contracted older than we think they are, and beyond that, economic and social pressures have an influence on that.

 Just married.  1943.

Social pressures?

What am I talking about here?  I only addressed economic pressures.

Well, on to social concerns, or perhaps I should say cultural concerns. These too have historically had an impact on marriage ages, but they're outliers in a way.

Consider for example the Irish.  The news in Ireland is that marriage ages are up, and now the first age for men and women is now in the 30s (although there may be a statistical glitch in this that makes the data a bit flawed).  The average age for women, in Ireland, is 33 and for men, 35.

But in reality, the average age in Ireland, and amongst Irish Americans, has always been high.  Men have crowed or surpassed age 30 routinely for as long as the statistics have been taken, and traditionally women were in their late 20s. There were strong economic reasons for this for centuries, but its also now a strongly cultural matter that has only changed marginally.  "Young Irish bride" is a category that doesn't even really exist.  Indeed, under the law of Ireland, a person under 21 years of age is a minor and marriages in that age group are regarded as under aged, which they would not be in the US.  Ireland allows marriages with legal provisions down to 16, which is actually a higher age than most US states ultimately have (I don't know what it is in my state, but at least according to a sign that was once up in the courthouse it was something like down to age 15 with parents permission.)

Indeed, my own family is somewhat of an example of this as my parents, who both had Irish heritage, didn't marry until they were both in their 30s.  They'd fit in nicely with the current Irish statistics.  I'm not sure how old my mother's parents were, but I know that they were more or less engaged as a couple for an extremely long time while my grandfather worked to get his feet on the ground economically.  I think, therefore, that they were likely around 30 when they were married.  I was 31 at the time of our wedding.

 

Well what about the opposite, "young" marriages? Are there cultures in the United States where this is common?  Well, not really any mainstream ones really.

There are some where the ages are slightly younger than the average, but they're only slightly younger.  Mormons, for example, marry statistically younger, but the median ages are only a couple of years younger than the national average.  By observation, this makes sense as we tend to see Mormon couples in fact be a couple of years younger than what we'd otherwise find.  While, by observation, Mormon dating practises are dramatically different than the American cultural norm, that isn't translating into really young brides as some people sometimes tend to think it does.

Some recent immigrant cultures do tend towards young marriages, particularly young brides, but those amount to statistical outliers and may not be statistically significant.  If they are, they are something that has existed throughout American history and have probably pushed the average marriage ages down, statistically, for a long time.  Some American Hispanic cultures had very young marriage ages, compared to the overall population, at one time for example.  The same is true of Italian Americans.  Marriages down into the teenage years were not uncommon in either culture, at one time, but they are now.  As the overall percentage of the population such groups represent is always a minority, the impact on overall statistics would be small.  Having said that, I've known at least one deceased New Mexican person who was married at about age 14 to a husband who was only a couple of years older, in the 1930s, and an Italian American couple that was 16 years old, in the 40s, when they they were married. FWIW, the marriages worked and were successful.

So what about the ones that are always the source of myth and rumor? You know, 30 year old guy marries 14 year old girl. That type of thing.

Well that was never common.

And it was particularly not common for a male "first" marriage.

Which takes us to second marriages, or rather a marriage where one of the two participants had been married previously. This is, I suspect, where we pick up these stories more often than not.

A real factor in the story of marriage in prior centuries was female mortality.  The female death rate was very high, often due to death giving birth.  Women wanted to be married, but at the same time its notable that the basic incidents of marriage could be lethal to women, and frequently were. 

What that meant was that the number of widowers was once very high. For that matter, there were once a lot of widows was very high as well.  The dynamics of this had a real impact on "second" marriage ages.

Today, there are more women than men, as male mortality is higher.  That's always been true to a degree, but if we go back prior to the mid 19th Century we'll find that this was not always the case. Female mortality was quite high.  As a result of this, it's not uncommon at all to find examples of men who were married three or so times and never due to divorce. Their prior wives had just all died.

None of that had an impact on "first marriages", and it didn't always have an impact on second marriages either.  Generally, given a choice, men tend to marry at or near their own ages, or within a decade of it (going down, usually, not up).  But for second marriages, this does begin to break apart.

For one thing, some men will simply look down towards first marriageable age no matter what.  Its not hard to find examples of that now, and I can think of at least one such example readily myself.  But beyond that, if a man had means at all, and his spouse died, he likely was in the position of having to hire female assistance to take care of his young children, and that assistance ends up explaining a lot of young brides.

As we've already discussed, women, prior to the mid 20th Century, normally worked in their parents homes until they married.  This wasn't the case for those who were forced to work outside the home for economic reasons, however.  Some women worked their entire lives as "domestics".  But some just started off their lives that way.  That is, they were surplus labor at home in a home that was better off with them employed outside the home.  Often these women were in fact girls.
 

Employed, as they sometimes were, in the home of a widower, who likely wasn't really all that old, and taking care of his children, at some point, practicality and familiarity took over.  This wasn't exactly a love match per se.  The man probably needed the labor, but probably also had some affection for the subject bride. The bride had a family that benefited from her leaving home, and what she'd be doing in the household of her new husband wasn't dramatically different from what she was doing otherwise, but somewhat more stable.

Indeed, you can find lots of examples, sometimes upset examples, of older children being really upset by a father "marrying down".  I can think of one such example of that myself in which a highly educated  man had been married to a highly educated woman, who died. The second wife was one of the maids.


Another example of this, although not a good one due to the conditions, is that of the parents of T. E. Lawrence, i.e. Lawrence of Arabia.  Lawrence's father was Sir Thomas Chapman and was married to a woman of equal rank who was one year older than he was. But Chapman took up with the governess of his children with his wife, who was fifteen years his junior. A better historical example, although still obviously rather problematic, would be that of Sally Hemmings, who became the mistress of Thomas Jefferson after the death of Jefferson's wife, and her half sister, Martha (who herself had been married prior to Jefferson but who had been widowed.  Of interest here, Martha had been 18 years old at the time of her first marriage, her husband had been 22, but Sally was in her mid teens when she became the enslaved mistress and perhaps near spouse of Jefferson (the dynamics of this are, suffice it to say, rather odd and problematic).

This is only one variant of that, of course. Poverty and security, in an age before any social welfare system existed at all, forced some people into relationships that were not only extreme in our view, but likely were extreme at the time.  They'd not arise now, however, as the economic pressures that gave rise to them just don't exist.




Which I suppose takes us up to the odd outliers we see in the news now and then today.  When we hear things like the Roy Moore story, or read about another Duggar getting married in a nearly arranged marriage, these are not only unusual, but in fact cross over into odd.

So, what's the overall story here? Well, there is one, but it's not the one that people expect.  Average marriage ages have changed, in fact, not hardly at all.  Where we think we see some change it's often because of economic and statistical factors that we don't quite appreciate.



  Yes, this is the third (now fourth) time I've run this photo.  I just like it.  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and their children, 1939.

So there's a story here, to be sure.  But maybe a lot less of one than we'd suppose, and its influenced by factors that we often don't really grasp, while we analyze ones that perhaps get more attention than they deserve.

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Related threads:

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For First Time in Modern Era, Living With Parents Edges Out Other Living Arrangements for 18- to 34-Year-Olds. Generations: Part Three of Three