The best posts of the week of October 10, 2021
Sunday, October 24, 2021
Saturday, October 23, 2021
Thursday October 23, 1941. Dumbo released
On this day in 1941 the Walt Disney animated film Dumbo was released. I've never seen it.
Free French leader Charles De Gaulle asked the French Resistance to halt assassinating Nazi figures in order to end German reprisals.
Both of these are noted here:
Today in World War II History—October 23, 1941
The German government banned the emigration of Jews from territory held by Germany, now that its mass murder campaign was in full swing.
The Germans killed all the males age 16 to 69 in Mesouvouno Greece.
Congress voted to add $5.96B to the Lend Lease bill,
A giant Shelley's Owl. . .
an African species standing about two feet high, has been clearly seen and photographed for the first time in 150 years.
Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Should SAR Leave the Body on the Peak?
Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Should SAR Leave the Body on the Peak?: A Colorado Air National Guard Blackhawk helicopter on a mission near Ouray (Ouray Mountain Rescue Team). Last August, three volunteers from ...
Friday, October 22, 2021
Wednesday October 22, 1941. Odessa, Châteaubriant and Nantes.
On this day in 1941 the mass murder of the Jewish population in and surrounding Odessa commenced, with over 20,000 people being killed in two days. The atrocity commenced in supposed retaliation for the detonation of a mine in the NKVD headquarters. The mine had been placed in the location prior to the Soviet withdrawal. German and Romanians participated in the atrocity.
In France, Germans executed 27 residents of Châteaubriant and 21 in Nantes in retaliation for the Resistance assassination of German officer Karl Hotz some days prior.
Saturday October 22, 1921. League adjustments.
Country Gentleman went to press with an elderly fiddler.
Negotiations were going on in the UK over the status of Ireland.
Arthur Griffith, insert, and Irish Republican sympathizers, in London for Irish-British peace conference
The German cabinest resigned in protest over the League of Nation's decision to award part of Silesia to Poland. The League also declared the Aland Islands neutral. They'd recently been awarded to Finland.
Thursday, October 21, 2021
Friday, October 21, 1921.
Premiered on this day in 1921.
Laura Lejeune played tennis.
Gen. Mitchell was checking out aircraft.
Thompson submachine guns made the press
Lt. Gen. Wise & Lt. Brooks Hyde-Pierson, 10/21/21
Some pondered.
And the mountains observed.
Mt. St. Vrain.
Wednesday, October 20, 2021
Supply Chain Disruption and Other Economic Problems
This past week was another one for which the weekend news shows are well worth watching.
Both Meet The Press and This Week dealt with the economy and what's going on with it. Part of what's going on is inflation, which, in spite of earlier Administration projections, is becoming a problem.
Part of that problem has been caused by "supply chain disruptions". Both shows, both of which featured Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, agreed on this point. The problem seems to have been caused by people basically foregoing purchases of many things "during" the still ongoing pandemic, and then seeking to buy them all at once. The Port of Los Angeles can't get all the stuff unloaded. It's now gone to twenty-four hours per day operations, which surprises me actually as I would have thought it already had that.
Port of Los Angeles.
So, while nobody is putting it this way, this is in part what happens when your own country no longer makes anything itself and instead relies upon China to produce everything.
There's discussion of calling out the California National Guard to act as dockworkers, which would suck if you were in the Californian National Guard.
That's not all of it, however. Added to this is the post Covid change in how American's view work.
There are presently 11,000,000 unfilled jobs in the United States. These are jobs that were filled before the COVID Recession. People aren't going back to work.
And laborers are also demanding better wages and benefits in order to do the work they're doing.
This represents a dual fundamental shift in the thinking of the American work force. Part of it is old-fashioned, and part not so much.
As for better wages and benefits, following the Reagan Administration and the economic woes of the 1970s, American labor really faded from the scene as an organized entity. Of course, we lost a lot of labor to overseas as well. Now the remaining labor is fed up and taking advantage of the situation, for which it cannot be blamed.
The second part of this situation, however, is remarkable. Forced out of work during the pandemic, stay homes, lots of people discovered that modern American work sucks. They don't want to go back, as their lives were better without the work.
Some of those who don't want to go back are truck drivers. The country is short 20,000 truck drivers right now.
In recent years the country has actually imported a lot of truck drivers, something the general public seems largely unaware of. Anymore, when I read the names of people involved in truck driving accidents, I expect the drivers to be Russian, and I'm actually surprised when they are not. What happened here overall isn't clear to me, but over the last fifteen years technology has developed to where it's much easier for trucking companies to keep tabs on their truckers while on the road and things have gotten safer. At the same time, this means, as it always has, but perhaps more so, that these guys live on the road. According to Buttigieg the industry has an 80% annual turnover rate.
An 80% annual turnover rate doesn't sound even remotely possible to me, but that there's a high one wouldn't surprise me. It's a dangerous job and contrary to what people like to imagine, it doesn't really pay the drivers that well as a rule, or at least fairly often. Often the drivers are "owner operators" who own their own super expensive semi tractor and who are leasing it to the company they are driving for. That in turn means that they're often making hefty payments on the truck. I don't blame anyone for not wanting to do it.
I can blame the nation for putting itself in this situation, however.
Trucking is a subsidized industry, but people don't think of it that way. Its primary competitor is rail. Railroads put in their own tracks and maintain their own railroad infrastructure. When you see a train, everything you were looking at, from the rails to the cars, were purchased by private enterprise. When you seem a semi tractor, however, it's always traveling on a public conveyance.
It's doing that fairly inefficiently compared to rail. Rail is incredibly cheap on a cost per mile basis, and it's actually incredibly "green" as well. It's efficient. Trucks are nowhere near as efficient in any fashion. Not even in employment of human resources. Trains have, anymore, one or two men crews, the same as semi trucks, but they're hauling a lot more per mile than trucks are with just two men.
Well, sooner or later people are going to have to return to work. When the money runs out, that's the choice you have.
But this isn't going to return to normal. Whether we'll stabilize soon in a new economy, and we better hope that we do, or keep on enduring this, which will be wiping out savings and destroying earning capacity, remains to be seen. The current Administration will be a key to that.
Biden can't be blamed for the current economic situation. And people who seem to think that Trump did all things well should be aware that we'd be looking at this if Trump had won the election. But what the government can do now is really screw things up for a long time.
Part of screwing things up would be to invest heavily in nonsensical "infrastructure" spending. Right now in Congress there remains a massive infrastructure bill that would fund lots of construction in an economy in which there's a shortage of laborers, not a surplus. Where are those workers going to come from?
Well, they'll only come with much higher wages, which is inflationary.
And frankly a lot of this spending is misplaced. Spending on "roads and bridges" particularly is. That's part of the problem, not part of the solution to anything. A "supply chain" based on highways was never a good idea, and its weakness is now demonstrated. And frankly, roads and bridges are mostly a local problem.
Of course, it might be pointed out, the Federal government had a big role in causing those roads and bridges to come in. That's both true and untrue. When you look at big urban bridges, those mostly were local money. States and cities that funded those bridges don't, apparently, have the money to maintain them, which is a local problem.
But Federal highway funding does certainly exist, having really started in small but significant ways as far back as the 19th Century. The Cumberland Road was authorized by Congress in the pre railroad days of 1806. Others followed, and then rail received a lot of support when it was first going transcontinental. So it can be justly maintained that there's never really been a time when the US government didn't have a role in transportation.
It was the early 20th Century, however, when Congress started to encourage highways. It soon followed the automobile. The Lincoln Highway was the first big national effort at that, as we've discussed on this site and elsewhere.
This is a monument to one of the founders of the Lincoln Highway, located along its successor, Interstate 80. The art deco memorial was created in 1938, the "L" cement markers are markers for the Lincoln Highway that can be found here and there along its route.
While this blog started out with war memorials, it's covered quite a few trail markers over the years, and indeed I will now be adding that as a category here, meaning I have to go back and edit quite a few old posts. This marker, however, is only the second one I've posted on any of my blogs to highways, the other being the Black and Yellow Road near Gillette.
This marker is quite elaborate and very nice, being both a suitable marker for the Lincoln Highway and a nice example of an art deco piece of art.
Wyoming has also commemorated the highway, the noted individual, and the marker, with its own highway sign.
All of this is located at the same rest stop on Albany County that the Lincoln Memorial is located at. Of note, this marker was moved from its original location, which might have been one that was preferred by the individual commemorated by the marker.The Lincoln Highway ran, at least in Wyoming, right astride the Union Pacific, the original transcontinental railway. This isn't surprising either as that followed the route used by the 1919 Motor Transport Convey when it did an experimental cross-country trek showing that the nation's roads were, well, junk, at least in the west. That experiment lead in no small part to the funding of the Lincoln Highway. Be that as it may, the nation's roads were still too dicey to be used for real transcontinental transportation, as the Second World War demonstrated.
Things moved by train.
Following the war, however, President Eisenhower sought to change that with the Defense Highway system, which the nation's cynics, myself included, have always maintained was just a thin excuse to get highway funding done, as in the 1950s, with the Red Army on everyone's mind, you just didn't vote against a thing like that. So we got interstate highways and with them, you got a teamster supplied nation. You also got an annual bill as, unlike the railroads, they were public conveyances that had to keep being paid for by somebody.
So now we have them well established, but the days of Convoy are over, and the driver is as likely to be a displaced Ukrainian baker as a cowboy hat wearing part-time farmer. In 1964 the Willis Brothers sang Give Me Forty Acres To Turn This Rig Around. The drivers didn't get heir 40 acres, but a lot of them have apparently gotten sick of the job.
And it even, apparently extends down to local hauling. Massachusetts called out the National Guard to serve as school bus drivers, a call-up that would suck nearly as much as being called out to be a dockworker.
Electrifying the rail system, however, would be a really good idea. I don't see anyone purposing that, however. If you don't have drivers for trucks, well haul things by train, and start funding that as part of the infrastructure bill. That would more or less take us back to the hauling infrastructure that existed before the mid 1950s, but in a more modern, clean, and more efficient way.
Probably not going to happen.
Predictably Buttigieg, who is just back to work from being off for family leave, is pushing Biden's "paid family leave" as a partial solution. That's doubly wrong.
Paid family leave, of course, is paid for by employers. Indeed, in some unionized occupations this has been a recent point of negotiations, which is fine. That's where that belongs. Otherwise, what it amounts to is compulsory employer subsidization of forced female employment.
Nobody, of course, will say that, even though it's completely true.
The official line on this left wing concept is that. Make employers pay employees family leave when they have children, or adopt a child, or sometimes something else. Usually this has been spoken of in regard to female employees, but in the new false genderless era in which the science of baby making has been lost and babies suddenly materialize out of the ether, and human reproductive organs are simply toys, like the Atari control stick or something, its male or female. Then, having secured family leave, the parent doesn't have to make the painful decision on whether to return immediately to work after having had, or acquired, the child, or staying home with the infant.
All that of course is a completely erroneous way of looking at this topic.
To start with, people want to stay home with their infant as they love their infant. Prior to the second half of the 20th Century the forced industrial bargain was that men didn't get to stay home, but women could. Prior to industrialization people simply lived with their families, as nature would have it. The industrial revolution couldn't tolerate that, so men, the stronger part of the couple, was drug out and away from home to work and "be the breadwinner" while women still largely stayed home with their families, save for poor women who worked as well. Mid 20th Century feminism, however,r bought hook line and sinker into the industrial line, probably not too surprisingly as all left wing thought in the early 20th Century was heavily industrial in its outlook, and thought that happiness meant being in the work place.
Turns out it's not, and COVID laid the lie bare.
Anyhow, that old fable keeps on keeping on in liberal circles, so they keep pushing this industrial idea. The basic gist of it is "get to work, female wage slave, and leave that waling infant at home or in the collective child warehousing center. . . "
Now, nobody wants to say that, and most don't even think it, but that's the reality of it. So is this:
I don’t want to work. I want to be home with my baby and I can’t afford it. I hate that. I hate it so much.
Now, thanks to COVID 19, a lot of women have effectively voted with Kay (momma of two) with their feet. They aren't coming back. And forced infant warehousing funding isn't going to change that.
But to the extent it did, and for various reasons it would somewhat, it'd be inflationary. People would take the leave, employers would pay for, and pass the cost of a non-working employee on to the consumer. The Transportation Secretary probably didn't realize that, although he should have as he received a taxpayer subsidized period of time off from working. Somebody paid for that.
Well former Mayor Pete wants to "build back better".
Or maybe President Biden does. That's part of the sale pitch for the infrastructure bill, the future of which is now in doubt.
Okay, so be smart about that. And so far, we've indicated what one of those smart things is. Rail transportation, and electric rail transportation at that.
Another smart thing, or in the vernacular "better" thing, would be not relying on a 19,270 nautical mile transportation run to a Communist country with a government that's destined to collapse sometime in the next tent to twenty years.
We only buy from China, we'd note, as the country's leaders from both parties, from the most part, have engaged in a quiet policy of exporting jobs to wherever basic production is cheapest, and its cheapest, right now, in China.
It's not cheapest in China as China has any sort of free market economy. It has a command economy that is at least somewhat analogous to Lenin's NEP. Given as it and depress wages to achieve its goals, it's cheap.
The US population has no vested interest in propping up the Chinese command economy at all. There's a basic human interest in seeing that everyone, everywhere, receives a fair wage. That can only come from one of the various free market systems. Therefore, if we're not going to make it here, we ought to buy it from folks who adhere to that basic system. Preferably, we ought to buy stuff from people working in that basic environment who also have the same basic set of economic, labor and environmental rules we do. That would be fair trade.
That's not what we're doing.
I'll skip how we could assure that, but we could assure that. Various administrations just rather didn't, as they were okay with cheap costs, not matter what that meant.
If we had done that, a lot of our manufacturing base would never have left. And the part that did would probably have gone south, to Mexico, and probably further south than that as well.
Mexico's achieved a modern middle-class economy, but you have to wonder if it would have achieved it earlier if a true fair trade policy had been the policy of the US. Mexico's economy may have now been much like ours, and for that matter, the rest of Central America's might be better.
And we wouldn't have a giant bottleneck at the Port of Los Angeles now. For that matter, we might not have a giant immigration crisis going on either.
Which I suppose bring us to our having depressed wages through a policy of ignoring illegal immigration now kicking us in the teeth.
This has been going on for quite some time with the net result that we now have 12,000,000 illegal aliens in the country. This is a separate topic, but it's bound to be the case that somebody will say that if we have 11,000,000 unfilled jobs and 12,000,000 illegal aliens, what that shows is that we need an even more unsustainable immigration rate. Quite the opposite is true.
The giant immigration rate, legal and illegal, has had the impact of unnaturally depressing wages in the construction industry, farm economy and service industries. All of these industries would have had higher pay rates for decades but for the high immigration rate, with the wage depression being particularly true in the case of those working illegally. It's not that Americans wouldn't have taken these jobs. .. we know for certain that Americans have been taking a lot of jobs they really didn't like, its that they wouldn't take them at the low pay scale that was being offered.
If those jobs had paid a basic American pay rate, Americans would have taken them. That would have meant that the economic impact would have been adjusted decades ago, with a probable result that average wages were higher and very high pay rates were lower, both of which would have been a net benefit, at least from distributist terms for the economy. So here too we're dealing with decades of neglect, but not of road sand bridges that local governments could have addressed, if they needed to, but with a complete lack of an honest approach to the immigration system, one that would have brought many fewer people in, and have actually enforced the laws that were there. This of course has also given us a massive humanitarian crisis, inflicted problems on our neighbors, and presented a massive moral dilemma for those now in power. Building back better would probably mean looking honestly to the south towards our neighbors, rather than simply hoping to "out compete" a nation on another continent whose government will ultimately collapse but which right now has a command economy, but that doesn't even seem to have entered anyone's thoughts.
What also doesn't seem to be entering people's thoughts, at least around here, is that some things can be addressed locally.
We read an article elsewhere that beef producers in Nebraska are organizing to build a packing plant. Food prices, including meat prices, are up, but as usual, stockmen aren't seeing the benefit of it.
So why not cut out the middle man, the packing industry? This can obviously be done, and elsewhere they are doing it.
And the state could help.
Rather than violently hurl money at fruitless lawsuits, which the state has been good at doing recently, why not instead have the state build a packing plant and organize it like South Dakota Cement or Dakota Mills?
Gasp, the reaction may be, that would be socialism!
Well, it need not be. It could simply be an investment by the state in a cooperative effort with the ownership to be transferred to participating stockmen. It'd be fairly easy to do. We've addressed it elsewhere and this would be the time to do it. Retail prices are high, ranchers don't see the benefit of that, cutting out the middleman would help.
But I'm sure we won't be doing that.
The legislature, of course, is going into a special session. There it's going to look at illegal bills to address OSHA mandates on vaccination that haven't even come into effect yet. A rational look at that would reveal that this will accomplish nothing, other than adding the expense of legal defenses of all sorts to the state's bills for taking an act calculated not to work. Instead of doing what it's going to do, the legislature could look around and do something about the times we do live in, and try to take advantage of them. But it won't, as those who want to protest the upcoming mandates will be fired up about that instead.
Monday. October 20, 1941. Borodino.
The Germans took Bordino outside of Moscow, the site of the early September 1812 pyhrric French victory over the Russians
French losses at Borodino on September 7, 1812, had been at a rate of 2 to 1 to the Russian forces. They won the battle, but the losses were unsustainable. Notably, they had arrived at Borodino over a month prior to the Germans on the calendar.
Japanese battleship Yamato running trials off Bungo Strait, 20 October 1941.
Thursday, October 20, 1921. End of the Franco-Turkish War.
France and the Grand National Assembly of Turkey signed the Treaty of Ankara, bringing to an end the Franco Turkish War. The treat fixed the bordered between Turkey and the French ruled Syrian mandate, which had not been accepted by the National Assembly.
The treaty signaled that France, which had better relations with the National Assembly than other Allied countries, was essentially recognizing the National Assembly as the legitimate government. It also demonstrated that the Alliance coming out of World War One, which had seen France, the United Kingdom, Greece and Italy all intervene in Turkey, had effectively come apart during the long-running Greco Turkish War.
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
The Forgotten Battle (De Slag Om De Schelde)
Alligator amphibious vehicle passing Terrapin amphibious vehicle on the Schledt.
This is a 2020 Dutch film which has been released with dubbed English, in place of Dutch, on Netflix.
The Battle of the Scheldt, which this film deals with, is hardly a "forgotten" battle, but it is a battle which is no doubt more remembered by the Dutch and the Canadians than it is for Americans. A continual complaint of European audiences is that American films tend to treat World War Two as if the United States was the only Allied nation in it. The complaint really isn't true, as there are certainly plenty of contrary examples, but this film is a little unusual for an American audience as it doesn't involve the US at all, while still dealing with a very important battle.
The Battle of the Scheldt was an October 1944 to November 1944 series of Allied campaigns that were aimed at opening up control of the Scheldt estuary so that Allied shipping could make it to Antwerp. Antwerp had been taken intact, but because the Germans controlled the banks of the Scheldt it was of no use to the Allies, which desperately needed the port. The task fell to the Canadian army which, in a series of attacks beginning on October 2, 1944, and running through November 8, 1944, took the banks of the Scheldt. It was a hard fought campaign.
This fictionalized portrayal of those events are centered on three principal characters. One is a Dutch a young Dutch woman,Teuntje Visser, played by Dutch actress and model Susan Radder, who comes into the underground basically both accidentally and reluctantly, a British paratrooper, William Sinclair, played by Jamie Flatters, and a young Dutchman who is a German soldier, Marinus van Staveren, played by Gijis Blom. The story involves three intersecting plot lines in order to construct a story that involves the climatic battle.
The story actually starts off, surprisingly for a Dutch film, with the Van Staveren character, opening up with a battle on the Russian front. Van Staveren, who is wounded in the battle, turns out to be a willing volunteer. While the Dutch are justifiably remember for their opposition to the Nazis, a little over 20,000 Dutch citizens did serve in the German armed forces. Cornelius Ryan noted in his book A Bridge Too Far that the number was significant enough that parents in some regions of the country worried about what to do with photographs of their sons in uniform taken while they were in the German Army.
Van Stavern is befriended by a mentally decaying wounded SS lieutenant in the same hospital who, as his last act, gets him transferred to a desk job in the west, in what turns out to be a unit that's going to Holland, his native country. That's where he first encounters Visser, who reports with her father to a newly appointed German commander who calls them in as he's aware that Visser's brother was involved in an incident in which he threw a camera through a windshield of a German truck, resulting in a fatal accident.
That ties into an earlier scene setting up that the brother is part of the Dutch underground. We're introduced to the Visser's there while they watch the Germans retreating in a scene that's much reminiscent of the opening scenes of A Bridge Too Far.
William Sinclair we're introduced to in the context of the topic Ryan's book addresses. He's a British glider pilot in the British airborne whose glider is damaged over the Scheldt and is cut loose to crash on a flooded island. This occurs before the offensive on the Scheldt commences and he and the party of men he is with try to make their way towards dry land and the Allies. Sinclair eventually makes it to the Canadian army and is in the battle with it.
The stories all, as noted, intertwine.
The film is well presented and presents good, and credible, drama. It's realistically portrayed but avoids the post Saving Private Ryan gore that American films have tended to engage in. None of the characters, interestingly, is without significant personal failings, thereby presenting a much less heroic and more nuanced picture of people at war than is usually the case. A Dutch film, the central portrayed Dutch characters all have significant personal defects and are not heroic. As a movie, its a good movie.
So how does it do on history?
Well, fairly good It is a dramatized version of history, but the battle on the Scheldt did come after Market Garden and it was a Canadian effort, as the battle portrays. The reasons for the battle are accurately presented. It's nicely done. Perhaps my only real criticisms are based on things that I don't know if they're accurate or not. One is that the British paratrooper ends up fighting with the Canadians in Canadian uniform. I tend to think that he would have simply been evacuated upon crossing into Allied lines. And I'm skeptical that the Germans would have assigned a Dutch private in their service to a unit serving in Holland, as it opens up the obvious loyalty problem. Having said that, this is speculation on my part.
In terms of material details, this film also does quite well. Uniforms and equipment are all presented accurately The glider scenes are unique for a film as far as I'm aware of, and are really horrifying.
So, well worth watching.
Wednesday October 19, 1921 Noite Sangrenta
The Noite Sangrenta, the Bloody Night, occurred in Portugal as Prime Minister Antonio Granjo, former President Antonio Machado Santos, and Navy Minister Jose Carlos de Maia were murdered in monarchical coup. The assassination had been against the wishes of the leaders of the coup, and demonstrated the instability of the nation.
In another act of violence, a British hand grenade was delivered in a package to U.S. Ambassador to France Myron T. Herrick. Herrick didn't have time to open it at work and took it home, where his valet, British Army veteran Lawrence Blanchard, went to open it, but recognized the sound of the Grenade's spring and threw it into an empty room, although he was wounded in the resulting explosion.
Monday, October 18, 2021
Saturday, October 18, 1941. Tojo becomes Prime Minister, Sorge arrested.
Hideki Tojo became the Japanese Prime Minister on this day in 1941.
The appointment signaled Japan's slide towards war, and was understood in that fashion at the time.
Tojo was a career army officer of samurai ancestry. He harbored strong resentment against the United States for the terms of the treaty negotiated in the US by President Theodore Roosevelt that ended the Russo Japanese War. While TR acted as an honest broker in those negotiations, and one the Nobel Prize for his efforts, many in Japan felt that the treaty had unfairly been favorable to Imperial Russia.
German Richard Sorge, a super sleuth for the Soviet Union, was arrested in Tokyo on this day.
Sorge had provided an incredible amount of detailed information regarding Japan to the Soviet Union, although there is some question of whether or not the Soviets made use of all of the information that he supplied. Stationed in Japan starting in 1933, he had penetrated the German embassy in Japan and provided highly detailed information to the Soviets, including the near starting date for Operation Barbarossa, information that Stalin definitely ignored. He later informed the Soviets that Japan would not attack the Soviet Union, which the USSR does seem to have accepted as accurate, allowing it to free up forces that would have had to remain in the East.
Sorge was a German national, but had been born in Azerbaijan where his father was a mining engineer. He became a communist while convalescing from wounds received as a soldier in World War One and after a time was recruited as a Soviet secret agent. His cover was that he was a reporter. In that capacity he'd supplied information from various locations all over the globe where he'd been posted, with his reports from Japan starting in 1940.
Sorge sent his messages to Moscow by short wave radio, using one time pads. While the messages couldn't be decrypted, their broadcasting couldn't be hidden, which is what lead to Sorge's arrest. As he was German and a member of the Nazi Party, the Japanese at first believed that he was a member of the Abwehr, but under torture he confessed to working for the Soviets. The Soviets of course denied this.
Sorge's second wife, who was in the Soviet Union, was arrested and died in the Gulags in 1943. Sorge's mistress Hanako Ishii survived the war in spite of her connection with him.
It should be noted that Sorge didn't work alone, and that he obtained information by various means, including through Japanese Communist spy Hotsumi Ozaki. He's an odd historical figure as he was a remarkably long-serving Soviet spy at a time when the Soviets recalled and executed many such figures. Like a lot of Soviet spies, he was loyal to the Soviet Union but not to his spouse. He was detested in West Germany following the war, but his reputation has been rehabilitated, perhaps undeservedly, as his service to the USSR can't really be regarded as an anti Nazi act so much as a dedicated Communist one.
Spies, it should be noted, were undoubtedly their own odd class. The Abwehr, which the Japanese had suspected Sorge of working for, did in fact have a spy on Japanese held territory, that being Ivar Lissner, who was, oddly enough, an ethnic German Jew. In fact, his ethnicity had been a factor in his working with the Abwehr as he had bargained with it to secure the release of his father from a concentration camp and his family members from Nazi harm. His spy network extended into Siberia, but he too was arrested by the Japanese, who then held him for the remainder of the war as, mistakenly, a Soviet spy. He survived the war, unlike Sorge who was executed in 1944.
Tuesday, October 18, 1921. The US ends the war.
On this date in 1921, the US Senate ratified the treaty ending the state of war between the United States and Germany.
On the same day, the German cabinet resigned due to developing economic conditions in Germany.
Sunday, October 17, 2021
Friday October 17, 1941. The Kearney Incident.
On this day in 1941 the USS Kearney dropped depth charges on U-boats after being summoned by a British convoy off of Iceland. The U-boats had overwhelmed Canadian escorts. Kearney's efforts went on for hours. Ultimately, the Kearney was hit by a torpedo from one of them, and then retreated back to Iceland. In the process, American sailors were killed, making it the first loss of life in combat for the US during World War Two. Eleven men were killed, and 22 wounded.
USS Kearney.
The event would be cited by Germany's declaration of war against the United States as a provocation leading to the declaration. Of course, the events of December 7, 1941, were the ultimate source of the US fully entering the war.
Soviet high command, Stavka, established the Kalinin Front, a major organizational event. The front included Moscow.
Saturday, October 16, 2021
Knowing better . . .
doesn't mean you aren't going to go ahead and do it anyway.
It snowed, heavy, late last week. The snow came in on Tuesday night and it really dumped. Deer season started on Friday.
I took the day off from work.
It's not that I expected it to be snowy. I expected it to be muddy.
Early in the morning, it really wasn't however. The mud was frozen. I knew, however, that wouldn't last. I drove on anyhow. Indeed, right up to a fence where I had to turn back.
They wouldn't fit.
That's because a year or two ago I changed tire sizes. Tired of always being high centered, I went up as much as I could on the stock rims. I knew at the time that might impact my chains, but I didn't do anything about it right away, and I'd forgotten in the interim.
Well, I crawled out of that area and tried another one, until the mud turned me back.
It dawned on me then that I might be able to get where I wanted to go from the backside, which was 2,000 feet higher and which, had access off of an old highway into the high country. The snow probably hadn't melted yet, I figured. But would there be a lot of it?
Well, there's only one way to tell.
So I drove up and on to the road. There was actually quite a bit of traffic coming off of it, which nearly deterred me from going further, as it probably would be pointless, but I went on. Soon the traffic dropped off.
Now, on the road I was on, there is a major slope. I'd guess you'd call it a road up the mountain. Not like going from the base of a mountain to its top, but a pretty good slope. I'd decided that once I got there, I'd access it and only go on if it looked good.
Well, at the base I met a truck from California coming out. . . and then two ATVs licensed in the Golden State also coming out.
I seriously thought about turning back. . . I knew better.
But, if they'd come out. . . .
So I went up.
3/4s of the way and slid off the road into a ditch. Luckly it was against the mountain, not the other direction.
But I was really stuck, and going uphill, and blocking the road.
Well, I reasoned, after it became clear I coudn't get out, I'd seen traffic coming down, and I was almost up. If I could make another 40 yards, and I'd be in the clear.
Nobody came by.
I dug and dug to no avail. Finally, after being stuck some time, I called my wife to let her know, as it looked pretty certain I'd be spending the night there.
She called a really handy friend who was at work, in an outdoor job, and who indicated that he'd be on the way as soon as he could.
I went back down and applied all the knowledge on getting unstuck that I had. I jacked up the rear of the truck with my handyman jack. I gathered a lot of dead wood and got it under the back left tire that was the most stuck. I gathered a large rock to put behind it so it wouldn't roll back into the pit, but up on the rock.
And I became unstuck. . . for about 30 yards when I slid back in.
So I started the process again. . but as I did, a truck started coming down.
It was two trucks.
And not other hunters, but guys from this county checking remote radio towers. One, a contractor, had a truck one year older than mine, but in better shape. He chained all the way up, and he pulled me out.
And I'd known better the entire time.
Thursday, October 16, 1941. Odessa taken, deportations in full swing.
Romanians and Germans took Odessa after a two-month siege of the Black Sea port.
It had been principally a Romanian operation and indeed was the largest such operation by a German ally on the Easter Front. The overall performance of Romanian troops resulted in a call to cease offensive operations by Romanian troops against the Soviets, although that was ignored by the country's military dictator.
Deportations of European Jews to the East started for many of them on this day in 1941, with the wholesale relocation of European Jews having started the day prior. The order included German Jews as well as those living in other western European countries that were controlled by Nazi Germany.
Franklin Roosevelt addressed the nation's draft enrollees.
On this day more than sixteen million young Americans are reviving the three-hundred-year-old American custom of the muster. They are obeying that first duty of free citizenship by which, from the earliest colonial times, every able-bodied citizen was subject to the call for service in the national defense.
It is a day of deep and purposeful meaning in the lives of all of us. For on this day we Americans proclaim the vitality of our history, the singleness of our will and the unity of our nation.
We prepare to keep the peace in this New World which free men have built for free men to live in. The United States, a nation of one hundred and thirty million people, has today only about five hundred thousand-half a million-officers and men in Army and National Guard. Other nations, smaller in population, have four and five and six million trained men in their armies. Our present program will train eight hundred thousand additional men this coming year and somewhat less than one million men each year thereafter. It is a program obviously of defensive preparation and of defensive preparation only.
Calmly, without fear and without hysteria, but with clear determination, we are building guns and planes and tanks and ships-and all the other tools which modern defense requires. We are mobilizing our citizenship, for we are calling on men and women and property and money to join in making our defense effective. Today's registration for training and service is the keystone in the arch of our national defense.
In the days when our forefathers laid the foundation of our democracy, every American family had to have its gun and know how to use it. Today we live under threats, threats of aggression from abroad, which call again for the same readiness, the same vigilance. Ours must once again be the spirit of those who were prepared to defend as they built, to defend as they worked, to defend as they worshipped.
The duty of this day has been imposed upon us from without. Those who have dared to threaten the whole world with war-those who have created the name and deed of total war-have imposed upon us and upon all free peoples the necessity of preparation for total defense.
But this day not only imposes a duty; it provides also an opportunity-an opportunity for united action in the cause of liberty-an opportunity for the continuing creation on this continent of a country where the people alone shall be master, where the people shall be truly free.
To the sixteen million young men who register today, I say that democracy is your cause-the cause of youth.
Democracy is the one form of society which guarantees to every new generation of men the right to imagine and to attempt to bring to pass a better world. Under the despotisms the imagination of a better world and its achievement are alike forbidden.
Your act today affirms not only your loyalty to your country, but your will to build your future for yourselves.
We of today, with God's help, can bequeath to Americans of tomorrow a nation in which the ways of liberty and justice will survive and be secure. Such a nation must be devoted to the cause of peace. And it is for that cause that America arms itself.
It is to that cause-the cause of peace-that we Americans today devote our national will and our national spirit and our national strength.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)