Summer Activities

In a bid to stop this blog devolving into a series of angry posts about Trump, Boris and Brexit, here is a round up of what I'm reading, playing and watching at the moment. In no real order, here we go:

PC Gaming

I continued to have a good time with 'Sunless Skies' after my previous post about it. However, having made it to Eleutheria and escaped without dying (brilliant change of pace there as you have to explore the new area unaided by familiar ports), I died a stupid death on my return to the Reach. I've yet to pick it up again but will have to at some point to see what the Blue Kingdom has to offer.

I picked up 'Into the Breach' in the Summer Sale and, while it is good, I think my expectations were a little high after the good press that it has received. On normal difficulty I find it much, much easier than the brilliant FTL and beat it regularly after only a handful of attempts. Will push the difficulty up to hard soon but I'm tempted to unlock and try out all of the Mech squads on normal first unless I get too bored by the lack of challenge first.

Finally, I'm giving 'Massive Chalice' another shot. The uneven difficulty and slightly oblique mechanics have put me off before but so far so good. I'm quite keen on the goofy humour and after finding ItB too easy the potential for characters to die suddenly (and even unfairly) seems refreshing and challenging.

Board Gaming

Out of the blue, a work colleague invited me to play in an eight player 'Game of Thrones' game with dragon expansion.

On top of it being a complex game in itself, I haven't seen the program or read the books so lacked any cultural context for the game. Everybody else was a hard core fan and I raised some eyebrows by calling my faction the 'Tulips' rather than the 'Tyrells' throughout.

Ultimately I had a good time though. Surrounded by other inexperienced players I quietly expanded with minimal conflict as the Starks and Lanisters wiped out the faction between them to the North. The dragon player (my work colleague) eventually won with some air strikes and a couple of canny alliances but since few people had played with the expansion this can possibly be put down to people not knowing what to expect.

Hell of a long game though. We played for nearly 6.5 hours with one short break.

Otherwise, at work I continue to have a very good time with quick lunchtime games of 'Codename Pictures' and slightly less fun with 5-10 player games of Saboteur.

Television

Not much to report here. I'm finishing up the first series of Netflix's 'Seven Deadly Sins', which I'm having an inordinately good time with despite the near constant objectification of the female characters.

Books

My reading list is threatening to bury me again after a number of impulse buys on Amazon. At my parents I'm reading a collection of A.E. Housman's Poetry and Prose which feels very high brow even if gets a bit samey and is highly dated in tone. I've also started Philip Pullman's Shadow in the North which I may drop or continue with based on mood and opportunity.

At home, I'm finishing off Kim Stanley's Robinson's Blue Mars which seems a little pointless after the energy of Red Mars and the interesting political machinations of Green Mars. As the author explores the realisation of what seems like his personal utopia the preachiness and superficiality of certain characters becomes ever more apparent. I'm also reading through Winston Churchill's The Gathering Storm for something a bit more weighty. 

Finally, a work colleague has lent me three recent-ish National Geographics which are my current lunchtime reading when I'm not socialising or drinking. They are definitely growing on me and I like the reasonable length of the longer articles although, as I generally read British publications, the editorial style is very unfamiliar.

Turing finally pardoned

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25495315

This is absolutely a step in the right direction and is too long overdue for such a brilliant scientist and cryptographer.

However, I'm equally as sure that 'pardon' is not the right way to put it. Turing did nothing wrong and was chemically castrated and, possibly, pushed to suicide for his homosexuality. Pardon implies that he had done something wrong whereas it is actually the society which treated innocent men in this manner for narrow conservative and religious reasons that needs absolution.

The Heavy Water Coup of 1940

Now this is a story that deserves to be as well known as the legendary activities of the Norwegian commandos and British bombers that destroyed the heavy water production capabilities of the German nuclear program.

These actions explain why the Germans were unable to make use of Norwegian heavy water after 1943 but of course the plant had been open for nearly a decade before that. One of the reasons why the Germans didn't find a nice cache of heavy water waiting for them on the occupation of Norway is that the French government had already obtained the entire world stock, approximately 40 gallons, on the instructions of Lew Kowarski and Hans von Halban.

In the chaos following the fall of France and amidst the installation of the Petain government the two scientists smuggled all of the heavy water by automobile and British ship to the United Kingdom where it could be commandeered by the Allies. For a characterful and idiosyncratic account of this adventure read sections II and III of this interview with Kowarski in 1969:

http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4717_1.html

... and just in case that doesn't grab your attention the captain of the boat that recovered the heavy water was a wonderfully piratical, bomb-diffusing Earl of Suffolk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Howard,_20th_Earl_of_Suffolk

Pohl's experiences in the US Air Force

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/

Frederik Pohl is in the process of writing a series of blog posts on his time in World War II. As one might expect they are wry, witty and do not portray the American Air Force in the most positive light.

The first post especially sheds some light on the mind that came out with the classic 'Gateway'. He notes a night when he saw five planes, crewed by fifty men, destroyed in senseless accidents. Such an event is dwarfed in the magnitude of the Second World War but must have had a profound effect on an intelligent and already slightly disillusioned weather observer.

The perils of using WW2 as a guide to past conflicts

So thanks to the incapacity of Belfast International airport to maintain normal service during snowfall I've come into possession of the latest 'New Statesman' - a publication I enjoy but don't get around to reading regularly.

The cover story is a rather interesting, but slightly implausible, attempt to link the current economic back-biting in the Eurozone to a consideration of the 'German question' as a driver of European history and international relations. Despite the tenuous linking of these themes it was a good read and I always appreciate any public debate that encourages an engagement with German history beyond the much picked over periods of the World Wars and the Nazi dictatorship.

However, as usual in such a sweeping history there were a couple of historical simplifications that jarred a little. Periods of German history and especially major wars were (possibly merely for reasons of space) characterised mainly in relation to one burning issue or theme. We find that the Thirty Years War was mainly concerned with the ambitions of the European powers in a time of religious turmoil while WW1 was caused by the alarming concentration of power in a unified Germany.

Of course such motivations were indisputably real. The Protestantism of the rebellious Bohemians was as influential in the origin of the Thirty Years War as France's fear of Spanish encirclement. Yet creating such a meta-narrative ignores the chaotic unpredictability of history. Where does the ambitious personality of Gustavus Adolphus or the territorial antagonism of the (universally Protestant) Scandanavian states fit into such an unnuanced narrative? If such awkward questions can be asked about the characterisation of a single war then how can five hundred years of German history before and after unification be tied together into any sort of consistent narrative?

In explaining this phenomena one could focus on the virtues of simplicity and a strong central argument or the political uses of easily understandable historical themes. However, in this post I will instead consider the effects on historical views of conflict caused by the centrality of the Second World War to British teaching of German history.

The dominant narrative and focus on World War II in the classroom and seminar hall allows teachers to focus on the horrors of war while absolving most of the blame from the victors of the conflict. The occurrence of ethnic cleansing and brutal attacks on civilians can be acknowledged by a focus on the mass killing of Jews and minorities during the Holocaust. The suffering of the ordinary soldier can also be emphasised through a focus on the discomfort of conscripted American soldiers, thousands of miles from home, and the privations of Allied paratroopers behind enemy lines.

However, such grim descriptions of the consequence of war are stripped of much of their subversive content by the ascription of the majority of the blame to the losers of the war. The ethnic cleansing and totalitarian acts of Germany can be used to obscure any war crimes or mis-treatment of non-combatants by the Allies. For example, the abandonment of Dutch resistance forces to German repression is justified by the need to end the war (and thus the killing of the Jews and other persecuted groups) as quickly as possible. The American use of nuclear weapons on civilians is condoned by the need to avoid the greater horror of clawing back island after island from fanatical Japanese troops. Such events are portrayed as horrific and distasteful but are ultimately justified by the necessity of combating the evil of Nazism and totalitarian expansionism.

In making this argument I am not sticking up for the Nazis and their authoritarian allies. I would far rather live in a world where the Allies won the war through pragmatic measures than in one where Hitler's grisly extermination of minorities continued beyond 1945. However, such standard justifications of Allied behaviour do influence our perception of previous conflicts. When we consider earlier wars we are conditioned to adopt an equally pragmatic approach in ascribing motivations. We assume that wars must have been fought for a central reason and that the actions of involved states must be explicable by rational necessity. In identifying such central and all-encompassing rationales for past conflicts we risk jettisoning large amounts of necessary historical context. We fail to consider such temporally and geographically specific factors as the difficulty of communicating with distant armies during the Thirty Years War or the incentive for soldiers to continue fighting when their only methods of logistical support were looting and extortion. Similarly we neglect the differences between a war initiated by a (theoretically) unchallenged Monarch and those directed by elected and (theoretically) easily replaced politicians.

This is not to say that there is no place for wide narratives in an understanding of past conflicts. However, care must be taken to avoid smuggling in assumptions by organising analysis around overarching motivations. The context of particular historical situations and motivations should always be considered and a meta-narrative only sustained if it can be extrapolated from an in-depth study of each considered historical example.

A sliding scale of pointlessness

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I've been very busy with a new job, dentist appointments, charity training and a visit to Birmingham to see Villa play Newcastle. All very enjoyable but hasn't left me a lot of free time. To make things worse I've been getting back into video games recently - finishing Portal 1, starting a British empire in Rome Total War and even spending a night in Stockwood co-oping the vast majority of Halo 1's campaign mode.

Anyway here are some of my favourite pointless moments in Military history:

1) The 40 minute war of 1896 - Well, 38 to be precise. I've taken longer than that to cook meals. You would have thought that the Zanzibaris might have considered the proximity of British gun ships before deciding to try and throw off their colonial oppressors. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Zanzibar_War)

2) The 1898 Battle of Manila - A mock battle fought between two colonial powers, neither of whom knew that a peace treaty had been signed the day before. They succeeded in their unofficial objective of stopping Filipino guerrillas from seizing the city. However, both sides took casualties despite an agreement that they wouldn't really fight. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Manila_%281898%29)

3) The German attack on the USSR in WW2 - This is a biggie. If Hitler hadn't taken on Russia he would have had a reasonable chance of consolidating his Blitzkrieg conquests in Europe. Stalin was so anxious to avoid war that he refused to alert his border troops as the ensuing invasion became more and more certain. The largest army ever to be assembled for an invasion swept across the border of Poland and the Baltic States causing massive damage to the Red Army. However within half a year the German advance was slowing and they found themselves at war on two fronts with both the USSR and the USA - the only remaining powers that could have saved Britain from defeat.

Fascist's job prospects in post-war Hungary

I am currently a few chapters into Victor Sebestyen's 'Twelve Days: Revolution 1956' - a history book about the Hungarian attempt to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, which was met with Soviet tanks and the execution of the Hungarian communist leadership.

My motivation for delving into East European modern history comes from a few directions. I'm concentrating pretty heavily on German language and history at the moment so it is nice to take a break and look at some closely related but slightly different history. Reading about the Berlin Wall and Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi) has also got me interested in the history of the Warsaw Pact countries. Finally and more tangentially, while watching 'The Hour' (a BBC programme which I eventually got disillusioned with but doggedly followed to the end) I was interested in the portrayal of the Hungarian uprising that they put in between their more plot-central focus on Suez.

Anyway, Sebestyen makes the interesting point that there was quite a large influx of former fascist Arrow Cross members into the post-war AVO security/secret police organisation. This superficially makes a lot of sense as apart from the showy trials at Nuremburg and initial purges in Soviet territory the removal of fascists from key positions always took second place to pragmatic consideration of restoring order and manoeuvering for Cold War advantage. The Headquarters of the two organisations was even the same (and is now a museum to the victims of Communism and Fascism named 'The House of Terror' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Terror)).

However, apart from the shared HQ I can't find any collaboration of this claim. If anybody knows anything about the issue or can point me towards any good books it would be much appreciated!

Libyan rebel general killed

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14336122

Shady business this. As the article itself points out there aren't really enough details to work out what actually happened. Reminds me a bit of the assassination of Francois Darlan in Algeria during WW2, which remains unclear to this day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Darlan#Assassination).

On a wider scale everything seems to be proceeding in the right direction, albeit slowly, in Libya. The UN, USA and Western Europeans continue to support the rebels despite Russia's grumbling. Recognising the rebels and expelling Libyan diplomats was an especially strong symbolic gesture as usually the UK makes a point of only recognising such groups after they have attained governmental power.

It is harder to make out how the military campaign of the rebels is going. The Economist and the BBC are sparse with exact details suggesting that no one really knows (possibly including the Libyans themselves). However, so long as the rebels continue to benefit from diplomatic and military support from the UN it is difficult to see how Gaddafi will avoid being forced into negotiations or even surrendering power completely in the long term.

WW2 era wrecks in the South Pacific - handling oil leaks

Ok, having said that I would confine my investigations into the environmental effects of WW2 to Europe and strictly to ecological effects I have immediately abandoned both of these limitations. The main reason for this change of plan is that the information available and my curiosity took me elsewhere. There is plenty of easily accessible data on environmental issues in the Pacific theatre and not so much information about environmental effects in Europe. Therefore, the first issue I will be examining is the wrecks of oil tankers in the South Pacific.

The South Pacific was not involved in the first stages of the war as before the bombing of Pearl Harbour (Hawaii) by the Japanese the 'global' war was predominantly confined to the European mainland, some minor colonial struggles in Africa and Asia, the battle for the Atlantic supply chains and Manchuria/China. However, after the American entry into the war the South Pacific became the site for the key battles of the Far Eastern theatre. Along with these large scale conflicts there developed an Atlantic-style form of submarine warfare as each side tried to derail the others logistical war effort by sinking their transports, oil tankers and warships.

Invariably this destruction of shipping had major environmental effects on areas of great marine biodiversity. To this day the governments of Pacific islands worry about the effects that oil discharges from long abandoned wrecks will have on sea birds, fish stocks and sea turtles. Some of the environmental issues involved can best be examined through a case study of the sinking and subsequent handling of the USS Mississinewa.

1) Environmental risks – Oil in submerged ships does not cease to be dangerous just because it has been down there for decades. A wide range of different types of fuel were used by WW2 era ships. Diesel, predominantly used by submarines, dissipates very quickly in Pacific waters but can still cause environmental damage if containers that have previously kept it from escaping are breached. Heavy fuel oil, generally carried by larger oil tankers and war ships, is more durable. While some elements of it quickly dissipate, others will spread widely where currents permit and can endanger birds, fauna and sea life over a wide area by smothering them in toxic oil. Even wrecks that seem to be secure can quickly become environmental crisis points as tropical storms are common in the Pacific and may cause breaches of previously sealed fuel tanks.

To take an example, the USS Mississinewa was carrying 3,780,000 US gallons of oil when it was sunk by a Japanese manned torpedo. SOPAC estimates that, after a tropical storm disturbed it in 2001, it was leaking 300-400 gallons of oil a day. They claim that 18-24,000 US gallons were dispersed before the clean up was complete, a serious amount of oil to release into a rich marine environment.

2) Responsibility for clean up – Obviously the nations with most reason to be concerned about potential oil spills are the island states of the South Pacific. It is their tourist industry and fishing activities that are endangered by pollution and they are responsible for protecting the local marine diversity. Their consciousness of this responsibility is shown by the development of the 'Regional Strategy' less than a year after the Mississinewa incident preparing for the management and safe handling of oil-carrying wrecks.

However, international law says that, unless a wreck was captured before sinking or is sold or granted to another party, it is still the property of the nation to which it belonged when it was in military service. This means that the nation in whose territorial waters the wreck ends up needs to ask permission before carrying out any salvaging or clean up operations. This means that responsibility for dealing with individual, high-risk wrecks generally extends beyond the nations of the South Pacific.

In the case of the Mississinewa the US SUPSALV organisation (contracted by the Navy for salvage, diving operations and environmental duties) took responsibility for the clean up of the oil spillage. They initially patched the leaks and pumped out the most unstable oil. However, in view of the high risk of further leaks, they decided to carry out a more comprehensive operation in February 2003. 'Hot tapping' through the hull was used to remove 2 million US gallons (virtually all the oil that remained on the wreck). This oil was separated from the sea water and sold to Singapore for reprocessing (showing just how resilient oil can be after decades of lying underwater in poorly sealed tanks!).

3) Difficulty of locating wrecks that were often lost in confusing war time conditions – While some wrecks have been known about for a long time (The USS Chehalis and the remains of its cargo of 400,000 gallons of petroleum were sold to American Samoa by the USA in 1955) others are still missing today.

Part of the regional strategy developed after the Mississinewa incident was a survey of the location of wartimes wrecks. 857 wrecks were located in the territorial waters of the participating countries and 35 of these were oil tankers. A risk evaluation was then carried out on these wrecks to work out what response was necessary in each case.

4) Aftermath – In the long term the regional strategy was abandoned in favour of bilateral negotiations between the nation owning the territorial waters and the nation owning the wreck. This was probably due to the positive response of the USA who assisted in the salvaging of both the USS Mississinewa and the later situation involving the USS Chehalis in 2009 (I don't know if the Japanese government or others that could conceivably be involved in wreck salvage operations show the same degree of responsibility). However, all in all this seems a good example of a strong regional approach to environmental damage caused by WW2. Vulnerable species have been protected and the potential for environmental catastrophes has been responsibly handled by international negotiation and agreements.

Sources -

-A Regional Strategy to Address Marine Pollution from WW2 Wrecks (July 2002), created by the South Pacific Applied Geo-Science Commission (SOPAC)

- South Pacific Regional Environment Programme website

-SUPSALV presentation on the USS Mississinewa situation.

-SUPSALV organisation website

- Wikipedia - USS Mississinewa, USS Chehalis

Brazil in WW2

I was reading an article this morning and wondered what part South America played in WW2 (beyond certain countries well known role in providing 'sanctuary' to various unsavoury characters after the war ended).

On the Wikipedia page I brought up the WW2 article and did some CTRL-F searches. South America is not mentioned once. Brazil, the only South American combatant nation, got two hits. One in the list of the combatants and another for the category page - 'wars involving Brazil'. Not much use.

However, scrolling through the Brazil history pages I found out about the Brazilian expeditionary force. They fought in Italy and (if the slightly shoddily constructed page is to be believed) took over 20,000 prisoners for the loss of only 948 soldiers. They also had awesome badges and uniform insignia. More armies should adopt the pipe-smoking-snake logo.

-Army shoulder pad (left) and Air force badge (below)

WW2 - an ecological nightmare?

So I was walking to the shops this morning and a thought struck me. I'm just starting 'Post War' by Tony Judt. It opens with a description of the large scale effects of the Second World War; dwelling on displaced refugees, demographic changes, mortality rates, destruction of cities and the national responses to the psychological shock of occupation and collaboration. This was all familiar stuff, although Judt manages to really illustrate the catastrophic nature of a war that we are indoctrinated from a young age to view with rose-tinted spectacles. However, there was no examination of what effects the war may have had on the ecology of the affected countries and I can't recall ever seeing such an analysis. Obviously environmental damage was not the top priority of post-war rebuilders but it seems likely that it was just as serious as the destruction of human life and infrastructure caused by the conflict.

This thought was backed up by something I remember reading in (of all things) a travel guide. The link between war and environmental damage is often easier to see in Africa due to the presence of large, endangered animals that are closely monitored and to a certain degree reliant on stable governance to protect them from poachers. Anyway this travel guide referred to the South African government's use of Namibia's lush Caprivi strip as a base for their intervention in Angola during the civil war. It noted that due to the break down of law and order, the presence of armed factions and the easy availability of weapons during this period there was a rise in poaching and a fall in the populations of endangered animals that many areas have still not completely recovered from today. War obviously has its environmental effects even if they often go unnoticed amid the general chaos.

So I think I'm going to do some internet research and see if I can find out anything about the effects of total war on European ecology. I'll confine my focus to Europe as it is a huge question already and I don't fancy getting into the environmental effects of dropping nuclear bomb (although that might be a fun project for another time!). Lacking University-level journal access and time it will probably be a bit patchy and unspecific but hopefully I'll discover some interesting things.

Initial thoughts for things to look into -

1) Rare animals in European zoos – I remember a possibly apocryphal story that bombing wiped out all of the elephants kept in captivity in Berlin. Zoo animals were high profile and had a better chance of making it into eyewitness testimony than wild animals.

2) Horses – Despite increased mechanisation the armies of WW2 were almost as reliant on horse drawn transport for logistics and the movement of troops as in WW1. Tank and truck numbers were limited and railways wouldn't get you everywhere. A large number of these horses will inevitably have been killed by bullets or bombing.

3) Feeding of large armies – How far did the various armies in Europe live off the land? Modern films generally portray them as eating army rations and buying/stealing from civilian farmers. However, this is an American-centric view of the war and wouldn't have been as easy for (for example) Russian partisans based in deep forests without logistic support. Quite conceivably there were some soldiers who were forced to hunt for their food or did so to supplement rations.

History repeating itself

Who says history is always repeating itself?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_von_Falkenhausen