Walker, R.N. is punchy first-round WW2 history, focusing on Captain Frederic John "Johnny" Walker, the most decorated and successful anti-submarine waWalker, R.N. is punchy first-round WW2 history, focusing on Captain Frederic John "Johnny" Walker, the most decorated and successful anti-submarine warfare commander of the Second World War. The book glides over his early life and pre-war career as a successful misfit in the Royal Navy, a natural leader who clashed with his superiors and who's career seemed to have stalled when war broke out.
The Battle of the Atlantic was one of the critical points of the war. Without convoys from the Americas, Britain would have starved, Russia would not have received important lend-lease aid, and the Normandy landings might never have occurred. This was a campaign without fronts or decisive moments, a grinding war of attrition between escorts and U-boats.
In this war, Walker made a name for himself as an aggressive and preternaturally gifted hunter. In command of the Second Support Group, consisting of a core of Black Swan-class sloops, Walker sought out U-boats wherever they were most active, either in the Bay of Biscay or attacking allied convoys. He pioneered several tactics, specializing in a directed quiet kill, where he would stand off maintaining Asdic (the British term for Sonar) contact, while directing another ship to creep in and nail the target with depth charges. The descriptions of combat are plenty exciting, if a little repetitive, while the rest of the book is standard hagiography.
As with most anything by Beevor, you're guaranteed a good book, if not a great one. Countless books have been written about the Normandy campaign. ThiAs with most anything by Beevor, you're guaranteed a good book, if not a great one. Countless books have been written about the Normandy campaign. This is a strong survey which goes from just before the landings to just after the liberation of Paris, looking at each of the major beaches and fronts in turn.
Beevor uses the wide survey to make several points. The first is about the overall brutality of the combat. The Allies were extremely liberal in their use of high explosives, both artillery and air, which leveled major cities and killed tens of thousands of French civilians. This grinding attrition was faced against a dense concentration of Nazi firepower. Roughly 10 divisions, including multiple SS Panzer divisions, on a 60 mile front, as compared to the same number on a 600 mile front in Russia.
Nazi soldiers fought skillfully and fanatically in defense, using the local tactical superiority of Tiger tanks and the FlaK 88 to dreadful effect. The Allied soldiers were often unwilling to push aggressively in close contact, with a desire to survive the war. Infantry suffered high casualties nevertheless, exceeding 70% for the branch as a whole, and over 200% for some units. While all sides had failures both tactical and strategic, Beevor has especially harsh criticism for the British, who's line troops had a "not my problem" attitude that e.g. burnt out vehicles in the road were for the infantry, or that an assault could pause to brew tea. While all generals made errors in judgement, Montgomery's perennial shifting objectives, failure to communicate with Eisenhower, and egotism proved a particular problem for the Allies, all out of proportion to his military or political skills. De Gaulle was a pain in the ass, but it would have been hard to liberate France with French opposition.
There were a couple of points that could have used some editing, like repetitions on the ineffectiveness of tactical air support compared to claimed kills, or hard ciders filling Sherman tanks, but overall this is a solid work that is likely the baseline for WW2 histories....more
One of the great mysteries of history is the Sea People. They arrived from somewhere in the 12th century BC, sacked the palaces of the literate civiliOne of the great mysteries of history is the Sea People. They arrived from somewhere in the 12th century BC, sacked the palaces of the literate civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, caused the collapse of the intricate society of the Late Bronze Age, and vanished.
[image]
Cline aims to explain what happened, but archeology is as much art as science, and despite ample ruins and inscriptions, including diplomatic correspondence, we simply don't know. There were webs of trade and communication, and then they stopped, cities burned, and people stopped writing anything for centuries. It's frustrating, because along with the mystery of the Sea People, two great epics of Western civilization are set in the Late Bronze Age, and extra-textual evidence for both the Iliad and Exodus is scanty at best.
Cline points at a multitude of causes: earthquake, drought, disease, and invasion. He draws labored comparisons to our own integrated and global world. One key factor was that bronze requires tin, which at the time only came from a region that is now Afghanistan. This single tenuous land link was an obvious vulnerability, though not one that is much discussed. It's a long way from Mycenae to Afghanistan. What was traded for tin?
I found Graeber's Debt a much more interesting exploration of the period....more
Gladius is an extensive, thematically organized look at the life of the Roman soldier, focusing on the long era Republican conquests around the CarthaGladius is an extensive, thematically organized look at the life of the Roman soldier, focusing on the long era Republican conquests around the Carthaginian Wars and the Christianization of the empire under Constantine.
Bédoyére draws from historical documents, archeological evidence, and primarily tomb inscriptions to depict a military world that was central to Roman society. After the Marian reforms, legionnaires were core parts of the administration of the empire, manning posts from lonely borders to dense trade hubs and doing everything that needed doing, not merely war.
The legions were both strongly standardized in terms of size, structure, and camp size, and also idiosyncratic in naming, command, and the attachment of auxiliary units of archers and cavalry. While centurions were veterans promoted from the ranks on the basis of experience, high officers were often inexperienced military tribunes drawn from the young men of the senatorial class.
This is a popular work (the author is a TV presenter, rather than a professor), which has the advantage of the writing being actually good. The thematic organization is well done. I particularly enjoyed the defeat-victory-atrocity triad of chapters, as well as looks at under appreciated elements, like the Roman navy, retirement, and side jobs....more
Binding Passions is a fascinating microhistory that is both serious scholarship, and also might have been substantially more interesting in the hands Binding Passions is a fascinating microhistory that is both serious scholarship, and also might have been substantially more interesting in the hands of a narrative non-fiction writer rather than a historian.
The subject is Venice in the late 16th century, as revealed by the archives of the Venetian Inquisition, and relating to matters of marriage, sex, and magic. Of these, marriage in a society defined by Catholicism and aristocratic lineages is a big deal. The wrong marriage can cause a spiral of ruin, wrecking not just the lives of the people involved, but also the fortunes of their families. Matters of class, promised engagement, and willing consent all were tested in these times. One of my favorite cases involved a claimed marriage between two young people, where the man was found in bed with the woman by her father and brothers, was hastily married that night, and took off for the hinterlands with a "uh, sike!"
While marriage is bound by time and place, horniness is a human universal. Another area that gets covered is how people have sex, and in particular female sexuality in a deeply patrichal era. At the top are courtesans, who can choose their suitors, relying on looks and good culture. The best venetian courtesans had a different man for every night of the week in a long term stable arrangement, and absolute freedom in their days. The book opens where one of them was accused of bewitching a young noble into marrying her, a sudden social catapult that threatened the peace of the Most Serene Republic.
Which leads to magic. In the pre-scientific 16th century, there is a blurring between esoteric real knowledge, prayer, and sorcery. People made figures of wax, wrote up contracts selling their soul to the devil, and used enchanted oils as love potions. And as a quote goes, 60% of the time, it works every time.
This book is dense, a fascinating exploration through the archives, but it fails to give a real sense of what it was like to live in these times. I wanted to know why a young woman might turn to magic to resolve difficulties in her love life, or how a pater familias might worry about his wife's strange friends. And the book was a little too scattered and objective to give me that sense...more
Condition Red is a contemporary memoir of life on a World War 2 destroyer, written and published by a destroyer captain in the middle of the war to giCondition Red is a contemporary memoir of life on a World War 2 destroyer, written and published by a destroyer captain in the middle of the war to give the folks back home some idea of what it was like at the front. Bell commanded the USS Grayson, referred to as the G-- throughout the book for security reasons. It's a pretty fine tale, though not one that's particularly thrilling for anyone without a specific interest in the period.
[image] The Grayson, star of this book
Bell's overall picture is one of dedicated professionalism and endurance. "Condition Red" is the call for the ship to go to battle stations: guns manned, damage control parties on standby, and every eye searching the skies and seas for targets. For more than six months in the waters around Guadalcanal, the Grayson was on constant alert and frequent Condition Red, as it escorted convoys, swept the channels for the survivors of lost ships, fending off Japanese bombers, and conducted shore bombardment.
Again and again, Bell applauds the crew of the Grayson as clever and dedicated men who do their duty under arduous circumstances, ready to go to battle at an instant. The basic message to the home front is "don't worry, and send more ammo!", your sons and husbands are surrounded by brave sailors, commanded by skill professionals, and supplied with every necessity. While the Grayson and its crew are the star, other US Navy ships, Marines, merchant sailors, and allies from the Netherlands and New Zeeland receive praise as well.
Some of the descriptions of battle, such as the action alongside the USS Enterprise which opens the book, are quite thrilling. But there's not much of that, and there's a lot more of the day-to-day work of keeping the destroyer in fighting trim while taking care of the innumerable tasks of being in the Navy. It sounds like hard work, and while destroyermen do get three hot meals and a cot, there isn't much time to enjoy them, or to do anything but work, scrub, and sleep....more
It is 1521 by the Frankish year, and Eli ben Abram is unsettled. His world is much like ours, with the key difference being that the Reconquista of SpIt is 1521 by the Frankish year, and Eli ben Abram is unsettled. His world is much like ours, with the key difference being that the Reconquista of Spain never happened, and the discovery of the New World was made by merchants working for the Caliphate of Cordoba, here to trade rather than conquer.
In Tenochtitlan, Eli is an outsider twice over: a Moor among the Mexica, a Jew among the Moors. He is married to the Nahua translator Malinala (an alternative version of Cortez' translator La Malinche). Amidst the bustling trade and human sacrifices of the city, Eli has carved out a little slice of peace, and a world where his boundaries are much wider than they are under the Caliph's Laws--boundaries so wide he can almost forget them.
Yet, rumors are unsettled. The Moorish fanatic Benmassoud is reported to have arrived on the coast with an army to end the trade in sinful goods like tobacco and chocolate. Plague is spreading through Tenochtitlan. Popocatépetl is erupting. The other merchants have requested that Eli gain an audience with the Emperor Moctezuma. And worst of all, Malinala is evasive, often absent on business she will not explain, and Eli will not ask.
Red Smoking Mirror is a fantastic piece of mood and setting, a mediation on exile and the ties that bind very different people. Yet it is also not really a novel, Eli is a great observer, but a shockingly passive protagonist. This is a really good book, but it's missing some element that would make it great....more
The Suez Crisis is one of those weeks where decades almost happen, to paraphrase Lenin. The overall situation is rather unbelievable: two simultaneousThe Suez Crisis is one of those weeks where decades almost happen, to paraphrase Lenin. The overall situation is rather unbelievable: two simultaneous international crises, one a meticulously planned fiasco and one a spontaneous revolt, right before an American Presidential election. And yet it all happened, and came very close to overturning 20th century order as we know it.
[image] The Ever Given stuck in the Suez Canal in 2021. Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.
Blood and Sand is a day-by-day account of the crisis, with events well contextualized with both their origins and later consequences. Tunzelmann frames the Suez Crisis as a personal battle of wills between British Prime Minister Anthony Eden and Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser. Nasser was an ambitious able Egyptian patriot, and one of his actions as part of policy of de-colonization was nationalizing the Suez Canal. In practical terms, the effects were basically nil. Egypt ran the canal effectively, fees were stable, and Nasser even allowed the transit of Israel-bound cargo, though not Israeli flagged ship. But Suez was the trachea of the British economy, the channel through which vital supplies of Arab and Iranian oil flowed. What if Nasser's ambitions lead him to put pressure on that oil supply?
So Eden embarked on a scheme to seize control of the canal and hopefully depose Nasser, enlisting France and Israel as allies. Each nation had their own reason for participating. David Ben-Gurion of Israel identified Nassar as the most dangerous Arab leader to Israeli security, and saw this as an opportunity to attack with cover from great powers. France's Guy Mollet had problems with Algerian independence fighters who were supported by Nasser.
However, this unlikely alliance couldn't just do the thing. Rather, Eden orchestrated an elaborate plan where Israel would attack, and then the British and French forces would intervene as "peace-keepers". To carry this act of outright imperialism under a lawful casus belli, Eden wove an elaborate and farcical web of deceit, lying to the international community, the British people, his own ministers, and the officers who were to carry out the invasion.
By the time everything had come together, it was months after the nationalization of the Suez Canal, and in the midst of the Hungarian Revolution. A spontaneous nationalist gathering in Budapest was fired upon by the Secret Police, and rather than dispersing the crowd found their mustard and comprehensive threw the hardline Stalinists and Soviets out.
It's unclear that Khrushchev would have let Hungary leave the Warsaw Pact, but when he saw Britain and France lurch into Egypt, and America leave them out to dry in the UN, there was nothing stopping Soviet armored divisions from rolling back into Budapest and smashing the Hungarian Revolution permanently.
Meanwhile, the Suez invasion was haltingly failing its military objectives, and utterly failing in its political ones. Israeli troops struck deep into the Sinai, achieving their main geopolitical objective at the Straits of Tiran. The French and British amphibious attack on Port Said was dilatory and piecemeal. Egypt had sunk blockships throughout the canal well before forces from the alliance reached it. Meanwhile, Britain's allies through the Muslim world, including Jordan, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan, all violently denounced it.
Eisenhower, in the midst of a tense reelection campaign and kept out of the l0op, refused to allow American power, prestige, or money to be used to support the British effort, in Tunzelmann's argument maintaining a moral clarity through the whole mess that was one of the higher points of American Cold War policy. With the pound falling and oil rationing in the future, Eden backed off, failing in all of his objectives and showing once and for all that the British Empire was done.
This is the first book I've read on Suez, so I'm not sure how well the personality-driven framing works, but it makes for an engaging read....more
Guerillas is a fascinating survey of five guerillas movements researched between 1988 and 1992: the mujahedin of Afghanistan, the FMLN of El Salvador,Guerillas is a fascinating survey of five guerillas movements researched between 1988 and 1992: the mujahedin of Afghanistan, the FMLN of El Salvador, the Karen of Burma, the Polisario of Western Sahara, and a group of young Palestinians fighting against Israel in the Gaza Strip.
At it's best, it lets the fighters speak, lets the clarity of their need to remake the world come through. Guerilla life is hard life, one of deprivation and sacrifice, but the idea of a better world on the other side of the struggle is worth everything. These are people who will never give up.
Combat is random, somewhat distant. The FMLN has a liberated zone, occasionally bombed by government forces. The Polisario have an immense wall across a harsh desert. The mujahedin engage in close combat with government forces, while the Karen are pushed back by superior firepower. The Palestinians work amongst Israelis, but live separate lives, with violence spilling over from long tensions of occupation all around: mob violence met with massive firepower.
35 years on, the guerillas have met with mixed results. The FMLN became one of El Salvador's major parties, and even won control of government, thought the president was forced to flee on corruption charges and gang violence is worse than the civil war. The mujahedin conquered Afghanistan, lost Afghanistan, conquered it again; and the country has only suffered. The Polisario and the Karen bouth brokered ceasefires, and returned to the battlefield around 2020. And I think everybody knows how the Palestinian intifada has gone.
Other reviews have noted some of the flaws. Anderson almost entirely overlooks women, exoticizes his subjects, and takes public relations, particularly from the media savvy Polisario, on face value. Still, this is some fantastic non-fiction reporting....more
Anybody who's been following the news for the past couple years or decades knows that we're on the cusp of one of those terrifying revolutions in miliAnybody who's been following the news for the past couple years or decades knows that we're on the cusp of one of those terrifying revolutions in military affairs, where the hard-won skills of previous generations gets shredded by new technologies, along with the flower of whatever generation has the misfortune to be on the frontlines. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine is clearly the first major action, but before that, there was the almost forgotten 2020 Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. This book, written in 2021 and published a few weeks before Russian columns headed towards Kiev and were turned back by Bayraktar drones and Javelin missiles, is a mixed bag: a decent summary of a conflict not much covered in the west, breathless and naive transcription of defense industry brochures, and a muddled sketch towards a futurism of the "kill web".
But first, some music!
[image] "Atəş" - a music video released by the Azerbaijani military on the eve of the war, which 'unfortunately slaps' according to a Vice article on the dueling songs of the conflict
First the war. Nagorno-Karabakh was an ethnically Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, which had been an autonomous region since Armenia won the first war in the 90s after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Azerbaijan, flush with oil wealth, spent years preparing for a rapid war of conquest, investing in Turkish and Israeli drones and loitering munitions. In the runup to the war, Azerbaijan's military budget was comparable to Armenia's GDP. Armenia's strategy rested on the strength of traditional defense in mountainous terrain, and hopes of intervention from Russia. At the end of September 2020, Azerbaijan provoked a casus belli and attacked. The coordinated effort involved a wave of obsolete An-2 biplanes converted into flying bombs to activate the Armenian air defense network, which was then comprehensively destroyed by Bayraktars and loitering munitions. With Armenian air defenses degraded and destroyed (and notably, the Soviet-era SAM systems seemed totally unable to deal with relatively low and slow flying Bayraktars), Azerbaijani drones worked down the target list of artillery, command, tanks, and infantry bunkers. Meanwhile, conventional armored forces made attacks through the mountain passes, and Azerbaijani special forces infiltrated and seized the strategic town of Shusha, which dominated the M-12 highway. After 44 days, Russia negotiated a ceasefire. Armenia suffered a crushing defeat, both sides sustained real casualties, approximately 3000 out of 17000 soldiers for Azerbaijan, and 4000 casualties out of an unpublished force for Armenia, and tens of thousands of civilians of both ethnicities were forced from their home.
The strategic narrative that Antal pushes is the kill web, a distributed, automated, rapid and precise expansion of the kill chain that links detection of a target to a weapon system and its destruction. In particular, drones like the Bayraktar enable a low-cost combined reconnaissance-strike package, where a single platform can spot targets, fire missiles at them, and accurately evaluate the results. But this seems like a jargon laden excuse to note that traditional infantry and armor have limited range, undirected artillery is random, and jet pilots are notorious for overclaiming the effects of bombing. The defensive counterpart to the kill web is masking, an all spectrum use of camouflage and mobility to prevent the enemy from acquiring your own weapon systems.
The tech is a read of drones and electronic warfare circa the late 2019s, at about the level that you might get from skimming a Lockheed Martin press release. Antal is obsessed with active camouflage systems, everything from hexagon panels of Peltier junctions to scramble IR silhouettes to metamaterial cloaks that would bend light around soldiers. Plato wrote about Gyges' ring as a cautionary tale, but it would be strategically useful.
My critical take is that we are definitely moving towards a new fighting of war, but kill webs and masking are insufficient theories. Some serious questions I have are:
1) Kill webs rely on high-bandwidth video transmission, while masking requires minimizing electromagnetic signatures. Who transmits and under what circumstances? How can jammers survive against home-on-jam anti-radiation missiles? 2) War is economic. A $10,000 drone is not worth shooting with a $100,000 interceptor, unless firing would protect a $1,000,000 tank or similar asset (and scale for more sophisticated weapons and strategic targets). What is the economic balance of offense and defense? 3) Guided weapons stocks run out very rapidly in most recorded conflicts. How can Western militaries ensure both adequate munitions stockpiles and the ability to rapidly replenish them? 4) What level of command proper for integration of various drone forces? Platoon, company, battalion, brigade, division. Should drones be organic to fire/maneuver units, or a supporting enabler, or both? 5) Are FPV drones the future, or is there a hard counter in terms of jamming, directed energy weapons, or just old fashioned airburst shells?...more
Inside the Cuban Revolution is a detailed, practically month by month political account of the Cuban Revolution. It's also very much Sweig's dissertatInside the Cuban Revolution is a detailed, practically month by month political account of the Cuban Revolution. It's also very much Sweig's dissertation, which is a double-edged blade. On the positive side is an obsessive focus with the minutia of newly open archives that a journalist or more senior scholar would elide. On the negative side is a desire to advance scholarship by pushing against the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom, at least as I understand it, is very much driven by Cold War ideologies, Cuban exiles, and the self-aware mythmaking of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. And yet, in looking for a new story about the relationship between the urban llano and the rural sierra components of the 26th of July Movement, Sweig perhaps misses the forest for the trees.
But first those trees, and they are quite impressive. Inside the Cuban Revolution brings forward lesser known figures of the Revolution, such as Frank Pais, Armando Hart, and Celia Sánchez. Rather than a unitary and inevitably victorious war, Sweig shows the Revolution as constantly backfooted, debating strategy and organization, and very unsure of where to go next. The main object of focus was a general strike, a broad coordinate rebellion across Cuban society that would shut down industry and transport, aligning ordinary workers, radical activists, and the staid conservatives of the civic groups in an anti-Baptista rising, out of which a new constitutional order would arise.
Of course, it didn't work out like that at all. Several attempts at a general strike failed due to organizational lapses, as the 26th of July Movement lacked the deep basis to pull it off, and these failures were accompanied by high casualties. The 26th of July Movement was one faction in the opposition, which included politiqueria exiles who threatened a return to traditional corruption. Coordination between Castro in the mountains, activists at the literal other end of the island in Havana, and members overseas charged with raising money, arms, and diplomatic support was always spotty at best.
Yet somehow Castro's ragtag but motivated guerrilla columns defeated Batista's army in battle, showing that superior firepower doesn't always win. A strongman cannot ever afford to look weak, and Batista fled, letting the 26th of July Movement seize power in a triumphal march....more
The Great Man theory of history has been out of favor for a long time, but if there was ever a case that proved the rule, it would be Napoleon. Born tThe Great Man theory of history has been out of favor for a long time, but if there was ever a case that proved the rule, it would be Napoleon. Born to minor nobility in Corsica, an insignificant and backwards island in the Mediterranean caught between French and Italian influences, Napoleon would rise through the ranks of the French Republican Army through ambition and immense military talent to Emperor of France, and then conqueror of most of Europe. Napoleon moved from triumph to triumph, until the disastrous invasion of Russia, the subsequent harrowing 1814 defensive campaign, and his final throw of the dice at Waterloo. In that interval, he redrew the map of Europe, wrote a new code of law and rational administration that swept away the last vestiges of feudalism, and laid the basis for modernity. Without Napoleon, the world would look very different.
[image] Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David.
As Roberts lays out in the introduction, the sheer volume of work about Napoleon makes scholarship difficult. He estimates that one book about Napoleon's life has been published per day since Napoleon's death. In English history, Napoleon was the great enemy, the "Corsican Ogre", while for the French he was the greatest national hero since Joan of Arc. Many cotemporaneous memoirs by people close to Napoleon were ghostwritten and self-serving collections of lies. On the fortunate side, Napoleon was an inveterate letter writer, drafting between 5 and 10 letters a day, both administrative and personal, and all of those letters have recently been collected and published by the French archives. Napoleon frequently exaggerated in his letters, particularly estimate his successes on the day of a battle, but they are the truest and most accurate picture of the man.
Some of the most fascinating parts of the book concern Napoleon the man, where Roberts describes the overwrought essays of a youth trying to make sense of the French Revolution and his own place in a rapidly changing world, and an exiled and dying Napoleon on St. Helena. While supremely self-assured, Napoleon was a man of good humor, passion, immense energy and attention to detail, and real charisma, a far cry from the megalomaniac that he is often portrayed as. A second area that I found fascinating was Napoleon in Egypt, where he flirted with converting to Islam and leading an Arab army through Persia to British India.
Napoleon the general and the emperor come through less well, simply because of the scale of both subjects. With so many battles, it is hard to give them sufficient detail. Roberts captures the genius of Napoleon's corps systems and 'advantage of the central position', where he used the operational agility of his armies to combine and attack his enemies individually before he could respond, but beyond that, the battles are often bloody messes. Administration is perhaps too complex of a subject for a biography to cover in detail.
While a great man, Napoleon's primary perspective as a soldier proved his undoing. The ongoing war with England over Napoleon's Continental System of economic blockade wore away at the financial foundations of his empire. While he reached his zenith with the Treaty of Tilsit, which bound essentially all European powers but Portugal and Sicily to his cause, Napoleon was unable to sustain a peaceful alliance. Pursuit of victory through decisive battle proved elusive in Russia and Spain, and both the Prussians and the Austrians kept returning from their defeats, having learned painful lessons about victory.
Worse, Napoleon proved unable to cultivate human talent. None of his Marshals matched his own strategic brilliance. As his old friends died in battle, no one replaced them, and lack of good advice lead to overconfidence driven disasters in Spain and Russia. Foreign minister Talleyrand betrayed him in complex intrigues. His brothers, who he placed on thrones across Europe, never achieved more than mediocrity. Marshals Bernadotte and Murat both were given thrones by Napoleon, and both joined the 6th Coalition against him.
If I'm going to blow bookrace 2024 in April, no better way to do it than with a 1000 page biography....more
A mighty empire at the peak of its' power, the center of an increasingly interconnected world, suddenly crumbles under the combined weight of an erratA mighty empire at the peak of its' power, the center of an increasingly interconnected world, suddenly crumbles under the combined weight of an erratic and idiotic ruler, the blowback from decades of unrealistic policy, and a sudden pandemic. It's not America 2020, it's Rome AD 165, and though the parallels are perhaps somewhat stretched, there's still a lot of valuable lessons, and a good ancient medical and economic mystery around the Antonine Plague.
Rome in 160 was at the height of the Pax Romana, a century and a half of expansion and peace since Augustus turned the Republic into the Empire. The empire was ruled by Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, adopted brothers who seemed uncommonly able to split the duties and benefits of the Imperium.
[image] Marcus Aurelius. Be suspicious of dudes with this as their profile pic
Elliott spends plenty of time setting the stage, and makes a convincing argument that the Pax Romana was more of a gilded age than a golden age. While the imperial core was peaceful and prosperous, that prosperity did not reach to the masses of urban poor, who either slept rough or in crude and unsafe tenement apartments. Sanitation was poor, despite investment in aqueducts and sewers. Administration was ad hoc, the semi-private affairs of local elites and imperial delegates, who lacked training, data, and resources to react to crises. And crucially, the grain supply in Rome was dependent on Egyptian harvests, and the Nile floods had been either too little or too much for decades prior. So in 165, when victorious soldiers returning from Parthia came back with an unknown disease, it was a more fragile empire than appearances suggest that took the blow.
And the disease is truly unknown. Elliott makes a convincing case for an orthopox virus, like smallpox but not modern smallpox, though measles is another common suggestion. Despite being associated with the great physician Galen, descriptions of symptoms is vague, including fever, rashes, and then in fatal cases bloody coughs and stools. How many people died is another unknown, with ranges between 1 million and over 25 million. For such a massive event, there is little direct evidence.
Yet the indirect evidence is compelling, including tangled mass graves in cities corresponding to the dates of the plague. Census records show declines across the period, as cities shrunk and entire towns disappeared. Mines and quarries ceased production, coinage was debased, the military had trouble recruiting for wars and peacekeeping against raiders, and conflict between orthodox Pagans and early Christians who refused to perform public sacrifices to appease the gods is recorded.
Though Elliott argues for a deathcount at the lower end of the range, he makes a case that the plague really did a number on the Roman economy, and more explicitly, the Roman political system. Commodus, who succeeded Marcus Aurelian, was a clown rather than a stoic, and his assassination triggered ongoing political stability on the basis that whoever could best bribe the army deserved to rule. The Crisis of 3rd century was clearly set up by the plague.
I will note that one thing that seems amiss is when Elliott draws more direct connection between the Antonine Plague and COVID-19, which is set in a very orthodox Chicago school economic framework. Roman macro-economics were surely bad, but it seems unfair to fault them for not reading Hayek. Similarly, the failures of pre-germ theory divine intervention have little bearing on evidence-informed public health measures. But I will say that while Elliott and I likely have significant differences in perspective over the recent pandemic, he is a gentleman and a scholar, so I'll avoid concluding this review with a rant.
After all, we probably don't spend enough time thinking about Rome....more
Isaac's Storm is a masterpiece of narrative non-fiction, tracing the systematic arrogance of the US weather service at the end of the 19th century andIsaac's Storm is a masterpiece of narrative non-fiction, tracing the systematic arrogance of the US weather service at the end of the 19th century and the devastating Galveston Hurricane of 1900 through the figure of Isaac Cline, the US Weather Service bureau chief in the city.
First, the systematic arrogance. America at the end of the 19th century was a country coming into its own power, having conquered a continent, beaten the Spanish, and (mostly) buried the strife of the Civil War. Americans were rational, muscular, confident, and ready to conquer the world. The nascent weather service was a mirror of society, taking in observations from sober and skilled young men across the country and spitting out reliable reports. Well, definitely reports, reliability was another problem.
The basic issue was that given the technology of the period, good forecasts were more a matter of luck than skill. Particularly for hurricanes, there was no way to observe them at sea, and damaging storms tended to down telegraph lines to transmit warnings back to headquarters. In typical period racism, American officials discounted the skills of Cuban meteorologists as emotional superstition, and banned them from using the telegraph system. In order to prevent politically damaging false alarms, the phrase 'hurricane' could only be used on expressed orders from Washington DC.
The city of Galveston was a second order of arrogance, built on a sandy island barely above sea level between the Gulf of Mexico and an interior bay. Objectively, Galveston was fantastically vulnerable to flooding. City officials argued that hurricanes would never strike Galveston, and if they did, various hydrographic features would protect the city. This was a matter of pride and of wealth, as Galveston and Houston were engaged in a race to be Texas' primary city.
Hurricanes that enter the Gulf of Mexico are rare compared to Atlantic hurricanes, but can be especially devastating because the Gulf is an expanse of humid heat that hits the cyclone engine of the hurricane like a nitrous oxide boost. The Great Storm slammed into Galveston on the evening of September 8th like a divinely ordained missile.
At first the inhabitants delighted at the unexpected coolness in the midst of a summer heatwave, and the entertainment of immense waves. Then the buildings on the shore started to collapse, water rose in the streets, and slate roof tiles whipped through the air like bullets. At the storm intensified, people sought shelter wherever they could. And then all too often, the buildings they sheltered in gave up against the forces that assaulted the city, and the people were cast out into the night to die. Families were torn apart by wind and water, some groups expiring entirely and others leaving a traumatized survivor to make sense of the devastation. Isaac lost his wife and several children, though some of his family survived.
Isaac's Storm is compelling and masterfully written, and though it came out years before Katrina, Harvey, and Sandy wrecked their havoc, it remains a prescient warning in an age of larger storms and rising seas. Compared to Isaac's generation, we have better tools to see the storm coming, but prediction is still not safety.
Those Who Hold Bastogne is fine military history that will satisfy both war buffs and serious historians, without pushing forward the edges of scholarThose Who Hold Bastogne is fine military history that will satisfy both war buffs and serious historians, without pushing forward the edges of scholarship in a substantial way. This is no fault of the author, The Battle the Bulge is one of the more covered events in a very thoroughly covered war. Schrijvers has ably covered a massive battle with hundreds of thousands of participants.
[image] Bastogne, from the Band of Brothers series
The basic story is pretty clear. In December 1944, Hitler launched a desperate last gasp offensive to split the British and Americans and secure a truce in the west. Mighty panzer armies once again smashed through the Ardennes, overrunning weak Allied divisions assigned to what was predicted to be a quiet sector. The only available reinforcements, the 101st Airborne Division, were rushed to the key Belgian crossroads town of Bastogne, where they held off the Nazis until relived by Patton's 3rd Army.
And that is the story, pretty much. Schrijvers is careful to note that while the airborne gets much of the glory, plenty of other units contributed to the fighting, and suffered heavily casualties as well, including a unit of African-American gunners. Neither side had superiority and the battle turned into a months long attritional grind that saw Allied logistics and firepower ultimately triumph. Schrijvers interleaves the movement of divisions with on-the-ground stories of individual soldiers culled from medal citations and oral history projects, skillfully blending the macro and the micro.
Two moments stand out. First, Belgian civilians, especially around Bastogne, suffered terribly from indiscriminate firepower, much of which was deployed by the Allies. P-47 fighter bombers burnt out Nazi fighting positions and Belgian cellar shelters alike with Napalm. Families were gunned down by trigger-happy machinegunners firing at dark shapes against the snow. War is tragedy.
Second, we all know General McAuliffe's famous reply of "NUTS" to the German offer of surrender. What I did not know is that the general was asleep when the offer came in, catching a moment of rest after several days of constant action, and "nuts" was a mumble on awakening, that his staff decided was the best response to the offer. ...more
Daniel Ellsberg will always be the patron saint of whistleblowers. He earned his place in history by leaking the Pentagon Papers, documenting that theDaniel Ellsberg will always be the patron saint of whistleblowers. He earned his place in history by leaking the Pentagon Papers, documenting that the American government knew the war in Vietnam was based on lies and going poorly long before it admitted anything of that sort to the public. Vietnam was the end of Ellsberg's official career. He real passion was nuclear war, and trying to make sure that one never occurred. In a twist of fate, the nuclear documents that Ellsberg also copied in the 1970s were lost in a landslide, but decades later much of that material has become available through FOIA and similar requests.
I thought I knew a fair bit about the Cold War and nuclear brinksmanship, and even so this book was astounding. The conventional wisdom is that nuclear war is MAD-Mutually Assured Destruction. Peace is preserved in a tense equilibrium where each side knows that any nuclear exchange will lead to annihilation of it's own population via a sure retaliation. The paradoxical credibility of peace by violence is restrained by the twin promises that nothing can stop the fire and that nukes will only be launched in response to a nuclear attack. The first point is true, the second point is a lie.
As Ellsberg points out, the American government has never disavowed the first use of nuclear weapons, or the potential of a nuclear first strike (First use is any unprovoked use. First strike is massive first use intended to prevent retaliation). Every American president since Truman has used the nuclear arsenal like a robber with a gun. That the gun has not been fired yet is secondary to the basic fact that it is loaded, aimed, and used to compel obedience.
This book is best when it hews closest to Ellsberg's work at RAND and in the White House. Coming out of the Marines and Harvard with a PhD in decision-making under uncertainty, he embarked on a survey of nuclear strategy in the Pacific in 1959 or so, and what he found was incredibly alarming. President Eisenhower had delegated the authority to launch a nuclear strike to CINCPAC in Honolulu, who had further devolved authority to theater commanders on Okinawa, Guam, Korea, and various ships. All of these commands were routinely out of contact with higher headquarters due to distance and poor radio communications. While there was in theory a 'two man rule' that prevented any single officer from broadcasting the order to launch a nuclear strike, in reality every ship and base had procedures for bypassing the two man rule.
Bases practiced alerts on a daily basis and were capable of launching aircraft on 10 minute notice, a stated objective of the attack plan. The attack plan was "fail-safe", in that if an aircraft had not received a go order by the time it reached bingo fuel and had to either commit to the attack or return to base, it would return to base. Strategic Air Command (SAC) practiced full alerts with armed bombers flying to their holding points. In the Pacific, Tactical Air Command merely taxied to the flightlines with bombs. This was both to save fuel and maintenance, and also because the bombs used were not one-point safe, and F-100s were difficult airplanes to flying, meaning there was a small but real chance a plane crash could lead to a nuclear detonation.
As Ellsberg pointed out, visiting a small airbase in the ass-end of Korea, a real alert would be the first time that these pilots had taken off with live bombs. There was also a non-zero chance that plane 8 of 12 would crash on take-off, and the remaining pilots would find themselves out of communications with command, their base enveloped in a mushroom cloud, and with the fate of their world in their hands.
Ellsberg asked the officer in command, a major, what would happen. Would the pilots returned to base as planned? "Yes they would. They're good boys. Well, probably... Hell, if one goes, they might as well all go!" The end of the world could be triggered by an honorable and dutiful officer at the very low rank of major, on his own orders, based on his own very partial understanding of the strategic situation. And there was nothing the entire chain of command, from the President on down, could do to stop it.
Worse than accidents was the actual proper plan. The effort involved in coordinating thousands of aircraft and bombs and avoiding mutual fratricide meant that there was only one plan, a massive all-out attack on the Soviet Union, Communist China, and the Warsaw Pact that would drop thousands of hydrogen bombs in a single spasm until nothing remained in the American arsenal. This plan was to be activated on the event of general war, a conflict with the Soviet Union larger than a skirmish. The plan itself, the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan, was so secret that it was concealed from the President and the White House staff, the anodyne JSCP acronym also kept secret. It was a plan for genocide. The initial bombardment would kill hundreds of millions. Fire effects were too difficult to estimate, so they were assumed to cause zero casualties. Radioactive fallout would kill an estimated another five hundred million or so, wiping out allies and neutrals in Western Europe and South Asia. Plumes of fallout would drift around the globe, and ash lofted into the stratosphere would trigger a nuclear winter and years-long famine.
In one rather acid summary of his career, Ellsberg describes his life's mission as moving a piece of paper from one desk to a desk with higher authority. The truth about the Vietnam War shifted from the Pentagon to the public. JSCP from the Air Force to the President. Ellsberg joined the Kennedy administration on a part-time leave from RAND, and drafted a new nuclear war plan that proposed leaving cities untouched, hostages for a second round, and reducing the triggering events for nuclear war. There is a lot of canny bureaucratic knife fighting, and great descriptions of the proper deployment of informational memos around the Cuban missile crisis, for those who care about those sorts of things.
The latter half of the book weapons as Ellsberg laps in general nuclear strategy, rather than his own experience, but he makes an ironclad case that current nuclear policy in the United States is inherently unsafe and that the soft power gained by joining international arms controls norms would override the veiled, and not-so-veiled threats, made by American Presidents. We've been lucky that there have been no fatal technical glitches, and that at moments of maximum tension people who understood the consequences had the last word, but luck is not enough. Something has to change before the doomsday machine goes off.
As the motto of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces goes, "After us - silence". ...more
Guillotine is an enthusiastic but amateurish history of a grim and powerful symbol. Made infamous during the Terror of the French Revolution, the guilGuillotine is an enthusiastic but amateurish history of a grim and powerful symbol. Made infamous during the Terror of the French Revolution, the guillotine remained in service for almost two centuries more, with it's final execution coming in 1977. Yes, hypothetically someone could have seen Star Wars and then gotten a rather fatal shortening.
[image] They got the TV- we got the truth They own the judges and we got the proof We got hella people- they got helicopters They got the bombs and we got the- we got the
Originally, the guillotine was supposed to be a modern and merciful form of execution. It's name-sake, the Doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, was a member of the National Assembly who opposed capital punishment entirely, but in bowing to popular pressure, urged an egailitarian reform from the diverse and grotesque ways the Ancien Regime had tortured the condemned to death. He had nothing to do with the design or implementation, aside from suggesting some kind of gravity driven device, and spent the rest of his long life running from the device.
Opie covers the period of the terror in most detail, as fascinated by the device as period French society. Thousands were executed, starting with common criminals, then traitors, then the king and queen, and finally Danton and Robespierre and the worst of the Committee of Public Safety.
The post-revolutionary aftermath of the guillotine is fairly interesting, though briefly treated. There were guillotine memorial balls for people who's had lost loved ones to the People's Razor, where guests wore red ribbons around their necks. The official Parisian executioner, a descendent of the Sansom family, wound up pawning the guillotine due to debts, and lost his post when the government had to redeem it. The Guillotine, the device that killed King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, was likely purchased by Madame Tussaud's museum (Madame Tussaud got her start making wax death masks of guillotine victims) and destroyed in a fire in the 1920s.
The guillotine ambled into the 20th century, used mostly on the worst of ordinary criminals. Compared to other industrial methods of execution: snap-neck hanging, the firing squad, electrocution, and lethal injection, it is relatively simple and error-proof, though extremely bloody. It remains an open medical question of how long a severed head retains awareness, though the likeliest answer is 'mere moments'.
As the introduction to this book makes clear, so much Vietnam War historiography, both popular and academic, is about assigning blame for the losses, As the introduction to this book makes clear, so much Vietnam War historiography, both popular and academic, is about assigning blame for the losses, both political and personal. Was it Kennedy or Johnson, hawks or doves, a conscious choice or a historical inevitability? Particularly when this book was written in 2005, at the height of the Iraq War, the question of political responsibility for a war going badly was particularly acute.
Counterfactuals are somewhat absurd. History is a matter of interpreting evidence, but there is only one past. The methodological dispute between counterfactual and virtual history is somewhat arcane, but the method here has some validity. Blight and his co-authors assembled a panel of about 20 distinguished individuals: 3 Kennedy-Johnson officials (low level ones, the only one I'd heard of was Bill Moyers, and that's because he's been a newscaster for decades since being LBJ's press secretary), and evenly matched teams of 'skeptical' academics who believe Kennedy would have acted much as Johnson did, and 'radical' academics who thought he would have done differently, had he lived. Participants read a 1000 page briefing document of mostly primary sources, a selection of which are at the back, and then met for three days of spirited discussion at the Musgrove Conference Center in Georgia.
The book consists of a mix of summarizing commentary by the authors, direct quotes of participants, and primary sources, and is therefore most immediately useful as a model of how historians debate. The questions focused on three key moments in 1961, as Kennedy decides whether to commit to Laos, 1963 as Kennedy decides to remove Diem from power in a CIA-orchestreated coup, and then "long 1964", where Johnson starts Operation Rolling Thunder and eventually deploys the Marines to Da Nang.
The matter of Kennedy vs Johnson is a fascinating one, because the two men were of the same party, had comparable attitudes on muscularly interventionist anti-Communism, and practically the same foreign policy team. The differences, as the skeptics argue, were in psychology and foreign policy expertise. Having been burned by trusting hawkish advisors during the Bay of Pigs, and gained confidence during the Berlin Crisis and Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was more confident in foreign policy, and more skeptical of good military outcomes. Additionally, while the foreign policy team (Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, etc) was very similar, Kennedy was better at tolerating internal dissent and going against his advisors. Finally, assuming that South Vietnam was teetering on the brink of collapse in 1965, Kennedy would be in his second term and much less vulnerable to public pressure of the 'Who lost China?' variety.
The radicals lay out an argument that Kennedy has made a private decision to limit the American commitment to Vietnam to advisors only, and that he was prepared to let South Vietnam fall before sending in American troops. The skeptical counter is that while this private decision may be in character for Kennedy, there's no actual evidence of it, even in masses of private letters and audio tapes, that Kennedy did massively escalate the advisory commitment between his inauguration and assassination, and that decisions about 'withdrawal' may have been a token 1000 advisors, who were in fact withdrawn and replaced with a new set of 1000 advisors, out of roughly 17000 Americans in-country at the start of 1964.
There's no argument that Johnson made the war a psychological referendum on his own character and resolve, and that he and his administration agonized over the decision for months, while Johnson and Walt Rostow worked tireless to suppressing dissenting views. Ultimately, we'll never have an answer to this question, but the key lesson is that a short victorious war isn't....more
The Devil's Broker is a fascinating popular account of the life of infamous knight and mercenary commander John Hawkwood. One of the minor English warThe Devil's Broker is a fascinating popular account of the life of infamous knight and mercenary commander John Hawkwood. One of the minor English warriors who participated in the 100 Years War under Edward III, after a truce he quit formal service and joined a mercenary company. The difference between royal service and mercenary work was rather theoretical. The English chevauchee was pure economic warfare, wide-ranging looting of the countryside that paid for itself. Mercenary work was much the same.
Hawkwood's company, the White Company, crossed into Italy, and there Hawkwood found his calling. His career was complex, to say the least, with Hawkwood fighting for Milan, Florence, and the Papacy at various points, although contrary to popular beliefs about mercenaries, Hawkwood did not suddenly switch sides on the eve of battle, or avoid battle entirely. Along with sacks and sudden assaults by storm and stealth, he was a master of the feigned retreat, luring his foes into vulnerable positions for a counter-charge. He participated in the brutal Massacre at Cesena while working for the papacy, and then switched to secular service.
Saunders makes the case for Hawkwood as an influential figure of the age. Aside from someone who executed the bloody intrigues of Italian politics, he also served as model for the protagonist of Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale" (the two met several times), and advanced English foreign policy in Italy, a vital market for English wool, and a strategic theater for apply leverage against the French from a second front.
Despite his long career and evident success in battle, Hawkwood died essentially broke, leaving his wife and children to make their own way in the world rather than establishing a major line. Dying in bed at the age of 71 or 72 is more than a lot of his contemporaries could say.
A Distant Mirror, this book, Mercenaries and Their Masters and The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior would make a solid survey of the era....more
Absolute Zero is a fascinating popular history of research into cold, from Francis Bacon through the present day, with a climax around the liquificatiAbsolute Zero is a fascinating popular history of research into cold, from Francis Bacon through the present day, with a climax around the liquification of helium by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. Popular in the sense that Shachtman avoids equations and a historical perspective, this book is comprehensive and enjoyable.
As Shachtman notes, cold presents an unusual negation of phenomenon for early physicists. Unlike light, sound, motion, or heat, cold is an absence. Francis Bacon, the proto-experimentalist, died of pneumonia after an impromptu test to see if snow could preserve chicken (yes), and after that the study of cold languished for centuries, a mere adjunct to the more important measurement of temperature.
The dominant caloric theory of the 18th century was intuitively satisfying, but its invocation of a ineffable and non-existent heat bearing fluid model the emerging technology of steam engines, or the mechanical production of cold by gas expansion. As physicists experimented with cold, they proved that gases could transform to new phases of matter at low temperatures and above atmospheric pressure. Carbon dioxide, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and finally helium were all liquified.
Onnes was the first to liquify helium, and the first to note the astonish property of low temperature superconductivity in mercury and a host of other substances, as well as the superfluid behavior of liquid helium. Low temperatures proved an experimental bridge between classical physics and the new quantum physics, where at low temperatures macro-scale objects that could be manipulated in the lab exhibited properties only explainable by quantum effects.
Today, commercial refrigeration and air conditioning are so commonplace as to be entirely unremarkable, but cold was once cutting edge, and this book captures the romance of the quest for absolute zero....more
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