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Nashville Debutante Fights Imperial Japan May 15, 2012

Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary

***With thanks to Larry***

A wish-i’d-been-there moment from 1941. Cornelia Fort was a twenty-three-year-old pilot and instructor flying a Cadet out of Honolulu in that year. Incredibly though CF had only been flying for a matter of months she was already deemed good enough to work as an instructor, putting a young Hawaiian through his paces. And that’s what she was doing at dawn on 7 December with the American Pacific fleet (thankfully minus Enterprise and Lexington) spread out below her.

In one of CF’s surviving letters she writes that she was happiest in her life behind the controls of a plane in the peaceful early morning sky. Well, of course, 7 December was to be anything but peaceful… Pearl Harbor has many memorable moments, not least the radar crew dismissing a splodge of red on their radars as birds and rushing off for breakfast. But for Beach this marvelously spirited flapper gliding into the Japanese attack beats them all.

Cornelia spotted a silver airplane surfing in from sea straight towards her. She, at first, registered irritation and then her instincts fired.  She took the controls from her trainee and climbed as fast as the throttle would allow her. She was only just in time. The Japanese plane – its imperial insignia clearly visible – swept under her and rattled the civilian craft. If anyone doubts that she was in terrible danger consider this: as she landed another instructor and trainee were torn apart on a Japanese strafing run.

Cornelia Ryan was only at Honolulu through a technicality. The youngest of four children from a wealthy Nashville family, Cornelia’s father had, many years before, called her three brothers into his study and had required them to give their oath on the Bible that they would never fly. The old patriarch did not believe for a moment that Cornelia, a girl, would take to the air, though that what is she did in 1940, the year of his death. When one of her brothers objected she pointed out that she had never been asked to swear to anything: even if she had watched from the hall as the oaths were given. Cornelia had a point.

As to flying she was a natural. This skill would take her to Hawaii and then into the wartime air-force (she is pictured above, the highest of the four with a raw, natural beauty) where women ferried military planes from one part of the country to another. Her talent would finally take her to her death in 1943 when she was caught up in a mid-air collision while in Texas. CR was to be the first woman to die on active service in the US armed forces.

Today an airfield is named after her, she appears fleetingly in Tora! Tora! and there is a book Daughter of the Air. For a short, though charming documentary, hop over to Youtube and for a longer article visit the Airspace Magazine.

Beach is always on the look out for Wish I’d Been There Moments: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

Freedoms Fliers by J. Todd Moye April 15, 2012

Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary

Wars have the habit of shaking up the social order in a way that a hoary old conservative like Beachcombing finds rather disturbing. Children join militias: think the moving photographs of fourteen and fifteen year German ‘soldiers’ guarding the Atlantic wall or ‘that scene’ in Doctor Zhivago. Gender relations are bent in knots: women are removed rudely from households and thrown onto tractors and into factories. And racial and ethnic respect is burnt like kindling on the barbecue: see every war in the last two hundred years in the Balkans. But let’s say that gender or race relations are no hot shakes to begin with, perhaps war does everyone a favour? Certainly many women recall new freedoms that the World Wars offered them (in their tractors and factories). While for Afro-Americans the pre-war status-quo was hardly worth defending: cue J. Todd Moye’s Freedom Flyers: the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II the book that Beachcombing has devoured most readily in the last month and its moving story of the first black combat fliers.

If you were black and American in the 1930s the chances are that you would have mixed feelings about your country. If you lived in the southern states you had to bear the disgusting tyranny of Jim Crow and if you lived in the north prejudice was ingrained in society, in the economy and in culture. Come WW2 then black patriots felt understandably torn. On the one hand, they wanted to fight for the flag and American freedoms against some of the most ghastly regimes the human race has ever vomited onto the card table. On the other hand, the flag was oppressing African Americans at home with a uniquely American version of fascism. Not surprisingly many of these soldiers articulated their fight then as a double ‘victory’: against Nazi Germany and other monsters from the deep, but also against attitudes and regulations at home. ‘We find it hard to fight Tyranny in the midst of Tyranny’ as one contemporary put it.

This was all sharpened by the fact that the American armed forces were unquestionably and institutionally racist. For example, there is the incredible fact that blood taken from black and white servicemen was kept separately, though there was and is no scientific justification for such an absurd procedure. With this kind of nonsense we can trace attitudes but there were also actions: the reluctance to use black infantry in battle with the same being employed as something equivalent to Liberty’s navvies. Nor unfortunately did things change very much in the course of the war: one of the most striking passages in this book describes a black pilot being momentarily taken up in the patriotic joy of a welcome in an American harbour only to arrive at disembarkation and be told that he has to walk out onto the dock on a ‘black’ gangplank. This was one of those men who had served his country, risked his life and who had disproved the absurd notion that black men could not fly. And here was his spit-in-your-face homecoming.

Many Second World War books (pioneers in this regard) thrive on witness statements of battles. But Freedom Fliers offers a richer take on the same. As the author is not just tracing the experience of war but also backgrounds and aftermaths – an important part of the book are the changes in life for black Americans – the reader goes deeper. He or she will feel at the end that they’ve read a Russian novel rather than a trashy throw away murder mystery because so much more ground is covered. And Beachcombing should say that if the lives honoured here begin with intolerable domestic conditions they end with an invitation, as guests, to Obama’s inauguration. The Tuskegee airmen took that familiar road from outsiders, to heroes, to icons. And, on the subject of icons, those who enjoy the perversions of history will particularly relish a bit of cobblers in part exposed by this book: the notion that the Tuskegee fliers never lost a plane while escorting American bombers. This claim, which is simply untrue, is a nice example of a half truth becoming a useful lie. The author in one brilliant passage expresses the outrage in popular culture over challenges to this claim thus: ‘But they didn’t every lose a bomber! It says so right here on my T-shirt!’

Beach is always looking out for outstanding WW2 books: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

 

 

Singing Enemy Songs: Lili Marleen April 13, 2012

Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary

One of the most moving moments in cinema is the extraordinary ending of Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. A young German girl is pulled in front of a crowd of French soldiers and forced to sing. The poilu mock her but as she nervously begins  the mood changes. The soldiers join in and drown her anxious, uncertain German, humming along. What begins as a musical lynching ends as a moment of unlikely understanding between enemies.

It works in a film, but has music ever really united foes in this way? Sure, there are stories of Silent Night/Stille Nacht being sung on both sides of the trenches at Christmas in the First World War. But these are difficult to document. However, there is one striking example from the Second World War, Lili Marleen, that can be documented by record sales alone.

Lili Marleen had the unlikely trajectory of so many surprise successes. It was written as a soldier’s poem in 1915, published in 1937 (in a very different Germany) and then set to music and recorded in August 1939 just before the Reich knocked rather loudly on the door of the Polish corridor.  The song was a complete failure and would have been entirely forgotten had it not been played by chance in 1941 by Germany’s military Radio Belgrade. There it was particularly picked up by Rommel’s Afrika Corps, listening and dreaming of home on the other side of the Med: Rommel himself is said to have loved the song, though Beach has found no good source for this.

A problem. The song was not very ‘Nazi’. In fact, its popularity infuriated Goebbels who briefly banned it – it did not help that its singer, Lale Andersen, had many Jewish friends. The song describes, after all, not the inevitably tedious march of the master race, but a suffering soldier with a heavy pack recalling a girl back home. And all this sung to a nostalgic, jerky, but catchy Blue Danube type tune! The arms of the swastika were wilting by the time you got to the end of the second verse.

However, it was these qualities that meant that it was able to cross the enemy lines with both the Dominion and British troops in the Eighth Army in Egypt and Libya singing along as they piled up sand bags or carried munitions back and forth.  By then Radio Belgrade, often listened to by the Allies, was using the song as their signature.

The war in the desert was a bloody and unpleasant affair: but it involved a degree of chivalry not found on any other front as combatants (all in a foreign land) found themselves also fighting the dunes and the sun. (Memories of the weather wars). In this unusual situation Lili Marleen became a motif of solidarity between the troops, friends and enemies alike. One British security agent, for example, remembers that whenever he was to debrief a German soldier he would always break the ice by asking what the latest alternative verses to Lili Marleen were: countless parodies and subversive versions were composed.

There was initially resistance to Allied soldiers singing the music: remember that some English-speakers had tried to get Beethoven banned for the duration of the World Wars, so a contemporary German number was bound to be controversial. However, in the end, Lili Marleen’s popularity was such that an English version became a commercial ‘sure thing’. A catastrophic rendering was given by Vera Lynn who is just too strait-laced and, well, English to do it justice. The best version in English is perhaps Marlene Dietrich’s sultry and very enjoyable purring. And from 1941 the song was translated into various languages among the combatant nations. Today it belongs to all of them.

Any other soldiers-brought-together-by-music stories? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

***

First on the subject of LM Howard M writes ‘I thought you might enjoy — if enjoy is the right word — this version (attached) of 07 Lilli Marleen recorded by Goebbel’s own propaganda swing band, Charlie and His Orchestra. It’s a bit atypical for Karl Schwendler’s outfit, since this is performed straight and sentimental. Nonetheless, the Reich seemed to feel that a German song popular with Allied soldiers had some propaganda value, or they wouldn’t have recorded it. Note that it’s not the usual English translation, and was probably written by Schwendler himself.  I don’t know if you’re familiar with the music of Charlie and His Orchestra; their best-known recordings are parodies of popular American and British dance numbers, characterized as much by exceptional musicianship as by lyrics full of antisemitism, racism, and frequent boasts of Aryan supremacy. The history of jazz and jazz musicians under the Third Reich is fascinating in and of itself (Jews! Drug addicts! Negermusik!), but I’m a little too steeped in jazz history to know if it qualifies as “strange” for your purposes.’ Katie J writes in ‘After the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, the Union regimental bands started playing at twilight. They played pro-Union songs, naturally. After a while, Confederate band started playing their songs. Finally, the Confederates started to play, ‘Home, Sweet Home’ and Union bands joined in. It’s recorded that soldiers of both sides joined in. I’m pretty sure that ‘Home, Sweet Home’ was a neutral song, but Fredericksburg was a horrific battle and oddly enough, there are a few well-documented acts of kindness and mercy between the opposing armies. Perhaps the combatants felt the need to reassure themselves of their common humanity.’ On the Civil War there is, as Tacitus points out, that beautiful story about Dixie. Abe Lincoln was said to be rather fond of Dixie Invisible writes in with an example of the Battle of the Bands also from the CW:  See Battle of the Bands and the Battle of the Bands at Stone River. ‘As’ Invisible continues ‘for soldiers being brought together by music, (but not on opposing sides) you can do worse than think of all the regimental pipers who stood their ground in the face of charging cavalry, rallied the wavering when badly wounded, and piped their men over the top or onto the beaches. Here’s the obituary of one, The Mad Piper, Bill Millin JEC writes ‘When I think of incidents of one side singing the enemy’s songs, I’m reminded of a scene from the book Das Boot and the movie of the same name in which the crew of u-boat U-96 lustily sing ‘Its A Long Way To Tipperary’. The book was written in 1973 by former Kriegsmarine propaganda officer Lothar-Günther Buchheim and, while fictionalized, closely follows his mission on the real U-96 in 1941. In the scene, the politically reckless captain clearly enjoys ordering his over-formal First Officer, a committed Nazi, to replace a Berlin propaganda broadcast being played over the p.a. system with the old English music hall song. The crew’s enthusiastic singing tells the reader/viewer that they heartily approve of the little tweak of the young Nazi’s inflated ego. Because the book and film are so well documented as having been heavily autobiographical, I feel safe in submitting this as a real-life incident.’ As a sidenote, the captain of the actual U-96, Korvettenkapitän (Lieutenant Commander) Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, was awarded the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves (Ritterkreuz des Eisernes Kreuzes mit Eichenlaub) for conspicuous and multiple incidents of gallantry, and, although wounded in action, survived the war to serve as a consultant on the masterful 1981 Wolfgang Petersen film based on Buxhheim’s book.’ KMH writes: Music itself does have a particular quality of rising  above national distinctions. Is it possible to imagine a world where German music was appreciated only by the Germans, Russian music only appreciated by the Russians, etc.? Music, as the world’s foremost international language,  seems to have done its share in promoting a global reluctance to indulge in genocidal thoughts and activities. The exception seems to be the Muslims, who have their own music, but non-Muslims aren’t aware of or familiar with it. Problem nations aren’t musical nations. The same goes for problem ideologies. This may be one reason why they inevitably fail to achieve their objectives.’ And to round off perfectly Grand Old Partisan, Michael Zak sent in this video of that famous Cold War Warrior Edward Rowny playing LM on his harmonica. Thanks to MZ, KMH, Invisible,Tacitus, Katie J. and Howard!

30/04/2012: Mike Zak also writes in: ‘Yankee Doodle was originally a British mockery of the American colonials’ Thanks Mike!

Suicide and Historical Loopholes April 7, 2012

Posted by Beachcombing in : Actualite, Ancient, Contemporary, Modern

***Dedicated to David: ‘between the bridge and the river…’***

Suicide has proved abhorrent to most spiritual traditions. Certainly, the great monotheistic religions and most of the far Eastern religions have condemned ‘self-murder’: cue lots of pulpit bashing and descriptions of hell or unpleasant reincarnations. This begs the question though of what you can do if you live in 500 BC or 500 AD or 1500 AD and you want to end your life at all costs. Beach was musing on this last night (as you do) and he wondered, human ingenuity being what it is, how individuals have got around these strictures through time. He would be very interested in any other categories or vivid examples: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com At the same time he should say that he writes this well aware of the horrible gravity of these matters and their capacity to blight families and communities; none of what follows is meant to be flippant either to G-K-Chesteron-Flag-of-the-World types or, indeed, to euthanasia ‘enthusiasts’.

i) This doesn’t count. Beach has come across several examples where individuals convince themselves that certain forms of suicide are not really suicide. For instance, if I eat rat poison then clearly I am ending my life and must suffer the eternal consequences. But if I stop putting food and drink in my mouth and I die then I have not ‘done’ anything: at best we can talk of a sin of omission. Curiously the examples of non-suicide by starvation, that he has found, come from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany. Not sure what to make of that or its historical background. Naturally many modern just-turn-off-the-machine debates involve similar arguments. It is one thing to fill someone’s veins with poison: another to stop pumping oxygen into the lungs or to take the food tube out of someone who has spent three decades immobile in hospital. An orthodox Catholic would claim, of course, that the difference, in the end, is not a categorical one: though even Beach’s beloved uber-Catholic wife would give up here if we talk about an elderly patient refusing, say, to take medicine.

ii) It wasn’t me. One extreme version of ‘this doesn’t count’ is tricking someone else into killing you. Take ‘a soldier’s death’: remembering countless examples from the eastern front in WW2. The man who does not want to go on living leaps out of the trench and walks towards the enemy firing to be killed moments later. There are some instances of death by cop in the modern United States, one problem with having an armed constabulary: a ‘perp’ pulls a weapon and police officers fire to defend themselves not knowing that they are really being coerced. Then there are even some extraordinary instances from history where a suicide kills an innocent (murder can be forgiven in most religions) so that they can be executed. This became a veritable plague in Denmark in the Early Modern Period. (Thanks to Andy the Mad Monk for this reference and Jason Z for some comments. ) Interestingly the early Christian martyrs had debates on a related question. Was it right to go and give yourself up to the Roman authorities? Or should you sit at home and wait for them to come to you? Christian attitudes to suicide arguably formed in this period in a strong rejection of the first.

iii) Can you help me? The reader will have noted that a lot of this suicide-avoiding-stuff involves loopholes. We’ll have to hope that, if there is an Almighty, He is more interested in the letter than the spirit of the law. Along similar lines one slightly more moral version of the ‘it wasn’t me’ technique is actually negotiating with someone to kill you so the sin is not on your head. A famous historical case of this was Masada where the defenders slaughtered each other by taking lots before the Romans could break through into the inner sanctum: that peculiar reluctance found in some period of not wanting to give your enemy the pleasure of massacring you. Beach, getting fictional, also has a scene from the Three Colours White in mind where much is made of this idea and the ‘murderer’ succeeds  – the scene is extraordinarily moving -  in giving the suicide a renewed will to live. It is interesting that in many cases couple suicides involve the partners ‘helping’ each other, almost as if there is a desire (unconscious or otherwise) to avoid putting your own hand on yourself.

iv) I ended my life but to save others. This is the category for those who suspect that, contrary to what was said above, the Almighty (always granting His existence) is more interested in the spirit than the letter of the law. There are, after all, cases where an act of suicide should actually help the world: depending naturally on our appallingly limited human viewpoints of what ‘help’ means. This might include the suicide of a Woolwich cadet described in an A.E.Housman poem who ends his life because he is worried he is going to damage himself and others: he was presumably homosexual at a time, late 19 cent, when this was unacceptable.  This argument is passionately used as a justification for suicide bombing by some Islamists. An uneasy Biblical ‘precedent’ is Samson who brings down the temple on the heads of himself but also the Philistines: the same Samson praised by the normally grumpy Paul in his letters. Altruistic suicide might very reasonably be used to describe the death of Bruno Fanciullacci the Italian resistance fighter in the last war who hurled himself from an upper storey window to avoid torture and indiscretions at the hands of the Gestapo, arguably saving tens of lives.  Thinking about this Beach once had a fascinating discussion with a member of Opus Dei who argued that, by this definition, Christ himself had committed suicide. Discuss.

 

 

John Lukacs: The Legacy of the Second World War April 5, 2012

Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary

John Lukacs’s The Legacy of the Second World War is, like most books by that brilliant and maverick historian, a bit of a mess. The chapter headings say it all. Chapter One, ‘Seventy Years Later’ and Chapter Two ‘the Place of the Second World War’ can pass muster. However, then everything is thrown off kilter. Chapter Three is about the carving up of the post-war world. Chapter Four is about Hitler’s personality. Chapter Five is about a meeting between two nuclear physicists (yes that meeting). Chapter Six, ‘Rainbow Five’ is about the American choice to finish in Europe before knocking out Japan. Then Chapter Seven discusses the origins of the cold war.

Usually run-around structures are not promising in a book: the ability to create a greater unity reflects on an author’s ability to be cogent, to the point and interesting from page to page. But in the case of JL the messier the structure the more interesting things seem to get.

The chapter, for example, on Hitler would justify the purchase of the book in itself. Again the arguments covered don’t always hold together: these are really three or four mini chapters strung one after another. But each section represents stimulating and sometimes taunting essays by a scholar who has refused to be cowed by contemporary ‘wisdom’ on the war.

So, there are thoughts on Hitler’s extraordinary state craft; Hitler as a Judaephobe rather than an anti-semite (JL as a Hungarian Jew was himself lucky to survive the Second World War); Hitler’s bizarre hesitation at Dunkirk; Hitler’s understanding that Germany was losing the war; Hitler’s indirect negotiations with the Allies…

JL at one point speculates whether Hitler will not become, in our future historical imagination, a second Diocletian: a ruthless defender of civilisation just before the barbarians cross the frozen Rhine. It would be absurd if this happened. But there is something eerily convincing about JL’s sense of where the world will drift in the next century. We are, as he often reminds his readers, at the end of an age. We’ll have to see how Beachcombing’s grandchildren have Hitler introduced to them in their text books… That is if there are still text-books to pass out.

Reading the book the historian that Beachcombing is sometimes reminded of is, of all people, the young David Irving; something that will make JL froth at the mouth should he ever read this. But JL, now in his eighties, has the younger David Irving’s talent as a gifted outsider. Yet there is none of DI’s grand-standing (Hitler’s Diary) or perverse/obscene political positions (re the Holocaust) or unfortunate heroes (let’s leave it at that). There is wisdom and a bubbling but always sensible moral impatience with the world. This might not be an ideal primer on WW2, but The Legacy is certainly the best advanced commentary Beach has read.

Beach is always on the look out for good books on WW2: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

Britain’s Obsession with the Second World War March 27, 2012

Posted by Beachcombing in : Actualite, Contemporary

Anyone who knows Britain will be aware of the constant references to the Second World War in the island’s political culture, particularly when  national sovereignty is at stake. Harold Wilson decried appeals to ‘the Dunkirk Spirit’: and then shamelessly used the same trick himself. And the recent spats over Britain’s use of its ‘veto’ within the European Union inevitably brought up ‘peace in our time’, the ‘bulldog spirit’ (with accompanying images of Churchill) and David Low’s Very Well Alone cartoon!

All this is mildly irritating, because most of it is reflexive and lazy thinking. But far worse are those who decry Britain’s obsession with the Second World War as provincialism. Britain is, it is true, obsessed with the last war. But in this she is hardly different than France or Finland and most countries in between. Even the neutrals – Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Switzerland and Sweden – can hardly stop picking at the scab of what happened sixty odd years ago. The Second World War has become, in fact, for Europe what Homer was for the Greeks, a kind of Bible of identity in which we look for ourselves and each other and our relations to each other.

Of course, our reconstructions of the recent past are almost always shockingly inadequate. Certainly, the Second World War as remembered by Britain is full of myths. So Britain never, for example, fought ‘alone’. She was backed by the Dominions and the Empire (a mere fifth of the globe) who had plunged into the fire storm along with the mother country: New Zealand and Australia immediately, democratically and at great risk to their own territories.  Britain’s claim that she was fighting ‘alone but not for Britain alone’ is sainthood after the fact. And Britain’s moments of WW2 glory from the Battle of Britain (the UK brilliantly fought Germany to a draw) to the Dambusters (a tragically underexploited stroke against the Reich) have almost all been artfully misconstrued.

Sometimes Beach wonders if Germany alone sees the Second World War in a rational light: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

But this is human nature and history will constantly be distorted by its creators. The sea captain might as well sue the sea as historians complain about such popular reimaginings. The fact is that Britain’s clingy, wallowing attitude to the Second World War is no better or worse than the attitudes of most other countries in this corner of the world. Those Britons who call the British obsession with WW2 ‘provincialism’ are either demanding a higher standard of behaviour from their country or, more likely, displaying their all too provincial ignorance of what happens in the rest of continent.

At least, in Britain the war is over and there is a consensus across the political spectrum as to what the war represented. In other countries (Ex-Yugoslavia, Austria…) the war is still being fought. Take Beach’s second home, Italy. There the right, particularly the post-Fascist right, continues to question the role of the partisans, particularly the communist partisans. While left-wingers still march to the music of the resistance: with ‘classics’ (most actually written several decade after hostilities ceased) such as Bella Ciao.

In much of Europe, the Second World War did not end in 1945: gunpowder and cordite were simply replaced by paper and podiums.

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29 March 2012: KMH writes: Since the USA has engaged in politically difficult  conflicts since WWII, (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) the war has receded from the public consciousness. The only ones left who participated in it are now approaching their nineties. If the British had suffered through another period of hostilities in the 70 odd years since WWII it might also have had the same effect. The economic recoveries of Japan and Germany (and perhaps also Italy)  may have helped to redirect their political attention away from the war. And now China has entered into its economic boom era. Russia is still focusing on WWII perhaps because its communist leaders rejected help with economic recovery through the Marshall Plan. The large quantity of military aid to Russia in the war seems to have been forgotten about. To both forget and forgive can take quite a while, but  without learning lessons from history we are bound to repeat it. Battles from the US Civil War are still being re-enacted – a reflection of the traumatic effect of this war on the American  spirit.  Thanks as always KMH!

 

Churchill, De Gaulle and Waterloo March 15, 2012

Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary

Today a bit of modern British history/myth. Beach will write it out as it was told to him. He would be interested to see whether there is any basis to the tale: it sounds very Churchillian, but it also has the exquisite stench of cobblers.

Towards the end of his life Churchill was visited by a young official to discuss the details of his state funeral. The official showed Churchill the planned route that his coffin would take from his home to London and was surprised that, though Churchill proved flexible and uncomplaining about most details, here he demurred. Churchill suggested various other routes and when the young official finally asked why Churchill tapped his fingers on the map of London and one of the capital’s most important stations. ‘If I outlive De Gaulle, there is no problem. But if he is still alive I want him to be part of the group that greets my body as it comes into Waterloo!’

It is a beautiful story. However, is it true? Beachcombing has found no confirming details. Churchill was one of those rare Britons, perhaps even rarer among the aristocracy, who loved France. He did though have a lasting and fond antipathy for De Gaulle who had often made his life a misery in the war years. While Churchill with an operational Empire had to creep and crawl before Roosevelt, De Gaulle, without an acre of France to his name, calmly antagonised the US at every turn with undeniable style.

De Gaulle had a similarly doubtful attitude towards Churchill. Here were, after all, two alpha males whose personalities had too many commonalities to make any form of friendship possible. And how Waterloo would have irked De Gaulle much as the general loved battlefields!

In fact, Churchill’s body did come to Waterloo – on its homeward voyage – which might mark the beginning of this particular tale. One BBC report that Beachcombing has just chased down states:

The funeral cortege was accompanied by a 19-gun salute and an RAF fly-past as it began the journey to Sir Winston’s final resting place. At Tower Hill, the coffin was piped aboard the launch Havengore for the voyage up the Thames. From Waterloo, it was placed onto a train drawn by a Battle of Britain locomotive named Winston Churchill. Thousands gathered to pay tribute at wayside stations. At many football matches a two-minute silence was observed. Sir Winston was finally laid to rest in the Oxfordshire parish churchyard of Bladon, close to Blenheim Palace where he was born 90 years before, with only family members present.

De Gaulle was still alive and, indeed, he was present at the funeral: see picture. But did he follow the coffin to Waterloo? Did Churchill ever insist on a Waterloo route – that seems, looking at the map to have been the obvious one? Beachcombing fears not… drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

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16 March 2012:   Wade did a lot of the necessary spade work here, though as he notes still no real sources. First website Wade links has: ‘On January 15, 1965 Churchill suffered another stroke — a severe cerebral thrombosis — that left him gravely ill. He died nine days later on January 24, 1965, 70 years to the day of his father’s death. His body lay in State in Westminster Hall for three days and a state funeral service was held at St Paul’s Cathedral. This was the first state funeral for a commoner since that of Field Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar in 1914. It was Churchill’s wish that, were de Gaulle to outlive him, his (Churchill’s) funeral procession should pass through Waterloo Station. As his coffin passed down the Thames on a boat, the cranes of London’s docklands bowed in salute. At Churchill’s request, he was buried in the family plot at Saint Martin’s Churchyard, Bladon, near Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England.’ Beach loves the ideas of the cranes of London bowing to their dead master. And another site that is sceptical. Beach can’t help but thinking someone with a good knowledge of British railways could kill this legend – not that we would want to, of course: As his coffin passed down the Thames on the Havengore, the cranes of London’s docklands bowed in salute. The Royal Artillery fired a 19-gun salute (as head of government), and the RAF staged a fly-by of sixteen English Electric Lightning fighters. The state funeral was the largest gathering of dignitaries in Britain as representatives from over 100 countries attended, including French President Charles de Gaulle, Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson, Prime Minister of Rhodesia Ian Smith, other heads of state and government, and members of royalty. It also saw the largest assemblage of statesmen in the world until the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005.  It has been suggested it was Churchill’s wish that, were de Gaulle to outlive him, his (Churchill’s) funeral procession should pass through Waterloo Station. This is complete myth. Though President de Gaulle did attend the service and the coffin departed for Bladon from Waterloo Station, there is absolutely no connection. In fact, Churchill did not plan his own funeral as commonly believed; he made a few suggestions, but there was a private committee which made the plans, and he was not on it.’ Thanks Wade!!!

17 Mar 2012: FP writes in ‘Hello, After reading your recent post  “Churchill, De Gaulle and Waterloo” and particularly the line that a railway expert could kill the myth, I thought I would write in with a comment. At first sight, railway geography would seem to support the myth.  To get from London to Bladon, Waterloo would not be your first choice of station.  The obvious departure station would be Paddington, from which a train can get to central Oxfordshire very directly.  However, if the organisers definitely wanted to include a journey down the Thames, the problem is that Paddington is a long way from the river: it would be a case of a road procession from St Pauls to Tower Hill, a barge from there to the West End followed by a second road procession through Mayfair and Bayswater.  Waterloo is not only almost on the riverbank, but there is a fairly direct rail route from there to Reading, where the train can join the main line from Paddington and on to Oxfordshire. Moreover, for obvious reasons the train was hauled by the locomotive “Winston Churchill”.  Although the railways were nationalised in 1947, in England and Wales the former railway companies had survived as largely-autonomous “Regions” within British Railways.  “Winston Churchill” was built by the Southern Railway, and in 1965 (although only a few months from withdrawal) was based at Salisbury, on the Southern Region’s lines out of Waterloo.  It is probably safe to say that at that time there were no loco crew at all on British Rail who were qualified both to drive “Winston Churchill” and to drive trains from Paddington to Reading; on the other hand almost all Waterloo-Reading line steam crews would have been able to handle the engine.  It is also likely that special work would have been needed to make sure that a Southern Region engine would even have been able to run on the Paddington-Reading line safely.  In other words, using Waterloo solved two issues: how to get the procession from boat to train easily, and also how to ensure the right engine could be used on the train with minimal special effort. I hope the above is helpful to you.  On balance, I think it is highly unlikely that the use of Waterloo was purely to annoy De Gaulle – although I can imagine that when it became apparent that Waterloo would be the most straightforward terminus to use, it would have raised a few wry smiles on the planning committee!’ Thanks FP!!!!

Pulling Things Out of Rivers March 13, 2012

Posted by Beachcombing in : Ancient, Contemporary, Medieval, Modern

Rivers are useful guardians of the past: often thousands of years roll by (and millions of tonnes of water) before things that have been thrown in are fished out (sometimes literally) several hundred or thousands of years later. Here are Beachcombing’s favourite they-were-found-in-river things. Others would be welcome: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

1) Claudius’ Head in the Alde: In 1907 a school boy pulled this prize out of the river and brought it to a local antiquary. From then excitement slowly mounted and it has never entirely died down. What is of particular interest is the way that the head of the emperor Claudius seems to have been hacked off a statue and a blow to the back of the head suggests that murder was done on an inanimate object. It looks very much as if a Roman statue was ritually slaughtered and the head was then dedicated to a Celtic river God (i.e. thrown in a river): back in the days when the Alde was called the Itchen. And the suspects? Why not Boudicca’s revolt in 61 AD when Colchester with its Temple of Claudius was overrun by British ‘savages’ and Rome was, at least for a season, lain low in East Anglia?

2) Silver Plate in the Rhone: ‘In 1656 a fisherman on the banks of the Rhone, in the neighbourhood of Avignon, drew to shore in his net a round substance in the shape of a large plate, thickly encrusted with a coat of hardened mud. A silversmith who happened to be present brought it for a trifling sum. He took it home, and upon cleaning and polishing it, found it to consist of pure silver… Fearing that such a massive and valuable piece of plate might awaken suspicion , if offered for sale entire, he divided it into four equal parts, each of which he disposed of at different times and places.’ One of the pieces was sold at Lyons to Mr. Mey, a wealthy and well-educated merchant, who at once saw its value and who, after great effort, procured the other three sections. He had them nicely rejoined, and the treasure was finally placed in the cabinet of the King of France.’ This object is often called Scipio’s Shield. It actually dates to the fourth century AD.

3) A Steamboat in the Missouri River: In 1987 a nineteenth-century steamboat, the Arabia was discovered in a field just off the Missouri. Its excavation proved logistically difficult because river waters kept pouring in as the excavators dug down. In fact, in one episode an excavator was almost killed. The boat had disappeared into the mud of that river almost a hundred and fifty years before, sinking in ten minutes with no casualties save a mule! 700 items are now on display from this victim of ‘the hungriest of all rivers’ at a special Arabia museum: and the boat stands as one of the most impressive archaeological finds from frontier America.

4) A Tank and the Neva. This picture shows a BT-5 one of the most impressive Soviet tanks from WW2 being fished out of the river. A nice question is how it got there! Images of the tank and descriptions of the find suggest that there was no one in it when it went down into its watery grave – so bridges and vodka-sozzled drivers have to be ruled out. And it does not seem to have suffered any damage from the enemy: though Soviet tanks were famously resistant to even point blank blasts. Perhaps its owners, as they were surrounded by the Germans decided to get rid of it and the nearby river offered the quickest way to dispose of their hardware?

5) Hindu finds from the Thames: The Thames has been good for ‘Roman brooches, medieval pilgrim badges, 17th-century tin-glazed tiles, an 18th-century miniature portrait and an early-20th century handgun‘. But for Beachcombing at least some of the most curious finds have been the various Hindu statuettes dredged up in London’s river. So what does this represent: an underground Hindu cult in medieval London? Not a bit of it. The best estimates put these objects from the 1880s to 2000. For London’s modern Hindu community have evidently been using the Thames as a kind of surrogate Ganges, a place to throw their gods in an eerie echo of those rituals carried out in pre-Christian times on the banks of the same waterway. The British Museum at first thought that some of these statues were Roman… An understandable if entertaining mistake.

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14/Mar/2012: First is Louis with some corrections for the tank story. ‘Actually BT tanks were notorious for their thin armor, which became very clear during the Winter War and the Nomohan incident and which prompted the Red Army to change to the T34 faster then previously scheduled. And, the tank was probably on its way to the Neva Bridgehead, on a pontoon, during a relief offensive for Leningrad, as can be read in this English language website:  Second is Tacitus from Detritus: Here is a link to one of my favorite river finds.  An early confederate submarine of which no reliable record has ever been produced.  Dredged up by accident in 1878.  Technically found in a bayou coming off of Lake Ponchartain, but clearly designed for use against an impending Union attack on New Orleans.  Even the thought of entering the treacherous muddy waters of the Mississippi in this glorified tin can alarms me! Then Jakub: ‘How about the opposite: pulling boats out of the ground? This happened a few years ago not far south from Warsaw, Poland. In a pond in an apple orchard a 500-year old ship was found and dug out: a 34m-long grain-punt. 500 years earlier Vistula, which is notorious for changing its course (and thus a most unsuitable container for long-lost artefacts), flowed through what is now the apple orchard on the border of a place called Czersk – once the capital of an entire province, dwindled into a tiny village once the river that gave it its prosperity decided to pack up and move a few miles eastward, leaving boats like this one in the middle of a sandy plain  (link in Polish). Next is Invisible: My personal favourite [creepy warning!]: I visited the Steamboat Arabia museum a couple of years ago. The amount of organic materials – leather, cloth, foodstuffs – that survived is simply astounding. Apparently the sites of several other wrecked steamboats buried by the shifting river are known and await excavation. The remarkable thing about the Arabia excavation and museum is that it was done entirely without public funds – the Hawley family (with friends and supporters) paid for the arduous, large-scale excavation, the conservation of the artifacts, and the museum out of their own pockets. The book The Treasures of the Steamboat Arabia by David Hawley gives a step-by-step account of the difficulties involved in getting the steamboat and its cargo out of the tons of mud that covered it and includes color photos of many artifacts. An extraordinary story.’ Thanks Louis, Tacitus, Invisibile and Jakub!!

16 March: Some great stuff from Jim W here. ‘Similar to the Arabia steamboat recovery was  the USS Cairo sunk in the Yazoo River during the Vicksburg Siege of the US Civil War.  Found by old-style geophysics (magnetic dip needle) nearly intact but broken in half during recovery.  Massively displayed in National Military Park as half original and half reconstructed.  Museum contains quantities of personal and military gear recovered in very good state of preservation. On the other side, the CSS Arkansas  is still buried under a mainline levee near Sunrise, LA.  She was badly damaged during the Vicksburg Siege and escaped downriver to her coup de gras at Baton Rouge. Steamer Desoto discovered under a bean field near Missouri River, IA, again by 1960s vintage geophysics (flux-gate magnetometer).  Excavated and on display with large quantity of personal and trade goods.  Carried supplies and equipment to Montana gold rush before snagged. Meandering, large-flow, high sediment rivers like the Mississippi/Missouri system do this kind of thing as a matter of course, generally leaving the wrecks hundreds of yards to miles from the present courses in old meanders. Reference the Mississippi Confederate submarine:  The Grand Gulf State Park Museum, Port Gibson, MS has (or had several years ago) a submersible home-built from an old boiler that was supposedly used for bootlegging from Louisiana to Mississippi back in the good/bad old days of Prohibition.’ Thanks Jim!!!!

28 March 2012:  Norman writes: Haven’t had any luck tracking an image of it down yet (still working on it), but I remember once seeing a crucifix in a museum in New Brunswick (Canada) that had been recovered from a river. It was made of bone (or maybe ivory, I misremember), and was of the type that missionaries would give out to the local Indians (in this case either Mi’kmaq or Maliseet). The cool thing about it was that the wrists and ankles of the figure, where they were attached to the cross, had been scraped so thin that they had nearly snapped off. Archaeologists conjectured that the natives had scraped thin shavings of the figurine into a broth which would then be fed to sick people – apparently a conflation of religion and magic, or perhaps a misunderstood interpretation of the old “this is my body…” routine that the indians took literally.’ thanks Norman!!

 

Gravestones: The Disparate Couple March 5, 2012

Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary

Beachcombing has a thing about Italian cemeteries, which tend to be far more gaudy than their British equivalents, but are often also more moving. There the visitor will find paper or fabric flowers on every tomb, photographs of the resident dead, the graves cared for on an almost weekly basis by relatives, the ‘Christmas lights’ that come on as twilight closes in, the strict segregation of graveyard and settlement – the old Roman notion that the departed are both powerful and unstable, a notion that is so alien to the Anglo-Saxon world…

After his recent post on witty gravestones Beach went to a couple of Italian cemeteries in search of Italian inspiration. He found none: texts are sparse and wit would be seen as bad taste here. But he did find another phenomenon that has haunted him all week: let’s call it ‘the disparate couple’.

Man and wife are often buried together in Italy, as is the case in many parts of the world. And, inevitably, there is an interval between the interment of one and the interment of another. The fact that men tend to marry women who are slightly younger and that women, anyway, outlive men means that very often the man is plastered into the wall (Italian graves are typically vertical) and is then only joined by his dutiful wife five or ten years later.

However, let’s say that a husband dies in his thirties or forties and that his wife lives on into her eighties. Today, the interval would be problematic for several reasons: not least that the wife might marry again. The link between man and wife is not, in theological terms, eternal in any case unless you happen to be a Mormon. And Beachcombing would bet that very few wives dying forty years after their husbands would be buried with special reference to the loves of their younger lives.

But Beachcombing is associated in Italy with a series of traditional villages, villages that have remained loyal to the old ways: pregnant teens get married, divorce is frowned upon, if you buy birth control don’t go to the village pharmacy…

And this is reflected in several graves where a wife has, indeed, been buried next to her husband forty years later. These gravestones are particularly poignant because the age difference is brought out not just by the numbers but by the photographs. Any other similar graves? drbeachcombing AT yahoo dot com

Both men in these images died in the Second World War. Their exact fate is not recorded but 1942 – 1944 were the years when resistance to Mussolini and latterly the Germans was growing, when the Italian population was reduced to starvation diets of 1000 calories a day, and when, 1943-1944, a low-key civil war broke out between Fascist Italians and their Anti-Fascist co-nationals.

It is not necessary that either died as a result of the war, but thinking of their sex and age it is likely, particularly given the ferocity of conflict in Beachcombing’s area: a secret room abutting the study where this post was written was used by Catholic partisans in the last months of the German occupation.

In any case, an Italian woman of this generation would have found it almost impossible to marry again even had she wanted to and come the 1970s and 1980s the wives were laid to rest here in peace next to their husbands of a generation before.

Beachcombing has not the slightest belief in any conventional form of afterlife. He can’t take reincarnation seriously. Perhaps the ‘spirit’ survives death but not the personality? However, looking at these photographs several childish questions come to him.

If we do make it to another world what age are we there? If Beachcombing stumbles across his grandmother will she be in her eighties, as she was the last time he saw her, or in the full bloom of middle age playing volley ball and winning egg and spoon races? Will the Italian couples pictured here even recognise each other in this unlikely second meeting?

Cue lots of medieval debates about the age of the soul in the next life: 33 the age of Christ at his death was often employed as a point of pontification.

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News update with thanks to contributors:

 

 

Selling (Balkan) Europe by the Pound March 2, 2012

Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary

Beach has pioneered for some time his WIBT (‘wish I’d been there’) series. Those moments in the past where any historically-conscious person would just LOVE to be a half dead bluebottle on the windowsill watching the great men and women conspiring to create history. It is a nice idea, of course. However, as most of history is emphatically about bad things: then the WIBT moments tend to involve great men and women making things worse rather than better.

Now on that very subject…

9 October 1944, two men meet in Moscow. One, an obese Briton with a drink problem, writes some words down on a piece of paper and hands it to a serial killer with a handlebar moustache sitting on the other side of the table. The serial killer looks at the written words and taking a blue pencil ticks the piece of paper.

The two ‘heroes’ of this tale are, of course, Churchill in his last year in office and Stalin. And the piece of paper – that survives in British public records (with the serial killer’s tic) and the Russian archives – the ‘naughty paper’ as Churchill called it, marked the division of the Balkans (plus) between the opportunistic democratic Allies (the UK and the US) and the murdering Communist allies (the USSR).

The paper reads as follows

Rumania           Russia 90%

                        The others 10%

Greece             Great Britain 90%

                        (in accord with the USA)

Yugoslavia       50%-50%

Hungary           50%-50% [this would later be changed to ‘75% Russia’]

Bulgaria           Russia 75%

And so less than a year before the end of hostilities millions of Europeans were condemned to the gulag and 40 years in the twilight.

Of course, Churchill’s supporters defend his actions. Churchill was trying to guarantee freedom for as much of Eastern and Central Europe as possible. He was in this perhaps more realistic than the Americans who said that such matters should be discussed at the end of the Second World War. And Churchill did manage to wrestle at least Greece free from the trap: when the British put down a communist insurrection there Stalin actually had the temerity to wink at Churchill!

Others might point out that the paper had little effect anyway. Did the western democracies really have 10% influence in Bulgaria or 25% in Hungary in 1950? Poland, which was mentioned at the meeting, but was too far from the Danube to appear on the paper, got dragged kicking and screaming into what would, with German rearmament, soon become the ‘Warsaw’ Pact: ditto Czechoslovakia.

Tito and Yugoslavia had contempt for Stalin and Churchill and he rightly decided that neither would risk their manpower in the hills and river valleys where his partisans had so bloodied the Wehrmacht.

Still the paper was given the nod and formed the basis for further discussions between the louche Eden and the haggler Molotov. And Stalin, who generally and perhaps curiously respected signed agreements, did take this as the outer limits of his action in the Balkans.

And, yes, Greece at least was spared a generation in the Stalinist version of Disney Land. God knows what Churchill would make of the pictures of the Greek middle classes reduced to rooting for food in dustbins and German politicians instructing Greek politicians to postpone elections… Another reason for hoping there is no afterlife.

On this merry note Beach should say that he is always on the look out for WIBT moments: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Perhaps particularly happy ones?

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