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Aviation
 Miles M 35 In 1943, the British Air Ministry was looking to create a bomber that was different from its stores of bombers in one significant measure: speed. The Miles M 35 had a distinct canard under the nose and a large wing just in front of the rear vertical stabilizer. Cool looking but it was not purchased by the Brits, partly because it was a private venture. Aviation
 Leduc Ramjet  Leduc Ramjet Rene Leduc was a French aircraft engineer who built the first ramjet powered aircraft that ever flew. It flew on October 21st 1949. The fact that a ramjet needs air running through it to operate meant that it could not take off from a still position. That said, it was meant to be dropped in mid air from a larger host aircraft. It worked. Only three were built and the testing helped develop missiles powered by ramjets.  Poster for Rene Leduc Martial Arts
 Bob Dylan April 2008. I am trying to figure out what to do next with my life. I have spare time and head to Richard Lord’s Boxing Gym on Lamar in a stinky old warehouse behind a Goodwill. It’s 2:30 in the afternoon, the sky is dark and cloudy and no one is there. I lift the warehouse garage door entrance, sign in on a moribund clipboard on a old nightstand stuffed into the corner. Richard Lord was a fairly successful welterweight boxer who opened this gym many years ago, and like all real boxing gyms, it is never clean, nor is it ever cleaned. Unwashed hand wraps redolent of the years of sweat and grit hang from clotheslines. Ten heavy bags in varying sizes, many with the stuffing literally beat out of them and then duct taped back in hang wherever they fit. There are two twenty by twenty foot rings, the ropes loose and sloping, the canvas spattered with dried blood and God knows what else. The walls are covered in Boxing posters. Ali Vs Frazier, Foreman vs. Moore, Jesus “el matador” Chavez versus Johnson. I head to the speed bag wall, pump a little air into a bag, turn on the electric bell that gives you a signal for the beginning and end of a three minute round and one minute rest. The bell rings and I start bouncing bouncing the bag off the top board. After a few rounds, in comes Richard Lord. Skinny, moustachioed, and kind as the day is long. “Heeeeeey maaaaaaan….whar you been” We hug. “Vegas man,” I tell him. “But we’re back.” “Hey man, glove up.” “Me? Dude, I’m in my fifties. I don’t fight anymore.” “Don’t worry,” he says. “This guy don’t have much. In fact, don’t even hit him. I mean not at all… just move around.” Oh shit, I think. This guy better have nothing because I haven’t sparred in years. When I hung up the gloves and decided never to fight again, I swore I would not become one of ghost guys I saw in Boxing gyms my whole life. The guys that can’t accept that they aren’t 18 anymore. The guys in their forties who get hit too often, their noses flatter and fatter, their ears begin to change shape, old cuts scar over, and regularly get bested by 18 year olds. Like I did whenI was 18. I wrap my hands. I jump rope to warm up. I dig out my battered caked with dust mouthpiece, rinse it off in a bathroom sink that looked like it was stolen from an old country gas station. I shove it in. It feels foreign. I have not had a mouthpiece in almost a decade, it makes me gag. A few minutes later four people come in, all dressed in loose fitting work out gear. Two guys and a woman. I look at the guys trying to figure out which one has nothing to hit me with. Frankly, neither of them looked like they could hurt me. A woman comes in. They all chat quietly and start digging out hand wraps. In comes a diminutive, skinny man. Looks to be a little older than me, has short curly hair. He turns to face me. It’s Bob Dylan. OK. I stopped bouncing around. Stop trying to get my heart rate up. I stare out the warehouse door into a now rainy parking lot. I am trying to process this. I am about to step into a boxing ring with a man who I have idolized as along as I have had ears. Richard walks over. “See what I mean?” he says. “Richard,” I tell him. “If you paid me by the shot, I wouldn’t hit this guy….EVER.” “Good,” he says. “Don’t. Just move around.” We step in the ring. He does not look at me. There is no conversation. The round bell goes off. He’s old, tiny, makes his way to the center of the ring, throws a series of jabs that don’t reach. Neither does his right. He throws a hook. I take it on my arm. I dance around, slip left and right. Before I knew it the round bell rang. Dylan goes back into his corner. Richard mouths some advice to him. The next round begins. Apparently the advice was to throw more hooks. They all miss or they land on my right arm. I’m just dancing around. Every once in a while, I get into a cat crouch and lean in so he can land shots. He hits me on the forehead with a straight right. Pretty good shot. Bell rings. Second round is over. “Thanks,” Richard says. “That’s all Catfish. Thanks.” No Richard. Thank YOU, I think to myself. I finish my workout. I go home and try not to wash my right arm or forehead for the rest of my life. In May of 2008 I succumb and finally wash Bob Dylan off of me. I tell you, Austin makes Vegas look like a booger. WWII
 German Dead At Stalingrad The thing about war is that it is often very confusing. When we talked about the German assault on Russia and the Russians valiant defense, it clouds facts that don’t fit neatly into these images. Not every Russian was happy to defend Russia, for example. When the Nazis invaded in 1941, Latvians celebrated. Stalin had been brutal to them. Of course when the Latvians began to die at the hands of the invaders then things changed. When the Germans invaded there were still millions of Russians who hated what the Russian government had done to their particular ethnic group. There were Russians who were still bitter about parents and friends being abducted and killed by the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB). It’s not difficult to imagine this. It’s not impossible to imagine that upwards of 50,000 Russians were actually fighting on then front lines at Stalingrad with Von Paulus’ Sixth Army. Lt. Colonel Mader leading the 279th German infantry division remarked regarding the Tartars, “As anti-tank gunners, using captured Soviet weapons, these Russians were proud of every Soviet tank they destroyed. These people were excellent.” Of course Stalin had been particularly hard on ethnic groups and expelled many of them from their own lands for his own political reasons, the Tartars among them.  German Dead At Stalingrad Many many Russians did not care if the Germans took Stalingrad or any territory or towns of the vast open steppes to the west. It wasn’t where they lived, had any family, and if Stalin lost some territory then that was a good thing. That said, many Russians tried to desert. Desertion rates we fairly high at the outset of the siege of Stalingrad. So NKVD detachments rode each troop ship over the Volga to make sure new soldiers made it into Stalingrad and didn’t attempt an icy swim over the side to safety. The Russian high command may have doubted that the Germans would win. But the Russians were not so sanguine. Most were terrified of the Germans. Russian high command under Chuikov was ruthless. The one way to make certain soldiers did not defect was simply to be more terrifying than the advancing Wehrmacht. The Soviet secret police that were so feared and studied in the Cold War got a good training session in the cold winter of Stalingrad.  Captured Wehrmacht Soldier On Left, Gloating Red Guard On Right The crimes that could be attributed to the execution, both those that were done in the spot and those that were done after a trial, consisted of desertion, defecting, taking bribes, and what the Communist party apparatchniks might consider traitorous to the cause. That might also include aiding and abetting the desertion or defection of another soldier, even failing to execute or report a deserter. It is said that almost 14,000 Russians were executed just at Stalingrad. That’s the equivalent of an army destroying an entire division of it’s own forces. Stalin also refused to arrange for the evacuation of Stalingrad. He knew that an empty city would be harder to capture than one occupied. He gave the same orders when Moscow was under attack. Over 60,000 Russians were captured by Germans at Stalingrad and sent to concentration camps in the west, or they were worked to death. Some 40,000 died in the city as a result of the bombing, the cross fires, the cold, or starvation. Of the 95,000 survivors of the German Sixth Army, 5,000 returned to Germany. Most of them were half dead by the time Von Paulus surrendered.  Red Guards Attack The dead and wounded at Stalingrad were everywhere. Bodies frozen in place for months at a time, make shift hospitals were filled with thousands of screaming moaning soldiers with little or no chance to get medicine, even painkillers. Death was in every street corner, every room in every charred smoking building, and in every hospital. Diphtheria, typhus, gangrene, even mites and lice and bedbugs made the sick and wounded even more miserable. For many there, death was the release they were praying for. NASA
 Buzz Aldrin  Buzz Aldrin on the Moon Buzz Aldrin. Born in 1930 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, was the second man to set foot in the moon on July 20th 1969. What’s even more incredible is his life previously. During the KoreanWar, Aldrin flew 66 combat missions in F-86 fighters. He shot down two MIG-15s and LIFE magazine featured gun camera footage of the MIG pilot punching out. Aldrin served as an aerial gunner instructor at Nellis Air Force Base and then was assigned to the post of aide to the dean of the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. In Bitburg Germany, Aldin served again in the role of fighter pilot flying F-100 Super Sabers with the 22nd fighter squadron. Then he earned his PH.D in Astronautics at MIT. Afterward he became part of the Gemini program. The rest is history.  F-86  F-100 Super Sabre  MIG 15 Culture
 British WWII War Poster
 All WarHawks Blame The Press For Losses At War  WWII Canadian War Poster  WWII War Poster  WWII Recruitment Poster  Various WWII Britsh War Posters  WWII War Poster  WWII War Poster WWII
 Russians March Into Berlin In 1945 Stalin wanted the Russian Army to take Berlin by April 30th, 1945, in time for May 1st 1945, or the Mayday Celebration. The 150th Rifle Division of the Red Guards had come within a few hundred yards of the Reichstag and other government and administrative buildings. Smoke filled the air. Bodies rotted in the streets. Tens of thousands of German citizens were huddled into bomb shelters usually constructed into the ground floor or basements of apartment buildings. Almost 100,000 Foreign SS and ragtag Wehrmacht soldiers were holed up in the upper floors of government buildings each one fanatically defending the homeland from the Bolsheviks. The idea that the Russians just ran and overwhelmed the Reichstag defenders is nonsense. The Germans were well armed with machine guns, sniper rifles and panzer faust anti tank grenades. Some survivors say the area around the Reichstag was filled with burning Russian tanks, another reminder by the way that inside a city is not a place for tanks at all. Every time a Russian infantry unit made a run for the building, a blinding volley of automatic fire filled the air. Many Russian infantry units bought it in the streets just yards away from where Hitler had headquartered. Many of these soldiers had fought on foot all the way from Siberia just to die moments before victory. The 171st Rifle Battalion was pinned down for hours by a flak battery at the zoo under two miles away from the Russian line. The Germans had constructed a deep defensive ditch around the Reichstag. It was well defended and fighting was nowhere near over by noon of the 28th.  Vollksturm and Hitler Youth Fight Russians In Berlin In The Desperate Last Days Of The War The Soviet forces kept bringing up self propelled guns and artillery. This included Katyusha rockets, 203mm mortars and 152mm howitzers. They had plenty of artillery rounds and poured a continuous rain of death on the Reichstag. There was no stopping at this. And amazingly, the building withstood the pounding. The Russian Eighth Guard and the Third Shock Army and First Ukrainian Army were held at bay at Tiergarten and Charlottenburg. To the west, also there were Hitler Youth who were actually holding ground fairly well. Also panzer Mk VI Tiger tanks from the Herman von Salza battalion were hunting for the T-34s of the Eight Guard and Third Shock Army.  German Women Managing However They Can In The Fighting In Berlin On April 30th, Hitler killed himself. The senior staff that was leaving Hitler left and those that remained loyal to the bitter end stayed. Chuikov and Zhukov called a cease fire and communicated to German General Krebs that they had until 10:15 AM May 1st to surrender without condition. The Russians waited and received no response. At 10:30 AM the Russians fired every artillery tube at the Reichstag. Violence vicious house to house fighting continued for two more hours. Then, slowly, Germans began surrendering. Officers began asking for terms. Hundreds of Germans lay in makeshift hospitals screaming for help or morphine. They finally succumbed.  Women And Children, Raped And Killed By Marauding Russian Soldiers German civilians were desperately trying to find holes in the fighting to jump out of basements and head west. The Russians were coming from the east and the Germans knew the Russians would be brutal. This was not because the Germans suspected the Russians were bent on revenge. To Germans, Bolsheviks were just animals. The Germans had no idea what the Wehrmacht had done to Russia. The Russian columns consisted of a wide variety of people and equipment. Russian tankers in black leather, Russian equipment carriers on horseback, disheveled, ragtag exhausted Asian Russians from the Caucasus, Ukrainians, Russian officers and civilians working to help the Russians take control of the eastern portion of Berlin. These were angry people whose country had been literally devastated, whose friends and neighbors had been killed indiscriminately. In April of 1945, German women were right to head west. Because something awful was about to be perpetrated upon them. Every evening after the shooting stopped, Russia soldiers, often high on vodka, began looking for German women. Wherever they found them, women were grabbed, and raped. Sometimes groups of women would be captured, taken to a warehouse, and gang raped by entire units of Russian men. Rape is the act of a conqueror, says feminist author Susan Brownmiller observed. She makes the point that rape is aimed at the “bodies of the defeated enemy’s women” to emphasize his victory. An article in the UK Guardian reviews a book that talks about the horrid aftermath of the Russian victory in Berlin.
An article in the Daily Mail reviews a movie released in 2002 that deals with these events.
I think it’s important to remember that not all Germans were guilty of what the Nazis did nor were they even aware of the crimes of the Nazis. Many of these women had already suffered privations one can only imagine. Their husbands were deployed into Russia, many of them never heard from again. Their cities were being bombed into powder. Many of them were just barely surviving, looking for food and water and safe places to keep their children. And now this, the ultimate deprivation: systematic rape and murder at the hands of strangers. At some point, the rape stopped being about power and domination. It was a conquerors right to have sexual congress with the conquered. But thousands of German women were violated, punished in the worst ways for things someone else did. This is a tragic and terrible chapter not just in Russian history, but in human history. These are the results of warfare. These are the flowers that bloom from holocausts and ideologically born bigotry. This is one more reason why war is hell. Africa
 Kikuyu Tribesmen (Mau Maus) The end of World War II brought a worldwide anti colonial movement to the forefront. Perhaps it was because Japan and Germany had spent so much time terrorizing others in their own backyard. Or perhaps it was the fact that troops around the world had to be garrisoned in other people’s countries such that it seemed like an occupation. Whatever the impetus for this it spread all the way down the African continent. In the waning years of the British Empire, it was necessary to divest the crown of foreign holdings. The country was broken quite literally and figuratively from the struggle against the Nazis. One of those protectorates was Kenya. Of course the British were really interested in Uganda, which controlled the headwaters of the Nile. In fact, Britain had built a railway during the beginning of the century that stretched from the Indian Ocean to Uganda. As with all their holdings, this one would prove more and more expensive and locals were beginning to resent white rule.  British General George Erskine That all said the British were not the most enlightened leaders when it came to administering to non-technological people. Like many white people around the world, the British simply felt that they were the obvious superiors of Africans. The great white hunter Robert Ruark, known for his travel writing about safaris once quipped “Before we came- less than fifty years ago- they were all eating each other and murdering each other for fun.” Furthermore, those administering to the occupied also felt a burgeoning human rights movement. F. D. Corfield, the British attaché who wrote the official history of the British adventure in Kenya said “I doubt whether those who have not served in Africa realized the very great disabilities under which all colonial governments have to function in an age obsessed with human rights.” It’s not surprising that the fever for self-government swept through the Kikuyu people in central Kenya in the early 1950s. They started to rebel. Organized loosely into a group called the Kikuyu Central Organization, they brought Jomo Kenyatta, a leader, into their fold and he spent the next 15 years representing the Kenyans in London. He did himself and his country no favors apparently. He was a Bon vivant and married a white woman at a time when it was anathema across England. He hung out with communist writers and thinkers. He partied, but eventually he returned to Africa to lead his country. Like Mandela, Kenyatta scared the colonial government and ended up in jail. Like Mandela, he emerged and became the president of his country. In fact, Kenyatta served for life in that role.  Jomo Kenyatta The Kikuyu people held a core resistance group that swore an oath to Kenya, an oath called a muma. Those who swore out the oath would serve as a protector of Kenya. Of course the British police kept watch on these rabble-rousers. Muma is probably the source of the term Mau Mau. It sounded a lot more frightening to the British than Land Freedom Force. It sounded foreign and repetitive like most African tongues sounded to those who weren’t familiar with them. Hollywood of course created imagery that looked like the night are of all British Empire stories: white settlers attacks by primitive natives. In fact, by the end of the uprising some five years later, only 32 British settlers were killed by Mau Maus. The Mau Mau were the latest Imperialist bogeyman for the British. This is not implying that there were no bloody incidents. With good use of news and propaganda, the British brought home the vicious nature of these attacks, especially when a white settler Roger Ruck and Esme, his wife, also a physician were hacked to detain with Kikuyu pangas. They entered the home and smeared blood over the piano and walls. The imagery settled in the minds of the British that is was us versus blood thirsty savages, not freedom fighters.  General China, Mau Mau Leader, In Manacles What started as a homegrown anti occupation force of raids and protests blossomed into a bloody war. The British encouraged whites to settle and held land for them to settle on. These were the first targets of the Mau Maus, land taken from them by foreign occupiers. The British, flush with the new wins after WWII, and bristling with newly trained troops and new weapons had quite a bit of firepower to bear. One of the organizations the British had were the Kings African Rifles, a paid and well trained regimental army organized by the British occupational forces, that could be called upon not only to fight, but to find trails, translate and otherwise help British forces navigate through the difficult local tribal laws and customs. The Brits had 400 KAF forces and quite a few other forces. They had 10,000 British regulars, a police force of 20,000, and a Home Guard of 20,000 made up primarily of white settlers. The British also feared that the Kikuyus they were fighting would infiltrate their own villages. The Mau Maus were operating from Mount Kenya and Mount Aderbare. Some 12,000 warriors mostly armed with panga machetes and bolt action rifles. So thousands of Kikuyus were forcibly resettled.  General China In Custody Of KAR The war itself began with Mau Mau raids that came thundering out of the mountains. They raided livestock, burned police stations, and killed many African loyalists, and sought to strike back at the appropriation of Kenyan lands for White settlers only. The British commander, Erkine, ran two massive counter operations in 1953 and 1954. In Operation Hammer and Operation Flute, Mau Mau outfoxed British forces that had surrounded them and slipped off into the surrounding countryside. A more brutal encounter in Operation Anvil consisted of a massive sweep through Nairobi and incarceration of 16,500 Africans thought to be supporting the insurrection. Erskine wanted. Major set piece engagements with the Mau Maus, but was denied. Hiring help from locals, he dug ditches around the passes below the mountains, covered it with barbed wire and then proceeded to bomb and shell the areas where the Mau Maus were hiding. Also, rural Kenyans had to prove their allegiance and before long the British were up to their necks in an insurgency not unlike our own experience in Vietnam where modern weapons are used in complex and unforgiving jungles.  Mau Mau Rebels The four year war saw about 12,000 dead Africans and less than 200 dead British and British auxiliaries. But the news and propaganda that fed the notion that the Mau Maus were a Boogeyman also showed a modern, oppressive army killing people living in their own backyards. The British public, tiring of constant warfare held little sympathy for another occupation. Like all colonial powers, the cost of holding all this territory was hardly worth it. Stories of Kenyans beaten to death and worked to death in British custody became their own Abu Gharaib. WWI
 Thomas Edward Lawrence or Lawrence of Arabia On June 10th 1916, Sherif Hussein Ibn Ali, Emir of Mecca, fired a shot into the air and thus signaled the beginning of arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks. Immediately the Arab forces under Sherif surrounded, overwhelmed and captured a 1500 man Turkish garrison at Mecca. Royal Navy seaplanes and Handley Page Bombers supported Arab insurgents who struck and took the port city of Jedda from the Ottoman forces. Britain brought huge naval gunfire to bear upon the Turks forcing surrenders at Rabegh and Yanbu and 3000 Turkish troops at Ta’if. It was a new type of guerilla warfare, a type where small fluid bands hit strategic locations supported by modern combine arms that include artillery and air support.  Armored Car, WWI, Turkey It was here that an Arabic speaking English staff officer at the Military Intelligence Department in Cairo became the liaison officer to Sherif Hussein’s oldest son Feisel. His name: Thomas Edward Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. Not only was this Oxford educated statesman familiar with Arab culture, he loved it and felt great sympathy for the Arab tribes who squirmed under the thumbs of both the British and Ottoman rule. Lawrence was disgusted that a plan was drawn out that apportioned the land of the Arabs and the Jews without ever consulting anyone but diplomats themselves; thusly, Arab insurgents he led in guerilla attacks upon the Turks were conducted with passion and ferocious determination because the Arabs thought they were fighting for their own sovereignty. Lawrence led an audacious 600 mile trek, and with £20,000 to find mercenaries along the way beginning on May 10th, 1916, he bright a force of 2700 into the port of Aqaba, (now in Jordan), and bring control of this major port out if the hands of the Ottomans. The harrassment from the air and sea provided courtesy of the Royal Navy, and the contestant guerilla night time raids and behind the scenes destruction of railways and telegraph lines by irregulars under Lawrence combined to weaken the Turks. By the middle of September, the irregulars were regularly beating the disheartened Turks and had taken 75000 of them prisoner. The advent of behind closed doors contracts and settlements created the middle east that exists today. The style of warfare that we see conducted in the former Ottoman Empire looks strangely familiar, because it was a revolutionary blend of Arab desert fighting and new technology. In a vast sandy desert where even locals get lost and starve, huge armies have a short shelf life. In this inhospitable environment, asymetrical warfare reigns supreme. A small hidden band with a bag full if explosives can tie down ten thousand men and make every day patrolling more expensive than it seems worth. This was the bane and end of the Ottomans, the British before them and the French and Hapsbergs before them. I believe that every soldier of every Western army that ever marched into the timeless, prehistoric Arabian desert has at one time or another squinted into the unforgiving Sun and wondered what on Earth they are doing there. WWII
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